“A cat?” The young men stared.
“Yeah.” Matt was about to mention color, then realized he didn't know what robe Balkis had been wearing for her kidnapping. He hoped it wasn't blue or purple or green. “You know, small furry animal, long tail, whiskers, retractable claws?” Matt pantomimed as he talked.
The nomads stared at him as though he were mad.
“This is poor country for cats,” the young woman told him.
An older woman nodded. “There is little to hunt, and less to drink.”
Well, Matt wasn't entirely sure of that—he saw clumps of scrub brush here and there and knew it probably supported small colonies of mice who knew how to find the catch basins that watered it. Still, he wasn't about to contradict the locals. “If you do see one, could you take her in?”
“The cat, or the woman?” the second young man asked.
“Right,” Matt answered. “I'll try to check back with you later.”
“Be sure that I shall help her.” The young woman gave her young man another whetted glance.
“We shall, us women together,” the older woman confirmed.
“Thanks.” Matt smiled. “I'd appreciate it. Have a good trip.” He waved as he turned to start back to Stegoman.
“Beware, stranger,” the graybeard called after him. “There was a dragon flying overhead not long ago.”
“I'll keep an eye out for him,” Matt said with a backward glance. “Thanks.”
“It was not perchance your dragon, was it?”
“Mine? No, we're just friends. Take care, now.” And Matt plodded back to Stegoman, oblivious to the stares at his back.
Each day's travel took Balkis and Anthony lower and lower; each noon's sun was warmer and warmer, though the nights stayed chill. By the end of the week they had come down into flat land, and Balkis found it was desert. The days were warmer than was comfortable, but not really hot; it was winter, after all. In her northern cloak, though, Balkis sweltered. She took it off, folded it flat, and slung it over her shoulder, retying her sash to hold it to her waist.
“Beware the sun's rays,” Anthony warned her. “They can burn.”
“I shall chance it,” Balkis told him. “The sun is my summer friend.” She doubted that the Central Asian winter could be that much worse than an Allustrian summer, which tanned her golden skin to bronze. She looked at Anthony with concern. “But your fair skin worries me.”
“I have a hood.” Anthony pulled it up to demonstrate. “Oh, my woolens are too warm for comfort, but I should be able to trade for a cotton robe as soon as we meet other travelers.” He took a shiny stone from his pocket. “We find these in the streams now and then. It should do for trade.”
Balkis glanced at the stone, then stared. It was gold. “Yes,” she said, “that might even buy robes for both of us—and a dozen more.”
“So small a stone as this?” A shadow crossed Anthony's face. “I wish we could find many of these, for then my father and brothers could cease this lifelong toil that makes them grow knobbed and bowed.” Then he brightened. “Still, with this one, perhaps we can buy food—and water, too.”
Balkis almost said that there was no sense in paying for water, but she looked at the desert stretching before them and said instead, “Could anyone spare water here, even for gold?”
“Some bring huge skins of it to trade, for it is dear in this waste,” Anthony said, “Nonetheless, there is water for those who know where to look.”
Balkis looked up at him in surprise, then remembered. “Yes, you have been here before, you said.”
Anthony nodded. “During the hot months, we bring down livestock and grain to sell to the caravans. It is only a few miles, but it has taught us some knowledge of desert ways.”
Balkis had dim memories of having traveled with a caravan as a cat during her human infancy, but not enough to do much good. “How shall we travel, then?”
“By night.” Anthony flashed her a grin. “Come, let me show you a cave where my family shelters when we travel.”
He turned to go, but Balkis stayed him with a hand on his sleeve. “Will they not think to look for you there?”
“Do you truly think they will look for me?” Anthony asked, with a sad and weary smile that seemed to accept every dagger Fate threw at him.
He seemed so forlorn that Balkis spoke without thinking. “Of course they will! You are theirs, after all.”
“A possession, you mean?” But Anthony's eye gained a gleam, even if it was only a sardonic one. “Perhaps they will at that—when several days have passed and they are convinced I will not come crawling back for food and shelter and they will have to do their own milking and mucking out. If they do follow, we will be gone long before they arrive. Let us find shelter.”
The shelter turned out to be a hollow in the bank of a ravine which was plainly a dry watercourse.
“If it should rain, we will move to higher ground,” Anthony explained, “and that quickly, for this gully will hold a raging torrent. There is a hidden pool; I know where to dig to find it.”
“Has it rained so recently, then?” Balkis looked at the arid land around her.
“No,” Anthony said, “but we came through melting snow, and some of it sinks down into a stream that pools out below-ground here. Even when there is no rain, this watercourse stays damp.”
Balkis had a vision of all that runoff filling the gully and shuddered.
The cave was a rough semicircle twelve feet deep. Anthony led the way to six pallets of straw at the back of the cave. “It is scarcely fresh, but is so dry that it will still do for beds—and will surely be more comfortable than the bare earth.”
“It will that,” Balkis said fervently, and spread her cloak over the pallet farthest to the side. Anthony spread his over the pallet at the back, with two between them, so they lay down as they always did, ten feet apart. Balkis wondered how she would feel if he tried sleeping closer, and was shocked to realize that she wished he would.
They rose in the sunset and sat awhile talking as the day cooled into night—talked of the Mazdans, who prayed to the sun as a symbol of Ahura Mazda, the god of light, then of the religions in which each had been raised. Anthony's ancestors had worshiped the old Greek gods, brought eastward by Alexander's armies, until Christianity had penetrated even the forgotten villages of their mountains. He learned quickly that she was a different kind of Christian than he, and listened to the Roman rubrics with knitted brow, clearly not understanding—but Balkis realized that he was trying for her sake, and the thought warmed her against the night's chill.
And it was chill; she was amazed to realize it as she shook out her cloak and wrapped herself in it. “Perhaps those cotton robes will not be needed, after all.”
“Well, at least to sleep in,” Anthony said. “Besides, will we not need them in your homeland? It should be cool enough to travel by daylight there.”
The memory of Allustria in winter flashed through Balkis' mind; then she remembered that Maracanda was her home now. Even so, Prester John's city had certainly been cool enough when she had seen it last. “We will,” she assured him. “Where shall we travel tonight?”
“To the oasis where we trade with the caravan drivers,” Anthony answered. “There we can find water without having to dig-That struck Balkis as a good beginning. She looked up at the wall of the ravine. “I think I can manage that in human form.”
“But your beautiful garments will be ruined!” Anthony protested.
Balkis shrugged. “We were going to buy new robes anyway, and my sleeping chemise is scarcely priceless.”
Anthony stared. “You wear so lovely a gown only for sleeping?”