Limits by Larry Niven (tohfa e dulha read online TXT) 📗

“You sold me so cheaply? You’re a liar and your mother was insulted on a garbage heap.”

“Well. He offered six. We settled for eight.”

“Four for you, four for me, hmm?”

He looked pained. Sparthera took her five pieces of silver, winked, and departed, wondering what Sung Ko Ja had really paid. That was part of the fun of bargaining: wondering who had cheated whom.

But this time Sparthera had the pointer.

On a bald hill east of the village, Sparthera took the bronze teardrop from her sleeve, along with a needle and the cork from one of Sung Ko Ja’s bottles of wine. She pushed the base of the needle into the cork, set it down, and balanced the pointer on the needle. “Pointer! Pointer, show me the way to Gar’s treasure!” she whispered to it, and nudged it into a spin.

Three times she spun it and marked where it stopped, pointing north, and northwest, and east.

She tried holding it in her hand, turning in a circle with her eyes closed, trying to feel a tug. She tried balancing it on her own fingernail. She studied the runes, but they meant nothing to her. After two hours she was screaming curses like a Euphrates fishwife. It didn’t respond to that either.

Sitting on the bare dusty ground with her chin in her hands and the pointer lying in the dirt in front of her, Sparthera felt almost betrayed. So close! She was so close to wealth that she could almost hear the tinkle of golden coins. She needed advice, and the one person who might help her was one she had vowed never to see again.

A faint smile crossed her face as she remembered screaming at him, throwing his bags and gear out of the tiny hut they shared, swearing by the hair on her head that she’d die and rot in hell before she ever went near him again. That damned tinker! Pot-mender, amateur spell-caster, womanizer: his real magic was in his tongue. She’d left her home and family to follow him, and all of his promises had been so much air.

She’d heard that he lived up in the hills now, that he called himself Shubar Khan and practiced magic to earn a living. If he cast spells the way he mended pans, she thought sourly, he wouldn’t be of much use to her. But perhaps he’d learned something…and there wasn’t anyone else she could go to. She stood up, dusted herself off, bent to pick up the bronze teardrop.

The sky was clouding over and the scent of rain was in the air. It matched her dismal mood.

What about her vow? It had been a general oath, not bound by a particular god, but she had meant it with all her heart. Sometimes vows like that were the most dangerous, for who knew what wandering elemental might be listening? She leaned against Twilight, smoothing his tangled mane and staring out over his back at the rolling foothills and the mountains beyond. Life was too dear and Gar’s treasure too important to risk either on a broken vow. She took her knife from its sheath and started to hack at her long tawny hair.

Shubar Khan’s house, hardly more than a hut, was both small and dirty. Sparthera reined her horse to a halt before the door. She looked distastefully at a hog carcass lying in the center of a diagram scratched in the hard dry ground.

She had sworn never to speak his name, but that name was Tashubar. She called, “Shubar Khan! Come out, Shubar Khan!” She peered into the dark doorway. A faint odor of burning fat was the only sign of habitation.

“Who calls Shubar Khan?” A man appeared in the doorway and blinked out at her. Sparthera swung herself down from Twilight’s back and lifted her chin a little arrogantly, staring at him.

“Sparthera?” He rubbed the side of his face and laughed dryly. “Oh, ho. The last time we saw one another you threw things at me. I think I still have a scar somewhere. You wouldn’t care to see it, would you? Ah, well, I thought not.”

He cocked his head to one side and nodded. “You’re still beautiful. Just like you were when I found you in that haystack. Heh, heh, heh. I like you better with hair, though. What happened to it?”

“I swore an oath,” she said shortly, wondering a little at what passing time could do to a man. He had been a good thirty years old to her fourteen when they met. Now she was twenty-six, and he was potbellied and sweaty, with a red face and thinning hair and lecherous little eyes. He wore felt slippers with toes that turned up, and five layers of brightly striped woolen robes. He scratched now and then, absentmindedly.

But he still had the big, knowing hands, and strong shoulders that sloped up into his neck, and hadn’t he always scratched? And he’d never been thin, and his eyes couldn’t have shrunk. The change was in her. Suddenly she hungered to get the matter over with and leave Shubar Khan to the past, where he belonged.

“I’ve come on business. I want you to fix something for me.” She held out the piece of bronze. “It’s supposed to be a pointer, but it doesn’t work.”

A small dirty hand reached for the pointer. “I can fix that!” Sparthera spun around, reaching for her knife.

“My apprentice,” Shubar Khan explained. “How would you fix it, boy?”

“There’s a storm coming up.” The boy, hardly more than twelve, looked at his master with sparkling eyes. “I can climb a tree and tie the thing to a branch high up. When the lightning strikes—”

“You short-eared offspring of a spavined goat!” Shubar bellowed at him. “That would only make it point to the pole star—if it didn’t melt first—and if it were iron instead of bronze! Bah!”

The boy cringed back into the gloom of the hut, which was filled with dry bones, aborted sheep foetuses, and pig bladders stuffed