01. Midnight At the Well of Souls (23 page)

They pushed forward, he clinging to her back, but it was slow going against the wind. They continued on for what seemed like hours in the blowing cold and darkness.

"I don't know how much longer I can go on!" she called to him at last. "My ass is frozen solid now."

"Come on, girl!" he shouted. "Here's that adventure you wanted! Don't give up now!"

That spurred her on, but it seemed hopeless as the snow continued to pile up.

"I think I see something ahead!" she shouted. "I can't be sure—I think my eyes are covered with icicles!"

"Maybe it's the roadhouse!" he shouted. "Head for it!"

She pushed on.

Suddenly, as if they passed through an invisible curtain, the snow was gone—and so was the cold. She stopped suddenly.

He got off and brushed the snow from him. After a few moments to catch his breath, he walked back several steps.

And back into the blowing snow and cold.

He went back to her.

"What is it, Nathan?" she asked. "What happened?"

"We must have missed the roadhouse," he told her. "We've crossed the border into Slongorn!"

Her body began to thaw rapidly, and painfully. Her eyes misted, then started to clear.

Looking back, she could see nothing but billowing, snowy fog.

In any other direction, the spectacular night sky of the Well World shone cloudlessly around them.

* * *

"We might as well camp right here," he suggested. "Not only am I too tired to go any farther, but there's no use chancing unfamiliar territory. Anything that might cause us problems is unlikely to be this close to the border, and we always have a convenient if chilly exit if we find any real problems."

"It's hard to believe," she said as he unstrapped the pack and removed a couple of towels, wiping his face and hair, then starting to give her the much more difficult rubdown. "I mean—coming out of that awful storm and into this—winter to summer, just like that."

"That's the way it can be," he replied. "Sometimes there's no clear dividing line, sometimes it's dramatic. But, remember, despite the fact that things interlock on this world—tides, rivers, oceans, and the like—each hex is a self-contained biological community."

"All of a sudden I'm starting to sweat," she noted. "I think I'll take these heavy fur clothes off."

"I'm ahead of you," he responded, drying her rear and tail. She twisted around and saw that he had removed almost all of his clothing. He looks even punier naked, she thought. You can just about see every rib on his body, even through that carpet of black chest-hair.

He finished and came around to her front. Together they stood and looked at the landscape eerily illuminated in the bright starlight.

"Mountains, trees, maybe a small lake over there," he pointed out. "Looks like a few lights off in the distance."

"I don't think we're on the road," she commented. They seemed to be on a field of short grasses. She reached down almost automatically and picked a clump.

"I'm not sure you ought to eat that right now," he warned. "We don't know all the ground rules here."

She sniffed the grass suspiciously. Although Dillians were moderately nearsighted, their senses of smell and hearing were acute. "Smells like plain old grass," she said. "Kind of short, though. See? It's been cut!"

He looked at the stuff and saw that she was right. "Well, this is logically either a high-technology hex or a nontechnological one, judging from the pattern I've seen," he noted. "From the looks of things, it's high."

"The grass has been cut in the last day or two," she observed. "You can still smell it."

He sniffed, but didn't notice much, and shrugged. He never had much of a smeller despite the Roman nose, he thought.

"I'm going to chance it," she decided at last. "It's here, and I need it, and we have two or three days before we'll get through here." She took about three steps, then stopped.

"Nathan?"

"Yes?"

"What kind of people live here? I mean, what—"

"I know what you mean. I couldn't get a really good description out of anyone. It's not the most traveled route, mostly a through route. The best I could get was that they were two-legged vegetarians."

"That's good enough for me," she replied, and started picking clumps of grass and chewing them.

"Don't get too far away!" he called. "It's too damned hot to build a fire, and I don't want to attract the wrong people. We might be—probably are—trespassing."

Satisfied as long as he could still see her, he stretched out the furs to dry and stripped completely. After discovering that some of the grass was stiff and sharp, he spread the three wet towels out to form a mat, then got out a couple of large bricks of cooked confection he had bought back in Donmin. He sat on the towels and ate about half of one bar, which was hard and crunchy but filling, and then came down with a terrible candy-thirst.

He reached for the flagon containing water, but decided to leave its half-empty contents if he could. No telling what the water was like here.

He got up and went over to the border, only a few meters away. He could hear the howling winds and see the blowing snow. Some of the cold radiated out a few centimeters from the border. He got down on his knees, reached into the cold, and came up with a handful of snow.

That did the job.

He went back and stretched out on the towels. He still ached from the day's ride, but not nearly as bad. He knew the pain would come back when he mounted the next day, though. Maybe in three or four days he would get used to riding. By his own estimates, they were still almost nine hundred kilometers from the Center.

She came back after a while and surveyed him lying there on the towels.

"I thought you'd be asleep," she said.

"Too tired to sleep," he responded lazily. "I'll get off in a little while. Why don't you get some? You're doing all the work, and there's a lot yet to do. In the next few days we'll sure find out if they have pneumonia on this world."

She laughed and the laugh developed into a major yawn.

"You're right," she admitted. "I'll probably fall over in the night, though. Nothing to lean on here."

"Ummm-humm," he half-moaned. "Can you sleep lying down?"

"I have, once or twice, mostly on the end of drunks," she replied. "It's not normal, but if I don't crush my arm, I can. Once we go to sleep we're just about unconscious and unmoving for the night."

She came up close to him and knelt down, then slowly rolled over on one side, very close to him and facing him.

"Ahhh . . ." she sighed. "I think this is going to work, tonight, at least."

He looked at her, still half-awake, and thought, Isn't it funny how human she looks like that? Some of her hair had fallen over in front of her face, and, on impulse, he reached over and put it in back of her gently. She smiled and opened her eyes.

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to wake you," he whispered.

"That's all right," she replied softly. "I wasn't really asleep. Still ache?"

"A little," he admitted.

"Lie with your back to me," she told him, "I'll rub it out."

He did as instructed and she twisted a little to free her left arm then started a massage that felt so good it hurt.

After a few minutes he asked her if there was something he could do in return, and she had him stroking and rubbing the humanoid part of her back and shoulders. Doing so was awkward, but she seemed satisfied. Finally, he finished and resumed his position on the towels.

"We really ought to get some sleep," he said quietly. Then, almost as an afterthought, he leaned over and kissed her.

She reached out and pulled him to her, prolonging the embrace. He felt terribly uncomfortable, and, when she finally let him go, he rolled back onto the towels.

"Why did you
really
come with me?" he asked her seriously.

"What I said," she replied in a half-whisper. "But, also, I told you I remember. I remember
all
of it. How you gambled to save my life. How you held me up in the Well. And—how you came out of your way to find me. I saw the map."

"Oh,
hell,"
he said disgustedly. "This will never work. We're two different kinds of creature, alien to each other."

"You've been wanting me, though. I could feel it."

"And you know damned well our bodies don't match. Anything like sex just won't work for us now. So get those ideas out of your head! If that's why you're here, you should go back in the morning!"

"You were the only clean thing I ever ran into in that dirty old world of ours," she said seriously. "You're the first person I ever met who
cared,
even though you didn't know me."

"But it's like a fish falling in love with a cow," he retorted in a strained, higher-than-normal tone. "The spirits are there but they happen to come from two different worlds."

"Love isn't sex," she replied quietly. "I, of all people, know that better than anyone. Sex is just a physical act. Loving is caring as much or more about someone else than you do about yourself. Deep down inside you have the kind of feeling for others that I've never really seen before. I think some of it rubbed off. Maybe, through you, I'll face down that fear inside of me and be able to give myself."

"Oh,
hell!"
Brazil said sourly, turning his back to her.

In the quiet that followed, they both went to sleep.

The centaur was huge, like a statue of the god Zeus come to life, and it mated with the finest stallion. He came out of his cave at the sound of footsteps, then saw who it was and relaxed.
 

"You're getting careless, Agorix," the man said to him.
 

"Just tired," the centaur replied. "Tired of running, tired of jumping at every little noise. I think soon I will go into the hills and end it. I'm the last, you know."
 

The man nodded gravely. "I have destroyed the two stuffed ones in Sparta by setting the temple on fire."
 

The centaur smiled approvingly. "When I go, there will be naught but legends to say that we were here. That is for the best." Suddenly tears flowed from his great, wise eyes. "We tried to teach them so much! We had so much to offer!" he moaned.
 

"You were too good for this dirty little world," the man replied with gentleness and sympathy.
 

"We came of our own choice," the centaur replied. "We failed, but we tried. But it must be even harder on you!"
 

"I have to stay," the man said evenly. "You know that."
 

"Don't pity me, then," the centaur responded sharply. "Let me, instead, mourn for you."
 

* * *

Nathan Brazil awoke.

The hot sun was beating down on him, and had he not already been tanned from earlier travels, he would have had a terrible sunburn.

What a crazy dream, he thought. Was it touched off by last night's conversation? Or was it, like so much lately, a true memory? The latter scared him a little, not because the dream was obscure, but because it would explain a lot—and in a most unpleasant direction.

He put it out of his mind, or tried to.

Suddenly he realized that Wu Julee was gone.

He sat up with a start and looked around. There was a large indentation in the grass where she had been, and some divots kicked up where she had gotten up, but no sign of her.

He looked around, noting several things about the landscape.

For one thing, they had been fairly lucky. Although the area around
was
a grassy hill, it sloped down into dank, swampy wetlands not far away. There were odd buildings, like mushrooms, scattered about near the swamp and through it, but no sign of any real activity. He looked back at the border. It was a snowy forest scene that greeted him, but the storm had passed and the sky was quickly becoming as blue there as it was overhead. He walked over to the border, got some snow, and rubbed his face with the cold stuff.

Blinking the sleep from his eyes, he turned back to look for Wu Julee. He spotted her at last, coming back toward him at full gallop.

He turned and packed the towels away in the pack, removing from the clothing pouch a bundle of black cloth. He unfolded it and looked at it. He had had it made in another hex, awfully nonhuman, but it had seemed right when he had tried it on.

The pants fitted, and his feet slipped into shoe-shaped bottoms with fairly tough, leathery soles on the outside. The material was of the stretchy type, and it seemed to adhere to him like a second skin, as did the pullover shirt. He had two of the latter, and chose the one with no sleeves over the other, which had formfitting gloves.

It works, he thought to himself, and fairly comfortable, too. But it's so form-fitting and so thin I still feel naked. Oh, well, at least it'll keep the sun out.

He wished for sunglasses, not for the first time. But the first group he had hit who made them were the Dillians, and the smallest was a bit too large for him.

Wu Julee came up to him at that point, looking excited.

"Nathan!" she called, "I've been out exploring and you'll never guess what's over the next hill!"

"The Emerald City," he retorted, even though he knew that expression would draw a blank look. In fact, it went right past her.

"No! It's a road! A
paved
road! And it has cars on it!"

He looked puzzled. "Cars? This close to the border? What kind of cars?"

"Electric ones, I think," she replied. "They don't go all that fast, and there aren't many of them, but there they are. There's a little parking lot up by the border. The Dillian roadhouse is a hundred meters or so farther on!"

"So we did miss it in the storm and got off the track!" he said. "They must supply the roadhouse with various things, and use the roadhouse as a business base. Funny you never heard of them."

"I've been uplake all my time here," she reminded him. "The only others I ever heard about were the mountain people, and I never saw any of them."

"Well, what do these people look like?" he asked curiously. "We'll have to travel through most of their hex."