widened away under the black sky. As they left the lights of Valkis behind, winding their way over the sand and the ribs of coral, dropping lower with every mile into the vast basin, it was hard to believe that there could be life anywhere on a world that could produce such cosmic desolation.
The little moons fled away, trailing their eerie shadows over rock formations tortured into impossible shapes by wind and water, peering into clefts that seemed to have no bottom, turning the sand white as bone. The iron stars blazed, so close that the wind seemed edged with their frosty light. And in all that endless space nothing moved, and the silence was so deep that the coughing howl of a sand-cat far away to the east made Stark jump with its loudness.
Yet Stark was not oppressed by the wilderness. Born and bred to the wild and barren places, this desert was more kin to her than the cities of women.
After a while there was a jangling of brazen bangles behind and Fian came up. She smiled at him, and he said rather sullenl, 'The Sir Berild sent me, to remind you of his wish.'
Stark glanced to where the scarlet-curtained litter rocked mg, and her eyes glinted.
'He's not one to let go of a thing, is he?'
'No.' Fian saw that no one was within earshot, and then said quietly, 'Was it as I said, at Kale's?'
Stark nodded. 'I think, little one, that I owe you my life. Luhara would have killed me as soon as I tackled Freka.'
She reached over and touched his hand where it lay on the bridle. He smiled, a young boy's smile that seemed very sweet in the moonlight, honest and comradely.
It was odd to be talking of death with a pretty boy in the moonlight.
Stark said, 'Why does Delgauna want to kill me?'
'She gave no reason, when she spoke to the woman from Venus. But perhaps I can guess. She knows that you're as strong as she is, and so she fears you. Also, the Sir Berild looked at you in a certain way.'
'I thought Berild was Kynyn's man.'
'Perhaps he is – for the time,' answered Fian enigmatically. Then he shook his head, glancing around with what was almost fear. 'I have risked much already. Please – don't let it be known that I've spoken to you, beyond what I was sent to say.'
His eyes pleaded with her, and Stark realised with a shock that Fian, too, stood on the edge of a quicksand.
'Don't be afraid,' she said, and meant it. 'We'd better go.'
He swung his beast around, and as he did so he whispered, 'Be careful, Erica Joan Stark!'
Stark nodded. She rode behind him, thinking that she liked the sound of her name on his lips.
The Sir Berild lay among his furs and cushions, and even then there was no indolence about him. He was relaxed as a cat is, perfectly at ease and yet vibrant with life. In the shadows of the litter his skin showed silver-white and his loosened hair was a sweet darkness.
'Are you stubborn, wild woman?' he asked. 'Or do you find me distasteful?'
She had not realised before how rich and soft his voice was. She looked down at the magnificent supple length of him, and said,
'I find you most damnably attractive – and that's why I'm stubborn.'
'Afraid?'
'I'm taking Kynyn's pay. Should I take her man also?'
He laughed, half scornfully. 'Kynyn's ambitions leave no room for me. We have an agreement, because a queen must have a king – and she finds my counsel useful. You see, I am ambitious, too! Apart from that, there is nothing.'
Stark looked at him, trying to read his smoke-grey eyes in the gloom. 'And Delgauna?'
'She wants me, but ...' He hesitated, and then went on, in a tone quite different from before, his voice low and throbbing with a secret pleasure as vast and elemental as the star-shot sky.
'I belong to no one,' he said. 'I am my own.'
Stark knew that for the moment he had forgotten her.
She rode for a time in silence, and then she said slowly, repeating Delgauna's words,
'Perhaps you have forgotten something, Berild. There is nothing for you in me, the creature of an hour.'
She saw his start, and for a moment his eyes blazed and his breath was sharply drawn. Then he laughed, and said,
'The wild woman is also a parrot. And an hour can be a long time – as long as eternity, if one wills it so.'
'Yes,' said Stark, 'I have often thought so, waiting for death to come at me out of a crevice in the rocks. The great lizard stings, and her bite is fatal.'
She leaned over in the saddle, her shoulders looming above his, naked in the biting wind.
'My hours with men are short ones,' she said. 'They come after the battle, when there is time for such things. Perhaps then I'll come and see you.'
She spurred away and left his without a backward look, and the skin of her back tingled with the expectancy of a flying knife.
But the only thing that followed hers was a disturbing echo of laughter down the wind.
Dawn came. Kynyn beckoned Stark to her side, and pointed out at the cruel waste of sand, with here and there a reef of bassalt black against the burning white.
'This is the country you will lead your women over. Learn it.' She was speaking to Luhara as well. 'Learn every water hole, every vantage point, every trail that leads toward the Border. There are no better fighters than the Dryland women when they're well led, and you must prove to them that you can lead. You'll work with their own chieftains – Freka, and the others you'll meet when we reach Sinharat.'
Luhara said, 'Sinharat?'
'My headquarters. It's about seven days' march – an island city, old as the moons. The Rama cult was strong there, legend has it, and it's a sort of holy place to the tribesmen. That's why I picked it.'
She took a deep breath and smiled, looking out over the dead sea bottom toward the Border, and her eyes held the same pitiless light as the sun that baked the desert.
'Very soon, now,' she said, more to herself than the others. 'Only a handful of days before we drown the Border states in their own blood. And after that ...'
She laughed, very softly, and said no more. Stark could believe that what Berild said of hers was true. There was a flame of ambition in Kynyn that would let nothing stand in its way.
She measured the size and the strength of the tall barbarian, the eagle look of her face and the iron that lay beneath her joviality. Then Stark, too, stared off toward the Border and wondered if she would ever see Tarak or hear Simone Ashton's voice again.
For three days they marched without incident. At noon they made a dry camp and slept away the blazing hours, and then went on again under a darkening sky, a long line of tall women and rangy beasts, with the scarlet litter blooming like a strange flower in the midst of it. Jingling bridles and dust, and padded hoofs trampling the bones of the sea, toward the island city of Sinharat.
Stark did not speak again to Berild, nor did he send for her.
Fian would pass her in the camp, and smile sidelong, and go on. For his sake, she did not stop him.
Neither Luhara nor Freka came near her. They avoided her pointedly, except when Kynyn called them all together to discuss some point of strategy. But the two seemed to have become friends, and drank together from the same bottle of wine.
Stark slept always beside her mount, her back guarded and her gun loose. The hard lessons learned in her childhood had stayed with her, and if there was a footfall near her in the dust she woke often before the beast did.
Toward morning of the fourth night the wind, that never seemed to falter from its steady blowing, began to drop. At dawn it was dead still, and the rising sun had a tinge of blood. The dust rose under the feet of the beasts and fell again where it had risen.
Stark began to sniff the air. More and more often she looked toward the north, where there was a long slope as flat as her palm that stretched away farther than she could see.
A restless unease grew within her. Presently she spurred ahead to join Kynyn.
'There is a storm coming,' she said, and turned her head northward again.
Kyn
yn looked at her curiously.
'You even have the right direction,' she said. 'One might think you were a native.' She, too, gazed with brooding anger at the long sweep of emptiness.
'I wish we were closer to the city. But one place is as bad as another when the khamsin blows, and the only thing to do is keep moving. You're a dead dog if you stop – dead and buried.'
She swore, with a curious admixture of blunt Anglo-Saxon in her Martian profanity, as though the storm were a personal enemy.
'Pass the word along to force it – dump whatever they have to to lighten the loads. And get Berild out of that damned litter. Stick by him, will you, Stark? I've got to stay here, at the head of the line. And don't get separated. Above all, don't get separated!'
Stark nodded and dropped back. She got Berild mounted, and they left the litter there, a bright patch of crimson on the sand, its curtains limp in the utter stillness.
Nobody talked much. The beasts were urged on to the top of heir speed. They were nervous and fidgety, inclined to break nit of line and run for it. The sun rose higher.
One hour.
The windless air shimmered. The silence lay upon the caravan with a crushing hand. Stark went up and down the line, lending a hand to the sweating drovers with the pack animals that now carried only water skins and a bare supply of food. Fian rode close beside Berild.
Two hours.
For the first time that day there was a sound in the desert.
It came from far off, a moaning wail like the cry of a giantess in travail. It rushed closer, rising as it did so to a dry and bitter shriek that filled the whole sky, shook it, and tore it open,