Implied Spaces Read Online Free PDF Page B

began its trek. Everyone had got practice by now, and though the caravan didn’t move appreciably faster, it was more orderly and better-behaved. The guards were efficient, organized into an advance guard, flankers, and a rear guard that complained of wandering in the dust. Patrols regularly trotted ahead to the next hill, or rocky outcrop, to make certain no ambush was lurking therein.
    The principal delays occurred at water holes. It took hours to water the animals.
    The terrain grew rougher and began to descend. Each hill gave a broader view than the one before it, though the farthest views were always hidden by heat-haze.
    After eight or nine leagues the group came upon a battlefield, the water hole where the bandits had routed three caravans and their sixty guards. Dead animals and bodies lay in the sun amid broken wagons, flesh turning to leather, lips snarling back from teeth. It looked as if the caravans had been attacked when in camp, their tents strewn across a valley floor in no particular order.
    “A lesson in forming a proper laager,” Aristide told Nadeer. But Nadeer was busy shouting down those who wanted to stop and give the bodies a proper burial.
    “Do you want to join them in death?” Nadeer demanded. “Our lives depend on moving quickly through this place!”
    Nadeer lost the argument, chiefly because the convoy took so long to re-water that there was time for the burials anyway.
    The caravan rolled on. Halfway to the next water hole Nadeer called a halt, and the laager was formed by grim-faced drovers who made sure their weapons were within easy reach. Aristide wandered through camp until he found Ashtra. He observed her as she brewed tea over a paraffin lamp. She was in the company of a family moving to Gundapur, the father, a pregnant mother, and three children traveling in a two-wheeled cart. They were sharing their bread and dried fruit with her.
    Aristide watched for a few moments, then left unobserved.
    The next watering hole was a spring that chuckled from the foot of a great slab of basalt that towered like a slumbering giant over its little dell. Guarding the source of water was a deserted military fort, its tumbled walls having been breached at some point in the dim past. A black and unnaturally flawless menhir stood above the empty pool of life. Though the gates had long since been burned for firewood, the fort nevertheless provided more protection than the open desert for the most vulnerable members of the caravan.
    The next march took them along the watercourse. The spring water was absorbed by the ground before the convoy had gone very far, but the dry river bed was full of scrub that testified to the presence of water below the surface. The watercourse widened in time into the Vale of Cashdan, the great zigzag slash in the wall of the plateau that led down to the plains of Gundapur. White birds floated far below, like snowflakes drifting in the wind. Crags crowned with trees loomed above the narrow caravan route that wound through green patches of mountain grazing. The blue of a stream was barely visible before the Vale vanished into a huge floor of brilliant white cloud that stretched to the far horizon. Never would the convoy again be without water.
    Aristide stood with the captains on the edge of a precipice overlooking the Vale, peering down and pondering their options.
    “At least we no longer have to worry about a mounted charge over flat ground,” Eudoxia said, her blue arms crossed on her chest. “I was troubled the whole body of them would charge in and cut us in half—they would have wrought such havoc that we might not have recovered our balance.”
    “Now we’re going to have to worry about people rolling rocks on us,” Aristide said.
    “Ay,” said Nadeer. His single eye glittered. “Like those fellows over there.”
    “Where?” Scanning the jagged walls of the valley ahead.
    Nadeer bent and picked up a rock the size of Eudoxia’s head. He hefted it for a