“Put it out of your mind, little man. No one sleeps on me. Up against me, perhaps, for mutual warmth, but only if I am in a sociable mood. But on my back, never. It would be demeaning.”
“We have to do something.” A peevish Simna kicked at the omnipresent water. “We can’t lie down and safely go to sleep in this. Never mind that we’d wake up sodden through and at risk of catching a fever. Isn’t that right, Etjole? Etjole?”
Ehomba’s attention was concentrated elsewhere. Instead of looking at their feet for a campsite, he was looking up. Specifically, at a small irregularly shaped hovering pond, the center of which boasted a small sandy island from which grew a trio of juvenile casuarina pines.
“Up there?” Simna sloshed over to stand alongside his tall friend. “But the island is floating. Put the three of us on it and our weight will make it sink to the bottom of this watery mass.”
“I do not think so.” Ehomba continued to study the drifting aerial pond. “If weight was going to do that, I would think the heaviness of the soil itself would be enough to sink it. And there are the trees it supports—not giants, it is true, but not saplings, either. I think we should give it a try.
“Besides, what is the worst thing that could happen? The island will sink beneath us and we will fall into the pond.”
“And drown,” Simna added. “That’s a little too much of a ‘worst thing’ for me.”
“We would not drown,” Ehomba assured him. “Even if we sank to the bottom, all you would have to do is rip a hole in the pond’s underside and all the water would come spilling out, along with the fish, and frogs, and plants, and us.”
Simna was still dubious. “It doesn’t make any sense. If I can poke a hole in the wall of one of these deluded bodies of water, why don’t fish and salamanders and snails and tree roots do it all the time?”
“An adaptation to where they are living, I imagine.” The herdsman pursed his lips as he regarded his friend. “We hike through a land where the lakes and ponds and puddles all float about away up in the air, where you can walk around and beneath them, and you wonder about such matters?”
Though still reluctant, Simna was willing to be convinced. Besides, the only alternative promised a night of little sleep and unrelenting wet. He glanced over at the patient Ahlitah.
“How about it, bruther cat? What do you think?”
Their feline companion shrugged, his ebony mane twitching as he did so. “Why put it to me? I am only a nomadic quadrupedal carnivore of commingled ancestry. Aren’t humans the ones who are supposed to have the big brains? That’s what you’re always saying, anyway. Or are you experiencing some second thoughts about your own cerebral propaganda?”
A bemused Simna turned back to Ehomba. “Ask a simple question, get a biting discourse. All right, I guess it can’t hurt to try. One way or the other, it looks like we’re gonna get soaked. The question is, for how long?” He glanced upward. “It’s getting dark, and I don’t fancy trying to find a better spot in the middle of the night. Not in this muck.”
“That is good.” Turning, the herdsman positioned himself next to the transparent wall of the hovering pond. “Because you get to go in first.”
“Me? Why me?” Simna hedged.
Looking back over his shoulder, Ehomba eyed his stocky friend considerately. “If you want me to go, you get to boost me up.”
“No.” The reluctant swordsman scrutinized the watery wall. “I’ll go.”
Scrambling up Ehomba’s legs and back as the herdsman braced himself against the transparent wall of water, Simna was soon balancing on the herdsman’s shoulders. Gripping the upper rim of the pond, he pushed down and up. The rubbery wall gave a little, sending small fish scurrying in the opposite direction and letting water spill through the depression created between Simna’s downward pressing hands. Then the swordsman was up and over the rim, swimming for the central island while doing his best to keep his kit as dry as possible.
Together, man and litah watched as Simna hauled himself out on the island and stood up, shaking water from his limbs like a slow dog. Experimentally, he jumped up and down a couple of times.
“Well?” Ahlitah growled impatiently.
“The ground gives a little, like a wet mattress, but I don’t think it’s going to sink under us. Come on over.” Turning, he carried his pack inland and set it down beneath one of the shady pine trees.
Ehomba turned to eye his remaining companion questioningly. Grumbling but complaisant, the cat advanced and placed itself next to the bottom of the watery mass.
“Tread easily, Etjole Ehomba. No man who was not a meal has ever done this before.”
“I will step lightly,” the herdsman assured him. So saying, he placed a foot on the litah’s right thigh and stepped up onto his back. From there he was able to pull himself up and over the rim of the pond into the water.
It was a short, easy swim to the island, where Simna was trying to dry himself with some large leaves he had scavenged. Wading out of the water, Ehomba settled down nearby and began to fumble inside his own pack. A violent splash made him look up. Ahlitah had negotiated the intervening height in a single effortless leap and was paddling toward them, his magnificent head held as high above the water as he could manage.
“One thing’s for sure.” Removing his leather armor and undershirt, Simna hung them over a casuarina branch to dry. “If we can get a fire started here, we can let it burn high all night without having to worry about it spreading. Hoy—have a care, there!”
He threw up his hands to shield himself and Ehomba turned away as Ahlitah shook vigorously, sending water flying from his fur. A marinated cat was a comical sight, Ehomba knew, even as he was careful to keep his expression perfectly neutral. He was not certain that Ahlitah’s pithy sense of humor extended to amusement at his own loss of dignity.
As it turned out, they were able to start a fire, but only a small one. Still, the additional warmth was welcome more for its aid in drying out their clothes than for their bodies.
“Not that this is very useful.” Simna was lightly toasting his underwear over the cheery blaze. Nearby, Ehomba was filleting the fish Ahlitah had scooped out of the pond with a couple of leisurely swipes of his huge paws. “We’re only going to have to drench ourselves again tomorrow when it’s time to leave and move on.”
“Perhaps not.” Ehomba, as he so often did, was looking not at the swordsman but past him. And as he so often did, Simna followed the direction of the tall herdsman’s gaze and saw nothing.
“Why? Why not?” His expression brightened. “I know! You’re finally going to do some real magic and float us out of here! Or call up a boat—no, that wouldn’t work in water as shallow as that which covers the real ground below.”
“I have told you,” an exasperated Ehomba replied, “I cannot do magic.”
“Yeah, right, sure.” The swordsman winked at Ahlitah who, head resting on crossed forefeet, did not respond. “Then if not by magic, how are you going to keep us from having to get good and wet again?” He gestured at their surroundings. “Going to drain the pond with us in the middle of it? I’m not sure that’d be such a good idea. The wondrous envelope that holds this water aloft might collapse in upon us, wrapping us up like a holiday present and suffocating us in the bargain.”
“I am not sure exactly what I am going to do. I was thinking of assaying some engaging conversation.”
“Really?” The other man swept his right arm around in a broad arc to encompass every inch of their aqueous surroundings. “With whom? Fish?”
“Something like that.” Turning away, the herdsman resumed wringing water from his kilt.
Simna grunted and looked over at the sleepy Ahlitah. “He’s going to talk to fish. Me, I don’t see the use of it.”
“Can he talk to fish?” the cat asked curiously.
The swordsman stole a glance in his companion’s direction. “I dunno. He’s a funny sort, is Etjole. After we first hooked up together he told me a st
ory about him spending time with some monkeys. I thought it was just that: a story. But the better I get to know him, the more I’m not sure.”
“So you think you know him?” The litah’s massive jaws gaped in an impressive yawn.
Simna shrugged confidently. “Sure I know him! He’s a sorcerer, see? Only he won’t admit to it. Hunting after a great lost treasure he is, and I aim to help him acquire it in return for a share. He’ll probably cut you in on the haul, too.”
“And what would I do with the bastard currency of human exchange? A warm place to sleep, plenty of game—preferably old and slow or young and stupid—and a pride of willing females one of whom is always in heat, and I would have all I could ask for. I am immune from and indifferent to the driving need that you humans suffer from to accumulate things. Spending so much time in accumulating, you forget to live.” He yawned again. “Your friend, however, is a breed of human I have not met before.”
“By Gwantha, he’s a new breed of human to me as well,” the swordsman confessed.
“Then who knows? Maybe he can talk to fish.” A guttural cough emerged from the muscular throat as the big cat closed his eyes and rolled over onto his back, all four paws in the air. “Me, I would rather eat them than talk to them.”
“Don’t see what good it would do us anyway,” Simna muttered uncertainly. “Even if he could arrange for us to ride, what fish would be big enough to carry you? And every time we reached the far side of one of these lunatic floating blobs of water we’d have to get off our fishy mounts, scramble over the side, climb up into another and find new fish in the new pond to carry us. Be quicker to walk—provided the water covering the real ground doesn’t get any deeper.” He concluded with a deep breath: “Well, best to leave it to Etjole. He’s the brains here.”
Eyes shut tight, the drowsing litah barely responded. “Among the humans, anyway.”
XIX
“THEY HAVE BEEN WATCHING US FOR A LONG TIME. EVER SINCE we crossed the river, I think.”
“What?” Suddenly alarmed, Simna left off repacking his kit and looked around wildly.
Ahlitah lifted his head, nose in the air, nostrils working. “I see nothing. But I do smell something—unusual.”
Without moving from where he was standing, the now wary swordsman turned a slow circle. Beyond the island in the floating pond and outside its transparent boundaries, hundreds of additional bodies of water drifted independent of one another, some the size of small lakes, others mere globules no bigger than a child’s ball. Some squeezed together until their mysterious transparent envelopes merged to form a larger aqueous mass while others wrenched apart until they separated into two or more distinct hovering bodies. He tried to let his gaze touch every one of them, but nowhere did he see anything out of the ordinary.
“There’s nothing out there,” he declared conclusively. “Nothing but fish and frogs, newts and waterbirds.”
“No, you are wrong.” One hand shielding his eyes from the mist-shrouded sun, Ehomba was standing at the water’s edge staring off to the east. “There is something else. Something greater.”
“They’re coming closer.” Head back, nose in the air, Ahlitah was inhaling a scent still too subtle for human nostrils to detect.
“Where, by Gheju! I don’t see anything, and I don’t smell anything! Except you two.” Frustrated, Simna stomped up and down the tiny beach, sending tide-zone insects and crustaceans scrambling for cover from the footprints he left in the soft soil.
They came from beneath the rising sun, distant dots at first that soon matured into rising and falling arcs of glistening pink, as if the morning had decided to hesitate in its brightening and mark the pause with a series of rose-hued commas. With the precision of experienced acrobats they advanced by leaping lithely from one hovering body of water to the next, sometimes entering those nearest the ground, then ascending skyward from pond to pond as if climbing a watery ladder. This they did effortlessly, soaring from floating lakes to drifting ponds in spite of the fact that a single missed leap would in all probability result in the slow, unpleasant death of the jumper. Because while they could live out of water, they could not do so for very long.
“Dolphins!” Simna exclaimed. “Here?”
“Yes, here,” Ehomba murmured. “They have sharp eyes, and even sharper hearing, and ways of seeing the world at distances greater than either eyes or ears can match.”
“But dolphins are creatures of the sea,” Simna protested as he watched the school continue its approach, leaping from one drifting body of water to the next.
“Not always,” rumbled Ahlitah. “I have seen these very same, or their relations, playing in the rivers that crisscross the veldt.”
“There are sea dolphins and freshwater dolphins,” Ehomba informed his friend.
“I guess there are,” admitted Simna. “Strangely colored they are and—” He broke off, frowning. “Wait a minute. You’ve been telling me that you come from a desert country. Now you’re saying that you know all about the different kinds of dolphins, even those that live in fresh water. Deserts aren’t known for a surplus of deep rivers. How do you know so much about this kind of water dweller?”
The herdsman smiled gently down at his friend. “The dolphins of the sea know well their inland relatives. Where river meets ocean they often meet and talk, and sometimes exchange matings. I know about the river dolphins because the sea dolphins told me of them.”
“Ah. So you don’t talk to fish. You talk to dolphins.”
“No. No man talks to dolphins. It is up to the dolphins to talk to men.”
“And they just happened to settle on you?” Simna eyed the tall southerner slyly. “Why would that be, Etjole? Because you are making all of this up to keep from confessing what I’ve known all along? That you are a sorcerer?”
“Not at all, Simna. They talk to me because I like to take long walks by myself along the beach, and the shores of my country are desolate. The currents there are swift and cold. There are men who kill dolphins, for food and to keep them from competing for the catch. I would never do such a thing. How can one eat another who is known to be kind as well as intelligent?”
Behind them, Ahlitah licked a paw. “I’ve never had any trouble with that.”
“Well, I could never do such a thing. I believe that they can sense a kind and kindred spirit. I have been talking to dolphins since I was a child.”
“So you called them to us?” Simna wondered uncertainly.
“Nothing of the kind.” Raising his gaze once more, Ehomba monitored the school’s advance. They were quite near now, slowing as they debated which floating globules to use to make their final approach. “I doubt they have seen many humans in this place before, or perhaps none at all before us. Naturally curious as they are, I believe they have simply grown too interested in our presence here to stay away any longer.” He began walking backward. “You should step away from the water.”
“Why?” Then Simna noted the enthusiastic splashes the oncoming dolphins were making and hastily gathered up his gear, moving it to higher ground among the trio of casuarinas.
The dolphins arrived singly and in pairs, leaping magnificently from a second pond into the one where the travelers had spent the night. There were a dozen of them, including a quartet of youngsters. They took up much of the available water, forcing the indigenous inhabitants up against the transparent skin of the hovering pond or close inshore as the invaders dashed in energetic circles around the island, squeaking and barking joyously. With their bright pink coloration they resembled strips of flame shooting through the water.
If it was a form of ceremonial greeting, it was a dizzying one, as Ehomba and his companions struggled to follow the streamlined racers’ progress around and around the little island. Eventually the new arrivals tired of the game and settled down to hunting out the fish and other pond dwellers who were trying to hide in the crevices and roots of the island.
One of the dolphins did not. Instead, it s
wam slowly toward the three travelers with effortless strokes of its broad, flat tail. Its head was different from those of its seagoing relatives, being narrower and with a prominent forehead in back of the long beak. Turning slightly to her left, she raised her head out of the water and parted tooth-lined jaws.
“I am Merlescu, Queen of the High River School and of the central district of the Water-That-Flies. Who are you?” Dancing eyes tracked their every movement.
Simna leaned close to whisper up at his tall friend. “No wonder you can talk to them. They speak perfectly.”
“Of course we speak perfectly!” declared the queen. “Why would you think otherwise, man?”
“Oh, I dunno. Maybe because I’ve never before heard your people do anything but squeak like oversized finned mice.”
It was hard to tell if Merlescu was smiling, because her kind were always smiling. Inherited physiognomy made any other expression impossible.
“It suits us to speak our own language around humans and to keep them ignorant as to our true abilities. Except,” she added as she turned to face Ehomba, “a very few. You, man, have about you a kind and sympathetic aspect.”
“Oh really?” Simna made a show of inspecting his companion’s face. “He looks pretty ordinary to me.”
“What are you doing in the land of the Water-That-Flies?”
“We are making our way north,” Ehomba explained, “so that we may eventually book passage on a boat going to the dry territories that lie to the west.”
“So very far!” Pivoting on her tail, she squealed at her school, whose members replied with energetic squeaks and chirps. Looking back at the travelers, she professed, “I have never met anyone who has crossed the ocean. Not even others of my kind—though there was one who insisted she had talked to one who had talked to one who had done it. What drives you three to undertake so extensive and dangerous a journey?”