“All the way to what?”
“Well, the beginning of their recorded history, I guess.”
“That could be a very long time, Dr. James. Tyril’s WeaverGuild records barely scratch the surface at twelve hundred earthyears, by my rough calculation.”
Susannah was ashamed to admit she had not given the matter serious thought. “Twelve hundred…?”
Weng had returned her attention to the bookshelves. “If we could determine what constituted a generation, we would have only to count backward. Indications are that this is a very old civilization, Dr. James, far older than we at first imagined. And here’s a remarkable coincidence for you to ponder.”
She went to the glass-crowded lab counter along the back wall and brought a heavy book to the table. She set it in front of Susannah, then laid some sheets of her own notes beside it. Pointing at the bound-in ancient diagram in the book, she said, “When I first saw this, something about it struck me as familiar, though it isn’t anything I have seen before, of course. But the thought kept coming back to me, and I did a few scribbles, and finally it came to me: it’s partly grouped in eights, you see? Twos and sixes. And notice this.” She turned the old book sideways. “Do you see?”
Susannah shook her head, mystified.
Patiently, Weng sifted through her own notes, extracted a sheet and laid it on top of the stack. “Is this familiar to you?”
“Of course. That’s a periodic table.”
“Excellent. Now if you remove this block containing the rare earths from the middle and place them down here, as is sometimes done…”
Susannah reconstructed the table in her mind’s eye. “Oh, my goodness.”
Weng gave her best Cheshire Cat smile. “It was the eights that got me. You know that the rules of atomic structure dictate a return to a similarly structured atom every eight elements. And…” She let a fingertip glide reverently down the ancient scrap of page. “If we consider the elemental family structures to be oriented this way, the space that has been left here could be a diagrammatic pause for the transition metals, etc., starting with number twenty-one, and so on. This peculiarity here could analogue the horns that hydrogen and helium create in our own table.
“But, Dr. James, most remarkable of all: remember that this restructuring of our own periodic table still contains the full range of noble gases, which in the history of our science were not discovered until after the advent of absorption-line spectroscopy and the analysis of stellar spectra.
“Now, the question I must immediately put to our Master Healer is this: if this aged Sawlish diagram does indeed represent the families of the elements, when and through what method was it assembled? Dr. James, it preserves the same number of slots as our most modern table, plus a few more!”
Susannah allowed the skepticism which she had always considered healthy to slow her astonishment. “Spectroscopy and periodic tables require a more precise grasp of atomic theory than I would have expected here, even of Ghirra.”
“Have you ever asked?”
“Well, no, but… Commander, are you sure about this?”
“Not in the least, but the coincidence is seductive. is it not?” Weng stood back, arms folded and black eyes glittering. Susannah could not recall ever having seen her so visibly excited. “Consider the implications, Dr. James! The most recent additions to our own table are no longer found in nature. They had to be manufactured for proof of their existence.”
“Manufactured?” Susannah shook her head with an uncomfortable smile. “Sorry, Commander, you just ran past my credibility limit. Try it out on Taylor—he’s ripe for anything, I think.”
“You worry for my sanity, Doctor?” said Weng dryly, her quiet intensity undimmed.
“And mine as well. I have enough trouble fighting off the various local implications of the paranormal, between the seemingly sentient weather and Ghirra’s, shall we say, less traditional methods of healing. Now you’re going to have me thinking my wild ideas about genetically engineered plants and animals might have some basis in possibility.”
“Is there anything that doesn’t, Dr. James?”
Susannah laughed. “Mind games, Commander. Shame on you.”
Weng’s raised eyebrow was like a faint shrug of disappointment. “Well, then, I shall keep my games to myself, until further proof presents itself. And that, Dr. James, brings me to your request. Go with the caravan, by all means. Observe carefully. Discover everything you can.”
“For the sake of my sanity, Commander?”
Weng said nothing, only smiled again, so privately amused that Susannah would have been but mildly surprised if the Old Lady did fade away to leave nothing but her smile behind.
35
The big yellow infirmary wagon gave shade enough for ten. As little Dwingen and another Physicians’ apprentice, Phea, looked on amazed, Susannah hauled pillows and blankets and wicker boxes out of the back for the third time, in preparation for packing it all back in some new way that would allow everything to fit.
“A Sawlian periodic table?” murmured Megan dubiously from her seat beside the rear wheel. She polished her little field compass on her shirt, opened it to watch the needle maintain its sure hold on Fiixian north, pointing towards the Vallegar. Hemmed in by the tall canopied wagons and the bustle of people and hakra carts, she could not see the mountains or the cloud bank slouching about their summits like a street gang massing for a riot. The sky above the white cliffs remained unclouded turquoise.
“And a very up-to-date one, at that,” Susannah replied. “Well, she admitted it was a wild shot, but she was so entranced by the idea, she said yes to the caravan without a fuss.”
“But not without her reasons,” Megan advised. “Did she mention keeping an eye out for anything in particular?”
“Discover anything you can, she said.” Greedily, Susannah considered the empty field cot, a hekker-skin stretcher supported by a folding wooden frame. It was lashed unfolded along one side of the wagon, taking up a great deal of room, but the first of Ghirra’s list of instructions had been to reserve sufficient space for the transport of serious injuries. Dwingen and Phea fidgeted silently in the sun, waiting for her to require their assistance. Though she was Dwingen’s senior, Phea, a short and solid child, was equally as wide-eyed. “I’ll tell you the first thing I intend to discover,” Susannah added, “and that’s how to mend this awkwardness with Ghirra over Emil’s rocks. What sort of taboo do you think we stumbled on there?”
Megan shrugged, kept an uncharacteristic silence, then said, as a long and subtle thunder roll tumbled over the plain, “You know, this word ‘arrah’ that we’ve been blithely using to denote ‘weather’ doesn’t really mean that. It means ‘struggle.’ There is no word for just plain weather, or climate or anything neutral.”
Susannah nodded distractedly, clutching a basket full of linen. “About the first thing we learned was that the Sawls don’t think of climate as a natural phenomenon.”
“I know, but have you really thought about what effect that has on them, seeing themselves as pawns in the midst of an eternally ongoing war? There’s nothing they can do to end it, as they see it, not good works or prayer or sacrifice, none of the traditional offerings.” Megan stretched neck and torso ostrichlike to listen without rising as the thunder died into the clatter and uproar of the packing and loading. “Tyril assured me quite calmly the other day that the arrah would end when the ‘darkness’ lifted from the Sisters’ eyes, and until then, the best the Sawls can do is try to keep one Sister from winning. What ‘darkness’? says I. The darkness, she replies, as if I had asked a Baptist, what Satan?”
Susannah put down the linens and dragged her own medikit out from between the legs of the lashed-in cot. “There’s not much talk of the Goddesses up in Physicians’.”
“Probably because they’re said to have no interest in the fate of the individual. Their only power over life and death is through the havoc they wreak with the climate.” Megan blotted her cheeks and neck
with a moist square of cloth. “Speaking of which… it’s going to be hot as blazes out on the plain.”
“Oh yes.” Grunting, Susannah yanked at a heavy wooden box until Dwingen could bear it no longer and leaped in to grab a corner. Phea followed eagerly, and Susannah left them to struggle the box into the dust while she concentrated on the problem of the wagon. It had looked gigantic when empty, and cheerful enough in its fresh yellow paint to remind her of a circus wagon. It was long and narrow, very like an old Conestoga in construction but for its hard bentwood canopy and its lack of metal underpinnings. It was larger than any of the other guild wagons but for the FoodGuild’s twenty red-and-blue giants. Like those, it had been winched down from the Caves in three pieces, and would require double teams of hjalk to haul it when fully loaded.
If I can ever get it fully loaded…
She was beginning to despair, feeling sweaty and dust-coated, when Phea touched her arm. Politely, the apprentice pointed under the big wagon, which rode high off the ground to make room for an ingenious suspension system made of leather and oiled hardwood. Susannah looked, then groaned softly. Above the rear axle was a large built-in shelf with several tough woven straps hanging loose. Earlier, against Dwingen’s meekly proffered advice, she had buried three odd-sized wooden boxes at the bottom of the load. They contained the store of dried herbs that Master Herbalist Ard was sending both for use and trade, and Susannah had wanted to be sure they were safely stowed. Suddenly it was obvious that the boxes had been built specifically to fit on the secure but easily accessed shelf in the undercarriage.
Ghirra had not demurred when she offered to oversee the packing, even though Xifa and Ampiar were in charge of supplying the guild for the trip. Pushy offworlder that I am… is this another of our Master Healer’s subtle lessons?
But Susannah had made the offer only to please him, trying to win back the confidence which had been so clearly eroded by the issue of the rocks. She supposed that point had been reached in the expedition’s relations with the Sawls when the initial good will of both sides had been exhausted and their cultural differences began to appear as obstacles rather than novelties. She was sure that with a little extra diplomatic effort, the difficulties could be worked through, but she felt sad and isolated nonetheless, and irritated with herself for botching the job of loading the wagon.
She was somewhat relieved to notice that behind a nearby wagon, an aging potter was suffering a similar dilemma with his loading. He, however, had the good humor to offer a wager to the apprentices assisting him. Susannah overheard him swear jovially that a spot would be found for every last bowl and tankard. One eager girl eyed the stack of straw-wrapped pots waiting to be packed and accepted the bet with a cunning grin.
Susannah sighed and set Phea and Dwingen once again to digging out the herb boxes. Megan chuckled hugely, looped the braided lanyard of her compass around her neck and rose. Thunder kettledrummed across the plain, and the guildsmen at the Potters’ wagon stopped their work to glance over their shoulders at the sky.
“I suppose it’s possible,” said Susannah, “that Aguidran’ll get the whole population packed up and still have to call it off at the last minute.” She searched for clouds overhead and found none.
“That’s what Ashimmel’s pushing for,” Megan agreed. “Look at her down there with TiNiamar, like a fly buzzing in his ear, poor old guy. She’s been at him for hours.”
Between the lines of half-loaded wagons, Susannah could see the Master Priest pacing toward them in the hot sun beside the elderly Master of the FoodGuild. One hand solicitously supported his elbow, though the old man’s step was agile. The other gestured sharply in the direction of the cloud-shrouded Vallegar. TiNiamar’s round face was prune-dark and wrinkled with worry. His head inclined as if unwillingly to Ashimmel’s exhortations.
“She figures as goes the FoodGuild, so goes the rest of the Kethed,” Megan continued. “If she can get him scared enough that Valla might sneak by Lagri’s defenses with a storm that’ll devastate the crop, she’ll swing him to her side. She’s already won over the Papermakers and Keth-Toph.”
Susannah frowned lightly. “Neither of whom really need the trading in Ogo Dul. Their products are both made and consumed at home.”
“Precisely.”
Susannah noticed how carefully the guildsmen working at their wagons observed the pair, gathering together when they had passed by to murmur and shake their heads. The old potter sent one of his apprentices scrambling to the top of his wagon’s arched canopy, where she perched as a lookout to report on the movements of the cloud bank now barely visible across the plain. Among a group of smaller wagons farther along the lines, families halted their packing as the two guild masters approached, only to take it up again as soon as they had passed.
Beyond the cluster of family wagons, to one side of the great stone stairs, a few brightly colored festival pavilions remained erect, nestled against the rock of the cliff. As Ashimmel and TiNiamar turned to pace back down the line, they interrupted their ambulatory conference to nod courteously to Weng, who was observing the commotion of wagons and goods from the canopies’ filtered shade. Weng returned their greeting, then resumed her own intense conversation with a person beside her wearing clean ship’s whites, whose face was in shadow, back to the brilliant sun. Judging from the incline of her head, Weng was engaged in being gracious.
Susannah squinted into the shadow. “Well, I’ll… Meg!” She pointed. “Look who’s back in uniform!”
Megan looked, then chortled with gentle irony. “He’s trying to convince her that going to Ogo Dul is more vital to his official mission than fixing the comlink.”
Susannah stared. The Sawl clothing he had assumed so many weeks ago had obscured the shape of his body. His back was to her, the close-fit Terran shirt clinging damply to his skin. His dark hair was wet, slicked back behind his ears, clipped closer to regulation length but raggedly, as if without benefit of a mirror. Susannah could not help but notice the trim white triangle formed between shoulder and hip. She sucked her lip speculatively.
The potter’s apprentice atop her guild wagon called down a report that was followed immediately by a dull crack of thunder, loud enough and lengthy enough to perceptibly still the hubbub of packing and loading as every Sawl on the rock flats glanced over his or her shoulder, shuddered and went back to work with newly frantic energy.
“Pretty loud, that one,” Megan commented.
Susannah pulled herself away from her rediscovery of the ship’s linguist to renew her own assault on the infirmary wagon. She shoved at a stack of boxes next to the field cot. The pile of blankets on top cascaded onto her head. Dwingen succumbed to a fit of giggles which Phea tried unsuccessfully to discourage.
“The Sawls call it Valla’s Ice,” Megan continued.
Unaccountably annoyed, Susannah shoved a tangled heap of blankets into Megan’s arms. “Fold these, will you? Make them small.” She made a gesture of surrender to the two apprentices and stood aside while they willingly jumped in to finish the packing themselves.
“The thunder, I mean.” Megan sat on a crate, pulling a blanket onto her lap. “Because it sounds like an avalanche.”
“Did you mention spectral little Dutchmen with giant bowling balls?” Susannah asked, while Stavros’s sun-bright image teased at her mind’s eye.
Megan made a slow fold and smoothed it flat as if to press the blanket into miniature. “You don’t trade mythologies with these folk—they’re liable to take you literally. They’d end up sure our thunder’s made differently from their thunder.”
“Perhaps it is.” Susannah smiled. “So you’ve given up on holding out for metaphor versus belief?”
Megan nodded glumly. “Stav is right, much as I hate to admit it. The Sawls believe their goddesses are real. Actual physical beings.”
Susannah smiled again. “Perhaps they are.”
The anthropologist made a wry face. “Wouldn’t that just show us all.”
&nb
sp; They heard another profundo rumble that could have been a legion of cartwheels groaning across the stone terrace. This time work came to a true halt. Aguidran appeared, flanked by her two most senior guildsmen, strolling down the line of wagons as if nothing more in the world were on her mind than the pleasant sunny day and the proper ordering of the wagons for the trek. The Master Ranger offered a somber nod in response to Megan’s grin of commiseration. She gave the inside of the yellow wagon a cursory inspection, growled briefly at Phea and Dwingen and continued on her way, picking up speed so that she and her aides contrived to reach the bottom of the cliff stairs just as several elder craftsmen from the allied guilds of Weavers, Leatherworkers and Basketry openly confronted a retinue of priests descending from the cave mouths to broadcast their latest dire warnings. Debate flared into argument instantly, but was snuffed almost as instantly by the Master Ranger’s barked advice to the guildsmen that their wagons needed attending to if the caravan was to depart on schedule. Ashimmel stalked out of the press of wagons, having deserted TiNiamar the moment raised voices were heard, only to find the argument dispersed before she could make use of it. The Ranger and the Priest flicked dismissive glances at one another and went off in opposite directions. As if on cue, an entire phalanx of rangers gathered to work up and down the long lines of carts and wagons, checking the loads, tugging at ropes and harness, kneeling to inspect wheels and axles, the mountings of running lanterns and water supplies.
“And there you see the traditional division of Church and State,” muttered Megan, turning back to her lapful of blankets. “Though not your traditional spiritual versus temporal, since both priest and craftsman in this society consider their bailiwicks to be totally temporal, here and now.”
“Hadn’t you gotten the impression they had that division nicely worked out?” said Susannah, who had watched the argument with some surprise.
Megan shook her head. “Recently they’ve begun to air their differences in public. The cracks always show most during times of crisis.”
The Wave and the Flame Page 32