Walls of Wind and the Occasional Diamond Thief Boxed Set

by Jane Ann McLachlan

  So far our plan was going smoothly. Koon’an’s deliberate emphasis on our advantage in size reassured those who had appeared nervous at first.

  I rose again. “Do they live like us?”

  As I sat down, I noticed Pandarris looking at me intently. He was here because he’d been honored for his work earlier. My performance wasn’t fooling my cool-headed youngling, so different from his sibling. Well, I could talk to him later; it was the rest of the city I had to worry about now.

  “They are much more primitive. They live in caves, like our ancestors. We have much to teach them. And, in fact, we have already begun. There was a Bria in our expedition.” He paused for the gasps of shock that greeted this revelation, first from the Ghen in the audience then, when it had been translated, even louder gasps and cries of surprise from the Bria.

  “Councilor Rennis’s offspring, Tyannis,” He bowed to Rennis casually, as though Tyannis’s going with them had been planned and agreed to all along. “He is well and chose to remain among our mountain neighbors until we return next season for him and for the Ghen, who presumably will be healed by the time we next see them, thanks to the excellent care they are receiving. Tyannis has already learned their language and made friends among them.”

  Rennis, to his credit, forced out a smile and nodded to Koon’an, as though delighted by the accomplishments of his youngling.

  The silence in Council Chambers was profound as Bria and Ghen alike grappled with so many shocking disclosures. We gave them a few moments to take it all in, and then the youngest councilor in closed-Council cried out in apparent delight, “So we are not alone on Wind! The Creator Wind has given us a sibling civilization!”

  By now I was breathing easier. We had the crowd with us, if only we could keep them. As if on cue, Triannis, the Single-by-Choice councilor, leaped to his feet.

  “What is it that wounded three Ghen in the mountains?” he demanded. “What is attacking our walls?”

  We had intended to come to this next revelation more slowly. At least we had had time to introduce the premises on which we would spin our half-lie.

  “Our mountain neighbors share one more misfortune with our ancestors: they bear Broghen. A few of these have begun to find their way into our forest.”

  I watched the parents in the gallery absorbing this; the relief of knowing it wasn’t their deformed offspring returning to attack us mixed with horror at our formal acknowledgement that Broghen were real.

  As though we could still keep that secret, with the increasing attacks upon our walls! At least we had pointed the blame away from us. The innocence of our young was only partially compromised.

  The second-year councilor, eyes wide with shock, touched his growing belly and cried out involuntarily, “Oh the poor mountain Bria! We must help them learn better ways!”

  Despite our deliberate attempt to mislead young Bria, it continually surprised me how easily they were fooled. I suppose we believe what we want to believe, for as long as we can. Nevertheless, his involuntary response was just what we had hoped for. It sent an immediate message to the Bria parents as to what our stand must be, and I saw them touching their breath across the gallery, especially those who had younglings sitting with them.

  Anarris wasn’t about to accept our performance as the other Bria did. Breaking all precedent he leaped to his feet and demanded, “And how did the mountain Broghen find our city? Isn’t that the Ghen’s fault? With their hunting forays, didn’t they lead the Broghen to us?”

  The question couldn’t be left hanging, the last thing Bria heard before Council ended. Chair Ghen was compelled to respond.

  “The white Broghen are no threat to you,” he said, looking across the wide gallery of Bria, as Council Chair translated his words. “We are more than a match for the few who come this far.”

  “Because you are just as violent as they!” Anarris screamed. “Today the Broghen attack us; tomorrow the Ghen!”

  Several of his followers stamped their feet in agreement, although others looked uncomfortable, even shocked that he would say such a thing here. Sandarris was one of those, I noticed. I hoped Anarris had gone too far and would begin losing followers instead of gaining them.

  Meanwhile, Ghen in the audience who had had Anarris’s comments translated by Bria partners, began calling objections. The entire gallery was becoming involved, ignoring Council Chair’s calls for order. I sat frozen in my seat, unable to think what to do.

  Suddenly, Anarris ran over and threw himself on the nearest Ghen, hitting and kicking and even biting him! What could have possessed him? I could hardly believe my own eye.

  The attack was so sudden, the Ghen nearly retaliated. His arms rose, claws snapping out in reflex. I expected to see Anarris cut to ribbons before us

  .Chair Ghen’s voice thundered across the room.

  The Ghen came to his senses and lowered his arms, retracting his claws. He stood there, letting Anarris abuse him, until Anarris’s own followers pulled him away. Voices silenced under Chair Ghen’s stare. Slowly, order was restored.

  “In the night while you sleep, in stillseason while you are blind, we risk our lives to protect you.” Chair Ghen’s voice rumbled throughout the chamber, followed by Council Chair’s voice, shaken but still strong, as he translated. There was no pretense to his shocked reaction now.

  “It has always been so. It will always be so. We are your protectors, never your enemy!”

  An uneasy silence hung over Council Chambers. Before it could be broken again, Council Chair stamped his feet twice.

  “Council adjourned.”

  Distortions

  (Pandarris)

  “Look through this, Pandarris. Careful, it’s sharp.”

  Gingerly I lifted the small bubble of glass, which had fallen from Ocallis’s blowpipe and hardened.

  “Here, look at this through it.” He placed on the table before me a paper design for the delicately patterned vase he was currently staining.

  I raised the slightly curved glass and stared down at a cloudy blur of white paper. I’d seen opaque glass before so I put it aside, murmuring something polite, but he was frowning thoughtfully over his vase again. I looked around the large studio my parent’s sibling shared with a dozen or more other glass-blowers. The room sparkled with their compelling nonsense.

  When I was younger I remember staring for countless removes at the slender limbs and glittering leaves of the little glass ugappa Ocallis had made for my parent. It moved slowly on its rotating platform, each tiny leaf barely a third the size of my smallest fingernail, jiggling in the breeze and tossing rainbow circles back and forth from branch to fragile branch. We had only that piece, given as a gift. How could a councilor afford one of Ocallis’s priceless glassworks?

  Like everyone else, I admired the beauty of his creations, but what practical use were they, really? I tried to hide my boredom. In order to avoid the public embarrassment of his demonstrative affection, I’d feigned illness the day our class visited the glass-blowing studio. As a result, my parent had ordered me to make it up today, on my free time.

  “What did you see?” His voice startled me out of my musings. I looked back at the discarded glass bubble. What did he expect me to say? “It looks like a cloud,” I guessed, trying to be creative. How soon could I leave?

  Ocallis laughed, a sound I always associated with sunlight shimmering on glass. Ordinarily I do not care to be laughed at, but there was too much warmth in Ocallis’s laughter for anyone to take offense at it.

  “Bring it closer to your eye. Now move it around a bit. Not like that, Pandarris. Angle it.”

  I pasted a smile on my face and did as he suggested, trying not to... suddenly the paper on the table leaped into focus, the central lines of the design on it clear but wildly out of proportion. I leaned forward.

  “No, pull it back, Pandarris. Bring the glass closer to your eye, not your eye to the glass.”

  There it was again, in perfect detail, but six, twelve ti
mes as large as it should be. Was my eye playing tricks on me? I blinked. The design on the paper was once again an opaque blur. I turned the glass slightly. Again the design appeared, enlarged beyond belief.

  Raising my head, I held the bubble of glass in front of me and looked about the room. Ocallis’s face sprang toward me. Startled, I pulled back from the glass. No, he hadn’t moved. I looked through the bubble again. He was huge, almost on top of me; so close, I took an involuntary step backward even though I knew the image was false.

  “What is it?” I examined the bubble, unable to believe I held in my hand merely a piece of glass, no different from the cups we brewed our tea in. Ocallis smiled, pleased by my interest at last.

  “Look at its shape. See how it curves so it’s thicker in the center than at the sides?”

  “What difference does that make? It’s still just glass.”

  “I don’t know. But only leftover bubbles curved in that way cause that effect.”

  “Could you make a bigger one curved like this?” I looked around eagerly, hoping he’d already done so.

  “Why would I do that?”

  “To see things, to look at things through it.” I raised the bubble again and looked around the room.

  “Put it down, sweetbreath. It doesn’t show you anything real. It’s all a distortion. I only thought it would amuse you.” Reluctantly I handed it to him, watched as he placed it in a pile of scraps for remolding.

  I couldn’t get that bubble of glass out of my mind. I’d look at cappa leaves, the petals of flowers, the delicate wings of an insect or the aerial threads of its web and wonder what each of them would look like seen through such a piece of glass.

  When I graduated from general school, Ocallis gave me a glass fish suspended from a golden rod so that it swam in lazy circles on its turning dais. I bent down and tried to look through it, hoping its curved body would magically enlarge my world. Swallowing my disappointment, I straightened up to thank him. Instead of thanks, I heard myself saying, “I’m going to specialize in glass-making.”

  “Glass-blowing, Pandarris?” my parent asked, setting a bowl on the table and taking the chair beside mine. “You’ve never...” He paused, glancing at his beaming sibling. “Are you sure you have the patience for that?”

  Before I could formulate an answer, my grandparent’s voice rose petulantly further down the table. “What’s that?”

  “Jellied ruberry sauce, Gramatri,” my sibling, Sandarris, said.

  “Ruberry sauce?” He peered into the bowl. “I don’t see any ruberries. We used to put whole ruberries in when I was making jellied sauce.”

  “They’re there, Gramatri.” I had a sudden urge to laugh out loud. “Only as large as life!”

  My journey piece was a great disappointment to Ocallis. Gramatri, however, saw ruberries again.

  That single invention, the enlarging glass, was so successful I could put aside all pretense of making dishes and ornaments. I spent each morning forming the large, convex circles of glass, or placing the cooled spheres on my curved metal plate and grinding them to the necessary contour with sand, then polishing them smooth with a dab of paste on a leather cloth.

  It left me free to spend the rest of my day as I wished. I sat at a small table directly under a window, looking through my own enlarging glass at all sorts of things; or else I wandered through the city collecting new objects to examine.

  I wrote extensive notes about everything I saw. The more I used my glass, however, the more frustrated I became with its shortcomings. No matter the slant or distance, only the center of an object was clear to my view, and when I shifted sideways the movement of my hand, however slight, threw everything out of focus once again. Around that central focus, all was blurred and often further obscured by rings of color. This was at its best. Depending on the angle of the sun, I frequently had trouble positioning my glass so that the entire object wasn’t overlaid by shimmering rainbows or by a glare of light.

  Struggling one morning to bring into focus a blade of grass, I lifted a small sheet of metal one of the glass-blowers had left on my table and held it in front of the glass to cut the sun’s glare. At once the dancing colors disappeared and I could see my magnified blade of grass clearly. I looked at the metal more closely. What if I used a permanent metal plate to block the sun? But I’d have to keep rotating it, as the angle of the sun shifted... A metal tube, then, with one of my glass circles inside it?

  It was easy enough to fashion one, but when I lowered my eye against the top of the tube I cut off almost all light to the object on the table below.

  Every time I solved one problem, I created another.

  “The wind blows against you,” my sibling, Sandarris, declared smugly, when I vented my frustration over dinner.

  “Contrary winds make us strong,” Matri said.

  Even a year before, Sandarris and I would both have groaned at the platitude, but our parent looked worried now, burdened by things he wouldn’t discuss. Perhaps he had taken more pains to hide it while Igt’ur and his youngling, Bruck’ur, lived with us; or else we’d been too young to notice. It was clear to me now that his comment was meant to bolster his spirits as much as mine.

  “I’m glad you feel that way, Matri,” Sandarris said, “because I’ve decided to join Single-by-Choice.”

  Matri stared at him. I could tell Sandarris was hoping for an argument, to prove his resolution, but Matri said nothing.

  “Eventually, we’re going to wipe out the Ghen entirely.”

  “Has it occurred to you that that will eliminate us, as well?” I demanded, rising to the bait our parent declined.

  “If we must sacrifice ourselves to rid Wind of the violent Ghen, it’s a noble sacrifice.”

  “What have you got against Ghen?”

  He looked at me, speechless, more surprised than angry at first. Oh, yes, I remembered now, he’d been spouting some nonsense lately about Ghen being killers, flesh-eaters. As though that was new information. I hadn’t paid much attention.

  “At least you listen,” he said to Matri.

  “At your age I felt the same way,” Matri replied.

  Sandarris glared at me triumphantly and stalked out the door.

  “You agree with him?” I asked our parent.

  “I understand him. He’s an idealist.”

  “Rubbish! He’s a coward. Afraid of the Ghen, and even more afraid of thinking for himself. If he did, he’d have to do something himself, not just spout someone else’s nonsense.”

  Matri grinned. “He’ll get to that. He’s taking the long route.”

  I shrugged impatiently and rose, collected our dishes and carried them to the wash-bowl. As I washed them, I looked out the window. It was getting dark. Sandarris would return soon. He would be able to see us, in the lighted room, before we could see him in the darkness. He would see us because the light was behind us...

  “What if there was light coming from under the objects?” I cried. “If I put them on a raised piece of glass?”

  I could hardly wait to get back to my studio.

  ***

  Over the next few weeks I devised a raised glass platform to lay my objects on, suspended nearly an inch above a second flat piece of glass, the back of which I silvered, like a looking glass, to reflect light back up at the object lying directly beneath my enlarging tube. I also built in levers to move the platform in tiny increments without losing the focus of my glass.

  On the whole, this worked quite well. Then I tried using two glasses together, hoping to double the magnification. The effect was disappointing. The brief, blurry images I saw were indeed much larger, but the distortion was so great and so consistent that the double-glassed tube was useless. Nevertheless, the single-glass tube was better than ever, now.

  At the end of my specialization year, I joined with a Ghen named Brock’an, even though my work was too important to interrupt for a pregnancy. But what use were my achievements if there was no one to remember who had made t
hem?

  Sandarris should have been the one having children, not me. His life was otherwise useless. I was so annoyed I deliberately chose a Ghen wanting second mating. Not only to spite Sandarris, of course; I hoped an older Ghen would take up less of my time. My days and evenings were spent in the studio. I would have slept and eaten there as well if I could have, absorbed in my enlarging tube and in writing up my observations.

  Brock’an was amused by my preoccupation with work. My enlarging glass intrigued him, and he frequently used one to look at the things I’d observed through my tube. He found it a strain looking down into the tube through only one eye and had to close the other. When I saw him doing so I grinned to myself, pleased that our single Bria eye was superior in this, at least.

  I made no attempt to start a sign language, so Brock’an taught me the one he’d used in his first joining. I learned it quickly—much faster, I’m sure, than he could have learned another. At first I only wanted the obligatory task out of the way, but as I noticed his interest in my discoveries, I thought, why not let the Ghen admire my work, also? After that, I was more willing to sign to him about it.

  My search for objects to examine widened. On one of the farms I built a large pen to hold a dozen farmborra which had each laid a clutch of eggs on the same day. I retrieved one egg every day, staring down my tube in fascination at the yolks as, day by day, they matured into living chicks. I wondered how similar this was to what would happen inside me soon.

  The growth of the farmborra eggs interested Brock’an, also, and every few days he brought his enlarging glass to see the changes in their development. His interest flattered me without making any real demands on my time.

  ***

  I’d been making enlarging glasses for almost three years before I thought of filing a glass circle the opposite way, narrower in the middle. I had half-guessed the result, but I was still amazed when it made objects appear smaller.

  When used with an enlarging glass, I expected the shrinking glass, as I called it, would bring an object back to normal size. Instead, when I held it to my eye above the enlarging tube, the distortions I’d come to accept disappeared! There lay the object, still magnified, but clear and focused. I designed a new tube at once, using both types of lenses.