But there was more, much more. For reasons he did not yet understand, certain areas remained off limits. While he went eagerly as far as Liphar would take him, Stavros honored the Sawls’ need for concealment, whatever it might be, and therefore could only guess at how extensive these ancient burrowings might actually be.
They hurried along the wide tunnel past the elaborately carved and paneled doors of the Woodworkers’ Hall. The floor was paved with broad square stones, smoothly level but for two faint cart tracks, one reflecting the wear from inbound traffic and the other, outbound. Stavros recalled Clausen pointing out, in a rare moment of bothering to connect physical and social phenomena, that the rock used for paving was not particularly soft, thus the Sawls must have been using carts with the same wheelbase for hundreds of years.
Hundreds? thought Stavros. More like thousands. The language alone could tell you that. But how many? How often has the Stonemasons’ Guild repaved these tunnels? Stavros had asked that question once, in an attempt to find an indicator of societal age that did not rely on a shared standard of time. Liphar had replied that the masons’ guild books would contain all such records but that he would have to find a guildsman who both could and would search them for such useless information.
Beyond the guildhall, they skirted a residential area inhabited by members of the one of three work shifts that was currently in the sleep part of their cycle. Solid doors were rare in the Caves, wood being too precious to waste in the name of privacy. An embroidered fabric or tooled leather drape more often served to shut off a Sawl domicile from the public corridors. Stavros followed Liphar quietly past the rows of darkened doorways. A thought nagged at him. When they were into the wide lateral corridor that ran behind the living quarters, he touched the young man’s shoulder as they stood aside to let a train of carts rumble by.
“So where did the Council put us, Lifa?”
Liphar read his subtext accurately. He tossed a conspiratorial nod in the direction they had come. “New cave. Away. More good landur.”
“Land-er,” Stavros corrected. “Better than the Lander?”
Liphar nodded. “Bettur wokind home.”
“Better?” Wokindu-moten loosely translated as “heads-above-our-own.” The Sawls had settled on a shortened version of the phrase as their nickname for their uninvited visitors.
“Away,” repeated Liphar.
Stavros hoped that “better” and “away” in this case implied that the new cave would put the Terrans where the Sawls could more easily keep an eye on them. He could not recall when he had decided that the Sawls needed protection from the other Terrans. Something Danforth had said, or Clausen, had tipped the balance. It did not take him long to realize that the Guild Council was way ahead of him in this regard.
Liphar turned right at an intersection, heading farther inward. Stavros was now in unfamiliar territory. The corridor twisted and narrowed as they left the heavily traveled areas. They met no passersby and crossed no other tunnels for a long stretch. The floor was unpaved, unevenly worn. The walls met the rough-hewn ceiling in an imperfect curve. The only breaks in the stone were the regularly spaced lamp niches. Along this section of tunnel, as few as every third or fourth oil lamp was lit.
Then they passed several intersections in a row. Liphar slowed at the last, hesitated to gnaw at his fist in sudden indecision, then made a quick turn into the unlit opening. The rock pinched in so closely that they could not proceed side by side. Stavros sensed a low ceiling in the darkness. He reached and touched sharp-edged stone only inches above his head. He could barely see Liphar ahead of him. He sneezed in the cold and dust. His exhaustion was returning, dragging at his limbs, slowing his pace.
“Lifa!” he called softly, overpowered by the need to sit down.
Liphar came back along the tunnel murmuring Sawlish encouragements together with what sounded to Stavros like an apology for taking him in the back way. And then, around a corner so tight that Stavros’s bare shoulder was scraped raw by the rock, there was amber light pouring through a small archway.
The air moistened perceptibly. Stavros felt a blessed warmth caress his skin. Liphar halted, staring ahead.
“No say, you, ah?” he whispered. “No say wokind?”
“You mean, don’t tell the others?” Stavros raised a palm. “Lifa, I won’t, unless you say I can. Okay?”
“Okay.” Liphar shot him a nervous grin and a here-we-go shrug.
Stavros could see a crowd milling about beyond the opening. He could hear noise, a good-natured commotion of talk and song and children at play. He wanted to be there, in that rich golden light, but was immobilized by a sense that he was intruding. He felt like a small boy at the top of the stairs, spying on his parents late at night. This ritual, whatever it was, was not intended for his viewing or participation. He put out a hand to hold Liphar back, but the young Sawl had survived his own moment of doubt. He grasped Stavros firmly by the elbow and guided him through the archway.
At first Stavros was sure his imagination was playing tricks on him again. The transition from dark to light, from cold to warm was too sudden to be credible. He squeezed his eyes shut and opened them again. The remarkable vision remained intact.
He stood at the top of a narrow flight of stairs, staring out into a vast golden cavern, as wide as three or four MeetingHalls and so long that the far end shimmered in an amber blur. Tall arched colonnades marched along the walls, framing white-tiled alcoves. The columns were wrapped in fluted ceramic, painted with colored glazes that gleamed in the light of countless chandeliers of porcelain and glass. The ceiling above the chandeliers was masked by a maze of fat white pipes and a haze of steam. Stavros looked up. The pipes were as big around as his own shoulders. He could see no joints except where a pipe angled to vanish into the damp shiny tile of a side wall. The pipes were utterly seamless.
Stavros squinted down into the golden brightness. The flat glassy floor was broken by a neat arrangement of broad shallow pools lined with brilliant multicolored tile. The huge space echoed with the splash and tinkle of water and the hiss of escaping steam. Mist rose from the surface of the pools.
Sawls lounged everywhere, young and old, dressed and undressed, all those who had chilled and dirtied and exhausted themselves evacuating the Lander. They sat around the pools chatting as they washed and soaked, or gathered at the stone gaming tables in the alcoves. Some luxuriated under warm jets issuing from the center of the pools. Children played tag around the shining columns and ran laughing in and out of the water.
“Wow,” said Stavros quietly. “Baths.” His brain struggled to fit this new information into his previous assessment of Sawl culture and technology. Pipes, steam, pressurized hot water, a vast system centralized around a single heat source, he assumed, as no heat source was visible in the cavern. But after six weeks closed in by the dark, rough-walled caves, the clean symmetry was the most disorienting, the sharp corners of the tile and the golden glow of the lamplight on the hard white glaze. It shook Stavros badly to have been so wrong, or so misled.
Liphar urged him forward, onto the narrow stairs. A sweet-scented heat enveloped them. Stavros became aware of a stillness growing within the vast space as the youngster dragged him insistently downward. The crowds on the floor turned to stare in surprise and dubious welcome. He froze at the bottom of the stairs, suddenly breathless with embarrassment. His intrusion on their nakedness was inexcusable. He felt blinded by the sharp breasts of the women, the rounded bellies and the parched limbs, the chests of the men so thin he could have counted every rib. Beside them, he felt obscenely soft and well-fed. He pulled back against Liphar’s grip and groaned in genteel panic, wanting nothing more than to be invisible or to have never come.
But it was too late to undo the intrusion, and Liphar held to his decision stubbornly. He hauled Stavros into the midst of the astonished bathers, toward the steam and the water. In the pools, the children stopped their games, cowed by the resonant silence.
; The crowd parted for Liphar and Stavros to pass, then closed behind them in a solid wall. For the first time since his arrival, Stavros feared for his life in Sawl hands, but he shook it off in shame. He must return the trust that Liphar showed by bringing him to this astonishing place.
They reached the edge of the nearest pool. Liphar stopped. He turned to stare at the crowd in nervous challenge. Having brought matters this far by his own hand, he now seemed to be waiting for some sign from the others. Stavros felt dirty and oversized and pale as a grub. He had taken Liphar’s risks on his behalf too much for granted up until now. He tried to stand a little straighter, to be less of a disgrace at his young friend’s side.
A whispered discussion passed through the crowd. Several older Sawls whom Stavros recognized as guildmasters worked their way to the front ranks to draw each other into what sounded like stiff ideological debate. But the crowd continued to murmur around them and the murmur rose gradually into a groundswell of unofficial approval. Liphar nudged Stavros and grinned. Tentatively, Stavros returned the grin, and the tension in the cavern broke as sharply and noisily as spring ice.
Spontaneous cheering broke out, and laughter, and then everyone wanted to welcome him at once. Acquaintances and friends who had hung back now pushed forward to touch his hand and introduce other friends and families. The children charged about in circles, responding to the energy that rushed through the gathering like a warm breeze. Liphar grinned more broadly. Wild with relief, he rained little pats of celebration on Stavros’s back. Stavros smiled back, out of the depths of his amazement, greeted those he knew and many more that he didn’t. He thanked them for their help with the salvage of his equipment. The language seemed to roll out of his unconscious, neither grammatical or precise, but with a fluidity that astonished him.
Meanwhile, he struggled to right his capsized understanding of Sawl society. He had thought himself more generous than his colleagues in his estimation of Sawl technology.
But this…
Each newly noted detail amazed him further. From along the edges of the pool came the telltale sucking sounds of a circulating water system. The floor was a sheet of ridged glass imbedded with a grid of pipes. The glass was warm to the soles of his feet.
He wondered how they managed such feats without sophisticated tools or machines, then realized that it was not so much the Baths themselves that shook his preconceptions. It was what the Baths implied about the rest of the technology. He had assumed that the Sawl habit of concealment expressed tribal and social taboos until now, when he had a glimpse of what they were really hiding.
Is there more? If they are capable of this, what else…?
It did not occur to Stavros to question his own reaction, which was not to rush back and inform his colleagues of this wonderful discovery. Instead, he felt even more protective of the Sawls than before, more convinced that their secrets must be kept. He was obscurely aware that in conspiring to this concealment, he journeyed into the heart of the dangerous no-man’s-land of divided loyalties on whose outskirts he had been lingering for six weeks.
But for now all that mattered was the heady rush of the Sawls’ approval. He watched as Liphar unwound his togalike drape and tossed it aside to ease his slim brown body into the pool with a long sigh of pleasure. Stavros reached to undo the Velcro fastening at his own waist, then hesitated. He glanced down at his pants as if they could offer some understanding as to why he found it suddenly so difficult to part with them. They were damp, grimy and totally synthetic. Ship’s issue. Plastic rivets at the seams.
He had never felt more alien in his life.
Waiting in the pool, Liphar mistook his hesitation for an attack of modesty. The little Sawl laughed and let loose a sidearm swing that sent hot water cascading into Stavros’s face. He coughed and blinked and shook his head like a dog.
He undid his pants. As they slid down across his buttocks, over his thighs, past his knees, he lived through a long terrifying second. On one side of it he felt utterly exposed and alone. On the other, he stepped out of the muddy huddle of his ship’s clothing with a sense of release that exploded into laughter.
He stood at the edge of the pool, hands on hips, laughing. His laughter was contagious. The children squealed with delight as the crowd joined in. No one knew quite why they were laughing, least of all the off-worlder who had started it, but they knew it felt good.
To Stavros, it was better than good. It was miraculous. Almost as miraculous as the clear hot water washing around him as he slid into the pool, as heat and laughter brought tingling new life to his frigid limbs.
12
Susannah’s dream woke her with a fit of coughing. She lay on a pad of blankets spread in front of a smoking fire. Megan knelt beside it, blowing into the coals and swearing softly. She pushed several dung cakes at it as if she were feeding a wild animal, then sat back on her heels, embarrassed by Susannah’s laugh.
“I used to be good at this Girl Scout stuff, would you believe?” she complained. “How do you feel?”
Susannah stretched cautiously. To her surprise, her body did not cry out in immediate protest. “Pretty good. Not too stiff… the bruises are tender, of course, but…” Her hands were immobilized by thick linen dressings. “How long have I been out?”
Megan considered. “Not long—eight, ten hours.”
“Whew. Whatever the doctor, I mean, that healer gave me, it sure worked.” Susannah sat up, less carefully. “I actually feel terrific. And boy, you know, I had the most amazing dreams up there.”
“Up where?”
“Where he took me.”
Megan shrugged, poking again at the fire. “Must have been dreaming, all right. Two of them brought you down here on a stretcher pretty soon after I left you in the tunnel. You’ve been sleeping like a baby ever since.”
“No. Really?” Susannah lay back, confused. “But I distinctly remember… oh, well.” She peered into the darkness surrounding the fire. “So where is here?”
“Welcome to our new quarters.” Megan gestured grandly around. “McPherson and I call it the Black Hole. Weng of course refuses to sink to our level, but then she’s still insisting it’s only temporary.”
“It’s still raining?”
“Oh yes.” Megan nodded grimly. “With a vengeance.”
“No sign of…?”
“No.”
“Have you been able to contact CRI?”
“Nope.”
Susannah sucked at her cheek and glanced around pensively. “Sure is dark in here.”
“Oh.” Megan turned up the battery lamp at her side. “Sorry. Conserving power, you know.”
The light revealed a good-sized cavern, longer than it was wide, with a lowish uneven ceiling. The walls were only crudely finished but for a section near the front, where smooth stone met flat floor in a gentle curve and the beginnings of a lamp niche echoed the curl of the entry arch. The cave was empty but for a jumble of familiar crates and equipment cases.
“This is a new cave,” Meg explained with a wave at the pile of stone rubble that had been hastily swept into a back corner. “They were still digging it out. Part of the western expansion, they tell me. Stav says Tyril has promised to get her cousin the brickmaker to fix us up a proper firepit, and Weng’s worked out some plan for using the crate lids to build a sleeping platform in the rear there. This lying on stone is hell on my old bones.”
“I notice they’ve left us alone.”
“The Sawls, you mean? In here, yes. But step two feet down that corridor outside and there’s someone right at your side. It’s going to be hard on them now we’re here all the time. They’ll have to do shifts.”
“They have been keeping track of us, haven’t they. Like Emil said.”
“Certainly. I would too, if I were them.”
“Why should they suspect us of meaning them harm?”
Megan gazed at her friend with bemused incredulity. “Susannah, I swear, I look at you sometimes and ask myself, c
an she really be that naive? It’s like with Clausen, you…”
“Don’t start, Meg. I feel good, but not that good.”
Megan shrugged and returned her attention to the still-smoking fire.
After a while, Susannah murmured, “I wonder if I could talk Tyril or Liphar into taking me up there again.”
Meg raised an eyebrow, shook her head.
“Well, I know I was somewhere, Meg!” Susannah sat upright. “Somewhere like a hospital ward, I swear! I wasn’t that out of it!”
“If you say so.”
“It would be great to work with that healer for a while, see what Sawl medicine is like.”
A light bobbed in the narrow entry tunnel leading to the main corridor. Weng’s voice called a strained but polite thank-you to someone outside. She snapped off her lamp as soon as she entered the cavern, and made her way slowly to the fire. She sat down on a nearby crate without speaking, tucking loose strands of hair back into her silver bun. Belatedly, she noticed that Susannah was awake.
“Ah, Dr. James. A relief to have you back among us.”
Susannah smiled with professional concern. “None too soon, I see. You look exhausted, Commander. Are you neglecting that regimen I gave you?”
Weng forced her back into a straighter line. “I keep up as best I can, Dr. James, given the situation.” Her mouth drew itself together and she gave a small sigh. “Lieutenant McPherson has disobeyed my orders,” she reported to Megan finally.
“She went out by herself?”
The Wave and the Flame Page 11