Soon the oasis loomed before her, filling much of her vision, and it was enough of a dark mass that she lifted the inner lids to get the full detail.
The trees weren’t like any she’d ever seen before, but they had a tropical look, with thin and supple trunks rising to layers of oversized palm- or fernlike leaves.
She ran right through the first row and found the area larger than she had expected and the ground inside harder with much exposed white-veined gray rock that produced a “clopping” sound when her feet hit it. She slowed but found that she needed to go up to a tree and put a hand out to fully stop herself without falling over.
It was almost a letdown to stop running, but her chest continued to heave and she continued to gulp in air at the same rhythm until her breathing slowed to a more normal rate.
She looked around, and her ears automatically rotated about a hundred degrees on either side, checking for sounds. There wasn’t much except the rustling of some leaves in the highest part of the trees, apparently in reaction to a slight breeze that didn’t reach the ground.
Her nose, though, brought an overpowering aroma that she recognized immediately, even though she’d never smelled it before—water!
Finding it was as simple as following her nose.
She didn’t hesitate a moment worrying that it might not be good water. It wasn’t any new inner sense that told her anything about it but rather an all-consuming thirst that made it clear that the question was moot. She simply had to have water.
The water was in fact from a spring that bubbled out of the rocks and created an attractive, shaded pool about a dozen meters across. She headed for it, got on all fours, then dropped down and just stuck her face in it and began to suck and lap it in. Her natural nose plugs closed the instant her face hit the water, and she hardly noticed.
It was an eerie sensation, though, because she just drank and drank. She had never drunk this much of anything in her whole life, and long after a human her size would have been satisfied she continued to take it in. She could feel it, cooling down her whole body in stages, coiling around inside her like a living thing, and finally concentrating in her back. There was no telling how much she drank before, unable to take another gulp, she came up out of the water and settled back, lying there on her side. For several minutes she felt bloated but cool, and then, slowly, her body temperature seemed to come back to normal and that bloated feeling subsided.
She wondered where all the water had gone. She didn’t feel like she’d grown some sort of camel’s hump, nor did rolling on her back for a moment reveal one, but clearly this body had areas to store a lot of excess liquid. After a while she forced herself to get up, even though she actually felt sleepy. For one thing, the pool was not totally calm but it did reflect decently and she wanted to get a more complete image of herself. And then it would be prudent to look around. Although Lori the American college teacher wouldn’t have resisted, Bimi of the People knew that it wouldn’t do to just zonk out without checking the lay of the land.
The image of herself in the gently rippling water was both strange and familiar. She’d always had something of a long neck, and she still did; the face, although the same beige or light tan color, contained enough of the old Lori Sutton to be recognizable, although it had a harder, larger, rougher cast. It was, she realized, what her face would have looked like had she been born a man. She’d always had that boyish look to her face, and now it seemed to have firmed up and looked not nearly as bad to her as it had all those times in the mirror.
The lips were thicker by quite a bit and were a dark brown, the nose was a bit larger, the eyes were dark black blobs against a medium brown field, the ears were very equine and larger than she’d thought, and the eyebrows were thick and snow white and rose on either side of the eyes at a slight angle, giving her a slightly exotic look. The big shock of white hair was actually kind of cute. The horn, the same color brown as the skin fur, looked, well, different from what she had imagined. That’s one hell of a phallic symbol, she thought. Jeez! As weird as this body is, it sure would have turned me on!
She tore herself reluctantly away from the self-examination and got up and looked around the rest of the oasis. It was, thankfully, deserted. Not that she wanted to hide out forever, but she wasn’t sure she was ready for others of this kind yet, particularly not as a man.
This was clearly a popular stop. In the sandy soil were traces of great numbers of people—beings like herself, anyway—having moved through here, and probably not long ago, since clearly the winds came through this place and erased many signs as if they’d never been. There was also signs of some sort of civilized behavior as well—holes which clearly were some kind of tent pole supports, a central fire pit with more support holes that might indicate anything from a rotisserie to grates being placed there, and a veritable waste pile of damaged and broken crockery, much of it of fired clay and some of it inlaid with elaborate designs.
The designs were very interesting, since among the more abstract parts were some scenes of what might have been life in this place. The style was almost reminiscent of ancient Egyptian, all in profile and two very flat dimensions yet finely featured. She couldn’t be sure if these were domestic or religious scenes, but a lot could be learned from them.
For one thing, they went in for decoration more than clothes, and that was instructive—not that clothes made a lot of sense out here with this kind of body. Either these beings came in a rainbow of colors or dyed fur in different colors and patterns was popular. So was decorating the horns, some of which were depicted as impossibly long. There was also a fair amount of jewelry on the males and what appeared to be serapelike capes with intricate designs worn over the head but extending down only chest-high and, on some but not all, a kind of highly decorated but very brief codpiece. Males didn’t seem to grow facial hair, but the big clump of hair on top tapered down the back until it vanished completely about three-quarters of the way down in a manelike appearance.
The females were quite different. First, they were all depicted as at least a head shorter than any of the males, although that might be just the male artist’s perspective. They had very soft feminine faces and no horn at all, but they had a huge amount of hair that trailed down their backs.
They also had tails, much like horses’ tails, that were almost mirror images of their hair and seemed to be deliberately styled to be that way and kept up with some kind of stays. They were not brown-furred but rather a soft, pale yellow, and their body hair and tails were a variety of browns, reds, even blonds, as well as black. How much was artificial and how much was “natural” color couldn’t be determined.
They also had two pairs of breasts, one atop the other. It was a very strange sight, but with the erotic equine curves of the body it didn’t look wrong, either. That got Lori to examining her own chest, where, after some effort even with the short hair, she did indeed locate four small nipples.
Did they have that many kids that they needed all that excess capacity? Or did they have a lot of kids and only a few made it past weaning? No, probably not. They didn’t seem big enough to carry more than one or two routinely, any more than human women did. The breasts, which seemed almost “humanlike,” had some of the short pale yellow fur about two-thirds of the way to the nipples but were otherwise all a very light brown.
Some of the decorations simply depicted scenes from some kind of tribal life: guards flanking a particularly decorated male who wore a lot of gold and a bright scrape adorned with a sash, females preparing food in fire pits. The males carried spears, and some seemed to be wearing swords—there was one scene of two males dueling, possibly in sport, the swords thin and rapierlike, with hilts somewhat reminiscent of their horns. There were also scenes that were blatantly erotic, often two or more females with one male, and the sexual attributes depicted made her own rather large endowment seem downright trivial.
Still, aside from the alienness of the people depicted, the scenes for the most part looked right out of some ancient Near Eastern Earth culture. A tribal, nomadic people, but with a sense of art and, from the odd-looking bands around some of the broken pottery, with a form of writing as well.
She was about to abandon her look through the remnants when a large fragment caught her eye and she reached down, picked it up, and frowned. It gave her a sudden chill to look at the scene, the first one she really didn’t like at all.
Their tents, crockery, ornamental stuff, all their goods moved on what seemed to be sledlike devices made to slide through the sand. Several had been depicted open or parked in other scenes, but this scene was of some in motion. She wondered why she hadn’t seen any depictions of domesticated animals, and this was why.
The females were lined up on a series of wooden bars passed through a forward support, and teams of six to ten of them, depending on the size of the desert sled, were clearly pulling them while the males ran with their spears to either side.
The females were the draft animals.
In fact, suddenly flashing back through the other scenes, she realized that whenever work was depicted, it was the females who were doing it. The males might fence or look magnificent or whatever, but never were they shown actually doing anything, except in the erotic ones, of course, when they were doing what men always liked to do.
She felt outraged by the sight as all her old principles came to the fore, and yet she found herself thinking, Thank God I’m not a woman here!
She was ashamed of the thought, yet damn it, the idea of being one of the bosses rather than one of the servants was something of a turn-on. She hated herself for feeling that, too, and tried to get some self-control back. She didn’t know what it was to be as oppressed as these women obviously were, but she knew what it was like to be a woman in a man’s world, and she hoped she wouldn’t descend to that level even if she had to adjust to this society.
She tossed the shard back in the pile, and it landed with a crash and cracked again.
This was too much to handle, coming all at once, she thought. It made the kidnapping and subsequent life among the People seem almost ordinary by comparison. Still, Alam—Mavra—had been right. Without that first experience, she wasn’t sure if she could have handled this one at all.
She looked around, but there was clearly nothing to eat here. There did seem to be some kind of round, green fruit way up atop the trees, but even if it were edible and ripe enough to eat, this body was good for a lot of things, but tree climbing wasn’t one of them. Filled with water, though, she was in no immediate danger of anything more than a growling stomach. She would pick a spot in the shade with some promise of concealment just in case and get the badly needed rest. Then she could think of what to do next.
It was a weird dream, mixing living scenes from the discarded pottery and the race that lived here with scenes of the Amazon and of the university, and at one point she was saying to her department head, “Now that I’m a man, Dr. Avery, you can’t deny me the Holburn Chair and the professorship that goes with it.”
The smell of odd spices and perfumes and the tinkling of bells brought her back to consciousness, but it wasn’t until the sudden thought that she was no longer alone that she stiffened, rolled over, and tensely peered out from the rocks and bushes toward the pool.
It wasn’t a big caravan like those depicted on the shards but, rather, a small party, no more than eight or nine people from the look of it, and one of those sleighlike wagons. Most, maybe all, were females, except for one big fellow reclining on a cushion. He looked, well, old—not really old but well into middle age from the cast and lines in his face and the wear and tear on his skin. He wore a somewhat faded and threadbare scrape of faded red that had an even more faded yellow design too shopworn to matter and one of those codpieces that might at one time have been silvery but now just looked a dirty gray. His horn, either shorter than hers or worn down over time, was wrapped in a kind of turbanlike affair that made it appear that he was wearing a cream-colored pointed hat. Everything about him, from his overall look and manner to the faded remnants of once colorfully decorated skin, looked a bit old and a bit seedy.
So did the sleigh. Clearly it had seen a lot of use in its time and hadn’t been cared for very well of late, but, like its owner, it was serviceable.
Watching the females, seeing them in person for the first time, was an odd experience. All were considerably smaller than either the old man or Lori, and the double pair of breasts on them all seemed quite a bit larger than in the pictures. The hair and the tails were nicely done up so that they were pretty well mirror images of one another, and the effect was quite nice indeed to look at. They all seemed to have a naturally feminine, sexy manner to them, and they would talk or whisper to one another, ears turning and twitching, and occasionally giggle like schoolgirls. Most wore some sort of jewelry—bracelets, necklaces—but little else, although the one at the fire pit had on a thick scrape much longer than the male’s, apparently not a garment but rather protection against heat. There was also something odd about their hands, but she couldn’t make out what it might be.
She wondered just what the hell she should do now. Here was contact, and on a scale she might handle, but damn it, it was scary to be in this situation. Finally realizing that there was nothing else to do, Lori hauled herself onto the top of the rock, assuming a sitting position, and coughed politely.
The effect on the females was startling. They froze like deer in the meadow might have frozen at the first sense of danger. The male moved pretty quickly, though, whirling, grabbing a sword, and actually getting to his feet in a single series of motions.
“Who be you?” the old man called out menacingly in a low voice.
“Please, good sir, put down your sword,” Lori responded, startled at how very, very deep her voice sounded to her ears but also relieved that language, at least, wasn’t going to be a problem. “I sit here with nothing, not even clothes, let alone a weapon.”
“Where’d ye come from?” the old man asked suspiciously, sword still in hand.
“I was already here,” Lori explained. “I—I woke up in the sands near here as I am now.”
“Yesss . . . ? And who dumped ye there, and why?”
“I—I don’t know if this is going to sound crazy to you or not, but I was a different sort of—creature—from another world. I came through what I was told is a hex gate to a place called Zone, and then they forced me through another gate, and I woke up as you see me.”
The old man sniffed, frowned, then put his sword away. “Not another one!” he said in disbelief. “Not in my lifetime, or my father’s, or his father’s lifetime has anyone come though there and been dumped here. Now suddenly yer fallin’ from the skies!”
Lori’s heart skipped a beat. “Another one, you say? You mean I’m not the first?”
“Not if yer what you says you are, anyways. Other was a girl, over in the Hajeb, a couple months ago maybe. Least, that’s what I heard.”
She shook her head. “That means nothing to me. I’m afraid I don’t even know where I am, or what I am, for that matter.” She was disappointed at the time frame. It meant that whoever the girl was, she was from one of the other parties—most likely the woman in the wheelchair, since that was the only female she recalled among the pictures shown to them back in Zone.
The old man chuckled. “Well, sonny, this land be Erdom, in the bottom of the World, and we all be Erdomites first. I be Posiphar of the Makob, a traveling merchant by trade. I buy and sell things, services, whatever be needed between the families and tribes of the Hjolai. I be on me route from oasis to oasis right now, headin’ next fer the camp of Lord Aswab.”
“The names mean nothing to me yet. I’m sorry,” she told him. Guessing that the man’s odd manner of speech was either a regional dialect or just the mark of a less than educated man, she made no attempt to duplicate it. “Uh, I’d like to come down, but I’m not really dressed fit for mixed company, I’m afraid.”
Posiphar chuckled again. “Don’t worry none ’bout the girls. Ye ain’t got nothin’ they ain’t seen many times afore, I promise ye. Come, come, let me get a look at ye!”