Reign of Fire Page 2

  Passing under the sentinel shadow of the tall rock spindle she had dubbed the Red Pawn, Susannah conjured visions of white-topped Conestogas sailing the ancient North American wilderness, and felt her excitement quicken. As the caravan rattled down a long, stony incline to the level of the plain, a gang of FoodGuild apprentices began a song-chant that spread down the line until the refrain was picked up by the herdsmen escorting the dairy herd through the dust clouds at the rear.

  Beyond the Red Pawn, the cliffs veered to the right, as the mountains behind swung south to join the rugged Grigar Range, then curved around in a deep arc to fill the distant eastern horizon with the gentle foothills called the Talche, or “the Knees.” The caravan moved due east onto the plain, which opened up like a vast expanse of water. Far to the northeast waited the Vallegar, its sharp peaks a deeper, bluer green against the green sky.

  Susannah found herself breathing deeply, not from exertion but in response to the sudden sense of endless space, after so many weeks of confinement in the lamp-lit caves that had become her temporary home. “Dop Arek,” the Sawls called the plain—“the Goddesses’ Gaming Board.” Susannah found the name ominous, considering the violent nature of the sister-goddesses’ games. The Sawls’ eagerness to forsake the shelter of their caves and brave the open ground for so long seemed reckless at best, but was the truest measure of how crucial the trade with other settlements was to their long-range survival. Ten throws, Ghirra said it would take, two weeks by the Terran clock, to reach their destination, a town on a leg of the northern ocean, called Ogo Dul.

  Progress across the Dop Arek was slow. The ground was storm-ravaged, broken by deep ravines and muddy washes. Here and there, signs of a roadway showed in mounded depressions flanked with wheel ruts softened by the recent flooding to the dangerous consistency of glue. The big hjalk strained against the constant pull of the mud, and Susannah’s field boots and khakis were soon caked with drying ocher. The Master Ranger was forced into frequent circular detours around steep-sided gullies and arroyos choked with rock and flood debris. The detours often required further detours, seeming to lead the caravan ever farther away from their eastward route.

  The noon air was windless and thick with humidity, as the hot sun sucked water from the sodden ground. The Dop Arek was utterly treeless, either by natural habit or, as Susannah judged from the twisted nests of unidentifiable vegetable matter clogging the ravines and stream beds, due to the extreme violence of the flood. But despite the mud and devastation, new plant growth furred every surface offering moisture and nourishment. Susannah broke open a new pack of specimen bags and eagerly began her biological survey.

  She took her first samples along a section of visible roadway: delicate yellow coils uncurling into fernlike brachts. They grew in soft spreading patches, the tallest reaching to her waist. On sandier ground, she found clusters of a broader, thicker leaf set in whorls about clusters of tiny scarlet flowers. She gathered several of these, of differing maturity, intrigued by the early development of prominent seed pods. It was thirsty work, bending and cutting and hurrying to catch up with the Infirmary wagon as it repeatedly passed her by. Susannah was very aware that after only two hours, the canteen on her belt was already two-thirds empty. Her ship’s issue clothing.—though intended for hot climates, was overly tailored and binding. Already, she missed a working therm-suit, and regretted her part in helping Stavros to convince Megan of the greater integrity, diplomatic as well as scientific, of travelling as the Sawls travelled, to experience each hardship exactly as they did.

  The golden-curled hjalk, as well as the hakra, their diminutive cousins hitched to the smaller carts, pulled their loads uncomplainingly, as if they required no rest or water to maintain their steady pace. Taking a break from the exertions of her survey, Susannah walked on the shade side of the Infirmary wagon. For many miles, she was haunted by the oddness of Stavros’s parting smile, then set herself the more useful task of reviewing her store of knowledge about camels, reminded of them by the hjalks’ broad fleshy feet, equally well suited to the mud of the Dop Arek as they would be to sand. She wondered if the hjalk and hakra stored water like the camel, or possessed the camel’s incredible stamina.

  Ahead of her, the Master Healer had fallen into a shambling gait as steady as the hjalks’. It was a practiced travelling pace that propelled him along with the least expenditure of effort. A ceramic jug rested in a sling across his back, but Susannah saw him uncork it only once or twice. The singing and chanting were more sporadic now, occasionally inspired into resurgence by the pipers who walked with the ranger wagons, playing the rhythm of the pace.

  Megan remained in the wagon, at Ghirra’s insistence. Dwingen currently occupied the other half of the driver’s seat, while Ampiar took her turn on her feet with the rest of the medical staff. Dwingen was a frail but brilliant boy. Susannah guessed he was Ghirra’s favorite apprentice. She grinned up at him as he tried to look serious and in control, with the great bundle of reins bulging out of his small hands to lie slack across the hjalks’ backs. Fortunately for Dwingen, the hjalk knew better than he which way to go.

  As the caravan wound down into a shallow valley, Susannah spotted new specimens for cutting and ran ahead armed with her sample bags. She took sprigs of low-lying scrub covered with minute yellow leaves that were thick and oblate, like tiny pea pods, and crisp with moisture when broken open. In the damp bottom of a wash, she discovered a scattering of waxy orange blossoms with sharp red spikes at the end of each petal.

  The Sawl physicians eyed her with varying degrees of suspicion and concern as she rushed about taking her samples. Ghirra eventually felt compelled to assure himself that she did not try to eat any of her cuttings or use them as herbs.

  “But there must be all sorts of edible plants out here,” Susannah protested. “With your own supplies so short, I’d think you’d take advantage of any available foodstuffs.”

  Ghirra flicked a warning finger at the bagged sprigs and leaves. “These is not food. These make you sick, Suzhannah.”

  “All of them? Every one?”

  “Yes,” he replied, and from beside him, sturdy Xifa added her nod of agreement.

  But more astonishing to Susannah was the stupendous growth rate exhibited by all the native flora. Several ship’s days earlier, at the end of two nightside weeks of continuous rain and windstorm, the entire landscape had been a barren sea of mud. Now it was rich with plant life in full leaf and bloom, already showing signs of rapid seed development.

  “The plants grow so fast!” she marvelled to Ghirra from the Infirmary wagon’s shadow, when the caravan finally halted at the bottom of a brush-lined sandy ravine, for a rest and a mid-throw meal. Master Ranger Aguidran stalked by on her routine inspection tour, nodding to her brother as she passed. The FoodGuild wagon nearest them was bustling with senior guildsmen loading bread and cheeses and dried meats into wide baskets for distribution down the line.

  “It is fast?” Ghirra was interested. “Do the plants grow much slowly in your caves?”

  Susannah decided not to do as Stavros would do, that is, explain to the Master Healer that the Sawl phrase meaning home translated poorly into English if rendered literally. “They grow much slower than here,” she replied, turning a full sample bag in her hands. “We’re always trying to make them grow faster, to mature and fruit quickly so that our very limited agricultural space can be replanted as soon as possible. The mechanism that allows such rapid growth would be well worth discovering.”

  Ghirra said, “You must ask this of Ard when we come to DulElesi again.”

  The idea of asking anything at all of the irascible Head Herbalist Ard was an intimidating prospect. Susannah was glad he had remained at home with his cave-grown medicinals and his freshly planted herb plots, sparing her the ordeal, for the time being at least.

  Ghirra considered further. “I think it is that if the plants do not grow fast, they die before the seed comes to grow again after the rains.”

>   “That’s evolutionarily sound, for sure, but it’s still amazing. If our computer were working, I’d cross-check in her files, but I’d bet on my guess that your plants, especially the cultivated varieties, grow faster than anything else on record. It’s positively uncanny.”

  His interest quickened. He tried out a word he had recently learned. “You name this growth abnormal?”

  “We think your weather’s abnormal, too.” Susannah shrugged thoughtfully and reached for chunks of bread and cheese as a FoodGuildsman offered his laden basket. “But growth rate is relative, isn’t it—it depends on an organism’s needs in a given situation. Who can judge what ‘too fast’ is, relative to the universe as a whole?” She leaned back against the tall rear wheel and nibbled her cheese, happy to be out in the open air, pondering the mysterious details of her work. Megan dozed on a blanket beneath the front axle, snoring gently, too tired even to eat. A small stream wandering the flat ravine bottom played gentle music to accompany the meal. An insect, or something that sounded like an insect, buzzed out in the sunlight. Susannah looked for it, but it had passed too quickly.

  “What means this word ‘evolu-tion’?” asked the Master Healer.

  Susannah sat up. “You could say it means changing to suit a changing environment. An organism adapting itself in order to survive.”

  “And your or-ganisms can do this change if they wish?”

  She laughed gently. “Only over many thousands of years, Ghirra. It’s not a thing you do consciously, like changing your clothes. For instance, in the analyses I ran of the dried plant specimens I was given during the snows, I found a substance very like the sugar trehalose, which some Earth organisms produce to allow them to survive drought. Trehalose replaces the water that maintains the spacing between molecules on the surfaces of cell membranes. Only a few Earth organisms manufacture it, but here on Fiix, every plant I have tested so far contains an analogue for it. This is a perfect example of evolutionary adaption to a changeable environment.” She recalled Danforth’s pre-landing predictions of desert conditions, now confounded by the empirical evidence of two months of snow and rain. “Do you sometimes have long periods without much rain?”

  Ghirra nodded as if this were grimly obvious. “When Lagri fights well her battles, the dry times is long, and the same is after a long gist, when the Sisters are tired and also their armies. It is very hot, then, as if Lagri herself breathed on us, for many cycles.”

  That sounds more like the desert Taylor expected to find here, Susannah mused.

  He continued doggedly, as if even to speak of such things was to risk bringing them about. “But if a Sister wins in the Arrah, this is most bad of all. Many die then, in the Wet Death or the Death by Fire, and then will come Atoph Phenar, when the Sisters rest from sunrise to sunrise and the air does not move.”

  The air does not move? Susannah tried to imagine what he might mean by this and failed. “And that’s what you call a Great Devastation?”

  “This is, yes.”

  “But so long as Valla Ired and Lagri are fighting, which is most of the time, you get this freakish weather? If Lagri’s strong, it’s hot and dry; if Valla, it’s cold and wet. There’s no pattern, no way to tell what the weather’s going to be until it’s practically on top of you?”

  “There are the signs,” he replied, as a hint of reproof drew down the corners of his habitual smile. “My sister’s guild watches well for these, and tells them to the PriestGuild with most speed so the predictions can be given.”

  Susannah dusted crumbs off her hands and took up one of her sample bags. “But there’s no one to warn the plants, is there… I think you’re right. It would account for why the growth hormones are turned up off the scale.” Tiny blunt thorns like ridges of little teeth poked at the resisting clear plastic in her hand. She realized that weather had not been much discussed during her time in the Physician’s Hall, but when it was, it was never expressed in terms of natural phenomena. There was no “weather” or “climate”: there was only the Arrah, the Goddesses’ endless struggles to best each other.

  “You see,” she continued, “on Earth, weather patterns are more easily predictable by scientific means. They follow the dictates of season and geography with some reasonable consistency. It’s never freezing one morning and tropical by noon.”

  “Your goddesses perhaps are kinder than ours,” Ghirra murmured.

  Megan had woken up and was listening from under the wagon. “When is the weather worse, when the Sisters are fighting or when they’re not?”

  “With no gist, the air will not move,” he repeated patiently. “This is very bad. When one Sister grows too strong, this is very bad.” He pushed one flattened palm against the other. “When the strengths is same, this is best for us.”

  “Like a balance between non-weather and too much weather,” said Megan.

  “Yes. This is the time of Otoph.” He considered the Sawl word, nodding. “Balance is a possible translation.”

  “Is it Otoph now?” asked Susannah.

  Ghirra spread his hands, a Sawl shrug. “It seems this, but the signs…” He squinted furtively at the hot, green sky. “There are other signs.”

  He never looks quite comfortable when speaking of the Goddesses, Susannah noted. Not like Liphar, for example. But then she had to admit to some discomfort herself in discussing the sister-deities as if they were the actual living beings that Stavros claimed the Sawls believed they were.

  Ghirra sucked his cheek. “ ’TavrosIbia says you do not have these Goddesses in the world you live.”

  “There are some who would dispute that,” offered Megan into the pause that followed. “But you won’t get any argument here.”

  “Perhaps your caves do not need the Arrah to move the air.”

  “You’re saying the fighting is necessary, then?” Susannah asked.

  His shoulders hunched as an eagerness flared in his eyes. He lowered his voice cautiously. “The Priests do not teach this but my sister shows me from her own guild books that it is so. The Priests teach that the Darkness brought the fighting, which can end only when the Darkness goes.”

  Susannah awaited Megan’s favorite question, ‘What Darkness?’, leading to a discussion of the apparent lack of savior mythology and why the Sawls gambled over the weather instead of praying for it to change. But Megan leaned forward intently, also whispering, her compass swinging loose around her neck like her own sort of talisman bead. “Do you think worlds only have gods when they need them, GuildMaster?”

  Ghirra hesitated, frowning slightly as if caught by this thought.

  “If a world has no gods,” Megan pursued, hot on the trail of anthropological paydirt, “then who created it?”

  “The creators,” the healer replied with only slightly more conviction than before. “Who created all, the First Books say. If the night lanterns are worlds, as Ibi says, the creators made these also.”

  “Valla Ired and Lagri are not creators?”

  His expression was a subtle mix of offense and amusement, and Susannah could not tell if it was with them or with what he was about to say. “I will tell you what the Priests teach to us from the First Books: that the Sisters were born as we were born.” He found a sharp stone and scratched the familiar symbol of interlocking circles in the dirt. “They teach we are all three daughters of the creators.”

  “Not quite the supreme beings, then, these Sisters,” observed Megan.

  “Wow,” Susannah breathed. “Meg, remember the Dance of Origins, how you complained that there wasn’t a creator mentioned in it?”

  The older woman nodded with enormous satisfaction. “Turns out it’s our mythical king figure. Wait until I tell Stav. He’s found his Sawl Book of Genesis after all.”

  The rangers passed the starting call down the line and the caravan continued along the marshy ravine. The gravel bottom of the streambed offered a damp but firmer base for the wagon wheels than the choppy mud of the upper plains. An occasional lavender-p
inkish streak showed among the striations of earth and rock, but the tall crumbling banks of the ravine were increasingly crowded with vegetation. Susannah was forced to become more selective in her sampling so as not to use up her supply of bags too early in the journey.

  After the sixth hour of travel, Ghirra asked Dwingen to surrender his place to Susannah, who was showing signs of wear. Instead, Megan offered to walk, and Susannah climbed into the high driver’s seat without protest. The harsh din of wheel rattle and harness was amplified by the ravine walls into a rhythmic roar that made her dream of an ocean after a storm. Rocked by the sway of the wagon, Susannah dozed.

  Later, the rhythm was broken by a jolt and she woke clutching the worn leather of the seat. The ravine had deepened further, widening and curling back on itself like the coils of a snake. The streambed gravel was roughened by larger stones and the occasional boulder. The hjalk labored under their loads and the pace slowed as Aguidran sent a contingent of her rangers ahead to clear the worst of the obstacles.

  Susannah stretched and called to the girl apprentice Phea, who she noted had not yet taken a turn in the shade of the wagon’s yellow canopy. Phea climbed up gratefully, and Susannah grabbed her field pack to go clambering among the rocks for samples of a fleshy orange plant growing in spiny clusters, like a vegetable porcupine.

  Upturning a stone by accident, she had her first confirmed sighting of local fauna: a long, whiplike body that slithered quickly away to hide under the next boulder. Briefly glimpsed, its eyes were yellow and bulging. The shape of its limbs seemed blurred as if still forming themselves.

  Amphibian, she guessed. Like a frog tad. But the creature’s movements and its smooth-scaled skin were more like a land animal’s, a snake or a lizard. Instinctively, she grabbed for the disappearing tail.

  “NO!” Ghirra barked, and she heard him running across the gravel. It was as hard-edged a syllable as she had ever heard him utter. She jerked her hand away and stared back at him in astonishment.