“Find one what?” she asked, startled.
“An extra day. When they went to fish one out of the navel hole.”
She laughed. “You’re an idiot, you know, Trompe. What an idea.” She chuckled, thinking about it, a kind of black joke on the Dinadhi. The high priest, or whoever, dipping into the omphalos with his what? His wand? His day hook? Slowly withdrawing it to the sound of drums and flutes, only to find it empty. No extra day. Gradually, as she thought on it and considered the implications, she stopped finding the idea at all funny.
Toward evening they arrived at the hostel, the first one between Simidi-ala and Cochim-Mahn.
“And not a moment too soon,” Lutha muttered as she parked the vehicle and heard the doorlocks make a solid thunk as they disengaged. “I’m exhausted.”
Leely was sitting up, looking around himself with some interest.
Lutha got out, sniffed the fragrant air, sighed, stretched, held out her arms to the boy, who came slowly into them, head turning as he tried to see everything at once.
They were at the top end of yet another of the endless canyons, its branches and ramifications receding into the distance: carved buttes, slender pillars and towers, stepped ziggurats of stone, vertical walls pocked with caves, some of them occupied by busy hive communities or by the lonely bulk of abandoned hives, all thrown into brilliantly colored contrasts of fire and shade by the level rays of the setting sun. Sound came softly from the canyons, voices and drums, the high shriek of a bone flute, the hissing rainsound of rattles.
“Evensong,” Lutha said. “Farewell to Lady Day. And that, too, is about time.”
“We’re more tired than we should be,” said Trompe as he slowly removed their belongings from the vehicle. “The trip wasn’t that arduous.”
She agreed with a weary brush at a lock of hair that dangled at her forehead. “Indeed, Trompe. We are scarce begun and I am so weary I can hardly see. What is it about this place?”
He considered the question soberly. “I think it’s the fact that we have no sense of distance traveled toward our goal. It’s been like a maze. One goes and goes, then comes a turn, and one goes back almost the way one came. It takes hundreds of lateral marks back and forth among these canyons before we make much progress toward the goal. I’m conscious of frustration in myself. I can certainly feel it in you.”
“That’s it,” she said, almost relieved to have identified her feelings. “Trompe, you’re right. It’s all the same—mark after mark of thorn forest and herds of woolly beasts, then the road emerges onto an utterly astonishing prospect. We look out on marvel, complete with rising song and smoke from the occupied hives and mysterious silence from the abandoned ones—”
“More abandoned ones than I expected,” he interjected.
“—then we turn back, almost the way we came; mark after mark of thorn forest once more, another astonishing prospect, then turn again, like a shuttle in a loom. Back and forth. Back and forth. After a time one’s sense of astonishment wanes.”
“But the landscape demands astonishment, nonetheless, so one is left feeling naughty to be so ungrateful.” Trompe grinned wearily at her. “At least, that’s how I felt! One more breathtaking view and I would gag. Especially considering we could have flown the distance in an hour or so.”
She sagged under Leely’s weight as the boy gripped her more tightly around the neck, murmuring his usual “Dananana,” moistly in her ear.
“He’s hungry,” she said.
“How do you know?”
“I just know. Or perhaps I assume he is because I am. Let’s go in and see what the menu offers.”
What the Dziblom-nahro offered was a flavorful stew of grain and peppers, flat polygons of unleavened bread served with a dish of salted herbs and another of a fruity sweet-sour-hot sauce, plus a small helping of roasted meat, no doubt from the same woolly, deer-like creatures they had seen in flocks along their journey.
“Not bad,” Trompe murmured.
“Should be quite acceptable,” Lutha murmured in return. “It’s the basic menu for human diets on most nonocean worlds. Grain. Vegetables. Fruit. A little meat. Evidently this is a nondairy cuisine. No milk. No cheese.”