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Water was normally valued above food when it came to a journey. John, however, ensured equal amounts of both. Since bringing Rodney to the caves – although the man's face hovered between the known and obscurity - John had been constantly nagged by the feeling Rodney always needed something to eat, so long as it involved nothing sourly sweet flavored. The sour-sweet dilemma was cleared up when Rodney mentioned citrus, the need for food when he mentioned hypoglycemia.
John would get his memory back even if it happened one crumb at a time.
The black edaaka John had “borrowed” from the fortress, he now claimed as his own, and loaded the beast with water skins tied in bundles to the saddle. Rodney was given a light tan male edaaka carrying its own food satchels and a few other supplies. He also got a light-colored robe of thin cloth with a hood to protect him from the sun, and a cloak to use as a blanket for the frigid nights. John simply used the ragged robes and cloaks of the hunting party. During the day, the clothes were turned inside out, going from black and dark gray to light gray and almost white. Rodney was right about the 'waste not, want not' thing. Cloth wasn't easy to come by, and so was a multi-tasking item.
They were ready to depart while it was still dark and arctic outside. Hemmin and several of the hunting party followed John and Rodney to the entrance of the cave hidden behind high, jagged pillars of rock shaped like fangs. They stopped at the threshold, and as the hunting party helped Rodney made sure his edaaka's saddle and bags were secure, John turned to Hemmin.
Hemmin smiled fondly at the younger man.“You are taking the largest of all the steps. How do you feel about that?”
John smiled shyly. “To be honest... terrified.”
Hemmin chuckled and slapped John's shoulder lightly. “So you should be. You would not be a living being otherwise.”
John rubbed the back of his neck in rising discomfort. An invisible band seemed to tighten around his chest. “Hemmin...” He was no good at heartfelt articulation, and suspected he never had been. “No words are going to cut it in expressing my gratitude for what you did. I don't know how, or even if, I could ever repay you. I know there's a lot of blanks in my mind that need to be filled but... Sometimes I feel like – had it been anyone else – they wouldn't have done what you did. They would have left me to die.”
Hemmin's smile remained fixed, but there was something melancholy about his gaze. The old man took the younger's hand and clasped it between his old wrinkled ones. “I can only hope this feeling is unfounded. Life is precious to our people. To lose it, whether the life of our own or a stranger, is a burden to the soul. To save it lifts the soul. You have done that for me, John Sheppard. You have lifted my soul. Living is your repayment to me.”
John had been with the hunting parties when they picked through the bodies discarded like waste outside the fortress. Arrival was solemn, but departure when no living body could be found was heavy, pressing, as though the bodies had been known to each individual of the party. During the days that followed, Hemmin's smile would not reach his eyes.
Unless he looked at John. John just taking a deep breath was enough to make the old man happy. The depth of the Indaani's consideration for life both touched John deeply and riddled him with guilt.
Who the hell was he to warrant that kind of love from complete strangers? He didn't even know what kind of man he was, whether he deserved it or not. A part of him was afraid to know.
Hemmin patted John's hand affectionately before releasing it. “Good journey to you, Sky-wanderer,” he said. Then he gave John a little shove as though making sure the younger man didn't change his mind. That got John smiling a little more sincerely.
John climbed into the saddle of the black edaaka and steered the creature around the wall of natural pillars. He led the way into the narrow canyon, like roofless corridors with walls of cream, tan, brown, and gray-striated rock. Rodney started rambling on about the canyons playing host to flooding during whatever passed for a monsoon season on this world, and how over millions of years the temporary rivers cut away the earth to create these canyons.
The clack of the edaaka's claws resounded sharp off the high walls like distant rifle shots. Rodney's ramblings shifted topic from erosion to minerals that made technology useless. After a moment, his one-sided conversation drifted off and he fell silent except for the occasional observational comment or complaint. Mostly complaint, and mostly about his ass going numb.
The narrow canyons remained relatively cool until the sun reached the sky's apex to shine directly on them. John called a halt when they came beneath the shade of an arch of rock. They had a quick lunch of midaki bread and white cheese, then resumed traveling when the sun was no longer in a position to beat down on them. They passed more arches of rock, and went through small tunnels and short caverns. When twilight came and the path became hard to see, John called another stop. They set up camp on the right side of the path and started a fire using the dry, skeletal shrubs that grew from the cracks in the ground, and dried edaaka dung. The shrubs released a pleasant scent Rodney compared to cedar, which covered the smell of the dung. The two men huddled in their heavy cloaks close to the fire, eating more bread and cheese.
“So, how much longer before we're out of this maze?” Rodney asked. He split his bread in half and put a chunk of the white cheese in between.
John had never gone that way through the canyons. He was used to the paths that led to the fortress, but Hemmin had told him the way to go, giving him a map drawn on tan leather and a compass. “Sometime tomorrow,” he said, repeating what Hemmin had told him, “we'll come to the end and open desert. We cross the desert to the other side, where we reenter the canyons.”
Rodney spoke around a mouthful of bread. “So, basically the whole trip's going to be one big tour of the mini-Grand Canyon.”
Grand Canyon, canyons, big freakin' canyons, a place John felt he'd been to. He twitched his head to clear it before his train of thought tried to run away. “Yeah, something like that. We could just cut across open terrain, but it's safer to stick to the rocks. It's cooler, for one thing, and you don't have to worry about predators.”
Rodney paused in taking his next bite of bread, his eyes snapping wide. “Predators?”
John tore off a chunk of bread and tossed it over his shoulder for his edaaka to catch. He heard the thing's jaw clack and a hiss of contentment. “Yeah, predators. Not that there aren't any predators in the canyons, they're just easier to handle than the ones out in the desert.” John finished off the last of his meal, then wrapped his robe tighter around his body and stretched out on the ground, using his arm as a pillow. “Goodnight, Rodney.”
“What? Goodnight? Wait, hold up. What predators, what kind?”
“The kind afraid of edaakas and fire. Go to sleep, Rodney. We're safe.”
A cry echoed around them, keening and long. John heard Rodney's sharp inhale.
“Safe, my ass,” he muttered, but John eventually heard the man shift. When John cracked open one eye, it was to see Rodney curled beneath his cloak facing away from the fire.
John smiled, finding Rodney's petulance rather comforting.
--------------------
They reached the end of the canyons an hour before midday. The narrow passage opened into a rippling ocean of sand shimmering with heat like water that could never be reached. Rodney tugged his hood over his head while snappishly pointing out the dangers of heatstroke and UV rays, and wishing he had his special blend of sun protection.
John pulled up his hood and fitted the skull mask down over his scalp. The skull with its long snout provided better protection than hoods. Rodney, however, had refused to have anything to do with it.
John exited the canyons first, urging his edaaka into a canter. The splayed edaaka feet with their thick toes pounded over the sand as though it were packed dirt. There was another animal that walked on the sand as though it were solid, an alien animal. Well, at least it would have been alien to this world, maybe even scary. Big, furry, so ugly it was almost cute, with a huge hump on its back.
“Hey, Rodney?” John called. “ What's that animal, from our world, with the hump back? Lives in the desert?”
“Camel,” Rodney replied. “Why?”
John shrugged. “I remember a lot of animals, just never their names. Well, not all the time. Sometimes I remember what the animal looks like and not the name, or the other way around.”
“All right,” McKay huffed. “I'm starting to think this memory loss thing is a nice little mix of mental trauma and a blow to the head. No way does mental trauma alone make you forget what a damn camel is.”
John shrugged again but more helplessly. “I don't know why I have a hard time remembering crap, McKay. Stuff gets a little mixed up when I do start remembering, then I can't focus. Small things I can handle, like I knew I wasn't from this world and neither was a creature with a hump on its back. Yet for some reason I couldn't remember what that creature was called. I know there's an animal called a 'kangaroo,' I just can't remember what it looks like.”
“Hops on two legs...”
“With long ears?”
“No, that's a rabbit, and they hop on four. Kangaroos hop on two, have pouches, seem to know kick boxing, or at least that one at the petting zoo did when I tried to feed it.”
The image plowed into John's mind like an epiphany, and it made him chuckle. “ Crap, I've been calling it a cat.” The chuckling ascended from amusement to slight hysteria that had his heart pounding and the muscles of his back quivering. “What the hell is wrong with me?” John honestly wanted to know. Amnesia, forgetting, he knew all that, knew what it meant, but he had a feeling there was a little something extra to worry about when one could not keep the names of animals straight.
“Well,” Rodney said, bringing his edaaka along-side Sheppard's and struggling to keep the beast from veering away, “drugging could have been involved. You realize – even if you don't recall – that you were tortured, right?”
John swallowed tightly and nodded. He'd seen his wounds weren't the kind inflicted by an animal.
Rodney tugged the reins sideways, bringing the cantering edaaka in closer. “If the guy who, you know, who roughed you up is the same guy who liked to shove me around, then chances are high he probably doped you up a few times. The only reason prisoners are kept is for interrogation purposes, and I worked with one of the guys who made the drugs used to loosen a few tongues. Not that they always worked, apparently, because that guy was always getting whipped. After a while...” Rodney trailed off for a moment. John glanced up to see him staring into the distant blue as he turned inward to thoughts he'd probably rather forget.
Wasn't life ironic that way?
Rodney cleared his throat and kicked his edaaka to pick up the pace. “After a while... he killed himself. Overdosed on as many drugs as he could. So who knows what they pumped into you. Beatings, knock on the head, drugs; definitely a recipe for screwing up the mind.”
John looked away back out over the sands. The twitching in his back radiated out to encompass every muscle until he was shivering, even in the heat.
Maybe forgetting wasn't such a bad thing.
“Hey, Sheppard. You all right?”
John glanced at Rodney. The man was looking worried, so John nodded stiffly. “Yeah, just... thinking.”
“Well, don't think too hard. This isn't exactly a good place to have you freaking out on me. Crap, how much farther? I'm gonna be a mummified husk before we reach those canyons. Hey, isn't it a bad sign when you haven't urinated in hours?” Rodney stood up in the stirrups for a moment, then plopped down. “I'm going to have saddle sores the size of my head by the time this is over. I did mention I burn easily, right? And don't those Indaani have some secret herbal concoction that beats the hell out of sun tan lotion? I thought primitive natives had secret recipes for everything...”
John tuned Rodney out until the other man's voice was a low drone, like a conversation in another room. His focus was on the sands, especially their rippling patterns. The canyons were not that far, Hemmin had said, and glancing up, John could see a thin line of darkness rising out of the horizon like gathering storm clouds. He returned his gaze to the sand, and caught the slight, almost imperceptible indention, like a shallow trench. He pulled hard on his edaaka's reins, forcing Rodney to stop talking and pull even harder.
“Whoa, whoa, what...!”
John held up his fist for silence.
“What?” Rodney demanded.
“Quiet!” John hissed. He listened into the silence. A weak wind rushed past his ears, tugging at the frayed end of his cloak. The edaakas' heaving breaths were like rushing bellows. He heard them shift their weight, heard the creak of leather when Rodney shifted his own weight, the musical chiming of the bridles, the slosh of water in the bladders, and the quiet thumping of his own heart.
Then he heard the hiss of sinking sand as something moved through it like an eel.
“Son of a bitch,” he breathed. “Rodney, when I tell you, you kick your edaaka into a full-on charge. Don't ask any questions, just do it, and make sure you go where I go.”
“What - ?”
“Rodney!”
“All right, bu - ”
“Now!” John screamed, and kicked his edaaka hard. The beast reared up, keening and hissing, and when it thumped back to the ground, tore off over the sands. John shot a glance over his shoulder to see Rodney racing close behind. He shot his gaze forward just as a spade-shaped white head burst from the sand, rising on a serpentine neck. The sand viper opened a fanged mouth big enough to bite John in half and lunged down. John pulled a hard right on the reins, veering just as the head shot down to get a mouth full of sand.
“What the hell!” Rodney shrieked.
“Follow my lead!” John called back. He steered his edaaka in an erratic path that would prevent the viper from getting a clean shot. He chanced a glance over his shoulder to see Rodney doing the same.
The viper was out of sight, back beneath the sands.
“Damn it!” John spat. Sand vipers were smart, and it was always a safe bet to assume there was more than one around. The creatures utilized two tactics: divide and conquer, or drive their victims like those suicidal little rodents that liked to jump off cliffs to their doom.
John reached down to the sheath attached to his saddle and whipped out the machete like-blade. A split second after, another spade-shaped head baring its fangs burst out of the sand and lunged for John. John swiped at the mouth, and the viper reared back, shrieking and howling.
Rodney's edaaka increased its speed until it was neck-to-neck with John's. The canyon wall rose up from behind the horizon, close enough to look less like clouds and more like actual rock. John looked over his shoulder to see two white, leathery bodies winding toward them, fast.
“Sheppard!”
John looked forward. A third viper struck at them. Both edaakas reacted without command and veered sharply to either side. The snake passed harmlessly between the two, then curved around to join its kin in the chase.
“We'll be safe in the canyons!” John called.
“Those snakes can move on the surface! So how the hell are we going to ditch them in the canyons?”
“We're not!” The canyon wall loomed closer, and so did the hiss of the vipers, making the hairs on the back of John's neck stand on end.
“Come on,” John begged his edaaka, squeezing its flanks with his heels. “Faster, faster...”
The canyon wall filled John's view like a dark amber obelisk. He could see the darker line splitting the rock face, creating the doorway into the canyon maze.
“John!”
John twisted his upper body while swinging out his arm, slicing at another lunging spade head. The snake reared back, but the other two continued on undeterred, now only three feet away.
Turning back, John could see the canyon entrance in all its detail, from the thin veil of sand moving along the smooth path to the multi-colored striations of the inner walls. Then they were through, pounding becoming clacking when claw met solid ground. John pulled hard on the reins. His edaaka reared, and the moment its front paws hit the floor, John jumped from the saddle, yelling for Rodney to do the same.
“But the edaakas...!” he yelled.
Both men turned to watch the edaakas stalk toward the canyon entrance with lips curled back baring very long fangs. The vipers milled and coiled just beyond the threshold, hissing and shuddering in agitation.
“What...?” Rodney said.
John held up a single finger. “Just wait.”
The edaakas lowered their bodies into a partial crouch with backs curved and webbed manes bristling. The smallest, and probably youngest, of the vipers lashed out until its head was through the entrance. John's edaaka reared its head back, then lashed out in return, only with a lot better coordination than the young snake. The edaaka caught the snake by the neck, and, with the help of the second edaaka pulled it in. The two edaakas shook, tore, and stomped the snake. The snake shrieked, coiled, bucked, then finally shuddered before falling still, allowing the edaakas to dig in, taking chunks of leathery hide and swallowing them whole.
John gestured at the beasts. “The vipers are vulnerable in narrow spaces with no sand to dive into. They know better than to come in here... Well, most of the older ones do.”
The two remaining vipers hissed and keened, then finally slunk off until they slipped back into the sand like albino whales. John smiled in relief and looked over at Rodney. McKay was looking slightly green and had his hand on his stomach.
“Oh, man, that's just... Oh, gosh...”
He ran to the side and leaned with one hand against the rockface as his body shuddered and constricted in noisy heaves. John looked on, sympathetic and disconcerted. After a few seconds of dry heaving, Rodney wiped his mouth and returned to Sheppard, only to look back at the feasting edaakas and bloody remains of viper. He promptly returned to the wall and resumed heaving.
After the edaakas had their fill of snake flesh, and Rodney a good helping of water, the two men mounted and continued on into the relative coolness and safety of the canyon corridor.
“How the hell did people even tame these monsters?” Rodney asked.
“How did we ever tame dogs?” John grinned smugly at being able to recall both animal image and name without help.
Rodney, still a little pale but no longer green, jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “Why didn't you just let the edaakas take the snakes? Why the race?”
“The edaakas needed the advantage of the canyons. Two edaakas against three snakes in open desert is a losing combination.” John patted his edaaka's neck, making the beast purr. “They may look like... uh, horses, right?”
“Yeah.”
“They may look like horses, but they're as loyal as dogs. During hunts, we never left the canyons without a few edaakas following behind. Vipers usually only travel in pairs except for the family units like what we got back there. Just having three edaakas around usually keeps them back. We always brought five to play it safe.”
Rodney rubbed the side of his tanning face. “You really learned a lot from the Indanni.”
“Their world became my world and the only world I knew. I learned fast. Kind of hard not to.”
“So how much longer before we reach the gate?”
“Three more days, give or take. A day and a half in the canyons is what Hemmin said, then we reach the pass, which involves going through some caves. After that, a day through open desert that's not bad. Hemmin told me this canyon forms kind of a wall that keeps the vipers in. Plus, our route takes us by some oases. The real danger is the town, but I don't think I need to tell you that.”
“Hell, no.”
“Once there, we need to head straight to the gate.”
“Way ahead of you there,” Rodney said, mopping his sweaty face with his sleeve. “So, we're pretty much home free in terms of danger, right? Barring possible heatstroke and rock slides.”
John twisted his mouth in sudden discomfort. “Well...”
Rodney froze in wiping his face. “Well? What well? What do you mean 'well'? No well. I hate well, and 'but,' 'although,' 'however,' 'on the other hand'.... Yes or no, Sheppard? Is there any reason we should be worried?”
“Depends,” John said. He was hesitant because Hemmin had said it wasn't a certainty, and John didn't want Rodney pining over an uncertainty.
“On what?” Rodney gritted.
Too late now.
“On the caves.”
TBC...
Ch. 5
John would get his memory back even if it happened one crumb at a time.
The black edaaka John had “borrowed” from the fortress, he now claimed as his own, and loaded the beast with water skins tied in bundles to the saddle. Rodney was given a light tan male edaaka carrying its own food satchels and a few other supplies. He also got a light-colored robe of thin cloth with a hood to protect him from the sun, and a cloak to use as a blanket for the frigid nights. John simply used the ragged robes and cloaks of the hunting party. During the day, the clothes were turned inside out, going from black and dark gray to light gray and almost white. Rodney was right about the 'waste not, want not' thing. Cloth wasn't easy to come by, and so was a multi-tasking item.
They were ready to depart while it was still dark and arctic outside. Hemmin and several of the hunting party followed John and Rodney to the entrance of the cave hidden behind high, jagged pillars of rock shaped like fangs. They stopped at the threshold, and as the hunting party helped Rodney made sure his edaaka's saddle and bags were secure, John turned to Hemmin.
Hemmin smiled fondly at the younger man.“You are taking the largest of all the steps. How do you feel about that?”
John smiled shyly. “To be honest... terrified.”
Hemmin chuckled and slapped John's shoulder lightly. “So you should be. You would not be a living being otherwise.”
John rubbed the back of his neck in rising discomfort. An invisible band seemed to tighten around his chest. “Hemmin...” He was no good at heartfelt articulation, and suspected he never had been. “No words are going to cut it in expressing my gratitude for what you did. I don't know how, or even if, I could ever repay you. I know there's a lot of blanks in my mind that need to be filled but... Sometimes I feel like – had it been anyone else – they wouldn't have done what you did. They would have left me to die.”
Hemmin's smile remained fixed, but there was something melancholy about his gaze. The old man took the younger's hand and clasped it between his old wrinkled ones. “I can only hope this feeling is unfounded. Life is precious to our people. To lose it, whether the life of our own or a stranger, is a burden to the soul. To save it lifts the soul. You have done that for me, John Sheppard. You have lifted my soul. Living is your repayment to me.”
John had been with the hunting parties when they picked through the bodies discarded like waste outside the fortress. Arrival was solemn, but departure when no living body could be found was heavy, pressing, as though the bodies had been known to each individual of the party. During the days that followed, Hemmin's smile would not reach his eyes.
Unless he looked at John. John just taking a deep breath was enough to make the old man happy. The depth of the Indaani's consideration for life both touched John deeply and riddled him with guilt.
Who the hell was he to warrant that kind of love from complete strangers? He didn't even know what kind of man he was, whether he deserved it or not. A part of him was afraid to know.
Hemmin patted John's hand affectionately before releasing it. “Good journey to you, Sky-wanderer,” he said. Then he gave John a little shove as though making sure the younger man didn't change his mind. That got John smiling a little more sincerely.
John climbed into the saddle of the black edaaka and steered the creature around the wall of natural pillars. He led the way into the narrow canyon, like roofless corridors with walls of cream, tan, brown, and gray-striated rock. Rodney started rambling on about the canyons playing host to flooding during whatever passed for a monsoon season on this world, and how over millions of years the temporary rivers cut away the earth to create these canyons.
The clack of the edaaka's claws resounded sharp off the high walls like distant rifle shots. Rodney's ramblings shifted topic from erosion to minerals that made technology useless. After a moment, his one-sided conversation drifted off and he fell silent except for the occasional observational comment or complaint. Mostly complaint, and mostly about his ass going numb.
The narrow canyons remained relatively cool until the sun reached the sky's apex to shine directly on them. John called a halt when they came beneath the shade of an arch of rock. They had a quick lunch of midaki bread and white cheese, then resumed traveling when the sun was no longer in a position to beat down on them. They passed more arches of rock, and went through small tunnels and short caverns. When twilight came and the path became hard to see, John called another stop. They set up camp on the right side of the path and started a fire using the dry, skeletal shrubs that grew from the cracks in the ground, and dried edaaka dung. The shrubs released a pleasant scent Rodney compared to cedar, which covered the smell of the dung. The two men huddled in their heavy cloaks close to the fire, eating more bread and cheese.
“So, how much longer before we're out of this maze?” Rodney asked. He split his bread in half and put a chunk of the white cheese in between.
John had never gone that way through the canyons. He was used to the paths that led to the fortress, but Hemmin had told him the way to go, giving him a map drawn on tan leather and a compass. “Sometime tomorrow,” he said, repeating what Hemmin had told him, “we'll come to the end and open desert. We cross the desert to the other side, where we reenter the canyons.”
Rodney spoke around a mouthful of bread. “So, basically the whole trip's going to be one big tour of the mini-Grand Canyon.”
Grand Canyon, canyons, big freakin' canyons, a place John felt he'd been to. He twitched his head to clear it before his train of thought tried to run away. “Yeah, something like that. We could just cut across open terrain, but it's safer to stick to the rocks. It's cooler, for one thing, and you don't have to worry about predators.”
Rodney paused in taking his next bite of bread, his eyes snapping wide. “Predators?”
John tore off a chunk of bread and tossed it over his shoulder for his edaaka to catch. He heard the thing's jaw clack and a hiss of contentment. “Yeah, predators. Not that there aren't any predators in the canyons, they're just easier to handle than the ones out in the desert.” John finished off the last of his meal, then wrapped his robe tighter around his body and stretched out on the ground, using his arm as a pillow. “Goodnight, Rodney.”
“What? Goodnight? Wait, hold up. What predators, what kind?”
“The kind afraid of edaakas and fire. Go to sleep, Rodney. We're safe.”
A cry echoed around them, keening and long. John heard Rodney's sharp inhale.
“Safe, my ass,” he muttered, but John eventually heard the man shift. When John cracked open one eye, it was to see Rodney curled beneath his cloak facing away from the fire.
John smiled, finding Rodney's petulance rather comforting.
--------------------
They reached the end of the canyons an hour before midday. The narrow passage opened into a rippling ocean of sand shimmering with heat like water that could never be reached. Rodney tugged his hood over his head while snappishly pointing out the dangers of heatstroke and UV rays, and wishing he had his special blend of sun protection.
John pulled up his hood and fitted the skull mask down over his scalp. The skull with its long snout provided better protection than hoods. Rodney, however, had refused to have anything to do with it.
John exited the canyons first, urging his edaaka into a canter. The splayed edaaka feet with their thick toes pounded over the sand as though it were packed dirt. There was another animal that walked on the sand as though it were solid, an alien animal. Well, at least it would have been alien to this world, maybe even scary. Big, furry, so ugly it was almost cute, with a huge hump on its back.
“Hey, Rodney?” John called. “ What's that animal, from our world, with the hump back? Lives in the desert?”
“Camel,” Rodney replied. “Why?”
John shrugged. “I remember a lot of animals, just never their names. Well, not all the time. Sometimes I remember what the animal looks like and not the name, or the other way around.”
“All right,” McKay huffed. “I'm starting to think this memory loss thing is a nice little mix of mental trauma and a blow to the head. No way does mental trauma alone make you forget what a damn camel is.”
John shrugged again but more helplessly. “I don't know why I have a hard time remembering crap, McKay. Stuff gets a little mixed up when I do start remembering, then I can't focus. Small things I can handle, like I knew I wasn't from this world and neither was a creature with a hump on its back. Yet for some reason I couldn't remember what that creature was called. I know there's an animal called a 'kangaroo,' I just can't remember what it looks like.”
“Hops on two legs...”
“With long ears?”
“No, that's a rabbit, and they hop on four. Kangaroos hop on two, have pouches, seem to know kick boxing, or at least that one at the petting zoo did when I tried to feed it.”
The image plowed into John's mind like an epiphany, and it made him chuckle. “ Crap, I've been calling it a cat.” The chuckling ascended from amusement to slight hysteria that had his heart pounding and the muscles of his back quivering. “What the hell is wrong with me?” John honestly wanted to know. Amnesia, forgetting, he knew all that, knew what it meant, but he had a feeling there was a little something extra to worry about when one could not keep the names of animals straight.
“Well,” Rodney said, bringing his edaaka along-side Sheppard's and struggling to keep the beast from veering away, “drugging could have been involved. You realize – even if you don't recall – that you were tortured, right?”
John swallowed tightly and nodded. He'd seen his wounds weren't the kind inflicted by an animal.
Rodney tugged the reins sideways, bringing the cantering edaaka in closer. “If the guy who, you know, who roughed you up is the same guy who liked to shove me around, then chances are high he probably doped you up a few times. The only reason prisoners are kept is for interrogation purposes, and I worked with one of the guys who made the drugs used to loosen a few tongues. Not that they always worked, apparently, because that guy was always getting whipped. After a while...” Rodney trailed off for a moment. John glanced up to see him staring into the distant blue as he turned inward to thoughts he'd probably rather forget.
Wasn't life ironic that way?
Rodney cleared his throat and kicked his edaaka to pick up the pace. “After a while... he killed himself. Overdosed on as many drugs as he could. So who knows what they pumped into you. Beatings, knock on the head, drugs; definitely a recipe for screwing up the mind.”
John looked away back out over the sands. The twitching in his back radiated out to encompass every muscle until he was shivering, even in the heat.
Maybe forgetting wasn't such a bad thing.
“Hey, Sheppard. You all right?”
John glanced at Rodney. The man was looking worried, so John nodded stiffly. “Yeah, just... thinking.”
“Well, don't think too hard. This isn't exactly a good place to have you freaking out on me. Crap, how much farther? I'm gonna be a mummified husk before we reach those canyons. Hey, isn't it a bad sign when you haven't urinated in hours?” Rodney stood up in the stirrups for a moment, then plopped down. “I'm going to have saddle sores the size of my head by the time this is over. I did mention I burn easily, right? And don't those Indaani have some secret herbal concoction that beats the hell out of sun tan lotion? I thought primitive natives had secret recipes for everything...”
John tuned Rodney out until the other man's voice was a low drone, like a conversation in another room. His focus was on the sands, especially their rippling patterns. The canyons were not that far, Hemmin had said, and glancing up, John could see a thin line of darkness rising out of the horizon like gathering storm clouds. He returned his gaze to the sand, and caught the slight, almost imperceptible indention, like a shallow trench. He pulled hard on his edaaka's reins, forcing Rodney to stop talking and pull even harder.
“Whoa, whoa, what...!”
John held up his fist for silence.
“What?” Rodney demanded.
“Quiet!” John hissed. He listened into the silence. A weak wind rushed past his ears, tugging at the frayed end of his cloak. The edaakas' heaving breaths were like rushing bellows. He heard them shift their weight, heard the creak of leather when Rodney shifted his own weight, the musical chiming of the bridles, the slosh of water in the bladders, and the quiet thumping of his own heart.
Then he heard the hiss of sinking sand as something moved through it like an eel.
“Son of a bitch,” he breathed. “Rodney, when I tell you, you kick your edaaka into a full-on charge. Don't ask any questions, just do it, and make sure you go where I go.”
“What - ?”
“Rodney!”
“All right, bu - ”
“Now!” John screamed, and kicked his edaaka hard. The beast reared up, keening and hissing, and when it thumped back to the ground, tore off over the sands. John shot a glance over his shoulder to see Rodney racing close behind. He shot his gaze forward just as a spade-shaped white head burst from the sand, rising on a serpentine neck. The sand viper opened a fanged mouth big enough to bite John in half and lunged down. John pulled a hard right on the reins, veering just as the head shot down to get a mouth full of sand.
“What the hell!” Rodney shrieked.
“Follow my lead!” John called back. He steered his edaaka in an erratic path that would prevent the viper from getting a clean shot. He chanced a glance over his shoulder to see Rodney doing the same.
The viper was out of sight, back beneath the sands.
“Damn it!” John spat. Sand vipers were smart, and it was always a safe bet to assume there was more than one around. The creatures utilized two tactics: divide and conquer, or drive their victims like those suicidal little rodents that liked to jump off cliffs to their doom.
John reached down to the sheath attached to his saddle and whipped out the machete like-blade. A split second after, another spade-shaped head baring its fangs burst out of the sand and lunged for John. John swiped at the mouth, and the viper reared back, shrieking and howling.
Rodney's edaaka increased its speed until it was neck-to-neck with John's. The canyon wall rose up from behind the horizon, close enough to look less like clouds and more like actual rock. John looked over his shoulder to see two white, leathery bodies winding toward them, fast.
“Sheppard!”
John looked forward. A third viper struck at them. Both edaakas reacted without command and veered sharply to either side. The snake passed harmlessly between the two, then curved around to join its kin in the chase.
“We'll be safe in the canyons!” John called.
“Those snakes can move on the surface! So how the hell are we going to ditch them in the canyons?”
“We're not!” The canyon wall loomed closer, and so did the hiss of the vipers, making the hairs on the back of John's neck stand on end.
“Come on,” John begged his edaaka, squeezing its flanks with his heels. “Faster, faster...”
The canyon wall filled John's view like a dark amber obelisk. He could see the darker line splitting the rock face, creating the doorway into the canyon maze.
“John!”
John twisted his upper body while swinging out his arm, slicing at another lunging spade head. The snake reared back, but the other two continued on undeterred, now only three feet away.
Turning back, John could see the canyon entrance in all its detail, from the thin veil of sand moving along the smooth path to the multi-colored striations of the inner walls. Then they were through, pounding becoming clacking when claw met solid ground. John pulled hard on the reins. His edaaka reared, and the moment its front paws hit the floor, John jumped from the saddle, yelling for Rodney to do the same.
“But the edaakas...!” he yelled.
Both men turned to watch the edaakas stalk toward the canyon entrance with lips curled back baring very long fangs. The vipers milled and coiled just beyond the threshold, hissing and shuddering in agitation.
“What...?” Rodney said.
John held up a single finger. “Just wait.”
The edaakas lowered their bodies into a partial crouch with backs curved and webbed manes bristling. The smallest, and probably youngest, of the vipers lashed out until its head was through the entrance. John's edaaka reared its head back, then lashed out in return, only with a lot better coordination than the young snake. The edaaka caught the snake by the neck, and, with the help of the second edaaka pulled it in. The two edaakas shook, tore, and stomped the snake. The snake shrieked, coiled, bucked, then finally shuddered before falling still, allowing the edaakas to dig in, taking chunks of leathery hide and swallowing them whole.
John gestured at the beasts. “The vipers are vulnerable in narrow spaces with no sand to dive into. They know better than to come in here... Well, most of the older ones do.”
The two remaining vipers hissed and keened, then finally slunk off until they slipped back into the sand like albino whales. John smiled in relief and looked over at Rodney. McKay was looking slightly green and had his hand on his stomach.
“Oh, man, that's just... Oh, gosh...”
He ran to the side and leaned with one hand against the rockface as his body shuddered and constricted in noisy heaves. John looked on, sympathetic and disconcerted. After a few seconds of dry heaving, Rodney wiped his mouth and returned to Sheppard, only to look back at the feasting edaakas and bloody remains of viper. He promptly returned to the wall and resumed heaving.
After the edaakas had their fill of snake flesh, and Rodney a good helping of water, the two men mounted and continued on into the relative coolness and safety of the canyon corridor.
“How the hell did people even tame these monsters?” Rodney asked.
“How did we ever tame dogs?” John grinned smugly at being able to recall both animal image and name without help.
Rodney, still a little pale but no longer green, jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “Why didn't you just let the edaakas take the snakes? Why the race?”
“The edaakas needed the advantage of the canyons. Two edaakas against three snakes in open desert is a losing combination.” John patted his edaaka's neck, making the beast purr. “They may look like... uh, horses, right?”
“Yeah.”
“They may look like horses, but they're as loyal as dogs. During hunts, we never left the canyons without a few edaakas following behind. Vipers usually only travel in pairs except for the family units like what we got back there. Just having three edaakas around usually keeps them back. We always brought five to play it safe.”
Rodney rubbed the side of his tanning face. “You really learned a lot from the Indanni.”
“Their world became my world and the only world I knew. I learned fast. Kind of hard not to.”
“So how much longer before we reach the gate?”
“Three more days, give or take. A day and a half in the canyons is what Hemmin said, then we reach the pass, which involves going through some caves. After that, a day through open desert that's not bad. Hemmin told me this canyon forms kind of a wall that keeps the vipers in. Plus, our route takes us by some oases. The real danger is the town, but I don't think I need to tell you that.”
“Hell, no.”
“Once there, we need to head straight to the gate.”
“Way ahead of you there,” Rodney said, mopping his sweaty face with his sleeve. “So, we're pretty much home free in terms of danger, right? Barring possible heatstroke and rock slides.”
John twisted his mouth in sudden discomfort. “Well...”
Rodney froze in wiping his face. “Well? What well? What do you mean 'well'? No well. I hate well, and 'but,' 'although,' 'however,' 'on the other hand'.... Yes or no, Sheppard? Is there any reason we should be worried?”
“Depends,” John said. He was hesitant because Hemmin had said it wasn't a certainty, and John didn't want Rodney pining over an uncertainty.
“On what?” Rodney gritted.
Too late now.
“On the caves.”
TBC...
Ch. 5
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Date: 2008-11-06 11:04 pm (UTC)From:I love it!
Can't wait!
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