Helm

by Steven Gould

  Red Rock Station was an oasis of biota, one of the areas of fecundity that had “taken” during the seeding, but was too small and geographically isolated to settle until recently. A low volcanic caldera, opening deep on the side of a line of shield cones, formed a natural dam. Over the years, this lake collected particulate stone fractured by temperature variation and, after the seeding, organic materials.

  When Leland led the pack string up a rise in the road that turned out to be the rim of the original caldera, he could see that the lake was still there but was now a tenth of its original size, reduced by silting. A small settlement, fields, groves, and a scattering of woods now lined the lake on fertile former lakebed.

  Several small valleys and canyons opened into the area, and Leland could see the beginning of wooded slopes. He continued along the road, trying to keep up with Bonkers, whose pace was now accelerating. Just before the settlement—it would be excessive to call it a village as there were less than ten buildings—the road entered the shade of a tightly spaced grove of peach trees. When he walked out of the trees, the sun had touched the canyon rim and the reddish rock of the surrounding hillsides turned shades deeper—truly red.

  Ahead, a figure stepped into the road from the porch of a large, low rammed-earth building. “You made good time. We were a little worried that you wouldn’t be in until tomorrow.”

  Leland shaded his eyes with his hands and said, “Louis broke his leg.”

  The woman was in her late thirties, a little taller than Leland, with short, dark hair and a sun-weathered face. She nodded. “Yes.” She gestured a small wooden tower beside the building. “We got it on the heliograph.”

  “Then you know that I’m Leland.”

  “Yes, Warden. I’m Charly.” They shook hands. “Come on—we just have time to unload the string before supper.”

  They put the pack frames on the porch of the building, then turned the llamas out into a large fenced pasture at the other end of the settlement. Bonkers, the first one released, went bounding off to where a taller fence separated the pasture from a cluster of female llamas.

  The geldings followed, making their short musical humming sounds deep in their throats.

  Leland and Charly put the lead ropes, collars, and halters in a nearby shed, and, as Charly turned away, Leland asked, “Who will feed them?”

  Charly shrugged. “Good question—it’s Louis’s job normally. His little brother’s been doing it while Louis was gone. Maybe he’ll continue.”

  Dinner was held in the “hall,” the large building where they’d unloaded the packs.

  It was communal dining room, library, meeting hall, and school. There were thirty or so adults in the room seated at long tables with benches or standing. Several children played around the edges. The drone of conversation dipped as they entered and Charly said loudly into the gap, “This is Leland de Laal, Warden of the Needle. He brought Louis’s pack string. I’ll let you introduce yourselves to him at your leisure.”

  Leland raised a hand and nodded, then said, “Just Leland, really,” but the resuming conversation covered his voice.

  At one end of room a shutter opened revealing a large kitchen. The man who’d thrown the shutter open said, “It’s food!”

  There was a general movement toward that side of the room and a line formed, people picking up utensils and wide shallow bowls from a shelf, but the person at the head of the line stopped short of the window and they all looked at Leland.

  He blinked. “Oh. Thanks, but after you, please.” He walked over and joined the line at its end. The man at the front of the line inclined his head then stepped up to the window. The line moved on.

  Supper was brown rice, stir-fried vegetables with or without duck, and a salad of mixed greens. The drink was chilled mint tea, and Leland drank several glasses.

  “That was well done,” Charly said.

  Leland blinked. “Well, surely you’ve seen other people drink tea before.”

  She smiled and the lines around her eyes deepened. “There are many who came here to get away from the guardianship. The fact that you arrived by foot and you didn’t claim any special privilege set well with them.”

  Leland shrugged. “A bit ironic.”

  “What?” she said.

  “Where do they think the guardianship came from? It was people who pushed out from the established settlements and founded new Stations—just like this one. Of course, they’ve become something else now, I guess. In Noram and Cotswold, it’s much more formalized. Ritualized, I guess.”

  “Especially in Noram,” she said.

  “Is that where you’re from?”

  She nodded.

  He poured himself more tea from an earthenware pitcher on the table. “Why did you come here?”

  “To study.”

  Leland looked around at the bookshelves. “We have a much bigger library in Laal. And there’s the Great Library in Noram City.”

  “What I study doesn’t come from books.”

  “Aikido,” Leland said.

  “Yes.”

  Leland looked around. “Which one of these people is Denesse Sensei?”

  “Sensei occasionally eats here but usually he eats with the uchideshi up at the dojo.”

  INSIDE STUDENTS, Leland translated to himself, then froze, staring at the table. He’d never heard the word before in his life. Aikido was one of several martial arts practiced on Agatsu, but he’d never studied it—never really known someone who had. Why did he know what uchideshi meant?

  “Are you okay?” Charly asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Leland.

  “It’s a long walk from the Tiber Valley. Maybe a bath before bed?”

  “I was supposed to see Denesse Sensei.”

  Charly shook her head. “He knows you’re here. I’m to take you to him at breakfast.”

  “A bath, then.”

  She showed him where the public bathhouse was and, when he was clean and steaming in a fresh set of clothes, walked him up the road by ringlight to a small house set in a grove.

  “This is my place. The spare bedroom is yours while you’re here. Please leave your shoes by the door.” A bench seat by the front door held a shelf beneath, half filled with shoes, boots, and sandals.

  She lit an oil lamp and Leland looked around.

  Inside the place was even smaller as the walls were almost half a meter thick.

  “How cold does it get here in the winter?” he asked.

  “Quite cold. We’re at thirty-two hundred meters.”

  There were only four rooms—the front living room, the two bedrooms, and a small bathroom with a wash basin and a composting toilet. A tiny iron stove sat between the two bedroom doors. The floor was mortared flagstone strewn with sheep and llama wool rugs. A small loom and a spinning wheel sat before one of the room’s three windows. A shelf in the corner held baskets of uncombed wool, large spools of dyed and undyed yarn, and other oddments of weaving and spinning.

  Leland set his bag down and took off his shoes.

  Charly kicked her sandals onto the shelf and entered one of the bedrooms with the lamp. She used it to light another lamp within. “This is your room.” She brought the first lamp out and placed it on a table near the loom.

  “Sensei eats breakfast when sunlight first hits the peaks. We’ll have to wake in time to dress and walk up the hill, so I’d get some sleep.”

  Leland bobbed his head in a half bow and carried his bag into the bedroom. The room was a bit like a cell, a straw tatami mat along one side with a thin hemp mattress on that, then a quilt and a pillow. There was a nook in the wall near the head of the bed for the oil lamp and more empty shelves on the wall above the bed. There was a wool hanging on a dowel across the doorway for privacy.

  Leland stacked his few things neatly on the shelves, then did evening rituals in the bathroom.

  Charly was weaving, throwing the shuttle back and forth with a practiced, casual motion as she raised and lowered the she
dding bars, pausing every six or so rows to slip a slim rectangular wooden bar in and beat the threads tight.

  “Good night, Charly,” Leland said, pausing awkwardly in the door to his room.

  “Sweet dreams,” she said without pausing. “I’ll wake you before dawn.”

  He pulled the drape across the door, blew out the lamp, and fell asleep to the soft clacking of the loom.

  Leland followed the dim figure of Charly and her shoulder bag up the path. He could see stars and only a dim glow in the eastern edge of the sky told him it wasn’t the middle of the night. After ten minutes he kept expecting them to come to Denesse Sensei’s house, but they kept walking, working up progressively steeper switchbacks. Leland thought about asking how much farther but decided it didn’t matter—they’d get there when they got there.

  Finally, about thirty minutes after they’d started, Leland smelled smoke and they rounded a shoulder of the hill and the path opened onto a mostly flat nook, an inset gully some hundred meters deep, facing south. There were three buildings adjoining a large paved square. The largest building was wide and long with several doors facing the pavement. Across from it was a narrow greenhouse, almost as long as the square, but not as wide as the larger building. The smallest building, at the far end of the court, looked much like Charly’s house with the addition of an ornamental garden in the Japanese style beside it.

  A cloud of steam rose from the back of the greenhouse, curled around the edges, and drifted away in the light breeze.

  “What’s that?” Leland asked, pointing.

  “Geothermal hot spring. It’s why the dojo is here.”

  As they walked across the square Leland heard laughter, conversation, the sounds of cooking and washing from the far end of the larger building. The sky was positively gray now, and he could see that most of the remaining area of the nook was terraced gardens. And he saw that there was someone standing in the ornamental garden besides the small house at the end of the square.

  The figure, a man wearing a long kimono and a thick woven wool overjacket, was trimming a small bush with a pair of iron shears and dropping the leaves into a basket at his feet. He glanced their way at the sound of their footsteps, then dropped the shears into the basket and turned fully to face them.

  Charly stopped at the edge of the garden and bowed deeply. “Good morning, Sensei. I’ve brought Guide Leland.”

  Leland stopped beside her and bowed.

  Denesse nodded his head. “Thank you, Charly.”

  Charly bowed again and left abruptly, going across the square to a door in the larger building. Leland looked after her, surprised, then back at Denesse.

  Denesse smiled and gestured. “Come into my garden.”

  Said the spider… Leland stepped off the paved square and followed the man back to where two tatami mats sat on raised area of tiled paving stones. A low table sat in the middle. To one side was a small charcoal brazier with an iron kettle upon it.

  Denesse slipped off his wooden sandals at the tatami’s edge and kneeled by the brazier, one tabi-covered foot folded across the other at the instep. He pointed to the other side of the table. Leland sat on the edge of the platform and removed his boots, then sat on his knees opposite the man in the kimono.

  There were households that lived like this, he knew. He’d visited a few as a child, but there was something happening here—something totally familiar about the way he folded his stockinged feet right over left, dropped his hands to rest on his thighs, and arched his back ever so slightly, causing him to sit upright without tension.

  Was it Denesse Sensei? He looked at his face as the man poured boiling water into a partially glazed teapot at the end of the table. The face was unfamiliar, not resonating like some of the other new things. He was not as old as his father, but older than Leland’s eldest brother Dillan, perhaps in his mid-forties. His hair was dark brown with the faintest graying near the ears, and Leland saw a pronounced bald spot at the crown of his head when he bent over to pour the water.

  “We’ll let that steep,” Denesse said, looking up. “How was your trip?”

  Leland licked his lips. “I enjoyed it. The barrens are such a contrast after the Tiber Valley.”

  Denesse shifted sideways, so he could look up at the peaks above, a series of black and red cliffs formed by the collapse an underground lava chamber. Leland followed his gaze in time to see the sunlight hit the tallest point.

  Denesse was silent for a few minutes, watching the line of light crawl down the face of the cliff. The basin grew lighter and birds and insects began to sing.

  Denesse finally turned back to Leland. “I was surprised when I received your father’s heliogram. I’ve been expecting your brother Dillan for the last few years.”

  Leland didn’t know what to say. “Perhaps I shouldn’t have come. Should I go back?” Is this another thing I screwed up?

  “Do you want to?”

  “My father sent me here but he also told me to obey you as I would him. If you send me back, I will go. But, no, I don’t particularly want to return.” Leland began to shiver slightly as the heat of exertion from the climb began to wear off. He wished he’d brought his vest. His legs, below the knees, were also going to sleep.

  Denesse clapped his hands suddenly, causing Leland to blink.

  Footsteps clattered across the court pavement and Leland turned his head to see two young men round the comer of the house and enter the garden carrying a tray apiece. They were wearing off-white cotton gi and voluminous, dark-blue divided skirts, like enormous culottes.

  HAKAMA, supplied that dark part of Leland’s mind-the part he associated with the Glass Helm’s legacy. KEIKO-PRACTICE-GI. He froze for a moment, reeling.

  They kneeled at the edge of the tatami, set the trays before them, and bowed. Then they lifted the trays to the edge of the table.

  Denesse nodded to them. “Thank you. Go on now. You don’t want to be late for class.”

  The two bowed again and left.

  The trays contained a bowl of wheat, rice, and oat porridge with nuts and dried pears, a chunk of bread, a thick dollop of honey, and a slice of goat cheese. A covered pot on each tray held a steaming hot washcloth, which both Leland and Denesse used to clean their hands.

  Denesse picked up the teapot. “The tea should be ready now. I wonder if you are.”

  “Sensei? Ready for what?”

  “When did you put on the Helm?”

  Does everybody in the world know about the Helm? “Last fall—Harvest festival.”

  “Well, we’ll just have to see if it has steeped long enough.” He poured tea into the cups.

  Slamming sounds, echoing in an enclosed space, came to them across the courtyard, as if several rugs were being beaten, but Leland recognized it as ukemi practice—the sound of palms and forearms slamming into the practice surface during forward and backward falls. Why do I know what it is?

  Denesse set a steaming teacup before Leland. “Are you sure you want to stay?”

  “It’s my father’s wish.” He said it softly. “Therefore, I stay.”

  “Well, it’s a reason to come here. Let’s hope you can find a reason of your own to stay.” He lifted his cup in a toast. “Good keiko to you.”

  Leland lifted his cup. “MASAKATSU.” A certain detachment was coming over him—almost as if he wasn’t in charge of his own body anymore. Masakatsu meant “true victory” and, at least in the practice of aikido, referred to a victory over oneself—over one’s defects and imperfections. Leland hadn’t known the word a few minutes before but he was beyond surprise now.

  Denesse’s eyes widened slightly. Then he drank from his cup and said, “I think the tea is ready.”

  Chapter 5

  UKEMI: LITERALLY RECEIVING [WITH/THROUGH] THE BODY

  After breakfast, Denesse led him back across the square, to the large building—the dojo, he now realized—into the door that Charly had entered. A hallway stretched back past the initial alcove, a place to re
move shoes with shelves to store them. Denesse slipped off his sandals and waited for Leland to slip out of his boots.

  Small, rough-glazed skylights dimly lit the interior.

  As they walked back, Denesse pointed to doors leading to the smaller end of the building. “That’s the kitchen and dining room.” They reached the end of the hall, and it branched left and right. “Here are the changing rooms,” he said, indicating two doors in front of them. “The uchideshi rooms are that way”—he pointed down the long arm of the hall—“and the entrance to the mat. Here we have the baths, and that door on the end is the toilet.”

  He pushed a curtain aside to reveal some shelves set into the hall wall. Bundles of clothing sat in neat rows, marked by size. Denesse selected one and held it out to Leland. “The men’s changing room is on the left. There are shelves for your clothes.”

  Leland bowed and retreated to the changing room, a narrow room with pegs and shelves for clothing. He stared at the bundle, then untied it—a white cotton belt wrapped three times around a rolled gi and knotted. He undressed, pulled on the pants and tied the drawstring tight around his hips, put the jacket on, then looped the belt twice around his waist and tied it in front, a tight square knot.

  All of this was automatic, but after he tied the belt, he felt wrong. The gi was on correctly. IT JUST DOESN’T FIT THE WAY IT USED TO. A wave of dizziness swept over him and he leaned heavily against the wall for a moment.

  He’d never worn a gi before.

  He stepped back into the hall. Denesse was waiting, wearing a gi and a dark-blue hakama. Leland wondered how he’d changed so fast. Maybe he was wearing them under the kimono all along.

  Denesse walked down the hall to a double doorway opposite the entrance to the uchideshi’s rooms. Inside the large room five men and three women were throwing each other on a tatami-covered floor. Charly, wearing a practice gi and a hakama, was sitting seiza, on her knees, near the far wall, to one side of an altar—a niche set in the wall.

  “After you,” said Denesse.

  Leland started to step onto the tatami but something inside made him freeze. He exhaled, dropped to his knees on the stone flagstones outside the door, and said, “Oneigashimasu!” He felt dizzy and faintly nauseated.