And the spy left the office, having carefully closed the door behind him.
In about five minutes, Ashinik walked into the office with a bunch of printouts.
"What's wrong with you, master? Are you crying?"
Bemish was not responding.
"Are you ok? Should I call a doctor?"
In three days, Kissur with Khanadar the Dried Date, Aldon the Lynx Cub and a couple of dogs dropped by Bemish and all five of them left for a horse ride.
The field they were riding over was already covered with concrete blocks. Tree stumps stuck out far away on a knoll like teeth leftovers in an old man's mouth and a cheerful red tractor was pulling them out of earth amidst din and screech.
The new road ended unnoticed — the riders raced down an old Empire track with yellowish stone ruts, wide palm trees and narrow pyramids of poplars planted along the road accordingly to the ancient laws… Green knolls and rice paddies covered with water flashed far away. Bemish spun his head excitedly — the beauty around seemed to be like a photo.
A squirrel sat on a poplar branch and ate a nut. Amusing himself, Khanadar the Dried Date shot at the nut and knocked it out of the squirrel's paws; it whisked up the tree in horror.
"Hunting used to be good here," Khanadar told Bemish. "And now the only big game here is your bulldozers."
"Hey," Kissur said, "Why don't we go to Black Nest? Hunting is great there."
"When?"
"Why don't we go there right now?"
"Riding?"
"That's a great idea," Kissur said. "Let's ride!"
Khanadar laughed uproariously.
And they raced. Bemish felt as good as he had never felt in his life. He wanted to cancel all the meetings in the world, he didn't give a damn about the spaceport and the investment funds — he just wanted to ride down this road where his car would get stuck and his bulldozer would just tear up.
By the evening, Kissur pointed at an altar house overgrown with burdocks and inquired,
"Will we sleep over here or in the field?"
Bemish came to his senses.
"Kissur," he said, "I have a business meeting tomorrow at eight in the morning. Will we be able to return before sunrise?"
Khanadar almost fell off the saddle laughing.
"Terence," he said, "Black Nest is Kissur's clan castle in Mountain Warnaraine. Old Elda lives there and Ashidan arrived there a week ago."
"Hold on," Bemish said. "It's fifteen hundred kilometers!"
"It's sixteen hundred thirty, if I haven't forgotten your damned units," Khanadar chortled. Bemish turned his horse back.
"I am sorry gentlemen," he spoke, "but I don't have time for a ten day ride next to good highways."
"Hey," Kissur said, "you can't go back on your word! You promised me a hunt in Black Nest!"
"I didn't promise to ride a horse there," Bemish stormed.
"One can't," Khanadar said, "reach a real castle by a car. One has to ride to the real castle for five days and five nights. And the Earthman's butt is already sore."
The comment was unfair. It was especially unfair since Bemish had been riding a horse around the construction in the morning for the last two months, having admitted the advantage a horse had over a heavy-assed jeep and a fleeting flyer. So, Bemish became quite a decent horse rider though he was not in the same league with the barbarians whose fathers had put them on horses before their mothers started teaching them to walk.
"All right," Kissur said, "You can go back but I will be waiting for you in Black Nest on the twenty third."
"What do you mean twenty third? Are you going to ride your horse to the castle in five days?"
"Seven years ago," Khanadar said, "I made this trip in five days and I had two hundred shield and spear horsemen with me and we had a skirmish every day."
"All right," Bemish said," I will take a car and drive to your Nest, whether it's black or white, and I am sure that I will get there before you."
The guests came in the next morning — the Federation envoy, Mr. Liddell, Shavash and his direct boss, the finance minister Sarjik. The finance minister was in really bad shape — his bald head shook and his watery eyes kept running. Shavash extracted this man from somewhere in Chakhar province where he had been sitting since sovereign Neevik's times. Accordingly to the non-confirmed rumors, the finance minister didn't have credit cards and, seeing other people using them, he would shake his head, "Nothing good will come out of it I assure you! Say, Shakunik Bank had also issued private money and then the bank was confiscated and the money was lost! What if the Federation government runs out of money and confiscates your bank?" The old minister firmly grasped in his youth the following rule
— the richer is an entrepreneur, the more the state covers his riches — and he couldn't change himself.
They abandoned the minister in a room and Shavash drove examining the construction.
"Where is Kissur," he asked. "And why are you so disheveled?"
"Kissur," Bemish said, "rode to Black Nest with his friends, on a horse back."
Shavash grinned.
"And what's happened to you?"
"And I rode back all night. There was not a single phone in the villages around and I was dumb enough not take a satellite phone with me."
Bemish was exhausted, since he rode slowly, afraid of tiring the horse out, and he couldn't sleep in saddle and he wasn't going to learn this skill.
"I see," Shavash said, "Khanadar the Dried Date is going to ride down the glorious battles' path. These people live in the previous century."
In the end, Bemish asked, where the story of Kissur trafficking in drugs came from, but smiling Shavash claimed his total ignorance.
Upon serious consideration, Bemish decided to drive and he was very proud that he would see the Country of Great Light not through an airplane window but through a windshield.
He chose an old 4WD jeep with large wheels and he put in the trunk the second spare tire, high hunting boots, a whole battery of drinking water bottles and several tinned food cans. He welded steel supports to the rack and fastened a light motorcycle to them. Bemish remembered how Khanadar had smiled saying that it was impossible to reach Black Nest by a car and one had to ride there on a horse. Knowing Khanadar, he suspected that he had been a butt of a dirty joke and a car road to the castle existed only on the map.
Bemish was driving out of the Empire's center to its barbarian outskirts and it seemed that every kilometer, put between him and the capital, was transposing him backwards in time. Cute manors with satellite dishes disappeared first, foreign goods on the road stands disappeared next, factory-made shirts on people around him disappeared last. A different landscape stretched around him — rice paddies covered with water, clay villages where dogs barked and drums boomed in precincts and where peasants in hemp pants sang thousand-year-old songs while collecting the harvest, and only a perfect highway, like a bridge spanning over time for a curious observer, connected a sprightly rolling jeep with the faraway world of glass and steel.
In thousand kilometers the road finally ended — the jeep started hopping down a rocky mountain path — the highest achievement of the construction methods in sovereign Irshahchan's times. The animals became more audacious and began crossing the road. Occasional people, however, dashed away from a weird cart into the woods. Rice paddies disappeared; the few villages existing in these mountains still lived by hunting and gathering and by robbing occasional travelers.