Storms Over Open Fields

by G. Howell

  There was an appetizer of filleted slivers of fish marinated in wine. The main course was some kind of tiny birds, roasted and filled with a mildly spicy stuffing. I felt a pang of apprehension when I tasted that.

  “Not to your taste?” Chaeitch inquired. I looked up. I hadn’t realized I’d reacted to that mouthful and now all the Rris were staring at me.

  “It’s very good,” I said. “But the spice in this...” I trailed off, gesturing at the main course.

  “It’s all quite safe,” the life-studier spoke up. “If that’s what you were referring to. There was a list...” he also hesitated, looking around at the others as if he might have committed a faux pas.

  Chaetich’s ears twitched and he looked at my dish. “There’s nothing you haven’t eaten before,” he said and added, “Safely,” with another flick of his ears.

  They’d tried to think of everything, hadn’t they. The reassurances helped, but...

  I glanced around the table. Rris nobility stared back. A circle of feline features watching me, hands hovering halfway between plate and mouth with food momentarily forgotten. They were curious, I could see that, but they didn’t ask. When I took another mouthful there was an almost imperceptible ripple around the table: a loosening of tension, a relaxing of ears and muscles in our hosts.

  I’d been honest when I’d said the stuff was good. It was. It was simply experience making me wary. The unpleasant experience I’d had with Rris condiments hadn’t killed me, not quite, but it’d certainly been enough to make sure I’d never forget it. There’d been suggestions of poison, but in the end it’d seemed most likely that it’d been a flavoring the Rris used like we used peppers. Harmless to them, toxic to me. I’d made my own cook quite aware that experimentation in his cooking wasn’t a good idea, not without being absolutely sure. But my hosts and my friends were assuring me the food was safe and I had to trust somebody.

  Sounds of cutlery and enthusiastic Rris mastication provided a background to the central conversation which drifted back to technical talk interspersed with random questions about other subjects. Like the impromptu language lessons, a single topic of talk could branch off into all sorts of unexpected scenic routes. A simple question about the construction of new smelting facilities led off into questions about supplies of kiln lining material from Shattered Water; exchanges of coke and iron ore; possibility of drawing and fabrication machinery and questions about production capability from back home. That last one... I didn’t really have the foggiest idea. But I dropped some figures I did know, like GMs annual production tonnage from some years back, converted to something that made sense to the Rris. The Metalworkers’ Guildmaster almost choked on his mouthful.

  The plans for the afternoon revolved around a flying tour of some of their facilities. On the list were a coal mine, a foundry and metal workshop, and lumber and a grain mill, all out in the western districts of Open Fields. Chriét handled the summary of the programme, quite transparent in his efforts at applying a gloss to the descriptions to make it sound like the glittering tour that it obviously wasn’t.

  The Lady sat quietly, lapping decorously from a small china cup as the Host enthusiastically described the program, using quite a few elaborate adjectives I didn’t know. She was watching me, I was quite aware of that, and it rattled me a bit. I could feel the stare and every time I glanced at her those amber eyes were on me. She didn’t speak, just watched.

  When the meal was done the Host politely announced the carriages were waiting. I rose with the Rris and before leaving bowed to the Lady, thanking her for the hospitality.

  With graceful ease the Lady returned the bow. “The pleasure was mine,” she rumbled, her face pursed in a smile and a slow blink.

  It was… it was a look like… I was staring. I felt a hot flush climbing up from my collar as I turned away. Out in the hall Chaeitch smirked at me, lolling his tongue slightly.

  “Oh, shut up,” I growled out of the corner of my mouth.

  He just looked smug.

  ------v------

  Later afternoon sun was low enough to shine in through the windows as iron-rimmed carriage wheels bumped and rattled on the unpaved roads. Draught animals bleated and complained, the sounds mingling with the strident rasp of insects and birdsong in the sward beside the road. Dust disturbed by our passage hung in the still air, smelling like hot summer and farms.

  Sitting in a slow-moving box on a hot afternoon, feeling a combination of heat-induced lethargy and plain tiredness after the tour. At least with cars you can turn on the AC or crack a window for a bit of ventilation, but an elk-drawn carriage didn’t offer that sort of option. The windows were wide open but the thing simply didn’t move fast enough to produce much of a breeze. I found it warm: for my fur-clad companions it must’ve been stifling.

  Chaeitch, Chriét, and Rraerch were sitting and panting steadily. I glanced at the two males sitting opposite with their jaws gaping and tongues lolling and then quickly looked back at the scenery scrolling by outside, choking back a laugh. At my side Rraerch gave an inquisitive chirrup, looking from me to the other, but she didn’t say anything.

  The mine we’d visited had been about twenty minutes ride to the west of the city. I’d been expecting a small strip mine, just a hole in the ground. The reality didn’t meet my expectations.

  The initial prospectors had struck a rich seam and they’d been following it ever since. And that’d apparently been for a long time. The hillside in which the original mine had been struck was almost gone, cut in half. What remained was a terraced pit larger than several football fields surrounded by a wasteland of cleared trees, heaps of broken rock and trampled earth. There were buildings around the periphery of the pit: several rough-looking sheds of rough-cut lumber with chimneys dribbling smoke and a couple more newer-looking constructions of brick with glazed windows.

  There was activity everywhere. Rris and animals moved around the pit, hauling carts and buckets. I saw a group of Rris emerging from what could only be the opening of a shaft in the side of the pit and had to stare. They were literally staggering with exhaustion. Some of them just dropped to the ground to lay in the sunlight while a few others began the long slog out of the pit. Their hides were plastered and dripping with mud and grimy layers of coal dust that turned them black as night. I remembered some of the stories I’d heard about early mining back home and had to wince.

  If anything those stories had been understating things. It was hell down there.

  The open cast mine had been getting the easy stuff. The originally vein had followed close to the surface and it’d simply been a matter of chopping away the hill to get to it. They’d found other veins of hard coals branching away from that main seam and those were more difficult propositions. Shafts had been sunk, chasing those deeper veins, and those mines were black holes in the earth. Cramped and poorly lit, ventilated or drained. The Rris workers toiled in near blackness, continually rained upon by freezing water and mud, smothered in coal dust that played havoc with their acute senses. Material dug out by hand had to be hauled along claustrophobia-inducing tunnels and then up to the surface. Again, all by hand. The whole process was slow, inefficient and absolutely appalling for the workers.

  What raw material was brought to the surface was sifted and graded into only a couple of different sorts, wasting a lot of potentially useful resources. Some was carted off for use in heating or industry smelters while - more recently - other grades went for gas production or use in engines. Wagons hauled loads of the stuff off toward the city and the smelters.

  A managerial type had been cashiered as our guide. He must’ve been briefed well because he only stared at me for a few seconds before starting the tour. He still kept a safe distance between us though. An hour was spent showing us around the brick and wood facilities: The stables and rickety bunkhouses, the new brick engine house where a feeble and
unreliable primitive steam pump managed to wring a trickle of seep water from deep in the mine. Our guide pointed out various features, proudly extolling the state-of-the-art techniques. Damn marketroid.

  God, just off the top of my head I knew about improved engines for pumps and winches, improved lamps and safety equipment, ventilation systems and techniques, railroads for distribution, silos for storage and loading, safety lamps for the miners. My laptop encyclopedia would have information about techniques and specialized machinery that would improve productivity and especially the conditions.

  However, it’d been made abundantly clear to me that we were just there to look; to observe; to evaluate. Land-of-Water didn’t want me giving away information for free. There was definitely a market there and they had what that market wanted. But I looked at those miners collapsing in exhausted bedraggled heaps beside the mine, the muck covering them caking in the hot sunlight, and I had to feel guilty. Land-of-Water would milk this for all it was worth, and it was worth a lot.

  After the mine came the foundry. Practical considerations had placed it near the mine; about fifteen minutes travel southeast, situated at a point where ore and coal supplies congregated. I’d seen places like it before, with the big furnaces and the open casting pits where spitting streams of molten metal were poured into sand moulds. The foundries in Shattered Water had been almost identical when I’d first been shown them. It was something I’d been through before, so I had an excellent idea of what would be required to upgrade the place.

  Although, as we were shown around, I couldn’t help but notice there were closed off areas where our tour didn’t take us where there were indications of construction going on. I knew industrial espionage was alive and well in the Rris business world. I didn’t doubt that they were frantically trying to make their own upgrades. Well, some of the innovations I’d introduced were obvious enough and easy to copy, like using rail and overhead winches for shifting bulk cargo, but other things weren’t as simple. For example: the non-sublimating lining for the blast furnaces or the air compressors for converters.

  Overall, however, providing what they needed wasn’t going to be a problem. Although, just what they were willing to pay might be.

  The lumber mill was next. It was in actuality a cluster of busy wooden workshops surrounded by stacks of logs and planks. Inside, the work was done by hand. Teams of Rris worked with huge saws. Not rotary or band saws, but giant rip saws, suspended from the ceiling and powered by four Rris hauling on levers at each end. Each team could handle over a dozen logs, on a good day. Put a steam-driven engine and band saw in there and they could do a dozen an hour.

  In contrast to that was the grain mill. I’d been expecting something like a windmill. What I got was a huge old building that’d obviously grown and expanded over time, built on the hillside below an ancient stone reservoir fed via an aqueduct from a river a couple of miles away. Five massive overshot wheels were set in the millrace running along the side of the building, each groaning as the water ran over the top, filling buckets and turning the wheels before running along to do the same to the next wheel. Inside, huge, chunky gears constructed from immense blocks of wood squealed like living things as they meshed. Patches of lighter color flashed amongst the aged wood, indicating sections where worn parts had been replaced. Millstones the size of monster truck tires ground with the unstoppable ponderousness of tectonic plates. Corn flour was the main cereal milled there, but they also managed some strains of what I thought of as bread wheat and barley.

  Back home, our cereal products had been selectively bred over millennia to become modern wheat and barley and corn. Of course what they had here wasn’t exactly like those products, but they were similar enough to require similar treatments. Rris were predominantly carnivore: they put more stock in livestock and most of their farmland was devoted to that, but they also cultivated grains and vegetable produce, if just for some variety. There was a demand, and that mill was able to supply a great portion of that demand. But population growth continually put a strain upon supplies. They were sniffing the winds of change.

  Rris milling methods were antiquated by my standards, but they all worked, they were simple and reliable. Why change them?

  To get more. To get more faster, cheaper, and more efficiently. To feed a growing population and industrial base. And the Jones’ had nice things, so why couldn’t they? Some things transcended species differences I mused as we left the mill, bound back toward the city.

  “May I ask what you thought?” Chriét asked.

  Talking to me. I glanced at Chaeitch, who just flicked an ear, looking interested but not offering an opinion. “Impressed,” I said. “I didn’t know you could do that much with just water and wood.”

  He tipped his head slightly. “I’d have thought that it would seem quite... old by your standards.”

  That was leading the conversation into treacherous territory. I didn’t need to inadvertently insult my hosts. “Sir, it was impressive by anyone’s standards.”

  “But you would recommend changes?”

  I hesitated, then said, “Sir, to the mining and lumber facilities, yes. To the grain mill, no.”

  “No?” He looked surprised. And there was a slight reaction from Chaeitch as well.

  “I think the machinery is simple and working well. New machinery could perhaps do it faster, but maybe not quite as reliably yet. And there would be fuel costs and training and maintenance… Really, you would really be better off building new facilities elsewhere to add to your current output.” I shrugged and looked at the countryside passing by outside for a second. “And I think destroying this would be a mistake you’d regret in the future: it’s a beautiful old building.”

  Chriét blinked and Chaeitch coughed. “It might be a little premature for final decisions,” he said and I caught his glance. “We’re just here to evaluate.”

  ------v------

  I pulled the drapes aside and fumbled with a latch designed for fine claws before the balcony doors swung open. Cool evening air washed in. To the west the sun was just a fading glow over the horizon, the sky fading through dark violet toward night blue. High overhead a few stars were already peeking out. Behind me, back in the suite, I heard the sounds of Rris voices and then the front door closing as the servants left.

  Wind blew across the meadows around the palace, sending ripples through dark grass, hissing as it set trees swaying. Otherwise silence. No TVs, stereos, traffic, distant aircraft, just the breath of the world.

  “Kh’hitch wouldn’t like the way you handled that,” a Rris voice murmured and Chaeitch stepped out on the balcony beside me. “Telling them they don’t need to buy something.”

  I shrugged. “Kh’hitch can take a long walk off a short pier. Although I suppose he’d probably be a hazard to shipping.”

  A snort.

  I didn’t turn. “Selling them something they don’t need, that’s not a way to treat a client. Lie to them, it could cause serious problems in the future.”

  “You really think they should leave that mill?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  A pause. “That was ‘yes’?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Uh,” he huffed. “You said they might regret it later.”

  “A. It’s true: It’s a nice old building. In the future they’d probably regret destroying something like that, something that showed how the city grew up.”

  “Ah,” he said, not sounding entirely sure. I guess they weren’t at a point where preserving historical buildings was a priority.

  For a minute or so the evening was silent. Meadow grass waved in the wind. I could see a Rris couple wandering across the Palace grounds, their shadows stretching away in the moonlight.

  “Chaeitch?”

  “A?”

  “Is there... something about the Lady I’m mis
sing?”

  “Missing? What do you mean?”

  “I mean, she was staring at me.”

  A slight chitter escaped him. “I’d have thought you’d be getting accustomed to that by now.”

  “Not... it wasn’t that. Just... the way she was watching me. It was... not usual. Not the way most Rris do.”

  “Huhn,” he huffed, leaning forward with forearms on the balustrade and not looking at me, his feline profile silhouetted against the evening. “That was what embarrassed you. Why?”

  I shrugged, watching the last glow of the sun fading. The air was already noticeably cooler. “Because I didn’t know what it was. I couldn’t tell what it was. In humans... it’d mean different things. I’ve learned it can be risky to assume it means the same in Rris.”

  “Different?” his ears pricked.

  “Different,” I said.

  He knew me. “As in male and female different,” he suggested, then chittered, his furry shoulders shaking. “You... rot, Mikah, led by your genitals, ah?”