The Margarets (28 page)

 

So the man sobbed silently, threw the image far out into the air, watched it fall partway, then he sat down on the precipice and waited.

 

 

The men arrived, among them King Frum the Furious, and they found the image missing at once. They surrounded the man of Dabberding and asked him where the little man with the golden book was. “I don’t know,” he said truthfully, for he hadn’t seen it land. “Who was it an image of?” he asked, because he didn’t know that either.

 

 

They knocked him down and searched him, but he had no statue. They searched the edges of the thicket, but there was no statue. And all the while the king lamented and lamented that his luck was gone, the pride of his lineage was gone, the image of the keeper was gone.

 

 

“Keeper?” asked the man from Dabberding. “What’s a keeper?”

 

 

“It’s a thing that knew all the king’s secrets,” whispered one of the men-at-arms. “That little statue knows everything that has ever happened in the whole world.”

 

 

“In the whole universe,” whispered another man-at-arms. “Where could it have gone?”

 

 

“An eagle, perhaps,” said the man from Dabberding. “Or a large raven. Ravens like sparkly things.”

 

 

“That’s true,” said the first man-at-arms, and he went to tell the king, who was still lamenting. After a time, the man-at-arms came back and told the man from Dabberding to get himself gone before the king remembered he was there, which the man did very quickly, fading himself into the thicket like a rabbit into a burrow.

 

 

The man got himself through the thicket, down the hill, back down the road, and again to the riverbank where he’d met the fish. “Fish, fish,” he called. “I’m very angry. I barely escaped with my skin.”

 

 

The fish came up to the bank, and when the man told him what had happened, the fish asked, “Is there anything making you angry that can’t be solved with the right information?”

 

 

“Probably not,” said the man.

 

 

“Well then, go get the information,” said the fish. “It must be lying along one of the seven roads that lead to the bottom of the cliff.”

 

 

“Seven roads,” cried the man. “It’s already getting along toward evening.”

 

 

“Then you’d better hurry,” said the fish.

 

 

Since the man had seen the riverbank from the top of the hill, he figured the roads must come from the river, so he walked along the bank in the proper direction until he came to a road that turned toward the cliff he could see through the trees. He ran very quickly along that road, stopping only once when the sun caught something shining in the undergrowth that turned out to be one of the legs of the image he had tossed from the top of the cliff. Well, one leg was one leg, but a leg wouldn’t help him, so the man went on down the road until it came right to the foot of the cliff and turned back toward the river at an angle.

 

 

So he ran and ran along this road, stopping only once when he saw something lying on the path, which turned out to be the other leg of the image he had thrown from the cliff top. Well, two legs was two legs, but the whole statue was better, so he went on running toward the river, where the road suddenly turned back toward the cliff again. On that road he found an arm, and on the next turn, another arm. And on the next turn, which was number five, he found the body, and on the next turn toward the river again, he found the head, which was all very well, but the book with the letters running across it was still missing.

 

 

It was almost dark when the man started on the seventh road, going toward the cliffs for the fourth time, and he was actually at the cliffs when he saw it, shining at him in the last of the sunlight. So he sat down and put the statue together, and when he put the book into his lap, he saw words there.

 

 

“How to cure your wife’s illness,” he read. And this was followed by a recipe for a medicine made out of very common plants that the man found on his way home.

 

 

That night, after he had given his wife the medicine, he looked at the book again. This time it said, “How to cure lameness in a donkey,” followed by a recipe for a poultice made out of very common things he happened to have around the house. And when he had done that, he looked at the book again, and saw the words “How to make ruined shoes like new again,” followed by a simple procedure the man was able to manage before he went to bed.

 

 

In the morning, the book told him of a widow living just down the road who had a pup she was giving away and who also had a bull she would let him use in return for the resultant calf. Then the book told him where he could find some discarded fence to mend his chicken coop. And last of all, the book told him what to do in order to be rid of his neighbor, a few very simple words having to do with misdeeds discovered and forces of law on the way, whispered in the neighbor’s ear.

 

 

The neighbor packed his cart and moved out before lunchtime. The man from Dabberding watched the cart go off down the road, the useless bull hitched to the back. Then the man from Dabberding remembered what the man-at-arms had said about the Keeper knowing everything in the whole world, so he knelt before the image and said,

 

 

“Keeper, you have been very kind to me, and I’m not angry anymore, and I want to do for you whatever you most desire. Please tell me what that is.”

 

 

Then he looked at the book, and the words ran across it, saying, “Roads out, roads back, seven roads was one road. Cow, donkey, dog, wife, shoes, fox, neighbor, seven cures was one cure. Two arms, two legs, body, head, book, seven parts was one Keeper. Let one person walk seven roads at once, go where they meet and find me there.” And with that, the Keeper vanished, leaving only the story behind.

 

“That’s the story,” I concluded.

“Sorry, Naumi, but it doesn’t tell me much.”

“It didn’t me, either,” I replied.

“When did you say the others are getting to Thairy?” he asked after a few moments.

“They’ll ostensibly come for the class reunion, but they’ll arrive several days early.”

“Well then.” Ferni dried his legs, saying thoughtfully, “I wish M’urgi were here. She had a very good head on her shoulders.”

I frowned, for the name teased at me. “M’urgi. Interesting name. Why don’t you go find her, Ferni?” I took a deep breath, managing a casual tone. “We have quite a bit of time before the reunion. Bring her along.”

Fernwold, wrapped in the towel, sat down on the stone bench beside the pool and fixed me with his “This is important” stare. “I was going to locate her anyhow, because of this other thing I wanted to tell you about. It happened a day or two ago. I was sitting in a tranship-tavern waiting for departure time, the way one does, not thinking about anything much, when I overheard someone saying, ‘The word came down all the way from the top.’ Someone else replied, ‘That doesn’t make sense.’ The first voice said, ‘Sometimes it doesn’t make sense, but the orders are, she’s got to be killed, and it has to be done soon.’

“That got my full attention. The second voice said, ‘Why her? Why some smoke-flavored old shaman’s hag from the steppes of B’yurngrad.’ The first one said, ‘No hag, she’s young yet.’”

I frowned at him. “So, you put shaman, smoke-flavored, B’yurngrad, and suchlike together, assuming they meant your friend?”

“Exactly. I casually looked at the people around me. A dozen races at least, most of them speaking interlingua…”

“Any accent?”

“No lisping, so not K’Famir. They didn’t curse one another, so probably not Frossian. There was no discernible stink, probably not Hrass.” He paused. “There were a few elder races there, too, very strange old ones, the kind that make you go elsewhere when you see them coming, you know…”

“Quaatar? Baswoidin?”

“Quaatar? Yes, now you mention it. There were a couple of them.”

He sighed. “You’re at least taking me seriously.”

“It could be serious. Why, precisely, do you believe so?”

“Some time ago, the word filtered down through the Siblinghood that the leaders wanted to be informed if any of us caught wind of ‘Top-down threats to specific and seemingly harmless humans…’”

“If you’ve quoted the conversation correctly, the threat was definitely top down. It may be be smart to check on her, my friend.”

“She probably won’t even remember me.”

Oh, she’d remember him! “Come now. Unforgettable Ferni?”

My friend laughed ruefully. “Meantime, I’ll keep your puzzle in mind. Will the others be with you for a while?” As he dressed himself, he seemed to forget whatever the strangeness had been. He looked more like himself.

I said, “All during reunion. I’ll be there for even longer, because I’ve agreed to teach a course at Point Zibit.”

“Professor Noomi,” drawled Ferni. “Why, I knew him when he was only a worm.”

As the end of my years of bondage approached, the enmity of the Frossian overseer increased, and its verbal hostility toward me became more frequent. It had not forgotten I could speak and understand Frossian, so I knew these open threats were part of its general plan of harassment.

“We agree,” said Deen-agern, the Ghoss, when I mentioned it to him. “Frossians do not forget much. They are completely ignorant of enormous areas of knowledge, but they don’t forget things that happen to them. It’s time we got you out of here, Mar-Mar.”

“I have less than a year of bondage left!”

The Ghoss raised a nostril. “You have only as long as they want you to have. Fifteen years is enough for most slaves: the bones are weakened, the back is bent, the strength is exhausted, and the Frossians are willing to let them go. Only draining the last of a slave’s strength at the end of its bondage proves they have gained their money’s worth: a full fifteen years of labor, with the least possible strength left over to go elsewhere, often just enough for the ex-slave to totter across the landing field to the colony ship. This is so well known that we counsel bondspeople to pretend greater and greater weakness during their last several years.”

“You’ve never told me that!”

“We had no reason to, even though you’ve stayed strong, and the Frossians have felt they weren’t getting full value for their money. Now, however, something new has happened. We’ve heard the Frossians talking. Some very important breeding male has communicated with the planetary leader here on Fajnard. It, in turn, has informed the least overlord that a bondswoman who speaks Frossian is to be killed, quickly and without delay. The least overlord has told the overseer, the one who keeps threatening you.”

“Why?” I cried. “The only Frossians I’ve ever seen are here, here on Fajnard. Why would some overlord care about me?”

“You don’t know; we don’t know. Certainly the least overlord doesn’t know or care, and the overseer doesn’t care because it was going to kill you anyhow. You’d be dead by now except for the umoxen. We know they warm you in winter, protect you at all times. They prevent the Frossians from stealing your clothes and food and from fouling your water. Is this not so?”

“You know it is.”

“Well, depend upon it, the overseer also knows it’s so. Very soon now, some Frossian or other will separate you from the umoxen, take you elsewhere, and you will not return.”

“The overseer hasn’t said this.”

“Of course not. The overseer knows you understand what it says. It says only what it means you to hear. To make you look in the wrong direction.”

I frowned, saying hesitantly, “Where am I to go? This is the only place on Fajnard that I know.”

“There’s a better place, and we’ll take you there. It’s the place we Ghoss go, when we are weary of serving the creatures.”

“Why you serve them at all is more than I can understand!”

“True. It is more than you can understand, at least for now. After a time in the hills, you may understand it.”

The next evening, when a plether of umoxen were pastured in the fields with only me to watch them, several of the huge creatures wandered over and began to hum at me. “Mar-Mar, time to go away.”

“You’ve been talking to the Ghoss,” I said.

“Ghoss been talking to us,” they remarked. “Time. You stay until
tomorrow, something bad will happen, so, we go tonight. Get on up.” It knelt on its front legs, giving me a foreleg to step up on.

It was the first time one of them had offered to carry me, but I did not hesitate. The small group of them started for the fence between the pasture and the river bottom, all the rest of the plether following along. At the fence they simply leaned against the posts until they broke off, then amused themselves by trampling vast lengths of fence into the ground and crossing them with trodden umox-paths, back and forth, humming as they went, finally splitting in a dozen different ways, one of which led through the riparian woods and into the wide but shallow stream of late summer. Here the umox knelt again as I splashed into the water. I saw the umoxen distributing themselves widely among the stream-side woods. The umox I had ridden touched my cheek with its tongue and went to join them.

“Mar,” said a familiar voice. “Over here.”

Rei was standing in the stream, a pack on his back.

I went to join him. “I didn’t bring anything with me.”

“You didn’t have anything you’ll need,” he said. “Come, we go upstream. Stay in the water.”

The water was cool but not icy, coming only to our ankles. I put my head down and waded, occasionally turning aside from a large stone or dead tree that had been washed down during flood. The journey was hypnotic, the water gurgling around my feet, the plethers humming in the pastures we passed, the small creatures cheeping and chirping in scattered reed beds. I lost track of time and did not think of it again until I looked up through the branches of a shutter-leaf tree to see the sky growing light. The branches creaked, the leaves turned to face the sun, an eye at the end of a branch winked at me.

We had entered a low-walled canyon. Rei said, “Far enough! We will sleep through the daylight.”

“Where?” I asked wearily.

“My customary wayhalt. Up there.” He turned between two massive tree boles onto an almost invisible trail that led up the canyon wall to a small cave, well hidden behind a protruding outcropping of stone. We sat, Rei took food from his pack and handed it to me. We ate without speaking, and I fell into sleep the moment I lay down.

Rei’s hand over my mouth wakened me. “Shhh,” he whispered. “We have searchers down in the stream.”

Together we crawled to the mouth of the cave and peeked around the outcropping that hid the entrance from below. I saw torches and smelled their smoke. I heard the angry jabber of irritated Frossians.

“There’s no trail.”

“If there was a trail, we couldn’t see it in torchlight.”

“Better go back, get some provisions, come back and try again in the light.”

“The least overlord will kill us!”

The voices continued their jabber, becoming softer as they retreated, back the way we had come. Rei stood at the opening of the cave, reading the air as the Ghoss often did, for it was full of messages from their kinfolk, who might be anywhere on the planet at all.

“Deen says the Frossians are angry,” he reported, with an air of satisfaction. “They had a great deal of trouble rounding up the umoxen. Some of them think you were probably killed in the stampede. The least overlord, however, insists that they find your body. He has to tell his overlord that he has seen you dead with his own eyes. Your enemy, the herd overseer, thinks you have slipped away in the confusion. He has sworn to hunt you down. We must hurry to reach the falunassa.”

I puzzled at the word as I translated it into Frossian.
Those in the faraway.
“Is that their name?”

“It’s a descriptive term for people in hiding. Here, they are the Gibbekot. If humans live on a planet, the Gibbekot become falunassa in faraway mountains perhaps, or deep deserts, or great canyons, always in the most secret places. They are not fearful. They simply prefer not to have the problems that result from unlike creatures housed too closely together.”

I stared into the distance. “Won’t the Gibbekot object to my coming?”

“No. You’ve been described to them. We told them the umoxen had adopted you. That was sufficient endorsement.” He returned to the cave and picked up his pack. “Let’s put space between us and this place before those Frossians return.”

Luckily, we had a moon providing enough light to let us see our way on up the canyon, past confluences with other small streams, the
wash growing narrower, shallower, and rockier the farther we went, at last dividing itself neatly into two tumbling brooks, left and right, both leading up stony channels.

“Here we go,” said Rei, as he turned to the right and began climbing up the stream, from rock to rock.

I followed. There had been a time, I reflected, when this journey would have been impossible for me. On Earth I would have been too weak and too flabby to have walked any distance at all carrying a pack. My flesh had grown hard during the years of bondage. Perhaps I should thank the Frossians for that.

During the next few hours, as we passed several other places where streams or dry washes came in from the sides and as the stream we followed became a mere trickle, I became less sure I should thank anyone. “Rei, how much farther do we climb?”

“Not far. You’re doing well.”

It still seemed a great distance. The sky was growing light when a breeze from behind us carried a great uproar to our ears. Shouting. Something mechanical, roaring.

“Aircar,” said Rei. “Hurry.”

I managed to be close behind him as he climbed the last plunging stretch of piled stone and stood erect at the top. “There,” he said, pointing. “Gibbekot country.”

We stood on a natural dike. The source of the stream we had followed was a small lake stretching from the dike at our feet eastward toward green pastures sloping upward to gently rounded hills, these backed in their turn by receding ranges of blue mountains. Umoxen grazed in the valley, but there was no sign of other inhabitants.

Rei moved to one side, thrust his hand into a crevice in the rock, and pulled. Somewhere wheels turned and creaked. Somewhere a valve opened and the lake before us developed an eddy that spun itself into a vortex. Below and behind us, a spate of water boiled out of the rivulet to gush wildly over the rocks we had climbed, the soil where we might have left tracks, any surface where any trace of us might have remained. Rei stood for some time, watching the water wash away all traces of us, and when he was satisfied, he thrust his hand into the crevice once more and shut the water down. As it silenced, we heard the roaring again, nearer.

He plunged into the shallow water and began to wade around its edge. “There are a dozen sizable streams entering the river we walked in. After rain, any of them might be in spate. There are about fifty little canyons and washes on this upper stretch, where we climbed, and the same is true of the other forks. Even if the Frossians have the patience to search them all, they are unlikely to get this far, and if they get this far, they will get no farther. Frossians like dampness, but they’re afraid of open water.” He raised his head and called across the valley. The echoes returned, amplified. An umox, the nearest, turned ponderously from its grazing and came toward us, down the left side of the lake. Rei plowed through the shallows to intercept it, with me close behind. The umox waded out to meet us; Rei grabbed handfuls of the creature’s long hair and pulled himself onto its back, then tugged me up beside him. The umox lumbered out onto the meadow and across the grasslands toward the nearest grove of trees. It did not speak to us, at least, not in any way I could hear.

“Scenters won’t be able to smell us,” I said.

“Not over the smell of the umoxen, no,” Rei agreed. “Here. Pull the back of my cloak up over yourself. It’s unlikely they will see us, and we will be under cover soon.”

I covered myself. Rei lay flat on the broad umox back, and I lay on his back, both of us covered in a cloak very much the color of the umox’s wool. The roaring came close, closer. The umox stopped, grazed, took a few steps, grazed again. I was about to panic when Rei murmured, “From above, the umox is one of a herd, all grazing. Hear them?”

I did hear them, all around us. Our own umox was working its way steadily through the herd toward the edge. Peeking from below the robe, I saw trees not far away. The herd leader snorted, and all of them moved into the trees, quite quickly, as the machine roared directly overhead, turning to return, even lower.

By that time, we were on the ground, lying in a hollow beneath a fallen tree, and the herd was moving into the open pasture once more. Rei said, “Anyone searching along the ground will find valleys full of umoxen on every side, streams everywhere, many little canyons and tricky places easy to get into and hard to get out of. Frossians
have explored here from time to time, but none has ever left here to tell others what he may have found.”

“Why did you bring me here?”

“We Ghoss were told to bring you, reason enough.”

“Told by whom, Rei!”

He shrugged. “Those who have the authority to do so.”

I gave up in frustration. Be thankful, I told myself. Be damned thankful you’re here instead of down there. The words resonated, bringing a childhood memory. Be thankful we’re up here, on Phobos, not in that windstorm down there on Mars. Be thankful you survived your bondage. Be thankful for your strength, your endurance. Be thankful you didn’t go with Bryan, wherever he ended up going. Be thankful you didn’t run off on the dragonfly, when you were a little girl. Be thankful the woods are all around us, for the aircar circled endlessly above us.

Be resentful about all those years of language study, however, for all they did was get you into trouble with the Frossians. Of course, I wasn’t dead yet. Language might still have some use.

“Here,” said Rei, pointing ahead once more. “Here is the Gate of the Gibbekot, and through it is the way to your freedom.”

Our way led into a shallow valley grown up in forest. On both sides the trees marched up slopes that grew gradually steeper. This was a new thing for me. I had labored for fifteen years among the riverside woods that drained the pastures of the umoxen: a few large purple-leaf trees, widely separated, with thin saplings and brush between, and never any feeling of being cut off from the light. Here, the darkness was a palpable presence even at the edge of the forest, a deepening reality as we went farther to be surrounded by many kinds of trees: the shutter-leaf, which seemed ubiquitous; silver-leaf, columnar black-bolled trees with leaves that were silver on the bottom; parasol-trees, with huge, tall green-gray trunks culminating in a flat canopy well above the general forest, some dark green, some laden with brilliant red fringes. We could see perfectly well, it wasn’t a question of being unable to see, but it was like seeing in late evening, bulks and masses of shadow, movement rather than form, a muffling of sound along with nose-filling, palate-touching smells, mostly resinous, occasionally threatening. I shuddered.