Chap. 72 K'ndar's Find

Chap. 72  K'ndar's Find

They'd been out on the steppe for four days.

This was much further than K'ndar had ever been. The further south into the steppe they'd flown, the wilder it got. While D'mitran and D'nis took readings and set benchmarks, K'ndar could only look…and look, at the vast open wilderness rolling as far as the eye could see.

The vast herds had grazed the grass down to ankle height. In the distance, he could see herds of wild horses and cattle, and the smaller, non-native creatures called 'pronghorn', introduced by the colonists. Large flocks of wherries stalked the plains. On several occasions, they'd seen wild cats. 

K'ndar knew their names, having read about them in the Natural History of Pern book. The striped ones were tigers. The tawny ones were lions. The spotted ones called cheetahs, were incredibly fast. Only they were fast enough to catch the equally swift pronghorn. 

Overhead, huge flocks of birds circled and called.  It would be a travesty, he thought, to disturb this. Maybe the lack of water could prevent it. For they'd run out of watercourses. Hours behind them, the river they'd been following ended in a shallow, vernal lake. 

Confident now that the navigational equipment they'd brought with them wouldn't mislead them, D'nis and D'mitran had decided to continue on a due south course, venturing into the completely featureless steppe, determined to mark the unknown land. 

He walked out, leaving the others behind him. He could easily see them, and the three dragons, now all snoozing after having killed and eaten their fill. Siskin was perched atop Raventh's head, having feasted on scraps. 

 What an amazing place, he thought, enamored with the openness. I will always have the steppe in me, no matter what cliff I live in, he thought. Some folks, he knew, would be terrified of the openness, without a tree, or water, nothing to relieve the vast open but the animals…but to him, it was exhilarating. He could throw his eye as far it the edge of the world without interruption. 

As he walked, his feet kicked up insects that swirled about his head, then left him alone. Here and there, he'd find bones and skulls of the various animals that lived here. There was dung everywhere, from the cattle, the horses, the pronghorn.  The little six legged creatures they called crawlers were everywhere, sometimes sitting up to look at him in fascination. He was sure that the creatures out here had never seen a human in their lives.  He could clearly hear D'mitran and D'nis talking from at least a kilometer away. 

Ah, how he loved this. If he could, he'd change from dragon rider to Holder if it meant he could have all this, to protect, to keep whole.

His foot kicked something more solid than a weathered bone. He looked at it idly, thinking it only a skull…then looked closer. And closer. He fell to his knees and got out his knife. Before him, covered in dead grass and dirt, something…something unnatural poked out. He scraped away the dirt and grass and began to dig.

It was hard to do. The soil was hard and the thing had been there a very long time. 

Raventh, ask Siskin to bring me the little hand shovel

I will. You are far away. 

I am. It is beautiful out here. 

After a few moments, Raventh said, he's coming

Siskin appeared before him, carrying a small shovel.

"Good lad, do you want to help me dig?" he asked the blue fire lizard.

The fire lizard chirped happily. He dropped the shovel and settled onto the ground. K'ndar began to dig, gently, the fire lizard digging with more gusto.

The thing was deeper and larger than he thought. The soil was sunbaked to rocklike consistency, making him work hard to get it uncovered. When he finally had cleared enough to be able to get a handhold on it, he grasped it and pulled. Nope. It wanted more digging. 

After a good fifteen minutes of hard digging with Siskin's enthusiastic but fairly useless help, he'd uncovered it. It was about a meter long, as wide as his spread hand.

It was an artifact, from the colonists. It was the only possible explanation. It had been there a very, very long time. Weathered and discolored, still, it was solid, without any damage or, for that matter, visible means of opening it. There were discolorations on the side that may, at one time, have been writing, but it was long gone. 

He freed it from its grave and placed it gently on the ground. 

"Whoa." is the only thing he could say. Touching it was like touching the past, as if someone had buried it here, solely with the intent of K'ndar finding it. 

Raventh. Tell Corvuth and Careth I've found an artifact. Tell them to tell D'mitran and D'nis.

I am telling them now

In the far distance, the two so small he could barely see them, D'nis and D'mitran suddenly began to whoop and waved at him.

D'nis says, send Siskin back to us here, he will give the blue a flag. Put it at the spot you found the artifact and bring the artifact back.

I will. 

"Siskin, good lad! Go to Raventh. He will give you a flag. Bring the flag to me, there's a good boy."

Siskin loved retrieving. He chittered, his eyes whirling, and disappeared. Within moments, he reappeared, carrying a bright red piece of fabric on a withy reed. K'ndar wove the withy into the grass so that the red fabric could flap in the light breeze. Picking up the artifact, he was about to leave when he thought, maybe I should make a mark of my own, just in case. 

There weren't many rocks around, but he did manage to find several large enough to be able to make a cairn. Then he memorized its configuration. Behind the cairn was an especially luxuriant mound of grass, left uneaten as it grew from a large pile of cow dung. In the center was one lone yellow flower. 

"Siskin? Memorize. Memorize." he told his fire lizard.  He wanted to come back. Maybe there were more things, buried deeper, and as every spot on the steppe looked like every OTHER spot, he wanted to be sure he could find it.

Then, carefully, he picked up the artifact and began the trek back to the others. He tried to not disturb it. It felt…heavy. He could feel a weight shifting inside it. What could this featureless capsule BE? 

Despite its obvious age, it was still sturdy and unlikely to break apart. Still, he carried it as if it were an egg. And he felt awed. Somewhere, sometime in the distant past, SOMEONE had been out here, so far from the edge of civilization. Had the person…or persons? come on horseback? Dragonback? Why had they left this? What had they been doing out there?

D'nis and D'mitran both looked at it with the same sense of awe. None of them had ever found anything like it. None of them knew what it was. They touched it almost as if it were hot…or holy.

"Amazing. K'ndar, this is an incredible find. I had no expectations of finding anything, especially this far from anywhere. Well done, sir. Take me back to where you found it," D'nis said, "I want to benchmark it. Was there anything else out there?"

"Not that I could see, sir. But…I didn't look around, just began to dig it out."

"We've finished taking readings and benchmarking this spot. Let's mount up, fly out there and do some more searching."

They packed up the equipment, like they'd done all week. D'nis carefully placed the artifact in one of the equipment boxes on Careth's side. It was, at the moment, the most precious thing ever. 

Mounting up, they allowed K'ndar to lead the way on Raventh. The spot where he thought the flag would be was covered with wild horses. They had seen him working there and once he'd left, ran over to see what he'd been doing. They bolted at the sight of the dragons, never having seen them before but aware that the dragons were predators. 

One ran off carrying the withy reed, flag still attached, in its teeth.

"SHARDS!" K'ndar said, asking Raventh to land. The others landed behind his dragon.

The ground was covered with hoofprints. He had no idea where he'd dug up the artifact. 

"That little pest! He took the flag!" D'mitran called, watching the herd race away. 

Was he in the right place? K'ndar wondered, wandering about, looking for his cairn. Oh. Duh.

"Siskin. Find. Find the cairn," he said.

Siskin chirped and flew another hundred meters, then landed and chittered. 

He went to that spot. The horses had kicked over the rocks, but it was obviously the spot he'd dug it out. Yes. There was the pile of dirt he'd mounded, flattened now, but the mound of grass was still untouched. Yes. 

They spent the rest of the afternoon, searching, digging hopefully, but found nothing more.

D'nis and D'mitran took readings, writing them down in their notebooks as well as on the 'gadget', installed a benchmark disk and post, and the three built up a more solid cairn.

K'ndar wrote the data in his notebook, too. He also sketched the site, as featureless as it was, its cairn, and then memorized it all over again. "Siskin, memorize.

Raventh, you too, please

It is important, yes?

Yes. It is from the ancients. I don't know what the thing is. But when we find out, we will probably came back here. 

Good. The hunting is excellent here. My wherry was very good.

K'ndar laughed. 

D'nis brushed off his hands. "There. Good catch, K'ndar. This might be the highlight of the expedition. We've given this spot a number, a lat long, that I've 'uploaded' to the Yokohama, of course, but in this case, I think I'll give this particular spot a name: "K'ndar's Find."