Into the thinking kingdoms - Alan Dean Foster [143]
“So you could,” Simna agreed. “But would they have been as appropriate? The spear would have summoned a demon too large for the room in which we were imprisoned. The sky-metal sword might have brought down the walls and ceiling on top of us.”
Now Ehomba looked over at his companion. “Then why did you want me to use it?”
“Because we would have had a better chance of surviving the smashed rumble of a palace than a certain knife in the neck. Of course, once I threw you the sea-bone sword everything worked out for the best.”
“I did not know you were going to fool your guards long enough to grab it and throw it to me,” the herdsman responded.
“Didn’t you?” Simna stared hard, hard at his tall, enigmatic friend. “I often find myself wondering, Etjole, just how much you do know and if this unbounded insistence on an unnatural fondness for livestock is nothing more than a pose to disguise some other, grander self.”
Ehomba shook his head slowly, sadly. “I can see, after all that we have been through together, friend Simna, how such sentiments could trouble your thoughts. Be assured yet again that I am Etjole Ehomba, a humble herdsman of the Naumkib.” Raising his free hand, he pointed to a nearby tree heavy with unexpected blossoms. “Look at the colors. I have never seen anything like that before. Is it not more like a giant flower than a tree?”
Hoy, you’re a shepherd for sure, mused Simna ibn Sind even as he responded to his friend’s timely floral observation. In the course of their long journeying together, Ehomba had talked incessantly of cattle and sheep until on more than one occasion the swordsman had been ready to scream. A shepherd and a—what had the southerner called it?—an eromakasi, an itinerant eater of darkness. The question that would not leave the swordsman’s mind, however, was, What else exactly, if anything, was Etjole Ehomba?
XXII
When finally they crested the last of the Yesnaby Hills and found themselves gazing, improbably and incredibly, down at the great port city of Hamacassar itself, Simna could hardly believe it. To Hunkapa Aub and Ahlitah it was no cause for especial celebration. Despite its legendary status, to them the city was only another human blight upon the land.
As for Ehomba, there was no falling to knees and giving thanks, or lifting of hands and hosannaing of praises to the heavens. Contemplating the fertile lowlands, the smoke that rose from ten thousand chimneys, and the great shimmering slash of the river Eynharrowk against whose southern shore the city sprawled in three directions, he commented simply, “I thought it would be bigger,” and started down the last slope.
Their arrival occasioned considerably less panic than it had in landlocked kingdoms like Bondressey and Tethspraih. Reactions were more akin to the response their presence had engendered in Lybondai. Like Hamacassar, the bustling city on the north shore of the Aboqua Sea was a cosmopolitan trading port whose citizens were used to seeing strange travelers from far lands. At first sight, the only difference between the two was that Hamacassar was much larger and situated on the bank of a river instead of the sea itself.
Also absent were the cooling breezes that rendered Lybondai’s climate so salubrious. Like the Lacondas, the river plain on which Hamacassar had been built was hot and humid. A similar system of canals and small tributaries connected different parts of the widespread, low-lying metropolis, supplying its citizens with transportation that was cheap and reliable. The design of the homes and commercial buildings they began to pass with increasing frequency was intriguing but unsurprising. As they made their way through the city’s somewhat undisciplined outskirts, they encountered nothing that was startling or unrecognizable. Except for the monoliths.
Spaced half a mile apart, these impressive structures loomed over homes and fields like petrified colossi. Each took the form of an acute triangle that had been rounded off at the top. Twenty feet or so wide at the base, they rapidly narrowed to their smooth