The Nearest Fire (V1.0), page 2
The visitor stood blinking in the light. He was a sturdy Moruian of middle age with skin tanned by the sun and dark red hair elaborately dressed. He wore rich clothes: tunic, overtunic, extra sleeves, boot covers, a “flying vest” and a long, dagged cloak. Only the Ningan’s silken baghose and embroidered jackets came close to this finery; the Great Elder wore a plain black robe without ornament.
“Matt Mattroyan,” said the newcomer, “merchant of Rintoul and Itsik. At the service of the Great Elder.” “Mattroyan,” said Tiath pleasantly, “we need the help of your ships.”
“I have a fleet of ten large ships and a score of smaller vessels, Highness. What are your needs?”
“A rounder,” said Tiath promptly, “a simple rounder to tow my barge to Itsik.”
“Itsik?” echoed the Merchant. “What would bring your Highness within wind of the tannery and the tallow plant worked by prisoners?”
“I could be traveling overland from Itsik to the temple at Windrock,” said Tiath.
“Well, a rounder to tow your barge is easily provided,” said Mattroyan, his florid face growing puzzled.
“Do you know there are strangers on Torin?” asked the Great Elder.
“I have seen one,” said the Merchant. “I have seen the one called Escott Garl, at the Bird Clan Air Race.”
“Three more Of his kind nest in the island of Tsabeggan,” said Tiath crisply, “and I need a vessel of yours to come to them.”
“That might be arranged. Highness.”
“I need your ship of honor … the Esnar”
“But Highness . . stammered the Merchant, “that ship … the Esnar..
“It is a steam vessel,” said Tiath, “reeking of fire-metal-magic. I know that well. How swiftly could it reach the islands sailing from Itsik wharf?”
“Three or four days, Highness.”
“So soon? A sailing ship takes thirty days from Rintoul to reach Tsabeggan.”
“Longer if the winds are bad.” Mattroyan grinned. “Highness … this will be an unusual transaction….”
“Most unusual,” agreed Tiath, “but you will be suitably rewarded. Sit down, Merchant Mattroyan; we must explore every detail of my plan. Ammur?”
“With your permission,” said the High Steward, “perhaps we should read the omens at the start of this venture?”
“Excellent!” said the Great Elder.
Ammur came forward carrying a bowl of dark wood so old and smooth it was hard to tell whether it had been carved out or whether it was a very large gourd. It was filled to the brim with short strips of fabric of every color and texture, some embroidered with a character. She set it down on a stool between Tiath and the Merchant and held up a thick rod of amber-colored resin.
“Do you read omens before a voyage?” asked Tiath.
“Of course, Highness,” said Mattroyan. “I use wind petals mostly, or the sands. This is a very fine resin-rod and bowl….”
“An ancient treasure….’*
The Ningan rubbed the glowing rod briskly with a small patch of animal fur and plunged it into the bowl of fabric. When the rod was withdrawn it was thickly covered with the colored strips; the Ningan shook it once, twice, until only a few strips remained. She gathered these off the rod one by one, reading their meanings in a penetrating singsong.
“Fair wind, changing wind, the number seven, offers of friendship, fire-metal-magic …”
“Is that what it says?” asked the Great Elder.
“Here is the strip.”
“Perhaps it is for the Esnar” murmured Mattroyan.
“Perhaps it is.”
“A good catch,” continued the Ningan, “or we might read that as ‘a successful plan.’ And two ‘wild strips’ here at the rod’s end.”
“What does that position signify?” asked the Merchant. “Something that may or may not come to pass,” said Ammur Ningan.
“Give the reading!” said Tiath.
“A dead person,” said Ammur softly, “and a sailor.”
“It is a simple enough warning,” said Tiath, amused. ‘Take, care that none of your crew fall overboard, MATTROYAN. No dead person can interfere with our plan.” Ammur set aside the resin-rod and the bowl. Then all three, the Great Elder, the High Steward and the Merchant, began to talk. The sound of their voices went on and on, a natural sound, like the night wind curling about the sky-houses of the city.
1
A New Voice
Dorn, the young scribe, has asked me to tell the story of my time in the islands. I will explain how I came there and who traveled with me on the Great Ocean Sea; I will describe the strange beings we found there. They were not Moruians, neither are they devils or Spirit Warriors, but rather they are “of a new mark,” or of a different pattern, beings somewhat like ourselves. When I talk of them in this way, it seems too cold: they are my friends Karen-Ru, Lisa and Sam Deg. Their fourth member, whom they mourned as dead, is Scott Gale, who fell in with other Moruians in the mountains and joined the family called Brin’s Five.
Dorn Brinroyan tells me that all this is part of the history of our world, Torin. He works hard at these tales; I have seen him sitting in his tower Aoom at the New Academy longing for the mountains as he tells of them. If this is the work of a scribe, I am not at all sure that I am the right hammer for the rock … but on the other hand I have spent many hours doing uncomfortable work.
Mine is a new voice. I cannot speak of the mountains, of the river Troon and its wild creatures. I have not spent much time in the “beautiful high-woven city of Rintoul.”
I was not a member of a Five, I did not weave; I would not’ know the ancient traditions of our world, “the old threads,” if I tripped over them in the dark. I am a miner, the child of miners. My name is Yolo Ham. I come from Tsagul, the Fire-Town.
Tsagul, whatever anyone says, is not a bad place. It is an ancient city, older than Rintoul, and has its own laws and its own legends. We are the fire people, the Tsamuia, who lived in caves not in tents, who made pottery and worked metal from the beginning of the world. When one of our children was shown from its mother’s pouch, it was held up naked in the light of the fire and a bronze amulet was laid on its breast.
The fear of fire-metal-magic, which lies like mist over the land of Torin, is not our fear. It was laid upon us by the rich clans of the southeast and their vassals and the wandering weavers who live on their lands. They have kept our roofs low and our people poor . .. and so on. This was the mixture of legend and politics I had from Old Ham on winters’ nights by our fire. I don’t know, even now, how much of this is true.
I do know that Tsagul is a solid workaday town laid out by generations of folk who knew their business. The houses, round or flat, are warm in winter and cool in summer; the drains work when they are not blocked. There are trees on Canal Prospect and a huge park to the west around the old Tsatroy palace. Overhead the coppery trails of the voice wire run from the City Hall and the sickhouse and the jail to the pitheads in the west and the north. To the east runs the red road, broad and straight, heading for Rintoul.
There is more traffic out of Tsagul along that road than ever comes in. All day long the wheeled carts and gangs of porters bear out metal, already worked or red raw the way we grub it from the earth. Rintoul could not exist without Tsagul.
I am a Child of the City. I know every inch of the streets, which begin as broad swept ways and end as teeming blocked lanes. I have climbed onto the rooftops as the Great Sun set to see the fleet sail home. I have heard the miners singing through the streets in the bright light of the Far Sun, carrying their baskets to the early shift. I have watched the gliders take off from the catapult in Wing-Up-Way.
I know how to trip the traces of a pedal cab, then rush up and help the Hauler get them set again, for a credit. I have been in the crowd on Market Round before City Hall to hear the Deputy speak and old Margan Dohtroy, the local grandee.
I was a Child of the City: that was my official designation. My parents, my mother and her partner, were killed in a cave-in on the old Tsatroy copper shelf when I was four years shown. I was raised in a waif-house on Tin Lane, by the docks, by Old Harn and his sib Morritt.
They were kind folk, and they became my true family; I took their name and will not set down the name of my poor young pouch mother and my young father. Morritt Ham had been a “mountain-mover” down on the wharves … one of the omor who carry huge high loads balanced by a head strap. She was running to fat when I first came to them but still strong enough to lift a small mountain. Old Ham … What can I say of him?
He had nearly lost the use of one hand, which was thin and hooked like a bird’s talons. His eyes were long slits of coppery brown in his bony face. He worked three days out of five at City Hall emptying the rubbish baskets and earned further credits for waif-keeping. He had to work because there had been a snarl-up over pensions for the irrigation workers.
Old Ham was proud and clever; he had worked harder than any three persons during his long life. He was wise and he was foolish. He drove me mad with his talk of “uvoro,” of freedom, when his proudest possession was a medal for special service on the irrigation projects. No pension, just a medal. He railed at grandees and pit-bosses, yet he worshiped the Deputy, Tsorl-U-Tsorl, as if this were Telve the fire spirit in person.
“One of the best,” he used to say, “the Deputy is one of the best.”
A great deal of what I did came from Old Harn. He was a rare bird; he was indeed “one of the best.” His will, his dreams of freedom, carried me a long, strange way, all the way to the Fire Islands.
There was one other waif at Ham’s house. Len was a male, older than myself, and I loved him as if he were my true sib. I ran after him and was pleased if he let me ride in his wheeled cart. He seemed to me enormously strong and clever. I can see now that he was always discontented. He remembered his own family and spun me long yarns about them.
It hurt Len to be a City-Child, a waif; he felt dishonored. When Len told me of his house, the good food, the woven pictures, the mats, the trips to fairs on the river Datse, I was vaguely discontented myself. I remembered my own parents: I remembered sitting up in the sleeping bag, eagerly, as these two young persons came striding into the room with their baskets. I had a bad memory too that turned into a nightmare. I sat up in the darkness of early morning and no one came. I sat alone for hours, and the neighbors would not set foot in the house because it was accursed. I was alone with only furtive knockings and footsteps outside the door.
Once, when I thought of this bad time, I ran to Morritt as she sat at the hearth mending fishnets for a few credits. I hugged her and said, “Was I always in this house?”
She gave me a strange look that hardly suited her fat, cheerful face. “You are the fish who swam into our net,” she said. “You were brought to Harn’s house by the warm south wind.”
“Slag!” grumbled Old Ham, chewing at his bara seeds. “Slag and ashes! The child knows well enough how she came here.”
“Do you think no one can spin fancy yams in this house except yourself?” Morritt asked, grinning.
In the darkness beyond the hearth, Len sat and watched and said nothing.
When he was fourteen and I was nine, Len shipped with a salt vessel plying far beyond Rintoul. He promised to come back and bring Morritt a fine mat and a bag of salt, but we never saw him again. I was sad and hoped for whole years that he would come. The ache and the waiting became part of me; there was a loneliness behind my eyes that kept me a little apart from other people. I believed that every good thing must end, that every beloved person was taken and did not return. There was a children’s singing game that we played in the streets on summer evenings and the chorus rang true for me:
“To wel welangar,
To tsa ulstam.”
“Every tall tree withers away,
Every fire is put out.”
I ran wild in summer through the burned streets; in winter I sat arguing with Old Ham by the fire. I went to school, if you could call it that, four mornings out of five at the Free Round on Canal Prospect. At thirteen I was the tallest in my tally. The recruiters came, and I signed up for the New Cut Mine. Old Harn had hoped for something better: apprentice silversmith or maybe a job with a stone mason. I was happy to be out of school, swinging along to the New Cut—which was fifty years old—with my new basket.
For four years, until my luck ran out, I worked at the New Cut, and these were the happiest years of my young life. I had my friends, my workmates at the mine, and I had credits to give my family. We really did have mats and good food and a trip now and then.
We went to the fairs up the Datse and to the Tsatroy Old Park. There I saw the flower pools and the menagerie; I wandered with my sibs through the wide courtyards of the old palace and laid good luck skeins upon those two white monuments, the cairns of Tell and Geran, the young children of mad Elbin Tsatroy. I joined in the festivals of the Fire-Town: I danced the Great Round in spring and saw the Lighting of Torches for the New Year.
I started on loading at the mine and went quickly on to hauling. Morritt, who knew the tricks of the trade, oiled my aching muscles and fed me the strength foods. I ate egg pasty, salt meat, fish cake, green nettles … even “red devil.” This is a kind of blood sausage seasoned with fire-weed; it comes from the scrub deer they farm on the Datse and it is a luxury … one credit for a fist length.
It was taken for granted in our house that I should become an omor … a worker who carries no child in her pouch and founds no family. There has been a lot of nonsense talked about the omor here in Tsagul and in the rest of Torin. The bush weavers find a childless female a pretty strange creature; the other city workers are jealous of the omor’s strength. They mutter about secret cults and magical ceremonies.
I will say this: anyone can be strong given good food and training at the right age. This great increase in strength and muscle often occurs when a worker comes from the country to the town and does different work and eats city food. Strong muscles will grow, and part of it is wanting to be strong. The other part, for an omor, is not a matter of magic but of medicine, whatever the scribes have written.
The omor have sub-guilds or circles, where likely youngsters of about sixteen receive die mixture of two herbs, the drink called Watten. It causes sterility; after one year of the Watten Cup, the drinker is an omor for life. She will never give birth to a child to carry in her pouch. That leaves one or two questions unanswered. An omor may take a mate or join a family, or she may live unmated like the hermits in the desert. It is not quite a matter of choice … it is a choice far beyond our eyes. My luck ran out, however, before I had this choice. I had taken one drink of the Watten Cup, no more, at the Circle Blue, among the omor who worked at the New Cut.
II
I was more than sixteen years shown, tall and strong. I had moved from hauling to cutting on the seam, and I was sometimes employed on the crushers. I had two friends, Warkor and Clee, and we worked as a team. Clee was about my age, he was thin and dark and strong-willed; Warkor took care of us both—she called us her cubs. I like to remember those two out of all the miners, but there is one other I recall: Tenn the Overseer.
This was an oversized brute who made our lives a misery. Everyone knew Tenn for a mean creature. There was a loose pile near our adit and a go-slow one morning until it was shored up. There was an argument that developed into a quarrel, then into a near riot. Our team had no real part in it.
One moment I was standing with my team holding my basket and minding my own business, the next the Overseers came in “to restore order.” Tenn began beating Clee with his whip handle; I took up a stone and struck one blow. I can still feel the blow as I struck; I knew instantly that Tenn was badly hurt, maybe dead. My luck had run out.
I don’t like to set this down. The pen shakes in my hand. I still turn cold with fear and see the faces of my comrades on that wintery morning. I still see the bloody stone where I cast it aside. I feel bitter shame for wounding Tenn. He was Tenn Tennroyan, head of a family, a miner like myself. How can I call him a brute if I am not one myself? Oh, it was an accident, a starfall, a knot in the thread of life, but I was deeply dishonored and felt that my own life had come to an end.
I stood there unable to move while Tenn was carried away; I was arrested and taken to the mine “rest house,” then to the city jail. I spent days shivering and staring at the wall in spite of the extra blanket Morritt brought me. I can’t remember what I said to the scribe who had been sent to speak for me by the miners’ guild. My case was an embarrassment: the whole thing had come at a bad time and had political overtones because of the wrangling about pay and the go-slow at the pithead.
Destiny is the cobblestone that trips us on the way to a feast; it is the one brick that holds up the wall; it is the silver amulet that turns up in the belly of a fish. This was a three-comet year. As I shifted my gaze from the cell wall to the cell window, I might have seen a comet fly past or Scott Gale’s small airship blast across the continent to the mountains and descend into the Warm Lake on Hingstull Mountain.
At this time too Tsorl-U-Tsorl, the Deputy, lost his fight with the Council; he was not the first good Deputy to be flung out of office or the last. Tsorl was dismissed and charged with stealing city funds. He was dishonored; there was talk of a death-pact between him and his team of personal helpers. No one knew what had become of him.
Old Harn did not know of this at first. He sat about in the cold anterooms waiting to intercede with Tsorl for me, for Yolo his foster child, but he never saw the Deputy. Tsorl had gone, and Old Ham went home to Tin Lane and began to cough. He died toward the end of the winter. I could hardly weep when Morritt brought me the news; I was alone in my cell of misfortune with footsteps beyond the door.
My case had been dealt with more or less fairly. I was sentenced to ten years in jail for wounding; it was a light sentence because of my youth. It might have been lighter still if I could have paid compensation to Tenn, who was an invalid, and his family. But I had nothing. The sentence sounded to me like a lifetime, but this was partly a young person’s impatience with periods of time. I knew that the dishonor of such a deed would last far beyond any sentence. I sat in my cell and was taken out every day to the workrooms of the jail to learn weaving at a mat loom. There was talk of passing the sack for me at Circle Blue to raise some compensation and lighten my load. But the time was so bad nothing came of it; before New Year, they reasoned, there will be an amnesty.
