It didn’t take long before Salan, Reegas, Hudnee and Habna were partaking of a late meal of fish stew and steeped berry juice. Oddly, Habna seemed to have had it already prepared when they arrived.
“You need a little work on your disguises,” said Habna, smiling, when her guests had finished eating.
Salan looked at Reegas in surprise. He made a little shake of his head, and she said nothing.
“You,” she said, turning to Salan, “you are a translator, a teacher I think, and one who studies the customs of others. The language of Hud is certainly not your language.
“You,” she said, turning to Reegas. “You are her bodyguard, and . . . you are here because you have travelled into the unknown many times before.”
Reegas and Salan still said nothing.
“What colour were they in your dream, Hudnee?” she said, talking to him but keeping her gaze fixed firmly on Salan.
“Um, oh, I see what you mean,” said Hudnee, as the pieces of the puzzle fell into place. That was why something was not right about these two – they were not from Hud at all.
“A pale brown,” he said, “almost a white, but with patches of red, the colour of blood, in their checks. Though maybe that was from the effort they were putting in to holding me up. And I remember they were thinner than us, stringy, like these two.”
“Would that be right,” said Habna quietly. “Under that painted on skin colour, would you be pale brown, or sometimes an almost white with tinges of red?”
Salan made a gesture with open hands toward Reegas, saying in effect, ‘what have we got to lose?” Reegas nodded.
“Excuse us for a moment,” she said to Habna, and then spoke rapidly to Reegas – strange words that issued in an unintelligible stream from her mouth.
Hudnee sat back, startled by the unusual sounds. There were variations in accent across Hud and the Western Islands, but he had only ever heard one language. The idea of another language dawned on him slowly.
“My friend has only basic words in your language,” said Salan. “For him there was little time left over from organising this mission. I, on the other hand, was able to spend many days acquiring your speech. I have a gift for such things.”
“You speak it very well,” said Habna, with a smile, and it was a much broader smile this time.
“But before we talk about what brings you to our world, there is a matter dear to our own hearts that you must help us with,” she said. Then she recounted the circumstances of Menona’s disappearance.
“Ah, of course!” said Salan, leaning forward. “We were not aware of this.
“Yes, we did take this dooplehuel from the village to the south. We took it at night, and we didn’t know who it belonged to. Perhaps your friend, Menon’s life partner, made it that far and has been taken in by the villagers.”
She looked quite distraught at the possibility of Menona drowning at sea instead. “I sincerely hope so,” she added softly.
“This is excellent news,” said Habna. “This gives us hope, a thin strand of hope though it may be.
“Hudnee, get Menon for me will you. He’ll want to hear this from these people himself, and as soon as possible.”
Hudnee left at once, and then Menon joined the little group.
“You never lost hope, did you,” said Habna shortly after that, as Menon wept openly in front of the strangers.
“No,” he said bluntly, wiping his eyes on the rough material of his sleeve. “I didn’t feel that the special connection between us had been broken.”
“Well, you have been proved right,” said Habna, rubbing his shoulder sympathetically. She was old enough to have been there at his birth, and she had a soft spot for the Shellport hunter. She often quizzed him for details when he came back from his long journeys into the interior.
“Daneesa needs you,” said Habna quietly, turning to Hudnee. Feeling somewhat arbitrarily dismissed, Hudnee inclined his head toward the strangers, and slipped out of Habna’s house.
People straight out of his dream, he thought, as he trudged along the walkway to his home. This world just keeps getting stranger and stranger.
The next day, Hudnee was out on the latest of his building sites, nudging the last of a number of square blocks into place in a new layer. He had learned from earlier mistakes, and now went no more than five layers high in one day.
The blocks his building team were making these days were squat affairs that made thick, solid walls, and did not need to be exactly level or perfectly vertical.
He had trained up some of his refugee team to lay blocks as well, but their skills were rudimentary. They would do most of the work and he would finish off. It was important to get houses built quickly, rather than perfectly.
It had turned out to be much more efficient to make blocks first, and then use them to build walls, rather than make boxing and pour walls. Once a water sluice had been built to the site where they made the blocks, production had almost tripled.
Salan and Reegis laboured alongside him this morning, though they spent most of their time with Habna, or talking into the strange metal pouches they carried. It was hard to believe, but there were more of the strangers from another world in other parts of Hud.
Salan and Reegis were tying sheets of leviathon hide onto the poles that would make up the roof of the house. They were surprisingly strong for their skinny build, but he found they tired easily.
He smiled. They were not used to continuous hard work, that was clear. They were taller and thinner than what he considered healthy for his own people, but he presumed it was normal for them. They had applied more of the dye that made them similar in colour to the people of Shellport, but they never really managed the full, glossy bronze colour that Hudnee possessed, even when they were glistening with sweat.
The weather had finally returned to something like normal. It still seemed hotter than usual, but the daily rains had ceased, and the weather patterns were more beneficial to plant and animal alike.
Hudnee looked across at the shore from the building site on one of the banks of shells in the river. There was only one dry, brown, creeping grass left after the permanent cloud and daily rains. It was slowly covering the low dunes, relieved of all competition.
The grasses had fared the worst, and most had been lost forever, but many of the tree species were coming back, especially those that had been used to wetter conditions before the rains came.
The birds had proved surprisingly resilient, and while they had initially disappeared, a few could now be seen and heard around Shellport. Hudnee wondered how other villages, scattered across the continent in widely differing localities, had got on, and whether they were starting to recover.
He turned to notching the ends of poles that would be used for the roof later on. Salan and Reegis were peeling the dried bark off other poles further over, and one of the refugee teams was floating out tomorrow’s supply of blocks from the shore, using a makeshift raft.
Hudnee returned to his thoughts. It was hard to believe a simple working man like himself had dreamed of people from another world, and then they had turned up in Shellport.
He thought Habna would be the person to have such dreams, but she said it had come to him because he had an important part to play in the future of the village. He put down his adzing mattock. What part in the future would that be?
He looked over at Reegis, who nodded a greeting and then went back to stripping poles. Well, right there was living proof of his dream, if he wanted it. Offworlders, pale people, just like in his dream.
He sighed, and turned back to his work. The future would come in its own good time.
CHAPTER 16
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Menon and Menona brought mid-morning refreshments to the building site. There was plenty of spring water, and some hot drink infused with herbs in a stoppered flask. The beaten copper of the flask was a rare thing for the medieval civilisation. The container had also been wound with a cloth to keep the heat
in, and protect the hands that carried it.
Hudnee remembered the glorious day when Menona had been returned to them from the sea village to the south. Menon at last became something like his old self, and the villagers rejoiced for both of them.
But there was sadness mixed with that joy. Menona found it difficult to remember everyday things, and her memories of who she was came and went. Habna had diagnosed a blow to the head, most probably from the night of the great storm. She could feel a depressed area on the side of Menona’s head, but it was beyond her powers to cure the condition.
“You fix it,” she had said to Salan, confident that a people who could fly vast distances between planets must be able to do something with a depression in the skull. As Habna had explained to Hudnee, all the things that looked like miracles were just skills, like his new skills with the blocks for the houses.
Unfortunately the ‘boat’ as Habna insisted on calling it, that had brought the Human team to Hud was a small fighting ship, and did not have a medical bay. Anyone with a life-threatening injury was simply put into stasis until the ship got to a more advanced medical facility at a later date.
Reegis had held another of the strange metal pouches over the depression in Menona’s skull for a while before announcing it was safe enough for the moment, but she was not to do anything strenuous.
Menona’s injury was yet another problem, sighed Hudnee. It had become quite depressing when Reegis had told him and Habna what he was learning from his other teams dropped off across Hud. The situation was desperate everywhere.
Some of the settlements run by the Descendants of the Prophet had not made it. They had simply run out of food, or been destroyed by the life-threatening weather. Those that had survived had all suffered losses, and for many it was marginal whether they would recover.
There was no doubt the sea folk, the outcasts, had survived much better. Inland too, where there was a concentration of people outside the Descendant-controlled areas, the villages had done better. It was largely because they were centred around lakes or rivers, which meant they had reliable fishing grounds.
Now that the weather was improving, some of the independent communities had offered to trade goods, and particularly salted fish and labour, with the Descendants. They hoped to get the seed necessary for crops, and the livestock needed to establish herds once again.
The reply had come from the ArchOrdinate himself. Only those who had taken the vow of complete obedience to the Descendants of the Prophet would be admitted into the settlements they controlled, and only those settlements would be planting crops. Which would be as soon as the ground was dry enough to avoid the early blights.
There had been some very generous offers for seeds, but they had been ignored. There had been delegations entreating the Descendants to reconsider. There had been raids on Descendant storehouses that had been repelled by force, and resulted in the deaths of some of the raiders.
Throughout all this the ArchOrdinate’s office remained unmoved. As the situation became more desperate, and the weather started to improve, the Descendants had planted crops inside their settlements, or inside hastily erected barricades just outside the walls. Their armed guards patrolled the new crops day and night.
The independent communities couldn’t live on fish and foraging forever, and there was a growing awareness the Descendants would claim all the good land for their crops as the seasons went by. They would say it was theirs by virtue of it being deserted by its previous owners.
Some families made a devil’s bargain with the Descendants, and slipped across to join their settlements under cover of darkness. But many of the independent communities stood fast, and they had started to form a league across Hud with a common purpose, the toppling of the Descendants from their seats of power.
When the midday break came, Hudnee followed Salan and Reegis to Habna’s house for something to eat, and, as it turned out, to discuss the very same issue. Shellport couldn’t go on with such a limited intake for much longer. A diet of fish and shellfish, and stores of leviathan fat, dried seaweeds, and berries in oil, was becoming more and more monotonous.
Hudnee came through Habna’s door and looked around with interest. The house was packed.
He nodded to Grisanton, the Shellport builder who had always supported him. The head man of the refugees was there, and Battrick from the docks. There seemed to be representatives from every group in Shellport.
When they had more or less finished lunch, Habna addressed the gathering.
“You all know the situation inland,” she began. “Some of the independent communities have banded together, and will soon make an attempt to overrun a number of the Descendant enclaves.”
Several people in the room looked surprised. This was news not all of them were aware of.
“Reegis and Salan have been able to talk to some of the other communities,” she said, by way of explanation.
One or two hands went up to ask how that was possible, and she ignored them. “We all have a lot of questions about our visitors,” she said with a smile, “but questions can wait.
“At the moment we have to decide what the rights and wrongs are as far as the Descendants not sharing the seeds and livestock they still have with others. Then we have to decide whether we are prepared to take sides in this dispute.”
“Why us?” said a woman at the back who had lost two children to the water spouts, and clearly did not relish the thought of more tragedy in Shellport.
“A good point,” said Habna, feeling for the woman’s loss. “But we cannot live isolated here forever. If we cannot trade for grains and livestock, and for the things we cannot make, we will be living on fish and wearing rough leviathan hide forever!”
This brought a mournful laugh from many. What she said was painfully true.
“But Hudnee fighting Hudnee!” said Menon. “We have always been the people of Hud, one people. A few outcasts perhaps, and a few contentious trials by the Descendants, but we have never been a people divided!”
“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that,” said Habna carefully. “I think we can do more with a few rumours and one or two decisive minor skirmishes than gearing up for a major war.”
She paused for a moment, and when she went on she seemed more resolute.
“But there is the matter of the Descendants and their religion,” she said sternly. “That is a subject I for one feel strongly about. There is little of personal discovery in it, and much more of social climbing and financial status.”
There was a low murmur throughout the room. Some could see what she was saying, others were shocked by her comments about the Descendants.
Habna sighed. Working this through with the village was going to take a long time. She would have to show them that the spiritual only arose in any open mind, and the Descendants had bent spirituality to their own purposes. A sense of inner understanding only happened when it was something discovered by each person for themselves.
Not that all structure was a bad thing, she thought. A little guidance at a few tricky places, a talk or two with those more experienced in these things, that worked very well. But a religion should not be a club, a place where everything was laid out for the seeker, including how to think.
That approach didn’t make for a smoother journey, as might be supposed, but it did seem to always lead to an empty parroting of tired words.
On a more practical level, Shellport would have to move fast if the village was to work in tandem with the independent communities inland. A pincer movement from two directions would be much more effective, and it would de-stabilise the Descendants more rapidly.
She had a couple of days to convince a majority of the village to make a choice one way or the other, and that meant there would be an awful lot of talking in her near future.
But there was one thing she did know. Salan and Reegis had told her how useful the Hudnee would be as pilots in the war against the great enemy of freedom, the Invardii. She still
knew very little about these matters, but she had managed to convince the offworlders that now was not the time to ask the people of Hud for help.
There was a civil war they had to fight first, and they didn’t know anything about these Human newcomers yet, and they were still getting over the tremendous changes to their lives that the weather had wrought.
Let the people of Hud get to know you, she had advised. Stay here for a while, and help where you can. Actions speak louder than words when it comes to asking people to help you later. Salan had acknowledged the wisdom of her argument.
So for now, it was first things first, and that meant deciding the future of the one continent on Hud.
Menon and Merrick arrived by sea a few days later with a small group of leaders from the low, flat plateau that made up the southern part of the continent. The visitors brought with them another lean, tall stranger that Habna saw immediately was one of Reegis’ operatives, the ones that had been dropped off across Hud previously. She said nothing though.
The southern uplands were better drained and cooler than the main part of the interior, and the community there had survived quite well on lake fish, and slime eels from the streams. The largest of the birds had congregated there as the weather changed, and had become part of the villagers’ diet.
The southerners had been the least involved with the Descendants, whose offices were mainly scattered over the middle of the continent and the western plains, but they were just as desperate for seeds and tuber shoots to establish farms again. A few livestock had, incredibly, survived in the least affected areas of Hud. They were more precious than gold, but it would be many years before their numbers would increase to anything like previous levels.
It was soon clear that the southern uplands and the village of Shellport held very similar views about seeds and livestock, and the call went out across all Hud for the formation of a militia to oust the Descendants from their boltholes.
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