Liphar stirred and brought over the video gun. He knelt with it at Stavros’s side. “Ibi?” he inquired in a whisper. “Tel khem, Ibi!”
Stavros turned to him slowly, his jaw still slack. His awe relaxed into bewilderment. “I sure hope so,” he muttered hoarsely.
With mechanical efficiency, he stored the recording and the preliminary translation in the permanent memory, then pulled all the plugs, His slump was pensive.
“It isn’t exactly a creation myth, is it?” Megan began. “But what’s interesting is that all over the explored universe, it’s the youngest child who gets ganged up on in the ancient legends. Significant?”
“Why isn’t it a creation myth?” asked Susannah.
“There’s nothing about creation in it.”
“You mean, no void or firmaments?”
“No creator.”
“The king?”
“Creators don’t usually grow old and die,” Meg reminded her.
Stavros made a noise of distracted protest, then seemed surprised when both women turned to him expectantly. “What? Oh… well, the translator’s not clear on that point. About what happened to the king. If it was a king.” His reply was more than usually disjointed, though he was clearly struggling to appear collected. “He grew old or ripe or dark. I think we can exclude ‘ripe’ as a possibility for now.” He unbuckled the power pack from Liphar’s back and handed it to him to put away in its case.
“Perhaps he simply left,” Megan proposed. “Not an unfamiliar variation, the god who creates a world, then splits.”
“A sorry excuse for a god,” Susannah murmured.
“But he was ‘skilled in the ways of power’… or ‘weather,’ ” mused Stavros, regaining his focus. “You recognize the warring siblings, of course.”
“Fire-eyed Lagri,” said Susannah quietly.
“And she of the lavender ice.” He rolled the words in his mouth like a lyric.
“The middle child must be your unnamed multitude,” said Megan. She sighed. “Truthfully, I’d hoped for more. It’s like a piece of mythical reporting, really, without much moral comment.”
“Oh, I think the part about the sisters betraying the father’s charge implies moral censure,” said Susannah.
“Betrayed or forgot,” reminded Stavros.
Susannah frowned. “How could you forget such a thing?”
“There is an interesting sense of the original trouble coming from the outside,” said Megan. “Even before the king died, war or darkness fell on the land, am I remembering it right?”
“Let me refine the translation,” said Stavros. “There must be a frieze somewhere to match it. That’ll answer some questions. Meg, about this idea of a separate ritual language… I am beginning to think there is a kind of language within a language here—” He was interrupted by the return of the knocker at the doors. This time, the appeal was more insistent. The apprentice priests chatting on the back tier fell silent. The girl left Kav Daven’s side and whispered across the brick to draw back the heavy beam. The doors flew open.
Kav Ashimmel waited in the archway, with a retinue of priests behind her. An unfamiliar gray-white light crept past the threshold. It etched Ashimmel with a pallid halo that left her face in shadow. Liphar gasped, then sprang to his feet and dashed past Ashimmel and the crowd of priests to stand in the middle of the FriezeHall, staring straight up. The same pale light caressed his face, which slowly broke into a joyful grin.
Stavros rose, laying aside his keypad. “My god,” he murmured.
“What is it?” demanded Susannah. Shouts and singing rang in the farther corridors. The other watchers on the tiers gathered themselves and their children and surged down and across the floor, sweeping the Terrans along with them. They joined Liphar in the middle of the patterned floor, where the blue and green circles were waking to new life, and all looked up.
“The hovering darkness above the chandeliers had transformed into a realm of light.
“But where’s it coming from?” asked Susannah.
Stavros pointed. “From the clerestory, below the vaulting.”
“No, I mean…” Still she could not comprehend.
Liphar dropped his eyes from the light to send an awe-filled stare through the flame-carved archway, past the silent Ashimmel, whose message was demonstrating itself, past the astonished little girl, over the embers lowering on the brick and straight into the heart of an old man’s blind smile.
“It’s the dawn,” said Stavros. “The sky is clear.”
Beside them, Liphar exulted softly, “Embriha Lagri!”
BOOK THREE
“Thou, Nature, art my goddess…”
King Lear,
Act I, sc. ii
22
The jubilant families and apprentices gathered up Ashimmel and her retinue and carried them away down the FriezeHall in a sudden burst of cheers and laughter. Liphar danced around the astonished Terrans like an excited terrier. He snatched at Stavros as the linguist spun back to grab his equipment where it waited in the StoryHall, hard white against the fiery brick.
“No, no!” Liphar exclaimed. “Later, that. Come now, you!” He turned and sped away. The now-empty FriezeHall echoed with the rumble of distant celebration. Stavros gave his cases a single bewildered glance and bolted after Liphar.
Megan and Susannah followed, pacing down the long hall past the rows of glowering friezes. Susannah held back for Megan’s sake, though she longed to be running with Stavros, with the others. She heard singing now and the marble floor vibrated like a drumskin with the passage of thousands through the tunnels below.
The dawn! She wished for Megan to hurry, to be younger, lighter.
The dawn! She rejoiced, while another part of her brain scolded her for allowing the irrational possibility that she had just witnessed a true feat of priestly weather magic.
Is logic really this fragile?
“Coincidence,” she muttered aloud.
“No way,” replied Megan, who was not supposed to have heard. “That old priest was out checking the signs. He knew the dawn was coming, even we knew that. And he knew the weather was going to break. Why else would he decide to start his performance in the middle of the night?”
“Probably wasn’t the middle of the night for him.”
“I’m telling you, he arranged the whole thing.”
The Sisters glared down at them from a frieze that rose the full height of the hall. Stavros and Liphar were distant shadows fleeting in and out of dim pools of light, flying toward the ramp head. Susannah’s stride lengthened unconsciously.
A setup. Now that’s a nicely rational explanation. Why didn’t I think of that? She found herself dancing in place, like Liphar, to slow her pace. “But why would he need to do that? To convince us?”
Megan chuckled, as if Susannah’s innocence were the quaintest thing imaginable. “Of course! It won’t hurt his credibility with his own folk if the Wokind appear to be impressed by this show of power. Remember, Stav said Ashimmel’s been accusing us of being pawns of Valla Ired. Kav Daven could now claim to have brought us around to the other side. Don’t you know Liphar’s going to be spreading this tale for many days to come, about how Kav Daven stood at the right hand of Lagri while she brought back the sun?”
“And you used to say the Sawls didn’t really believe in their myth!”
“I exaggerated for emphasis. They do and they don’t. It’s complicated.”
“Well, they certainly believe in some of it. When Liphar and I were caught in the storm on that mountain, he wasn’t invoking his gods for my benefit.”
Megan scoffed. “Liphar’s in training to be a priest-what do you expect?” Then she slowed, considering. “Besides, how do you know he wasn’t?”
“Oh, Meg.” Faint music and cheering floated up the FriezeHall. Susannah fidgeted. Sometimes she pictured Megan as Sisyphus’ rock. “Sometimes you just have to trust your instincts.” She peered ahead into the near-darkness, wondering if
they had missed the turning at the ramp head.
“Of course, there’s some belief,” Megan continued, plodding along at the measured pace of her words. “Despite the seeming lack of a system of religious ethic, this is a society structured around a religion: the weather. The priests would have no power at all if there were no belief.” Then she added significantly, “And no income. The real question is the exact nature of that belief. Are the goddesses, as Stavros claims, incarnate or not’? Do the priests have a hot line to them’? Remember, the priesthood is often the police force in a primitive society, using superstition to keep the people in line.”
“Except here, the Guild Council holds the civil authority, not just the priests.”
“Well then, a dual authority,” amended Megan. “Church and State. Hearts and Minds, or in this case, Hearts and Bellies.”
Ahead, Liphar suddenly reappeared, passing through a shaft of light falling from the clerestory. Susannah resisted the urge to grab Megan and run. “Weng claims Sawl society’s structured like a ship’s crew, with every Sawl doing his or her job in support of the whole. But she’s also having trouble deciding who the captain is.”
“Weng’s viewpoint on that subject is hardly objective.”
“It’s as objective as any of ours.”
Megan sniffed. “Well, all I’m saying is that the levels of belief are more complex than Stavros would have it, with all his mystic cant about ‘knowing’ that gods walk the earth. The Sawls are a pragmatic people.”
We keep laying down these generalizations, Susannah thought uneasily. She tensed her shoulders against the chill that tickled the back of her neck. Liphar had stopped to wait in the shaft of gray light. On the walls, jeweled eyes glimmered like morning stars. “I think Stavros also exaggerates for emphasis, to fuel his argument, just like you.”
“Not just like me,” Megan insisted. “I ponder. Stavros acts. I question. Stavros accepts.”
Susannah let the tired subject of Stavros’s methods pass. “I don’t know with Kav Daven, though: if this was planned, his timing was impeccable.”
Megan’s shrug was confident. “That’s why he’s a successful priest.”
They caught up with Liphar in the light of the clerestory. Stavros was nowhere in sight. The young Sawl beckoned them eagerly toward’ the ramp head, toward the shouts and singing below. As they stood at the top of the slope, Susannah felt as if the very air were in motion, drawing them down into the teeming mass of rejoicing Sawls.
“Come, you!” Liphar called, and danced away down the ramp.
The crowd flowed like a living river across the vast market plaza. Many had come straight from their guild halls, with the clay drying on their hands or the dye still fresh on their leather aprons. Others wore whatever their hands had found first when the joyous alarms had waked them from a sound sleep. Children chased each other through the throng with high-pitched squeals. The youngest rode wide-eyed on their elders’ shoulders. Grandmothers and grandfathers perched in the front of little two-carts, with fat canvas sacks jostling in the box behind them. The shaggy hakra hauled their loads with a jauntier step than usual, their bright eyes eager, their noses working.
“Exodus!” Susannah murmured.
The two women hesitated at the bottom of the ramp. Liphar waved, his guide duty done, and bounded off into the crowd. Megan was already breathing hard. Susannah awaited only the proper moment to plunge in. Once into that current of humanity, it would drag her along irresistibly. There was no sign of hostility toward the Terrans now. Men and women called to them, laughing, gesturing them onward. Susannah took a step forward, and the current swept around her as gently and firmly as an arm laid about her waist. She grabbed Megan’s hand to pull her along. They were carried around the wide plaza in a spiral. The new light of dawn filtered like dust down the huge ventilation shaft to touch the curls of two small children splashing in the stone water trough. The throng moved on toward the bright signs and lanterns of the MarketHall.
In the MarketHall, the shops stood empty. The proprietors and their customers had gone on ahead with the first wave. The signboards and painted banners swayed as if in a breeze, presiding over a wake of scattered gaming pieces, handcarts heaped with merchandise, deserted toys and the occasional lonely broom parked unceremoniously beside its pile of litter.
Susannah knew from the reproof in Megan’s eye that she was grinning like a fool. She started to try to explain her sudden giddiness but was happy to be drowned out by voices around them raised in boisterous song. Two songs were begun at once, and the singers faltered in laughter and began again, each choosing to sing what the other had started first. The singing was throaty and disorganizedly cheerful, at times inaudible over the cheering and chatter and rattle of cartwheels as the throng swept along. Small bands of reed-and-pipers marched among the singers, their sweet shrillings attempting a more disciplined music.
An intersection approached, where another ramp fed in from the upper levels. Susannah spotted three of the midwives, down from the Physicians’ Hall with their apprentices. The Head Midwife, Xifa, still wore her stained linen smock with its many pockets, baggy from use. The women’s drawn, hardworking faces were glazed with relief, as if the coming of the sun and the change of mood could affect some of the cures that they had been unable to. Behind them came the Master Healer, who returned Susannah’s fisted victory salute with a wan smile and a wave.
“That’s Ghirra, you remember?” Susannah said loudly into Megan’s ear. “The one who patched me up after the storm?” She pointed him out as the crowd carried them by.
“I remember,” replied Megan, craning her head back with interest. “You don’t forget a face like that.”
Susannah laughed. “Yes, well, there is that. Quite a beauty, is Ghirra.” She grinned at Megan teasingly. “Unattached, too, as far as I can tell. And not much younger than you are.”
“Big for a Sawl,” Megan commented.
“Like Aguidran, you know, the Master Ranger? Ghirra’s her twin brother.” Susannah sidestepped a teenager pulling a cart laden with bulging sacks. “They’re from the northeast, apparently, another settlement called Ogo Dul. They came here on a trading trip when they were babies and lost their parents in a mudslide. One of the herdsmen raised them.”
“Guess they’ve done all right for themselves here,” observed Megan. “Both Masters of their guilds.”
Susannah nodded. “Ghirra is a gifted healer,” she replied simply.
“And Aguidran is a powerhouse,” Megan added. “Quite a pair.”
They overtook a lumbering high-wheeled wagon. It was stained berry-red. Clusters of white streamers were tied to its corner posts. Megan peered through its slats as they passed. Inside, a leggy wooden device wound with leather strapping sat on top of another load of canvas sacks.
“Plow,” she remarked, then caught at Susannah’s sleeve and shouted over the din, “Plow!”
Susannah shrugged an inquiry. The noise swelled as the tunnel narrowed.
“I just noticed…” Megan yelled.
Grinning, Susannah burlesqued deafness. The Sawls’ joy was too contagious to dampen it with serious discussion. She thrilled to the roar of a thousand voices echoing along the rock, to the pressure of moving bodies all around her. The reed-and-pipes urged her to hurry. She took a little skip, childlike, laughing.
Megan caught up to yell into her ear. “Don’t you feel you should be carrying a rake or something?” She pointed at the ranks of poles sticking up from the crowd like a forest of porcupine quills. “That’s what I just noticed.”
Everyone, no matter what age or guild affiliation, carried some sort of digging tool. Susannah saw rakes and harrows of all shapes and sizes, broad-bladed shovels and fat wooden picks lashed to their handles with heavy oiled thongs. She saw even an occasional pitted iron hoe, carried reverently aloft like a relic.
“Now you can really see how crowded the Caves would feel if they all worked on the same shift,” she said.
> Megan nodded. “It was a mob armed like this that stormed the Bastille,” she joked, and slapped the heavy wheels of the wagon. “Tumbrels and all.”
Susannah found the image hopelessly inappropriate.
“You wait, though,” Megan pursued. “We’ll see that this is no act of spontaneous celebration. I mean, when was the last time you took a plow to a party?”
Ah, Meg. Always analyzing things. Suddenly Susannah envied Stavros. Why should she not lose herself impulsively in the crowd, as he had done? Why be immune to such contagious joy? She let the human current carry her forward a little faster, turning to look at Megan, who plodded along, absorbed in her ponderings of priests and plows. The throng flowed around her like water around a rock. As she glanced up to discover herself being left behind, Susannah waved guiltily but did not fight to slow her forward drift. Megan waved back and settled in to move along at her own pace.
Alone among the Sawls, Susannah felt lighter, relieved of sharing the burden of Megan’s more cynical vision. Realistic, Meg would say, she reminded herself. She fell in step with a young musician who shot her a friendly glance over her pipes. Her brightly colored guild tabard was slightly askew, donned in haste and never adjusted. The narrowing of the corridor compressed the crowd so that Susannah walked shoulder to shoulder with her. The hoarse singing around them coalesced into a more unified voice and a single song-chant surfaced through the random cheering. Susannah swung her arms to the rhythm as the chant was repeated through verse after verse. Though she could not pick out the words, the melody soon became familiar. She began to hum along, to the delight of the young musician beside her, who leaned toward her and piped all the louder. Susannah reveled in not caring for the moment where she was going or why.
The human river slowed at a bend to stream thickly down a wide ramp that dropped in a spiral through two major levels with their additional half-levels. From each joining passage, a tributary flow swelled the river further. With a final banking turn, the ramp opened into the lowest level still in use. Here, the animal smells were damp and rich, and the lighting dim. The strong downdraft made the lamps flare and gutter in their niches. The main tunnel was low and wide, with countless barrel-vaulted corridors leading off to both sides. The dairy herds bellowed from their stable caverns and the side corridors bustled as the herdsmen led out huge broad-shouldered beasts that strained against their halters with excitement, nostrils flared to catch the changed air.
The Wave and the Flame Page 19