“Does God or man judge man?”
“Neither, and both. Let history judge,” she said, whispering finally, reaching for him once again.
“I cannot forget. I could block it then, but I cannot forget.”
The intensity, the pain in his voice frightened her. “You should not. And you would not have won those chieftains unless you had showed them you meant business. One man for the future. So it will be, until the Cied themselves change. With your help, maybe he will be the last.”
“Maybe.” He sighed softly and, releasing one arm, walked her down the passageway to the sanitation. He reached over to test the water and was half out of his over-robe before he knew it. He stiffly stood straight. “You are good at that.”
“Practice.” She did not blush or flinch or even smile.
Braan faced her. “Will you stay ... here?”
“Yes.”
“Will you marry me?”
“I don’t know. I think so. I need time to consider, and to orient myself to Nuamura once again.”
“How can you do one and not the other?” he started, but she stopped him with a touch.
“I have to,” she said. He looked irritated, hurt. Tay hurried on. “No law or authority can bind, belaiss. Not as securely as the human heart ...”
Trembling, she dropped his robe as he sought her embrace.
MT. AMURA
TWOHUNDRED EIGHTYTWODAY, TIERCE
Lyte had managed to avoid Moran several times since the group had arrived back in Nuamura. When they finally had a chance to talk (or fight ...) Lyte wanted no witnesses. Eventually Lyte allowed himself to be found on the boulders outside the grotto.
Lyte heard footsteps and stood, facing into the darkness of the cavern. Moran walked up and paused before him, studying his friend.
A smile crept over Lyte’s face. “Is this all the greeting I get for sparing your demented hide?” Moran laughed aloud and hugged him tightly. Shoulder to shoulder they moved back to the rocks. “I’m serious. If you hadn’t left so early, I would have followed you and beat your ass to mush.”
Moran snorted. “You might have lost a few teeth.”
“True,” Lyte agreed amiably. “Jaac prevented our finding out. But if you ever—ever take off again without inviting me first—”
“Never.”
“—The reason had better be good,” Lyte finished.
“What are you doing out here?” Moran asked.
“Enjoying the view.”
“Try again.”
“Seriously. This is a ... beautiful planet, Moran. Turquoise and white and black, three moons, a long hot summer coming ...”
“What’s with you?” Moran stared at him. “You look ... happy.”
“I am.”
“Why?”
“Because ... I’ve been thinking a lot about a gatuhlpa Ronüviel told right after you left.” Lyte stared back out at the valley. “These people have roots, Moran. They belong here, in this strange world. Just as surely as my parents belong in CSSI. And they’ve offered it to me—freely. No strings attached. You can ignore it, you know. But I don’t want to. What is in the outer galaxy that I can’t find here? We’ve got everything.“
“Even brewing civil war,” Moran said dryly.
“No—interlopers, maybe, who will keep us busy; but the Nualans put peace higher on the scale than profit. Maybe it’s the trine gold.” He turned to Moran, letting surprise cross his face. “I never thought of that! Every Nualan has trinium—it’s not worth as much here, did you know that? Maybe it isn’t as important when it’s always there! And I’d like to watch Ried and the others grow up. And your kids—you’re a lousy authoritarian, so this should be fun.”
“Kids are different.”
“We’ll see. But my first priority is ...“
“Yes?”
“To climb this mountain.” He looked up, up, craning his neck to see the rising Sonoma range, the peak of Mt. Amura lost in rolling clouds. “We’ve barely touched it.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Today.”
“I’m beat ... and this partnership is a two-way path.”
“Tomorrow.” Lyte extended his hand for the oath grip.
NONE
Moran found Ronüviel right inside the grotto. Only her guaard was present, standing next to her. Moran did not recognize the warrior—undoubtedly the regulars were already resting. Roe was sitting on the ground, leaning against the cavern walls; she appeared asleep.
Moran squatted down beside her. “You should lie down. Come.”
She held up her hand, a languid gesture. “Not yet. Listen.” He sat down. The arguments of the synod filtered out to them.
“What are you waiting for?”
“The official decision on Kal and Shinar.”
“It will pass, won’t it?”
Roe smiled, and reached for his cheek. “How you murder our language, you and Teloa. Just speak Axis when you are not sure. It will pass. I hope they will strike all laws concerning it. Humans should not pass judgment on individuals when it comes to their private lives.”
“Aahmn. But you do look thoughtful.”
“I am. I am thinking about what kind of future we are creating for our children. About what Kal told them, about the things Braan and I discussed. Do you realize the challenge, Moran? The possibilities? In our lifetimes we may be able to improve the situation of not only Nuala but other planets as well. For millennia we have been a sanctuary. We must spread it, love; spread the word that justice shall prevail. I hope for peace among Fewhas, Axis, Malvevenians and Nualans.”
“We are not Axis?”
“No. It was a mistake—well, not a mistake—to go back. But it has outlived its usefulness. Self-sufficiency is the key. Harmony with the universe. We must throw out the old, racist prohibitions, must impress upon people the need for system rule and mutual survival by helping friends, not dominating them.”
“Shall we be the new masters of the galaxy?” Moran asked.
She opened one eye, thinking he was mocking her, but he knew his expression was serious, and he hoped tinged with his love. “I pray not. I hope we are willing to help the oppressed no matter where they be. If asked, we shall aid them. When any group exploits another, it threatens the balance, Moran. I believe, as you do, in the ultimate triumph of right. But there will be so many mountains to climb.”
He reached for her hand. “We will show our children the balance. What they do with it is up to them. We cannot anticipate their universe. We must prepare them for all possibilities.”
Roe nodded wearily, and he saw the narrow line within her—the optimism and the fear.
A shadow fell upon them, between the glow and the guaard. Glancing up they saw the ghost that was Arrez. “Seri?” Moran said, using the title of respect for the man.
“I have left inside many confused elders, Ronüviel, fearful and belligerent,” the priest started carefully, and Moran sensed relief in him. “They are hesitant about the future, yet no longer distrusting of their Atare, it seems. He may lead us to destruction, but they are willing to follow. Many laws fell this morning, under a simple catch-all statement that will undoubtedly cause many arguments in the next few years. ‘We are Human.’ And Url has pronounced the declaration of our freedom to be the wedding of Kalith reb^Ila Atare and Shinar^reb Elana—whenever they blessed well please!”
Roe leapt to her feet, half-strangling the older man in her delight. “Come, we must tell Kal, he is waiting!”
NUALA, MT. AMURA
TWOHUNDRED EIGHTYTWODAY, NONE
“Kal! Kalith!!” Ronüviel rushed past the guaard in front of his door, nearly tripping over the step up. “It is done, it is done!”
“What is done?” he asked steadily, looking away from the window to meet her gaze.
She seized his hands. “Where is Shinar?”
He knew, then. He opened his hand a moment to reveal the hard object within, and then swiftly left the room, racing for the departin
g lift, his guaard running to keep up.
Roe turned to Moran and hugged him tightly, refusing to let go. “Did you see his face?” she started, laughing.
“The most incredible mixture of joy, relief, and arrogant assurance I have ever seen,” Moran agreed.
“Come! I must see her reaction!”
oOo
The lift was hours too slow. Kal flew down the corridor to the life shelter, nearly knocking over a medtech at the bronze door and not apologizing for it.
Fortunately the door, itself, was open. She was in the main room with her fellow students, watching a ward healer prescribe medication. Kal’s sudden arrival stopped all conversation and turned every head. Embarrassed but undeterred, he abruptly extended his fist to her. She stared at him, not understanding, and then, at his repeated gesture, offered him her palm. Kalith slowly, forcefully unfolded his fingers, pressing the serae stone into her outstretched hand and covering it with his own.
“For better or worse, serae, we have won.”
She folded into his arms, her answer in the fierceness of her grip.
* END *
A Note About the Nualan Language
Down through the centuries, the various colonies of Earth each evolved their own language. If the founding group was homogeneous in background, its primary language generally derived from the culture; if it was heterogeneous, the favorite language of choice eventually dominated. At the time of the first launches, the languages of choice for the myriad of peoples who chose the stars were Chinese, English, and Spanish. These three languages formed the pidgin tongue which was the basis of Axis Standard.
The colony of Nuala was one of the few founded involuntarily, and its linguistic progression was radically different. Due to the high number of scientists among the original settlers, English, Latin, and German predominated, with a sprinkling of Gaelic and several African dialects thrown into the language stew. Since the pronunciation of several commonly-used Nualan words does not translate easily, assistance is offered below.
ä — used in:
Ragäree
ragäree
ciedär
Ciedärlien
This “ä” is pronounced as American speakers say “o” in bother and “a” in father. The first “a” in ragäree is pronounced as in rah.
aa — guaard
This double vowel is the long exhalation ah. It is almost identical to the first “a” in ragäree, and in most parts of Nuala and on the planet Niamh has become identical. Only tradition leaves the spelling of ragäree unchanged.
ē — sini
This vowel is the old usage for the “e” sound in American English for beat, bleed, and sleepy. Both “i”’s are pronounced the same way.
ü — used in:
Mendülay
Mendülarion
Ronüviel
This “ü” is pronounced as American English speakers say the “ue” in cue and the “ew” in few.
A bracketing effect is used by the Nualans in their written language, mostly in titles and in proper names. In the first example below, the second and third words are pronounced differently when linked; in the second, the written usage is merely traditional. A few very strict septs of clans use this bracket only when a child is the heir of its mother (eldest daughter or son) but this is not a general interpretation.
^ — used in:
Mendülarion S^Atare
Nadine reb^Ursel Kilgore
Nualan Calendar
The Nualan year is an elliptical orbit of 432 Nualan days, based on a twenty-five-hour day. Ancient Terran hours are used as the base measurement. Nualans divide the calendar into four seasons of 108 days each. These divisions are based on the rainy seasons; it rains almost thirty-six days straight at the beginning of spring and autumn. A Nualan month is thirty-six days. Nualans do not use any smaller fraction of the calendar between “month” and day. They refer to the passage of time according to festivals and religious feast days.
New Year Firstday (first day of fall)
Festival of Masks — Thirtyfiveday
Feast of Souls — Thirtysixday
Yule — Onehundred Twentysevenday (midwinter)
Feast of Atonement and Anointing — Onehundred Eightyoneday (first day of spring)
Ascension Day — Twohundred Fortysixday
Midsummer’s — Threehundred Fortythreeday
Feast of Adel — Fourhundred Twentyfiveday
High Festival — Fourhundred Twentysixday through Thirtytwoday
Nualan Time
The planet Nuala has a twenty-five-hour day, retaining the ancient sixty-minute hour and sixty-second minute, although Nualan time-keeping appears hazy to off-worlders. It can be extremely difficult for planet visitors to keep track of time, since moonrise and moonset can vary enormously. In Amura (Nuamura) the hours are canonical. Elsewhere, however, the moon cycles are closely watched, and it is possible for second bell to precede first bell — or follow third bell, depending on the time of moonset. The same situation applies to moonrise.
Matins — First bell and the deepest point of night.
Lauds — Second bell, moonset (firstmoon)
Canonical Lauds — Rung between matins and starrise
Prime — Third bell, starrise (Kee)
Tierce — Fourth bell, midmorning
Sext — Fifth bell, high noon
None — Sixth bell, mid-afternoon
Vespers — Seventh bell, starset (Kee)
Compline — Eighth bell, moonrise (firstmoon)
Canonical Compline — Rung between starset and matins
The Nualans’ sequence also changes fractionally with the seasons. Compline and Lauds are rung at their median points during the dark of the moons.
Nualan Map
Recent Atare Line — Nualan Year 4952
A Second Edition Afterword, and Acknowledgments
It is strange to look back on the very first novel, written in the dark ages (before e-books.) Rather like stumbling over a box of high school pictures. You know you are somewhere inside that half-fledged bird of a person, but on several levels you’d like to make sure that the pictures never come to light again. Fire Sanctuary made me a Campbell nominee for best new writer, and brought me to the attention of the science fiction world. A lot of people enjoyed the book.
I enjoyed the book, both the creation of the world and the writing. Fire Sanctuary began with an image and a scrap of a news article. I’d always been fascinated by the Time-Life book on genetics. One photo especially intrigued me, of a man holding a radish that looked several yards long. What would happen in a place where things not only survived, but eventually thrived among radiation? And then there was the tiny article about wiring a battery to a bone break to speed healing. What if the myth of the healing hands of a ruler was true? No placebo effect—touch could quickly heal wounds?
From these two things, all of Nuala was born.
I remember Nuala differently, of course. The original novel was about 250,000 words, at a guess—a sprawling intergalactic tale that covered the collapse of a rotting interstellar alliance and one world’s new beginning. When it became apparent that I could not sell such a book in the market of the time, I started cutting and editing, refining, teaching myself to write fiction with a tighter lens. Friends would encourage, nudge, occasionally pretend they didn’t know me (it was embarrassing back then, having a friend who admitted she wrote things) and wait for the next installment.
Even the version in your hand started out differently, with Teloa’s nightmare. Editor Brian Thomsen asked me to put Lyte and Moran first, then Teloa, as he saw them as more important characters. (He also stripped the last of that huge saga, which started 100 pages earlier. Braan and Roe’s siblings became vague shadows, not people we had met and suddenly lost. An excellent point—just because we can learn all those names doesn’t mean we should learn all those names.)
But I had to go back in and do the copy editing done by the original Warner editor
, matching the copy edit of the previous Nuala e-books. In the first Warner book, the copy editor changed most of my Initial Cap choices and made them lower case—and made the lower case Nualan words Initial Cap. I was young and easily intimidated by grammar, so I allowed most of this. I even turned in Fires of Nuala matching the copy editing of Fire Sanctuary.
Of course the new copy editor made the Initial Cap choices in Fires of Nuala lower case, and made the lower case Nualan words Initial Cap. (Yes, we are now back to what the original manuscript of Fire Sanctuary contained.) By the time Hidden Fires showed up, I did what I wanted and fiercely STETed (I.E. “put the item back to what it was before you mucked with it”) every Initial Cap change the copy editor attempted. Do they all match now? Heaven only knows. But you can see why it is hard for me to keep it in my head. I remember too many versions, and other things have interfered with a smooth edit flow.
It’s hard to go back through a book this old. You are no longer the person who wrote it. You have time traveled, and the book has traveled separately from you. A writer hopes that s/he is a better writer, a better storyteller, each time a story pops out of the subconscious to become a novel. For Fire Sanctuary’s e-book I was blessed with a friend who kept mentally slapping my hand and saying, “No! It’s a good book. Don’t mess with it.”
She’s right, of course. This book can stand on its own merits. The culture is older than the other Nualan books, the viewpoint style different to match their more mannered, ancient language. (Not as changed a language as it would have been—the copy editor kept altering the ways I consciously changed the language. I lost that battle. But something like thirty-five percent of the Magna Carta is unintelligible to most English speakers today, and that’s less than a thousand years. The Chinese can still read their written language, but the meaning of many words and concepts has shifted radically over the centuries. How big a shift in five thousand years? The book has to make sense to us here, so I hung on to a few things and let the rest go.)
Fire Sanctuary Page 40
