Into the thinking kingdoms - Alan Dean Foster [46]
“I am glad that you are feeling better.”
“So am I, though I don’t ever before remember being knocked unconscious quite so pleasantly.” He rose, only slightly shaky. Nearby, the litah was exercising and testing its recovered reflexes by leaping high in playful attempts to knock the agitated crows out of their tree.
“By Gielaraith, wait a minute. If I was unconscious and the cat indisposed, how did I get out of those hills?”
“I carried you.” Ehomba was scanning the northern horizon. Ahead, the terrain continued to climb, but gently. No ragged escarpments, no jagged peaks appeared to block their way northward.
The swordsman’s gaze narrowed. “The aroma didn’t affect you?”
“I told you—you and Ahlitah received a stronger dose than I did. Besides, my sense of smell is much weaker than either of yours.” Looking back down, he smiled. “Many years of herding cattle and sheep, of living close to them every day, have dulled my nose to anything very distilled.”
“Hoy—the preserving power of heavy stink.” With a grunt, Simna straightened his pack on his back. “I’m used to my assailants smelling like six-month-old bed linen, not attar of camellia.”
“In a new and strange land one must be prepared to deal with anything.” Ehomba started northward. The grass was low and patchy, the ground firm and supportive. Able to hike in any direction they preferred, they did not need to follow a particular path. Behind them, the litah gave up its game of leap and strike, conceding victory to the exhausted crows. “Old forms may no longer be valid. Seeming friends may be masked by lies, and conspicuous enemies nothing more than upright individuals in disguise.”
Having shaken off the last lingering effects of the potent perfume, the swordsman strode along strongly beside him. “Hoy, that’s not a problem a man has in a dark alley.”
Ehomba took in their clean, bracing environs with a sweep of his free hand. “I would rather find myself in surroundings like this facing adversaries unknown than in some crowded, noisy city where one has to deal with people all the time.”
“Then we make a good team, long bruther. I’ll take care of the people, and you deal with the flowers. And damned if I don’t think I’ll have the easier time of it.”
They slept that night in a grove of smaller trees, welcoming in their silence and lack of activity. They were indisputably trees and nothing more, as was the grass that grew thickly at their bases and the occasional weed flower that added a dab of color to the campsite. The stars shone unblinkingly overhead in a cool, pellucid sky, and they enjoyed the best night’s sleep they had had since before embarking on their crossing of the Aboqua.
At least Simna ibn Sind and Ahlitah did. Ehomba found his slumber unexpectedly disturbed.
She was very tall, the vision was, though not so tall as the herdsman. Her skin had the texture of new ivory and the sheen of the finest silk. Large eyes of sapphire blue framed by high cheekbones gazed down at him, and her hair was a talus of black diamonds. Beneath a gown of crimson lace she was naked, and her body was as supplely inviting as a down-filled bed on a cold winter’s night.
Her lips parted, and the very act of separation was an invitation to passion. They moved, but no sounds emerged. Yet in the absence of words he felt that she was calling out to him, her arms spread wide in supplication. With her eyes and her posture, her limbs and the striking shape beneath the gown, he was convinced that she was promising him anything, anything, if he would but redeem her from her current plight.
Discomfited by her consummate union of lubricity and innocent appeal, he stirred uneasily in his sleep, tossing about on the cushioning grass. Her hands reached out to him, the long, lissome fingers drawing down his cheek to her lips, then his neck, his chest. She smiled enticingly, and it was