The Steel of Raithskar by Randall Garrett Read Free Book Online

both arms, burying my face in the fur on his wide forehead.
    Keeshah lifted me from the ground as he had done out in the desert. I released him and we walked without touching toward the water trough. I dipped my hand in the water and held it to his muzzle.
    While among men, a sha’um always eats or drinks first from the hand of his Rider.

5
    The caravan trail led north across the salt wastes, toward the base of the Great Wall, where Raithskar lay. The Respected Elder had offered me simple directions, as well as a pouch of dried meat and a small leather canteen of water, assuring me that it was but three days’ trip for a sha’um. I soon found that directions were unnecessary; once Keeshah knew where we were going, he knew the way. I lay my head upon the wide back and dozed as he moved with long, seemingly effortless strides across the desolate land. He did not gallop headlong, as I fuzzily remembered him doing in his urgency to bring me to the Refreshment House, but fell into an easy lope which ate up distance without tiring him. An easy, rhythmic, soothing motion—I drifted in and out of sleep as the distance passed.
    At first I had been hesitant about riding the sha’um. Especially was I hesitant about mounting him. I remembered the scorn I had felt as a kid, watching a cowboy comedy and laughing as the greenhorn tried to swing into the saddle from the horse’s right. There was no one watching, as by custom I would not ride my sha’um within the walls of the Refreshment House. But Keeshah was there, and I most certainly didn’t want to make a fool of myself in front of
him.
    There was no saddle to give me a clue. The sha’um is the only animal in Gandalara big enough for a man to ride, and the great cats would not have put up with a saddle. Even the cargo-carrying vlek, with hardly enough mind to get mad, threw a fit every time a pack-harness was tightened around its low-slung belly. It could carry only as much weight as that of a ten-year-old child, but it was untrustworthy as a child’s pet. So there was no such thing in Gandalara as a riding saddle.
    But I need not have worried. My body behaved in an almost automatic fashion. Keeshah lay upon the ground, and I sat astride his back, seating myself near the base of his spine. Then I lay forward, drew my knees up against his sides, and reached up with my hands to grasp his huge shoulders. My knees were just below his rib cage, my feet tucked up just forward of his thighs. I could direct him with slight pressure from my hands or my knees—but, as I have said, Keeshah needed no directing.
    We traveled for some hours across the desert, the only sound in that vastness the
pad-pad-pad
of Keeshah’s thickly calloused paws against the hard-baked bed beneath us. Occasionally I would hear the cry of a bird, and look up to see a flash of wings, or a distant, almost stationary soaring form. But there seemed to be nothing larger than the sand-ants alive on the desert floor except for Keeshah and me.
    I had accepted the leather canteen of water from Balgokh with formal thanks and unspoken skepticism. Keeshah would need no water in that time—he could go for several days without it. But the canteen contained, at a guess, somewhat less than a pint of water, four or five hundred milliliters. Hardly enough for a man for three days in the desert. I felt it wouldn’t be politic to ask for more; I decided I would have to make it last.
    I soon found that it would be plenty. In the first place, I didn’t feel thirsty very often—not nearly as often as I should have in this heat. In the second place …
    I was a water saver.
    We had been on the road for some hours when I noticed a pressure in my lower abdomen which indicated a need that should be taken care of. *Stop,* I directed Keeshah, and when he did, I sat up and swung my right leg over his back, sliding down to the ground. I walked a few paces from the smoothly worn area that was the road and urinated.
    I passed very little