The Burning City

by Jerry Pournelle

  “We’re a long way from the river,” Whandall said.

  “Yes, yes, it was washed down to the river from above,” Hickamore said. “The hills are alive with its music; I feel the power of it calling me. We must find it.”

  “Now?” Kettle Belly demanded. Hickamore nodded ecstatically.

  “Is this wise?” Kettle Belly said. “There are bandits all about us.”

  “With the power in the gold, I will find and destroy them all!” Years had fallen from Hickamore’s face, but they were creeping back again. His voice must have carried for miles; any bandit spy would hear him.

  “You made a spell so you wouldn’t get old,” Whandall guessed.

  Hickamore grinned craftily. “I have spoken many spells in my life, Lordkin. Kettle Belly, I must find that gold tonight. It wants me.”

  “How much gold?”

  Hickamore shook his head. “As much as this, perhaps more. You want refined gold. I want—”

  “The gold changed Morth,” Whandall said slowly. “He became someone else.”

  “Younger, you told me,” Hickamore said.

  “Yes, and crazy!”

  “I am already crazy,” Hickamore said with casual conviction. “Whandall, come. We will search together, and you can tell me more of Morth of Atlantis.”

  “But—”

  “Recall our bargain,” Hickamore said. “Black Kettle will count what is here. Come.” Before Whandall could protest, the shaman took his hand and pulled him away from the wagon. Behind him Whandall could hear the others shouting as Kettle Belly inspected the false wagon bottom. He tried to go back. He’d left Kettle Belly surrounded by armed adolescents in an argument over wealth!

  Missing the point entirely, the shaman said, “Your friends are safe with Black Kettle. He is an honest man. I have said so, and it is true. You!” He turned to one of Kettle Belly’s sons. “Number Three. Run quickly to my wagon and tell Twisted Cloud that her father needs her instantly to go with him on a journey. Run!”

  “Why Twisted Cloud?” Twisted Cloud was Hickamore’s fifteen-year-old daughter, who giggled.

  “We seek magic. Rutting Deer has no sense of magic. Her jawline is clearly mine, else I might be suspicious of my wife,” Hickamore said.

  Whandall looked sharply at Hickamore, but if the shaman noticed, he didn’t react.

  A half-moon peeked through scattered streamers of cloud, nearly overhead. The clouds stirred restlessly.

  The older man strode on. Before they reached the wagon train, they saw Twisted Cloud running toward them, still fastening her skirt. Her black hair flew in the wind.

  “You feel it?” Hickamore demanded.

  “Something,” she said. She wasn’t giggling now. “Father, what is it?”

  Hickamore seemed to sniff at the air. “This way, I think—”

  “No,” Twisted Cloud said. She cocked her head to one side. “More uphill, where the flood ran.”

  “Ah. Yes. It is very bright.”

  There was nothing bright ahead of them, but Whandall didn’t say so. He’d seen Morth at work.

  They were rushing ahead of him, running through poppies and scrub brush and over rocky ground. Whandall had trouble keeping up. A young girl and an old man were leaving Whandall in their dust. Hickamore might be enchanted—was enchanted—but how could Twisted Cloud outrun Whandall?

  She saw him stumble—somehow, though she was far ahead—turned back and took his wrist, and ran again, pulling him.

  She babbled breathlessly as she ran. “I squinted when I was little. My father made magic to strengthen my sight. It worked, a little. I’ve never seen so well as tonight! There are spirits about, but nothing dangerous. Follow me!”

  “Oh, that’s it. You’re seeing—in the dark. Did Hickamore make himself—young too?”

  A laugh in her voice. “Yes, but when he was younger…” She stopped talking.

  The ground wasn’t tripping him anymore. They were climbing a steep hill of bare pale rock. Twisted Cloud was steering him aright; but Hickamore was far above them now, outrunning them both. Power in the half-refined gold was taking him back through time; or else he was running over raw gold left by a flood.

  Whandall gasped, “He doesn’t need me… as much as he thought!”

  Her answer was not to the point. “Rutting Deer is promised, you know.”

  “Doesn’t like me.”

  “My dowry isn’t the equal of hers, but—”

  Whandall laughed. “Hickamore wants us together?”

  “Just to see each other, it may be. To notice.”

  A man could be knifed for lusting after a girl this young. Change the subject. “When he was younger. What kind of magic… does a shaman cast?”

  She laughed. “I’ll tell you one he told me. Piebald Behemoth was dying. Father was his apprentice. A shaman must not be seen to grow ill and die. Father took the aspect of Piebald Behemoth and became our shaman.” Twisted Cloud was pulling him uphill and chattering as if a fifteen-year-old girl had no need to draw breath. She’d never spoken so much in her older sister’s presence. “The Bisons wanted to be fooled, you understand. Father let himself get well over the next year. Took a new name. And of course he blesses crops for the villages we pass and makes weather magic that sometimes works. The twisted cloud that was tearing up the camp the day I was born, Father dispersed it before it reached our wagon. Mother told me about that.”

  Their path converged with a small and narrow, swift-running stream. Hickamore was far ahead. Twisted Cloud raised her voice above the sound of rushing water. “And once he tried to summon Coyote, but the god wouldn’t come.”

  The stream narrowed and was partially dammed, so that it formed a falls as high as a tall man. Twisted Cloud and Whandall reached the stream just as Hickamore was emerging from the pool behind the boulder. He was holding a nugget the size of his fist and grinning like a fool. Lean as a snake he was, and muscled like a Lordkin. Black hair fell to his shoulders. His eyes were ecstatic and mad.

  All in a moment his black hair curled; a wave of gold ran through it, and then a wave of dirty white. Then most of the white mane was dripping into the stream, leaving bald and mottled scalp. Hickamore’s face contorted. Gaunt and hollow, jaw more square, brows more prominent, it was not his face at all but the face of a dying stranger.

  Hickamore fell backward into the water. His twisted features were a grimace of pain and horror. One eye turned milky, the other stared wildly.

  “Father!” Twisted Cloud screamed. She held two smaller nuggets. When she ran to her father with them, he writhed in pain. She threw the gold into the water and reached to wrest the larger nugget from Hickamore’s fingers. “It’s the old spells!” she shouted over her shoulder. “Take the gold!”

  Whandall ran to help.

  The old man’s arms had gone slack, but the gold would not release his fingers. Twisted Cloud touched it and yelped. She pulled her hands loose as if the gold were sticky and lurched back into Whandall, shouting an unfamiliar phrase.

  He tried to get around her. Then his mind caught up: she’d shouted, “Don’t touch it!”

  Hickamore whimpered and spat teeth. The sound in his throat was a death rattle. Then he was still. The current dribbled water into his mouth.

  Whandall asked, “Are you all right?” For Twisted Cloud was looking around her like a blind woman. This wasn’t mourning; this was something else.

  Her eyes found him and pinned him to reality. “I can see. I think I never saw before. Whandall Feath—”

  “Girl, what happened to your father?”

  “All the old spells. Did Morth of Atlantis know how to make a failed spell go away?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Father didn’t know. Piebald Behemoth didn’t know. Father took the old shaman’s aspect on the night Piebald Behemoth died, before I was born. Stay here, Whandall.”

  The stream was icy on his shins. The shaman’s daughter spoke before he started to wade to shore. He stopped
, and looked, and saw the merest shadow of what was happening on shore.

  Both sides of the stream were thickly overgrown with plants. It hadn’t been like this earlier. You could almost see them growing. Whandall hissed between his teeth. He was not a man to take such a thing lightly.

  “Father blessed crops,” the girl said, “and made rain during drought. That didn’t always work either.”

  Clouds were forming knots in the half moonlight, gearing up for rainstorms decades postponed.

  “Should we be in a riverbed when the rains come?”

  “No.” Twisted Cloud turned and began to wade downstream. “We have a few minutes. It won’t be like this farther down.”

  Whandall had lost all feeling in his feet. The bushes on both shores were closing above them. Behind their backs, the voice of a god laughed.

  They whirled around.

  The dead shaman was sitting up. His voice was strong, and louder than the falling water. “Cloud, dear, your father is dead. He lived a life very much to his liking, and no more can be done for him. Harpy-Seshmarl-Whandall?”

  “Coyote.”

  “Hickamore once mimicked a shaman freshly dead. His spells have succeeded beyond his maddest dreams. And I am Coyote, yes.” The voice of a god. Hickamore had tried to call Coyote. “But do you know who Coyote is?”

  “A god among the Bison People. I’ve heard stories. My people may have known of you, Coyote. The stories make you sound like a clever Lordkin.”

  Coyote laughed. His throat was drying out in death. Whandall glanced aside: Twisted Cloud was basking in a state of worship. He’d get no help from her. Don’t offend a god, he thought, and hoped it could be that simple.

  Coyote said, “I must know more of this Morth. I see that you understand the notion of trading knowledge, trading stories. Will you trade with me?”

  “That would delight me,” Whandall said; and Whandall was gone.

  CHAPTER

  47

  Whandall Placehold came to himself in black night, shadowed by a boulder, kneeling in pooled blood above a dead man. He was holding his Lordkin knife, and it dripped. He stayed quite still—more still than the dead man, whose heel still jittered against the rock—and listened.

  He heard not city noise but campground noise. Running water. Forty beasts and a hundred children and elders and men and women settled down for bed. The campground must be just the far side of this rock. Sounds announced a dozen Bison gone to gather water. Nobody did that alone; there might be bandits about.

  A smallish bandit lay right at Whandall’s feet. His throat had been cut. His knife was better than Whandall’s, and he wore a sheath too. Whandall took both. The moon wasn’t up yet, but there was starlight and campfire light, and in the west a wall of black clouds sputtered with continuous lightning. In that near darkness he could see lurkers who moved too often. In just these few breaths he’d seen too many to be mere spies.

  Would they attack the caravan directly? Or the little water-gathering party? Where was Twisted Cloud? Safe? Where was Willow?

  How had he come here? Memory was there to be fished up if he could find any kind of bait.

  So. The dead man… and a chest-high rock. Rocks everywhere, hiding places everywhere, but Coyote must have… had seen this rock as the best. A bandit or two must be hiding there, so Coyote had crept from shadow to shadow until this shadow gave up its lurker. Coyote cut his throat, and now it was his hiding place. Then—

  Then nothing. Only Whandall blinking in the dark.

  Ah. He’d been counting on the gold! And it all came flooding back….

  Coyote had become Whandall. Whandall had become Coyote. Whandall was gone.

  Coyote held out his hand. Twisted Cloud took it and came into his arms with a laugh, her joy a near-intolerable glare.

  Whandall shied back. That memory was too intense. It blinded him to the danger in the lightning-lit night. Women had loved Whandall for gifts, or for status, or for love alone, and one he had gathered; but he had never been adored.

  Coyote expected it. He knew how to treat a worshipper.

  Sending the girl into ecstasy was not the point. She might remain rapt, wandering in enlightenment while she grew old. He had to keep bringing her back, with humor, with sudden bursts of startling selfishness, or, for minutes at a time, by becoming Whandall Placehold, ignorant and lost, puzzled and horny. This Whandall was a mocking graffito, and the memory made Whandall’s ears burn, but it snapped Twisted Cloud from nirvana into postcoital laughter.

  Everything was funny to Coyote.

  They’d loved in the freezing stream, an hour ahead of a flash flood, while plants went crazy all around the old shaman’s body. Coyote loved the danger. Then they’d run downstream ahead of hard rain and a flurry of hail.

  And while they ran, Coyote had run barefoot through Whandall’s memories. Tracing Morth. Matching Whandall’s life to sketchy tales he’d found in Hickamore’s dying brain. Seeking more.

  Whandall had guessed right. The shaman didn’t know of a lurking spell. He hid in shadows like any Lordkin gatherer.

  Coyote lurked in the same fashion, hiding in shadows, risking a too-keen eye. Of course a god need not be seen. But that was a cheat, as Morth’s lurking spell was a cheat, Coyote thought contemptuously, even as he yearned to try Atlantean magic.

  Whandall, remembering, saw what Coyote had forgotten: he must teach his skills. A god can’t teach a god’s power to his worshippers!

  In Whandall only a trace remained of Yangin-Atep the torpid fire god, but Coyote sensed kinship. He saw a city of thieves and arsonists! And himself barred forever by his nature!

  The stories. Coyote loved stories. He learned Wanshig’s tale of Jack Rigenlord and the Port Waluu woman, and Tras Preetror confronting Lord Pelzed’s men, and others. The story he’d told Hickamore of a boy and girl on Samorty’s balcony, Coyote balanced against Whandall’s own memory.

  He reveled in the performance, story and music and people pretending to be what they were not. He lived it again while his body ran blind. Plants lashed Coyote, unnoticed, and now Whandall felt scratches and swellings across every exposed square inch of skin.

  What he left behind…

  Coyote remembered walking from the frozen east across a wilderness of ice that had been ocean, crossing stretches of water he ensorcelled to buoy his followers. Then south toward the sun, he and his people, six hundred years moving south under pressure of starvation. Setting fires to drive game into reach and to leave the forests free of undergrowth afterward. He had become Coyote while they wandered, but he bore other names elsewhere, and he was there still. Tribes encircling the world’s cap of ice shared a trickster god, and another lived in the tundra, and in Atlantis another. In the Norse lands he was Loki, who was also a god of fire.

  Gods of a same nature shared a life, and memories and experience were contagious. Loki the fire god was being tormented. Prometheus gave fire and knowledge to men and was punished by Zoosh. Birds tore at his liver. Yangin-Atep felt the same agony: his life leaked through the gash that was Lord’s Town, an emptiness made by Lords with a Warlock’s Wheel. Whandall Placehold had felt their agony in his sleep.

  Coyote had kept his bargain. Story for story.

  Urgency added spice. Coyote had never forgotten the bandits. He and Twisted Cloud stopped and spread their clothes on bare rock and loved again, and again lower down.

  He said presently, “They’ve come to attack your caravan. They’ll do it while the shaman’s gone. Twisted Cloud, return to your folk. I will stop them.”

  “Please,” Twisted Cloud said, “don’t let Whandall be killed.”

  “I won’t,” Coyote promised. He had no idea whether the Lordkin would live.

  Neither did Whandall. Lordkin’s promise! Still, Twisted Cloud’s last thought for him made him warm inside.

  Every few breaths he saw more bandits in the rocks, in the dark. They had some skill, he decided. Whandall alone would have seen less of these lurkers in t
heir native turf, and they’d have seen him. But something of Coyote’s skills stayed with him.

  Coyote had intended more. He moved ahead of Twisted Cloud, lurking shadow to shadow.

  Twisted Cloud moved toward the camp, slowing as she came. With skills taught by her father, she would remain hidden from bandits; but Coyote knew what would happen when she reached the caravan. Perhaps she did too.

  Coyote passed lurking bandits and left them alive, save one who just wouldn’t get out of the way. He passed through the caravan’s ring of guards. They patrolled in pairs. The boy Hammer and the young man Carver were on duty.

  The rest of the Miller and Ropewalker families were on guard around their own wagon.

  By now most of them should have been asleep. Little Iris Miller was out like a doused flame, but the rest were up and edgy. This was going to be difficult. Twisted Cloud was perhaps twenty-five minutes away; Coyote would have that long.

  He needn’t escape with gold! Coyote only needed to touch it, but for several seconds. He needed a disguise… wait. Why not pass himself off as Whandall Placehold?

  He slid out of their vicinity, circled and came back from the uphill direction, a Lordkin stumbling just a bit in the wild sputtering dark. “Willow, you still up? Carter? I saw Hammer on sentry duty.”

  She said, “Whandall, good—”

  Carter broke in. “Yeah, well, the entire caravan knows what we’re carrying, thanks to you. We don’t just have bandits to worry about—it’s everyone.”

  Carter was disappointed in Whandall. Coyote was enjoying himself immensely.

  “My first good chance to teach you how to hide what you’ve gathered, and I failed you. Poor child. Now hear this,” he said with the authoritative rasp Whandall Placehold had spent years perfecting. Heads snapped up. “We are not gatherers. If we were gatherers, we wouldn’t know what to gather and what to leave alone, because we’re among strangers. Town or caravan, we’d be caught and hanged the first time we tried. But none of that matters, because we are not gatherers.”