by John Dalmas
It made no response to her touch, none at all.
She stepped back, pondering, then knelt and stroked its head and neck, crooning to it. Nothing. After half a minute she turned and waved for her bodyguard. He rode up, expression curious, until he saw the sellsu. His face turned wary then; he'd grown up far from the sea.
"Yes, namirrna?"
"It's alive, but something's wrong with it. It's sick or badly hurt. Help me turn it over."
The guard dismounted, a tall heavy-shouldered man hiding his hesitancy, and the two of them rolled the four-hundred-pound body over. There was no visible wound.
"Jonkka," she said, "ride back to the house quickly, and have the men bring the boat. We'll take it home and I'll nurse it back to health."
Distress flashed briefly behind the soldierly eyes. "Miss, I can't do that. My post is to keep you in my sight, lest harm come to you."
She turned face on then, fists on hips, expression severe, though the top of her head came no higher than his chin. "Then help me drag it into the surf. We'll take it home swimming, holding its head above water. You and I together, because you have to stay with me. Or me alone, if you cannot swim."
His face too turned severe at that. "You do me ill, Juliassa Hanorissia. You know I can scarcely swim; I'm from the Eastern Dale, where water is for drinking and we bathe in a basin. And you know as well that I am charged with your safety."
Her cheeks darkened, and her fierceness faded. "I do know, Jonkka, and I'm sorry. But somehow I must save this sellsu, and I know no other way. I'd ask for your help to load it on Sannshi, but it seems to me it would surely die, riding across a kaabor's back so far. And anyway, how would we tie it on?"
She turned back to the sellsu, the child of the waves, and kneeling again, grabbed the flukes. "Here. At least help me pull it into the shade of this rock. It's said they do not tolerate the sun well for any length of time."
He'd never heard that. He'd heard they raised their young on the beaches. But he bent to it, and with his strength they readily dragged it out of the sun. "Now lend me your helmet," Juliassa said. "Then gather wet floatweed at the water's edge and cover the sellsu with it. To help keep it damp."
His expression was both hesitant and puzzled, but he handed her his helmet and trotted off. As he filled his arms with the long and pungent strands, he paused once to see what the namirrna was doing. She was carrying seawater in his helmet, pouring it on the sellsu. He muttered a prayer and continued to gather. It was the will of Hrum that they do what they properly could.
When they'd spread the weeds over the unmoving body, she looked it over. "Another load should do it," she said, and trotting, he returned to the water's edge. This time he didn't look back until he'd gotten most of a load. When he did, he dropped the weeds and shouted angrily. The namirrna was a hundred yards away, riding his kaabor back along the beach, leading her own by the reins. He strode toward them, calling his mount to come to him, but when it tried, she dug heels in its flanks, using the reins and bit harshly. It yielded to her, and she rode on.
"You do me ill indeed, Juliassa Hanorissia," Jonkka called after her, and she stopped.
"I know," she cried back, "and it grieves me. But this way it's out of your hands, and you can scarcely be blamed for my treachery. It's me that'll be punished. I'll be back as soon as I can, with a boat." Her tone changed then from apology to command. "Meanwhile stay by him."
With that she urged her mount into a trot, and moments later Jonkka watched her start up the cliff trail. With an oath he turned and kicked his helmet some fifteen feet, hurting his toes despite his boots, which brought another curse. After retrieving the helmet, he looked at the second load of floatweed, lying where he'd dropped it. Probably its only purpose had been to occupy his attention while she sneaked off, he told himself. Taking no chance though, he picked it up and strewed it over the sellsu, leaving only head and neck exposed.
She's willful, that namirrna, he thought. And all this for a sellsu that's as good as dead already. As for punishment . . .
By his observation, the amirr's idea of punishment for headstrong children was nothing compared to his own father's. Now there was a man who knew how to punish! Although in all truth, the whippings had been few, if memorable, dealt only on severe provocation. And when they were over, that had been the end of the matter.
He stroked the sellsu's sleek head. "You are a good-lookin' lad," Jonkka. murmured. "And who knows? Maybe you'll come through this after all." Did this fellow truly have the intelligence of a human, he wondered? Or, as some insisted, the soul of a human, resting for a cycle from humanity's labors and responsibilities? He'd even heard from fishermen that the sullsi talked to one another, though their words were strange, beyond human comprehension.
Jonkka chuckled. Maybe the sellsu'd been a soldier, once upon a time. "How'd you like a soldiers' song?" he asked, "to let you know you're among friends. Maybe you'll even wake up and join me." Then, still stroking, he began to sing, but instead of a soldier's song, it was one he'd heard his mother and grandmother sing the younger children to sleep with, and no doubt himself as well, farther back than his memory reached.
It had many verses, and as he was finishing, something caught and drew his eye. Two sullsi lay at the tide's edge, not more than fifty feet from him, where the light surf hissed softly up the sand. They were not moving, not even their heads, but they watched intently. And in his present mood, Jonkka called softly to them.
"Peace, lads, your buddy's sick; either that or hurt inside. My lady's gone to fetch help; she means to nurse him through it."
They neither bolted at his voice nor showed any sign of attacking. Maybe they were smart, Jonkka told himself, for he had his sword still at his belt, and ashore he was much nimbler than they. Cloud blocked the sun again, and he looked up. Cloud indeed! A curving wall of thunderheads now, from that angle seeming vast, hid the sky to south and west, near enough that he could not see their heads, but only their flanks and blue-black undersides. The rains were at hand, he told himself, despite the foreign ship and the serpents' brief flight.
Again he stroked the sellsu's head. "It looks as if I'll not have to fetch more water to keep you wet," he muttered, and wondered where the namirrna was by now. Halfway to the villa or farther, he guessed. She'd not hesitate to run the kaabors hard. The slower part by far would be rowing here around the curve of shore. Men would have to leave other duties to be her boatmen, and they had several miles to come.
Soon enough the rain arrived, with Borrsio's hammer banging and booming, his lightning spears stabbing sea and earth. Like all children of Hrumma, Jonkka'd been raised to love wild storms, but not out in the open like this! He huddled in the lee of the great rock, grateful for even that little shelter, listening between thunders to the cold hard sheets of rain hiss on the sea and slash the streaming stone. When next he peered out toward the two sullsi, they were gone. Back into the sea to keep dry, he thought wryly.
He was shivering by then, skin blue and pebbled. Once he felt the spirit of Borrsio, making him tingle and his hair stand on end. A moment later, the god cast down a great and blinding spear that struck somewhere very close, and the thunder with it burst the air so that Jonkka was knocked flat and for a long moment forgot to breathe. Finally, after further booming and rumbling, the wind changed, and he shifted round the rock, grateful again because, to an ex-herd boy, it meant that the storm had passed half over. When next he thought to look at the sellsu, its eyes were open, looking at him, although it seemed not to have moved. Perhaps the thunders had wakened it, Jonkka thought, or the spirit of Borrsio when it had caused his hair to bristle.
Finally the rain became fitful. The wind stopped, and shortly the sun came forth to raise steams from the sand and rocks. The tide was rising now, had been awhile, and Jonkka began to wonder which would arrive soonest, the surf or the boat. The surf would take some hours yet, he supposed, but he wasn't sure how many; he wasn't that familiar with the sea. Meanwhile, here the high
tide mark was on the base of the cliff itself, and perhaps the boatmen had delayed starting till the storm was over, on grounds of safety.
The tide was still twenty feet away when they hallooed him. His clothes were dry by then, even somewhat his boots, which he'd set out on a rock, and twice more he'd poured water over the sellsu, whose eyes had long since closed again, though it still breathed. They loaded it into the boat, which rode perilously low with all the added weight, water splashing over the bow as they launched out through the mild surf. They were hardly two hundred feet from shore when two sullsi came alongside; the same two, Jonkka supposed, that had watched him on the beach. The boatmen eyed them watchfully, and called assurances that only good was meant for their kinsman.
Juliassa left that to the men. Her attention was on the sellsu in the boat, stroking it and crooning, and every little while she poured another helmetful of water on it, till the bottom was three inches awash. Jonkka hoped the sellsu wouldn't wake up in the boat. A four-hundred-pound bull trying to get over the side would surely overturn them, maybe breaking someone's bones in the process.
But quickly enough he forgot about that. The motion of the boat, up, down, sideways, introduced him to seasickness.
At least the boatmen made haste, pulling the oars till the sweat ran, and at length Jonkka could see the villa, well back from the water. What, he wondered, would the namirrna do with the sellsu when they got it there? She had something being prepared for it, he was sure.
Eight
At noon on Elver Brokols' fourth day in Hrumma, Eltrienn Cadriio took him to a school where children were given knowledge of Hrummlis. By neighborhoods and ages, they attended twice a week for four hours, to recite with the teachers and ask and answer questions. And, when they were old enough, they were taught to meditate.
And no, Eltrienn said, they did not learn to read and write and reckon there; those skills they learned at home, from a grandparent, or lacking that, their mother or an aunt.
Without actually giving it any thought, Brokols had expected a stone box of a building, like the city schools in Almeon. Instead he found a small building of whitewashed bricks, unstuccoed—a residence for the bachelor teachers, Eltrienn said. With a courtyard behind it, and shelters—roofs without walk—for the classes to crowd into when a rainstorm struck. Even in the rainy season, summer, rains were mainly a midday phenomenon, and should a day begin with hard rain, classes might be cancelled.
They'd arrived minutes before the morning class left. There were no seats, no tables. The children wore short dresses of light colors—blue, pink, yellow, pale pure green. Brokols realized then that they wore nothing underneath. Inexcusably indecent, he thought. It fell short of obscenity only because the wearers were children.
Sitting cross-legged on the grass, the children's voices piped in rhythmic unison with the teacher who chanted before them. The individual words had meaning for Brokols now, most of them, but what was being said seemed gibberish. The concepts, and the events and persons alluded to, were unfamiliar, and he felt twitchy listening. With Eltrienn, he waited near the gate till it was over. Shortly, as if at some signal, the children leaped to their feet, and with a chorus of squealing, poured as a swift stream of color past the watchers into the alleyway outside the courtyard and were gone.
Then Eltrienn led Brokols over and introduced him to the senior teacher, requesting that the man speak slowly for his guest. Brokols felt ill at ease with him. The teacher had shaved his head, leaving it bare and shiny, and worse, he wore only a sort of diaper. Convenient, presumably, for the strange, cross-legged posture he'd used in leading the chant, and it did cover his genitals, but it was far from decent attire for an adult. His belly was bare to the navel, his legs to the groin; in Almeon he'd have been jailed. And there was no sense of nobility about him; he looked nothing at all like a repository of knowledge and wisdom.
Brokols' mood of the Festival evening was definitely gone, replaced by proper Almaeic disapproval.
The teacher looked at him. "Why have you come to see me?" he asked.
"In my country," Brokols answered carefully, "we know nothing of Hrum, or of Hrummlis. I hoped you could tell me something about them."
The teacher's eyes were calm and steady, and Brokols adjusted his evaluation upward a little. "Ah," the man said. "In your country, do you know something of the world? The universe?"
More than you do, teacher, Brokols thought to himself. "Yes, we do. Quite a lot."
"Good. Then you know somewhat about Hrum. And do you know much about mankind?"
Brokols suspected what was coming, but answered anyway. "Yes, of course."
"Excellent. Then you have already made much progress in the study of Hrum. For the universe and the people in it are reflections of Hrum." His eyes seemed to search inside Brokols. "And who do you worship in your land?"
Religions had sprung up in Almeon in more primitive times, and even become prominent on some of the islands before the islands had been unified. But they'd been suppressed by the empire, and had all but died out after the Larvest had been opened and The Captain's Book found and finally deciphered, giving them the facts of their origin.
"We worship no one," Brokols answered. At that, with a pang of chagrin, he remembered that he'd used religion to explain his antenna and generator, and hurried to cover the slip. "We worship The Book of Forbiddances and The Book of Right Comportment," he said. Which was true in a manner of speaking, he realized, though he'd never looked at it that way before.
"Ah," said the teacher. "It is not feasible to teach you what I know about Hrum while we stand here in the courtyard. However, you are welcome to attend classes with the children if you wish. With your maturity, you might prove to be one of our best pupils." He paused. "Meanwhile, perhaps I can answer a question for you. Is there one you'd care to ask?"
Not really, Brokols thought. "Yes. Describe Hrum for me."
"Hrum is—" The teacher paused, gray eyes evaluating Brokols, then went on.
"Hrum is not our father but our foster father, for you and I came from very far away in an earlier life. Hrum is the builder of the theater, the carpenter who created the stage. Hrum-In-Thee, who is not Hrum, who is yourself in the audience, names the play and chooses your role, then allows you to play it as you will.
"Hrum has provided you the spindle and the wheel, has given you the loom. You must ret the limma yourself. The pattern is your own, and you weave your own tapestry."
He paused, his eyes still on Brokols' eyes.
"What I have told you is the truth, and each word of it is a lie."
He paused. "That should suffice for now. Are we done for this time?"
Brokols nodded curtly without speaking. He felt . . . angry, cheated, insulted. He could not have said what, subconsciously, he'd anticipated, but certainly not this nonsense.
"Very well. Should you come here again, you will be welcome." The teacher nodded dismissal, then turned away and walked toward the house.
Come here again? Not likely, Brokols told himself as he left with Cadriio.
He was sweating in his suit and hat. With the rainy season had come heat and humidity, and they were walking uphill now. Eltrienn had said the dry season was cooler, sometimes even cold, but it would be hot and humid like this for more than a quarter of the year. At home it was seldom this hot, and he almost envied Eltrienn his short immodest skirt, bare legs, nearly sleeveless tunic.
But not his religion. He'd never cared for riddling games, and certainly not for fraud or pathological stupidity. While for something like this to be presented as a central and serious aspect of life . . .
Walking, he wiped his forehead with his handkerchief. "What now?" he asked.
Eltrienn had sensed his guest's annoyance and had been waiting for Brokals to initiate conversation. His answer was cheerful: "We're going to a monastery, where I hope you may talk with a master. A monastery is where masters live in celibacy, and lead would-be teachers and would-be masters to the wisdom
of Hrum."
"I thought the children were taught the wisdom of Hrum. I thought that's what we were listening to back there."
Eltrienn shook his head, still cheerful despite Brokols' surliness. "The children are exposed to the wisdom of Hrum. They learn enough to help guide their behavior. But wisdom is not like knowledge; it cannot be taught. Wisdom comes from within; from Hrum that is in each of us.
"It is something that most of us gain only small pieces of. Enough, hopefully, to make our lives happier and more pleasing."
Brokols thought he'd be happier and more pleased with a cold drink, and for a dismayed moment realized that there'd be none here. Not even in winter, as he understood the Hrummean climate. These people hadn't developed ice factories where one could send a servant to fetch a supply.
And he was committed to spend years here if necessary!
"But there are those," Eltrienn went on, "who after much meditation achieve in a sudden rush the full wisdom of Hrum. It doesn't remain on them, but once it has struck, they thenceforth look at the world through different eyes. It is these who are called masters."