The Gist Hunter

by Matthews Hughes

  But the noönaut had been too canny. He had broken out of the context in which he had been placed, found a new setting in which all that was required of him were his functioning arms. And now he was putting together the means to open a gate and leave this Location. After that, he would never again come unawares into the Commons; he knew techniques that would keep him safe once he was free of the stricture at his throat. The noösphere would have to find another patsy.

  He turned his attention to some hoe blades heaped in the corner and after a few tries found one that rang with the frequency of note seven. Three to go, he thought, then he noticed a wooden plank beneath the hoes, set flush with the dirt floor and so discolored by ash and soot that it blended in with the packed earth around it.

  Curious, Bandar brushed aside the Smith's tools and examined the wood. It seemed to be a small trapdoor. He used the edge of a hoe to pry it up and peered within, finding a layer of sacking. This he pulled up, disturbing what was underneath. He heard a clonk that, to his pitch-perfect noönaut's ear, was the exact sound of note number one in the seven-tone thran. Another down and only two to go, he thought, and reached into the hole.

  His fingers closed around cold iron and he brought up what he had found. It was a broad-bladed spear point, needle sharp at the tip and razor edged down both sides. He tapped it with the little bar of iron and it rang true. He set it down and reached deeper into the darkness, careful of cutting himself, and found more spear heads then a long bundle wrapped in sackcloth that contained three rudimentary short swords. He struck one with his rod but the sound it produced was off-key and useless.

  A horn-skinned hand closed about the back of Bandar's neck and he was pulled up and to his feet, then still higher so that his toes barely brushed the ground. He felt himself rotated until his eyes met those of an angry idiomat. The Smith shook the noönaut so that his virtual bones rattled within him.

  "What are you doing?" was the Smith's first question. The second was, "Who sent you?"

  Bandar opened his mouth, but no sound emerged. He tried to convey by facial expression alone that he was innocent of any ill intent, but he knew that his grimace of pain kept creeping in to overshadow the message. With a grunt of disgust, the Smith flung him toward a corner and Bandar landed hard on his back and one elbow. The pain felt very real.

  He struggled to rise. He saw another face peeking into the smithy from the yard: the old man in a loincloth who had brought lunch to the work gang. But Bandar's attention was soon reclaimed by the Smith. The big idiomat had gone to the forge and was now turned toward him. In his hand was a heavy maul and behind the anger in his honest face was an underlying expression of reluctant determination.

  The little iron rod Bandar had used to test for tones had rolled free. He reached for it and struggled to his knees. If he had read the situation correctly, his appealingness as a Sympathetic Mute, coupled with the Smith's beneficent nature, could deliver him from the latter's anger—provided Bandar performed the right action. He stood up and went to the workbench where he struck the tongs, then the punch, ringing two pure notes from the metal. He struck the strengthening band, then from the three he played a simple tune.

  The Smith now regarded him with a mixed countenance. Bandar tried for his most appealing expression as he crossed to the hoe blades and spear points and brought one of each back to the bench. He arranged them in a simple scale then played another tune for the idiomat, wishing as he did so that he had all seven tones needed to open a gate. But the song and the innocence of Bandar's borrowed face were having the desired effect.

  "You just wanted to make music," the Smith said.

  Bandar enthusiastically signaled an affirmative and the idiomat put down the maul, his face showing almost as much relief as Bandar felt. The old man came into the smithy and said, "We should have known. He's too simple to be a spy for the Subgovernor. Come, let's get these things stowed before somebody sees them as shouldn't."

  The noönaut enthusiastically helped transfer the weapons to baskets and hide them in the cart, and when the Smith unthinkingly counseled him to say nothing, he tapped his lips and smiled. They all laughed together, the Smith with a hearty boom and Bandar in heartfelt mime. The idiomats left him there and went into the house, doubtless to conspire further, Bandar thought. For his part, the noönaut assiduously fell to seeking the other two notes of the escape thran. He found tone number six in a copper ladle used to drip water on cooling metal, but the fifth and last note remained elusive.

  Bandar struck his way about the forge with an energy that was increasingly desperate. This Location was not what he had thought it was: the Event was not a variant of The Building of the Grand Monument; it was an iteration of another great trope of the Commons—The Rising of the Oppressed. But, once again, Bandar's situation had started bad and become worse: the idiomat to whom he had attached himself was a Principal of this bloody Event. Worst of all, although Bandar was not particularly well-versed in Revolts, he was enough of an Institute scholar to know that they almost always culminated in a massacre of the rebels.

  The clandestine weapon-making was a sophisticated operation. Every piece of iron that entered the smithy was accounted for, from the raw ingots sent down from the City under guard by troops of the Governor's own household to the tools and implements distributed and collected each day by the Subgovernor's men at the slave camp. Even the pots and pans in which the communal meals were prepared were kept under guard.

  But midway along the route between the Monument and the town someone with a knowledgeable eye had noted an outcrop of iron ore. The area soon became a place where slaves would relieve themselves, an activity they were allowed to do without being closely watched, the guards being almost as likely to go unsandaled as most of the workers. Unobserved, the slaves would break off handfuls of the friable rock and deposit it in the baskets from which the old man distributed bread at lunchtime, and which found their way to the smithy where the Smith would smelt the ore into iron and fashion weapons from it.

  The old man who brought the ore also took away the weapons, carrying them back to the communal huts where the women hid them in the thatch and beneath the dirt floors. Bandar deduced that the arming of the slaves had been going on for quite some time and, judging by the ancient courier's excitement, the Rising was imminent.

  It was an inspired plan. Not for the first time in his career as an aficionado of the kaleidoscope of human experiences exemplified in the Commons, Bandar marveled at the ingenuity with which the simple contrived to counter oppression by the mighty. But he also knew that a talent for brilliant improvisation was rarely a match for phalanxes of trained and well-led soldiery. He definitely needed to find the missing fifth note and complete the thran.

  Still, nothing rang with the right frequency, although the noönaut tinked and tonked on every possible object in the smithy and the attached household. His ability to search during his spare time grew limited, however, because the Smith required him to assemble various metallic items on the workbench and to reproduce tunes that the idiomat liked to hum while working at the forge.

  It would not have been an intolerable existence but for the imminent threat of annihilation. Even so, Bandar found himself slipping into the routine of the days, taking pleasure in small things. The Smith was an agreeable sort, almost always of a pleasant disposition, being an idiomat idealist who lacked the full array of subtler sensibilities that would complexify the personality of even the most simple real human being. Bandar kept finding in himself an urge to be of help to the fellow, even to the point of wondering if there was some way he could prevent the cycle of the Event from fulfilling itself, which must surely end with the Smith heroically dead.

  He resisted the urge, which was not ultimately put to the test. No options presented themselves for altering the inevitable flow of the Event toward its sad conclusion, and Bandar was resolved not to try to create one. If he were truly a misplaced idiomat—although he would have to be an Iconoclastic Genius
rather than merely a Sympathetic Mute—Bandar might fortuitously discover an elementary explosive or craft a primitive aircraft that would give the slaves some advantage over the authorities.

  But he was quite sure this was not an archetypal rendition of the Traveler Displaced in Time. So the moment he introduced disharmonious material, the Location would begin to accumulate stress on an exponential scale. Bandar had already been inside a Class Four Situation while it was coming apart because of his inadvertent interference; the thought of what it might be like to experience the dissolution of a Class One Event did not bear thinking of.

  So he continued his search for the fifth note. It had the highest frequency of the seven, more than a full octave above the lowest. Bandar was starting to think that no object of iron, bronze or copper that he was likely to find around the smithy would produce it. A plate of very thin iron might do. He wondered if he could convince the idiomat to fashion a xylophone. But between his open and surreptitious labors the Smith was already so occupied that the likelihood was scant, even if Bandar could somehow communicate the idea.

  Then one evening, as he helped the Smith fashion a mold in which to cast a set of bronze weights, Bandar heard the elusive note. It came from beyond the outer wall, from the cross street that the Smith had told him ran to where the Subgovernor's mansion sat on a slight rise overlooking town and river.

  Bandar rose and took up the jug that held the water they used to dampen the sand of the mold. He went toward the well at one side of the yard, but instead of stopping continued on to the gate and looked out in time to see the source of the sound: four slaves were carrying a curtained litter, escorted by a squad of spearmen. Ahead of them all stepped an idiomat whose attire and bearing identified him as a variant of Pomposity in Office—a major-domo of some sort—who carried a staff that curled into a loop at one end. Hung within the loop, gleaming in the day's dwindling light, was a small silver bell. As the party approached the next intersection, the servant shook the staff so that the bell sounded again—it was indeed precisely the right note—and every other idiomat on the street stopped, turned toward the litter and bowed.

  The Smith had come to see what had caught his helper's attention. "The Subgovernor's First Wife," he said, following it with an eloquent twist of his mouth. "Come, we must finish."

  Bandar went back to their work, but as he crossed the yard he heard again, fading into the distance, the sound that could offer him deliverance.

  The calendar was built around the phases of the moon, with observances performed at its maximum wax and wane. Twice each month of twenty-eight days, all work ceased and all the town, high and low, slave and free, gathered at the white stone temple at the river's edge. Priests clad in fine robes hemmed and cuffed with metallic thread carried a great disk of beaten silver down to the water, where they ritually bathed the pale orb then bore it in a mass procession back up the broad stairs to the sanctuary. At the culmination of the ceremony, the high priest would bless the assembly then all would return to their dwellings for a celebratory meal, a siesta and, in the late afternoon, rowdy team sports and dancing.

  The Rising was set for the moment of the benediction. The shuffling throng on the steps was always a heterogeneous mingling of slaves, townsfolk and soldiers. Traditionally, when the hierophant spoke the concluding words of the rite—"It is done. Go now."—the mix would separate into its component streams, with the slaves walking back to their compound under loose guard, everyone glad of the feast and leisure to come.

  The Subgovernor and his family sat on a platform to one side at the top of the steps, attended by their senior servants and a squad of bodyguards. Behind them a broad ramp descended to a paved road that led up the rise to the mansion. They were no more than a few paces from the front of the throng on the upper steps, and today that portion of the crowd was unusually thick with strong male slaves.

  The underpriests carried the moon disk into the temple. There came an expectant pause then the high priest spoke the ritual words. As usual, the crowd sighed and a hubbub of murmurs broke out as people turned and began to descend the steps. Then the day became unusual.

  Instead of turning and leaving, some thirty slaves at the fore of the crowd stood still, so that the intermixed townsfolk and soldiers drew away from them. From beneath their long kilts some of the men brought out short swords. Others produced lengths of turned wood to which they quickly fitted broad bladed spear points. As one, and without a word, they charged the Subgovernor's party.

  The guards, lulled by the familiarity of routine had already turned away. The rapid scuffle of feet on stone alerted them, however, and they swung back, attempting to establish a line, shields locked and spears coming down to form a bristle of points.

  But the slaves had practiced their tactics too many times on the trampled ground where they were allowed to play muscular games with a ball of cloth wrapped in horsehide. They hit the guards before the line could form, and once broken, the guards were no match for thrice their numbers. While the priests and townsfolk looked on in horror, the slaves slaughtered the bodyguards and seized the Subgovernor and his entourage at spear point.

  The townspeople scattered to their homes amid cries of horror. The soldiers shouldered their way free of the mob of fleeing civilians and, under the barked orders of their officers, assembled halfway up the steps, forming two lines angled toward the rebels on the platform above. They set their spears and shields and waited for the order to advance.

  Bandar had watched all of this from near the bottom of the steps where, in the company of the Smith, he had stood through the ceremony. Now, as the townsfolk fled, he saw the great mass of slaves, men as well as women, stand gaping in horror and consternation at the armed confrontation until a double squad of soldiers was directed by their commander to surround them and march them back to camp.

  With kicks and blows from their spear butts, the soldiers rapidly shaped the hundreds of slaves into a column and began to march them away. But they had gone no more than a few paces before a great shout and clashing of weapons came from the top of the steps. Many of the soldiers marching with the column could not resist turning to look toward the source of the racket. They saw the rebels around the Subgovernor bellowing and smashing their iron weapons together, and that was the last thing they saw because their momentary distraction was the signal for scores of those they guarded to draw concealed knives and stab them.

  "Now!" cried the Smith, and pulled from beneath his kilt the heavy maul with which he had once threatened Bandar. He threw himself against a maniple of soldiers who had had the presence of mind to close together and were spearing the knife wielding rebels from behind their shields. The Smith attacked from their rear, crushing skulls and spines with his great hammer and in seconds the guards were dead, their corpses plundered for their weapons.

  "Make a line!" the Smith shouted. "Those without arms pry up the paving stones!"

  A few of the slaves hung back, frightened and uncertain. But Bandar saw even Crones and Maidens digging their fingers into the cracks between the flags, upending them then lifting the squares to dash them down. The impact shattered the stones and hard, eager hands reached for the jagged fragments.

  The Smith's voice boomed out—"All right, at them!"—and the slaves charged up the steps toward the double line of soldiers, even as the officers were frantically screaming at the rear rank to about face. A hail of sharp-edged stones came arcing over the heads of the upsurging armed rebels and the soldiers who had reversed to meet them threw up their shields to ward off the barrage. But these soldiers were not the stones' intended targets. Instead the jagged chunks of rock flew over their upraised shields to smash into the unprotected skulls and spines of the spearmen still facing the thirty who had seized the Subgovernor.

  As men fell moaning or unconscious out of the upper rank, leaving gaps and causing those not hit to glance worriedly over their shoulders, the majority of the thirty rebels above left the Subgovernor and his entourage in
the custody of a few men with swords. Screaming just as they had practiced so many times on the ball field, they formed a bristling wedge and threw themselves at the wavering line of soldiers at the same moment as their friends from below struck the lower rank of spearmen.

  It was a brutal business. Though Bandar had seen it in other Locations, with men who wore different garments and wielded more sophisticated weapons, it was always the same. Metal pierced flesh, blood spattered from slashing wounds or fountained from severed arteries, to a chorus of high pitched screams and bestial grunts. He watched with an expert eye and decided that this might well be one of those Risings of the Oppressed in which a gifted Hero—for so the Smith undoubtedly was—carried the day. But then he saw Doomed Innocence roaring in the front rank of the rebels, stabbing with his spear, his Demure Maiden at his side wielding a long knife with the skill of a butcher. And Bandar remembered that even the successful revolts usually lasted no longer than it took for fresh troops to arrive in overwhelming numbers.

  He skirted around the edge of the melee, careful to maintain a safe distance. He kept experiencing an urge to go toward the Smith, to help him in some indefinable way. Suddenly it all became clear. I am becoming embedded in the Mute's dynamic. He is a Hero's Helper. That is the role that the Commons wants to press me into.