Reign of Fire

by Marjorie B. Kellogg

  He wondered how Kav Daven would look on such an idea.

  “May I ask a question?” ventured CRI after a few moments.

  “What?”

  “If you were not looking for evidence of an impact, what led you to request information about an anomaly precisely where one seems to be?”

  Stavros remembered his hunger and ripped at the packet of apricots. “You really want to know?”

  “I am not programmed to make insincere requests, Mr. Ibiá.”

  “Well, your input might be useful, so I’ll play you a tape.” He heard Edan’s quiet trot speeding along the outer corridor and decided not to care that he had discarded all his clothing. A Sawl wouldn’t give it a moment’s thought. “Run the tape through my translator program, store it and tell me what you think.”

  He took the battery lamp to the rear of the cavern and unearthed a metal box from beneath a pile of silverfilm blankets, his cache of precious hours of singing and chanting and story telling.

  “In fact,” he called back to the console, “I really should upload all my tapes, before the heat gets to them, or…”

  Or something gets to me. Something like a convenient landslide.

  He located the cartridge he wanted, Liphar’s throaty rendition of the Fortress of Lagri tale-chant. He brought it back to the console and fed it into the slot. “Chew on that for a while.”

  Edan materialized at the entrance, sweat-drenched and eager. As he’d predicted, she paid his nakedness no heed but announced breathlessly that the ranger salvage party was on its way in with the wrecked Sled. Liphar stirred on his bedroll and sat up groggily. Edan delivered her second piece of news to him. A ceremony was planned, an attempt to sing strength to Valla so that the crops might have a little rain.

  Stavros’s attention caught on the Sled. He thought it remarkable that the vehicle should reappear coincident with his notion of going in search of a physical Goddess.

  “Mr. Ibiá, I seem to be receiving…”

  “Just a minute, CRI.” He pressed Edan for a report on the apparent condition of the Sled and the progress of the antenna repairs. Liphar woke up enough to clamor for further information about the ceremony.

  “Mr. Ibiá, there is a signal…”

  “CRI, Lifa, please!” Stavros pumped the younger ranger patiently, for she was having understandable difficulty describing objects for which she lacked the appropriate vocabulary.

  “I am patching it in now,” CRI continued, oblivious.

  The speaker snapped and hissed warningly. Stavros whirled in horror as Clausen’s voice invaded the room, transmitting his call code from the Lander. Liphar scrambled up in confusion. Edan flinched into a fighting posture and scanned the darkened corners for the man she knew the voice belonged to.

  Forcing himself to exhale. Stavros lunged at the console and shut down all but the listening mode.

  “The Orbiter is receiving you, Mr. Clausen,” came CRI’s welcoming reply. “Captain Newman will be relieved to have you back in contact. You have had a successful trip, I hope?”

  “Trip?” Clausen’s voice was as clear as if it came from the next room.

  “Across the plain, with the traders? Mr. Ibiá has kept us well informed of…”

  “IBIÁ? WHERE IS HE?”

  “Oh, Christ, he’s fixed the link.” Stavros slapped off the audio and sat in numbed silence for the approximately thirty seconds required for him to realize that CRI would be able to supply the prospector with an exact fix on the location of his hiding place.

  Suddenly the air in the cavern was too hot to breathe.

  “We’ve got to get out of here, we’re sitting ducks.” He whispered when what he really wanted to do was shout and run. Instead, he grabbed his pants for some small sense of security, then began to explain to his shaken companions the new depths of their predicament.

  Clausen summoned a deadly calm in place of his first explosive rage.

  “Where is he, CRI?”

  “I was unaware that you were ignorant of Mr. Ibiá’s whereabouts,” the computer replied peevishly. “I will supply those coordinates.”

  “I’d appreciate that, CRI.” Clausen curled into a predatory slouch. He watched hawklike as the figures appeared, pointedly placed dead center in the screen. His eyes slitted. “That little shit! He’s right on top of us!”

  Weng stood blocking him by the time he came erect.

  “Out of my way, Commander.”

  Weng’s hand shot out and unsnapped the flap on Clausen’s hip holster. “Perhaps you would rather leave your… tools here, Mr. Clausen?”

  Clausen knocked her hand away, with more force than was necessary. Behind him, McPherson tensed but remained immobile with indecision. He glanced at her, then chuckled and drew the little pistol.

  “How right you are, Commander. I won’t be needing this, will I?”

  He handed the laser to Weng butt-first and snatched up his searchbeam instead.

  Weng stared after him stonily as he loped up the dark path toward the Caves. Then, impulsively, she stooped to the console.

  “CRI, kindly inform Mr. Ibiá that Mr. Clausen is on his way.”

  McPherson stared. “Commander, why did you do that?”

  Weng backed slowly away from the console as if it had made an indecent proposal. Her powder-soft brow creased with unease. “I don’t precisely know, Lieutenant. To save Mr. Ibiá’s life, I suppose.”

  Later, as they nervously awaited Clausen’s return. Weng filed a month’s worth of status reports with her superiors in the Orbiter and began the downloading of recent instrument data for Danforth.

  McPherson trudged up to the small work encampment at the foot of the cliffs to borrow an idled water wagon. She met one of the returned rangers trotting down the path, on his way to announce the arrival of the salvaged Sled. She greeted him gladly in her fledgling Sawlish and paced after him to the encampment, where the battered vehicle lay just outside the circle of firelight on its hastily assembled sledge.

  She walked around the winged hulk. The nose and tail hung precipitously off either end of the sledge. A thick coating of dust turned the smooth white plastic to ochre. The hjalk team that had hauled it blew heavily into their water buckets, their lathered ribs heaving. McPherson guessed that the lashed and pegged wooden sledge itself weighed more than the Sled, and pitied the Sawls for their lack of lightweight construction materials.

  The salvage party had collapsed in scattered twos and threes out of range of the fire’s heat. As McPherson approached, they glared dully as if daring her to demand the Sled’s immediate delivery to the Lander clearing.

  Instead, she thanked them and made arrangements with the party leader to haul it down at the start of the next work cycle. The tired Sawls were relieved enough to assent immediately to the loan of an empty two-cart. McPherson placed herself between the shafts and trundled off to the Lander to make a movable bed-chair for Danforth.

  She took advantage of Clausen’s absence to raise the new computer desk so that her invention could slide underneath and Danforth could face the terminal as if seated at a standard console. Weng agreed to use it standing up. When he had been painfully levered into the adapted cart, Danforth greeted CRI like a long-lost lover, and was beyond reach for the better part of an hour. Eventually, he sat back from the console with a frown.

  “That’s odd.” He turned to Weng and McPherson, the first sign that he was aware of their constant presence at his shoulder.

  “Want to know what Ibiá’s been up to all this time?”

  Weng leaned into the screen. “I see.”

  “That’s weird, all right,” McPherson remarked.

  “What possible interest could a linguist have in the sensing data?”

  Weng pointed a slim, dry finger. “Just with reference to those two areas, it would seem.”

  “If I may, Commander,” offered the computer. “I believe Mr. Ibiá was attempting to draw some connection between locations figuring prominently in the Sawlis
h mythos and actual geographical features of the planet.”

  “What locations?”

  “The homes of the Goddesses, Commander.”

  This silenced them a moment. Then Danforth noticed the angle that would result if a line were drawn between the two points of Stavros’ interest: the now familiar northeast-southwest diagonal slash across the face of the planet.

  Coincidence? he wondered. Or the beginning of a pattern?

  He soothed his chill with the reminder that mythological locations were often inspired by some extraordinary feature of local geography.

  Still…

  “Weng, how good is your Sawlish?”

  “Nearly nonexistent, I fear.”

  “Yeah. Me too. How about you, Ron?”

  McPherson shrugged. “I get along.”

  “Mr. Clausen has been giving it some attention of late,” said Weng.

  Danforth bared his teeth, then sighed. “Think he’s good enough to get a Sawl talking about the weather?”

  “I wouldn’t know, Dr. Danforth.” Weng permitted herself the ghost of an ironic smile. “If he could, would he?”

  Danforth cursed softly. “I’ve been a damned fool, passing up data that’s been right under my nose!” He shifted awkwardly in the wheeled chair. “Listen, Weng, we’ve got to get Ibiá down here. Can we offer him amnesty or something? I really need him here to translate.”

  “Mr. Clausen may be doing us that favor as we speak,” Weng reminded him. “CRI says she was unable to contact Mr. Ibiá again to warn him.”

  Danforth’s eyes flicked over the dark fields, toward the towering bulk of the cliff kissed by pale Cluster light. “Damn! I sure hope the kid’s in one piece when he gets here.”

  BOOK TWO

  “Look, here comes a walking fire.”

  King Lear

  Act III, sc, iv

  18

  Once again the wagons were being loaded, but this time the waiting stacks of goods bore the guild stamps of Ogo Dul. A more solemn frenzy prevailed along the columned streets of Traders’ Branch than had enlivened the joyous departure from DulElesi three weeks earlier. The street lanterns seemed to burn unbearably bright. No songs of celebration rose above the clatter of crate and wheel and harness. After Megan had provided what little help she could with the reloading of the Infirmary wagon, she wandered the bustling crowd, taking its temperature.

  She missed the music. She had grown used to a sung or chanted accompaniment to almost every Sawlish activity. She thought of music as a calmative, a matrix on which to weave human passions into a more coherent order. But singing required effort, even if minimal, and in this great heat and hurry, not a soul was willing to squander even an ounce of energy on a nonessential pursuit.

  The children were another telling barometer. The youngest instinctively stayed out from underfoot. Their older siblings raced around laden with sacks and baskets and armloads of cloth-wrapped merchandise bigger than they were. Their small faces were serious with purpose. They were eager to prove their adulthood in the face of an impending crisis whose nature they did not quite comprehend but whose aura radiated from their harried, grim-faced elders.

  In the crowd, disputes flared easily and the talk was of Devastation. The wagering was fast and reckless, though the PriestGuild hung close to its own wagons, offering nothing more than predictions of continuing heat. The rangers circulated constantly, calming tempers, arbitrating difficulties and encouraging a rapid, efficient pace. Megan overheard them spreading Aguidran’s directive that space be found in each big wagon for two extra water kegs.

  When the heat seems to be emanating from within as well as from without, she decided, that’s when you start to get frightened.

  She worried about the long return trek across the Dop Arek. As hot as it had been on the way out, water had been plentiful, left over from the storms. But she expected that the three and a half rainless weeks since had seared the arid plain into virtual desert. Worse still, sunrise was due within the week, when the caravan would be well into the most open stretches of the plain.

  Normally, I’d welcome dawn with joy and relief after two weeks of darkness.

  Now the very thought of it filled her with dread.

  Along the railing outside the infirmary, Ghirra and Aguidran leaned shoulder to shoulder in gloomy conference with a lanky balding man who Megan recognized as the head of Ogo Dul’s RangerGuild. Susannah and Xifa sat on the yellow wagon’s lowered tail gate, little Dwingen sandwiched between them. Three pairs of legs swung back and forth to the same nervous rhythm.

  “All packed?” Megan rubbed her hands in a manic attempt to break out of her own doomsday mood.

  Susannah nodded. “The herdsmen are bringing the hjalk around now.”

  “Be better when we’re moving again, making actual progress toward home.”

  “Home?” Susannah echoed.

  Megan listened for bitterness but heard only rueful confusion.

  When the hjalk arrived, they were restive and grouchy about being laced into their harness. Ghirra came over from the rail to draw the great curly head of the team leader down to his, holding it gently by its undersized ears for a murmured chat. Aguidran went on her way, her fellow ranger beside her, to hurry along the rest of the harnessing and start the long wagon train moving up the steep ramps to the savannah.

  At the top of the ramps, the tall torches blazed against the blackness. The smoke rose past the smoke and light of the Cluster, fading the dimmer stars. The shining worried faces of Ogo Dul lined the white roadway to bid friends and guild-mates a safe journey. Relatives embraced. Last minute wagers were offered and exchanged, to be collected at the next market. Ogo Dul’s PriestGuild stood apart in the darkness, chanting ringing choruses that were answered antiphonally by Kav Ashimmel’s retinue at the front of the caravan.

  “Khe khem!” Megan heard over and over, called fervently and often followed by a whispered “ValEmbriha!”

  A faint breath tinged the air with the salt pungence of DulValla. The tall torch flames leaped. The hjalk danced with flared nostrils while their drivers struggled with the reins.

  “I am not meant to live in a cave!” Susannah breathed in grateful release, the only one among them welcoming the dark emptiness of the rolling savannah.

  Megan, who had discovered that she was perfectly at home in the deepest of caves, wondered how it was possible to feel safer out in the open.

  The first two throws brought the caravan up the gradual slope from the sea, through the long, brittle grasses to the cooling depths of Imvalla’s pool. The great waterfall cried out in a tumbling roar of phosphorescence. The incredible precipice loomed above the camp, visible only as a darker darkness devoid of stars.

  When the wagons were settled, Aguidran ordered all the water kegs to be emptied, then sent the entire caravan to the pool’s edge for a last long bath.

  At the beginning of the next throw, the wagons’ loads were further lightened by the amount that each person could carry on his back. The arduous slow climb up the eight long switchbacks began.

  What had required a mere matter of hours in the descent took the better part of a full throw to accomplish in the ascent. The hjalk balked and complained. Even the reliable little hakra showed a more goatish nature. The herdsmen swore and pulled and finally resorted to occasional blows. When the last panting hakra had heaved its burden over the top, and the dark expanse of the Dop Arek stretched before them, Aguidran declared an early camp, set careful perimeter watches and called a conference of the guild leaders.

  The conference was interrupted by a child screaming among the herd of hakra and hjalk gathered to drink at the river. Rangers pounded past the wagons and a scuffle exploded in the darkness, more screams, not the child, but a dying angry beast.

  The terrified child was rushed to the Infirmary wagon. Xifa searched hurriedly for teeth marks while Ampiar ran for the antivenom poultices. But the boy was found to be uninjured and was soon grinning with pride at having evaded
his attacker’s lethal jaws.

  Ghirra returned later from the conference to find his staff drawn in a close circle around a low-burning lantern. He settled himself cross-legged among them, smiling at Susannah over his tray of cold food.

  “I have ask my sister give you some of this lechrall that is kill by her guildsmen.”

  “An animal sample!” Susannah cheered softly. “Thank you!”

  “I know you need this thing, Suzhannah.”

  “And he’d rather you didn’t go after a live one yourself,” said Megan.

  Ghirra swallowed several quick bites of food, then slowed to explain Aguidran’s plan.

  “We’d call that a shortcut,” said Megan, when he had finished scratching maps in the dust. “But I’d think it’d be worth the two extra throws it’d take to go back via the Talche. Won’t there be more water available?”

  Ghirra nodded pensively, and Megan decided that he was not totally in favor of his sister’s strategy, but did not think it right to speak out against it. “Every throw longer, the crop is dying,” he excused. “And the FoodGuild keeps the food of two cycles if we go as my sister says.”

  “What about the herds waiting in the hills?” asked Susannah.

  “My sister send some guildsmen, bring food to the herdsmen, tell them stay in the hills where the more water is.”

  Megan set her food tray aside and leaned back against the hard rim of a wagon wheel while Ghirra questioned Xifa about the refilling of the water kegs. It seemed to her now that she had lived this way all her life, heat-drenched, striding through dust, eating bland food, sleeping on the dry ground. It was a hard life, and she marvelled that the Sawls, after centuries of it, retained the energy to go on.

  “So,” she mused aloud. “One hundred-odd nasty kilometers straight across the Dop Arek, eh? Five throws, if we can really manage the twenty klicks a throw like we did coming out.”

  “Five throws in this heat is better than seven,” Susannah pointed out.

  “Only if the water holds out.”

  Ghirra nodded. “Dop Arek gives no shelter to hide from the Sisters.”