P. Hodgell - The Sea of Time

Kalan pulled herself together. “That,” she said, “is the other great worry. It varies from trip to trip. At first time passed faster in the north than the south, the present faster than the past, but that stabilized and then reversed. Now only two things are sure. For one, seekers cannot revisit their own pasts. Our lives lead forward, at whatever pace our surroundings decree. Whatever is done to us, we cannot undo.”

“And the second thing?”

“Langadine is catching up with Kothifir, or rather I should say with the Kothifir of three thousand years ago. Around that period, the southern city suddenly collapsed in some final, fatal cataclysm. We don’t know what happened, except that beforehand the sea turned to salt water and began to dry up. The process had already begun the last time I was there. What has taken them centuries is only years to us.”

Jame sat back on her heels, considering. “We could slip through one last time,” she said, “or we could get caught on the cusp of disaster. Here and now, though, I don’t know what we can do about it.”

“Turn back,” said Kalan.

Laurintine gripped the other’s knee with a bony claw. “I want,” she rasped, “to die . . . at home.”

“And the wagon masters aren’t likely to listen to me,” Jame added. “Would they to you?”

The two seekers looked chagrined.

“I thought not.”

An idea struck her. “The spoils of the Wastes can only survive in the present if King Krothen touches them. Lanielle hadn’t met him yet. Is that why she died after she was injured?”

Kalan inclined her head without speaking.

Leaving their tent, Jame paused on its threshold to consider the situation. If she understood her people’s role, they wouldn’t be permitted beyond the boundary between past and present. That should put them out of the path of disaster unless, as Kalan said, something went wrong.

And it always does .

G’ah, she hated being out of control, but this situation loomed like the mountain ranges to the east and west, not to be changed by any puny effort on her part. At least the wind seemed to be abating. In another day or two, they should reach the edge of the Great Salt Sea.

The next day dawned clear and hot, revealing that the caravan had camped on the very edge of the sand dunes. Flat, rock-strewn land stretched away before them in unparalleled monotony, broken here and there by wind-tortured stone formations. Once again the wagons were unpacked, the wagon wheels restored, and their loads returned. Jame supposed that the rocks, as small as they were, would scrape on the sledge bottoms. Lambas whiffed and hooted, not eager to resume their harnesses. Over the past few days without water, their swollen bellies had shrunken noticeably and their girths needed to be tightened. Soon they would require another deep drink.

Few other beasts had made it so far except for the moas, who required copious amounts of water at least every third day. Horses, mules, and oxen had long since turned back or died in harness under the lash of desperate drivers. Some of the latter found passage on the wagons, abandoning all but the choicest of their own loads, but most shouldered what water they could carry and started the long trudge back to Kothifir. Jame wondered how many would make it.

To have come so far, to fail by so little . . .

At dusk on the thirteenth of Winter, the remaining travelers—some fifty wagons in all—arrived at the edge of the Great Salt Sea. It stretched out before them to the horizon, its surface broken by drought into octagonal plates. A failing slash of light from the west washed its white surface with pink and mauve. The east wind picked up, causing sparkling salt ghosts to drift across the empty plain in stately procession like an army on the march, until the shadows overtook them.

Tents were pitched, evening meals cooked.

When Jame rose early the next morning, she found that the trade caravan had slipped away in the night, leaving its Kencyr escort behind. Moreover, she smelled fresh water. They had set up camp at a brackish oasis which, when dug out of the sand, stank of rot. Now the camp was surrounded by grass, sedge, and tall reeds marching into a shallow sea. One could still make out the salt plates under the surface, but they hadn’t yet dissolved to contaminate the rainwater swell. The face of the water reflected the glowing morning sky like a vast mirror, dazzling the eye.

“What in Perimal’s name . . . ?” said Timmon, coming up to her. “I know this is the beginning of the rainy reason, but surely it didn’t pour last night. Runoff from distant mountains?”

“That might explain it, but not all of this established vegetation. What do you think, Ran?”

The senior officer stood near them, surveying the sudden sea. “I’ve heard of such a thing,” he said, “when the Tishooo plays tricks.”

“Because the Old Man controls the flow of time in the Wastes?” Jame asked, remembering what she had been told in the Undercliff.

He gave a short laugh. “So the natives say.”

“That’s what I was afraid of,” said Jame.

Laurintine had guided the caravan back to lost Langadine, into the past. What if the Tishooo had taken them there too, for some obscure reason of its own? If so, where in the past might they be? She gathered that each caravan trip was closer to the Kothifir of three thousand years ago and to Langadine’s ultimate, mysterious destruction. Perhaps the caravan had barely arrived there. Perhaps it had been in Langadine for days, or months, or years. How long could they wait for its return before their supplies ran out?

Brier also stood by the shore, gazing out at the watery expanse. Jame wondered if she had been there all night and had seen the flood rise. What must she be thinking now? Her mother Rose Iron-thorn had escaped with Tori, Harn, and Rowan from Urakarn on the edge of this same sea, if much farther to the west. It had been dry at first as they fled, and sinksand had swallowed Rose. Jame remembered Brier’s voice telling her the story as Tori had told it to her, how at dusk they had come across the petrified remains of a boat and had collapsed into it.

“In the night, feverish,” Brier had said, “he thought he saw the water return . . . all that flat sand plain changing back to the sea it had been, and the stone boat afloat on it. Under the surface, he saw Rose and reached down to her. She took his hand, pulled it down into the stinging salt water, pulled the whole boat across the sea . . . in a dream, he thought, born of fever; but in the morning, there they were safe on the northern shore, with nothing behind them but sand . . .”

“Do you think that your mother is still out there, under the sand, under the water?” she asked Brier.

The Southron shrugged, malachite green eyes still sweeping the sea. “Did she come back at all or did the Highlord only dream it? Did you?”

“For your brother’s sake . . .”

Cold words, cold hands, thrusting Jame back to the surface when the returning sea had swallowed her outside Mount Alban after the weirdingstrom had swept it into the Southern Wastes. She had no doubt, herself, what she had experienced.

Brier shrugged. “Her bones at least still lie under the sand. Who knows?”

The laughter and catcalls of Char’s third-year cadets sounded behind them. They turned to see Gorbel trudging toward them from Ean’s abandoned tent, stripping off ropes and spitting out a gag.

“One of the wagon masters recognized me,” he said with disgust. “Our friend swore that I was his assistant, but they dragged me off anyway and tied me up to keep me from following. Is that them?” He peered at vague, wavering forms on the horizon.