The Book of the Ler

by M. A. Foster

  “So, Han, here we eat our last. Now how far can we go?”

  “If we were in good shape, about three days’ worth, but as we are. I’d guess no more than two, to amount to anything.”

  She looked around. “So here is where it will end, our most amazing thing, something no others know. I do not fear it. Look around us, look at this.”

  Han did as she asked, and in the swift evening fading light, the buttes and buttresses of the gorge reared above them, sizable mountains in their own rights. Now the high range was out of sight behind the western rim. Han was thankful for that, for he had felt daunted and humbled in the sight of those naked, high rocks. No human, nor any other conceivable creature, would ever walk those passes, climb those peaks, “because they were there” or for any other reason. There was no air. They towered miles above the high plains, higher than any mountains Han had ever seen or viewed pictures of.

  Liszendir began again, not waiting for him to reply. “You cannot see it, but I can. There is far-violet in the deep shadows, nefalo perhos ’em spanhrun. The rocks, the river below. This is a place of giants in the earth, heroes, reison, cold, relentless, cruel beauty. I have journeyed far to see this.” She seemed entranced by the spectacle, like a child again, he thought. She looks death and termination in the face and says, “How lovely. Look at the view.” Han saw only oblivion and darkness forever. Pain and cold and the big sleep.

  Night fell and they slept. In the morning, which was coming later and later, they picked up what they had left, the blankets and the crossbow, and continued on their way down. They saw nothing to give them hope. There were plants, now, fairly common, but they looked suspicious, and neither one of them wanted to eat them. And they were wrong about two days’ travel. He knew that they could not go any farther than they got this night. And as the night closed about them, she went far ahead of him, pushing what was left of her strength to the uttermost. In the last light, he saw her far below, her face shining with joy. Joy? It was probably, he thought, a combination of fear and hysteria, which he was feeling himself. And exhaustion and starvation. Yes, perhaps she was right—it was better to face it this way, than to meet it cringing.

  She was waiting for him by a large boulder, her face full of happiness. Han hesitated to join her, fearing her insanity, if that was what it was. But she did nothing more irrational than falling into his arms and pulling him down in the shelter of the rock. Not for love, for they were long past the strength to accomplish it, even a part, but for comfort against the night they knew was coming for them. She cuddled against him like a small child, and later, semi-conscious, she began talking in her sleep. It was Multispeech again, and went on at a steady pace for a long time, the voice, now soft, whispering next to him, saying many things simultaneously that he would never know. She would not stop for long. He looked at her face before he went to sleep; it was very thin, drawn and worn, but she was smiling as she talked, happy, even rapturous. She probably did not expect to wake up. Neither did Han. He stroked her hair, and went to sleep.

  But they did wake up the next morning, early, with the first light. They arose listlessly, silently. This would be the last day, absolutely. He felt he could not walk another step. Once more they gathered up their blankets, more for the reassurance of ritual than for any other reason, and automatically started around the boulder.

  Before them spread not another interminable slope down, but a large, level terrace stretching parallel to the river, still far below. And not fifty paces from them was a house. A rude stone house, with thin blue smoke rising slowly out of the chimney. Lights within the house glowed yellow in the deep blues and violets, overlain by the nude pearly sky overhead, of the morning of the planet Dawn. A chill was in the air.

  He looked at Liszendir. Tears were streaming down her thin cheeks, and as he watched, she slowly folded up and sank to the ground. He picked her up; she was light, hardly a burden at all, a mere collection of bones. He knew. She had been starving, so he could get the lesser amount he needed. And he knew why she had been so carefree the last day. Carrying the small load, Han started for the house, but he only made it as far as the gate of the dooryard before he, too, sank down. The owner, much to his surprise, found them there about an hour later, as he was making his morning rounds.

  The farmer was human, and had a wife and two daughters, big strapping homely girls, all of which Han noticed very little. He ate, and he slept. And ate and slept some more. He heard voices speaking ler Singlespeech, or a version of it. It was far away, and it meant nothing. He slept deeply.

  He finally awoke, clearheaded, to find Liszendir, thin but recovering, sitting on the floor beside his pallet. It seemed to be noon of some day, a day he didn’t know, but he knew one thing. He was recovered. He looked at her, seeing that she had been waiting for him to wake up.

  She asked, “Are you feeling better now? I can tell you that I am.”

  He nodded. She was fleshing out again, but the experience they had been through had molded and eroded and rebuilt in her a new, sober and more thoughtful beauty. Whatever her age-status was in ler glandular terms, she was now neither adolescent nor tomboy, the intriguing ambisexual creature he had met in Boomtown, and loved on Chalcedon. Her eyes reflected the electric blue of the light of the sky.

  “I think you will have trouble talking to them for a while. They speak only Singlespeech, but it has changed even more than the version the Warriors use, and at first, even I had trouble with it. But humans! That is what amazes me, Han, I really must admit to prejudice and wonder why your people persist in speaking such irregular and redundant languages. Even when given a regular language, they contrive to make it irregular.”

  “Are they friendly?”

  “Yes, friendly enough, although you will possibly think them rather close-mouthed. I have told them that we escaped the Warriors and walked here from a great battle scene miles to the east, up on the plateau. Better that than the truth. It is all they can handle, and even what I gave them is a lot. They distrust me some, because I am ler, they can see that. But my hair and the way I let it fall straight has convinced them at least that I am not a Warrior. We are heroes, to have walked so far.”

  “You look beautiful.”

  She looked away sharply for a moment, as if the remark pained her. Then she turned back. “We can also get down the gorge, on the river. It gets low in this season, and they say that they raft down after the harvest. And if we will stay and help them, they will take us when they go to market. Guess where it is? On the other side of the mountains! The gorge does go through.”

  She looked back outside again, as if searching for a reminder of some knotty problem. “There is something very strange, here,” she said at last. “I hear echoes of the proper words for seasons in his speech, but they have additives which distort them terribly, more than any other part of the language. If my ears do not lie to me, I understand from him that there are eight seasons on this planet. Two winters every year. I have never heard of the like. How could that be? Would the high mountains cause it?”

  Han suddenly sat upright. It was what he had been waiting to hear, the missing pieces that fit the puzzle of the swift sun drifting to the north so fast. “What season is it now?”

  “North, or short winter is coming. This is little autumn.”

  “What happens in short winter?”

  “It will get dark, but not as long as long winter, which they fear.”

  “Now I know. I suspected when we were up on the plateau, walking, but it didn’t make sense to me then. I have heard of planets like this one, but all the known ones are out of the habitable zone for our kind of life forms. They are called uranoid planets, after the first one discovered, back in the old Earth system. Remember Chalcedon? It had no seasons because it had a regular orbit and no axial tilt. This planet has an extreme tilt; its plane of rotation is closer to perpendicular to the plane of orbit. It means that from the ground, the sun will be over the poles once during the year for each pole
. The polar regions overlap the tropics. It will be a strange place with a stranger climate. Probably the only thing that makes it livable is the presence of high mountains, high enough to block mass circulation of the atmosphere with the rotational direction.”

  “The days are already shorter, and the sun is more to the north than when we were walking.”

  “Right. Here, they have eight seasons, four when the sun is to the north, four when it goes to the south. At the poles, it would be even stranger; if we were there, we would see the sun rise, spiraling around the horizon, and then it would climb to the zenith, or near it, still spiraling. It would wiggle around overhead for a while, and then start spiraling back down. Then it would get dark for a long time, three-quarters of the year. And cold. It must be hellish at the poles.”

  “How?”

  “Temperature. At the poles, once the sun rises, it stays risen and in a day, illuminates every object from all sides. It probably gets hot enough on the surface to melt lead in the polar summer, and in the long dark winter, cold enough to freeze some gases out of the air.”

  “Yes! He said that. I did not understand; I thought it was the language. He said that the air freezes in places and falls to the ground.”

  Han thought some more, then asked, “And how far is it to the ocean?”

  “More problems for you to figure out. He said that there wasn’t such a thing anywhere near here. He didn’t even know the word. He used the old word for pond or lake, or so I thought. I corrected him, and he said not that, but a lake, and he waved his arms around to show me how big. Not very big at all. A salt lake, very far down and very hot in the summer. There are salt deposits all around, and it sometimes boils. They go there and get salt in other seasons. But he had never heard of an ocean.”

  “That is curious.”

  “However it is, over the mountains are people. Plenty of them, too many for him. Human and ler, both. But while he was telling me all about the region, thinking I’m from a far country, the whole time he was talking about the ler, not once did he mention the four parents, the four children. They marry by twos, human style. Except for the Warriors, whom he fears greatly. They do something else, and it isn’t by fours. He didn’t know what. The word for ‘braid’ does not even exist on this planet.”

  Han didn’t know what to make of that, either. He got up from the pallet, dressed, and started out to meet the farmer. As he did, he looked down at his body, now still thin from their hard trek across the high plateau. He was clean. He looked at Liszendir. She smiled.

  “I pay my debts.” It was the only thing she said, all she ever said about it.

  The farmer and his family were indeed friendly, if somewhat reserved, but they balanced their suspicions of Han and Liszendir with their admiration and awe of their exploit of walking across the bare high plains. He himself had heard that people lived up on the plateau, but he had never seen any direct evidence of it; as far as he knew, the air was too thin for people to live in it. Han and Liszendir agreed with him. The farmer also thought that perhaps the plains were the abode of ghosts and various dire spirits, although Han could not be sure just what he meant; his language was sketchy to begin with, and Han’s command of it was none too good. So, after the local accent, the peculiar usages, the irregularized grammar and the changed phonemes, the ambiguity of the resultant idea in Han’s mind was indeed high.

  But he had been right about the course of the sun of Dawn through the heavens; it did go to the very pole, or very close to it. Of course, no one had actually seen the polar summer—only from the edges, where some mining was done. And in the winters the poles were far worse. The farmer said that once, during south-winter, on a trip north, he had actually seen a fall of dry snow, luckily from the inside of a snug cabin. He was terrified of it, and Han did not blame him; those temperatures were nothing to face with bravado and a hairy chest. A space suit would be more appropriate.

  There were small freeholds all along the gorge, usually in places where large natural terraces had been formed, and they were all completely independent, free of tax and overlord alike. No flags flew in the gorge, no armies marched. Only scattered farm families, making a precarious living between the dangers of wandering nomads, who infested the lower gorge, the cold of the winter, which was more severe on this side of the mountains, and the unknown of the high plains. On the other side, however, the density of population went up; there was even a city, Leilas, which the farmer regarded as the very nadir of corruption. There was another range west of the large mountains, separated from them by a trough, which was extensively cultivated. The river had cut a low point through the trough as well as the rocks, and the trough actually had two arms, south and north, which rose gradually away from the great river. The lower parts were generally human, and were ruled from Leilas, while the upper parts were mostly ler, and were ruled from, it was reputed, castles perched high up in the farthest reaches of the troughs.

  As the description of Dawn went on, Han was disappointed by the news. It was a primitive society, more feudal than anything else. And in addition, the natives had to put up with an impossible climate which kept them constantly at bay, and an incredible geography, which kept them isolated and ignorant. To the farmer’s knowledge, there were no oceans or seas—just lakes. Dawn consisted of vast, rearing mountain ranges, which were separated by huge sinks, or high plateaus. Earthquakes were common, in fact, so common that Han could feel very slight tremors almost constantly. The difference was not between earthquake and no-earthquake; it was between a greater intensity or a lesser. He tried to visualize the kind of imbalances in the crust which would produce mountains like these. He couldn’t. And besides all that, the specter of the Warriors hung over everything.

  Years would pass with no incidents, and the memory of the Warriors would be forgotten. Then they would come again, to sift the people. They never took many, but they always took some. Naturally, they were never seen again. They generally left the ler of the higher troughs alone. He knew them well, and called them by a curious name: firstfolk. Even Liszendir derived a wry amusement from that.

  No one had any idea about the size of the planet, or anything in the area of astrophysics. They thought the world was flat. Han did not question him too deeply on this subject, knowing that sometimes questions revealed more about the questioner than answers about the answerer, and he did not want to get involved in any kind of religious dispute. A flat world! Archeoforteans! He thought wryly that the theologians of Dawn would have evolved an interesting cosmology to explain the erratic path, or even surrealistic path, their sun followed through the heavens.

  Han and Liszendir, for their part, agreed to stay and help with the harvest, and further, help him dispose of it for the best price in Leilas. Han identified himself as a merchant by trade, and vowed to obtain the best possible price. The farmer, in turn, agreed to transport them down-river in several tendays, depending upon the harvest and the weather.

  Liszendir asked him how they returned from Leilas. He told her that they took their pack animals with them, loaded them in Leilas with the things they needed, and walked back, up the gorge. By the time they got back, it would be in the first half of north-winter, but it was not so bad, and gave them time to prepare for the rigors of the half-year darkness of south-winter. From the times he mentioned, Han hazarded a guess, in Common, to Liszendir, that they were somewhere around thirty degrees north in latitude. The information was not particularly important. They had nowhere to go.

  7

  “This is not the real world. The real world is Yar, a great place of bright cities, towers, magic, fertile ground and gentle rains. For our sins, we were banished and cast forth to Limbo, which is here, by Hoth the Sun-God, and here we expiate the sins of our ancestors. We do not know today what those sins were; they must have been terrible, however, for such a punishment to come to an entire people. It is said that they cannot be described with words. So, we are here. The dual hells are nearby and convenient. One is locate
d in Uttermost North, the other in Uttermost South. Those of excessive passions are cast into the North, where Hoth visits them with fire. The cold-blooded go to the South, where Hoth visits them with cold unimaginable. The Firstfolk maintain the purity of the Word, and the Warriors dispose of the impure in thought and heretics, chiefly from among the young, who are prone to harbor resentments. Those are judged, and sent to the appropriate destination. The Warriors live in the lower heavens, but they follow the orders of Hoth, who goes to all parts of the rocky world, who sees all and judges that we may be deemed fit to return someday to Yar the Beautiful, Yar the Kind.”

  —The story of creation, as told to Liszendir Srith-Karen by Narman Daskin, the farmer of the gorge.

  “It is only when one has somewhere to go that it becomes manifestly important to know precisely where one is.”

  —Cannialin Srith-Moren, woven Deren

  THE RAFT, MADE from boles of light, spongy timbers from the slopes of the gorge, made its clumsy way down the great river, piled high with bales of produce, grains, legumes, and tubers of several sorts. Besides them, there were others on the river as well; Han had seen them pass, just as heavily loaded, poled and steered by crews of dour men who spoke little greeting as they passed me shoals below the farmer’s house. Mostly, they spoke no greeting at all.

  Narman Daskin, the farmer, stood lookout at whichever end happened to be the front at that time. His two daughters, Uzar Rahintira and Pelki Rahintira, worked broad sweeps at the end which happened to be facing rearwards, back upstream. Han and Liszendir wielded poles in the middle. The way was surprisingly smooth, free for the most part of rocks and rapids.

  Pelki had explained why. “The south-spring flood-thaw sweeps the lower gorge clean of rocks and gravels; they all flow down with the great waters and collect in a great wad below Leilas, down on the salt flats by the bitter lake.” So had spoken the younger daughter, the more personable one. The older one, Uzar, was a heavy-set, brooding girl who was no beauty and who said little, even in the way of routine pleasantries. Pelki was no less homely, but she evidenced considerably more animation, and at times almost approached plainness. Han was not deceived. Neither was a prize.