by Jim Grimsley
“We’re almost to the city, whatever the name is,” said Melda. “Oh goodness, I hope there’s a place at the trade center for the putter to pull indoors. I don’t want to get out under that again.” She gestured to the sky, too sullen to name it. “Honestly, these people have too much open land for their own good.”
“We’re not in a travel center tonight, we’re in a local hotel,” Kurn said. She had a breezy voice, a languorous way of speaking. “We’ll be among the natives.”
“Oh, my.”
“So we’ll definitely be walking outside again, at least to get into the hotel. And I’ve heard your room may even have a window to the outside.”
“A window?”
“You open it, and there’s the sky right outside your room,” Kurn said.
Melda shivered and went back to her flat, which was dancing with patterns of color that changed the color of Melda’s pasty wrists as she held it. She worked for the Health Ministry, and Kurn was with the Ministry of Science. Jedda had learned that much from eavesdropping.
At dinner with the delegates in Karsk, Tarma took out her stat and briefed them on what the delegation had come to do. Jedda was there and went online with her stat, too, which was functioning properly even so far away from the link server. She uploaded her version of the meeting as one of the listeners even though she was not needed to translate; everybody else did the same, with a certain air of weariness. Certain functions of the stat passed through the gate, like access to the data mass; others, like mentext-messaging, did not. Odd to have her head clear of mentext, to have none of that traffic to contend with.
Tarma began with an apology for the small size of the working group; seven visitors were all that the Ironian government would allow. Tarma noted that in the normal course of Hormling business, such a high-level delegation, to one of the colonies, for instance, would have included several hundred people, or even thousands, in order to assure that the delegation would be taken seriously.
Tarma had heard of Malin only recently, she said, when the Orminy finally learned that there was a ruler of Irion, that the ruler was a woman who was called the Thaan, and the woman’s name was Malin. The Orminy had been proceeding quietly in the matter of our relations with Irion, ever since the shock of discovering the Twil Gate two decades ago, a new world beyond, peopled with humans and rich with resources. In those days the ministries advised a cautious approach to relations with Irion, and, given the fact of the ongoing interstellar war being fought along the Hormling trade line, there was little choice in the matter.
Tarma relaxed against the high back of her wooden chair and gestured languorously with her hands as she spoke, her face, in the flush of the good beer she was drinking, relaxing into a pixielike prettiness that Jedda found attractive. Tarma’s lecture was carefully rehearsed. She noted that the southerners, the Anin, had been grateful for our cooperation since the beginning and were eager for trade. Her voice was pleasant, husky. “But we’ve explored as much of Irion as the Anin control, apparently, and for access to any more of the country and its resources, we need the permission of this woman, the ruler. We have been asking to meet with her since we learned of her existence, and she’s finally agreed to talk with us, though it appears she wants us to chase her to the edge of the world.”
This was the whole of the briefing, and there was no talk afterward, since everyone had stats set to pick up anything that was spoken. Everybody was aware of Tarma’s status and nobody wanted to be put in the position of asking questions. No one knew what she was thinking, exactly, and no one wanted to stick a neck out in such a small group, except Kurn, the scientist, who remarked placidly that this was a wonderful opportunity to see a city that only a handful of the Hormling had seen. If she could get used to looking up and seeing all that open space overhead. Everyone laughed at that, even Tarma.
The rooms in the inn were a shock to the guests; not in size, for people of this rank were accustomed to large spaces; but each room did indeed have a window and all were open to the air. Jedda closed her windows after a few moments of standing at one. The inn had good plumbing and hot water, at least, and she only shared her bathroom with Melda, whose last name turned out to be Natocan, the same rank as Jedda.
2
No putter roads ran north of Karsk. In the morning porters heaped baggage into one wagon and the delegates climbed aboard a second, laid with carpets and cushions. The wagons were pulled by living animals, horses. This caused something like terror among the Hormling, who were frightened of the large beasts and frightened at the thought of riding in the wagon and staring up at the sky all day. But soon enough everyone had ordered a sufficient level of sedation from the stat, everyone was settled into the cotton batting, and the consular representative stood in the cobbled yard in the posture of good-bye. The sky was gray and heavy with weather, the low stone buildings of the town emerging out of mist, some lit within with electric light provided by the Hormling. The wagons headed through narrow stone streets where buildings loomed over both sides of the cart as if they were leaning in to have a look at the foreigners. They traveled out of town across a stone bridge into open country, the wagon giving a number of jolts that shook the delegates on their cushions. This time they were not riding in an enclosure and they looked at one another nervously.
Jedda smiled at Himmer when he broke into a sweat. Whatever his stat was doing for him wasn’t enough. “Close your eyes,” she said, “it helps.”
He nodded, lay back on the pile of carpets on the wagon floor, and closed his eyes. Melda and Vitter did the same, Melda so tall she touched both sides of the wagon as she lay across it. Jedda stared purposefully into the distance, the roll of the wide green plain, the blue of a distant range of hills. So much open space, houses scattered here and there.
Two days across the Veden, according to Tarma’s map. The wagons followed an older road, made of some kind of stone composite, marked with standing obelisks to tell the distance. By then the long ride had settled into silence, most of the Hormling sedated or sleeping or both. They stayed overnight in a small hotel at a crossroads village, a few stone buildings with slate roofs and small windows. The delegates were relieved to be indoors for the evening, inside rooms with other people, away from all that unnerving open air. Tarma asked for no meeting, being too tired from the ride in the wagon.
“My stat’s not working very well,” she said to Kurn, who simply smiled at her with a helpless look.
“Mine’s not helping with this feeling of nausea from that wagon,” Melda said.
“We probably need to eat something,” Tarma said, and they went upstairs to their rooms.
Jedda pretended sickness and brought her food up to her room to eat alone. She sat at the window looking at the fields, the few buildings of the village huddled close under the cloudy night. Someone lit a bonfire in the plaza and she could hear the strains of some kind of music through her window. She lay listening, staring up at the ceiling, listening to people pass in the hallway outside.
The next day she could see the mountains, sheer and high, and while she was looking at them, a bit of sickness returned to her, along with dizziness at the height. A blast of wind made her wrap the blanket tight around her shoulders. She had a good coat and hardly needed it for the warmth, but she liked having it around her in the wagon. Such a soft weave, one of the Erejhen textiles, she guessed. She had learned a lot about Ironian cloth and carpet making while she was trading with the Anin, the years when she and Opit lived here. Before so many of the other Hormling started to come.
The wagons began to approach a city that climbed the slope of the nearest mountain. High white walls surrounded the lower quarters, the road leading to a gate of pink and blue stone, following a course the eye could trace through the city, rising into what could only be the mouth of a tunnel cut through the mountain. Himmer pointed the tunnel opening out to Jedda and she disbelieved him until she studied it with her folding binoculars. The road ran through the mountain. Someone
had excavated a tunnel to carry it through solid rock.
Tarma was pointing higher on the mountain, and what Jedda saw there took her breath.
“A high place,” she said, disbelieving. A slender tower, climbing half as high as the mountain, and then, as the wagon drew nearer the city walls, she saw that what had appeared to be one tower was actually two.
“What did you call it?” Himmer asked.
“A high place.” She found his wide face to be quite handsome at times, his clear brown eyes. “Some of the Anin told me about them. There used to be towers like this in the southern cities as well. But they were torn down.”
“Stone towers as tall as that,” Himmer shook his head. “There’s got to be some kind of reinforcement; you can’t build stone that high.”
“There’s the evidence. Though I’ve no idea how they’re built.”
“What are they?”
“Religious places, I think. The Anin weren’t sure, or wouldn’t say. You never know with these people,” she said, hedging her bets, not saying, wizards’ towers.
Both of them sat staring for a while. At the top of one, Jedda saw three tall spires, like horns, covered with a layer of hammered silver metal, and gave the binoculars to Himmer to take a look for himself. The others were interested as well.
“That’s amazing,” Tarma called, staring at them through her own binoculars. “What fascinating structures. Look at the windows. There must be a stair going round the inner wall. We’ll have to ask them for a tour.”
“I wouldn’t count on it.” Jedda closed her eyes. Giddy at the sense of space and height and emptiness, she forgot for the moment that she was speaking to one of the Orminy; one would not ordinarily contradict such a person. “The Erejhen don’t allow a lot of access to their religious sites. They don’t really like us very much.”
“We’ve come here to change their minds,” Tarma countered, blandly.
By the time the wagons reached the city, the sun was nearly down. A guide who spoke Anin had been waiting for them at the gate, one of Malin’s people, who informed them that Malin was in the high north country and would not be meeting them tonight or for the next few days. The guide took the delegation to rooms in a stone house in lower Montajhena to wait.
“When will Queen Malin return?” Tarma asked, in badly spoken Anin, when the guide was handing the party over to functionaries in the house. She had been seething ever since she learned the guide was taking her to lodgings and not to a reception or a welcome dinner.
“Malin is not a queen,” the fellow answered, and one could see he was offended. His accent was thick and unfamiliar to Jedda. The staff was unloading the baggage from the wagons, taking everything inside. “She’s in the north with Irion and will return as soon as she can.” The guide bowed and withdrew. Tarma looked at the rest of the delegates, and Jedda could tell she was even angrier now. But there were Erejhen all around, so she said nothing.
Jedda took a room as far from the others as possible, hoping for privacy while she was here. It had come as a surprise to her that there was country farther north; Opit had never mentioned it. When the porter was conducting her to her room, she tried to ask him the question, “What is the name of the place north of this city?” in her best Erejhen. She and the porter had been talking about the city, how cold it was this time of year, and he seemed to follow her speech pretty well.
But as soon as she asked the question, he looked puzzled. “Whatever there is,” he said, and waved his hand in that direction, opened her door and let her enter.
Her room was comfortable, the floor covered with carpets, the walls layered with tapestries, some of the beautiful weaves she had begun to collect in her tiny apartment in distant Nadi, the city where she lived. She fingered the fine weavings, threads as supple as anything she had ever seen, all made of vegetable fibers or fibers from the fur of animals, colors rich, often hypnotic. Scenes of forest life, populated with familiar and unfamiliar creatures. But here, in this room, she was struck by the largest of the tapestries along the inner wall, for the scene depicted was one she had seen before.
A huge canvas of fabric like the one in Evess years ago depicted an old stone fortress built, as the northern people liked to build, high in a mountain crevasse, a thin road leading to the structure across a causeway. On this tapestry, the structure stood on a spurlike rock, surrounded by the sea. This had to be the same fortress, the same scene she had seen on the tapestry in Evess. Over the rock and the waves rose one of the towers, the high places, this one bursting into light and cracking apart, beneath fields of gray clouds, a storm, huddled figures on a road, what looked like soldiers. A script ran along the edge, similar to the Erejhen she knew, but unreadable, unwilling to resolve itself into words.
A knock on the door proved to be Himmer, stat in hand, telling her Tarma wanted them all to come to her room for a meeting. “And my stat’s not working,” he added, “fine time for that,” shaking the thing.
Tarma was waiting with her stat on her belt, ready to work, like all the others. Melda was checking her stat, the same expression as Himmer.
When Vitter entered the room, Tarma pounced on him. “I thought your Ministry told me this was all arranged, this visit was expected.”
“We are expected,” Vitter said, looking at the rest of us for support. “They’re welcoming us with open arms, I’d say.”
“If this woman knew we were coming, why did she run off north somewhere? And tell me, Vitter, what is there north of here? Your people in Interior swear there’s nothing beyond these mountains.”
“We don’t know of any place,” Vitter admitted. “But none of our parties have explored this high. We’re just getting access to this part of the country, Tarma.”
After he answered, everybody else kept quiet, waiting for Tarma to let her anger go. None of the rest had ever worked with her before, Jedda guessed. Jedda was finding this amusing, since she was only here to translate. “I thought you told me she was a queen,” Tarma said, again to Vitter, and judging from the high flare to her nostrils, the light flush to her coppery skin, Jedda guessed that this was what had made her angriest. “I thought you told me Malin is in charge of these people.”
“She is,” Vitter answered, confused.
Jedda spoke quietly. “She’s called the Thaan.”
“Yes,” Vitter agreed.
“It doesn’t mean queen,” Jedda continued, “there’s another word for that. Anin merchants explained the facts to me. They say Malin would never be a queen, it’s some kind of point of pride. I don’t know why.”
“Then what’s a Thaan?” Vitter asked, blanching beneath his coffee-colored skin.
“I don’t know.”
“Fine thing to come so far and realize we don’t even know that much about these people.” Tarma was still hissing, not making it clear to whom she was talking, but she was walking back and forth in the room, looking at everyone. “All right. Well, we have a few days. No one from the Ministries has ever seen this city before. We may as well learn everything we can while we’re here.” She was about to lift her stat, to start to give directions.
Himmer was looking at his stat. “Mine’s not working. It was fine this afternoon.”
Jedda thumbed the grip of her own stat and waited. For a moment there was the flash of the retinal screen, then nothing. They were all looking at each other. With the stat online, the screen should have come into focus for each of them, an overlay on the visual background that could be brought into and out of focus simply by will. Along with the screen, the stat’s recording, connecting, input, upload, and download options should have become available. Each delegate should have felt the connection to the others. But no one was online. The stat wasn’t even recording. Judging by the expressions of the others, some of them had already known, too, but had kept silent in Tarma’s presence, in order not to appear to know more than she. Jedda had been waiting for this. Her heart was pounding.
Ordinarily at such a time the st
at would kick in, order the body to sedate itself. That underlying touch of the device was absent as well.
A draft blew through the room. Tarma had opened the window. She was dumbfounded. She stood there looking out, over all that space, without any reaction, as if she had stood at open windows like that all her life. Maybe she had. Maybe the Orminy lived that way.
She dismissed the delegates a moment later. “Go away, eat and rest,” she said. “We’ll talk in the morning. We’ll see if the stats are working then.” But she kept her back to them all as they were leaving, and no one spoke to her, feeling it too dangerous. Tuk An, the man from Enforcement, remained behind.
Safely back in the room, Jedda threw the stat on the bed and looked at it. Only a lump of silicon here. The shock of it was still spreading through her. It was really true, as Opit had claimed. There were places here where all the stat functions were blocked. Her mind was racing.
She went to the window and looked out. Night, the city lights flickering high up the mountainside. The sense of space was becoming intoxicating. She opened both the outer windows, cold wind striking through her clothes, and she quickly pulled the windows closed again. The metal latches worked in a cunning way, drawing the window tight so the seal was complete. She studied the workmanship for a while. Precision in the design, in the casting of the latch, the closure. She would not have been surprised to see it in a Hormling structure. Yet she had been led to believe the Erejhen were backward, primitive metalworkers, at a level of civilization much lower than the Anin.
Later, a knock on the door, and there was Himmer. One of the house staff waited behind him with a tray, and Himmer was carrying another. “We’re being fed,” he said. “I was hoping you’d let me join you.”
He was speaking Alenke. Jedda said, in Erejhen, to the porter, “You’re very kind to bring me food, don’t mind my friend, he’s from the south.”
