Chapter 85
Aria: “Neither fear nor courage saves us”
Indifferent stars glittered overhead in the cold of early winter as she emerged onto the rooftop. “I've been looking for you,” she said.
Xander was sitting near a corner of the roof and gazing out over the decayed city, where a little snow had fallen. More would be coming. He turned at the sound of her voice, slowly, as if he had been expecting someone. “Oh? Is something wrong?”
She paced over to sir down near him. “I'm sure many things are wrong. People are sick and children are hungry, somewhere. Soon men are going to kill each other again, and I see no way to prevent it. But that's not why I'm here.”
Xander regarded her. Aria studied his face, seeing things she had never noticed before. His eyes. His chin. Even the shape of his nose. If you knew what to look for, the resemblance to what she saw in the mirror every day was so clear. Why had she never noticed it before? Had others? “I want to know about my mother,” she said.
His eyebrows lifted. “I'm sure you know her as well as I do.”
She reddened a little. “Not in the same way. Tell me how the two of you met.”
His eyes shifted, gazing past her at nothing. She could almost see him sliding back along the line of his life, to a time before she even existed. “It almost didn't happen. I was just out of Wyoming, wandering through northern Rado, and I stopped into a little village called Dustfall, a mining town where it was common for customers to pay for supplies with a palm of gold dust panned from the placer deposits that wash downstream from eroded veins.”
He closed his eyes, sinking into the memory. “Not me, of course. I knew nothing about mining at the time. I hadn't intended to venture into the local inn, but then I saw the horses.”
Unwilling to disturb his reverie, she edged closer to the man she now knew was her father and whispered “the horses?”
He nodded, eyes still shut. “They say you can tell a lot about a man by his shave, haircut, and shoes. Maybe that's true, some places. But in Dustfall, a lot of the prospectors were just back in after spending days or weeks out in the wilderness, avoiding their own kind for the most part to keep secret the locations of their strikes. It's pretty hard for a man or woman out by themselves to guard a stretch of river shallows.”
She wasn't quite sure she had heard that right. “River shallows?”
“Yes. You see, with a larger group, you might be working an old mine or starting a new one. Sometimes gold is actually visible in the rock, sun-bright veins in quartz or whatever, easy to get at. You hack out the rock with a pick axe, pulverize it with hammers, slurry it with water or various solutions to wash away the slag, and the gold is left. The veins are down inside a mine and the opening can be guarded with a couple of bowmen.
“But with the loners who go solo, the mining is a lot of work to do by themselves. Most of them go for the placer deposits. When thousands of years of rain erosion exposes a vein and wears down the rock, the water flows downhill to a creek or river. When there's a hard rain or enough snow melt in the spring, the river runs hard enough to wash the rock and gold dust downstream where it ends up in the shallows, often near bends in the river, where the water slows down enough that the gold-bearing mud settles to the bottom.
“If you find a spot like that, you're in business! All you have to do is scoop up some of the mud into a pan, add some river water, swirl it around until the lighter mud is washed away, and the gold is left there gleaming up at you like grains of solid sunlight. But unless your spot is heavily forested, your find is pretty exposed, hard for one man to guard when he has to sleep. So you avoid other people until you have enough to take it into town to bank it or buy more supplies.”
“What does all that have to do with horses?”
“I'm getting to that. As I said, some say you can tell a lot about a man by the state of his face and his clothes. But that's not strictly true for solitary miners. When you don't want to spend too much money on food, and you're out there by yourself, well, let's just say personal grooming is not a high priority. Every minute spent washing clothes or shaving is a minute you could have spent panning out some more gold dust, follow me? So when a solitary prospector comes into town, he'll more likely than not to be a pretty scruffy fellow. Even the ladies. Can't tell anything from his or her appearance. A ragged sleeve or an unshaven face doesn't mean he has no self-respect or doesn't care about how he looks. It means he was concentrating on what would make the most money.
“But his horse is the exception. A man who doesn't take care of his horse is a man who might not make it back next time. If you run into claim jumpers or hostile strangers, or manage to injure yourself or get sick, your horse is what gets you out of danger or back to civilization. So if you want to know who the best miners are, the ones who care if they live or die, then look to their horses and tack, not whether they have dirt behind their ears.”
“I see,” she said, not really caring about that detail much. She had no plans to become a prospector. But she knew by now they the only way to hear the story was to let Xander tell it the way it came back to him.
“Anyway, I was strolling through the center of Dustfall, fresh off the farm, so to speak, and I see the most beautiful horse in a hundred miles tied up outside the inn. Big, bright eyes, nicely built, and white as snow.” He rubbed his chin. “A gray. That's the funny thing, you call a white horse a gray. I didn't even know that, back then. And his saddle and gear was in perfect order, not a bit of tack out of place, gleaming leather. I'd seen good horses before, but even the best weren't this clean, this fine, especially not just back from the wilderness. And there were a few more tied up next to it that were nearly as good-looking.”
“So what did you do, steal it?”
He opened his eyes and stared at her, shocked. “What? No way. There were two men with crossbows guarding them. But looking at that animal, I thought, there's a man who knows what he's doing. I wonder what he's doing out here in Dustfall? So I decided to go in the inn for a look-see. Who knows? Maybe he had work for me.”
Xander laughed. “Picture the scene. I'm barely more than a kid, twenty summers old, hardly any skills to speak of. Couldn't even ride a horse! And dumb enough to think I could talk my way into a job with someone like that. But I went in.
“I go in, and there he is, talking to a bunch of folks in the common room of the inn. What you would call 'ruggedly handsome' with a strong chin, piercing hazel eyes, and dark hair cut short, going gray at the temples. What he's saying doesn't make any sense to me, at first, but the people in there are hanging on every word as if he were about to tell them where a ton of gold is waiting to be found.”
The old wizard coughed. “But what he's talking about is America. Now I knew by that time that it was the old name for this continent, named after some foreign mapmaker, but he's talking about it as if it were a country. One country! A country as big as a continent. And I remember some of the crap the elders back at the commune used to say, that is was one country, back before the Tourists and the Fall. So I figure he's talking about our history, and I decide to keep listening, to see if his story agrees with the ones we used to pass around with the soup.”
He started coughing again at that point, and one of the guards on the roof watching for signals came over to offer him his canteen. Xander took a swig of it and handed it back, smiling his thanks.
“But he wasn't talking about history. He was talking about the future. I almost laughed out loud, at the idea that all the countries here now would stop fighting and just agree to be one big country again. What a ridiculous idea! But he kept talking about it, and nobody laughed, not even me. He believed it, you see, and he believed it so hard it was like a drunk passing around his bottle and getting the whole room drunk with him. Pretty soon he had me believing it was possible too, and I realized right then and there that this guy was someone special.”
By this point Aria knew who he was talking about. Her heart was beating a little faster n
ow. “So you asked him for a job?”
Xander laughed, but not in a cruel sort of way. “No. By then I'd heard one of the men call him the General and I thought, no way am I going to get myself killed being one of his soldiers. He wasn't even really recruiting, as I learned later. His style was more to put out his message and move on, and wait for the ones who thought it over and decided to come look him up.” Xander brushes a strand of hair out of his eyes. “He didn't want someone coming to join him on a whim and then changing their mind later just as quickly. He'd sow the seeds, and wait for the harvest. It was a smart approach. The ones who had time to make up their minds usually stayed with him longer.”
Xander looked out over the city again. She followed his gaze, and saw the old buildings, some fallen, some standing, like cornstalks after a harvest. Islands of order in a crumbled wasteland of decay. In some of the buildings, she could see the old girders exposed like ribs of a carcass picked clean by scavengers. Good building stone is easier to remove from a toppled tower. Why crack it free from a quarry when so many megatons are there there for the taking?
She brushed back her own hair with one hand and pictured the scene he was describing. She could see how it might have been, but it wasn't what she was waiting to hear. “So what did you do?”
“I had a drink. Hadn't planned on it, but he bought the room a round, and there I was, so I grabbed a mug and listened some more. Why not? I was thirsty, and he was buying.
“One thing led to another, and you know how it is with beer. Before I knew it, I was heading outside to get rid of some used beer that didn't want to be inside me any more. There were outhouses in back, and I headed for one. And then I saw her, in the light of a full moon.”
He paused, and she could see he wasn't looking at the city now, but at an inner vision. “She was hardly much older than you are now, and short, but well put together.” He looked left and right to check that the guards were not close enough to hear him. “You're taller, got that from me, so it's good that he was too. She was heading back in as I was heading out, and we passed each other without a word. But before we did, someone opened the back door of the inn, probably someone with the same need as me, and the light from inside spilled out and showed me her face.”
He put his head down for a moment before he continued. “I felt like my heart had stopped. When I saw her face, it was like everything stopped. I say we passed each other, but, really, she passed me on her way back inside, because I was just stopped there, frozen, staring at the most beautiful woman I had ever seen.
“I did what I had gone out to do, but when I was finished I went right back in looking for her. Found her of course. There was no missing that face – it was branded on my eyeballs. But she wasn't looking back at me, of course. She was looking at him, at the General, and I could see from the worship in her eyes that she was with him. In that moment, I knew that I had fallen in love with another man's woman.”
Aria was silent for a moment. She tried to imagine how that must have felt, having that strong a feeling, a yearning, for someone who was already paired. “What did you do?”
“I left town,” he said, “ and I never saw her again.”
“What??” He was kidding her, and the anticlimax left her wanting to slap him. “Is everything just a joke to you?”
Xander chuckled. “Sorry, I was just trying to lighten the mood for myself. What I actually did was ask one of his men where they were headed next. I had a honest-looking face back then, long before I became the wicked old rascal you know. Once I knew where they were heading, another frontier town called Panning, about twenty miles to the east, I started walking.”
“Why didn't you stay at the inn?”
He shrugged. “No money for it. We hadn't used it at the commune, so I'd been working my way South doing whatever I could find in the way of odd jobs, like washing dishes, loading and unloading wagons and the like. I wanted to see her again, fool that I was, and I figured the General and his men would start out early, so I walked most of the way to the next town and slept under the stars. And that's where it happened.”
“What? What happened? That's where you saw her again?”
He shook his head no. “It was a day like today, with the winter coming on, but not a cloud in the sky. While I was lying there, looking up at the stars, I found myself thinking about what the General had been talking about back at the inn in Dustfall. Somewhere up there, the Tourists were in their sky-ship, wandering between the distant suns the way I was drifting between towns.
“Yes, I still wanted to see Kristana again, though I didn't know her name. I didn't expect she'd ever leave the General, but I had a young man's optimism, and I wanted to be near her. At the same time, though. I was thinking about the Tourists, and what they'd done to our civilization, the civilization the General was trying to put back together. I realized that simply lining up armies and putting countries back together wasn't enough. Armies hadn't kept us together the first time. Sure, they'd conquered territory and amassed land to make countries, but what had held the countries together, at least until the Tourists came along, was the technology. Our civilization didn't crumble because our armies failed. It Fell because the technology had failed.
“I lay there under the stars asking myself why it had all happened. Why weren't we out there now among the stars like the Tourists? Technology doesn't go backward. It gets better and stronger until you can do things like leaving the Earth and traveling the skies.
“But the skies were too big to imagine, so I thought of the Earth like a small town, that the Tourists had stopped over at like the General and his men. Then it was suddenly obvious to me.”
He'd lost her in the turnings of his recollection now. “What was obvious?”
“What had happened. What we needed. Suppose the General had stopped at a town with no wagons and left them one. It'd sure come in handy hailing things around. But if they didn't know how to fix it when the axles broke or the wheels came off, it would stay broken. And if they didn't know how to make another one, they'd be right back where they started.
“And that's what had happened to us, only worse. The Gifts the aliens traded us had started failing, and we'd built them into our technology without ever learning how to maintain or make 'em. So we lost the technology that held out countries together, and it all crumbled down to where it is today.”
“Why didn't they rebuild it, the way it was before the Tourists came? We still had the scientists and engineers, didn't we?”
He smiled a sad smile. “Great question. The answer is twofold. First, we still had scientists but their workshops were all funded and maintained by the countries and large corporations. You don't find a scientist or an engineer making a fusion reactor in his basement. Those sorts of efforts take money, and lots of it, and mostly only the governments and corporations had that kind of money. When the technology broke down, and chaos descended upon the lands, with panic, starvation and disease, without the means of transporting large amounts of food or medicine around, governments fell and countries splintered into city-states and kingdoms. The paper and 'electronic' money they were using became useless without the governments to back it up, and the Fall kept falling. Lot of people died. Without large populations to tax, what remained in the way of local governments were poor. A poor government doesn't support much in the way of research and development. It concentrates on defending itself from other gangs.
“The only dependable transportation was horses, and so blacksmiths became important again, but the factories, the laboratories, and the schools that trained specialists for them all vanished like the big countries. Instead of huge and great, all we had was a lot of small and simple. We survived as a species, at the cost of going backwards into the way of life we'd had centuries before.
“I lay there thinking about these things, and I thought about what little I'd learned about the Gifts, like how to make a swizzle and control it without touching it, and suddenly I realized that if I could learn t
his, if I could learn how to make and maintain the Gifts, then I, and anyone who could learn what I knew, was what we needed to build our civilization. I didn't see anyone else doing it, so it appeared that it all depended on me.”
Aria smiled. “Sounds like a lot for a twenty-year old to be taking on.”
“Oh, it was. I knew that one man, wandering about making a swizzle here and there, wasn't enough to get the momentum going. It was going to take dozens, hundreds, thousands of people like me. That's when I first had the idea of setting up a school to train them.”
“Just one school? For the entire world?”
“No, you're right. Even a whole school full of us wouldn't be enough. But it would be a start. And some of the people I trained could go off and start their own schools. It might take a hundred years, maybe two hundred. But even that would be better than the two thousand years it took us the first time, going from horse-drawn carts to automobiles and airplanes. So then and there, that starry night, I dedicated myself to it. Well, to two things, actually. To founding a school, and staying near your mother and the General.”
He laughed at the folly of youth. “The next day I finished walking to the next town and found the local blacksmith. He was rolling some pipe for a well a local farmer needed to sink. I showed him how I could make a swizzle for his forge that was better than a hand-pumped bellows, and in return for that and a few hours work helping him with his work, I got a short length of pipe. And I waited.
“Sure enough, the General and his men and Kristana came riding into Panning that afternoon. They hadn't started out as early as I thought they would. He'd bought a few too rounds too many, and he was probably slower setting out than he would have preferred. But he got there, and when he did, I was waiting for him. When he swung down off his horse, I was there by the watering trough. “General,” I said, “you don't know it yet, but you need my help and I need yours.”
Xander shook his head. “If I had any more sense, I might have been afraid to say anything. But I was young, in love, and now I had my own Dream, different from his, maybe, but not incompatible with it.
“He just stared at me with a little smile. 'Colorado needs good men,' he said. 'Do you have a horse and a bow?' No, I said, but I have something none of your men have. He looked like he was about to laugh. 'And what's that?' he asked me. Magic, I said.
“I showed him the length of pipe I had, maybe a foot long, barely wide enough to stick your thumb in it. I stuck it in the watering trough and nothing happened. 'Son,' he said to me, 'I've seen metal pipe before. Blacksmithing might seem like magic, but it isn't.”
“I know, I said. But have you ever seen anyone do this before? And I concentrated on the pipe in my hand, made it into a swizzle, and stuck one end of it into the water again. This time the water shot up out of it making a little fountain. It splashed me, of course, but I didn't care, because by then I really had his attention. He looked at that little fountain I was holding. Then he looked a me. His eyes were a little wider now. 'Now that is magic,' he said. 'What else can you do?'
“I don't know, I told him. But I know I can can learn more, and I can probably teach others, too. For that I need a patron, someone to help me build a school. I've heard your dream, and I'm ready to tell you mine. Want to have magic working for you?”
“He was still staring at the swizzle, but he heard me. So were his men. 'Let's go inside and talk about it, wizard,' he said.
“Sitting around a table, we did. 'What do you want, for pay, a bag of gold? I have to warn you, I'm not a rich man,' he said.
“Fresh from the commune, knowing little of money, I told him no, I didn't need any gold. All I need, I told him, is a roof over my head, food to stay alive, and time to myself to learn as much as I can about this magic. And when I'm ready, a school to teach it to others.
“He smiled at that and looked at his men. 'Anything else?'
“Yes, I told him, after a moment's thought. Any bits of the old magic that your men find, that I might be able to learn from, and any of the old books they run across, I want those. Deal?
“I'll never forget his handshake. I could feel the strength he still had then, long before the consumption took him. 'Son,' he said, 'I think you'd better come with me to Denver.'”
Xander sighed. “And that's when two dreams came together, and I became the court wizard to the government of Rado. I still haven't built my school, but I got everything else that I wanted.”
“Like being with my mother.”
He dropped his gaze. “Yes,” he whispered. “That too.” He raised his head, then, and stared into her eyes. “Which is why you are here, and why we are going to beat the Honcho.”
“With the tanks he has? How?”
“I'm still working on it,” he said.
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