I may not ever understand Creeks.
Chapter 28
We don’t paddle the whole way.
I’m not one of those disappointed by this.
A canoe, well, it’s not like I really don’t know what I’m doing, we know what we’re doing, because Dove’s skilled at this, extensively so. After the thirty-kilometre practice trip up and back down the West Wetcreek yesterday, enough, more than enough, of that knowledge is in my spine. Even if the main purposes was to check stowage and to see what had been forgotten, near enough a paddle-picnic. I even believe that, if I think about it, but getting in a canoe is still full of expectations of being lost to the Dread River. Starting the trip from a canal, an obvious canal, the West West-East canal is purely dug, entirely not a natural stream, and moving into something equally obviously not a major river, is a help with expectations.
The barge crew doesn’t comment on the canoes, I think there’s some sort of professional expectation that they can’t be surprised by boats. Other passengers do; it pulls Dove and Wake and Zora into several lengthy conversations, and one of those pulls in Blossom, who winds up looking around for something to write on, deciding there just isn’t anything, and flinging a full-scale see-through diagram of one of the canoes on the air. There are some narrowed eyes, but being informed that, no, it’s not an idea, it’s that one, the third one, Blossom and Grue’s canoe, exactly, see the knot on the painter rope on the stern mooring ring?, there’s a general outbreak of approval along with the examination of details.
“Making more?” gets said in hopeful tones, and Wake notes, firmly, that making more is premature; let the two in regular use put in at least a year of service, let these serve well, and perhaps see wider service than conveying sorcerers, and if no ill thing should arise, then making more is to be considered.
There are nods, that’s only sense, and a very dry “And when they really are the best canoes I’ve ever seen?” that makes Zora blush extensively.
Blossom makes a swooping broad hand gesture. Can’t be what does the illusion, I think it’s there to get people’s attention. Tiny canoe, a metre long, at the end of, yeah, big, physically large, focus, it’d need sixty-four people, not as complex as the armour, just big, more scope to handle, those honeycomb stiffener plates, the sheer size of the vacuum, eight metres by two by two, the mass isn’t that far off, some of the lads are in thirty kilogrammes of armour. Ahead of the tiny canoe, tiny schematic ingots, complete with question mark, pattern to copy, those spray out into three choices, physical sample, fixed list of illusion patterns, single tweakable illusion.
“Call it a month,” Blossom says. “Canoe-maker focus’d be about a décade, then there’s some way to mine titanium, aluminium, and vanadium.”
There are some nods. “Titanium rare?”
Blossom’s head shakes. “Tenth as much as iron, hundred times as much as copper. Not rare, just exciting to refine.” There are some more nods. It’s obviously good stuff, there’s been talk about the Line armour, lots of family-and-lovers social reach from two thousand some-odd people, so it’s either rare or hard to use.
“There’s more aluminium than iron. Vanadium, there’s thirty-odd times as much titanium as vanadium, but that’s not really rare yet, two and a half times as much vanadium as copper.” Blossom makes another hand motion, compact, compressed. The problem is that one thing must happen after the other thing. There are a bunch of smiles. Everyone knows that one.
“Iron’s a bit short,” someone else says. “Never needed much, but it’s not helping the price of nails.”
Blossom nods, carefully making it acknowledgement, not agreement. All the work to get folks settled into the Folded Hills is drawing off worked iron, and the Creeks have always used small-batch refining of bog-iron deposits. The collectives with the rights to those aren’t eager to draw them down, you get mutters about short-term thinking. You get mutters back about having to get through this year before you worry about next, it hasn’t gone outright political yet.
“Too much good dirt,” Blossom says, smile wry. “Hides the rocks. Makes metal tricky to find.” Deep breath, half a glance at Halt, at Wake, in the undertone, you’d never catch it if you weren’t used to using the Power. Not that anybody thinks Blossom’s going to say something they don’t all agree on, all three Keepers of the Shape of Peace in one place hasn’t gone outright political yet, either, but some of the remarks I’ve heard about the member of Parliament and the picnic breakfast suggest it might.
“Refining, mining and refining together, there’s at least three ways to make a focus to do that. Which one is best, which one is safest, no one’s ever done that work; there were mines, collectives to work them, they were all prospering pretty well, nothing much short.”
Except samarium, Dove says into the undertone, all innocence, and Blossom’s formal face nearly slips.
I have a list comes back from Blossom, vehement.
“So you’d be taking a season to figure that out.” Someone else, from the smock and the hands they could be a metal-worker.
Blossom’s head tips to the side. “Maybe not quite that. Getting proper standards made comes first.” Everybody nods. It’s not like anyone is actually suffering, there’s a lot of worry, not the same thing, slides around in loud thoughts. “After that, I’m supposed to get some artillery made, but that’ll take some mining. Might consider to address the larger problem while I’m at it.”
More nods. Apparently a good answer.
The barge stops at a regular landing, a sparse one, there because there’s a landing place every five kilometres. Any landing means we can get the canoes off the barge without being clever. The barge is meant to have at least two metres of freeboard at full load, and it wasn’t at full load.
Not that we couldn’t have done it, the students, I doubt any of the teachers would do it the same way but the idea that getting a canoe off a barge would make any of them pause is beyond silly. It’s still impolite to do things with the Power when you could perfectly well do them the regular way. Lug thousands of tonnes of rock, sure, that’s fine, you’re not going to do that with a wheelbarrow, but the canoes leave the barge the regular way or we’re showing off.
I can’t quite shake the belief that Creeks show off by existing, at least when it comes to carrying things. This never made any sense, and it makes even less after Block’s classes and shape-shifting have me just about as strong. I remember how I felt, or I think I remember how I felt, most of my memory from before is getting blurry enough to really be another life, when a bunch of people with a focus would do something that was completely impossible for me, something I could never even help do. Watching someone do that themselves, by themselves, easily, that would have been worse.
When there was still one Commonweal, before the Second Commonweal, Independents in the Creeks were really rare. Creeks generally preferred to handle trouble themselves, there were a few times Independents got called in, but mostly the Creeks kept to themselves and dealt with stuff themselves. So sorcerers, sorcery, anything socially sorcerous, Creeks have been making their own foci for something past four hundred years, that’s mostly entirely new, here.
“May I ask a question?”
“Of course, dear.” Halt is sitting in the bow of a canoe shared with Wake, knitting. Wake is doing all the paddling, and looks positively contented. Dove and I have to work at it to keep up, it makes me glad it’s a slackwater canal. Can’t tell if Wake is using the Power or not.
“Are the rules for being sorcerous in public, the ways it is and isn’t polite, are those changing?”
“It would be better to say they’re new, dear. Creeks, Creeks as a whole, don’t mind sorcery as much as the old Commonweal did, and the displaced are desperate to survive.”
“Sorcery being better than starvation.” Grue, Grue’s not happy about the prospect of starvation, it’s the new standard of politeness. For-sure happy about that.
“My mother minds sorcery.” Chloris
can’t decide between angry or sad.
“So does mine,” Zora says. “Delighted I’m not sulking or screaming or inexplicably hostile all the time much more than sorcery is objectionable.”
“We’ve got a cultural habit of losing high-talent people, too,” Dove says. “Doesn’t mean we’re more hostile, we missed a lot of the Bad Old Days.”
“Do you know which portion of the Creek ancestry contributed to the traditional Power-use-as-craft part of your society?” Wake asks this offhandedly, Wake and Blossom are trying to figure out which small stream we want to turn up, there are maps floating in the air.
Upstream in the spring. Late spring, not peak runoff, but still, it’s going to be something like work.
Better than sandbar after mud-bar, all the way up low water, Dove says. Stuff lives in mud.
“Didn’t know there were portions to the ancestry. The crafting runs in families, but they don’t seem especially picky about who they have kids with.” Dove’s voice is a lot calmer than Chloris, particularly, looks. Zora’s got a bit of wide eyes, too. I can’t see it, but I don’t need to, spend months with the working link up and you just know. Their canoe’s up front, next to Blossom and Grue’s. Nothing like as weird as Dove dreaming when I’m still awake.
“There were three primary contributor populations to the Creek species,” Wake says. “One previously incumbent in the region, two immigrant; one of the immigrant groups appears to have been altered as labourers, the other as soldiers. It is likely there were two other, minor, contributing populations, possibly incompletely assimilated sub-populations of the incumbent population.”
“Uh, how?” Zora says.
“The assimilation happened as it usually does,” Wake says, voice very dry. “More politely than such things often go, but otherwise as usual.”
“Asks the dead”, Grue says. “I look at patterns in heredity. Same answer.”
“Asks the dead?” Chloris says, almost the way you’d say ‘radishes in the salad?’. A long way beyond startled.
“Something to do on Déci”, Wake says. Blossom’s canoe, Blossom and Grue’s, has turned up a side stream. Not too bad, there’s a current, you can feel it, but it’s not more than work to make progress.
“There are a number of old burial grounds, burial mounds, throughout the Creeks. More densely to the east, it was not as dry a few thousand years ago. The dead come back as they were, if you have the knack of it. The incumbent population were where your teal and violet eyes come from.” Wake sounds happy talking about ancestry. Chloris’ violet eyes, Zora’s teal.
Dove’s ought to be amber, and are golden.
Paddling upstream doesn’t seem to be any different to paddling along the canal for Wake. Halt goes right on knitting away. Whatever it is has a lot of orange yarn in it.
“Two hearts, size, bone and muscle density, probably both the delayed and abrupt senescence, that’s from the labourer population. Needing particular horrible alkaloids in your diet is likely the soldiers, typical food-leash.” Grue’s tone is contemplative.
“Only other thing I’ve got as for-sure from the soldier lineage are some lingering social structures,” Grue says.
“Don’t tell Radish without some buildup,” Dove says to Grue, smiling so much that my back is warm.
“Knees,” Wake says. “Reflexes, certainly the amber and probably the red iris colours. Details of the wrist. Teething in early middle age.”
Grue’s head turns to give Wake a look.
Wake’s benevolence extends. “I was sufficiently lucky. The shade self-described as a midwife, but we would say a life-mage. One who had a long life. Possibly responsible for the Creek species, the inter-fertility wasn’t high.”
Dove gets this very strange grin, not the kind where the back of my neck gets hot, looking at Grue looking flummoxed.
There’s an hour or so of paddling upstream, Grue giving an introduction to detecting the mechanisms of heredity the whole way. I store it, Dove stores it, Zora’s paying actual attention. Letting a new book accumulate pages in the shared library’s not a good habit for actual lessons. Wouldn’t do it at home. Paddling, paddling upstream through wild land? Dove and I are sort of half-merged, reflexes and reactions, it’s a comfortable state. Helps with the paddling. Perceptions all the way out isn’t dense enough, we’re sure we’re missing stuff, we’re never going to get bugs or diseases, but a couple of kilometres all around seems to work for big stuff. Dove picks up on different things than I do. Nothing actually dangerous shows up. There’s some big things, feels like a couple tonnes each, I don’t know what they are, but we never get within half a kilometre of them.
There’s, not really an island, a pile of rocks, the channel around the west of it is probably dry by summer. For now, though, they’re big rocks, head-sized, bare and dry. Good enough spot to camp, the water’s still high enough pulling the canoes out will be easy.
I can worry about the Dread River, hundreds of kilometres away across Folded Hills, four mountain ranges if whomever named things around here didn’t love understatement, but camping in real wild, it is real wild, it’d do for forest primeval, there’s far more of the Creeks than there are Creeks, they don’t fight with the difficult bits, people may not have come here in a thousand years, no, not worried at all.
If I was alone, I’d be terrified. You can only think die at what you see, what you know about. Fungus, disease, all manner of terrible tiny sharp weeds, bugs, parasites, we’d be facing poor odds if it was just the students.
Wake’s sticking metal stakes between stones, not quite any old way but certainly not worried about perfectly upright. Eight of them, no, nine, more or less evenly around a twenty-metre circle. Without the canoes, four seven-metre objects need space, I don’t think the circle would be that big.
There’s a bunch of formal hand passes and Wake nods, approving. The high singing noise coming through the Power fades down in ten, fifteen seconds, it’s still there, but it isn’t like my ears are ringing.
I don’t mean I sensed it using the Power.
Halt, Halt’s chair, the little side-table with the teapot, they’re all totally indifferent to being set on a bunch of big round rocks. Halt’s still knitting. It’s still got a lot of orange in it. If those are sleeves, there are six of them.
Blossom’s got big tall pots, the kind of thing you sterilize canning jars in or use to boil stock. Seven of them. No fire, but at least two of the pots are obviously steaming. There’s a bunch of potatoes peeling themselves in the air, slicing themselves, and landing in a big glass dish.
Grue, well, hands isn’t the right word, presents? — it goes from floating in the water to floating beside Grue to floating in front of Blossom with the potato peels to a cloud, abrupt chemical decomposition, it was a bunch of green things, some sort of water plant, and about half the cloud mists back out over the stream and falls, a slow rain of wet dust.
The other half restructures itself, thickens, acquires crumbling dried herbs from a container, slathers itself on the potatoes. The dish goes in a pot, the glass lid goes on the dish, the metal lid goes on the pot, the big rock under the pot goes glowing warm, and gravel, it was several rocks seconds ago, heaps over the pot. Whole process took fifteen seconds, maybe a bit less.
“Easier than packing lard,” Blossom says.
I nod. A narrowly specific value of easier.
Still, dinner will be hot, and soon. We don’t have to do anything except set up shelters for ourselves. Illusory ones, trying to get a flat space in these rocks would take melting and we’re trying to avoid large uses of the Power, Wake’s been emphatic about that.
Illusions make keeping the bugs out a lot easier. Not many of the biting kind, whatever Wake did with wards seems to work on biting insects. We’ve just got the ones that happened to have been in the warded space when the ward went up.
Well, happen to have been there and haven’t tried to bite Halt — they die — or Blossom — they go up in a tiny ball of fir
e — yet. None of them try to bite Wake, none of them can bite Grue, all of them can bite us, though they do thin out fast. Doesn’t do anything for the non-biting ones attracted to lights. Grue has a couple of lights that shine a horrible blue-purple colour. Those get put over past the canoes, just inside the circle of the ward. The insects, all the insects, like those better, and mostly stay over near the canoes, away from dinner.
Doesn’t this seem odd? Zora may not believe it’s odd, but thinks perhaps a good Creek would think so.
New’s not the same as odd, Dove says. Pretty much any Independent’s got to go looking for something sometime, prospecting, trying to find plants, trying to track down whatever those are that ate all the beets, it’s a regular part of the job. We’re here with more skill and Power than’s at all regular, but I doubt anybody’s a sorcerer-surveyor for very long without figuring out some camp comforts.
Blossom and Grue are, it’s either an argument about smooching or smooching about an argument, no way to tell. Wake’s organizing a flat space by tipping some rocks. Halt’s looking up from knitting, and just for an instant Halt’s eyes narrow.
Nothing dead falls out of the forest canopy, and whatever it was either wasn’t really there or it left. Or air-jellyfish the size of river-barges dragged it away wrapped in poisonous tentacles, paralysed, alive, and slowly torn to pieces, there isn’t much way to tell. The sky’s hazed with sunset and narrow with tall trees.
Chloris, it’s not a shudder. Zora does something closer to shuddering.
Dove looks quizzical at them.
You’ve seen Halt angry. Zora’s making a chair and a little table out of nothing, and looking only at the work. The possibility’s unsettling.
Chloris nods, fishing through a string of aluminium tags worn as a necklace, all furniture of one sort or another.
I’ve seen Halt be — Dove’s right hand reaches into the air for a word — stern? If I ever see Halt get angry I’m going to hide behind Ed.
A Succession of Bad Days Page 36