Watcher At The Well - Echoes Of The Well Of Souls Part 24

She was startled by this sudden rather sophisticated sci-ence and immediately saw what Julian meant when she said that this guy was no fool.

"I accept what you say. The problem I have is, what is it doing to her mind?"

"You won't notice any changes from the way she is now so long as you continue them. The bottom line is that she won't want to kill herself, and she will be accepting of her role."

"Okay, that's one condition. You said several."

"Yes. When you reach Aqomb, you must check in and present the papers to the Holy Office there.

They will mon-itor your compliance and her progress."

"Very well."

"Next, you will speak only Erdomese to one another, even in private. Language is the primary definer of a cul-ture. You must believe that the Holy Office can determine if you uphold this or not in their examination of you both."

She wasn't sure how they could tell, but right now she would agree to anything just to get it done and over with.

"And finally, as soon as practical after the marriage but certainly before you retire for the night, youmust consum-mate the marriage and present her for examination by me the next day.Then, and only then, will I give you the pa-pers. Failure in any one of these may result in the marriage being annulled, and if it is, you will not see her again and may yourself face criminal penalties. Once you are married, you are morally and legally responsible for her and youwill be held accountable. Remember, too," he added, possibly guessing at her ultimate intentions, "that even if you leave our land, you have had your living rebirth. There will be no more change in race, s.e.x, or anything else until you die and are again reborn. There is no running from it. There are no colonies here. You both will be Erdomese and nothing else."

Well, the monk had sure laid it on the line. "All right, I agree." Lori said. "I swear it to you here and now." He hoped he could fulfill the duties he was agreeing to. As a male and an Erdomese, he was still a virgin.

"Very well. I a.s.sume you can write insome language?"

"Several. Just not Erdomese-yet."

"All right, then, I will dictate the contract, and you will write it in the language of your choosing. One copy for you in your language, certified as a true copy by me, and the other in Erdomese for official use.

Those, and the marriage contract, will suffice. When do you leave?"

"Well, Posiphar has indicated that he might well go to Aqomb himself for a while and take a rest. If he does, we'll go with him. The hope is to leave just before dawn the day after tomorrow so that we can hit a small oasis at midday."

"Very well. Then you will marry tomorrow. I will then be there before you leave the next morning to make my ex-aminations and, if satisfactory, hand you the papers."

The interview was over. "Thank you, Holy One. I will try to be worthy of your trust," he said, rising, bowing slightly, and leaving the prayer sanctuary.

He headed for Julian, who was still locked up by decree until the marriage, to tell her the good and the not so good parts of the news.

"I speak in Erdomese," he said right off, "because one of the conditions was that we speak nothing else to one an-other, and I do not wish to have anything go wrong."

"It will be so," she agreed.

"The reason why you have changed so much in here is that they have been giving you herbs to facilitate the pro-cess," he told her. "They are strong, and the Holy One knows his business. I am commanded to keep you on them until they are gone. He said that to stop them now would cause you to go mad. He also said that they would not change you more than you are now, that it is just to ensure that you remain this way. He also said that an examination by others could tell. Does this bother you?"

"No," she responded. "It-gives me relief. Now I under-stand why I have been this way. It helps me.

And if it frees me from this place, I will take anything they wish. I know they can probably tell. That is one thing they are experts at here. Getting what they want."

"Then we do it tomorrow."

"Tomorrow!" Julian was excited. "But-I will need more thanthis !I can't get married looking and smelling likethis !"

Lori grinned. "You look just fine to me, but I'll speak to Aswam. Most likely his wives and daughters can help you.

He'll probably try and rob me blind for the service, but un-til tomorrow he's stuck with you."

Julian laughed, the first laugh she'd had since she'd got-ten here. "And I will be a good little girl until he has no hold on me. I promise."

"Um, one more thing. They require that we consummate as soon as possible after marriage."

"Well, I am ready for that. I would not have it any other way, as I told you before, even though it is another way they hope to hold us here."

"Huh? Why is that?"

"They hope I will get pregnant, which will restrict us, and that I will have children, which will limit us more. With nations so small and so different, it is unlikely that the others would welcome families as settlers. It does not worry me. One day I might like to have children, but it is not how you do it here that counts. Even births are regulated from on high, so that the nations do not get too many people to support.

That is what they told us when we came in here."

Reminded of that, Lori felt a little more relieved. She didn't think they had a population problem here at the mo-ment, and she'd seen some babies in her travels, but not a lot of them. The fact that at least by observation it appeared that twins were the norm made the chances even lower.

"That's supposing that we can do it right to begin with," she joked.

Julian gave a soft laugh. "That should not be a problem.You know what a woman wants;I know what a man wants. When you consider that, we should be the most perfect couple in all history!"

After Lori left to make the arrangements, Julian had to chuckle at the sudden realization that she was still of two minds. As a human male she'd been divorced with no chil-dren; now, as an Erdomese female, she was to be married and could have her own children, and something in her re-ally craved the kind of family life Julian Beard had rarely experienced. Lori might find what he was looking for else-where, but she would never again fly a plane, let alone a s.p.a.cecraft, never again do meaningful research-not with this body andthese hands-and, curiously, she didn't really mind. She'd railed against that knowledge most of all in the beginning, but it no longer seemed to matter now. Oh, she was glad that she'd done those things and had those mem-ories, but at the age of forty Julian Beard, from a broken home and with no wife or family, had accomplished as much or more on his own than his boyhood dreams had ever imagined. She hadn't realized until now how empty some of the triumphs had been without anyone to share them with.

She wondered if in fact the Well had screwed up or whether, somehow, becoming Julian Beard's complete opposite-s.e.xually, technologically, and in every other way-wasn't what was exactly right for her at the moment. Now she was supporting Lori's show, and it felt comfort-able to be in that role and stop fighting. Lori might never understand it, but that, too, was all right.

Husbands never understood their wives, did they?

Julian in fact looked stunning for the tiny wedding, with long golden earrings-a series of squares linked together with chain, hanging down from punctures in the lowest part of the equine ears-a matching necklace, a pinkish glow applied judiciously to her face and upper body, hooves and "fingers" shined to almost a reflective polish, and her hair and tail done up in the traditional style, rising from golden tubes out across her back and up from the rear and then slinkily down to almost the ankles. Aswam's women had done her up just right, and she had just the body for it.

Lori was stunned by the look. In the dark shed he hadn't even noticed that Julian's hair was a sultry light reddish-brown, and the combination now put the other women around to shame.

Somehow, too, he'd expected Julian to be taller. It was true that Lori was very large for an Erdomese male, and he'd gotten used to being higher than everybody else by a few inches, but Julian looked positivelytiny beside him, with only that huge mane of hair bringing her up to near his shoulders. She also looked soyoung, although certainly amply developed.

The wedding was brief and simple, held in a small demonstrator tent on Aswan's property, with only the tentmaker and his women and Posiphar and his women in attendance. In some ways the oaths taken before the witnesses and priest were everything Lori had hated back on Earth; Julian had to promise to honor, respect, and "obey absolutely" her husband, while Lori was required to swear only that he ac-cepted all responsibilities, morally and legally, for his wife's welfare. More interestingly, the word "love" was no-where to be found. That, at least, Lori thought, was not dis-honest; he wasn't in love with Julian, but he did find her incredibly attractive on all levels, and love might come later. Neither, however, really knew the other yet-which was in some ways also consistent with Erdomese tradition.

Then there were fruit drinks and exotic pastries and some of the exotic-sounding Erdomese music from two of his daughters who had some talent in that direction, and that was it. By the heat of midday they were in a guest tent not too far away, the floor of which was covered with the large, varicolored pillows that were the most common furnishings in the nation.

Julian sighed. "Well, now I am Lori-Julian, or Madam Lori. Husband's name goes first here, but even if you take a dozen more wives I'll still be the only Madam Lori."

"I know," Lori replied, stretching out on the pillows and sighing. "Sorry, I didn't get much sleep last night."

"You are lucky. I got none at all. I never thought I would ever get married again. And Isurely never thought I would be somebody'swife ."

Lori frowned and looked up at her. "You were married?"

"A disaster. I will tell you about it if you want. We were divorced years ago, and after she remarried, I never saw or heard from her again. You were never married?"

"No. I lived with a string of men off and on, the last one for five years. We had just broken up for good when I got the offer to cover the meteor strike." He smiled sadly. "Want to know the ultimate irony? I forced the issue. I was closing in on forty, and my biological clock was in scream-ing mode. The idea of children frightened him to death for some reason. I pressed, he left. Just moved out without a word." The smile turned to a nasty grin. "How I'd like to see himnow !"

Julian chuckled. "Yes, it might be fun to see Holly now, too. I've got twice her cleavage inboth ways.

Useful, too. They actuallyare 'jugs,' you might say, holding water until near the time of birth, when Mother Nature throws a switch inside. You thinkyou have problems. Erdomese gestation is almost a year long, and the little b.u.g.g.e.rs have hooves." She lay down beside him. "We can get some rest now and do what we must later," she suggested, "but can you at least satisfy one bit of curiosity I've had since I woke up here?"

"Huh? What?"

"Will you take that thing off? I've got to know if it re-ally is that big or if those things are falsies."

Lori shifted around, removed the codpiece, and put it to one side, then rolled back. He'd never seen anybody's eyes get that big.

"Oh, my! Ohmy, oh my . . ."

It proved a lot easier, and a lot better, than either of them had thought it would be.

The land changed considerably as they neared the coast, be-coming harder and more like the deserts of the American southwest or the steppes of Kazakhstan than like the Saharalike interior. Water here could be found coming from fissures in the rocks or occasionally in streams around which sprang dramatic vegetation. Because of this, they would often run into wandering herds ofamat, twon, orzalj, the Erdom equivalent of the bison, the cow, and the antelope, respectively, and, here and there, signs ofmahdag, the elephantine and vicious yaklike creatures of the steppes. Overhead, the fierce pterodactyllikemaguid would swoop down in aerial packs; while preferring carrion, maguid were perfectly willing to do their own killing if they were really hungry.

Posiphar had exchanged the sand skis for wooden wheels, and it occasionally took all of them to get it up some of the grades and all of them to keep it from going down some grades ahead of them. Mostly, the daughters pulled it, the others walking beside.

"This place could be beautiful if you knew the rules and what was dangerous and what was not," Julian noted. "Un-fortunately, I do not know those rules, and it seems pretty scary to me."

"I've seen little here that scares me," Lori a.s.sured her. "Nothing I couldn't take with a spear or arrow, anyway. Mahdag is a different story, but I don'twant to try one of those."

"There be them who hunt them," Posiphar remarked. "And them who be offerings of mahdag to the maguid who have tried to hunt them, too. Luckily, they be few and far between, and the ground be shaken long afore they come."

"Have you ever seen one?" Lori asked him.

"Yes, several times in this district, always from a dis-tance and going the correct way, which is not the same way the mahdag be going. The cursed beasts be a head or more taller than even y'self and weigh a couple of tons or more."

Lori shook his head in wonder. "What do theyeat ?It would seem that it would take a lot to satisfy just one of them."

"Oh, there be a lot more vegetation around on some of these plateaus and mesas than ye'd think," the old trader told him. "I be not sure anyone has ever had the opportu-nity to study livin' ones and survive, but I be certain that they be vegetarians and kill entirely for pleasure."

The church taught that the mahdag had once been peo-ple, evil ones beyond redemption, doomed to wander in the wastes until the end of the world.

The trip had been an uneventful one as usual, and Lori and Julian had pretty well stuck to the bargain.

She was even mixing the herbs herself according to the instructions pa.s.sed on to them. They also practiced some social rules that Lori at least had never even noticed before, although he'd been around Posiphar's wives and daughters since ar-riving in Erdom. Heshould have noticed, though, and he felt bad about his lapse, since most were really designed to keep women in their "place."

For instance, a wife or daughter could address a husband or father easily, and also any other woman, but conversing directly with any other man, unless specifically invited to do so by husband or father, was forbidden. Since Julian considered Posiphar's family a set of ignorant little air-heads, she talked mostly to Lori, butnever interrupting a conversation Lori was having with Posiphar. This grated a bit on Julian's nerves, but she held it in and practiced it anyway. She was well aware that she was still on some kind of probation and that it all could be yanked away, and that was her biggest terror.

Still, when they got to the start of the last mesa, they found themselves in an actual forest, which seemed strange and alien to them after so long in the desert, and when they emerged from it at the other end, the whole of the Sultanate of Aqomb was spread out below them in the late afternoon light, and even Julian had to gasp.

The town itself sat on a broad coastal plain, its towers and spirals and vast honeycomb of streets looking like something out of theArabian Nights. The green of trees and gra.s.s, in parks within the city walls as well as outside and up the coast as far as the eye could see, made it seem literally a different world. But what was even more startling was the view beyond, not only just to the east of the city but also to the south of it, and it wasn't the vast expanse of the West Arm of the Sea of Turigen, either, although that seemed amazing enough. It was the shimmering curtain that seemed to follow the coast all the way through which most of the water was glimpsed, a curtain that seemed to rise up to heaven itself.

"That's right," Posiphar cackled, "Ye never seen a hex boundary afore. That there be the border with Hadron. All the nations be bordered like that, all over the world. It can be kinda odd sometimes, not like now. I hear tell of some where it be havin' ice fallin' from the skies and as cold as the lower h.e.l.ls on one side, and on the other side it be sunny and warm as the Hjolai at midday."

"And that to the right-it looks like the same sort of thing, only solid. You sure can't see through it."

The wall there did indeed look thick and translucent; it reflected the sun to some extent but was a mottled gray-black going from behind to ahead of them as far as could be seen.

"That be the Zone Boundary," Posiphar told him. "Inside there is where ye came in, somewheres. d.a.m.n thing's so huge, you can put dozens of nations in it at least. Even where they be havin' great weapons, they can't blast through it, chip it, even scratch it. The only way in or out of it is by the Great Zone Gate, which be hidden by that tall building down there built up against the wall. I hear tell it be a mighty strange thing. Ye walk through any of them, and it's like a tunnel and there you are in the Zone. But no matter if ye walk in your own, or someplace far away, even on the other side of the world, when ye leave the Zone, ye walk out right there. If ye travel as I know ye intends, re-member that. Any gate will take you to Zone, and any gate out of Zone will take ye right there. Be a whale of a short-cut home."

Both he and Julian stared at that wall. Inside there was where they'd awakened after dropping through, somehow, to Zone from Brazil. Inside there they'd received their briefings and gone through the gate the first time and wound up here.

"Can anybody just use it?" he asked.

"Well, yes 'n' no. Accordin' to treaties, anybody'ssup-posed t' be allowed to walk through any gate, but not ev-erybody likes everybody else and not everybody signs treaties, and some who does sign treaties don't alwaysre-member what's in 'em, if you gets my meanin'. Still, mostly you can, but you only can if ye turn 'round and come right back to home. Zone itself's for official types only. Kinda handy for some emergency-type trade, though. If ye needs somethin' quick, ye can always have a fellow someplace far off push it into Zone byhis gate, then ye pick it up there and push it back and it's here."

"You meanthings as well as people are transported? That's not like the ones we went through."

"Oh, it be handy, but limited. Mostly things like medi-cines and stuff and fancy stuff for the rich come through. Most all else goes in or out by ship and overland by all sorts of ways. It don't allow no animals or bugs or stuff through, so it's safe, but them critterscan get into Zone, so they spray and inspect and all that in there, and they really don't allow much use of the thing for that kind of trade, you see. Most bugs and stuff don't like it outside their home, and most races can't catch other races' diseases, but there's always a few what can. And mostanything can live inside the Zone."

"Have you ever been outside of Erdom?" he asked the trader.

"Me? A few times, yes. Not far, though, and not on any of them floating contraptions. Been up north where they grow tobacco. Be a big trade item here, only for the very rich. Gave it up, though, after a while. Them Ambrezans be mighty strange folks, and I don't much like them contrap-tions floatin' you in air and all that. Also it be wet and smelly, with water just hangin' in the air. They be also makin' smart remarks about our ways and looks and how I treats me wives and all that. The longer you're away, too, the better home seems. This place wasmade fer us."

Lori couldn't imagine himself having that problem, but he might. Who could tell what sorts of places those other hexes were? "Is there anywhere where we can see a map of the world? Find out about some of the other hexes and races and the like?"

"Oh, there's plenty books 'n' maps and stuff, but if ye can't read Erdomese, it don't matter, does it?

Down by the port there ye can get stuff in a ton of crazy languages as well as the one they use for translators so we can talk to one another, even them what don't have mouths. But ye can't read that, neither, so what's the use? Best go down to the port and pump some of them funny critters that runs the boats."

Julian's head came up and looked at Lori, who had the same sudden thought. "You mean those translators work- even in Erdom?"

"Yep, they do. Got several kinds. Some folks wear 'em, some get 'em stuck inside 'em-don't recommendthat be done in Erdom! I hear tell they be hexes where they can look right inside you and see what's there and do all sorts of miracle things. The rich and n.o.bles go there when they needs stuff.

'Course, you and me, we can't afford it and don't have the contacts." He looked at the sun. "We better be gettin' on down there if we want to be on the flat afore dark. It be all downhill from here and windy.

The woods don't stop here where ye think; they just go down, too."

The sundid set before they were all the way down; the road was good, but they were descending maybe two kilo-meters or more in a fairly steep grade, and the compensa-tion was a serpentine roadway that switched back and forth on itself for what seemed like forever.

Still, even though it was some distance yet to the city, the flat made it easy going and the city was certainly not something anybody could miss. It was big and bright and seemed lit up like a million Christmas trees.

Julian's past military experience spotted a puzzle. "I wonder why they have city walls if they light the place up like that."

Even Posiphar didn't know the answer to that when Lori pa.s.sed along the question to him. "Guess if anybody be attackin', they'd put them lights out," he guessed.

This was one city that did not close at night. Oh, the shops and bazaars were closed, but there seemed to be clubs and nightlife and eateries and music and gaiety all over the place, all illuminated by brilliant oil lamps, some, with stained gla.s.s, casting fairyland glows that ranged the spectrum.

Posiphar directed them to a small hotel. "Farewell, lad. It's been a very interestin' time we be with you, and the G.o.ds go with you. With my brood we be stayin' with some old friends in their place near the docks. Ye mind yer money, now. Ye ain't got much, and it goes quick."

Lori felt like he was losing his oldest friend, which in a way was true, but they parted on a handshake rather than the embrace he almost gave the old fellow. Men did notdo that, not in Erdom.