Red Country by Sylvia Kelso

merchants sealing consignments, Sathellin discussing firewood prices, townsmen, agents and a stray hunter or two wanting a start on his way into Hethria. When they dispersed, I asked to join the caravan.
    He said, “Alone?” I nodded. He gave me a flinty look. “And where would you be going?”
    I returned an equally flinty look and a reply in the true Sathel manner.
    â€œTraveling.”
    That cut his questions short. He made sure my beast and gear were fit for the trip, and charged me fifteen gold rhodellin for “conveyancing.” Next morning, after a short but acrid contest with my turban, I joined the mile-long string of pack-beasts and side-saddle riders filing through the main gate of Gebasterne, took a last look at the guards’ green Everran livery, the Gebros’ height receding into the northern distance, and turned my face to the red levels spatched with meager dull green tussocks and scrawny trees that vanished into a horizon of surging red dunes. Hethria.
    * * * * * *
    Though most of it was a howling desolation, plains of gibber stones and huge shifting sandhills that in the old days must have been perilous, it was also a country of hot color and many unfamiliar animals and plants, and unless you leave the Sathel roads there is no danger now. Every three days you are sure to find a dassyk, a staging-point, with its toll house and caravanserai and market and the ring of irrigated farms fed from immense underground cisterns, into which covered channels pour the water of Kemreswash. They made bright green islands in the desert red, shaded by subsidiary oases of life and sound in the innumerable groves of hellien trees. Not the short-lived staring white desert breed, but the lovely big river helliens whose bark echoes the subtle red shadings of Gebria, growing lovelier against their subtle gray-green foliage.
    The Sathellin were still planting them: everywhere saplings rose amid the giants of five and six generations back. A Sathel—kindly for a Sathel—informed me in their terse way, “Use ’em for the salt. Irrigation brings it. Trees suck it up.”
    The dassyx themselves were an agreeable surprise; not dirty, smelly, beggar-ridden desert fleapits rife with poverty and lassitude, but clean, vital centers built on a common plan with the efficiency of a military encampment, full of busy people doing a job with minimum fuss and maximum effect. Someone, I thought, had spent much time on them, someone with a clear sophisticated planner’s mind untrammeled by either advice or precedent.
    I am not at all sure when I saw the rocks. Traveler’s time is a river, running unsegmented between ripples of routine and the road’s endless bed. I know they came after the gorges, monstrous defiles in the glaring red and gold rocks of Hethria, and after some of the ranges, whose rust-red and indigo dulled in comparison, and which annoyed me with their impression of ancient, ancient places stubbornly intruding into the present world.
    The rocks emerged, not from a range’s chine, but as a single bulge on the northeast horizon. Gradually they increased to a hump, then a cluster of humps. Then they swelled to gigantic mushroom domes with colors that deepened from pale pink and lilac pastels to the glaring rusted-blood shades of Hethria at close quarters. They were certainly the oddest sight of the journey, and eventually I asked a Sathel about them.
    He gave me a sidelong look, said “Eskan Helken. Red Castle,” and instantly walked away.
    My heart leapt. However ignominiously, I had to admit that after all, Eskan Helken was a place, a fact. Perhaps, so soon, so simply, the dream’s promise would be fulfilled. Who knew what was up there, or what use it would be? Who cared?
    I was so elated as to forget my principles and seek hearsay about the place from other Sathellin, but none would say anything more. It drove me to vain speculation, then to vexation. Sathel