Fire Time (21 page)

‘–and the happenings are too long ago and far away to be very personal.’ They murmured assent. ‘Okay,’ Larreka said, a word which had passed into the Sehalan dialect. He paused to kindle his pipe.

The fire sputtered sparks. A porter fueled it and the flames licked higher, red and yellow. Stars touched with faint light the smoke which rose straight toward them. Out in the darkness an animal hooted, the single forest sound.

‘You know I’m a Haelener born,’ Larreka commenced between puffs. ‘Spent my first fifty-odd years there. The song Jill gave us raised these memories, because Haelen is like what she’s told me about that Scotland on Earth, only more so, I imagine, being out-and-out polar. Even in summer, when the sun – the proper sun – never sets over most of the country, even then it’s cloudy, misty, rainy, stormy, moors and bare mountains, treacherous gray seas beating on stony shores … well, you’ve heard. No wonder Haeleners have a name for being skinflints, and many of them become soldiers or merchant sailors or whatever will get them out.

‘But me, I wasn’t restless. Clan Kerazzi, that I belonged to, counts for wealthy. You know they’re organized in clans, the Haeleners. Mine holds first-rank fishing and sea-hunting waters, and inland a wide chunk of ground for what game can be found, not that that’s much by Boronnen standards. And my family was well off. My father owned the sloop he captained and a share in three more. We lived in a big snug house on the coast, at a spot where currents brought driftwood.
Not needing to buy coal, we could trade our catches for other things.
Yai-ai,
a pretty good life.

‘Haeleners marry young, like around twenty-four, barely out of adolescence. They have to, because they lose a lot of kids in that climate and need all the breeding years they can manage. Besides, since you marry into a different clan, everybody’s anxious to make ties. Could be that’s the reason for the law of a single spouse at a time and outside romps theoretically forbidden. Parents arrange the marriages, but do check with the youngsters; when your life may depend on your partner, you’d better have one who likes you.’

Larreka smoked for a while in silence. When he continued, his vision was past them and into the night woods. ‘Saren and I were happy. We could’ve asked our families to raise us a house near my parents’, and I could’ve gone on working for my father. But we wanted independence. So the Kerazzis deeded us a spread on Northwind Bay, bleak as a usurer and sterile as his wife but with, ng-ng-ng, possibilities. You see, the fishing wasn’t bad thereabouts; and storms often drove in big critters, well worth the trouble and risk of hunting; and in the hills behind, a tin mine was getting started. The miners took the stuff off overland, but I figured in time they’d be digging out enough to make sea transport better – and any ships which put into that bay would need a pilot who knew it. Eventually this came true, and we opened a small tavern as well. Saren’s cooking tasted mighty good to sailors in from a long haul, and I was a popular tapster, I don’t mind boasting. Meanwhile we had four kids who lived, three males and a female, fine’uns.

‘Sure, I’d no reason not to sacrifice to the gods. Having yarned with a lot of outlanders, I knew our gods didn’t rule the universe. In fact, I sort of doubted they were more than a story. However, we’d suffered less than most folk, and fair’s fair. Besides, respectability’s useful to have. Why not go through the rites?

‘Until, after twenty-three years, we were bound for Daystead–’

Larreka broke off. Jill stroked his back. He threw her a smile … of thanks?

‘Daystead, sir?’ asked a soldier from the Fiery Sea.

‘A rally place,’ Larreka said. ‘Or maybe you don’t know about those? Well, think. Most of Haelen gets no sun in winter. Your skin-plants would die, that long in the dark. A few peninsulas stick north of the Circle and catch a little daylight. Everybody has to crowd into them in season. Law and custom turn on this. The clans pitch in to build and maintain housing, stock food – all the necessities, including ways to keep people from hating each other after they’ve been packed in like that for a while.

‘We, my family belonged at Daystead. We’d always gone to and fro by boat, there being a mountain range in between which is apt to have killingly foul weather. This year’ – Larreka’s tone flattened – ‘the weather was at sea. We got dismasted, swamped, and driven into the surf. None but me made shore alive. I’d kept a grip on my daughter’s mane, but the vines tore loose. … Never mind. I raised a cairn over what drifted to the strand and limped on into Daystead, mainly to let our kinfolk know.’

He puffed again for a spell, during which the flames died back, the darkness crept near, and then very slowly, almost timidly, a crooked Urania rose above treetops which it tinted silver, the sole cool thing in the night except for his memories of winter Haelen.

‘I’ve gone on like this,’ he said at last, ‘not to make you feel sorry for me, but to show you the situation. One more thing you must know. Remember, different nations have different ways of taking a member over a loss. What the clans do is to provide him or her company, day and night, until the wound seems to’ve healed. Somebody’s always beside the mourner, ready to lend a hand or talk or whatever. Usually several persons are. For most this is good. At least it’s better than brooding alone, in a country which is often ghastly empty. Besides, the way of Haelen is to help your neighbor without stint – you save your grasping greed for outsiders – because you never know when you might need him. Yes, people meant well by me.

‘But… for the past three octads, my household had dwelt aside. We had visitors, but they were hunters, miners, sailors,
fishers, traders – friends but not, intimates, if you follow me. I’d gotten used to being on my own, me and my wife and our children. We hated the crowding at Daystead, and kept to ourselves as much as might be without giving offense. Here, suddenly, I was allowed
no
privacy. And – well, Jill will understand. I hurt like fury, but there was no call to treat me as if I’d lost a family I’d had for two or three sixty-fours. They did. It was the custom. Also, I suppose, it was something to do, to keep interested in, during those stretched-out blacknesses between glimmers of sun.

‘And they expected me to honor the gods! “After what the gods have done to me?” I answered. That shocked my clan worse than it would have otherwise, midwinter being a time when you live on such a thin edge. Me, I challenged the gods to come down and fight like honest males.

‘No reason to say much more. I’m sure you can see how trouble got worse and worse, the bulk of it my fault.’

They didn’t assume he’d gone a bit crazy and bear with him till he recovered,
Jill thought,
because Ishtarians practically never do go crazy.

‘In the end, I walked out,’ Larreka said. ‘By then, the sun was far enough returned that I could live off the country, though that was mighty lean living, what shellers and seaweed I could scrounge on the beaches, what fist-sized animals I could knock down with a rock inland. Yet my bad temper was lucky for me after a fashion. You see, soon afterward a late blizzard hit Daystead, really vicious. It brought the deaths of several people and great hardship to the rest when fuel gave out.

‘Now, mostly the Haeleners are not ignorant. Mostly they didn’t think my ranting at the gods and our folkways had caused this. But a few did. I don’t blame them for falling back into old superstitions. You northerners can’t know what that season does to your soul, the cold and the gloom, aye, the auroras that’re called the Dead Fires…. As for the majority, well, I was not popular. I’d made it hard for them to get through winter.

‘So I wasn’t likely to be offered another wife. And a bachelor there can’t hope to be more than an ill-paid hireling.
Unless he turns robber, which in my bitterness I actually considered.

‘Yet – there was the Gathering. There was the trade it makes possible. In spring, the merchant ships started coming again for our hides, minerals, salted ichthy, preserved bipen eggs. By then I was in sorry shape, but somehow talked myself into a deckhand’s stall.

‘And for the next forty-eight-odd years I wandered half the world. I’d never imagined how big and wonderful it is. Eventually I joined the Zera, and later found me the female I still have. Everything came to me out of the Gathering.

‘Lads, this isn’t all that civilization is about, not by a long spear-cast. But it’s a sizeable part of the thing. Take a while to imagine what your lives would’ve been like without the Gathering. Ask yourselves if you don’t owe an equal chance to your children.’

Larreka folded his forelegs and settled back down. The group took the hint that he wished to speak no further, and made ready to retire. Jill scrambled to kneel beside him and throw an arm across his neck. The mane rustled scratchily. His warmth, the blent smells of iron maleness and tobacco smoke, a sense of rubbery muscles beneath the moss-like pelt, flowed through her.

‘Uncle, you never told me,’ she said in English.

‘Never got around to it before.’ He left unspoken:
How much can I tell you of a life which has already been four times as long as the most you can hope for?

‘What say we get some sleep?’ he went on immediately. ‘Anu’ll soon be up, blast its bloated belly; and we’ve stiff country to cross. Never miss a chance to flop your bones, soldier.’

‘Yes, sir. Good night.’ She brushed lips across a leathery cheek. The cat-whiskers tickled her.

Stretched out on the bag, arm across
eyes,
she wondered what he would choose to dream of. And what would come to her?

Or who? If she could pick, whom would she most like to have join her in dream?

Ever as midsummer drew nigh, the True Sun paced closer on the heels of the Red One. Meanwhile the Cruel Star grew and grew in heaven. At its nearest, said old stories, it would loom seeably larger than its rival. Drought seared Valennen, but storms lashed the Fiery Sea.

Likewise did the Tassui. During the past octad, Overlings had been building fleets to harry islands from which the legions were departed, and the commerce between them. Arnanak had been too busy ashore for much buccaneering of his own. However, he used all the labor he could spare in Ulu’s shipyard. Some vessels he lent out to raiders whom he egged against the east coast and the Ehur archipelago. They pulled the attention and strength of the enemy in that direction while he readied his inland campaign. Some keels he held in reserve until now – now when his time looked ripe to close the ring.

For the Zera sat only in Port Rua. Its sallies were fitful into those hinterlands which, a bare year ago, civilization had imagined it dominated. United behind Arnanak, the warders of Valennen beat off every such foray, or faded from sight and let it waste itself on emptiness.

He was not content with that. As long as the Gathering had a sea-supplied base here, his flanks and rear would be too unsafe for the ventures further south that he planned on. Due haste was needful. Though scouts and spies reported no sign of a movement anywhere in the Gathering to send reinforcements, this could change. Before it did, he wanted Port Rua under siege ashore and blockade afloat… and not a single soldier getting home to fight on a later day.

Thus he put himself at the head of a flotilla. They sailed afar to Castle Island, overcame a weak defense, pillaged widely, and tore down stone buildings raised by agents of the Gathering. Else these might have become fortresses. Arnanak
meant for the inhabitants erelong to have Tassu masters, where they were not simply replaced in their still fertile home. Beyond this, his purposes were to learn by direct experience how well his naval organization, modeled on the legionary, worked; to exercise a number of quite young males; and to get away for a span from dull demands on the Overling of Overlings.

On their way back northwestward, a typhoon scattered his ships. He didn’t believe any would be lost. His people had a tradition of outfacing wild weather. But it was the reason why he had only two hulls with him when he spied the vessel from Beronnen.

‘Sail ohai-ah!’

The lookout’s call brought Arnanak springing to the poop. Seas ran high, gray-green and foam-laced, blue-black in their troughs. Spindrift flew blindingly and stingingly off wave-crests. Overhead, low clouds raced gray, high clouds roiled. Double shafts of sunlight struck through, double colored, to shatter in glints and spill in gleams. A wind shrilled nearly cold. The waters brawled and rumbled, the deck swung underfoot.

He picked the strange craft out, a fleck afar. Behind it, the peak of a volcano on Black Island thrust above a dim horizon. Smoke blew tattered from the mountain’s throat. He focused a telescope he had once bought from a trader. The shape grew clear, not a lean low Valennener but a high-sided two-masted square-rigger such as plied out of Beronnen.

‘A Gathering transport, bound for Port Rua,’ he decided, and offered the telescope to Usayuk, the mate. ‘Surely alone. Steer to intercept and signal
Devourer
to come along.’

‘I’d say yonder’s a legionary, not a merchantman,’ Usayuk replied carefully. ‘Belike they’ve guards aboard and ballistas ready cocked.’

‘The better reason for a close look. Fear not. We can maneuver around them like fangfish closing in on a sea judge.’

Usayuk stiffened. ‘I never said I was afraid.’

Arnanak gave him a stark smile. ‘Nor did I. Let me own,
instead, that I am he who feels a little unease, at what their faring may protend.’

For if the enemy has decided after all to pay the cost of holding fast north of the equator– No, now. What use a single shipload?-’ Well, a convoy may have been flung apart as we were. Or if it carries something those humans are giving the legion to fight with–

Arnanak thrust the thought away. Worry was bootless, the more so when he knew not with any surety what the will or the powers of the aliens were. Therefore let him go boldly forward. The Three would dance out his fate: in the mighty rhythms of Sun and Ember Star, and in that chaos the Rover brought, from which free will might snatch a chance to begin a new cycle of destinies.