Clausen limped back to McPherson and curled an arm around her shoulders. “She’s not in as bad shape as you think, McP. I had her nearly to the ground before we lost power. A little tinkering, you’ll have her zipping around in no time.”
McPherson resisted being coddled. “You’re out of your mind,” she countered and shrugged away his arm. “I was out there. I saw the damn thing and she’s totaled. Besides, we can’t even get power or comlink working here, never mind get a Sled in the air!”
“This is not the best place for an argument,” reminded Susannah with a glance at the unconscious Danforth.
“Aw, he can’t hear anything!” McPherson retorted, but her voice was subdued and she turned to leave the room. Clausen caught up with her, laid a hand on her shoulder to slow her down to his hampered pace.
“The Sled’s omni is working fine,” he consoled her, as they passed through the curtain. “The high gain’s down but it’s probably just a little shaken up. I didn’t dare go into the housing in all that rain.”
“Emil!” Susannah called, and got no answer. “You really ought to let me look at that ankle,” she insisted and strode off after him.
Ghirra smoothed the linen bed coverings, murmuring briefly with Ampiar, then turned back toward the operating hall. Weng walked alongside.
“I wonder, GuildMaster,” she began.
Ghirra slowed, inclined his head politely.
“I wonder if I might spend some time in your library?”
When he looked puzzled, she indicated the narrow archway with a wave.
Ghirra smiled. “Lyberry?”
Weng nodded. “Books are kept in a library.”
“Ah,” said Ghirra.
An old man in a multipocketed apron thrust himself through the curtain, nearly colliding with Weng. He stared at her accusingly, then bustled off muttering. Two apprentices followed breathlessly. They apologized to Ghirra with big eyes, then hurried after the muttering ancient. Susannah came through the curtain shaking her head.
“All I did was ask him for some cussip to soak Emil’s foot,” she explained to Ghirra in mild exasperation. She turned to Weng. “That’s Ard, the Head Herbalist. I don’t know how Ghirra puts up with him!”
“Cussip, I will get,” Ghirra offered.
“He said something about the weather and growled at me,” Susannah elaborated.
Ghirra threw a questioning glance at Ard’s back, but he nodded to Weng in answer to her request. “Welcome you my… lyberry, Commandur.”
“Thank you, GuildMaster. When I have a moment, I will take you up on that. Perhaps you would care to visit mine sometime, in the Lander? It is not so big as yours but you might find one or two things of interest. I don’t believe you have been down to our Lander yet, GuildMaster.”
“I will come,” Ghirra assured her graciously.
“Excellent. Then I will be off. Dr. James, I hope you intend to get some rest as well?”
“I will, Commander. Soon as I finish here.”
Ghirra accompanied Weng through the curtain while Susannah joined Ampiar at the patient’s bedside. She put a hand to his hot papery skin.
“Still burning up,” she said. Ampiar murmured her worried assent. Susannah smiled and patted the solemn healer’s hand. “Do what you can. I’ll check in later.”
She returned to the operating hall to clean up her instruments and found Ghirra standing beside Clausen’s pack, with a chunk of the frosty lavender rock balanced with caution on his palm, as if it were a holy relic or a snake that might bite him.
“What is it, Ghirra?” She had seen him approach a shattered limb with greater equanimity. He looked up, searching her face as if desperate for an answer but reluctant to reproach her for a trespass he was not sure she shared. Clausen and McPherson stood in the little antechamber leading into the hall, noisily debating the condition of the Sled and plotting their next move. “What?” she asked again, keeping her voice low.
He tilted his palm slightly. The rock flashed star-specks of lamplight. “What does he with this?” he asked gravely.
Susannah opened her mouth to answer, but caught herself as she realized how loaded that answer would be. The Master Healer might as well have asked to see what was inside Pandora’s Box. She felt a slight stab of resentment. It should not fall to her to have to explain the prospector’s intentions, to thus seem to share the blame. That job belonged to someone official, like Weng, or Clausen himself. But then, as she imagined Clausen making his announcement, she realized what a construction of half-truths it would be, no real answer at all. Ghirra deserved better than that.
But how do you tell someone such a thing? Well, Ghirra, he wants to dig up your planet?
It wouldn’t be the entire planet, of course, only what was commercially viable. Susannah had seen strip-mined worlds before. Why now this attack of queasy weakness? Some of the mining companies even terraformed after they were done, usually at the request of the vocal Terran colonies that inevitably sprang up around a mining effort and stayed on to expand and thrive. Susannah pictured one of those colonies and suddenly found herself unaccountably close to tears.
“He wants to dig it up,” she heard herself say. Her voice came out flat and hard. She hoped the notion would strike him as mere offworld eccentricity and that the confrontation could be postponed.
“Why?” Ghirra pursued, as if the thought were not at all inconceivable.
Susannah’s weakness threatened to become physical. “He says it’s lithium. He wants it… some… to take away with him.” Coward! her inner voice shouted. COWARD!!
“Lithy-um.”
“Yes. To study, you know? Emil studies rocks, like I study plants?” She mimed her little field microscope and wished herself a thousand light-years away.
Clausen’s voice floated in from the antechamber. “If we can get enough of these little guys on it, we can haul it right in…”
Ghirra nodded thoughtfully and laid the chunk down among its brethren, then thought again and picked up a smaller one. He wrapped it carefully in a square clean cloth and slipped it into his pocket. He said nothing more about it as he helped gather up the used instruments and linens, but Susannah could sense a hidden smolder of dissatisfaction waiting in him.
He has an ear for the truth, this quiet man, and he knows I have not said it to him. Half-truths, just like Emil.
She told herself that situations like this were precisely why she made sure never to get too personally committed in the field, and in the same thought, realized that her nearness to tears probably meant it was already too late.
If only Emil had come back empty-handed!
But that was again postponing the inevitable. She rethought how she might phrase the prospector’s intentions to make them seem less dire in their consequences, a way she might tell the truth and at the same time disassociate herself from it. She failed.
Heartsick, she tried to make light of the issue by ignoring it. She summoned her best tone of professional intimacy as she hefted an armload of linens and followed Ghirra into the side hall the healers called the hotroom. “Taylor’s a strong one,” she said, dumping the linen into the long stone sink. “If we can get that fever down, I think he’ll be fine.”
“Yes,” Ghirra agreed coolly. “Nhe khem. He has luck.”
“Luck?” She tried smiling at him. “He has us. Two good doctors.”
He returned her smile but a polite distance had settled into his eyes. He loosed the tie that held back his long curls and turned away, calling for his apprentice Dwingen, who came running out of the ward eager for a task. Ghirra bent and murmured briefly in his ear. The child nodded and sped off toward the outer corridor. Looking pensive, Ghirra went back into the operating hall. Susannah tagged after him, already feeling cut adrift from the fraternity that had finally been her support and solace through the long night of storms, when she had faced the growing conviction that she would never see her home again. Again she felt the resentment rise in her.
All this over a damn rock! Or is it just because he knows I’m not dealing straight with him?
But she knew it was childish to expect trust to be given where it wasn’t being offered. Why should the healers offer her the intimacy of their fraternity if she would not offer a commitment in return? Laying out clean linens on the slabs, she watched Ghirra deftly remove the obsidian-flake blade, one of his own, from her scalpel. He squinted at it and set it aside in a bowl with other used blades. These would be passed along to various craft halls that required a sharp but no longer surgical edge. The metal clamps and handles he placed in a ceramic basket pierced with triangular holes that would fit on top of one of the steaming caldrons in the hotroom.
He does nothing without purpose, nothing without good reason, she thought and recalled his uneasiness as he handled the rock. It’s not just me that’s bothering him, then, she decided, it’s something about that rock.
31
Stavros trotted briskly toward the PriestHall. The coffee recently shared with Megan had grabbed his nervous system like a football and was running with it, but his heart’s noisy anticipatory pounding spoke of adrenaline as well as caffeine. He had gained an ally in his secret battle to protect the Sawls. An ally and the rudiments of a plan, both at once.
He saw Liphar in the corridor ahead, standing outside the PriestHall archway in a huddle of debate with four fellow apprentices.
Looks like a union meeting, Stavros thought, but he heard none of the usual excited chatter, only a hiss of urgent whispering. He grinned and waved as Liphar glanced up. Liphar did not grin back. His already anxious expression awoke to near panic. As Stavros drew up beside him, the young man leaped on him, hushing him as he tried to speak. Half pushing, half dragging, Liphar herded him away from the huddle, away from the PriestHall, down the corridor and into the open double doors of the Woodworkers’ Hall.
Two surprised guildsmen drew back from the doorway and nearly dropped the large crate they were carrying. Liphar’s mumbled apology was inaudible over the racket of sawing and hammering from inside the hall. He slipped past a stack of’ crates, hauling Stavros behind him. Sawdust and wood shavings covered the stone floor. Several apprentices pushed at the rubble with brooms, only to have their neat piles scattered by the busy scuffing feet of the journeymen. Racks of rough milled planks lined the walls. Stavros sucked deeply at the sweet heady scent of cut wood. The quartet of long workbenches that filled the center of the cavern were near to being buried in a mountain of crating, most of them already well used and being repaired. Bright new wooden pegging or replaced slats showed hard white against the darker aged wood.
Now Liphar managed a grin, an unconvincing one which he threw at those guildsmen who bothered to look up at his sudden appearance. Woodworkers’ was one of three or four guildhalls with two entrances. Stavros guessed they were used to being used as a shortcut between two main corridors. Liphar kept going, snaking a rapid path among the stacks of finished crates. Finally Stavros tired of being hauled around without explanation. He let his weight drag the smaller man to a halt.
“Lifa, what is going on?”
“Hssst! Hssst!” Liphar insisted. His feet slipped in the sawdust as he tried to pull Stavros onward. “Ibi! Please, come you!”
Stavros relented. At the far end of the hall, a second set of carved double doors yawned open. Crates were piled inside the doors and out in the corridor. A senior woodworker with a list stood among a bustle of apprentices, checking the stacks, directing the movement of crates from one stack to another, matching up the individual guild seals burned into the side of each crate. In the corridor, a handful of Glassmakers loaded their guild’s refurbished crates onto a big hjalk-drawn flatbed wagon. Stavros had never seen a hjalk being used in the upper caverns. The Glassmakers seemed to be in an abnormal hurry to finish the loading and be on their way. Thinking about it, Stavros realized he had never seen Woodworkers’ in quite such an uproar either.
Liphar ducked around the crates and out the door. He sped past the wagon with a backward glance to assure himself that Stavros still followed. The linguist jogged gamely after him.
In the opposite wall of the corridor was the entrance to Keth-Toph, the grab bag, all-important guild whose name literally meant “LifeGuild.” The Terrans tended to refer to it by the more prosaic nickname “Heat and Light.” Liphar slowed, glanced up and down the corridor, and slipped through the open archway. Stavros shrugged and followed.
Keth-Toph was an island of serenity compared to Woodworkers’ and the peripheral corridors. From a tiny deserted antechamber that served as the local light station, Liphar led the way through a maze of narrow shelf-lined caverns. The shelves were stocked with a now-dwindling supply of brown soap and tallow candles, bundles of lampwick, ceramic lamp bowls and glass chimneys. One long cavern held row after row of tall graceful jars for lamp oil. Less than a quarter of them bore the wax seal that indicated they were still full. A larger cavern off to one side was pitch-dark but reeked of dried dung cakes. They passed through a small messy workshop for the repair of lamps, also deserted, and came into the central guildhall, a large circular cavern dominated by the traditional broad table with numerous backless stools for guild meetings. In a gesture worthy of the eccentricity for which Keth-Toph was famed, a single-bowled oil lamp hung over each and every stool. Against the wall, a ring of giant caldrons, encrusted with use, hung over soot-blackened firepits. The hall was empty and the fires cold, but Stavros could imagine, from the touch of it that lingered, the stench and heat in the RoundHall during the darktime rendering of fat for soap and candle making.
Liphar finally came to rest, leaning against the great central table under one of the three oil lamps that remained lit.
Stavros folded his arms, breathing heavily. “Well?” he demanded laughingly.
But the young Sawl was not playing games. He shook his head and began to pace while he caught his breath.
“Okay, Lifa, what’s going on? What’s all the secrecy, and what’s with the crates in Woodworkers?”
“Anu!” exclaimed the Sawl unhappily.
Stavros considered this. “Anu” referred both to the giant wooden priest-horns and to the thunder whose sound they imitated. Thunder was said to be the war horns of the goddesses, blowing the challenge, the call to battle. But the priest-horns were reserved for ritual use. “Thunder?” he replied. “Yes, I heard it.”
“Sisterfight maybe, too soon!”
“Lifa, the thunder was very far away.”
Liphar shook his head, unconsoled. “Ashimmel, Aguidran, very worried, very mad both!”
“Yeah, at each other.” Stavros tried a smile. “Just like the Sisters.”
“Aguidran want go. Ashimmel say no, bad khem go now!”
“Go where?” Stavros thought to distract him from his tightening spiral of anxiety.
“Ogo Dul,” replied Liphar as if it were obvious. As he read Stavros’s surprise, he stopped pacing and spread his arms wide. “Big markethall,” he explained. “Go there, we. Make trade always.”
“And that’s what all the crates are for. But it sounded like Aguidran was saying everyone goes.”
“Yes,” said Liphar. “All go, we. Some stay with crop.” Then he added with a touch of returning mischief, “No good stay here. No fun. Many beautiful lady, Ogo Dul.”
Stavros grinned, his mind balking as he tried to imagine five thousand men, women and children picking up and trekking off simultaneously, like an army on the march, in search of markets and mates. The logistics were staggering. But suddenly he saw possibilities for a magnificent cover for the salvage operation he had decided he must carry out in secret. On the other hand, if the entire population deserted the Caves, who would be left to keep Clausen from invading them unchallenged?
“What about the Kethed?” he remembered. “Did you talk to any of the guildmasters?”
Liphar’s anxious frown returned. “No Kethed now. After come back Ogo Dul.” He lowered his voice even in t
he deserted hall. “All guildmaster no want hear bad khem now.” He pushed himself off from the table and began to pace again. “Anu bad khem, Clausen bad khem, Ashimmel say no go Ogo Dul, Guildmaster say need go, say need trade very bad, no food, no other thing. FoodGuild big mess, not know go trade food, stay here keep crop. All guildmaster very worried, no listen Ashimmel, no listen bad khem. Big mess, Ibi!” He stopped and murmured desperately, “Too soon now, anu!”
Stavros’s head swam with the complexities of politics. “You mean, the guildmasters won’t listen to anything that might stand in the way of this trading trip, even if we’re trying to warn them for their own good, plus we have to keep Ashimmel thinking all Terrans are terrific or she’ll use us as an excuse to get the trip called off? So who do we go to, to both keep the Caves protected and go to Ogo Dul?”
Liphar peered into the shadows and moved closer, as if Ashimmel herself might be listening from concealment in one of the giant black caldrons. “Must talk Aguidran, you,” he whispered.
“But she’s not going to want to hear about any bad khem either. She wants to go to Ogo Dul.”
Liphar squirmed visibly, then spoke in a rush. “Aguidran not same, others. Guildmasters see only food and trade. Ashimmel hear anu, bad khem, get most worried, want stay in Caves always. Aguidran not same. Aguidran hear anu, get mad.” He hesitated, then seemed surprised to hear himself whisper, “Aguidran get mad Rek.”
“Mad at the Sisters?” Stavros worked hard to repress a smile. He liked the image of the weathered Ranger howling her rage at the heavens.
Liphar nodded disapprovingly, but then he added, “Aguidran not think Wokind come Valla Ired.”
That was Liphar’s reasoning, then. Aguidran wanted the trade trip but was unlikely to link the “bad luck” of Clausen to the threat of bad weather. The unspoken implication was that she was also unlikely to link the recent retreat of Valla Ired to the Terrans’ very visible show of support in the StoryHall. She would deal with the Terran issue as independent from the weather. And at the moment, with the trade trip in dispute, she had the ear and support of the craft guild heads.
The Wave and the Flame Page 28