Down in The Bottomlands (and Other Places)

by Harry Turtledove

  “Dakotia is neutral in this dispute,” Park said, “not least because it borders no state that has a boundary with yours. Dakotian maps”-he drew one out of his leather briefcase to show to Tjiimpuu-“show your border with the Emirate running so. This might be a line from which you and Da’ud could at least begin talks.”

  “And abandon everyone east of it to the Muslims’ savagery and false faith?” The foreign minister sounded appalled.

  “They feel the same way about your worship of Patjakamak,” Park pointed out.

  “But they are ignorant and misguided, while we possess the truth.”

  Park resisted a strong temptation to bend over and pound his forehead against the top of the table. That Tjiimpuu was sincere made matters no better. If anything, it made them worse. A scoundrel was much more amenable to persuasion than someone honestly convinced of the righteousness of his cause.

  Sighing, Park said, “I had hoped to sound you out before we began face-to-face talks with Da’ud ibn Tariq. Maybe this will work out better, though. If he is as stubborn as you, the whole world will see neither side is serious about ending your life of war after war.”

  Tjiimpuu’s face turned a darker shade of bronze. “I will speak with you again when these talks begin. Till then, I want nothing to do with you. You are dismissed.”

  Let the Moors try to claim I’m biased toward Skrellings now, Park thought as he walked out to the street. On the whole, he was more pleased than not over his confrontation with Tjiimpuu. He would have been happier yet, however, had the Tawantiinsuujan foreign minister shown even the slightest sign of compromise.

  Kuuskoo’s streets, nearly deserted an hour before, now swarmed with life. The locals, quiet and orderly as usual, all seemed to be going in the same direction. “What are you doing?” Park asked a man walking by.

  The man turned, stared in surprise. For all Park knew, he had never seen a pink-cheeked, sandy-haired person before; neither travel nor communication between distant lands was as easy here as in the judge’s native world. Still, the Kuuskan’s answer was polite enough: “We go to the festival of Raimii, of course.”

  “Raimii, eh?” That was the most important religious festival in Tawantiinsuuju, the solemn feast of the sun. Curiosity got the better of Park, though he knew the original inhabitant of ex-Bishop Ib Scoglund’s body would not have been caught dead attending such a pagan rite. Too bad for old Ib, he thought. “Maybe I’ll come with you.”

  The local beamed, shifted the big cud of coca leaves in his mouth. “I always thought foreigners were too ignorant and depraved to understand our religion. Perhaps I was wrong.”

  Park only grunted in response to that. He walked with the crowd now, instead of trying to cut across it. The Skrellings’ low-voiced talk grew louder and more excited as they filed into a large plaza near the center of Kuuskoo. The square was as big as two football fields side by side, maybe bigger. Park tried to work out how many people it could hold. Let’s see, he thought, assuming each person needs a little more than a square foot to stand in, if thisplace is, say, 400 feet by 300-

  He gave up the arithmetic as a bad job, for he suddenly saw that the walls of two sides of the square had a golden chain stretched along them, a little above man-high. Each link was thicker than his wrist. Instead of figuring out people, he started reckoning how many dollars, or even Vinland crowns, that chain would be worth. A lot of them, for sure.

  The Tawantiinsuujan who had told him of the festival was still beside him. He saw Park staring at the chain. “This is as nothing, stranger. This is but the common people’s square; we call it Kuusipata. The Son of the Sun and his kin worship one square over, in the plaza called Awkaipata. There you would see gold and silver used in a truly lavish way.”

  “This is lavish enough for me,” Park muttered. Just one link of that chain, he thought, and he wouldn’t have to worry about money for the rest of his life. For the first time, he understood what Francisco Pizarro must have felt when he plundered the wealth of the Incas back in Park’s original world. He’d always thought Pizarro the champion bandit of all time, but the sight of so much gold lying around loose would have made anyone start breathing hard.

  Several men strode out onto a raised platform at the front of the square. Some wore gold and silver wreaths, and had plates of the precious metals adorning their tunics. Others used the hides of pumas and jaguars in place of robes, with their own faces peering out under the big cats’ heads. When one man held his arms wide, others had to step aside, for his costume included huge condor wings, feathered in black and white.

  One of the priests, for such they were, raised his hands to the sky. All the people in the square somehow found room to squat. Park was a beat late, and felt rather like an impostor trying to pretend he belonged in a marching band. His knees creaked as he held the squat. He grumpily wondered why the Tawantiinsuujans couldn’t kneel when they worshiped, like everyone else. That would have been a lot more comfortable.

  The locals tilted their heads back so they looked up toward the sun. They must have had a trick for not looking right at it. Park didn’t know the trick. He kept on staring blearily upwards, dazzled and blinking, his eyes full of tears.

  The Tawantiinsuujans held their hands up by their faces and loudly kissed the air. Somehow, again a beat slow, Park managed to do the same without toppling over into one of the people by him.

  The priests on the platform began to sing a hymn. Still squatting, the squareful of worshipers joined in. Everybody — everybody but Park — knew the words. Some voices were good, others not. Taken all together, they were impressive, almost hypnotic, the way any massed singing becomes after a while.

  The hymn was long. Park’s knees hurt too much to let him be hypnotized. Back in his New York days, he’d never thought much of baseball players as athletes, but now he started feeling no small respect for what catchers went through.

  At last the hymn ended. People stood up. Another hymn started. When it was done, the Tawantiinsuujans squatted again. So, stifling a groan, did Allister Park. Yet another hymn began.

  By the time the service was finally done, Park felt as though he’d caught a double-header. He also desperately needed to find a public jakes.

  “Is that not a magnificent festival?” asked the Skrelling who’d inveigled him into going to the square of Kuusipata.

  Well, maybe it hadn’t happened exactly like that, but at the moment Park’s memory was inclined to be selective.

  “Most impressive,” he said, lying through his teeth.

  “Raimii will go on for nine days in all,” the local told him, “each day’s worship being different from the last. Will you come to Kuusipata tomorrow, your foreign excellency?”

  “If I can,” Park said, that seeming a more politic response than not on your life. After nine days of squatting, he was convinced he would walk like an arthritic chimp forevermore. Then something he had noticed but not thought about during the service sank home. “Nine days!” he exclaimed. “I saw no books for prayer among you. Do you remember all your songs and such?”

  “Of course we do,” the Skrelling said proudly. “They are graven on our hearts. Only people whose faith is cold have to remind themselves of it. Books for prayer, indeed!” The very idea offended him.

  Park was thoughtful as he filed toward the edge of the square. Reading was obviously easier and more trustworthy than memorizing, and therefore, to him anyway, obviously more desirable for keeping records straight. The Tawantiinsuujans, though, as he had already discovered in other contexts, did not think the same way he did.

  Maybe that was what made him notice the goodwain parked near a wall fifty yards or so beyond the edge of the square. In New York, or even in New Belfast, he would not have given it a second glance: parking spaces were where you found them. In Kuuskoo, though, it surprised him. It impeded the flow of people coming out of Kuusipata, and that was unlike the orderly folk here.

  The locals must have thought the same. A man climb
ed up onto the running board, reached out to unlatch the driver’s-side door so he could get in and move the truck out of the way.

  The door wasn’t locked. Few were, in law-abiding Thwantiinsuuju. He yanked it open. The goodwain blew up.

  Park felt the blast more than he heard it. The next thing he knew, he was on the ground. The cobbles were hard and bumpy. As if from very far away, he heard people shrieking.

  He shook his head, trying to clear it, and scrambled to his feet. The carnage closer to the goodwain was appalling. He shivered as he saw how lucky he was. Only the bodies of the people in front of him had shielded him from the full force of the explosion.

  Half a dozen men sprang up from behind the wall, which was of ancient megalithic stonework and hence undamaged by the blast. For a moment, Park thought they’d got up there to direct help to the writhing victims near them. Then he saw they all had air rifles. They raised them to their shoulders, started shooting into the crowd.

  Allister Park had seen combat as a young man in his own world, and again during his brief tenure as Vinland’s assistant secretary of war. At the sound of the first sharp pop, he threw himself flat. He knocked over the person behind him. They fell together.

  The men with guns shouted in unison as they fired. Park took a moment to notice, first that the shouts were not in Ketjwa, then that he understood them anyhow. “Allahu akbar!” the gunmen cried. “God is great! Allahu akbar!” Someone screamed, right in Park’s ear. Only then did he realize he was lying on a woman. Her fist pounded his shoulder. “Let me go!” she yelled. She tried to push him off her.

  “No! Stay down!” By some miracle, he remembered to speak Ketjwa instead of English. As if to punctuate his words, a bullet felled a man standing not three paces away. The woman screamed again, and shuddered, but seemed to decide Park was protecting rather than attacking her. She quit struggling beneath him.

  Around them, the noise of the crowd changed from horror to animal fury. People surged toward the men on the wall. Had the gunmen been carrying the automatic weapons Park’s world knew, they would have massacred their assailants. With air rifles that had to be pumped up after every shot, they slowed but could not stop the outraged mob.

  “Allahu akbar!” Park lifted his head just in time to see the last gunman raise a defiant fist and jump down in back of the wall. The locals scrambled over it to give chase. One was shot, but more kept on. Others, men and women both, began to tend the scores of injured people near the twisted wreckage of the goodwain.

  Park cautiously got to his feet. After a few seconds, he was convinced no more gun-toting fanatics were going to spring from nowhere. He stooped to help up the woman he had flattened when the shooting started.

  “Thank you,” she said with some dignity, accepting his hand. “I am sorry I screamed at you. You saw the danger from those — madmen” — she shivered — “before almost anyone else.”

  “I am glad you are not hurt,” Park said. For the first time, he had the leisure to take a look at her. She was, he guessed, only a few years younger than he; one or two white threads ran through the midnight mane that hung almost to her waist. She was attractive, in the long-faced, high-cheekboned local fashion. Her mantle and brightly striped skirt were of soft, fine wools.

  The derby she’d been wearing was crushed beyond repair. She picked it up, made a wry face, threw it down again. Then she studied Allister Park with as much interest, or perhaps curiosity, as he showed her. “You are not one of us,” she said. “Why were you at the festival of Raimii?”

  “To see what it was like,” he answered honestly. “I probably will never be in Kuuskoo again; while I am here, I want to learn and see as much as I can.”

  She considered that, nodded. “Did the beauty of the service incline you toward the worship of the sun and Patjakamak?”

  Despite wearing an ex-bishop’s body, Park wished people would stop asking him loaded religious questions. He temporized: “The services were very beautiful, ah-”

  “My name is Kuurikwiljor,” she said.

  Park gave his own or, rather, Ib Scoglund’s name, then said, “Kuurikwiljor-‘golden star.’ That’s very pretty. So, by the way, are you.” He played that game almost as automatically as he breathed; his attitude toward women was decidedly pragmatic. But just as genuine a sense of duty made him look around to make sure he was not needed here before he asked, “Where are you going now? May I walk there with you, so you will feel safe?”

  Kuurikwiljor, he saw with approval, looked toward the wounded herself before she answered. With the usual Tawantiinsuujan efficiency, teams of uniformed medics were already on the scene. They slapped on bandages, set broken bones, and loaded the worst hurt onto stretchers for more extensive treatment elsewhere. They did not seem to need any unskilled help.

  Park also saw Kuurikwiljor eye him appraisingly. He did not mind that; he was sensible enough to think well of good sense in others. Whatever Kuurikwiljor saw must have satisfied her, for she said, “Thank you. I am staying at my brother’s house, in the district of Puumatjupan.”

  That district, Park knew, was in the southern part of the city. With Kuurikwiljor following, he started in that direction. “On to the house of your brother,” he declared. He thought he sounded rather grand, but Kuurikwiljor giggled.

  He mentally reviewed what he’d just said. “Oh, hell,” he muttered in English. Then he switched back to Ketjwa, more careful Ketjwa this time: “I mean the house of your waukej, not your toora.” He’d tripped himself up by echoing Kuurikwiljor; waukej was the word men used for brother, while toora was reserved for women.

  “That’s better,” Kuurikwiljor said. “You don’t speak badly. From what I’ve heard, most foreigners would never have noticed their mistake, Ib Scogljund.”

  In his turn, he tried to get her to say the “l” in his name without pronouncing it as if it were “ly.” He had no luck; the simple “l” sound did not exist in Ketjwa. After teasing her a little, he gave up. “Never mind. It sounds charming as you say it.”

  “But I should be right,” Kuurikwiljor said seriously. “Ib Scog-Scog-Scogljund. Oh, a pestilence!” They both laughed.

  The fumbling with languages and names helped break the ice between them. They talked all the way down to Kuurikwiljor’s brother’s house. Park learned she was a childless widow. That sort of thing was only too common in this world, which knew less of medicine — and a lot less about immunization — than his own. Kuurikwiljor sounded suitably impressed about Park’s reasons for coming to Tawantiinsuuju.

  “We need to find some way to live at peace with the Emir,” she said. “Either that, or wipe his country from the face of the earth. Sometimes I think Muslims are viler than the dog-eating Wankas. The way those terrible men took advantage of the accident to work even more harm on us-” She shook her head. “My mantle is all splashed with blood.”

  Truly, Park thought, this world was more naпve than the one from which he’d come. As gently as he could, he said, “Kuurikwiljor, I don’t think that was an accident. I think they made that truck blow up. I think they were waiting for it to blow up, so they would have a confused and frightened crowd to shoot at.”

  She stared at him. “What a dreadful thing to say!” But after walking a few steps in silence, she went on, “That does make sense, doesn’t it? They would hardly be waiting with guns just in case there was an explosion.”

  “Hardly,” Park agreed. He let it go at that; telling her the Tawantiinsuujans were little kinder to Muslims would have accomplished nothing.

  Her brother’s house was a large, impressive stone building next to one of the streams that defined the boundaries of Puumatjupan. Servants came rushing out when they saw Kuurikwiljor. They exclaimed over her bedraggled state and, once they found Park had helped her come home safe, praised him to the skies and pressed llama meat, cornmeal mush, and aka on him.

  Before long, he found himself meeting Kuurikwiljor’s brother, a stocky, solemn man of about his own age named Paulju
u. “Most kind of you, foreign sir, and most generous,” Pauljuu said. “I know you sought none, but let me reward you for the service you have done my family.” He drew a heavy gold signet ring from his right thumb, tried to hand it to Park.

  “Thank you, but I must say no,” Park told him. As Pauljuu’s face clouded over, Park went on quickly: “I am a judge. How will people say I judge fairly if I take presents from one side?”

  “Ah.” Pauljuu nodded. “I have heard it said that all foreigners will do anything for gold. I am glad to see it is not so.”

  “Any saying that claims all of some group will do a particular thing is not to be trusted,” Park observed.

  “Spoken like a judge. If not gold, then, how may I express my thanks?” Pauljuu asked. “You should know my father Ruuminjavii is kuuraka — governor — of the province of Sausa, to the north. I need not stint.”

  Park bowed. “As I say, I am a judge. I will not, I must not, take your gifts.” He hesitated for a moment, then said, “Still, if you would not mind me coming to see your sister-” he carefully used the right word, not wanting to embarrass himself “-again, that would be very kind.”

  Pauljuu glanced toward Kuurikwiljor, who had been sitting quietly while the two men talked. (In some ways, Park thought, Tawantiinsuuju was positively Victorian. Too bad no one here had any idea what Victorian meant.) Kuurikwiljor nodded. “As it pleases her and pleases you, I have no objection,” Pauljuu said.

  Park bowed again to him, then to Kuurikwiljor. “Thank you both,” he said. “Have you a wirecaller here?” In this world, the telephone had been invented in Northumbria; its Ketjwa name was a literal translation of what English speakers called it here.

  “Of course. Ask for the house of Ruuminjavii’s son. The man who connects calls will make sure it goes through,” Pauljuu said.