by M. R. Carey
Mardew brung the cutter up again, only there was nothing now to aim at. He lowered his hand back down to his side, very slowly. There was a look on his face that was kind of wildered and kind of sour, all at once.
The drone was on the ground at Ursala’s feet, bent almost in two. The rock was still in her hand.
“Put that thing back on safety, Mardew Vennastin,” she says. “Before you slice your own foot off.” She said it the same way she told me to jump in the fire, without turning her head but still knowing in some way he was there.
Mardew looked like he was going to answer her, only he couldn’t find the words. He turned on me instead, his face all alight inside with strong feeling, most of which was anger.
“Do you want to tell me why you laid hands on me, boy?” he asked me. He spit out the words like he didn’t like the taste of them. I didn’t either, come to that. Mardew was only two years older than me, and I was done with my Waiting, so that “boy” didn’t sit right at all.
He shoved me in the chest with the hand that didn’t have the cutter on it. “I’m a Rampart about his duty,” he says. “You know what happens to people who get in the way of me?”
I stammered out a sorry that I didn’t really mean, and he roared at me, “Sorry don’t help. I’m bringing it to the Count and Seal and you’ll be whipped for it. Damn fool boy!”
He was wild, all right. He would of said more, or maybe done more, but then he looked all around at the people that had come up behind him from the gather-ground. I never even seen they was there until then, and I don’t think Mardew did either. One of them was Haijon. Another was my mother, her face very pale.
“The boy was helping me,” Ursala said, all quiet-like, “to bring down this drone.”
“That’s Rampart work,” Mardew said.
“Usually it is,” Ursala agreed. “But as you can see, I had this under control.”
“My cutter would of handled it.”
“Your cutter is a formidable weapon, Rampart Knife. And at full strength, pointed straight ahead of you instead of upwards… well, I have no doubt it would have done the job. But there are houses over there.” Ursala raised up her hand to point. “And the well too, unless I’m mistaken, with a crowd of people all round it. The drone was far too low for you to hit it without hitting anything else.”
“I never harmed anyone yet,” says Mardew.
Ursala smiled without no warmth in it. “And your record stands unsullied. I think you should thank this boy for stepping in when he did.”
Mardew hesitated, looking from Ursala to all the people that was standing around. I could see there was things he wanted to say but thought better of before they was spoke. I didn’t see no thanks in his eyes when he turned his face my way again. “You watch yourself,” he says to me at the other end of a long, hard stare. “And don’t you come by me.”
“You’re very welcome,” Ursala said.
Mardew walked away without another word. My mother grabbed me then and hugged me close. I seen Haijon over her shoulder, looking at me as if he was somewhat troubled by what had passed. But he give me a nod and he locked his thumbs in our secret sign.
I nodded back.
“You’re coming home,” Jemiu said to me. “And you’re staying home. You been a big enough idiot for one day.” And she dragged me away.
The last thing I seen as I went was Ursala picking the broke drone up off the ground and carrying it into her tent.
16
When Jemiu called me an idiot, she didn’t mean no harm by it. The plain truth is that there’s people who think before they do and people who do before they think. Most times, as you probably seen, I was the former kind. This time I was not, and I got a taste of what can come from that – enough to confirm me in my regular path.
But here I was again, in the bad place I already told you of. Brooding on what I’d lost, or thought I’d lost, and wistful of things I couldn’t have. It’s a curious thing, how a blessing or a curse can come to you without you knowing it. Looking back now, I see that Ursala’s friendship has meant more to me than almost anything in my life, but still it come at a time when I was least like to profit by it.
It didn’t come right away, neither. Jemiu was as good as her word and kept me to it at the mill, brewing stop-mix, racking the steeped wood to dry, squaring planks on the lathe, cleaning the blades of the three big saws, sweeping the mill floor, and on and on. I breathed more sawdust than air, in that time.
This was not laid on me as a chastisement. Far from it. Jemiu wanted to keep me from any bad effects springing from my recklessness, and she thought hiding me out of everyone’s sight was the best way of achieving that. I knowed, though, that out of sight was not the same as out of mind. Athen and Mull went into the village most days, and they told me that what happened on the day the three drones come was still much talked of.
Then Haijon paid me a visit, and he told me the rest of it, starting with what happened on the gather-ground, where the two other drones was brung down. Rampart Arrow took one of them clean, and Rampart Fire sent up a blaze to protect against the other.
“But it was too fast,” Haijon said. “It come down low even while she was firing. Come right under the fire and was there in the midst of everyone. Fer didn’t have time to launch a second bolt, and my ma was facing the wrong way. It might of killed the both of them, except that Ursala’s drudge was sat there on the gather-ground where she left it at the end of each day’s doctoring.
“The drudge had its legs folded under and it looked like it was asleep. But it unfolded right quick. Its gun spun round and tracked the drone, and then it sent off a volley. It wasn’t like the bolt gun. It was a whole lot of shots that kind of chased each other across the sky and then went off one after another like green twigs cracking in a fire. I never seen the like of it. The drone was stuck in the middle of all that and the next thing we seen it was on the ground in a hundred pieces.”
That must of been the other sound I heard, that was like a hammer knocking a nail in.
Haijon leaned in close. “Here’s the strangeness of it though, Koli. We looked for bullets or bolts afterwards, and there wasn’t none. There was just little white chips on the ground, like broke-off bits of bone. Whatever the drudge was shooting, I don’t think I want to know about it.”
“So Ursala brung down two out of the three drones, one way and another,” I said, ignoring the fireside tale though another time I would of relished it.
“I guess she did,” Haijon says back to me. “She still went meddling in Rampart business though, and my ma only took it halfway well. The drones was took down, but not in the right way.”
“The right way?” I says. “What’s the right way, Haijon?”
“The right way is the way that don’t shake people’s faith in us. In Ramparts, I mean. Loss of faith might bring more harm than the drones in the long run. That’s what my ma says anyway.”
“More harm how?”
“Like, in how we live, and how we make our minds up about things.” Haijon shrugged, like he didn’t get it either. “She says mostly people kind of dawdle themselves to death. Something bad happens and they’re not nearly quick enough in dealing with it. Sometimes Ramparts just got to be on it fast, but sometimes what they got to do is make everyone else be faster. Tell them what to do and whip them up into doing it.
“So anything that makes people slower in doing what Ramparts tell them to do is bad, she says. Ursala done a good thing, no doubt about it. But she don’t have to live with the effect of it, and we do. She should of thought more about how it looked. Especially when she talked back to Mardew like that in front of everyone. Mardew didn’t like that at all, and neither did my ma.”
“But still,” I said, kind of looking for the common ground I thought had got to be there between us, “people is alive who would of died. Me, for instance. That drone was standing as close to me as you are now.”
“You got to think of the long run,” Haijon s
ays again.
I kept my silence after that. It seemed to me that us all still drawing breath was a bigger and more important thing than Catrin being the one to thank. But I didn’t want to have a fight with Haijon about it. I still counted him a friend, and I took it kindly that he come to see me even though Ramparts in general was hard down on me right then.
“Listen,” he said. “Spinner and me, we’re to be wed on the Salt Feast. I was thinking you’d be with me on my fasting, Koli, and carry the cutter for me at the wedding, but that’s not possible now. I hope you won’t take it bad if I choose Veso Shepherd instead.”
“I won’t take it bad,” I told him. I meant it too. Veso would be joyed by it, and it would do a lot to quiet them in the village that was down on him just for being who he was. Anyway, I wasn’t going to be at the wedding at all if there was any way out of it. That Haijon and Spinner was going to be together was something I couldn’t halt or hinder. I had got to make my peace with it. But standing right by while the two of them kissed and swapped promises felt like more than I could bear.
Haijon read my face, but he read it wrong. He thought the sadness he seen there was for me being passed over in favour of Veso, when it wasn’t Veso’s place but his own I was wishing to fill in that ceremony. He put a hand on my shoulder. “Let’s get out of here,” he said. “It’s been a while since I raced you round the walls. A married man can’t do that, but I didn’t get married yet.”
A race sounded good. I was full sick of the mill yard by this time. I hesitated a moment, thinking of what Jemiu would say when she found me gone, but then I thought of how these would likely be the last good days of Falling Time, with all the snows and sleets to come, and my mind made itself up.
“Let’s put a wager on it,” I said. “Winner gets a handful of apricots from the Underhold. Loser got to steal it.”
Haijon give out a laugh. “I’ll take that bet,” he said, “for I won’t be the one paying.”
“Might be hard for you to get in that window now in any case, Rampart Breakfast,” I said. I held up my hands to take the measure of his shoulders – then I brung them down and measured his stomach too, making it out to be wider.
“Oh, now you made this be personal,” Haijon says with a laugh. “Come on, Koli, let’s see what you got. Three goes two goes one. Run!”
I run, but I didn’t run well. You can only do that when you can stop thinking about anything except running, and I was poorly placed to do that right then. I losed the race by ten clear strides. But Haijon let me off from stealing the fruit, for this wasn’t a good time for me to be seen sneaking into the Underhold, or out of it. Catrin was not like to listen to reason in any such trespass. I was for doing it in any case, not wanting to slip sideways out of a bet, but when I walked around to the back of Rampart Hold I seen some of the upstairs windows open and my courage was bowed down a little. If someone was inside there looking out, they was bound to see me.
“We can go best out of three,” Haijon said, and we parted on that understanding.
I walked back along the line of the fence, which took me past Ursala’s tent. I didn’t see her there, but the drudge was set beside the tent with its four legs folded under it. I was not used to seeing it any place other than the gather-ground, so I slowed down to look.
A hand lifted up the tent-flap. The nails was painted bright red, so I knowed it was Ursala’s hand. Her voice sounded out of the deep dark, for so it looked to me. “Come along in, Koli Woodsmith. I’d like a word.”
17
I just stood there for a moment, wondering if I could walk on and make pretend I didn’t hear. It shames me now to remember it, but I thought of Ursala as somewhat to be feared. Nobody knowed where she lived, or how she come to know so much about so many strange things. There was stories about vengeances she took on them who tried to rob her or cheat her, and the vengeances was truly terrible. I had been mostly bent to disbelieve them, but that was before I seen her charm a drone out of the sky. Now I didn’t know what to believe.
“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” Ursala said, as if I’d been speaking all this aloud. She sounded angry, or at least rate not minded to be patient. “I won’t hurt you, boy. Come inside, and be quick about it. If one of your Ramparts sees us, they’ll think we’re plotting treason.”
I didn’t know what kind of thing treason might be, but I seen the drift of what she was saying – that Catrin was displeasured with the both of us and would not greatly favour the thought of us doing each other kindnesses. I still misgived a little, in my thoughts, but I bent my head and stepped inside the tent.
Once I was in there, I looked around in wonder. It wasn’t dark at all, but had seemed so because there was a double skin on the tent-flap. I was in a space that was brighter than the outside. It was like the tent’s walls was shining, almost, and I had to squint my eyes where I had thought I’d be hard pressed to see anything at all.
I put out my hand before I even thought about it. The tips of my fingers tingled, and somehow they didn’t quite touch the cloth, but was stopped a little way before.
Ursala seen the dazzled look on my face. “The same tech as your cutter,” she said. “It can be a wall as well as a knife. I can dial down the brightness if it bothers you.”
I mumbled something not very much to the purpose, and turned my head away. But everywhere I looked, there was strange marvels.
There was a thing like a cooking pot, only its sides was made of glass and you could see the water boiling inside – boiling fit to bust, though there was no fire under it. There was a kind of a thing like three burning sticks in a fire that was throwing heat out into the tent – only the sticks didn’t ever burn through; they just glowed bright red and stayed the same. Strangest of all, there was a picture like you might put on your wall, only it was on the floor at Ursala’s feet. And it wasn’t a picture of anything you might recognise. It was signs of the old times, black and spindly like ants, that moved around when Ursala touched them. She had sit down and was poking at the picture with both her hands. The signs run up and down the screen, but mostly up.
“I’ve just got to finish this,” she says to me without looking up. “God help me.”
I guessed that when she said god she meant Dandrake, for he was the main god everyone went to when it come to swearing. If she meant the dead god, it was strange she didn’t give him his full name.
She give a sigh as she poked at the little picture. I plucked up my courage and asked her what she was doing.
“Maths,” she said. That wasn’t a word I knowed, and I suppose she seen that in my face. “This is a computer,” she said, nodding at the little picture. “It’s for working things out when they’re too hard to work out in your head.”
She poured some wine out of a leather skin into a tin cup that seemed already mostly full. The wine spilled a little down the side of the cup. For some reason, that made me think of Ursala’s shirt, all covered in blood, on the day she took away Athen’s sickness and saved her from dying. It made me be less afraid of her.
“Would you like some?” she asked me, holding up the skin. “I don’t have another cup, but you can swig from the neck.”
“No, thank you kindly,” I said. I hadn’t ever had no head for drink, the few times I tried it. Mostly it just made me dizzy, and being in the hot tent surrounded by all these wondrous things was doing that already. “What is it you’re puzzling out?”
Ursala didn’t answer. She give the little black signs another long, hard look, then she waved her hand over the thing she called a computer and the signs was gone. There was just a pattern there now, made of bright colours shifting all the time like leaves moving in the wind.
She give me a shrewd look, like we each of us knowed the same thing and knowed that the other knowed it too. “She can’t hear us,” she said. “Your Rampart Fire, I mean. Not in here. And I’m keeping my eyes open, though it might not look it, just in case she comes by. When she’s in her current mood, it pays
to be a little paranoid. Go ahead and sit down.”
“All right then,” I said. I had not been thinking about Catrin Vennastin, but I liked that she couldn’t come by without us knowing it. I didn’t think to doubt what Ursala said about that. Not now I’d seen some of what she could do.
There was pillows to sit on, and a steel box set down between them to make a table. There was more boxes besides, all over the floor of the tent, so I had got to be careful where I put my feet. I sit where Ursala bid me.
“You’re sure you won’t help me along with the wine?” she said. “If I empty this skin myself, I’m going to be more dead than alive tomorrow.”
“You don’t got to empty it,” I says. It come out before I knowed. I was thinking of my mother, who had a store of sayings against strong drink, otherwise I would not of been so bold.
But Ursala just gave a laugh, like I had said it to be funny and she got the joke. “Oh, trust me,” she said. “I do. I’ve been sitting here crunching numbers for the last three hours, and they came out even worse than I was expecting. Drowning my sorrows feels like the least of a whole lot of evils right now.”
When Ursala was doctoring and needed to ask you questions about what you was feeling, she talked like anyone else did. The rest of the time, though, she talked like this. I can set her words down in their right sense now, on account of some things that happened to me later: back then the best I could do was to run along next to her meanings like a man who’s trying to get up onto a horse but can’t fix his foot in the stirrup.
“What was you eating again?” I asked her, picking up the part of what she said that I could understand.
She give me a blank look for a moment or two before she got what I meant. “I wasn’t eating anything. Crunching numbers means counting things up. Working out the answer to a problem.”
“I’m sorry to hear you got a problem, Dam Ursala.”