Normally, Radnal would have been cautious around a Morgaffo. But now he found him easier to confront than Toglo. Glancing at the sketch pad, he said, “That’s a fine drawing, freeman, ah-”
The Morgaffo held out both hands in front of him in his people’s greeting. “I am Dokhnor of Kellef, freeman vez Krobir,” he said. “Thank you for your interest.”
He made it sound like stop spying on me. Radnal hadn’t meant it that way. With a few deft strokes of his charcoal stick, Dokhnor had picked out the features of the campsite: the fire pits, the oleanders in front of the privy, the tethered donkeys. As a biologist who did field work, Radnal was a fair hand with a piece of charcoal. He wasn’t in Dokhnor’s class, though. A military engineer couldn’t have done better.
That thought triggered his suspicions. He looked at the Morgaffo more closely. The fellow carried himself as a soldier would, which proved nothing. Lots of Morgaffos were soldiers. Although far smaller than Tartesh, the island kingdom had always held its own in their struggles. Radnal laughed at himself. If Dokhnor was an agent, why was he in Trench Park instead of, say, at a naval base along the Western Ocean?
The Morgaffo glowered. “If you have finished examining my work, freeman, perhaps you will give someone else a breakfast.”
“Certainly,” Radnal answered in a voice as icy as he could make it. Dokhnor certainly had the proverbial Morgaffo arrogance. Maybe that proved he wasn’t a spy — a real spy would have been smoother. Or maybe a real spy would think no one would expect him to act like a spy, and act like one as a disguise. Radnal realized he could extend the chain to as many links as his imagination could forge. He gave up.
When all the breakfast packs were eaten, all the sleepsacks deflated and stowed, the group headed over to remount their donkeys for the trip into Trench Park itself. As he had the night before, Radnal warned, “The trail will be much steeper today. As long as we take it slow and careful, we’ll be fine.”
No sooner were the words out of his mouth than the ground quivered beneath his feet. Everyone stood stock — still; a couple of people exclaimed in dismay. The birds, on the other hand, all fell silent. Radnal had lived in earthquake country his whole life. He waited for the shaking to stop, and after a few heartbeats it did.
“Nothing to get alarmed at,” he said when the quake was over. “This part of Tartesh is seismically active, probably because of the inland sea that dried up so long ago. The crust of the earth is still adjusting to the weight of so much water being gone. There are a lot of fault lines in the area, some quite close to the surface.”
Dokhnor of Kellef stuck up a hand. “What if an earthquake should — how do you say it? — make the Barrier Mountains fall?”
“Then the Bottomlands would flood.” Radnal laughed. “Freeman, if it hasn’t happened in the last five and a half million years, I won’t lose sleep worrying that it’ll happen tomorrow, or any time I’m down in Trench Park.”
The Morgaffo nodded curtly. “That is a worthy answer. Carry on, freeman.”
Radnal had an impulse to salute him — he spoke with the same automatic assumption of authority that Tarteshan officers employed. The tour guide mounted his own donkey, waited until his charges were in ragged line behind him. He waved. “Let’s go.”
The trail down into Trench Park was hacked and blasted from rock that had been on the bottom of the sea. It was only six or eight cubits wide, and frequently switched back and forth. A motor with power to all wheels might have negotiated it, but Radnal wouldn’t have wanted to be at the tiller of one that tried.
His donkey pulled up a gladiolus and munched it. That made him think of something about which he’d forgotten to warn his group. He said, “When we get lower into the park, you’ll want to keep your animals from browsing. The soil down there has large amounts of things like selenium and tellurium along with the more usual minerals — they were concentrated there as the sea evaporated. That doesn’t bother a lot of the Bottomlands plants, but it will bother — and maybe kill — your donkeys if they eat the wrong ones.”
“How will we know which ones are which?” Eltsac zev Martois called.
He fought the urge to throw Eltsac off the trail and let him tumble down into Trench Park. The idiot tourist would probably land on his head, which by all evidence was too hard to be damaged by a fall of a mere few thousand cubits. And Radnal’s job was riding herd on idiot tourists. He answered, “Don’t let your donkey forage at all. The pack donkeys carry fodder, and there’ll be more at the lodge.”
The tour group rode on in silence for a while. Then Toglo zev Pamdal said, “This trail reminds me of the one down into the big canyon through the western desert in the Empire of Stekia, over on the Double Continent.”
Radnal was both glad Toglo would speak to him and jealous of the wealth that let her travel — just a collateral relation of the Hereditary Tyrant’s, eh? “I’ve only seen pictures,” he said wistfully. “I suppose there is some similarity of looks, but the canyon was formed differently from the Bottomlands: by erosion, not evaporation.”
“Of course,” she said. “I’ve also only seen pictures myself.”
“Oh.” Maybe she was a distant relative, then. He went on, “Much more like the big canyon are the gorges our rivers cut before they tumble into what was deep seabottom to form the Bitter Lakes in the deepest parts of the Bottomlands. There’s a small one in Trench Park, though it often dries up — the Dalorz River doesn’t send down enough water to maintain it very well.”
A little later, when the trail twisted west around a big limestone boulder, several tourists exclaimed over the misty plume of water plunging toward the floor of the park. Lofosa asked, “Is that the Dalorz?”
“That’s it,” Radnal said. “Its flow is too erratic to make it worth Tartesh’s while to build a power station where it falls off the ancient continental shelf, though we’ve done that with several other bigger rivers. They supply more than three fourths of our electricity: another benefit of the Bottomlands.”
A few small spun-sugar clouds drifted across the sky from west to east. Otherwise, nothing blocked the sun from beating down on the tourists with greater force every cubit they descended. The donkeys kicked up dust at every footfall.
“Does it ever rain here?” Evillia asked.
“Not very often,” Radnal admitted. “The Bottomlands desert is one Mountains pick off most of the moisture that blows from the Western Ocean, and the other mountain ranges that stretch into the Bottomlands from the north catch most of what’s left. But every two or three years Trench Park does get a downpour. It’s the most dangerous time to be there — a torrent can tear through a wash and drown you before you know it’s coming.”
“But it’s also the most beautiful time,” Toglo zev Pamdal said. “Pictures of Trench Park after a rain first made me want to come here, and I was lucky enough to see it myself on my last visit.”
“May I be so fortunate,” Dokhnor of Kellef said. “I brought colorsticks as well as charcoal, on the off chance I might be able to draw post-rain foliage.”
“The odds are against you, though the freelady was lucky before,” Radnal said. Dokhnor spread his hands to show his agreement. Like everything he did, the gesture was tight, restrained, perfectly controlled. Radnal had trouble imagining him going into transports of artistic rapture over desert flowers, no matter how rare or brilliant.
He said, “The flowers are beautiful, but they’re only the tip of the iceberg, if you’ll let me use a wildly inappropriate comparison. All life in Trench Park depends on water, the same as everywhere else. It’s adapted to get along with very little, but not none. As soon as any moisture comes, plants and animals try to pack a generation’s worth of growth and breeding into the little while it takes to dry up.”
About a quarter of a daytenth later, a sign set by the side of the trail announced that the tourists were farther below sea level than they could go anywhere outside the Bottomlands. Radnal read it aloud and pointed out, rather smugly, that the salt lake which was the next most submerged spot on dry land lay close to the Bottomlands, and might almost be considered an extension of them.