Law of the Wolf Tower: The Claidi Journals Book 1, Tanith Lee [pocket ebook reader .TXT] 📗

thought you understood, this might be a long journey. Didn’t the princess tell you?’

Had she? I didn’t think she had. I suppose it was common sense and I was just a twit. Then again, I couldn’t have carried much more. He would have carried it, maybe.

Nemian took the enamelled box out of his pocket. He offered me another of the sugary stalks.

The stalk was difficult to chew with such a dry mouth and scorched dusty throat.

But it did help. Even the thirst became more uncomfortable than sharply painful.

‘You see,’ said Nemian, ‘there is a town over there somewhere,’ he waved idly at the hills. ‘I saw it from the balloon. We can get transport there, perhaps. Unless they’re very unfriendly. Which they may be.’

I’d thought everyone and thing was unfriendly in the Waste. But Nemian had come from the Waste.

He closed his eyes. I heard myself say in a faint panic: ‘Don’t—’

‘Don’t? What?’

I wanted to say, Don’t go to sleep. Talk to me, please. But what right did I have to demand that?

When I didn’t add anything, he shrugged and – slept.

Glumly I sat there.

I tried to be brave. I tried to think he was wise to sleep, and I should try to as well. But the sugary spice-stalk seemed to have made me wide awake in addition to staying tired.

So I sat and stared nervily out over the plain.

Little spirals of dust still spun there. Huge hollow clouds above. A large black bird hung motionless on the air, as if from an invisible rope.

He’d only held my hand and put his arm around me to keep us together. He had felt responsible, like a kind prince for his servant. And I’d let him down. Hadn’t brought enough water.

I thought if anyone in the House had been the way he was it would have annoyed me. Because it was Nemian, I felt in the wrong. Was this a very bad sign?

A huge new blond cloud was streaming along the plain. Getting bigger.

I watched it, then properly saw it. Before I considered I jumped up with a howl.

Nemian woke.

‘Are you a girl or some species of jumping deer?’

‘The storm – it’s started again!’

He looked, with those cool eyes.

‘No, it isn’t the storm. Riders, and vehicles.’

And he sprang to his feet and ran, all in one coordinated bound, across the plain away from me, towards the dust cloud.

Had I been abandoned? Was I expected to follow? I’d better follow, hadn’t I?

I floundered into a panting gallop.

The cloud (riders and vehicles) was going from right to left across the near horizon, slightly looping in towards us as it went. Because the ground was fairly flat now, I didn’t see at first they were on a sort of makeshift road which the storm had obviously uncovered.

How far was it to reach them? Miles. Probably not. Towards the end I had to keep stopping, gasping for breath, but by then some of them had slowed down, and then halted.

When I eventually staggered up, Nemian was in conversation with seven brown men in the two halted vehicles. The others had gone rolling on.

There was a mad noise. This was because the two chariots (I recognized them from the riding vehicles the princes sometimes used in the Garden) were drawn, each, by a team of six, very large, curl-horned sheep. Some of the sheep were bleating in deep voices. And then I grasped the chariot riders were also bleating. And Nemian was bleating too.

For a minute I thought I’d lost my mind. Or they all had.

Then Nemian turned and saw me standing there with my hair raining down and my mouth as usual wide open.

He smiled, and raised one eyebrow.

‘Hello, Claidi. You needn’t have rushed. These are Sheepers. I know their language.’

One of the brown men, who wore their hair in plaits, braided, like the wool of the sheep teams, with beads and sheep-brasses, said loudly, ‘B’naaa?’

Nemian turned back, and bleated in return.

A few moments more, and one of the riders in the second chariot got out, and jumped into the first chariot. Helping hands drew Nemian and me into the second chariot.

Everything smelled very oily and woolly. But – oh wonderful – a leather bottle was being offered to us. Nemian politely let me drink first. It wasn’t water but warmish sheep milk, and I wasn’t terribly delighted. But it did soothe my throat.

‘We’re going to the Sheeper town,’ Nemian informed me.

A whip cracked high, well clear of woolly backs, and we were off.

CHARIOT TOWN

There was quite a welcome.

Under a square gateway in a thick wall, but only just high enough so we could drive through, and into the brown town of the Sheepers. And everyone had come out, in the dusk, with lamps. Women laughing and holding up babies, and children screaming and bouncing, and old men leaning on wooden staffs, and grannies (they call them that), old women, and almost all of them were banging drums and blowing whistles, and some even threw flowers – a particularly hard sort of white poppy.

I gathered, but not right then, the chariot-riding Sheepers had been off somewhere, trading. With some other settlement of Sheepers? Anyway, it was a success. Best of all, the road had reappeared after the storm, which made the journey quicker. Although in fact we’d ridden with them until after sunset.

As the sky flamed, the hills had abruptly seemed to come nearer, then the sheep chariots bundled round a swerve in the road, and we saw the town lying in the curve of two really near, rounded low hills, as if in the paws of a lion.

They call it, not for the sheep, as they do practically everything else, but for their chariots. Chariot Town.

Nemian says the walls may belong to something older and lost. The Sheepers patched them up and built inside.

The houses are made of wood and skins. (Not sheep. They never kill sheep.) Each has a strange little open garden, a stretch of neat close-cut fawn turf.

In the