She looked at him. "You and your short cuts! So all that talk in the
border towns was just gabble, huh?"
"So it's my fault! If that isn't just like a woman...." Ciaran made an
impatient gesture. "All right, all right! That doesn't matter now. What
does matter is where are we going and why?"
"How should I--Wait a minute. We're stopping."
The Kalds warned them with their wands to stand. One of the grey
brutes seemed to be listening to something that Ciaran couldn't hear.
Presently it gestured and the party started off again in a slightly
different direction.
After a minute or two a gully appeared out of nowhere at their feet.
From up on the ridge the Forbidden Plains had looked perfectly flat,
but the gully was fairly wide and cut in clean like a sword gash,
hidden by a slight roll of the land. They scrambled down the steep bank
and went along the bottom.
Again with an uneasy qualm, Ciaran realized they were headed in the
general direction of Ben Beatha.
The old legends had been gradually lost in the stream of time, except
to people who cared for such things, or made a living from singing
about them, like Ciaran. But in spite of that Ben Beatha was tabu.
The chief reason was physical. The Plains, still called Forbidden,
ringed the mountain like a protective wall, and it was an indisputable
fact whether you liked it or not that people who went out onto them
didn't come back. Hunger, thirst, wild beasts, or devils--they didn't
come back. That discouraged a lot of traveling.
Besides, the only reason for attempting to reach Ben Beatha was the
legend of the Stone of Destiny, and people had long ago lost faith in
that. Nobody had seen it. Nobody had seen Bas the Immortal who was
its god and guardian, nor the androids that were his servants, nor the
Kalds that were slaves to both of them.
Long, long ago people were supposed to have seen them. In the
beginning, according to the legends, Bas the Immortal had lived in a
distant place--a green world where there was only one huge sunball that
rose and set regularly, where the sky was sometimes blue and sometimes
black and silver, and where the horizon curved down. The manifest
idiocy of all that still tickled people so they liked to hear songs
about it.
Somewhere on that green world, somehow, Bas had acquired the flaming
stone that gave him the power of life and death and destiny. There were
a lot of conflicting and confused stories about trouble between Bas and
the inhabitants of the funny world with the sky that changed like a
woman's fancy. Eventually he was supposed to have gathered up a lot of
these inhabitants through the power of the stone and transported them
somehow across a great distance to the world where they now lived.
* * * * *
Ciaran had found that children loved these yarns particularly. Their
imaginations were still elastic enough not to see the ridiculous side.
He always gave the Distance Cycle a lot of schmaltz.
So after Bas the Immortal and his Stone of Destiny had got all these
people settled in a new world, Bas created his androids, Khafre and
Steud, and brought the Kalds from somewhere out in that vague Distance;
another world, perhaps. And there were wars and revolts and raiding
parties, and bitter struggles between Bas and the androids and the
humans for power, with Bas always winning because of the Stone. There
was a bottomless well of material there for ballads. Ciaran used it
frequently.
But the one legend that had always maintained its original shape under
the battering of generations was the one about Ben Beatha, the Mountain
of Life, being the dwelling place of Bas the Immortal and his androids
and the Kalds. And somewhere under Ben Beatha was the Stone, whose
possession could give a man life eternal and the powers of whatever
god you chose to believe in.
Ciaran had toyed with that one in spite of his skepticism. Now it
looked as though he was going to see for himself.
He looked at the Kalds, the creatures who didn't exist, and found his
skepticism shaken. Shaken so hard he felt sick with it, like a man
waking up to find a nightmare beside him in the flesh, booting his guts
in.
If the Kalds were real, the androids were real. From the androids you
went to Bas, and from Bas to the Stone of Destiny.
Ciaran began to sweat with sheer excitement.