Under the canopies, Stavros finished his discussion with Weng and stepped out into the sunlight. The flash of white caught Susannah’s eye. She studied him as he walked in her direction, his attention drawn aside to the scattered tendrils of debate drifting through the crowd at the bottom of the stairs. He listened as he walked, frowning slightly as if the incident were an inconvenient intrusion on some other train of thought. His step was purposeful but oddly, for Stavros, unhurried. It seemed to Susannah that he carried himself with a taut confidence that she had not seen in him before. The energy in him was collected, for once not spinning off like sparks from a flywheel.
When he glanced around to find her watching him, his impulse toward a smile was damped immediately by awkwardness as he retreated behind his usual misunderstood whiz-kid glower. He allowed her a nod and dropped his eyes as he approached.
“It’s all fixed with the Commander,” he announced quietly to Megan.
“At what price?” she returned, still folding blankets.
Absurdly, Susannah felt rejected. In the space of a second, the man had become a boy again.
Did I do that? she wondered.
“She wants Danforth’s terminal moved back down under the Lander,” he replied with only mild disgust. “He wants to be out where he can keep his eyes on the skies, since he hasn’t got CRI to do it for him.”
Megan smirked. “Never trust a weatherman who refuses to look out the window.”
“Taylor is not a weatherman,” returned Susannah, surprised at how defensive she sounded.
Megan’s smile was sly. “Closest thing we have at the moment, next to Ashimmel and her cronies.” She turned back to Stavros. “Will that leave you the equipment you need?”
“All stowed away,” he replied with studied casualness. “It’s not much, but I’ll manage.”
“You’re taking a terminal along with the caravan?” Susannah asked, mostly to force entry into a conversation that did not seem to want to include her. She thought he looked momentarily furtive.
“No, well, the translator. I’ll need power packs for the translator.”
Megan glanced from one to the other, tight-lipped, about to say something, deciding finally on silence. She bent her head and reached for the last blanket. Stavros stood with his hands on his hips, as if uncomfortable to be there but not yet willing to leave.
“Has Clausen stopped yelling yet?” Megan asked eventually.
There’s something going on here, Susannah realized. She was missing everything but the innuendo. From her oft-assumed position of neutral observer, she had acquired a nose for the subtler currents of alliance and coalition, rather like a magnetic field detector, but it was not clear yet where the poles were in this particular alignment.
“Clausen doesn’t know yet,” said Stavros. “He’s been too busy fussing with the comlink. I warned Weng that he thinks we should all dump our own jobs to help him, but she agreed that until the Sled’s recovered, wagon train is as good a way to explore the planet as any. All thanks to the Commander’s dedication to Mission.”
Megan finished folding the final blanket. “Any luck with the com?”
Susannah read definite smugness in Stavros’s shrug.
“Not so far,” he answered, and as his glance flicked toward her and away, she recalled that she had already accused him of purposefully delaying the repair of the comlink. This time she saw defiance in his response rather than guilt. The implication of challenge piqued her.
“So it must have been to encourage the Commander’s dedication to Mission that you reported in looking like an Academy recruiting poster,” she teased. She took the pile of folded blankets from Megan’s knees and stood with them hugged to her chest. For reasons she was not entirely proud of, she let her gaze be frankly appraising. “I believe you even shaved.”
She had wanted his attention, and got it. He looked briefly startled. His hand strayed unconsciously to his jaw. “Yah,” he admitted with an embarrassed half-grin. “Guess it must have worked, eh?” For a moment, the boy slid away and the man stared out at her with a look as intimate and hungry as a hand slipped between her thighs. Then it was gone, and the boy returned, as he caught himself and backed off, moving away from her, aware of having been discovered. “Gotta find Aguidran,” he muttered and stalked off down the line of wagons.
Susannah found herself gazing at the ground, sure that she must be blushing. She turned to the wagon with her armload of blanket and began shoving them into every available crevass.
Megan nodded to herself, then wagged her head. “Susannah, Susannah,” she chided. “Why don’t you just get into bed with the lad instead of torturing him this way?”
“Oh, Meg…”
“Take him or let him go. The boy’s in pain.”
Susannah resumed the obligatory protest, then stopped herself. “You think so, really?”
“You expect me to believe you never noticed?”
Susannah stowed a final blanket in silence. “Never took it seriously,” she said finally. “I mean, he’s young and… well, I guess I thought he’d be a bit much to handle, being the way he is, and you know, that stuff always gets in the way of the work…”
“But?”
“Well, he is rather a pleasure to look at, and.
“And sometimes it’s hard, out in the middle of nowhere.” Megan’s laugh was nostalgic. “That’s gotten me in trouble, too, in the past.”
“Sometimes you just can’t help… well, I don’t know.”
“My, that was coherent.”
“I don’t know,” Susannah repeated. Her shoulders hunched, then relaxed. “Hell, maybe I should.”
“Well, if you do,” offered Megan, sobering, “don’t expect it to be casual with him. Life is not yet a game to Stavros.”
Susannah nodded pensively in reply. All her pragmatic instincts told her to avoid this complication.
And yet…
And yet, he was there and she was lonely, suffering from the recent chill among the fraternity of physicians. But would it be fair to him?
In the distance, the thunder cracked and built into a rolling boil that finished with a dying basso flourish. The clot of priests at the bottom of the stairs sat in a circle on the dusty rock and began a low-voiced chant.
“I think,” said Susannah, “that I’d better give this long and careful thought.”
“Don’t think about it for too long,” Megan advised.
“Why?” Susannah laughed, but Megan’s serious eyes stopped her. “Meg, time seems to be the one thing we have plenty of.”
Megan nodded as if unconvinced but would not elaborate.
Stavros searched down one line of wagons, then doubled back along another, heading for the stairs. He put Susannah from his mind with an ease that was becoming practiced. The plan and its various unresolved details dominated his consciousness. He was impatient to be on his way to the Sled, committed in action as well as in thought. He wondered if a few light questions to Weng on the subject of extraterrestrial-development legalities would attract her undue attention.
She was gone when he reached the stair bottom. He found a ranger group leader bundling up the poles that had supported the last of the festival pavilions. The canopies themselves lay folded on the rock, ready to be stowed in heavy canvas bags. He chatted with the group leader, a youngish maternal woman, especially cheerful for a ranger, and secured the aid of two guildsmen for the hauling down of Danforth’s equipment. He felt better for not having bothered the Master Ranger with minute details. He helped the woman tie up the pole bundles, then stood with her on the bottom step, where the planted terraces were visible over the sea of multicolored wagon tops. The thunder was in retreat for the moment. A haze of damp heat hung over the flooded fields. The ranger pointed across the wide Dop Arek at the cloud bank hugging the Vallegar and spoke to Stavros about Valla’s habits of battle strategy and what Lagri might be expected to do in response. She discussed each Sister’s arsenal as familiarly as if she h
ad the care of it herself. She described Valla’s Water Soldiers to him in precise detail, and allowed that Lagri’s counterforce of fire was one of the best defenses but was difficult to maneuver on the attack. Stavros was not sure, but he thought he was beginning to detect a greater tendency among the rangers than among others to use this battle-related vocabulary when speaking of the Arrah. The priestly vocabulary more often emphasized the formal gaming aspect of the conflict, though it was no less aggressive in its imagery.
On his way up the stairs, he met Ghirra coming down, ahead of four burly Sawls who were stretchering Danforth out into the open air and sunlight. Stavros leaned against the cliff to let the stretcher pass.
“Weng’s letting me go,” he murmured as the Master Healer paused beside him. Ghirra nodded, careful eyes on his patient. Danforth lay quietly, gazing up at Stavros as the stretcher went by.
“Hello, Ibiá,” he said slowly, noting the other’s spanking clean whites. “Someone throwing you a party?”
Stavros returned a thin smile. “Your homecoming, Danforth,” he called with a ready hostility that left him shamed. The planetologist was painfully thinner, weaker. His handsome ebony face seemed hollowed and a bit haunted. Stavros asked the stretcher bearers to wait and descended the three steps to Danforth’s side. “I’m bringing your stuff down now,” he offered more gently, refraining from reminding the injured man that it was no thanks to him that there was any equipment left at all.
The two faced each other in a silence made awkward by the acrimony of their last confrontation. Danforth glanced away first.
“Ibiá, I…” he began.
Thunder rumbled. Danforth’s head swiveled toward the sound. The stretcher bearers cast worried looks up at Ghirra, who gestured them onward.
“Wait!” Danforth exclaimed. “Hold it! Ibiá, get them to stop.”
Stavros also looked to Ghirra, who shrugged and nodded, watching with interest as the planetologist searched for the source of the thunder. The bearers unfolded the stretcher legs and set it down atilt across two wide steps.
Danforth struggled against the webbing that held him into the stretcher. “Pull me up here, Ibiá!” he demanded impetuously. “Untie these damn straps! I can’t see a thing!”
“You must not move this way,” said Ghirra, coming down the steps to calm him.
“I’ve got to see!” Danforth insisted.
Ghirra bent and loosed the straps that pinned Danforth’s chest. He let Stavros draw the big man up so that he leaned against the physician’s chest as Ghirra knelt beside the stretcher. Danforth’s jaw clenched as they moved him. His knuckles whitened, grasping the sides of the stretcher.
Stavros put his hostility aside as he felt Danforth’s weakened muscles bunching against the pain. “Easy, now,” he soothed.
“Damn!” Danforth wheezed. “Doesn’t get any easier!”
“You try too much,” said Ghirra sternly. “You must sleep more to heal.”
Danforth let out a breath. “Doc, I got too much to do!” He squinted at the distant Vallegar. The lurking cloud bank had retreated but the thunder remained. “Ibiá, are my eyes going with the rest of my damned body, or is the sky out there clear as a baby’s ass?”
“It is now,” Stavros affirmed.
“And what’s that yellow fuzz all over everything?”
“Vegetation,” replied Stavros blandly. “Cultivated on the terraces out there, wild on the plain. A shipweek ago, the ground was waterlogged mud. Now the crops are shoulder-high in the fields. The wild species seem to grow considerably slower,” he added, conceiving at the same time the unlikely hope that Susannah had not yet noticed this, which would allow him the opportunity of bringing it to her attention.
But Danforth was new to the phenomenon of near-instant growth. He stared at the fields in wonder. “One shipweek!” he breathed. “Christ!”
“Oh no,” the linguist corrected. “Lagri and Valla Ired.” He shared a crooked smile with the Master Healer, helped him ease Danforth down again and continued on up the stairs.
Later, he rode the winch pallet loaded with Danforth’s equipment. He dropped past the long flights of stairs, clinging to the ropes as the pallet swayed with the speed of its descent. The steps were once again impassable, as the herdsmen led out the dairy cattle. They nosed cautiously out of the cave mouths into the light, blinking, five or six hundred rangy long-haired beasts, crowding along in ragged double file. Their hornless heads were lowered, intent on the steps. They needed no encouragement to stick close to the cliff side of the stair. At the bottom, a group of herdsmen urged the leaders off the last wide steps where they wanted to halt for a leisurely look around. Apprentices yelled and shoved at their flanks to hustle them off along the line of wagons to join their larger cousins, the hjalk, in the muddy flat at the far end of the rock terrace.
Stavros clucked at the hekkers sympathetically as he slipped past them, clinging to the winch ropes. The herd was part of his cover. Traditionally, they accompanied the caravan for the first two throws across the Dop Arek, following a more southern route than would lead straight to Ogo Dul, so that in the middle of the third throw, the herd could be turned aside and driven up into the foothills of the eastern mountains, the Talche, to graze those richer pastures until the caravan collected them on its return trip.
This time, in the rest period before that third throw, while the caravan lay camped and, he hoped, sleeping soundly, the plan was for Stavros to vanish with Liphar into those same hills, from there to make their way in secret through the Talche to the site of the disabled Sled. It would take longer to reach the Sled this way, but it provided the advantage of surprise and a substantial head start. Only after the dairy herd was settled in their new pastures would Aguidran return a small number of her rangers to the Caves to help Clausen haul the Sled in for repairs.
The winch bucked, swung precipitously toward the cliff, but slowed and swung back short of impact. Stavros barely noticed, preoccupied with his plan. It sounded viable as far as it went. It was what would happen after he’d salvaged the antenna that was most in question. He was not schooled in law or lawyer’s rhetoric, yet he would be on his own when he reestablished contact with CRI. Megan had insisted that she would be a physical burden to him, that to go underground as he must would require being able to move fast on the spur of the moment. She would go to Ogo Dul and return to remain as his mole in the enemy camp. He must do the research himself without benefit of her long experience in such matters. He must patch together the skeleton of an argument convincing enough to lure her people’s advocate into taking the case. Finally, he must fox CRI into sending an FTL drone to Earth in secret with his message. From there, they could only hope that the lawyer would be won over enough to begin proceedings immediately, so that when Clausen did file his claim (Stavros knew he could not hold off that inevitability forever), he would run smack into an already full-blown court case.
As Stavros played through his various alternate scenarios for the hundredth time, the pallet touched ground with a gentle shudder. A borrowed hakra two-cart awaited-him, along with his volunteer help, two young ranger apprentices whom he did not know. He wondered whose household goods now lay in the dust until the return of their conveyance. The apprentices helped load the equipment into the cart, then set off ahead of the shaggy little hakra to guide it along the road through the fields to the Lander.
Stavros followed, with a backward glance at the continuing pandemonium of packing. While the last of the hekkers started their ungraceful clatter down the stairs, the bulk of the herd still milled about among the wagons, kicking up dust clouds and resisting the best efforts of the herdsmen to get them moving toward the mud flat. The big hjalk were being led up to be strapped in their traces, team after team of them, pushing a path through the dust and lowing hekkers and the swarms of little hakra carts. The winches rose and fell with last-minute bundles of goods to be made room for in already overstuffed wagons. Children darted back and forth among the beasts
and vehicles with armloads of clothing and utensils.
Along the edge of the rock flat, their bright red and blue reflecting in the watery mirrors of the nearby terraces, the twenty FoodGuild wagons waited in a trim impressive line, fully packed and ready. TiNiamar huddled with Aguidran and his senior guildsmen at the head of the line. At the back of the rear wagon, two older women wearing the guild’s red and blue stripes on their tunics lounged against the big wheels, playing stones.
Stavros held back at the top of the path and let the ranger apprentices go ahead with the cart. He stood in the still heat, tugging at his damp shirt, already anxious for a chance to shed the close Terran clothing.
Taking the entire population to market! he reflected. There were carts and wagons as far as his eye could see, at least a hundred large hjalk-drawn wagons of various sizes, and six or seven times that number of smaller hakra carts and wagons, nearly five thousand men, women and children on the move together. What a glorious madness! If he had been able to observe this process beforehand, the evacuation of the Lander might have seemed merely efficient instead of miraculous.
In his heart, he saluted the ambitious spirit of the venture, then squared his shoulders mentally to face the base camp at the Lander, where he had not set foot since before the storm.
Ocher dust billowed from under the cartwheels ahead as the already drying road dipped down through the plantings. In the mirrored fields, sheaths of fernlike fronds were thickening into stout fleshy clusters. Behind the terrace earthworks, the tall yellow stalks sank muscular roots into mud topped by several inches of warming water. Broad furry leaves shaded the path where it narrowed, the lower foliage shading from yellow to amber and orange between bright lemon-colored veins. FoodGuildsmen hurried barefoot between the rows, peering into the fat leaf whorls, scattering dried manure from sacks slung across their chests.
The road narrowed again at the turnoff to the Lander site. The wheels of the hakra cart just fitted between the earthworks that hemmed in the path on either side. Stavros brushed leaf stalks aside as he passed, and glanced up through the foliage to see the Lander towering above him. He felt like a runaway, caught and forced to return to a home he no longer wished to claim.
The Wave and the Flame Page 33