Pathways - Jeri Taylor [228]
It lay on its side, tongue lolling out, eyes blank and staring, rib cage heaving rapidly as it panted desperately. Tuvok knelt quickly and felt the nose, which was warm and dry. The rugged beast had pushed itself to its limit, but now it could go no further; it was dying.
Tuvok looked off to Seleya in the distance, the longed-for goal now manifest. He was weak and thirsty, but he knew he could go on, lured by the proximity of the sacred mountain. It was the logical course, to continue his march and accomplish what he had set out to do. Sehlats were born in the desert and died in the desert; it was the natural order of things.
But he could not bring himself to abandon the beast. He assured himself it was not an emotional decision, but an unwillingness to offend whatever spirits might be at play in this vast expanse. Inexplicable things had happened to him during this remarkable sojourn, and he felt the power of mysterious forces all about him. Things unknown were present here, and it was therefore not possible to act according to any prior set of expectations. With imperfect knowledge, one could not be in control of one’s fate.
The appearance of the sehlat, his unusual behavior, his loyalty—all seemed to point to a guiding presence, and to affront that presence might be to invite disaster. To turn one’s back on a benefactor was surely an insult to any being, corporeal or not.
And so he sat down beside the sehlat and stroked his head. “I can see the mountain. It gains me nothing simply to see more of it. I deem my journey over.” The sehlat made no response.
They sat like that for a long, uncounted time, Tuvok keeping his eyes firmly fixed on the faraway triangle, wondering if in fact he had accomplished anything. The vague questions with which he started had not been answered nor even clarified, and new questions had been added along the way. And the sight of the mountain—the tip of the mountain—brought him no relief, no fulfillment. To what end, then, had he endured this travail?
He thought about that for a long time, worrying the idea like a fine point of logical debate, and had lost himself in a serpentine series of possible deductions when he realized he heard something—had been hearing something for a while, in fact, without its having registered on his conscious mind. It was a low, rumbling sound and it seemed to be coming from all around him.
He looked up and realized the sky had darkened, even though it was, by his reckoning, midday. Shadowy yellow clouds sagged above him, ominous and foreboding. In a second’s astonishment, he understood that he was hearing something Vulcans heard only rarely: thunder. As the rumbling grew louder, the saffron clouds were illuminated from within by flashes of light. A rainstorm was approaching.
Rainfall was scant on Vulcan, and almost unheard of in the desert. There were stories of torrential downpours that erupted only a few times each century, but were leviathan in their immensity. Tuvok acknowledged a palpable sense of awe that he was about to witness one of these legendary events, and stood as though to greet it with proper reverence.
The air temperature had dropped quickly and a cooling breeze began to stir. It was utterly unlike the punishing winds they had recently survived, and was refreshing in its chilliness. It caressed Tuvok’s body gently, as though assuaging a fever, and he shivered as he had not since his last Pon farr.
The rumbling of thunder now became louder, and assumed the form of discrete claps, which resonated through the clouds with the sound of the most powerful photon cannon, and were followed by a sharp brightening of the clouds, turning them from yellow-brown to a brilliant gold. Tuvok studied the changing palette of the sky as though evaluating a colossal painting, then he felt the strange oppressiveness of humidity in the air, and smelled the scent of moisture.
Presently,