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I'd almost swear it was for bullets."
Mavra chuckled. "Not bullets. Small compressed-gas canisters. When you pull
the trigger, it works in the normal way, but if you have one of these little
things in there, it gives a tremendous extra shove to the bolt, and a bit of a
twist, at virtually no cost in weight or balance. Use it nor-mally for
defense; use the canister if you want to be sure you kill whatever you're
firing at. It'll drill a hole through a tree thicker than your middle."
"Not very sporting."
"No, but it's damned effective even against somebody who thinks crossbows are
no real threat."
Tony looked down at her. "I see that you are inserting one, but I have none."
"Double insurance. You make the first shot. If need be, I'll make the last
one."
"Fair enough," the centauress agreed. "Still, it is almost disappointing
somehow that even the crossbow should be turned into something so
devastating."
Anne Marie nodded. "Doesn't seem sporting somehow," she agreed.
"When it's a sport, you're playing a game," Mavra re-sponded. "On this sort of
expedition I don't play games." She turned to Lori. "Can you scan that grove
in the infra-red?"
He nodded. "I've been doing it. Lots of little stuff, noth-ing major. It looks
normal to me. I smell water, though. Possibly a big watering hole. If it is,
that means we can ex-pect most anything and everything around it."
Mavra nodded back. "I know. I haven't lost three hun-dred years of knowledge
and experience in wild terrains," she reminded him.
"Yeah." The fact was, however, that the woman beside him was so different in
so many ways from even the image of the savage jungle goddess of the Amazon
that he had to remind himself that it was the same person. The conversa-tion
and the sophistication were large differences, of course, but it was also
other factors not so easily nailed down. She had been so dominating, so
commanding back on Earth, she'd seemed far larger than her size; now she was
such a very tiny creature, he had to crane his neck just to see her. Even her
form no longer seemed normal and familiar some-how but rather, well, alien.
More alien than the Dillians, whose equine parts were more like the Erdomese
and whose rears seemed, well, sexy.
Sexier than their torsos, in fact.
He began to wonder if what had changed in Julian was changing in him, too.
Wouldn't that please the priests! But he had no desire to forget his former
life and hoped that he could remember some of the lessons from it, as distant
as they now seemed to him. Still, it was
Julian who looked normal and pretty and sexy to him, as did his own
reflection. Maybe it was crazy, but he realized that somehow, at some point,
his own definition of "human" had flipped. He and Julian were "human"; the
twins were, well, not human but kind of distant relatives. Mavra was not
human. She was something else.
The grove was large and not at all like an Erdomese oa-sis, no matter what its
geologic and ecological similarities. The foliage was far denser than it had
looked from afar and heavy with life. There were hordes of brightly colored
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and cleverly camouflaged insects and insectlike creatures here, more, it
seemed, than in the Itun jungle. Small animals were in the trees as well, some
screeching or chattering at them and others
just staring, often with huge eyes. There were things like birds, too, in that
they had wings and flew, but they were more reptilian than avian, with often
brightly colored but leathery skin and beaklike snouts. Even the small, pretty
ones looked mean.
The group intersected a wide, well-worn trail that came in from the south, one
that was adequate not just for the creatures they'd seen on the plains but for
the two Dillians to walk side by side if they wanted to.
"Someone cut this wider," Tony noted, pointing a long finger at a lopped-off
tree branch and to other obviously cut limbs and bushes elsewhere.
"Yeah, but why this wide?" Lori wondered. "I've got too many weird scents here
to decide what might be odd, but I've sure not seen anything this big so far."
"Well, whatever it is, it's very large indeed," Anne Marie noted, gesturing
toward the ground. "Those are not the droppings of a chipmunk, dog, horse, or
anything else so tiny."
"Holy shit!" Mavra exclaimed, not realizing she'd made something of a joke. "I
haven't seen turds that size since . . ."
Since where?
Lori stared at the droppings. "Since perhaps some sort of zoo or preserve? Or
maybe a circus? Those look like ele-phant turds to me."
Mavra nodded. "That's it! But not a zoo or preserve or a circus, no. I saw
them with soldiers on top of them in both military parades and in fierce
battles."
"They're not that fresh thank goodness," Anne Marie commented.
"And the cuttings aren't recent. Maybe a week or so old, maybe more," Tony
added.
Lori looked over and down at Mavra. "Could the locals here be elephantlike? I
mean, like Dillians are horselike and so on?"
"There are a couple that I know of who might qualify in that area," Mavra
replied, "but none who'd mess up their own trail like that. You have to
remember that we're talking intelligent races here. Out in the wild, thinking
beings crap off their roads, not all over them. On the other hand,
intel-ligent races ride elephants and use them as work animals as well. And if
you ride in on something like that, there's nothing in this grove that's gonna
argue with you, is there?"
"
We're not atop elephants," Tony reminded them. "And there is the watering
hole. The watering hole and something very much more."
It was indeed. The "hole" was a large pool or basin per-haps fifty meters
across. It seemed natural, and the contin-uous rippling on the surface
suggested that it was fed by an underground stream. Someone, however, had
taken the nat-ural pool and carved and shaped it until it was an egg-shaped
oval with a two-meter-thick lip of mortared stones around it on all but its
back side. That ended in a curved wall, with stairs of stone that went up on
both sides to a flat stone platform above the pool. In back of it was a
cone-shaped structure that seemed twisted, creating a spiral to its point.
The building, stairs, wall, and pool itself were partly overgrown with vines
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