[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.The long tunnel down which Shaiara and her people had ventured in their first days here at Abi'Abadsharwas only the merest fingernail's-breadth of the city's subterranean realm.As her hunters had tracked theherd of goats, they had been led through a maze of passages that intertwined like the strands of a hunter'snet.Some passages led to other open spaces such as the first one they had found, vast undergroundchambers that teemed with a shocking concentration of life.These underground gardens were filled withtrees and grass and vines and bushes; with animals such as no one in the desert had ever seen, such asthe large fat fluffy-tailed tree-climbing mouse and the chattering black-furred manlike creature the size ofa young ikulas puppy.There were other animals here such as belonged in the Iteru-cities: the shaggyred-coated swine, the goats, the bright-plumaged birds larger than the largest and plumpest rock-dove.Doves there were as well, and bright tiny birds such as no Nalzindar had ever imagined could exist.At first the hunting falcons were confused by this new place, a place that had no sky.But the Nalzindartrained their creatures well, and soon both falcons and ikulas were bringing down game in abundance.The Nalzindar tested each new beast cautiously before adding it to their menu, and the plants and fruitseven more cautiously: what a goat or a shotor could safely eat would kill a man.With the slaughter of fat goats, and swine, and fur-mice, and great-doves, there was fat for the lamps andwool to twist into wicks, and between the lamps and the creation of more and better torches for theNalzindar used the bounty of their new home to replace much that they had been forced to leave behind,weaving baskets and mats from twigs and vines and grasses, and harvesting wood to carve into bowlsand cups in addition to creating new sources of light the exploration of even those places which the sundid not reach continued.Beyond the refuge of the gardens, they found chambers where dry sand haddrifted in through holes they could not find, and other places where great stone cylinders had fallen, andbroken, and blocked further exploration.Seeing these, Shaiara was grateful that so much of thisunderground world seemed to have been carved from one piece of stone, much as an artisan might carvean object from a single bone.In any place they came to that was built from one stone set upon another,those stones had shifted and fallen.Shaiara had moved the tribe down to live in the first of the garden-places they had discovered.Kamarhad suggested, in the first handful of days after they had come to dwell here, that watchers should be setat the bounds of the city to warn them of discovery.Shaiara had held his words against her heart, thentaken them to the tribal elders, speaking against them with a combination of fatalism and practicality.Upon the surface, sentries could be seen as well as see.In day, they would be punished by the fierceheat of the sun; in true night, there would be little to see.But no hunter would go upon the hunt with only one bowstring for his bow, and the Nalzindar weremaster hunters.Shaiara was unhappy with the thought that there was only one entrance and exit fromtheir underground home, and set her hunters to the task of finding others.Though her hunters found thatthere were many openings to the light and air on this level, most of them could only be entered anddeparted by birds, and the rest would only permit one person to climb out at a time, and that after scalingseveral feet of wall.If disaster struck, it was possible that all of the tribe could win its way to freedomthrough the many escape routes of this sort they had discovered in the time they had been living here, butthey would have to abandon all of the shotors and all their supplies and to do that would be tocondemn themselves to a lingering death instead of courting a quick one [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]