What stretched for a distance before her and on every side were more walls marking rooms, or passageways, long unroofed. In addition the pile stood on a mound or small hill, and stretching out from that was a patchwork of fields each also partitioned by broken walls. There was an opening not far to their left which suggested a road had led here and that that maze of rock had been the entrance to this place. But nowhere was there any hint of water.
“That way—” Yonan pointed north and rose to his feet cautiously. His motion, as wary as it was, started a slip of loose stone down into the room of the star.
“There are no doors.” Kelsie had noted that almost at once. These walls sealed in each room one from the other, and their only path to freedom appeared to be by the tops of those shaky divisions.
“That is the truth. Therefore we must take these upper ways and with full care. Follow me, and, if you can, place your feet where mine have been.”
The sun was up and beginning to warm the rocks about them before they reached that point which once might have been a gate. Not only was Kelsie hungry and thirsty but she was also trembling from the tension of that journey. Twice they had had to make detours which had lost them much time because the wall tops were too unsteady to allow them footage.
Though she looked with hope into each room they passed she saw no way of going except by this dangerous path they had chosen. There were no doorways, no trace of any floor side opening from one space into the next. This amazed her.
“They might have had other means of entrance,” Yonan commented when she spoke of this. “If they were winged for example.”
“Flamen!” she burst out in denial. She could not think of the small airborne creatures as the architects of such massive walls.
“There may be—or were once—other flyers beside the flamen,” he told her soberly. “It is well known that the adepts played with the very forces of life itself, creating new creatures for their own use or amusement. Such are the Krogan, the water people, and even the Thas. There were few of true blood left when the rest of the Old Ones thought to flee such unnatural dealings and went into Estcarp, laying upon themselves forgetfulness of their land lest they be tempted to so misuse the power again. But whoever set these stones together are now long gone. Ah, take this wall, and then that, and we shall be at outer bailey at last.”
Perforce she followed him, though the footing was never safe and she tottered on the edge of slipping twice before they reached the point he indicated and could look down at the earth below.
Yonan selected a portion of the wall path which appeared to show the least of time’s erosion and lay flat on it. Then he ordered Kelsie:
“Give me your hands and swing over. You will drop but I think that the space is not so much we cannot make it. We have no other choice.”
There was a drop certainly and she hit ground, to roll over the edge of another small fall, coming to stop painfully against one of those broken field walls. There was a whir in her face which made her start and cry out as two birds took off out of a clump of grass before her, not ascending very high into the air but covering a goodly space before they alit and disappeared again into the tall cover of the field.
When Yonan joined her he was fumbling with his sword belt and produced a length of what looked like tough cord, a small weight fastened to either end.
“Circle,” his command was delivered in a voice hardly above a whisper, and he motioned with his hand toward where the birds had taken again to cover. “Come at them from the south if you can, but get them up.”
She obeyed in spite of her bruises, trying to walk as noiselessly as she could through the vegetation which was waist-high grass, giving support here and there to a loaded seed head as if it were some form of wild sown grain.
There was another whir and eruption of feathered bodies. Something whirled through the air and one of the birds fell, entangled foot to wing by Yonan’s weighted cord. A moment later he passed her in a leap, knife in hand, and used that expertly to put an end to the wildly struggling bird.
Following the same method of hunt they added two more of the low-flying prey to their first capture. Then Yonan, swinging the birds by their feet, turned aside from the open into an ancient field where the stones at one corner had shifted forming a small half cave. He went to work at once, skinning and gutting the birds, saying:
“Get some dry wood.” He jerked one hand toward where a straggle of trees stood. This once might have been an orchard, Kelsie decided, but only one or two of the trees showed any signs of life by ragged greenery. Some storm of the past had laid others low and she went among those breaking off branches and carrying an arm load to where Yonan was conducting his bloody business.
She watched him lay a fire of sticks hardly more than twigs and then light those with a stone from his belt pouch struck against his knife until sparks flew into a handful of grass in the center of his cave oven.
“This will break the smoke,” he told her as he worked and she felt that he was deliberately sharing with her information which was the result of long training at living off the land, a land which had nearly as many perils as blades of grass in the field. He had pieces of the birds spitted on trimmed branches and already over the fire while others were hung well out of the flames but where the smoke, partially trapped under the stones, could reach them.
He was right as that smoke emerged in wisps which drifted in different directions at the will of the breeze. Kelsie having built up a goodly supply of wood inspected more fully the seed heads in the field growth. She rubbed some free of their stems and between the palms of her hands, blowing away the chaff and being rewarded with a handful of what was unmistakably some form of grain. She tasted it, finding it chewable and slightly sweet. Then she set about gathering enough of it still on the stem to make an arm load. Though as she went she watched carefully what lay around.
More of the birds were dislodged from their feeding and flew clumsily perhaps as far as the next field. She could smell now the odor of the cooking meat and it drew her, though she wanted most of all a drink of water to rinse away the dryness of the grain she had eaten.
She returned to their improvised fireplace to find Yonan, his attention divided between the roasting meat and something he held before his hands to saw at with his knife. It was yellow in color and shaped not unlike a gourd of her own world, though larger than she had ever seen. Having chopped off its top he was now turning the knife around and around in its interior, shaking free at short intervals pieces of woodlike flesh hung with black seeds.
Kelsie saw that two more of the odd vegetables, if that is what they were, rested beside his knee. She pulled loose the scarf that had covered her head when she had set out from the Valley and began to rub into it the grain she had harvested. Yonan looked closely at what she had found and then nodded.
“Pound that into flour,” he commented, “and with drippings from those—” he indicated the birds, “you will have a kind of journey cake.”
What about water?”
He slapped the gourd he was working on. “There is a spring in that last opening beyond where we came down. Did you not see the water reeds?”
She had to admit that she had not, her full attention being on how she could zigzag along the walls without a slip. However, he did not wait for her answer as he set aside the first of his gourds and inspected the meat, turning the spits on which the chunks were impaled with the familiarity of an expert at such cookery.
The meat was done to his satisfaction and laid on the large leaves which he had harvested from the same plant as bore the gourds. Then he took the first of those and stood up, looking at her appraisingly.
“Can you give me a foot up. It is over the wall for our water.”