Night's Daughter Read online

  But the thick rugose trunk was solid beneath his fingers, and when he climbed, it supported him. He thrust one of the fresh soft dates into his mouth. It was not like the elaborately prepared sweet dates, sticky with syrup and stuffed with sweetmeats, he had eaten at the Emperor's table, but it still seemed good enough to him for an imperial banquet. He ate several more of the fresh dates and thrust a bunch into his pack.

  Food, then, was supplied, unless—and he did not seriously think so—this was a bizarre dream born of hunger and solitude and he was still lying in his sleep of fatigue under the dry and barren desert bush.

  His hunger satisfied, he turned to the even more pressing problem of water. Date palms did not usually grow in the bare desert. He had heard that they grew only in oases. Had he then been moved while he slept, his body carried to an oasis of date palms with the usual springs at the center? Alas, no; the solitary date palm under which he seemed to have slept without knowing it was alone in the barren wasteland. It was a riddle he could not read.

  He was certainly awake. The only possible solution, and that was as mad as all the other ideas, was that the dry and spiny bush had somehow been changed, while he slept; changed to a date palm where no date palm could grow. Was this then why they called this barren waste the Changing Lands?

  The dates were real and wholesome; at least they felt so to his palate and to his stomach. What a pity that they had not somehow transported their oasis with them.

  Slightly to the north stood a boulder; not very high, but when the terrain was so flat, it could perhaps provide a vantage point from which he could spy out whether there was any break in the rough and barren country, any sign of an oasis or even of vegetation of the kind which might signal the presence of water. Tamino climbed the rock and turned slowly in all directions. The sun had now risen, and the view to the east was obscured with light. Tamino, squinting his eyes against the cruelty of the sun, now saw not only the low horizon, broken only by the distant shapes he had seen on arising, but, roughly halfway to that broken line of horizon, the rising green of palms and a glint that might well be water.

  On the face of it this was as unlikely as the scrubby bush which in the night had become a palm loaded with bunches of ripe sweet dates. Was it a mirage? Ten days in the desert had taught him something of that danger, too. Yet he had breakfasted well on the impossible dates; it was at least worth the possibility that he might quench his thirst at the equally impossible oasis.

  It took him no more than a moment to gather up his possessions: the pack which now held only a few scraps of dried meat and the miracle dates; his cloak, which rather than wearing he now tied carefully about his waist; his bow and a few remaining arrows; and the short sturdy knife he carried about his waist, less weapon than utilitarian tool for skinning game or cutting firewood.

  He set off in the direction of the oasis. After thirty days he was a hard and tireless walker, and set a steady pace. The dry and thorny bushes tore at his legs, though he had wrapped them in scraps of an old tunic, and impeded his walking. Strange that there were now so many of them; the day before they had grown as sparsely as all other life in this desert. He looked down curiously. They were thicker and not as spiny as they had been—a new plant with thorns rather than spines, and bearing leaves. Leaves, green leaves in this barren desert?

  Yes. Leaves, green leaves with prickly undersides and ragged toothed edges. And rather than the low spiny bushes, they now grew on trailing reddish vines which were—Tamino stopped, wondering again if his eyes played him false—laden with ripe blackberries.

  He tasted one. It tasted like any other berry, perhaps a little sweeter than most, or was it only that he had gone so long on short rations? He went on pushing his way through the thickening tangle of thorny bushes, filling his hands with the ripe berries, which also quenched his thirst.

  There was a crashing sound through what had become, almost swiftly, thick underbrush. Before Tamino's startled eyes, a gazelle leaped across a clearing before him and disappeared while he was still staring.

  He blinked and went on, scowling. He should have had his bow at the ready, but he had not expected anything like this in the desert. But was it a desert now? When he had surveyed the country round the rock, it had been the same barren desert in which he had gone to sleep last night. Now it seemed to have taken on some of the qualities of a jungle. Definitely, the ground was softer under foot, and after a time he heard a soft and definite squelching sound beneath his boots.

  The Changing Lands?

  Long before he reached what had been an oasis when he surveyed the ground, he reached a small pool fed by a crystal spring. He rested there for a time, bathing his parched face in the water and drinking his fill for the first time in many days.

  He was still not free of the fear that this was all a mad dream. He had lived for twenty years and never before had he encountered any territory where date palms appeared by magic or desert changed to bog without any intervening transition—or, more accurately, lands which he had seen as desert were discovered to be bog. But then he had never traveled, before this, in the Changing Lands.

  A rustle beyond the pool alerted Tamino. He snatched his bow from his shoulder, strung it swiftly with one hand, almost in the same motion fitting an arrow to the notched string. At the far side of the pool, bending to drink, were a small herd of antelope, shoulder high to a man, with long curving horns.

  He paused for an instant before loosing the arrow. Although after a month of short rations the smell and taste of fat roasting haunch of antelope was already in his mouth, yet if he reached his goal in a day or two, he could not eat that much meat. Was it right to kill for so little, and waste the rest?

  Or—he looked again—was it an antelope? His eyes must have deceived him; it was a small gazelle, not much higher than knee-high to Tamino, who was not particularly tall. This much he could certainly make use of. With swift decision, he let the arrow fly.

  The gazelle fell soundlessly to the earth, shot through the heart.

  CHAPTER THREE

  QUICKLY, Tamino hurried toward the spot where he had seen the gazelle fall. He stumbled over roots and vines that he had not seen before (had they been there?) and when he looked round he saw no sign of the dead animal.

  This was as mad as anything else that had happened this morning. Yet he persisted. He was no longer starving, for he had eaten his fill of the dates, but he had lived far too long on dried foods, and was hungry for the taste of fresh meat. He looked carefully for the gazelle's body. Had he missed it, after all? No—he had seen the arrow strike, and at this distance he could hardly have missed clean. Moreover, he had seen the creature fall.

  He kicked restlessly at the underbrush. It was not as tall as all that, not enough to hide a full-grown gazelle.

  His foot encountered some obstacle. With astonishment, Tamino saw that it was one of his arrows. He bent and lifted it. It was stuck in something, and when Tamino lifted the arrow to free it, he found that he had indeed shot something through the heart.

  But it was not a gazelle; it was, instead, one of the small and peculiarly shaped squirrels which had constituted his last previous meal of game.

  Thoughtfully, Tamino picked up the animal. This was even stranger than the other things that had been happening to him. He had seen an antelope, and forborne from killing it because he felt he could not eat so large a beast. Whereupon it had conveniently turned itself into a gazelle, and he had shot it. And when he found the carcass it had undergone yet another metamorphosis into a squirrel.

  Maybe, he thought, he had better cook and eat it at once, before it underwent some other change and shrank down into a sparrow or a cricket!

  He returned to where he had left his possessions, watching carefully to be sure they did not change into something else. If his skinning knife, for instance, were to become a fishhook or a spinning reel, it would be troublesome to get his meal ready. But everything was reassuringly the same. He sat down cross-legged and sk
inned the squirrel—carefully not taking his eyes off it—gutted it and cut a dry stick to spit it; then he built up a fire and set the carcass over it to roast.

  Soon it began to sizzle and sent out the most appetizing smell. While it was cooking, Tamino rinsed and refilled his waterskin, and, stripping to the skin, plunged into the pool to refresh his dusty and sunburned body. He washed his soiled tunic and his leggings and hung them to dry on one of the thorny bushes. Again he drank from the sweet water of the pool. After so long in the desert he had begun to think he would be thirsty forever.

  Half naked, he sprawled on the bank, munching the roast squirrel. The flesh had a strange taste, as if the beast had fed on some oddly astringent berries, but it was meat, and filling, and Tamino enjoyed the first really satisfying meal he had had in many days. When he had finished, his tunic and leggings were dry, and he went to reclaim them from the bushes. The sun was warm by the pool, and he delayed a little before putting them on again.

  In the pool there was a ripple and splash, and a small furry face, whiskered and inquisitive, peered up at Tamino. Although at first he thought it some small water animal, perhaps an otter, he realized quickly that there was human intelligence behind the dark eyes: a Halfling! He had heard of them, even far away in the Empire of the West; but never before had he actually set eyes upon one. Although he had known that many years ago such creatures had been brought to the Emperor's court as curiosities. There was a story of an ape who had played at chess with the Empress, Tamino's mother, and had beaten her at the game.

  The otter-halfling crawled slowly up the bank. In form it was a small furry woman, the face so round and bewhiskered that only by seeing the small paired breasts down her belly was Tamino certain that the Halfling was female. She had fur all along her back, too—though there was less of it on her breasts and belly—and her arms and hands were abnormally, almost grotesquely short, ending in stubby clawed fingers. The legs were short and clawed too, rather than footed, and less than half the length of the torso. Tamino looked at her halfway between fascination at her strangeness and revulsion for this parody of the human form. A real otter would have pleased him, and an encounter with a real woman, after so many days with no sight of a human creature, would have been more than welcome. But he was not at all sure that he wanted to encounter this curious being. She watched him so intently that Tamino was suddenly aware that he was all but naked. He reached for the tunic and pulled it quickly over his head. Why should he be so self-conscious in the presence of an animal? Yet as he looked at her he discovered that he was very conscious of her femaleness, as he would not have been in the presence of a real animal. He was very much aware that this was not an animal but a woman, and to be treated as such.

  Small splashes in the pool revealed three or four smaller furry faces, replicas of the Halfling woman: her babies, surveying him from the safety of the water. They made small chittering sounds. He wondered if the Halfling had human speech, and if it would be useful to ask her the way. He took a step toward her, and she slithered swiftly down the bank and into the pool, swiveling an inhumanly supple neck almost all the way round to look cautiously at Tamino. Could she possibly think that he meant her any harm?

  He coughed self-consciously and said, "I won't hurt you."

  There were small squeaking sounds from the furry babies; but the otter-woman only stared, the brown eyes fixed on him with curiosity and skepticism. She was after all a woman, though a very strange one; perhaps she had reason to fear strangers encountered in the wild like this. He had not been sexually aroused by her, but somehow he was conscious, without knowing how he knew, that other men perhaps had been so, that she had reason for her fear. She went on looking at him, and that intense dark gaze gave Tamino a chilling sense that merely by being, as he was, human unadulterated, he had somehow wronged her, and that made him angry. He was not to blame that he was a man and a prince of the West.

  "I only wanted to ask you," he said stiffly, "what is the way to the great Temple of Wisdom, the palace of the Sun-kings?"

  Silence, while the Halfling woman stared at him with her great dark eyes, then the furry babies chittered softly. He wished, if she was capable of speaking, that she would do so.

  Quickly, she pointed to the northeast with one stubby arm; then, in a splash and a ripple, submerged, leaving nothing but fading circles on the surface of the pool. In four little splashes, the babies dove after her.

  Tamino stood staring for a moment, watching the ripples remaining in the pool, before turning away. Well, he had encountered now the first of the strange things he knew that he must face in the Changing Lands, and he was sure he would see stranger things than this while he was in the country of the priest-kings of Atlas-Alamesios.

  He gathered together the remnants of his meal and was about to bury them in the leaf mold near the pool; then he wondered if otters were meat-eaters. He supposed, being pool-dwellers, that they lived mostly upon fish, but in case they liked meat, he left the scraps for them. If they chose not to eat them, he thought crossly, wondering why he was annoyed, the bugs and insects near the pool would do away with them soon enough. He took up his bow and his few remaining arrows, gathered up his cloak and tied it around his waist, carefully extinguished the last coals of his fire, and strode away.

  He took the path to the northeast, as the otter-woman had directed him, but the character of the land had changed, and he found himself traveling now through thickly forested country. It was almost impossible to see very far ahead or behind in any direction, for there were trees and tangled vines and heavy underbrush, and sometimes they grew so thickly that he could hardly see the sky. He found it incredible that only the night before he had slept in a barren desert; surely, if this forest had been here, he would have seen it somewhere on that deserted skyline. Here and there in the over-grown forest, which was rapidly becoming a jungle, he glimpsed great ruins and overgrown buildings, and more than once he heard the snarling cry of a predatory jungle cat.

  Gradually, as he moved, he grew hotter; even his thin tunic was too heavy. He started to take it off, then remembered that he was no longer alone in an untenanted wilderness. Where there was one creature with sentience there might well be others, and he might at any moment encounter the inhabitants of this place. And if he must, he preferred not to do so with the disadvantage of near-nakedness.

  There were now many sounds in the forest and after the silence of the great desert, they seemed to press in upon him. Birds called in the trees overhead, small things scurried away under his feet, and from time to time, glancing up, he could see some creatures moving swiftly through the branches. As yet, though, none of the sounds were specifically human sounds. Not unless some of the beasts he could dimly see sharing this wilderness with him were, in truth, Halfling, partaking in some small measure of Humankind. And he still found that hard to believe.

  All that morning and well into the afternoon he walked. At one period he heard the beast-sounds, high overhead and under his feet, fall suddenly silent; then there was a short, swift, violent shower of rain. Even in the shelter of the trees he was drenched, stunned by the sudden wind stirring the leaves and whipping the branches. He huddled under the trees, shivering, letting the wind roar over him, and the rain was like knives cutting his skin.

  Then the rain stopped, as swiftly as it had begun. The sun came out and gleamed through the rifts in the branches; silvery drops tilted and fell shimmering on his head. A bird screamed in the high foliage overhead and Tamino saw a flash of brilliant yellow and crimson swooping above. Almost at once his soaked tunic dried in the heat.

  He was beginning to think about looking for a place to rest for the night, and of another meal from the cooked remnants of the squirrel when the forest opened into a clearing. At one time this had been a settled place where men lived, for great masses of stone rose overhead, high pillars and half-fallen walls. When he looked down he was treading on small bright stones set in a mosaic; there were curious shapes, beast and
bird, human and half-human, a woman with the horned moon set above her brow, a great coiling serpent who yet bore the shadow of human-form. But even the colors of the stones had faded. He wondered who had lived here, and how long ago it had been?

  Even as the question crossed his mind, he saw across the clearing the shape of a man, no more than a shadow in a bright cloak. Or had it been a man? It was tall and erect, carrying his head proudly, and he caught one glimpse of a face, high-bridged nose, sharp arrogant chin, then no more; there was something inhuman in the swiftness with which it moved. But Tamino had seen it only for a second or two before it disappeared behind the great ruin which stood at the far end of the clearing. In memory it looked something less than human. Another Halfling? He retained the image in his mind of a profile that was both noble and melancholy, and without thinking he called out, if indeed it was a man:

  "Hey, there! Hello! Won't you come and talk to me? I am a traveler from the Empire of the West—" and, remembering how the Halfling woman had feared him, he added—"I don't mean you any harm, I only want to talk to you!"

  Silence. Tamino realized that his heart was pounding against the walls of his chest. Was it only excitement at the thought of encountering something human after a full month of solitude? Or was it fear? There was no sound in the clearing except for the rustle of grasses and insects underfoot. In the distance a bird chirped and there was a merry little whistle—Tamino could not tell whether it was a bird, or some human ound. It did not sound entirely birdlike, but seemed to have some purposefulness behind it.

  Where had the strange man, if indeed he was a man, gone? The clearing was empty; it seemed that now even the birds fell silent.

  Then there was a harsh roaring sound and a hot scorching wind past his head and Tamino looked up to behold a dragon looming over him.