They stopped at a spring five kilometers from camp, two kilometers from where the cartographic projection said the pass through the mountains officially began. Makana watered Slowth while Rigi looked around, studying the soil and the land ahead of them. What appeared from the little hillock near camp to be a single row of mountains was actually two, a lower set where she and Makana stood, and the main range to the west, with a depression between. Rigi saw a stream or small river flowing through the depression and tried to recall what the name was. The projection did not list one, and she wondered if the decision had not been made yet. The original planetary surveyors had numbered everything instead of naming, for reasons Rigi vaguely recalled had to do with cultural sensitivities or something. Since at that point they had not yet encountered any Staré, Rigi decided once again that people who made silly rules ought to have to recite all of them from memory while hopping up and down on one foot in a market square.
Rigi and Martinus walked away from the road, looking at the edge of the hill. Something about it… She did a quick drawing, then picked her way down a few meters to take a better look at the valley below. Nothing about it leaped out at her. The water flowed in gentle, winding curves across a moderately wide floodplain that took up about half the width of the valley. She could see the flood-plain’s edges quite clearly because of a well-defined terrace, showing how the stream had cut down at some point in its past. She didn’t see any tell-tale hints of First World settlements, and no smoking holes, either. Rigi giggled to herself at her and her husband’s slightly morbid term for sites that the aliens had attempted to re-destroy on the Nigh of Falling Birds.
She climbed back up the slope, startling some drab green birds that launched from the grass with a rushing whirr of sound. Martinus ignored them, and Rigi turned her attention back to the ground at her feet. She didn’t have good footing on the little animal trail, and slipping and falling held no appeal. She clambered up an especially steep little meter or so, then stood at the crest of the hill, looking east.
“Mistress, come see,” Makana called. Rigi followed the sound of his voice to the east side of the slope, then north to a clear area. He crouched, studying a steep-sided cut that ran east-west across the hillside. Rigi stopped beside him and looked where his ears pointed. He’d found an odd band in the dirt, and mismatched layers. The band stood out, paler than the soil and rocks above and below it, and dropped ten centimeters or so at one point, as if the Creator had started to draw a line, stopped, and restarted below His original mark. Rigi crouched as well and peered into the shadows in the gap. There was a second pale line, almost too far down for her to see, and it also dropped a little but in a different place, closer to the western end of the cut.
“It is a fault, a place where the land broke and either dropped or rose.” She straightened up, trying to remember that geology class she’d taken as part of her archaeology training. “Ah, one side is the hanging wall or horst, and the low bit is the graben. It depends on how the land broke, if part rose or if part dropped, or if both happened. But whatever it was, happened a long time ago. A lot of dirt and rock got piled on top of the pale stuff.” She turned around, looking south. “The pale may be ash from the volcano that the Falling Birds woke before they fell.” Rigi still wondered what the Staré of the First World had been thinking to build a city or even a village in an active volcano, but that was not her problem.
“How does the ground break, Mistress? Is it not solid?”
Oh dear. Rigi had forgotten that Makana was not first or second Stamm, but high third, and abstraction came very, very hard. “Um, usually something below pushes it. Do you remember the mess in the kitchen when I forgot to stir the pudding and a skin formed, got steam under it, and then broke all at once?” Nahla had been away on a day of rest, and Rigi had cooked for herself.
She smelled a very strong //affirmative// and had to smile a little despite her lingering embarrassment. “Sometimes the ground does that, we call it a ‘volcano,’ a fire-throwing-mountain,” she switched back to Staré. “The world’s skin gets wrinkled, like the skin on the pudding.” The mess had been rather impressive, not the least because some of the milk and sugar blend dribbled into the heating unit in the stove and smoked. Burning milk—wombow, cowlee, or anything else—stank with a reek unrivalled by anything in her experience save the angriest Staré male.
Rigi did a quick drawing of the faulting, then a second of the land looking north from her position, toward the blue-distant curve of the range where it bent east-north-east to the sea. Nothing really caught her attention, aside from some animals grazing on the slope. Their pale coats or skin stood out from the grasses and she pulled a small set of electronic sight amplifiers out of her bag, then looked again. “Makana, do you know anything about mountain wombows?”
“No, Mistress Rigi.” He had a similar device that he carried in the bag worked into his modesty apron, and he looked as well. “Not wombows, Mistress. Their legs are too thin, bodies too square. Heads square also, have two, no,” he leaned forward, as if that might help. “Four horns it appears. Two in front, two on side.”
Rigi adjusted the focus on her viewer and watched as one animal lifted its head and peered around, probably watching for predators. “Yes, four horns. And you are right about them being square.” A large shadow flashed over the half-dozen beasts. They formed a clump and together ran across the slope, toward Makana and Rigi. Then they stopped and formed an out-facing ring, heads up so the front horns made a sort of fence, with two smaller animals inside the ring. She lowered the viewer and saw a large bird with a pale underside and crimson head soaring out, away from the hills. “They can move quickly when they choose to, it seems.” She looked through the viewer once more, readjusting the distance setting. Now she saw what looked like ropes of cream-colored hair or matted wool covering the beasts, and the narrow legs and feet that Makana had observed. They had relatively long, thick tails that came half-way down to the ground from their back. One of the animals, one with larger side horns than the others, lifted its tail, then raised it until it curled into a loop over his back. The other animals scattered once more and resumed grazing.
Rigi stowed her viewer and drew the animals. She did separate sketches of the loop-tailed one and of the enormous bird. She guessed that Loop-tail might be a male, but in some herd animals it was the senior female who led the group. Rigi wondered if they were monotremes, marsupials, or placentals. Shikhari had all three types of mammals, although it was not supposed to. Shikhari did a large number of things normal worlds were not supposed to do, Rigi had observed over the decade that she’d lived on the planet.
She finished and initialed the sketch. After shaking her hands out, then sharpening the pencil before putting it away, she reversed her steps and walked south. She also drank some of the water she’d brought. The cool breeze dried her out more than was healthful. Makana had checked on Slowth, who appeared content to drowse in the late morning sun. Rigi crossed the road, dodged a boulder, and gave a natural rock-shelter and stone overhang a wide berth. She didn’t smell any of the musky or rotting scents she associated with predators, but better safe than bitten. The grass thinned out as she reached the southern shoulder of this particular hill, revealing reddish-brown soil with dark grey, weather-rounded rocks poking out. Rigi started to sketch the land on the other side of the shallow valley between hills. She stopped. She set her pad and pencil on the grass and took out the distance viewers. The east-facing side of the hill looked too regular. But it was not smooth. “Did someone carve steps in— Steps?” She lowered the viewer, tipped her head a little, and studied it with bare eyes before once more looking through the viewer. A cloud shadow flowed across the slope west-to-east, and she bounced on her toes.
“Makana! How close can you get Slowth and the cart to that area?”
He hop-walked over, inspected the ground around them, thumped it with one hind foot, and tipped his ears forward and back. “Into the little valley, Mistress.”
>
“Perfect. Please do so. Martinus and I will be on the next hill, looking at those flat places.”
He inspected the land, looked at her, opened his mouth and inhaled, nose twitching, and looked again. “Very well, Mistress,” //dismay/hesitation,// “It would be better for you to wait for my return.”
“So you smell/taste something?”
“I do not know.”
Rigi’s wariness warred with her curiosity, and wariness won. “Then I will wait.”
A gust of //relief// threatened to bowl her over. “Thank you, Wise One.” He hopped to the cart. Rigi decided that this was a good opportunity for a moment alone and dropped just far enough into the little valley that she could relieve herself behind a waist-high boulder without being obvious. A small spur of land helped conceal her from anyone looking up from the settlement, although surely no one would be vis-scanning the area.
The moment Makana and Slowth appeared, Rigi picked a path between rocks, hopped a trickle of water, and marched up the hillside to the flat areas. Her jaw started to drop before she recalled herself. Proper ladies did not gape in wonder at unusual terrain features. The shapes in the land were not just flat areas, they were true terraces, with stone walls marking the sides and ends of the individual terraces. Martinus bounded ahead of her, stopped, and went on point, as if watching something. When he didn’t woof, she rushed to where he stood, went to one knee, and lifted away a handful of the plants that had draped themselves over the wall. Then she gasped, just staring at the image on the stone.
Or was it stone? She drew her knife and poked at one of the plain rectangles. When she tapped it, it seemed to ring a little, more like some of the heavy-duty ceramics. “Martinus, you know,” she said slowly in Common, thinking aloud. “The fancy things the First Worlders did are all in stone or ceramic, not metal, not that we have found thus far. Why? Or did all the metal corrode and disappear over the centuries?” Martinus tipped his head a little to the side but had no answer for her. She tapped another, darker square and it thunked. Maybe it was just an unusual rock. Rigi heard a gurgling kind of sound and stood. The sound seemed to come from ahead of her, and she sent Martinus first. “Slow walk, straight,” she commanded. If he did not fall into anything, then she would be safe, since he weighed almost twice what she did. He walked with deliberate care, hesitating a little with each step. She followed exactly in his paw-steps, picking her way along an overgrown pavement, or perhaps something else with flat slabs on it. She smelled a wonderful herb scent from under her feet and made a note to take a sample so it could be analyzed for safety. It reminded her a little of false-thyme, but sweeter. It would go well with white fish or eggs.
The water noise came from a tiny spurt emerging from one of the walls and shooting over a basin. Minerals had colored the basin reddish-brown. Rigi drew her knife again and poked at the place where the water came from. On a hunch she pulled her light out of the bag and shone it at the water source. Rigi considered for a moment, archaeological preservation versus curiosity, and this time curiosity won. She picked at the rough, reddish-brown encrustation with the metal blade until a chunk fell out. The water flowed more easily, some falling into the basin instead of squirting over it. She kept poking until all the mineral build up had fallen away, at least what she could see. They probably needed to run a spinning brush through the conduit to clean it properly.
“A fountain, mistress?” She almost jumped out of her skin with surprise at the question. She’d been too fascinated by the water to hear Makana walking up behind her. That was a good way to become dinner for something more wary.
“Or just a drainage way, to keep water from backing up under the walls and weakening them.” She turned off the light, sheathed the knife and hopped over the basin. Rigi turned to face Makana. “I found another wall picture, baked into the stone again.”
His ears went back, then flopped to the sides. “First-Stamm sir must see.”
Oh yes, Kor needed to see this. Rigi could not think of a single memory song or map depiction of a settlement on a mountain side. Every First World site had been constructed on level ground. But the elders of Sogdia and Southland continent only knew Southland and the Bataria Archipelago well. Some of the oldest map-hides showed the Indria Plateau and its surroundings, but she could not recall anything about this part of the world. However, someone had built these walls, and had diverted the water or at least channeled it. Rigi shifted so she could look east.
The world fell away from her feet, stretching into a distant blue haze that might well be the sea. She could see the road, a brown interruption in the greens and blues and darker browns of the trees and grasses that marched up from the coastal plain. Which made her wonder why there were no trees on the eastern slopes. She set the question aside as she located the new settlement on its long slope, and then the military camp in the little plain beside the slope. Birds circled, climbing on a thermal, and the wind sweeping up the hillside threatened to steal her sunshade. It was a beautiful view, and Rigi suddenly wanted a house right here, where she could watch the sun rise.
“Perhaps the people who built here were scent sick,” Makana stated. Rigi blinked, staring at him as he continued, “There is no water for cleansing or fishing, no garden space, no room for work areas, no reason to be here. Where are the trees, the Place of Refuge?”
The Staré of the First World had not been like the modern Staré, or so current tradition and memory songs averred. They had not had Stamm, and they built large cities using far higher technology than their survivors had possessed. Even so, Makana had a good point. “Perhaps,” Rigi started, hesitating. She was not to make suppositions about unknown cultures. “Perhaps this was a place to be separate, to be quiet and think, away from the busy-ness of market and farm and workshop.” But it would still need to be supplied, and to have sanitation. The mineral water might not be good for Staré insides. “Um, many, many centuries ago, on the human home planet, people sought out places with mineral water because they thought it could heal them. Maybe this was a healing place.” But sanitation and access still required roads and carrying away the waste, and she did not see evidence of any of those things. Not that she’d done a survey, of course, but Makana should have noticed something. “I need Captain Prananda and Kor. They see with the hunter’s eye, they know what should be here, part of the land, and what is First World.”
They spent the next two hours exploring and documenting the site. Each terrace had been subdivided into five large oblongs, with smaller oblongs inside them, all partitioned by stones. The stones were dry-fitted and Rigi admired the workmanship. She wished she could have a stone wall that nice at the house in NovMerv. Makana did not recognize the herbs, so she took four samples for the botanists. Rigi wanted to dig but knew better. Instead she drew, working quickly and carefully. The site would not go anywhere overnight she kept reminding herself. Makana took care of Slowth, brought her the lunch she’d left in the cart, ordered her to drink more water, and at last announced, “We must return to the camp by dark, Wise One.”
“What? Oh, yes, you’re right.” She put her materials away and followed him to the cart. Together they guided Slowth back to the road. She spent the return trip in a tired haze, trying to puzzle out just what the terrace site had been, who would have lived there or visited there, and why the First World Staré did not build on hillsides on Southland.
Her archaeological mental fog did not lift until she heard a most unwanted voice sneering, “A report to file?” Makana turned around from lowering the cart step, bowing to the major. “What report requires your absence until dark, Mrs. Prananda?”
Rigi flipped to the four-horn sketch. “Documenting wildlife and terrain for the university, Major LeFeu.” She showed him the drawing.
“Indulging in a hobby? Really. I’m coming to believe that Capt. Prananda’s judgement as an officer is less than stellar. Good night, Mrs. Prananda.”
As the major had been talking, Makana had shifted his weight to
the front half of his hindfeet, tail rising, ears back, forefeet up, ready to attack. Rigi wondered how LeFeu had missed the warning. Everyone else around them had seen, because humans and Staré both moved well clear of the cart and people. “Thank you, Makana. I believe the major has departed for the evening.”
In Staré Makana muttered, “He smells of bitter and lies, and golden-root.”
Rigi agreed.
An hour later she sat down in front of the comm unit and logged in. Her budget did not allow her much private comm access time, and she’d limited herself to messages to her parents, since Tomás was busy and had told her not to take up comm space. Now she looked at the time difference, confirmed the schedule, and sent a visual and voice call to Dr. Su Xian, the chief of xenoarchaeology at the planetary university. Dr. Xian answered promptly. “Rigi. Have you found anything?”
Rigi had to smile at the other woman’s lack of formality. She wasn’t rude, just far more direct than most. “Yes, two somethings. One is possibly the remains of another wall, and the other find I do not wish to speculate about until Capt. Prananda and Korkuhkalya have studied it. I have shards from the wall, and soil chemistries.” Rigi had already downloaded the soil tester’s results onto a data chip, which she plugged into the appropriate port on the comm unit. “Transferring data now.”
“Do you have any images?” Rigi opened the first sketchbook and showed it to Dr. Xian. “Interesting. A pity about the geologic debris on top of it. Are there any above-ground elements?”
“None, aside from pieces of tile in the soil. I have not dug any sort of test pit.”
“No, there’s no reason to at this stage. We’re limited to observational work at the moment until the proper permits and forms have been submitted and approved.” She sighed. “Anything else?”
Woman's Work: Shikari Book Four Page 11