Helm

by Steven Gould

  “And not a blow struck Leland?”

  “None, sir.”

  Dillan sat on a bench and pressed cold compresses against his shins. Guide Dulan stood at the study window and looked east, toward Cotswold. His voice was low but curiously tense. He swayed from foot to foot. “Can you walk?”

  Dillan looked up. “Painfully.”

  “Fetch Dexter and Anthony to the hall. I will join you there after I’ve written some messages.”

  Dillan set the compresses to the side and stood slowly. He hobbled across the room. Before he reached the door, Guide Dulan added, “And get Leland, as well.”

  Dillan froze, still facing the door, silent. After a moment he said, “Yes, sir,” and went on.

  Anthony found Leland in the kitchen, reading in the corner by the light of an oil lamp.

  “Come to the hall,” Anthony said. “At your father’s command.” My father’s command? I suppose.

  He followed Anthony to the hall with calm exterior and shaken interior. Guide Dulan hadn’t talked to him in seven months. Leland had seen him only at a distance. Leland was quiet because it was taking all he had to maintain an air of calm indifference.

  It was dark in the hall. The drapes were drawn and only the oil lamps around the high seat were lit, making a pool of light against crouching shadows. Dillan sat on the stone steps leading to the high seat. His pant legs were rolled up, showing red and blue marks on the shins. Dexter stood above him, leaning against the high table, hands resting lightly on the edge of the table. Anthony paced, his arms first locked together behind him, then crossed in front of him.

  None of them looked at Leland.

  Leland stood on the edge of the circle of light, feet spread slightly, arms hanging to his sides. He stared straight ahead, at the back of the high seat.

  Then Guide Dulan was in the room with a stirring of air and the slam of the door behind him. Leland flinched at the sound and cringed inwardly. In Guide Dulan’s hands was a bamboo cane.

  He stopped before the high table and threw the bamboo at Dexter, who caught it awkwardly, almost dropping it.

  “Dexter,” said Guide Dulan. “Try to hit Leland.”

  “What, sir?”

  “Try to hit Leland! Are you deaf, or just disobedient?”

  Dexter swallowed and hefted the cane. He slowly walked down the stairs and moved across the stones toward Leland.

  Not before them all! Leland took a half step back involuntarily. His skin, bone, and muscle screamed at him to run. Then he took a deliberate step forward, at Dexter, and stopped in the same spread-legged stance.

  Dexter swung then, feinting from on high, then slashing from the side at rib height. The open end of the bamboo screamed in the air of the hall, a shrill whistle. Leland pulled his hip, twisting, and the tip of the bamboo passed a finger’s breadth from his arm, still hanging limply at his side. Dexter skipped forward, bringing the bamboo around and down at Leland’s shoulder. Leland simply leaned aside and the bamboo passed even closer to his arm, but still not touching him. He stepped forward then, past Dexter and behind him, pivoted and stood still.

  Dexter grinned tightly and swung around, the bamboo at shoulder height. Leland dropped to one knee, his hand lightly touching the floor before him. The bamboo passed harmlessly overhead.

  “Enough,” said Guide Dulan.

  Leland slowly stood up and turned to face Guide Dulan.

  “Give me the cane, Dexter.”

  Dexter took several quick steps forward and handed the bamboo to his father, glad to get rid of it, apparently.

  Guide Dulan eyed Leland, slowly slapping the bamboo into his right hand. Then he walked forward. Bap, bap, bap—the bamboo slapping into Guide Dulan’s palm was the only noise in the hall. He made one slow circuit around Leland—very slow.

  Leland stared straight ahead, his face impassive, still as stone. In truth, petrified—fearing not pain or injury but hurt dealt out from this man—by this man himself. Leland concentrated as hard as he could on the back of the high seat—at the Seal of de Laal worked into the back with multihued pieces of carved wood.

  The crest was an open book with a candle flame above it. Below it were the words LITTER SCRIPTA MANET.

  Guide Dulan came back around in front of Leland. Slowly, deliberately, he raised the bamboo over his head, poised. His eyes searched Leland’s face, probed into his eyes. Leland stared at the seal over his father’s shoulder, stone faced, like a graven image—frozen without because he was petrified within.

  The cane whipped down, almost too fast to see. Leland closed his eyes. Then jerked them open again, furious with himself. The cane had stopped before it touched his head.

  Leland stared at the seal.

  Guide Dulan slowly lowered the raised cane—his eyes still searching Leland’s face. He shifted his grip on the bamboo until he held it with one hand in the center of the cane. Holding it out at arm’s length, he dropped it at Leland’s feet where it clattered on the stones, a harsh, hard sound in the silence of the hall.

  Leland continued to stare at the seal.

  Guide Dulan walked briskly back to the high table and turned. “Dillan, Dexter, and Anthony. Leave us.”

  Dillan stood slowly and started to walk toward the door. As he passed in front of his father, he stopped and stared at him for a moment. Guide Dulan stared past him, into the dark end of the room. Dillan walked on, shaking his head. Dexter and Anthony followed.

  After the door had shut again, Guide Dulan spoke to Leland for the first time in over seven months.

  “Sit if you want.”

  Leland said nothing, made no move. “All right then—sit, I command it!”

  Instead of moving toward the chairs of the lower tables, Leland sat cross-legged on the floor where he stood, arms resting on his knees and his back stiff as a board.

  “I wonder why you didn’t dodge my blow,” Guide Dulan asked. Leland licked his lips but said nothing.

  “Well?” Guide Dulan looked at Leland expectantly.

  Leland shifted his head for a moment, looking in Guide Dulan’s direction but not lifting his eyes above knee level. “You didn’t ask me a question,” he whispered. In the silent hall it was loud enough to be heard.

  Guide Dulan winced then and turned his face back toward the shadows. “Why did you dodge Dexter’s blows?”

  “I did not wish to be hit.”

  “And why did you not dodge mine?”

  Leland was quiet for a moment. A tear formed at one eye and slid down his cheek, making him furious at his weakness. In the darkness of the hall, Guide Dulan did not see it. “You are my father and my steward. If it is your will to strike me, then I will not stop you.” And if it is your will to strike me, what is the pain of flesh? The damage is done by the willing.

  Guide Dulan stood in front of Leland for an instant. “What did the Guide Marilyn say to you at the banquet that caused you to insult her?”

  Leland blinked at the sudden change of subject and winced slightly at the remembered pain. “She told me why I was at the banquet. That you allowed me to attend as a favor to her.”

  “And what did you say in response?”

  “I asked her to mind her own affairs.”

  Guide Dulan grunted. “I see.”

  You do? wondered Leland. I sure don’t.

  “I’m sending a heliogram to Denesse Sensei at Red Rock Station. He’ll expect you the day after tomorrow. Stay there until I call for you. Obey him as you would me,” Guide Dulan directed.

  He stepped forward and took the stick of bamboo off the floor, then leaned it in the nook behind his chair. While his back was still turned, he said, “There will be no more beatings.” Almost as an afterthought he looked at Leland and added, “Any questions?”

  Why? Why? WHY? Leland screamed inside his head.

  “No questions,” he said.

  Guide Dulan turned and walked to the door. When he’d opened it, the light from the passageway without silhouetted him as he paused and
half turned, as if to say something.

  But, with a shake of his head, he went on, slamming the door behind him.

  Chapter 4

  KIHON: FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLES

  Leland left Laal Station at dawn leading a string of six pack llamas—three bays, two gray roans, and a dilute agouti. They were all geldings except the lead, the agouti whose name was Bonkers.

  “Long as you’re going,” Bartholomew told him, “you might as well take this month’s supplies. The string belongs to Red Rock, but Louis, the boy who brought them in, broke his leg and won’t be traveling for a while.”

  “He break it on the trail?” Leland asked.

  “Dancing at a wedding.”

  Louis, bedridden in the men’s guest dormitory in Brandon-on-the-Falls, was skeptical. “You handle llamas before?”

  “Yes. Cart work and packing. For a while this summer I packed the supplies to the heliograph stations.”

  “Well, Bonkers—he’s the agouti, the one with the black head and reddish body, he’s dominant and he prefers to be up front. He likes to be scratched, but the others weren’t handled that much as crias so they’re not into touch. You can handle them all right—they just don’t like to be petted. Melvin, the roan with the torn ear, is the most nervous, but if you put him behind his buddy Pumpernickel, he does fine. Pumpernickel is the fresh-shorn bay. He’s got more undercoat than most pack llamas but he’s really strong. I put the water bags on him.”

  Leland didn’t take a horse—the low road suitable for horses required going the long way around, a week-long trip, and the pace of horses was different from llamas.

  The first three hours he and the string climbed steadily, moving up the valley, passing planted fields, groves, pastures, and greenhouses. He kept crossing the Tiber, the valley’s small river, and the many mountain-born streams that fed it, on stone and wooden covered bridges. Then, as he got higher and the broad fields of the valley floor were replaced with wall-lined terraces, the bridges gave way to stepping-stones or felled trees paralleling rocky fords that the llamas splashed through. The terraces were replaced by forest interspersed with pastures, and the road, narrowing yet again, gave way to a broad rocky path.

  The few people who saw him raised hands in greeting or touched their heads in deference if they recognized him, but went about their business—driving sheep, pulling weeds, fishing, or just passing on the road.

  Once he pulled the string off to the side when a cart of soybeans pulled by a three-llama team went by. He’d checked that all the pack string had their fighting teeth filed down but still didn’t want any trouble—the packs could get dumped.

  By noon he cleared the timberline and the path narrowed, a thin trail worn down through the grasses, edelweiss, rock flora, sedges, rowan, creeping pine, and dwarf shrubs that covered the gentler slopes. In the distance he could see occasional clusters of sheep or long-haired angora goats, driven up for the summer grazing by shepherds and dog teams, but no one passed him on the trail.

  Just before the Khyber Pass, he made the string lie down. “Kush, kush. Kush, kush.” Then he sat on the lead rope while he ate his lunch on a rocky shoulder that overlooked the entire Tiber valley. He could see the great stone station and Brandon-on-the-Falls, the Needle, multicolored fields, groves, the flashing reflections from greenhouse roofs, the thin gravel lines of road, and the meandering liquid silver of streams. Then the forested slopes above leading to the high meadows, and then the alpine tundra, and, finally, bare and lichen-splotched rock marred only by the stone towers of the heliograph stations on the ridgelines.

  Much of Laal was like this—a series of fertile valleys, like fingers spread between crags of barren, volcanic rock, a happy accident, where alpine freezing and thawing had collected pockets of rubble, dust, and volcanic ash, and the right mixture of summer temperatures, spring rains, snow melt, and dry autumns had proved receptive to the Great Seeding. Only the Plain of the Founders, the richest delta of farmland on Agatsu, and areas of the great Noram plain rivaled the Tiber valley’s fecundity.

  He turned his back on it and climbed the last hundred meters to the pass. Here was a completely different world.

  Only yellow and green lichen, the occasional clump of scrawny grass, and a surprising cluster of rhododendron were in the pass itself. He kept an eye on the llamas as he led them past. Rhododendron is poisonous and llamas hungry for leafy browse have been known to eat it. Between lead ropes and llamas, the entire string stretched back almost twenty-five meters, so he had to crane his neck, but none of the animals so much as glanced at it.

  Beyond the pass was much the same, though the grasses were more common.

  This side of the mountain was in the rain shadow and received far less snow and rain. Which is not to say life stopped outside of the main valley. Here was low brush, even a bristlecone pine. Here were isolated clumps of Indian rice grass. Here a gnarled, stunted cedar. Above floated red-tailed hawks, so there must have been smaller animals, prey that lived in this drier place.

  His path took him along ridges, through long dry washes, and then finally, as the sun was setting, north again, climbing a series of tight switchbacks toward another high pass. As he walked, he collected dry llama dung from previous trips, putting it in a bag on Bonkers’s pack.

  Several times he had to break up the string and lead them over and around obstacles one animal at a time. He thought about horses on the same ground and shuddered.

  He stopped as the sun dropped below the horizon and the wind picked up, making camp in the shelter of an overhang.

  He unloaded the llamas, switched their lead ropes from halter to collar, and staked them out—close enough to socialize, but far enough apart to avoid territorial disputes. He fed them a mixture of parched corn, cottonseed meal, and alfalfa pellets from their packs. They watched everything he did and hummed at each other, making him feel as if his every move were being discussed. Before and after eating, he let them drink from a collapsible bucket.

  The temperature dropped quickly with the sun, and he sat before a small fire of dried llama dung, sheltered from the wind, his bedroll draped across his shoulders.

  The ring was bright tonight, casting shadows among the rocks, and for a while Leland stared at it. Some said the ring was the work of the original probe, remnants of ice moved from the system’s outer planets and used to increase the water on Agatsu. Others said it was made of seeds, pods of frozen life, waiting eventual orbital decay to rain down on soil made ready by the passage of time. Leland’s reading suggested the rings were the product of planetary formation, a moon that either never formed or was pulverized by some ancient collision.

  He lowered his gaze to the southern landscape, where he could just see the faintest glimmer in the distance, kilometers to the south, where the Rubicon River separated Cotswold from Laal. He thought of Marilyn then and frowned.

  Why did I do that? Why did I attack her for being kind to me?

  He had no more answer for that than he did for his father’s behavior.

  He used a small amount of his water for evening rituals and, after burying the remnants of his fire, stretched his bedroll over the warm earth and slept, sung to his rest by the wind in the rocks and the muttering of llamas.

  He was up in the predawn glow, stamping his feet and swinging his arms to warm himself. The wind was lighter, but his breath formed clouds in the cold air and when he took his first drink, ice clinked in his canteen. He loaded the llamas quickly as he could, taking care that the packs were balanced, then moved up the pass, chewing trail bread as he walked.

  The sun cleared the walls of the pass as he crossed the high point of the saddle, almost four kilometers above sea level, and the air warmed substantially, letting him remove his sheepskin vest. On the north side of rocks little pockets of snow and ice lingered. Even lichen was scarce here, and he had trouble catching his breath. Then he felt the slope change and knew he was headed down again.

  Almost immediately there was an inc
rease in vegetation. This was the wet side of the range and, like the Tiber valley, it received ample rain. When he dropped below twenty-five hundred meters, he encountered alpine tundra-grasses, flowers, and sedges—just like the heights above Laal Station. Below, though, there wasn’t the same rich forest.

  Here soil hadn’t collected and formed as it had in the Tiber valley system. Below was a landscape more typical of the planet. Topsoil was patchy and thin, slowly building, but also subject to erosion. Foliage was sparse, shallow rooted, and prey to variations in rain patterns since the soil held very little water.

  This was why humanity was both a scattered and concentrated affair on Agatsu.

  Laal’s villages and communities were concentrated first in the Tiber valley system, then spotted in smaller islands of fecundity—pockets and basins and canyons where topsoil accumulated and thrived.

  But between these pockets were the barrens—rocky desolate, sometimes arid, sometimes wet stretches of landscape hosting only lichens, scattered grasses, and negligible topsoil.

  There was a stream now, or, more accurately, a rivulet, running between meter-wide pools. Here life was a little more concentrated. Algae on the rocks, caddis larvae, diving beetles, some simple aquatic plants, and a few rushes. The path followed the water’s twisting plunge into a canyon, and Leland paused to let the llamas drink, wetting his bandanna in the waters and wiping his exposed skin before moving on.

  By midmorning he reached the turnoff—a place where his trail met a small road coming up the canyon from the flatlands below. The road turned and entered a side canyon with high, reddish walls.

  Leland looked down the road. It was the longer way to Laal Station, leading to a lower pass and a longer road that looped up into Noram proper before cutting back to the Winter Pass into the Tiber valley. But Bonkers, the lead llama, didn’t hesitate, edging past Leland and trying to turn up the canyon. When his lead rope pulled up short, Bonkers clucked and looked back at Leland, as if to say “Well?”

  Leland laughed and walked up the road, side by side with the llama.