The Walls of Air Page 0,34

he quieted under the old man's touch. Rudy, who stood a little in the lead, risked a glance back at them.

'Would those things attack people?'

'Oh, possibly.' Ingold took Che's headstall in one hand and brushed past Rudy, making his way calmly toward the half-

dozen or so hairy, two-legged animals blocking the route. 'In this part of the country they're hunted and put to work on the treadmills in the silver mines. I don't believe the wild ones know where the captives are taken, but they associate humans with horses and nets and fire, and that is enough.'

The big male in front of him raised its weapons with a threatening shriek. Ingold pointed unconcernedly toward the main mass of the band, the females and infants, grouped on the hillside above. 'You see how the weaker members of the tribe travel in the ring of the stronger? It's for protection against the prairie wolves or the hrigg, the horrible birds.'

Rudy took a deep breath, something seldom advisable in the vicinity of large numbers of wild dooic. Okay, man, it's your game, he thought grimly and hefted his sword, prepared to sell his life dearly.

Several paces in front of him, Ingold didn't even turn his head. 'Gently, Rudy. Never fight if you can pass unseen.' As he came close, the dooic seemed to forget why they were standing in the roadway. Some began looking aimlessly at the sky, the ground, and each other; others wandered off the road, scratching for vermin or picking among the skimpy brush for lizards to eat. Ingold, Rudy, and Che wound their way among them, but the only assault was olfactory.

'Always take the easiest way out,' Ingold counselled pleasantly, scratching the burrow's ears as they left the subhumans behind them. 'It saves wear and tear on the nerves.'

Rudy glanced back at the scattering Neanderthals, who had returned to the usual primate occupations of hunting bugs and picking lice. 'Yuck!' he said succinctly.

Ingold raised his brows, amused. 'Oh, come, Rudy. Barring rather crude table manners, they aren't the worst company I can think of. I once travelled through the northern part of the desert with a band of dooic for nearly a month, and though they weren't particularly elegant company, they did take care that I came to no harm.'

'You travelled with those things?

'Oh, yes,' Ingold assured him. This was back when I was village spellweaver for a little town in Gettlesand. It was hundreds of miles from their usual runs, but they evidently knew I was a wizard, for when the single water source in the midst of their territory went bad, they came south and carried me off one night to go there and make it good again.'

'And did you?' Rudy asked, both fascinated and appalled.

'Of course. Water is life in the desert. I couldn't very well force them to come in closer to the settlements for it, else they would have been trapped or killed.'

Rudy could only shake his head.

They had left the high plains and had passed the borders of the desert itself. They

moved through a dry, cold world where marches were measured from water to water and the wind whipped dust-devils across a barren horizon. In the great sunken flats that were like the beds of abandoned lakes, the wind played skeleton-tunes in the rattling bones of thorn and jumping cactus. But the high lands between were bare rock, clay, and lava, scoured into fantastic shapes by the unbroken cruelty of the elements, or ground to rock and pebble and sand. In places, dunes covered the road entirely, the sand printed with the laddering tracks of enormous sidewinders, six to eight feet long. Once Rudy glimpsed what looked like huge, two-legged birds dashing weightlessly along the red skyline. It was an eerie land, where for days, unless one of them spoke, there would be no sounds but the persistent whine of the wind, the tap of the burro's hooves on the roadbed, and the hissing slur of moving sand. It was like the silence of the hills back in Rudy's California home, the silence he had sought there on his solitary expeditions with shotgun or bow. In that unending stillness, the whirring of an insect was like the roar of an airplane engine and the only noises heard were those of the listener's own making - the creak of belt-leather and the draw and release of breath.

In all this empty vastness the travellers met no one, and the solitude, far from bringing loneliness, created