Into the Thinking Kingdoms (37 page)

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Authors: Alan Dean Foster

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BOOK: Into the Thinking Kingdoms
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Straight at Ehomba.

 

 

XXIV
O
n board the
Grömsketter
all eyes turned to the obviously bemused herdsman. When he did not respond, Stanager again addressed the assembled officials. “This man is a passenger on my ship. Though known to me for only a few days, I have found him to be a responsible and worthy individual. What is it you want with him?”
“That is our business,” another man shouted upward. “Turn him over and you may proceed on your way. Refuse, and your vessel will be boarded. Those who comply may depart freely. Those who resist will be killed or taken before the Board of Logicians to have their ultimate fates resolved.”
Stepping away from the railing, Stanager turned to stare up at her long-faced passenger. “I don’t understand any of this. What do the Gate Masters want with you? What have you done?”
“I tell you honestly, Captain: to my knowledge, nothing.” Ehomba was aware that the eyes not only of his friends but of the crew were on him, watching and waiting to see what he would do. “But I cannot allow my own circumstances to put you and your people in danger. You have done nothing.”
“By Gorquon’s Helmet, neither have we, Etjole!” The right hand of Simna ibn Sind rested firmly on the hilt of his sword. “I’ll not see you handed over to an unknown fate. Not after all we’ve been through together!”
The herdsman smiled fondly at his friend. “What is this, Simna? Loyalty? And without a gold piece in sight?”
“Mock me if you will, long bruther. You wouldn’t be the first.” The swordsman’s face was flush with anger. “Dying in combat with some monstrous beast or battling an attacking army is a worthy death for a man. You deserve better than to rot in some cell accused of Gwinbare knows what imaginary crime.”
“No one has said anything about dying or rotting in a cell.” Ehomba’s voice was calm, his manner composed. “They may only want to talk to me.”
“Hoy, but for how long?” Simna gestured sharply in the direction of the assembled soldiers and officials. “They said that once they have you, the rest can sail on. That doesn’t sound to me like they plan to let you go anytime soon, and you said yourself we shouldn’t wait two months for another ship.”
“So you should not.” Raising his hands, the herdsman placed them on his friend’s shoulders. “I hereby charge you, Simna ibn Sind, with completing my task, with fulfilling my promise to the dying Tarin Beckwith. Stay with the
Grömsketter.
See her across the Semordria, and find your way onward from there.”
The swordsman tensed. “What madness is this? What are you saying, Etjole?”
Removing his hands, Ehomba turned back to the railing. “I am getting off the ship.” He looked to Stanager. “Captain, as soon as I am on the dock and the Narrows are once more cleared to navigation, set your course downriver and sail on.” She eyed him purposefully for a long moment, then nodded once.
A ladder of rope and wood was thrown over the side. Ehomba started toward it, only to be grabbed and held by the swordsman.
“Don’t do this, bruther! You have your weapons; I have my sword. There is the black litah and Hunkapa Aub. We can fight them off!” His fingers tightened on the taller man’s arm.
Gently, Ehomba disengaged himself from his friend’s grasp. “No, Simna. Even if we could, sailors who have no part in this might get hurt, or killed. As could any of us, yourself included. Stay on the ship. Sail on.” He smiled warmly. “Think of me as the river carries you to the sea.” Turning away, he stepped over the side, straddling the railing preparatory to climbing down the ladder.
“Stop there!” a voice commanded from below. Crossbow bolts were trained on the herdsman. “No weapons. Leave them and the pack on your back on board the ship. You can claim them upon its return.”
Removing the sword of sea bone and the sword of sky metal, Ehomba passed them to a stricken Simna. They were joined by the long walking stick–spear. Lastly, the herdsman slipped off his backpack and handed it to a somber-faced Terious. Hunkapa Aub was crying outsized inhuman tears. Ehomba was grateful that the black litah was still asleep. It might not have been possible to restrain the big cat with words. Had it been awake, the spilling of blood might have proven unavoidable.
Descending the ladder, he jumped the last few feet to the dock, landing with a resonant
thump
on his well-worn sandals. Instantly, he was surrounded by soldiers. With an approving nod, one of the Gate Masters turned and gave a signal to someone in the brick tower. Flags flashed in the direction of the opposing headlands, where other flags responded.
How it was done Ehomba could not tell. The time gates that surmounted the headlands were too far away for him to discern the mechanisms involved. But the shimmering, coruscating blue haze that blocked the Eynharrowk abruptly vanished, though it remained in place everywhere else.
Aboard the
Grömsketter
shouts rang loudly. He could make out the brisk, lively syllables of Stanager’s commands and the deeper echoes of Terious and the other mates. Deliberately, the sleek ship pulled away from the dock and turned its bow once more toward the Narrows. Along the railing he could see an openly distraught Simna staring back at him. Behind the swordsman the hulking mass of hair that was Hunkapa Aub stood and waved slowly. He continued to follow them with his eyes until a hand shoved him roughly in the middle of his back.
“Move along, then. There are coaches waiting to take us back to the city.”
Turning away from the
Grömsketter,
receding rapidly now that it was edging back out into the main current, Ehomba began the long march to the end of the dock. Gate Masters paralleled him on both sides and were in turn flanked by their stalwart, alert soldiers.
“Maybe now you can tell me what this is all about?” he asked the green-clad official on his left. Like his sisters and brothers, the man’s hands were locked together in front of him.
“Certainly. We don’t act arbitrarily, you know. There is a reason for this. Your arrival was predicted by the Logicians. Taking their measurements from disturbances in the Aether and the flow of Time, they calculated the cognomen of your aura and its probable path. As you have seen, Hamacassar is a big place, where even a distinctive aura can hide. We almost missed you. That would have been tragic.”
Ehomba frowned, openly puzzled. “Why is that?”
The Gate Master looked up at him. “Because according to the Logicians’ predictions, if you were allowed to proceed on your chosen course unhindered, the flow of Time would have been substantially altered, and perhaps unfavorably.”
“Unfavorable to whom?” In the lexicon of the Naumkib, forthrightness invariably took precedent over tact. Ehomba was no exception.
“It does not matter. Not to you,” the official informed him importantly. “Having committed no crime, you are not a prisoner. You are a guest, until your friends return. Or if you prefer, you will be allowed to leave in one month’s time, once the
Grömsketter
is well out to sea and beyond reach.” The man smiled. His expression was, the herdsman decided, at least half genuine.
They were nearing the end of the dock. “What makes you so certain that if I was permitted to continue on my journey Time would react adversely?”
This time it was the woman on his right who replied. “The Logicians have declared it to be so. And the Logicians are never wrong.”
“Time may be a river,” Ehomba responded, “but logic is not. At least, not the logic that is discussed by the wise men and women of my village.”
“His ‘village.’” Two of the Gate Masters strolling in front of him exchanged a snickering laugh.
“This is not a village, foreigner,” declared the man on the herdsman’s left meaningfully. “This is Hamacassar, whose Board of Logicians is comprised of the finest minds the city and its surrounding provinces can provide.”
Ehomba was not intimidated. “Even the finest minds are not infallible. Even the most reasonable and logical people can make mistakes.”
“Well, according to them, detaining you is not a mistake. Whereas letting you continue on most surely would be.”
The tall southerner glanced back down the dock. In the distance, the sturdy hull of the
Grömsketter
was passing through the Narrows, traveling swiftly westward as the current continued to increase its speed. Turning his attention to the red-brick administration buildings up ahead, he saw several antelope-drawn coaches lined up outside. More soldiers waited there, a mounted escort to convoy him and the Gate Masters back to the city.
“You know,” he murmured conversationally, “logic is a funny thing. It can be used to solve many problems, even to predict things that may happen in the future. But it is not so very good at explaining people: who they are, what they are about, why they do the things they do. Sometimes even masters of logic and reason can think too long and too hard about something, until the truth of it becomes lost in a labyrinth of conflicting possibilities.”
While the woman on his right pondered his words, the man on his left frowned. “What are you trying to say, foreigner?”
“That anyone, however clever they believe themselves to be, can think too much.” Whereupon he lurched heavily to his right, slamming his shoulder into the startled female official and sending her stumbling and crashing into the two soldiers marching close alongside her. In a confusion of weapons and words, all three went toppling together off the end of the dock to land in the shallow water below.
“Stop him! Don’t kill him, but stop him!” the senior Gate Master shouted.
With dozens of soldiers in pursuit, Ehomba ran inland. A lifetime of chasing down errant calves and stray lambs allowed him to outdistance all but the most active of his pursuers, not to mention the Gate Masters who trailed huffing and puffing in their wake. Neither group was in any especial hurry. There was nowhere for the herdsman to go. If he entered the water they would quickly chase him down in boats. The headland toward which he was running ended in a low bluff overlooking the river. All other directions were sealed off by the still active time gates, through which the flow of Time continued to ripple and shimmer.
“Stop!” yelled a voice from behind him.
“You can’t get away!” shouted another. “There’s nowhere to go!”
But there was somewhere to go. Or rather, somewhen.
Taking a deep breath and making an arrow of his clasped hands, Ehomba leaped forward and dove headfirst into the time stream.
Somewhere far around the curve of the world, the most powerful sorcerer alive woke up screaming.
From the hole Ehomba’s body made in the channel, Time spewed forth in a gush of unrestrained chronology. Amid shrieks and howls, Gate Masters and soldiers alike were swept up and washed away in the flood of Time, to disappear forever into some otherwhen. The detained deranged foreigner was forgotten in the survivors’ haste to close all the time gates and so shut off the flow to the devastating leak.
Once this had finally been accomplished, reluctant soldiers were sent to scour the area where the tall stranger had disappeared. Though not hopeful, the Gate Masters knew they had to try. The Logicians would demand it. As expected, there was no sign or suspicion that the foreigner had ever existed. He was gone forever: vanished, swept away, taken up by the river of Time. With wondering sighs and expressions of regret for those colleagues who had been lost in the short-lived disaster, they set about composing themselves for the journey back into the city. It was an occurrence that occasioned much animated discussion among the survivors.
Caught up by the river of Time, Ehomba kicked and dug hard at the eras that rushed past. Growing up by the sea, he was a naturally strong swimmer. Still, it was hard to tread years, difficult to hold one’s breath as wave after wave of eternity broke over one’s mind. But to the determined and well conditioned, not impossible.
He swam on, trying to make timefall as close to the point where he had entered the river as possible. The current was strong, but he had expected that and, by his angle of entry, done his best to anticipate it. Caught up in the flow of Time, he was battered and buffeted by astonishing sights. Animals ancient and fantastical rushed past. Great machines the likes of which he had never imagined clanked ponderously forward down unsuspected evolutionary paths, and all manner of men inhabited times immemorial and impossibly distant.
He was almost out of breath when a faint gleam caught his eye. Turning in the Time flow, he kicked hard for it. It was one of the blazing yellow-white streaks he had seen from his own time, viewed now from the inside out. This in itself was a wonderment to him, for he did not know that it was possible to see light from the inside out. The current tore at him, insistent and relentless. He felt himself weakening.
Worse than that, he was running out of Time.
* * *
Below the Narrows of Hamacassar the Eynharrowk once more became a broad, placid highway. Smaller boats traveling in the same direction as the
Grömsketter
kept closer to either shore, while those beating their way upstream gave her a wide berth. Small islands dotted with reeds and cattails had begun to appear, the first outposts of the great delta into which the torpid river spread before at last entering the ocean. Fishermen had erected modest homes on the larger islets, and spread their nets from long poles rammed into the shallows.

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