She took his hand and they walked companionably “Debly, tell me something.”
He hesitated. “What?”
“Why did these worlds crash so badly? The Dark Age was rough on the Old Planets. The prehumans deliberately mixed cultures and languages, and it took centuries to recover; but the Old Planets never forgot the past as badly as here. The Harps have a legend about ancestors who went out on the Shining Path, promising to return. But they never did. That would have been the expedition sent to Harpaloon. I’ve seen the landers in Côndefer Park, and even the’ Loons have forgotten what they were. No surprise, the Enjrunii never heard of the League or the Confederation. But I’ve mentioned the prehumans, Dao Chetty, even the Commonwealth. Nothing. It’s like they never were.”
They continued silently for a space while Sofwari gave it thought. A bird with a flare of red feathers at his crest called out from a branch they were passing and took wing to another tree. “This is outside my expertise,” he said at last, “but my guess is that as rich as the Treasure Fleet was, it was not as rich as a world. What they took with them was nothing; next to the whole of Terra. In the end, there were not enough of them, or they lacked for something essential, or they spread themselves too thin. Perhaps if they had focused on fewer worlds…”
“I understand the world has to be receptive. Look at Gatmander or New Eireann. Had they seeded too few places, and the prehumans had stumbled across them out here…No, their safest choice was to spread their seed as far and wide as they could. Who knows…”
“Who knows what?”
“Who knows what we would find in the Cygnus Arm, if we ever get there?”
She heard chimes, and looked around to see what the sound could be. The Harps placed “soul catchers” in trees and the wind rang the metal pieces woven into them. But this was far outside Harp country.
Donovan was answering his comm. unit. For a moment, the significance did not register. Then she realized. “Blankets and Beads! She’s back!”
Their translators and guide did not understand the elation. Méarana tried to explain to Watershanks that their “endarooa-of-the-stars” had retuned from a trade visit; and Watershanks tried to explain that to two people who had likely never seen an endarooa. A star canoe? What was that beside the wonders they had already seen? Ayiyi! The Scarred One spoke to a djinn invisible!
Donovan said, “They have a fix, but there are only four signals. They have another signal, very weak, from Roaring Gorge, and ad-Din wants to know what happened? Who’s lost their beacon?”
Teodorq shrugged. “Mine went missing during the fight in Roaring Gorge. I ain’t going back to get it.”
Debly Sofwari ducked his head. “Same thing. When they Harps ransacked my equipment…”
Méarana grabbed him by the sleeve. “You were supposed to keep it on your person! Not stuff it away in your baggage! What were you thinking? If you’d gotten separated from us, we would never have found you!” She had begun pushing and shoving him; and he seized her hands at the wrist.
“Why berate me over what might have happened? If I had told you, what could you have possibly done about it?”
“D.Z. wants to know,” said Donovan, wagging his comm., “if we want pickup.”
Paulie said, “Easier than climbing up that mesa.”
Méarana backed away from Sofwari. “Tell him no,” she said. “We’ll be on top tomorrow morning.”
“The priestess back in Daciiti,” Theodorq said, “said day after is when the god comes.”
“Donovan, tell D.Z. that the ship should search for an approaching astronomical object. An asteroid or something.”
Donovan did so, adding, “And D.Z. it would not be a good idea to let Blankets and Beads come between that object and the mesa.” He signed off and tucked the comm. back in his breast pocket.
Méarana, watching him, said, “How did you hide your comm. from the Harps?”
The Fudir grinned with Donovan’s lips. “There’s always one place you can stick things where most folks won’t look.”
The path to the top of the mesa was steep. Bavyo assured them that there were no turnoffs to lead them astray. He then wished them good fortune and turned to the main trail. Méarana cried with astonishment. “Wait!”
But Chain said through Watershanks, “He walks his own path. The Oorah trail is not his trail.”
Billy Chins grunted. “Some guide.”
“I will go with Bavyo,” Chain announced. “He needs a woman to walk beside him, and how the barbarians used Skins-rabbits will not matter to him.” She, too, turned her feet to the main trail, speaking a few words with Watershanks as she passed.
The others gathered round. Teodorq watched the two Emrikii depart. “That can’t be good.”
“Watershanks,” said Méarana, “what did she tell you?”
“She assured me that the Oorah consider a guest as their most precious treasure.”
“Fine,” said Paulie, “but without we have an interpreter, what can they tell us?”
Donovan stood to the side with a thoughtful frown, running his fingers across his scars. “Oorah,” Méarana heard him say. “The people of the village? Do you think it could be, or is it just a coincidence?”
The way was steep, though unlike the Longfoot trail, there was no point at which they had to resort to toe- and handholds. But the air was thin and cold, and there was trouble catching one’s breath. Coming to a primordial lava flow, the trail passed through a slot cut through the rock and fashioned anciently into stairs. In the rock were carved the runes:
Donovan stopped and ran his fingers over them, feeling out the shape of the figures. “Kapartār,” he said, as if to himself. “Could that be ‘guhbahdāw’?” He stood, staring and silent.
“I suppose it could be,” said Teodorq. “But for my eyes it could be ‘For a good time, summon Tsuzi Elkhorn.’” Paulie laughed with him.
Méarana said, “Donovan, what does guhbahdāw mean?”
“Hmm?” The scarred man turned from his contemplation of the carving. “Oh. It means ‘beware.’”
Teodorq looke at Paulie. “That can’t be good.”
Paulie said, “Stop saying that.” And the mountaineer made a sign with his left hand to avert the evil.
“Pedant talks about phoneme shifts. A ‘bh’—or ‘v’—tends to become a ‘b,’ for example; and a ‘b’ becomes a ‘p.’ But sometimes people pick up phonemes from neighboring folk and ‘b’ may become ‘bh’ again. This looks to me like the old Tantamiž that we saw in Madéen O’ Loons, or on the old captain’s logs that Greystroke stole from the Harpaloon temple.”
“I don’t mean that,” said Méarana. “I mean, what are we supposed to be wary of?”
“Life.”
“We needed a sign to tell us that?”
Méarana started into the cut, but Teodorq suddenly grabbed her by the shoulders, lifted her up, and set her down behind him. “I think,” he said, “that this is what yuh hired me for, babe. Paulie, you take rearguard. Donovan, Billy, in the middle with the scholar and the lady.”
“I can handle myself,” Méarana told him.
“Yeah? That’s what the late Tsuzi Elkhorn said to me at Whisker Bluff. But she was only half-right, and it was a whole fight. So, shut up, babe. Without yuh, there’d be nobody to sing my story. I mean, yer the reason we’re here an’ not somewhere else. My head would be decorating a spike outside Josang prison, and yer old man would be a drunk in a Jehovah bar. And Debly, here, would be playing with himself and swabbing people’s cheeks instead of being on this here quest where his name might be remembered for something that matters.”
Sofwari began to protest, but Teodorq had already started up the cut. Donovan paused before following him. “I don’t know,” he said with a grin. “The Bar on Jehovah might have been the better choice.”
Méarana pushed him along. “Move along, old man. Mount your head on a spike or mount it on a bottle of uiscebaugh, you’re embalmed either way.”
The passage took them up onto the lip of a wind-whipped parapet. Emerging, they saw that the rim of the mesa was a ridge that encircled a great barren bowl of a valley. It was at least a thousand double-paces from lip to lip. The village of the Oorah was strung around this bowl like a wreath woven of greens and fir branches. Fields were set in terraces in the side of the bowl. Below them, huts nestled. Inward of the huts was barren rock: no vegetation grew, no trees, no bushes.
“Like the caldera of a volcano,” said Sofwari as they made their way around the ledge.
“Except here,” Méarana said, “the fire comes down from the sky, not up from the ground.”
Thin lines of people filed into the caldera, each person carrying something which he laid in a great pile in the center of the bowl. Through the stiff wind they heard the faint murmur of singing and the people swayed to the rhythm of it.
“Offerings to the approaching god,” Sofwari guessed.
One of the supplicants, turning back after dropping her offering, pointed and raised a cry, and heads began to turn their way.
“Perhaps we have interrupted something,” said Watershanks.
Donovan stepped to the edge of the parapet and cupped his hands. “Halloo!” he called. “Nawn inki yergay mbetão!”
This caused a flurry of activity beneath them. People ran to and fro, sleeves were tugged, hats held out to shade eyes, more fingers were pointed. Finally, an old man was led out. Despite the cold, high-altitude air, he wore nothing beside a short skirt and what looked like a dusting of talcum powder over his chest, face, and arms. He bore a staff made of a thick, twisted tree limb and his hair was a rat’s tangle. An acolyte held a megaphone to the man’s lips.
“Ungloady pr’enna?”
Donovan thought about that, then shouted back, “Onkyawti por enya?”
Now the priest, if such he was, appeared puzzled. Then he made a sign on his body and said, “Ongalodai per enna?”
Donovan smiled. “He knows the ancient dialect!” he told the others. Then he called, “Naan Donovan. Naan ingey irke vendum!”
Tangled hair bobbed as the priest nodded vigorously. “Vanakkam! Ullay waruvangal.” He pointed ahead of them. “Munney po! Munney po!”
Donovan turned to them. “He says welcome and come in, and we should go forward.”
__________
They found the path down through the terraces half a league farther on along the parapet. But once down to the next level they had to “pinnal po,” go back the way they had come to find the stairs to the next terrace down.
“I had wondered about that,” said Billy Chins. “Their village occupies the low ground, which disadvantages them. But they have created a maze through their crop terraces, so an invader cannot charge straight down. Though if the Emrikii learn to make rifled muskets, they could stand on the parapet and pick off people in the village.”
“The Harps could take this place,” said Watershanks. “They could rappel down the sides of the terraces like they did down the cliffs at Candle-town.” Whether that thought heartened him, he did not say. The Harps, in any case, were far away and getting farther.
The entire ring of habitations was called Ūr, or Oor; but different segments along the ring were called by different names. When Méarana and her company finally emerged onto the terrace where the houses were set, they found themselves in Mylap Oor, or “Peacock Town.” There was a great stone statue of a peacock there under the shade of what they called a “funny tree.” The peacock was said to be the goddess Fahbády worshipping the god Žiba. That one god might worship another struck Méarana as peculiar. Maxwell certainly did not worship Newton! And since the stone peacock gazed nowhere but into the empty bowl valley, how did anyone know what she worshipped?
A happy, laughing crowd met them and escorted them around the ring-village to the headman’s house. Along the way, they passed bronze statues, mostly of young women, but including also some young men and a few older men dressed like the bonze who had first greeted them. Donovan told them, after asking their escorts, that these were the nayanmars, the sixty-three saints of Žiba. The statues were beautifully done and many of them were adorned with floral wreaths around their necks or with bouquets and jar-candles and joss sticks at their feet. It is the festival of “Rupa Ðamupa,” they were told by those who kissed them as they passed.
That evening, at a banquet in their honor, they learned that the festival celebrated the coming of the god in two of his aspects: Vrabha the Creator and Žiba the Destroyer. The headman, who was also the hierophant for the entire Oorah tribe, sat them on great embroidered pillows and placed cones of incense before them and decked them with leis. Then he brought in troupes of naked dancing girls, between performances of which he explained the traditions of the Village People.
Eons ago, Vrabha the Creator placed the Oorah on the mesa to bring life to the world by preparing a place where the god might come: the Vagina of the Earth, although the pagans in the Lower Lands called it the Well at the End of the World.
“But it is not the End, but the Beginning,” he explained.
The speech had to run through Donovan’s ears and out his tongue, which made at times for slow-going. The ancient Tantamiž had changed in one way for these people and in another way for Donovan’s, and so they spoke in the dead tongue that was their common ancestor. Donovan felt exalted. He was, however inexpertly, speaking as the Vraddies of the old Commonwealth of Suns had spoken in the glory days of Terra. He was, in some manner, at one with them.
“But the god is three in one,” the old man explained. “He not only brings life, but he sustains it, and destroys it, and thus brings the wheel full circle; for the destruction is the conception. And so when the god comes, we hold this festival to honor his saints. We take our most precious treasures and place them in the Vagina of the World to be consumed by his love. Thus it has been. Thus it will be.”
Paulie said, “This food tastes funny.”
“It does have an odd flavor,” Donovan agreed. He asked the headman what spices had been used to flavor the meat and the headman told him.
“Tānikam,” he said. “What some folk call ‘coriander.’”
Donovan paused with his spoon half-lifted. “Coriander?” he croaked. “This is corander? But it grows nowhere else but Terra!”
The headman shrugged. “Perhaps it is but a different thing called by the same name.”
Donovan finished swallowing. “It is not so much of a such,” he said.
Méarana laid a gentle hand on his arm. “Sometimes a dream is more alluring than the fact.”
But Donovan shrugged off the hand. “Then we should dream more realistically.”
Méarana looked away. “She was here, wasn’t she? Your headman confirmed it. They called her a reincarnation of Fahbády the Peacock. She came down from heaven in a chariot, walked among them, and then rose once more. You can’t say my quest was unrealistic if we actually succeeded.”
Donovan saw tears in the corner of her eyes, and did not answer. Success was no proof at all. One man might succeed on the wildest of hunches; another fail after careful calculation. If the True Coriander had proven a disappointment, the same was not true of what it symbolized. He gazed at the bowl valley, which the verandah of the headman’s palace faced. The Burnt-Over District, he thought. There must be places like this on a dozen worlds; places where the god returns at intervals and screws them over with fire from the sky.
That sort of repetition bespoke the mechanical, like the tock of a metronome. Whatever the original purpose had been, it was simply repeating itself now, like a scanner stuck on a bit.
“At least,” said Méarana softly, “I know at last where she went.”
“But you don’t,” Donovan told her. “She came here, yes; but she left to go elsewhere. And these people don’t know where. This is the end of the trail.”
“No it isn’t,” Méarana said, pointing to the stars that were appearing in the violet sky. “She went there.”
And there was a blue star, brighter than all the others, rising above the eastern rim of the bowl, directly in line with the Vagina of the World.
“She’s decelerating,” Maggie Barnes told them over the comm. as they gathered for the night in the Longhouse of the Nayanmars. The building was decorated for the festival in banners and icons. And one of the bronze statues had been rolled into the building with them. The second-oldest, they had been told.
“No,” the captain continued, “I don’t know what kind of engines she’s using, but they ain’t what we use. She’s a-coming our way at a fair clip. D.Z. says she has a two-year period relative to Enjrun’s year and reaches conjunction at northern hemisphere spring.”
“That fits. We think the harper’s mother tracked down the object and rendezvoused with it—it’s some sort of old Commonwealth tech—”
“We ain’t stupid, Fudir. And I gotta say if it pans out, yer high-handed arrogance commandeering my ship may just damn-well pay for itself five times over.”
“Short of what the Kennel will want kept confidential. Send the boat down for us in the morning, after the festival.” He glanced at Méarana, who nodded. There was no urgency to the rendezvous, and it hurt nothing to be polite to their hosts.
The others were already bedded down, although Teodorq sat on his bedding against the wall with his nine in an open scabbard and Goodhandlingblade across his lap. “They seem friendly enough,” Donovan told him.
The Wildman shrugged. “Then I lose a few hours’ sleep before Paulie spells me. I’d rather be cautious and wrong than careless and wrong.”
A bench ran along the inside walls of the longhouse and Donovan sat beside Teodorq. “You know, Teddy, I had my doubts at first; but you’ve been a good man to have. The way you handled those Harp warriors showed good judgment as well as bravery.”
“Yeah. I’m good. It’s what we call counting coup back home. The law of least effort. The real bitch is when yuh have to kill a friend. That’s hard.”
“Yes,” the scarred man said after a moment, “I guess it is. But I know one thing harder.”
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