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Topiara - Chapter 56
Two pair of sandals took about a day to craft from thick slabs of tree bark shaped with Jilan's dagger to fit the feet and chi'uchi thread braided and then braided again into narrow rope to fit over feet and between toes. The next few days were spent either moving away from the path carefully to find and gather as much chi'uchi fluff as would fit in both netted bags, or spinning the fluff into thread and knotting the threads relatively tightly together into a fairly heavy equivalent of a small blanket.
Jilan's arrows brought down birds which were skinned and the meat reluctantly discarded for lack of means to cook it. The skin was very carefully de-feathered, stretched and then patiently worked into soft, thin leather that Lyara then stitched with thin chi'uchi thread into light jerkins – first for Jilan, then for herself. With careful cutting and fitting, using cutaway scraps to fill in length elsewhere, it took four skins to craft each jerkin that would be warmer than the simple shi'ili they'd been wearing.
The two of them debated whether or not to stay and hunt more birds to provide material for trousers for the both of them, but decided against it. "If it gets too cold," Jilan reasoned, "we can head back to the trees and make our trousers – and more chi'uchi blankets, for that matter." Lyara, just as anxious as he was to be on their way to whatever lay ahead of them, agreed.
Garbed in the patchwork jerkins over shi'ili breechclouts and with the bark and chi'uchi rope sandals in their netted bags, Lyara and Jilan waited until the rays of the sun were just breaking over the peak of the coned mountain before venturing out onto branches and making the twisting, cautious trek slowly downward toward the ground. At last they scuttled down the trunk of the tree on the outermost fringe of the Forest and sprinted through the grasses between the moving zumi vines until they stood safely on stone and dirt.
"Ow," Lyara commented and reached for her sandals. "I'd forgotten just how HARD the ground is."
"Zumi vine paths and platforms give, just a little, when we walk, I think," Jilan agreed as he dug through his bag for his footware too. "No wonder the Vri'ia'ani believe that a person loses their vri'i down here."
Lyara shot the tall trees a wistful glance. "Amazing what we get used to – and how fast it happens."
"Come on," Jilan put his hand on her leather-clad shoulder, "the mountain awaits."
The mountainside wasn't quite as barren as they had at first thought. There was a light dusting of silvery grass that nearly matched the grey rocks in color – but any illusion of softness ended the first time Lyara bent to touch a thin blade and drew back a bloodied finger. "By the Gods!" she exclaimed, injured finger in her mouth, "the grass is sharper than any dagger I've ever seen."
There were also a few stalwart examples of scrub brush, generally growing in a place where there was enough pulverized soil to hold water and give the roots a purchase. These spindly and twisted plants had very tiny leaves that covered the branches like green fur.
There was no path to follow – nothing to indicate which direction to take in climbing the side of the mountain, which grew steeper the further up the tumbled pile of stones and bounders and razor-sharp grass they went. Each step was taken carefully – for while the bark of the trees was good protection against the cutting edges of the grass, that advantage waned when the grass wrapped up over the edge of the wooden sole. Jilan had, however, recessed the knot that held the rope to make the sandals functional, so the sharp grass had little chance to slice at or damage the sandals themselves.
The beasts of this strange and forbidding grassy slope were as daunting as the grasses they grazed upon. Big, muscular and given to making plenty of noise, they gathered in small and slow-moving herds where the huge males stood guard for the inner circle of females and smaller young. Just what the males were guarding their females against, neither Jilan nor Lyara could figure out – and hoped they never had to face. It took nearly every last arrow in Jilan's quiver to bring down a lagging female – probably ailing or aged – and then the better part of an afternoon was spent waiting for the herd to give up urging its deceased member back to her feet. Finally, however, they began to move on in search of better grazing – and Jilan and Lyara could at last begin to butcher and skin their prize.
The two of them quickly set to work while the sun was still high enough over the horizon to see by – and when they finished, they took a healthy hunk of meat with them, wrapped in an extra birdskin, for their meal later. "We don't want to stay here any longer than we have to," Lyara had been warning Jilan as they worked. Topiara had been hinting at the danger of carelessness in this strange land, and she was tending to agree with her power stone for a change.
As it was, they moved more than several hundred paces away from the skinned carcass of their prize and had just settled down behind a rather large boulder to stake out the huge skin when an eerie call rippled through the air, raising their hackles. The pair looked at each other in consternation, with Lyara removing her sword from its scabbard and putting it on the ground next to her and Jilan drawing his dagger. When the eerie cry erupted much closer to them – and down the slope a bit, Jilan beckoned to Lyara.
Very cautiously, the two slowly raised their heads over the top of the boulder behind which they were sheltering – and the sight that met them chilled them to the bone. Small creatures had found the bloody carcass of the huge grazer and were swarming all over it, hissing and spitting and fighting one with the other over every mouthful of fresh meat.
"We need to scrape that skin, quickly," Lyara whispered to Jilan, "and then get rid of the scraps. If those little creatures can follow the scent of blood…"
"What about the meat we took?" he worried back at her as they ducked back behind the boulder and hurriedly finished staking out the huge skin.
"Bury it in the birdskin," Lyara directed. "Cover it with small rocks. Hopefully it's small enough that it won't call to them too loudly." She knelt at the edge of the skin and began scraping at the fat and membrane that clung persistently with her sword. "Hurry!"
Jilan worked his way around and through the surrounding boulders to a patch of nearly barren ground, where he used his dagger to dig a small hollow that he deposited the package of birdskin in which their meat was wrapped. Then, working quickly, he moved as many of the rocks and small boulders as he could to cover the package – and then wiped his hand free of blood on a nearby boulder to mark the spot before returning to Lyara's side.
Lyara had gathered half of the scrub brush branches that they had collected from the area into a small hollow and, with a few tuffets of fluff from the bottom of her bag, managed to get a very small fire started, although the wood was green and didn't burn well. That, perhaps, would be enough to keep the vicious little scavengers at bay.
The work of scraping the hide was accompanied long into the night by the hisses and spitting and growling from down the mountain. Both Lyara and Jilan were tired to the bone by the time the task was finished and the scraps taken a short distance from their resting place for disposal. From his netted bag, Jilan drew out two of the juicy fruits from the Forest to sustain them through the night, and then directed Lyara to rest with her head in his lap, her sword in her hand in case it was needed. Half-way through the night, he roused her – and the two of them exchanged positions so that Jilan could get some rest as well.
Morning dawned crisp and chilled, with a light fog trailing down from the mountain above and covering every surface with a light film of moisture. Jilan stirred and shivered, and then roused. "I guess its official - we're not in the trees anymore," he commented ruefully, sitting up.
"Listen," Lyara tipped her head.
Jilan strained. "What?"
"It's quiet," she answered in a whisper. "Almost too quiet."
"Gods! Where are the…" Jilan's wide blue impacted her worried ebony, and together they raised themselves up so they could see over the top of their boulder and down on the carcass below.
Little was left but a tumble of white bones scattered across the clearing where the grazer had fallen. "Maybe they're gone, now that there's nothing left," Lyara offered in a quiet voice. "Do you suppose they were just scavengers?"
"Whatever they were, I still didn't like the sounds of them," Jilan shook his head. "We need to keep moving."
"What about our meat – the packet you buried?" she asked, remembering it suddenly. "Did they find it?"
"You get that skin rolled and tied, while I go check," he told her.
Lyara ducked back down behind the boulder and gazed at the huge grazer skin spread across the back of a boulder. Already she knew that it was drying into a tough and hard surface made only a little more pliable by the heavy morning dew. The chill of the night had convinced her that they would indeed need trousers eventually – although keeping the heavily furred skin as a warm blanket under which to shelter at night wasn't such a bad idea either. She had just enough of the chi'uchi rope that she could tie both ends of the heavy rolled hide and leave enough of a strap of rope between that the strap could be slung over a shoulder for ease of carrying.
"They found it," Jilan grumbled with a wry face as he returned to their campsite. He held up the scraps that were all that was left of the cured birdskin. "I have a sneaky suspicion that either we learn to eat raw meat, or we're going to be pretty hungry by the time this is over."
Lyara sighed and nodded. "I was afraid of that last night."
Jilan's face assumed a disgusted expression. "I think I'd almost rather go hungry."
She shook her head. "Some of the internal organs could be tasty enough to eat raw," she countered as Topiara whispered in the back of her mind. "Some of the Kauwlut hunts would bring down grazers bigger than this – and being the first to get a steaming slice of liver was considered the best of luck." She gave her i'ilim a sympathetic smile in response to a look of pure disgust. "Anything's better than going hungry, Jilan. Then again, if we're lucky, the next time we bring one of these things down, we'll be closer to a defensible shelter – and we can cook our food properly before eating, and hopefully before being attacked for it."
"Here." Jilan handed Lyara his netted bag and his quiver. "I'll carry the hide – it's bound to be heavy."
Lyara dug into her bag and brought out two more of the fruit of the Forest. "We have six more in your bag," she reported after a quick check of the rest of the bag's contents, "and four in mine."
"We'll have to learn to gather water here too," Jilan nodded, accepting his breakfast and shouldering his water carrier, "hopefully without slicing ourselves open on the grass." He looked about them up the slope. "Which way?"
Lyara put her hand to her forehead to study the mountain, then pointed. "Up," she said, "and towards that steam. Maybe there's water up there."
"Lead on," Jilan said, motioning with his half-eaten fruit.
The further along they walked, the steeper the slope got – and the taller the cutting grass grew. Occasionally they would encounter small clearings where the grass was much shorter than elsewhere – signs of grazer activity. In such places, they also tended to find a weathered scattering of bleached bones – and the marks on the bones made shivers run down their spines. Whatever had cleaned these bones, the teeth had been extremely sharp – sharp enough to leave evidence of where powerful jaws had gnawed and crushed smaller bones for the juicy marrow within.
Slowly the nearest outcropping behind which the steam rose in a steady cloud grew closer – and gradually the air began to have a slightly pungent odor to it. "I remember something like this in the far north of my clan's lands," Lyara remarked during one rest period. "From the ground, heated water bubbled out and sometimes sprayed up into the air. Our shaman had us using the water to bathe in once a year, claiming that the water was hot because the spirits had blessed it."
"There are a few hot springs like this in Talandria too," Jilan replied, letting the rolled skin fall to the boulder behind him. "It's considered to be a preventative against aging to bathe in the pools – it soothes sore joints and gives back flexibility to those who have lost it."
"This mountain has many such springs, then," Lyara remarked, casting her eye up the slope past the head of steam toward which they were climbing. "I wonder if the place we need to find is one of them?"
Jilan sighed. "This mountain is a very big place, Lya. The Gods only know just exactly where it was that Nilyaron wanted the two of us to go – or just how we're going to go about finding it." He reached behind him and settled the rope for the rolled skin more comfortably on his shoulder once more. "Ready?"
Lyara pushed herself off the boulder she'd been sitting on and once more led the way up the side of the mountain, walking with a smooth scooting action that she'd discovered tended to push the cutting grass down before her and lessened the opportunity for the little blades to come up over the wooden soles and slice at the bottoms of her feet. Jilan had learned to walk in her steps precisely, for there wasn't really enough time between when Lyara's foot lifted and his set down for the grass to fully recover.
The sun was just hovering, full and red, over the far horizon when the two pushed up and over the boulders that they had determined were very close to the spring – if that was what they were approaching – and found themselves on the very edge of a small clearing quite unlike any they'd encountered. The silvery cutting grass was nowhere in sight – rather, there was a vivid green carpet of something that squished beneath each step and stretched from the bordering boulders to the very edge of the small, steaming lake. Here and there, a plant with very wide and dark green leaves that seemed covered with a thin coating of hair had pushed up through the green carpet and spread lazily.
Lyara pointed to a spot much closer to the water where a grove of strange-looking trees with thin and drooping leaves grew tall and twisted. The tendrils of green from the branches waved gently in the breeze that the lake seemed to create for itself. "We can camp there."
"We're going to be sleeping in the wet," Jilan warned as he walked beside her toward the spot she'd pointed out.
"I don't know that we have any choice," Lyara responded. "It's either we sleep wet but much warmer, or we go back to the rocks and sleep on the hard ground. If you ask me, we see about unrolling that skin we've carried up the mountain and use that as a blanket on the ground to keep us from getting so wet – the heat from the water will keep us very comfortable otherwise."
Jilan withheld his comment until the two of them had drawn close to the trees, and then he shook his head. "I say we use our sleeping net," he offered. "We can tie it between two of these trees – above the lowest branch, so that it won't slip…"
"True," Lyara nodded on second thought. She'd grown very used to the sleeping net – sleeping on the ground the previous night had been far more uncomfortable than she ever could have imagined. "I'm glad we hung onto that thing when we left the Forest."
She watched as Jilan dislodged the net from his other shoulder and handed her the one end after he'd untied and unfolded the thing from the neat container it could be turned into, and then tied it to a low-hanging branch of one tree while he fastened it to a similar branch just a few feet away. "We can leave our things in the net," she suggested with an eye to the steaming water. "I don't know about you, but I think we both could use a hot bath."
Jilan turned from tying off his end of the sleeping net to find Lyara had placed both of their shi'ili bags and their netted bags into the sleeping net itself, hung the two water carriers from the branch on her end, and was already shedding the jerkin.
"We don't know if the water's safe," he cautioned, despite the way the entire idea of soaking the aches of ground travel and tired muscles in the steaming water was tempting him too.
"I'll take my sword," she replied, "You take your dagger." A knowing tug parted the shi'ili breast wrapping, which she tossed onto the already discarded jerking and then reached for her breechcloth.
The tantalizing image of Lyara, naked except for her vri'ih'sun and Topiara at her breast and the shi'ili cord about her waist from which her sword hung at the ready, trotting off toward the warm water was all it took to tip the scales of caution for Jilan. He quickly shed his vest and breechcloth and trot after her, his dagger hanging from its sheath on his shi'ili cord and his vri'ih'sun and the pouch containing Rodayn bouncing against his chest.
Lyara moaned in ecstasy as she walked into the hot water until she was up to her waist and then dove forward into the deeper water. This smelled exactly like the hot springs that she'd visited every year as a child had smelled – and the heat penetrated her knees and feet as she treaded water. With practiced strokes, she turned to watch Jilan splash forward to join her. "I may never come out," she called to him playfully.
As she had done, Jilan dove forward into the deeper water and then surfaced right by her side. "You say your shaman saw to it that you bathed in the hot springs every year?" he asked, bobbing near her.
"Every year," she replied and sighed deeply. "A few of us children would visit the spring again a day or so after the ritual bath, however," she confessed with a smile. "We liked how the water made us feel."
"This is amazing!" He could hardly believe how energized the warm water and the nearness of his i'ilim were making him. He moved closer to her and caught her around the waist, then leaned back in the water and began swimming back to where the water was shallow enough that their feet could touch the bottom. "I've never felt like this before!"
Lyara had been captivated the moment he'd touched her, suddenly hungry for his touch. She turned in his embrace and saw the intensity on his face. "There is magic here for us, I swear it!"
Jilan could wait no longer. The moment his toes could touch bottom, he straightened and pulled Lyara into his arms and kissed her with every ounce of passion he possessed. Lyara responded by wrapping her body around his seductively. There was only herself and Jilan in the world at the moment – and nothing else mattered to her.
So wrapped up in each other they'd become that neither of them noticed that two pairs of very patient and understanding eyes were observing their every action from the far shore of the lake.
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