Tales of Midbar: Secret Priest

I won’t bore you with the details of my night in the Vineyard Doghouse.

I had a good breakfast of fruit, cicadas and locusts. Then Mountain introduced me to a beautiful young anavah named Beauty. She looked a bit pale for faharnis but dark for bennis or quippas and had oddly frizzy hair in two bunches. Mountain said he thought it would be a good idea to have a female in our party, in case Dwendra was in a place where males weren’t allowed.

Then we teleported back in time to the day after Nuhar Zorg officially disappeared.

I got a similar feeling to the one I’d felt the first time I teleported, of traveling a very great distance. However, this time I was sufficiently knowledgeable to realize I hadn’t gone very far in space, just a few hundred meters. We materialized in a dimly lit place. I saw several gray people in a circle, posed as if they were having an argument. We were in the middle of them. Then I realized they were idols.

“I didn’t think Winemakers had idols,” I said.

“They’re not idols,” said Mountain, “they’re statues, we don’t worship them. We don’t even know who they’re meant to be.”

My eyes were adjusting to the dim light. There were also lots of shelves with small items on them. A pregnant idlan anavah was standing between two shelves and looking at us. She was dressed in pre-Cataclysm Winemaker clothing with black and white squares. “That wert brief?”

“Where didst the glildac anavah goeth?” asked Mountain.

“I knoweth not. She didst teleport as soon as thou didst depart. Probably unto the doghouse to procure some clothing appropriate unto this period.”

“Thank you.”

Mountain took my hand again.

We materialized in the open. There was a circle of small buildings with an open space with some seats and a table in the middle. This was similar to the present dog house but there were fewer buildings and the trees were noticeably smaller. The place was deserted.

“Not here,” I said.

“Unfortunately,” said Mountain.” I took care of some business here before returning to our time so I had to bring us to after she’d left and now she has a head start. Fortunately, we know where she’s going,”

“Do we?” I asked.

“She wants to marry that priest. Most the Yohoist priests are in Rendamar now and most the rest in Laraget. She’s probably gone to Rendamar and if she hasn’t, it’s easy enough to get from there to Laraget. First thing, we need costumes for this period.” He started leading us to the costume store. “You don’t have the gift of tongues do you Clindar?”

“What?”

“Ability to speak and understand any spoken language, even works on XT’s and robots.”

“No.”

“Then try not to say anything when other people can hear you. Let Beauty and myself do the talking. You may think you can imitate a pre-Cataclysm accent but you probably won’t get it right.”

We materialized between a wall and some bushes. Mountain led us out saying, “We need to get to a lower altitude. The fair is six denari each in modern money. Clindar should pay as it’s his thing.”

Six denari wasn’t very much.

“Is this going to be the last thing I’ll have to pay for?”

“I don’t know,” said Mountain, pursing his lips. “Of course, we could take the opportunity to get some antiques while we’re here, that should help.”

“There aren’t many devices from this period,” I said. “We could get something really valuable.”

I looked around. We were now on the other side of the valley from the Vineyard. It was white day so I got a good view. The Vineyard didn’t look as overgrown as it does now. The valley was generally greener. It was a place where it seldom rained. I wasn’t sure if it rained more now or was artificially irrigated better. There were more palms and cycads and fewer succulents. Most this side of the valley was occupied by a huge camp site, with a few groups of huts flying flags with variations on symbols for Yoho. We came round the side of the building we’d materialized behind and found an area of level ground with two aircraft sitting on it.

“Wow!” I said, holding my hands out level with my head. “Are these Skyskimmer forty sevens?”

“I think so,” said Mountain.

“They can change between ground effect craft and high altitude craft by morphing their wings. They have inducted fans and plasma jets and can land or take off from pretty much anywhere!”

“What didst I sayeth about thou’s talking?” said Mountain.

“What species madeth them?” asked Beauty.

"Homo sapiens,” said Mountain.

“Verilly?” said Beauty, staring at the craft with her mouth open.

“Thou art from Midbar-Teradriel art thou not?” asked Mountain.

“Yes.”

“Remember in Midbar-Binah, humans didst developeth advanced civilizations on Earth ...”

“And destroyed them in a nuclear war,” said Beauty.

“We also developed interstellar space travel without XT assistance,” said Mountain. “We designed and built these and lots of other technology.”

Mountain paid the fare using a banking device, saying I could pay him back later, and suggested I should get a banking device and an account to go with it if I intended to do much time travel in Midbar-Binah.

Going on the aircraft was about the most exciting thing I’d ever done. Well I’d gone back in time and helped a beautiful, scantily clad anavah to kill Nuhar Zorg but I wasn’t feeling at all happy at the time. I looked in amazement at the little details, like the writing on the air vents and the numbers on the seats. I’d seen these things in movies and somebody had once given a talk on them in device club. Beauty seemed rather nervous about the whole thing and was chewing her fingernails and Mountain acted like it was normal.

Then they fired up the induction fans and the craft lifted off the ground and started moving towards the road. It turned onto the road and then started increasing speed, flying over other vehicles, heading east. When it reached the point where the valley narrowed and the road (and river) dropped steeply, it fired up the plasma jets and changed to altitude flight move, the wings getting longer and narrower, leaving the road far below. We passed the sapphires, it was weird seeing them from the sides and above. I knew they worked in a similar way to mage lights but mage lights always looked like small balls. The sapphires are discs apparently with no thickness, and only shine light down. From above they look like black shadows hanging in the air.

I can’t remember when somebody had first told me the Great Basin was a giant impact crater. I was the sort of boy who knew all the inhabited solar systems (those which had been colonized by humans or were known to have intelligent XT’s at the time of the Landing) long before I left beginner school. The edge of the crater had been eroded into a range of mountains and it wasn’t clear from the ground that it was a crater wall. Seeing it from the air, it was obvious to me for the first time. I tried quietly pointing this out to Beauty but she was scrunched up in her seat, with her chin resting on her knees and the fingers of one hand in her mouth, absolutely terrified and muttering to herself, I think a prayer in her own strange language. I remembered that humans in Midbar-Teradriel spoke a modified form of an XT language which was very different from anything developed by humans. I tried putting my arm round her but it didn’t seem to help.

“Hath thou’s kids not flown before?” asked a stranger.

“No,” said Mountain, “they cometh from a remote place.”