“Or how I’d get to the Sled if the weather turned really bad.”
A group of journeymen Engineers crowded the cave mouth, bustling around a tallish young apprentice dressed in white. They all talked at once as they fixed the folds of her tunic, fussed with the arrangement of her beribboned hair. The young woman’s eyes shone while she patiently withstood their ministrations and advice. To one side, two guildsmen polished a large plaque painted with the guild’s triangular seal.
As Stavros stepped out of the shade of the overhang, he thought he heard thunder again. But the turquoise sky stretched unbroken all the way to the Vallegar. One or two discrete spots of cloud still lurked about the sawtooth peaks. Stavros grinned crookedly, picturing them with with heads and tails, lashed to the mountaintops as Valla had neglected to do in the tale carved on the entrance to Eles-Nol. And he thought again of Ghirra’s dilemma, which he had made his own, and of the elating sense of the Possible he had felt, standing among the giant shining cylinders. The elation was gone now, crushed by Emil Clausen’s all too efficient arm. What remained was a reckless promise that Stavros could no longer conceive of being able to fulfill.
“It’s the priesthorns,” said Megan, thinking his sober frown a response to the baying thunder-sounds that ricocheted from the cliff tops. The sun was hot on their faces. Below, the dust rose in a giant ocher cloud from the rock flat, as eight hundred wagons and carts jostled for their assigned positions in rows that stretched along the cliff bottom for a solid half kilometer. Farther to the east, the dairy herd nosed among the plains ravines where the newly sprouting vegetation softened the drying mud with a dense yellow carpet. Rimming the eastern horizon were the blunted mounds of the Talche, the Knees. Whose knees, Valla’s or Lagri’s? Stavros mused with therapeutic irreverence as he and Megan started down the stairs. He noticed two more little cloud scouts lingering about the Talche, as if reconnoitering the terrain. They moved even as he watched them, sliding farther south, clinging to the profile of the lavender hills like low-flying aircraft.
Weird shit, he thought, and wondered why it had taken him so long to see it that way.
The Engineers’ guildsmen came clattering down the stairs behind them, surrounding them with excited greetings and swallowing them up in their midst, urging them to greater speed. The priesthorns ceased their random thundering and segued into a thrilling basso call that stilled the racket below and drew the population away from their last-minute frenzy. They gathered along the rock terrace in front of the rows of wagons, leaving a wide strip of open ground between themselves and the cliff face. Stavros hurried along with the Engineers, bringing his mind to focus on the coming ritual as a distraction from his self-pitying gloom. He lost Megan in the throng at the bottom of the steps. He looked for Susannah or Weng, but if the other Terrans were there, they were well hidden by all the confusion.
The ceremonial horns fell silent. The dust cloud settled about the wagons as shouts and chatter and the rattle of harness and cartwheels died into an expectant hush. Stavros searched his pack, located his pocket recorder and eased himself with his observer’s presumption into the front ranks of the silent crowd. By now accustomed to his polite but aggressive curiosity, the watchers parted to give him room. Crouching in the hot sun among the children and the elderly, he activated the recorder.
The cave mouths waited, black and empty maws in the sheer fall of sun-bright rock. Then the horns sounded again, first one, the westernmost, followed by the others in sequence toward the east. When all twelve boomed a single drawn-out chord, the caves overflowed amid a burst of plainsong. Across the third level, twelve dark entries glittered, and with a swirl of color, twelve honor guards of apprentices carrying bright banners marched out of the shadowed mouths to begin the processional descent along the connecting ledges to the stairs. A pair of musicians followed each cluster of banners, and next a cohort of priests, all moving in single file to the beat of skin drums and the shrill of woodwinds.
The priests had donned their longest, whitest robes, simple long-sleeved shifts over which they wore soft tabards and shawls of earthy red. Unlike the apprentices, they bore no PriestGuild seals. Their hems and sleeves were embroidered in the colors of flame, the hot salmons and vermilions, the golden yellows and the crimsons that honored Lagri, whose dominance they hoped to encourage until the trade caravan had returned and the crop could be harvested. They poured out into the sunlight in a blaze of finery, and behind them came another glowing rank of banners and the rest of the apprentices, dressed also in white. The younger ones carried triangular flags in Lagri’s brightest colors. The older ones supported tall fringed standards, painted or sewn with picture tales of the goddess’s past victories over her sister-rival. Last in line came a master apprentice from each of the guilds. Their white tunics sparkled like sea foam as they moved to the staccato beat of the drums. Each carried a carved or painted plaque bearing the symbol of his guild. As they marched, they sang, priest and apprentice alike. A hundred voices joined as one brought the masses assembled at the cliff bottom to their feet to raise a throaty chant of exultation.
Stavros rose with them, surrendering his gloom to the crowd’s contagious enthusiasm, adding his voice gladly to theirs while still remembering to clip the recorder to his belt and adjust the volume.
A stout figure clothed in white appeared at the mouth of the highest cave. Even with the distance and the glare of the sun, Stavros could tell from the redoubtable posture that it was Ashimmel, putting on the kind of show for which she was famous. There was no sign in her stance that she was anything but ecstatic about the forthcoming departure. She stood alone for a moment, arms spread with palms up as if humbly receiving the accolade of the throng. Then she lowered her arms and moved toward the ledges to begin her stately descent.
Behind her came a line of open sedan chairs and litters carrying the members of the guilds too elderly or infirm to walk. Each was supported by a pair of strong white-clad apprentices from the elder’s own guild. The litters were draped in white. The chairs bore white canopies and their side panels were decorated with carved polychromed friezework. The last and largest was a high-sided chair carried by two pairs of priests. The wave-and-flame seal gleamed on both side panels. The curved white canopy was tied with streamers that fluttered in a diaphanous curtain around the sides and back, in colors that honored both Valla Ired and Lagri. The Master of Ritual was nestled inside, seeming as slight as a child in the huge chair’s embrace. His blind smile lit up the inner shadow.
The procession zigzagged down the cliff face to the rhythm of the music and the joyous chanting of the crowd. When they reached the bottom, the guild apprentices lined up facing the throng, the hundred priests and their apprentices behind them, banners and flags raised in a rainbowed wall at their backs. The freshly painted guild seals glistened in the sun. The elderly were set down next to the seal of their guild. Their bearers retired into the ranks behind. When Kav Daven’s chair had left the final step and was lowered lovingly to the ground, the horns on the cliff top sounded a final note, a long tumbling call that fell like water into silence as the chanting ceased within the space of a breath.
Stavros forgot the recorder at his side. He could not hope to preserve the quality of that intent silence, filled as it was with wind sighs and the flap of ribbons and banners, with the silken murmur of long priestly sleeves, with the lowing of the distant dairy herd and the wavelike rustle of the yellow stalks in the fields behind the wagons. There was every sound in that silence but the nonsound of five thousand people waiting motionless, enrapt.
The sedan chair’s ancient joints creaked as the Ritual Master inched his bony legs over the edge and climbed down into the sun. No one stepped forward from the ranks of priests and apprentices to offer him support. He stood a moment, balancing, smiling as if it were a game to relearn the art of existing upright. He was not wrapped in the ceremonial white but in his own soft brown layers that made Stavros think of wilted leaves. His head swung in a ge
ntle arc as he oriented himself with the preternatural hearing of the blind. He took a few shuffling steps, an experiment, then stopped and beamed at the crowd, a jester’s grin, as if he would follow this act with juggling or a few jokes. Instead, he took a few more steps, firmer now, advancing as far as the front ranks of children so that he could bend, an old tree swaying stiffly in the wind, to touch fingers with those sitting nearest him. The children chattered at him and softly called his name and there was no disapproving adult around to hush them, but Stavros, who felt like a child himself, in awe of the old priest’s mystery.
Kav Daven smiled again for them and shuffled back a step. Then he straightened, impossibly old and frail, and began to walk along the long line of enthralled watchers, a solitary brown figure moving through heat and dust and silence. The standing watchers sat as he trudged by them, so that his passing was like a slow wave receding across a sea of heads, a relief of waiting tension. Stavros wished briefly for his videogun, but knew that he would need no machine to recall this moment. His own flesh-and-blood brain would retain the memory in all its vividness.
When the Ritual Master had passed by him on his journey along the line, Stavros backed through the crowd and made his way through the press of smaller carts to climb the slatted side of the nearest big wagon for a better view. He searched for Liphar among the ranks of apprentices and found him not far from Ashimmel’s retinue of senior priests who had gathered in a semicircle around her. Liphar looked scrub-faced and solemn in his knee-length white tunic. His long brown curls had been combed and braided with red-and-orange ribbon. Feet braced, his head high, his hands behind his back tightly clasped the tall shaft of a triangular banner sewn with the wave-and-flame seal of the guild. The long orange point of the banner fluttered just above his head. The silky threads of the embroidery shone very blue and red in the brilliant sunlight.
Glancing down the front line of wagons, Stavros noticed the yellow mobile infirmary in the middle of the row. Megan had found herself a grandstand view. She sat hunched in the driver’s seat, scribbling in her notebook with a tiny pencil stub. McPherson perched beside her, whispering eagerly into her ear, laughing occasionally and pointing. Ghirra leaned beside the tall rear wheel, intent on the ceremony. Susannah watched beside him. Danforth lay in his folding stretcher, propped up against the wheel rim. Weng stood with them, slim and erect, her white uniform outshining even the white of the priests’ robes. Clausen was nowhere in evidence.
Stavros frowned, suddenly distracted from the joy of the ceremony. He realized that Clausen’s absence would now always hold the threat of his arrival, until the grudge was repaid or the man himself was light-years removed, or dead. In his mind, Stavros refought his moment of humiliation, He rehearsed all the things he could have done to the prospector if only he’d been able to wrench free a hand, an arm, a leg, anything. And he would have done all of them, even with the cool steel of the laser pressed to his throat, anything but suffer that awful impotence that Clausen had forced upon him, with hardly a visible effort.
And Stavros decided that Megan was wrong after all to think that the personal injury bore no relation to the larger issue. CONPLEX might be the ultimate power, but Clausen was here and it was not. Local power is the only important power when one man threatens another with death. But the real lesson to be taken from this individual violation was that Clausen would treat the Sawls with the same arrogance and casual violence he had shown to Stavros. He would grind them under his heel without a thought.
Just as the Goddesses march rough-shod over the Sawls in their blind determination to subdue each other.
Stavros had a sudden gut understanding of Ghirra’s raging at the Sisters, that before had been merely intellectual. If it was possible to “believe” an emotion, as opposed to “knowing” it, Stavros felt himself to be a true believer at last. He had felt himself as helpless in his own rage as the Master Healer was in his. It was the same rage, after all, the rage of the powerless against the powerful. Did Clausen see himself as godlike in his power over others? Stavros had no doubt that the directors of CONPLEX nurtured vast Olympian notions.
Remembering made him restive. What was to be done? He could not imagine backing away from his commitments to Ghirra, to the Sawls. He would be left without purpose, meaningless. So it seemed he must throw himself against the rocks for their sakes, though it might do them precious little good. He felt no resentment, only sadness that he had made promises he could not fulfill.
Clinging to the side of the tall wagon seemed suddenly an unnecessarily conspicuous and vulnerable position. This is what it’s going to feel like, being hunted, he thought. He unclipped the recorder from his belt and replaced it in his pack, then eased himself down from the wagon. He could see over the heads of the seated crowd well enough, but also feel protected by them.
He wandered close to the infirmary wagon, past two wagons belonging to the Leatherworkers’ Guild. A bevy of apprentices perched on the curving canopies, whispering excitedly. The hjalk teams, bored with standing, bent their heads to watch him pass.
Stavros found a vacant wheel to lean against, and returned his attention to the ceremony.
Incredibly, the old priest’s pace had quickened as he progressed along the line. A glad tension built within the crowd as he neared the end. When the priest had several hundred meters left to travel of that long half kilometer, the tension became a sound, a low eager humming as if from a swarm of bees. Kav Daven covered the final distance in a miraculous swinging walk, his wilted-leaf clothing floating around him with a rhythmic life of its own. His stride was more like a curious lope than the deliberate putting of one foot after the other. Every eye was on him, and the humming increased its pitch and volume.
He reached the end and stopped. From behind the lead wagon, Aguidran emerged. She was dressed in her dark road leathers but over them she wore a white sleeveless robe with the RangerGuild insignia embroidered on a wide soft collar. She approached the Ritual Master, made a formal bow of greeting, which he returned, then came to stand beside him. He raised his right arm, palm up, and offered it to the sky, the white cliffs, the wagons and lastly the waiting crowd. The Master Ranger followed the motion of his hand with a narrowed piercing glance that seemed to penetrate into every corner and heart.
When the priest’s salute was completed, Aguidran extended a leather-bound arm to him. He laid a feathery hand on her steady wrist, and the rising hum climaxed in joyous song. The crowd surged into motion. Kav Daven and his ranger escort started slowly back along the line of people and wagons. The priests and apprentices broke rank to fall in behind, banners and long robes flying. Following them, the musicians started up several tunes at once, and the populace rose from the dusty rock to mob after them in cheerful, chanting disorder.
Stavros found himself once more being swept up by a throng of celebrating Sawls. He was drawn away from the wagons as if caught in the current of a laughing stream. Hungry for the soothing touch of communal joy, he let himself be filled by the sensual rush of music and song vibrating around him. He drifted forward with the watery surging of the crowd, at ease, laughing with them, humming when he lost the words, enjoying his surrender. And then, into the center of his vision moved the mismatched pair, the ranger and the priest, approaching with measured step.
Caught up in the tide of elation, Stavros felt the familiar signs, the slippage, the slight quaking of his reality. He shook his head to clear it. Not again, he told himself firmly, not twice in one day. And still, as priest and ranger approached, all else blurred around him into an aura surrounding them with misty brightness. He fought the urge to move closer, considered clinging to the nearest arm, digging his feet into the ground. Yet move he did, as if compelled. Without his asking, a path to the front of the crowd was cleared for him, for he moved like a sleepwalker, intent but humble, grateful to find space among the others sitting to receive Kav Daven’s greeting. It seemed suddenly appropriate to him, given the hopelessness of his future purpose,
that he drop to one knee to ask a blessing for his endeavor. He hoped Ghirra would not be disappointed in him for giving in once more to his inner voices. He knelt, dropped his pack to the ground, and bowed his head.
Kav Daven worked his way slowly along the line, touching fingers, greeting those he knew with soft words and laughter. Aguidran paced beside him in patient silence. When he came to the kneeling offworlder, he stopped. Stavros dared not raise his head to meet those sightless eyes. He saw feet, booted and sturdy, Aguidran’s, and others, Kav Daven’s, gnarled and brown and bare, dusted with ocher. He heard murmurs, a grunted exclamation of surprise, a discussion and a rustling, and then more feet appeared, women’s feet in thin white sandals, a pair on either side of the gnarled ones, as the booted feet withdrew. He wondered why he could hear such quiet sounds through all the uproar, and then realized.
The singing had stopped.
He started to a touch, cool fingers brushing aside his long hair to rest against the nape of his neck. Thumb and little finger slipped inside his collar to lie along his shoulder in a protective caress, almost sexual in its intimacy. Stavros shivered, too much in the grip of his compulsion to resist.
“Ibi, this is not needed,” murmured Ghirra’s voice above him.
“I must ask his blessing,” Stavros replied with the last ounce of will left to him.
“Leave this, Ibi. It is not needed.”
Stavros shook his head. He thought the Master Healer sounded sad, and did not understand why the asking of a simple blessing should disturb him so.
Ghirra sighed. “I will help, if you must do this thing. The pain I will help. Give him your hands.”
Pain? Do what thing? Stavros put out his hands, confused by old memories of the altar rail.
The pairs of white-sandaled feet shuffled uneasily. Stavros waited head down with palms outstretched. He heard another muttered discussion, and a voice raised in protest that he thought was Ashimmel’s. It was silenced by a low singsong command in words Stavros could not understand. But he recognized their throaty diphthongs and their ancient cadences. Old words. PriestWords.
The Wave and the Flame Page 38