The Burning City

by Jerry Pournelle

  “So I can be lost, and Green Stone can be lost, and Feathersnake goes on. Your mother will grieve, but she won’t starve, and neither will your sisters and their kin. Number One, we need you out here.”

  Saber Tooth was a long time answering. Finally, “Father, I’ll take the caravan on to Condigeo. Having a new opportunity doesn’t make an old one less worthwhile. I’ve always wanted to be the Feathersnake wagon boss. Most never see their dreams in old age, let alone as young as me.” He sighed. “I’ve always wanted to see Tep’s Town, too, but that can wait. You go in. We’ll travel light to Condigeo, and we may be back here when you come out. If not, you can wait here for us.”

  “Good plan. What are you carrying to Condigeo?”

  “Marsyl poppy seeds. Gorman hemp. Some bad carpets that will still be better than anything they have that far south.”

  Whandall nodded to himself. The Feathersnake wagons didn’t go all the way south unless they had cargo Condigeo would pay for, and time to reach Road’s End before the snows. Storms chopped off the Condigeo leg two years out of three.

  “And civet cat glands,” Saber Tooth said. “Two jars.”

  “I want one,” Whandall said.

  “Did your nose die of old age? Or do they make perfume in Tep’s Town?”

  “Not that I heard,” Whandall said. “Just an idea. I won’t need a whole jar; two cups of the juice will do. Be sure it’s sealed tightly.”

  Saber Tooth’s nose wrinkled. “Don’t worry about that!”

  “So,” Whandall said. “It’s my wagon, and Hammer Miller’s, and who else do I take?”

  “Four, you said?”

  “Four wagons if I can get ’em.”

  Saber Tooth poured tea. Sipped. “Not Fighting Cat Fishhawk,” he said. “His mother’s getting pretty old now; she’ll expect to see him.”

  “How is she?”

  “Sorry she retired, I think,” Saber Tooth said. “But she was too damn old to be on the road!” He brooded, thinking of the first hard decision he’d had to make as a wagonmaster. Beaching one his father’s oldest friends. The worst of it was that Whandall should have done it years before and hadn’t.

  “So who?”

  “Insolent Lizard,” Saber Tooth said positively.

  Whandall nodded. Kettle Belly’s fourth son. Reliable and skilled, if a bit of a smart-ass. “One more, then.”

  “You’ll need a blacksmith,” Saber Tooth said. “I can hire another for a while. Take Greathand. He’d follow you anywhere.”

  Starfall Ropewalker’s brother, not her father. The son took the father’s name when the first Greathand died six years ago, a skilled giant to his last day. He wasn’t blood, but he was kin. “Good. I’ll talk to them after we’ve left this town behind.”

  Saber Tooth nodded agreement. The less the townfolk knew of family affairs, the better he liked it.

  “Sure you’ll be all right letting me have this wagon?”

  “Truth is, Father, I like my own better. This is the nicest travel nest on the Road, but—”

  “But you designed and built yours,” Whandall finished for him. “Yup. All right, now for supplies.”

  “This is going to be like herding snakes. We have to cut out four wagons, take all the Condigeo cargo off them, put anything you want for Tep’s Town onto them, and get it done out of town without making camp before the damn Leathermaster caravan catches up and sees us!”

  “No doubt you are competent—”

  Saber Tooth took on a cagey look. “This will be tricky, and tricky is expensive.”

  “Never knew I’d have to bargain with my own son,” Whandall said.

  “Sure you did.” Saber Tooth looked thoughtful. “It’s Morth who needs the gold in those bottles.”

  Whandall nodded.

  “I do not exactly see why we need Morth.”

  “There’s me and there’s Morth, and nobody else on this expedition knows a cursed thing about Tep’s Town.”

  “And we need him that much? I could sell everything we have and not come up with that much gold.”

  Whandall sighed. “Son, it’s wild gold. Unrefined.”

  “But contained. There are wizards in Condigeo who would be more than pleased to refine it for us.”

  “It’s not mine. Morth helped gather it. It’s a matter of our word,” Whandall said.

  “Oh. I take it this is entirely a Feathersnake enterprise?”

  “Yes, if we can keep it that way.”

  “Do that,” Saber Tooth said.

  CHAPTER

  70

  Every wagon owner expected to call at Whandall Feathersnake’s wagon den, to present respects and get a glass of the best wine or tea or both, to meet the wizard who was Whandall’s guest, to learn why Whandall Feathersnake kept a boy from a bandit family as guest, to test bargaining skills. Had Whandall Feathersnake gone soft from living in town?

  Fighting Cat Fishhawk hailed Whandall with a glad cry. Ruby Fish-hawk’s son was four years older than Whandall, a touch of his mother’s kinless ancestry in the ears.

  “Give my warmest respects to your mother,” Whandall said.

  “Won’t you see her yourself?”

  Curse. “Perhaps not. I will not go farther than the Springs this trip,” Whandall said. “Tea or wine?”

  “Both, please, but little of the wine. The Springs? So you believe the stories of gold in the hills above?”

  “Lurk, make us some tea.” Whandall had taught him how. It was best to have something to do to cover a social gaffe. And Burning Tower was eager to be hostess for her father, but Whandall had sent her on errands. She wanted to help, too much.

  “Condigeo is getting soft,” Fighting Cat said. “I sold a Marsyl carpet, used, for seven sea turtle shells.”

  “Good price. Are sea turtles so common now?”

  Fighting Cat grinned. “No more common than ever.”

  Whandall sensed a story. “How?”

  “I don’t talk so much.”

  Whandall grinned and waited… and Fighting Cat grinned back. Whandall said, “Excellent!” and they moved on to what Whandall needed, which was two repaired wheels, water jars, root vegetables, and dried meat.

  When Fighting Cat left, Whandall told Lurk, “My first trip, the caravan had just found out we had a wagonload of refined gold. I’m passing Fighting Cat’s wagon, he pulls me into his travel nest by the arm. Shows me a necklace that would look wonderful on Willow. I admired it. He wanted nine thumbweights of gold. Far too much, but it really was a beautiful necklace, and I was—I wanted very much to please Willow. He showed me each turquoise, blue to match Willow’s eyes, tiny gold flecks. He pointed out the absence of cracks, that there was no yellow or green, which are flaws, but I didn’t know it then.

  “I kept looking. It was clear I wanted it, but the gold wasn’t all mine—we hadn’t divided it yet—and I wasn’t saying anything. He told me its history. Offered me three Shambit figurines to go with it, still nine thumb-weights. Y—” Lurk wasn’t listening closely, getting bored.

  Some things you say because they’ll be understood later. “I already knew nobody could force me to buy without actually drawing a knife. So I was entertained. He showed me everything he had, and I smiled and admired and watched him go from nine thumbweights to two and a half. Willow loved it. And I told Fighting Cat what he’d done wrong a year later.”

  PART THREE

  The Year of Two Burnings

  CHAPTER

  71

  They left Firewoods Town at dawn of the third day. At noon they came to a side road that led steeply downhill and off to the west.

  A score of locals had been overjoyed to find there was suddenly employment in the Feathersnake wagon trains. Where the road forked, they watched in astonishment as four wagons were separated out.

  Fallen Wolf had been hired to replace a guard who was going with Whandall. “That’s where you came up from the river, twenty years and more ago,” he said. “You’d felled some trees. Big one
s.”

  Whandall remembered. Two trees had blocked the wagons. It had taken all day to cut them, and he’d been much younger and stronger then. “I’d hate doing it again,” he said.

  “My Uncle Badwater found them,” he said. “You’d already started a road in. Uncle logged them out, and that’s been a logging road ever since.”

  Whandall frowned. “Does it go all the way to Tep’s Town, then?”

  “Great Coyote, no!” Fallen Wolf was horrified. “Down and along the stream, up the other side of the hill, then the creepers start. Creepers and vines, and stuff that wants to kill you!”

  “And no one has explored farther?”

  Fallen Wolf looked from Whandall to Saber Tooth and back. Thinking. “Okay, you hired me, you hired what I know. When I was about sixteen, maybe nine years ago, there was a lot of smoke out of the Valley of Smokes. A lot more than usual. Me and three friends put on leather stuff, took axes and food, and tried to get in.

  “The creepers were bad enough; they’ll be worse now. We hid from three armored men who were coming out. Four days we cut our way through, chopping tangled crap you’ll be glad to find gone. Then we saw a wall. Big stone house. Masked men in leathers, spears. Saw them just in time. We ran. They came after us. We brushed some stuff we’d avoided going in. Got away, but I sure wouldn’t want to go back! We were a month getting over the itch.”

  “Want to come with us now?” Whandall asked.

  “You all going?”

  “Just four wagons,” Whandall said. “With me.”

  “So it’s true.”

  “What’s true?” Saber Tooth demanded.

  “Crazy old woman in town, babbling that Whandall Feathersnake is going home,” Fallen Wolf said. “Look, all my life I wanted to work in the Feathersnake wagon trains, but if it’s all the same to you, I’ll stay with the main wagon train. I’d hate to get killed my first trip out!”

  Fighting Cat’s wagon came by. “Not going farther than the Springs?” he called. “I see you haven’t lost your skill.”

  “Farther south. Thank you.”

  “And good luck. Wish I were going in with you; Mother would love to know.”

  “I’ll visit her afterward.”

  Fighting Cat went on. He wasn’t expecting Whandall back. He’d heard about Tep’s Town all his life.

  Of thirty-one volunteers, Whandall rejected five. That gave him twenty-eight fighters counting himself and Green Stone, one spy—he’d better not count on Lurk to fight—and one wizard.

  They had four wagons. He took leathers, axes, long poles to make severs. Morth gathered herbs to make remedies against touch-me and thorns.

  They carried weapons, but not to sell. A mixed bag for trade goods, a sampling of things based on old memories. Memory said that clay and metal pots would be best, but they had few because there were good markets for those along the Hemp Road. Mostly they had anything that should have sold somewhere but hadn’t.

  Saber Tooth stood by as Whandall’s band turned off down the logging road. “Farewell. Good trading.”

  Whandall waved. Then all his attention was taken with guiding the bison down the old road. When he looked back, Saber Tooth and the Feathersnake wagon train were gone.

  They reached the stream by evening and made camp high. “It reached you in three days last time,” Whandall told Morth. “How long until it finds you?”

  Morth shook his head. “There’s no knowing. But I wouldn’t stay here very long.”

  “I don’t intend to.”

  At dawn he sent Lurk and Hammer Miller ahead to scout out the old route up the hill, then a crew with axes and brush hooks to clear the way. They were moving up the stream by noon, the wagons jouncing along the old streambed.

  “A big flood cleared out many of the boulders,” Whandall said. “I suppose that was your flood, Morth?” There was no way to know, but bison moved up the streambed as fast as the boneheads had taken them down. By nightfall they were ready to climb up the embankment, and Whandall had torches lit. He would not let them camp until they were high above the water.

  And he remembered what he had learned while he was eldest in the Placehold: everyone complains to the Lord, and they do it all the time.

  They found the first of the touch-me creepers just over the brow of the hill. The trail Whandall had burned through the forest was clear of big trees, but vines had grown into it. One rustled slightly as the bison approached it. The bison stopped. Could it sense danger? Or did it feel Whandall’s thoughts?

  But the way didn’t seem too bad. There was more creeper than anything else. Here and there were the bright flowers of lordkin’s-kiss and the duller lavender of creepy-julia, but the plants mostly defended the big trees. The road they would take wound through those. A few redwoods had sprouted up and were now a dozen years and more tall, still small among the giants. Small armies grew around their bases.

  It would be tedious but not impossible.

  Whandall halted the wagon train and drew everyone around.

  “I’ve told you of touch-me before. This is what it looks like.”

  “Does it strangle you?” Lurk asked.

  “No, but the poisons can make you wish it had,” Whandall said. “And it doesn’t just lie there; it can come after you. That’s lordkiss over there. Stay away from it. Lizard, serve out the tools, and lash blades to the poles we brought. I’ll show you how to deal with lordkiss.

  “All of you, I don’t know what this stuff will do to a bison, but I don’t think we want to find out. We certainly don’t want to brush up against a bison who’s got the oils on his coat. Remember that when you’re clearing the path.

  “This”—whack, his palm against a slim trunk—“is an apple tree. You can eat the fruit. There’s other stuff you can eat, trees and bushes and patches of brambles, but most of them are poison. Ask Morth or me. Morth can see poison.”

  “Yes, Father—”

  “Burning Tower, you were supposed to go on with Saber Tooth!”

  “Did I say I would?”

  Of course she had never agreed, and it was too late to send her back now. Whandall looked into her triumphant smile, remembering Willow’s nightmares.

  That first year he’d grown used to waking in Willow’s grip. Coming out of a nightmare, she would wrap herself around him for reassurance. Yes, you’re here; I’m out of the city, I’m free. The nightmares faded over the second and third years… and she faced the old terrors when she named her third child.

  If something happened to Burning Tower, Willow would be long getting over the loss. So would he.

  “Use rakes,” Whandall said. “Never touch it with your hands, and use the yellow blankets we brought to clean tools. Wear leathers, and don’t touch the leathers when you’re taking them off or putting them on. When you do begin to itch, see Morth, and don’t put that off.”

  “Don’t forget, we may want to come out fast, with heavy loads and enemies behind,” Green Stone reminded them. “So make the way smooth now. Now let’s get to it.”

  It felt good, at first, to swing an ax again. He left the creeper to the younger men and women, and took Greathand to attack the first tree to bar their way. It was a small redwood, no more than ten years old, perhaps less. They used severs to clear away the defending brush. Greathand stepped forward with his ax.

  “Wait,” Whandall said. He approached the tree and bowed. “I’m sorry you’re in our way,” he said. He bowed again. “Now.”

  Greathand chopped through the arm-thick trunk in one blow.

  When Burning Tower found a patch of redberry brambles, she called him. He was unspeakably relieved. “Drop all your weapons here,” he told the assembled workers. “Yes, the knives too. Now go look.” They walked cautiously closer to the brambles. Then the magic reached them and they surged forward. They gorged, fighting like children for the berries, and left only twigs.

  Hours later he held them back from a darker bramble patch. “Poison,” he told Burning Tower, raising his
voice so others would hear. “The creepers’ll wind around your ankles and hold you while you die. They want your body for fertilizer. The only thing that can eat those berries is a kind of bird. Those.” Little and yellow, with scarlet wings, fluttering among the brambles. “Watch for the flushers. Flushers and thornberries, they made a deal, long ago. The flushers swallow the seeds and carry them—”

  “Father? How do you know?”

  What was he remembering? “Coyote,” he said. “Coyote made the bargain. He can eat thornberries too.” Would that protect Whandall? Not bloody likely, he decided.

  They made camp in the wagons, in a wider area they had cleared. It was not wide enough to allow them to unload the wagon boxes. Whandall was hungry. Chopping wood and vines was harder work than he was used to.

  But dinner was delayed.

  “Father!” Burning Tower called. “All the fires are out! I can’t light the brazier.”

  “Curse. Of course you can’t,” Whandall said. He called for Greathand. “You’ll have to strike fire for us. Keep it outside. From here on, fire won’t burn inside a house or a home, and our wagons must seem too much like houses to Yangin-Atep.”

  “It may be more than that,” Morth said.

  “You have a vision?”

  “No. But does Yangin-Atep? I’ve lost most of my perception, Whandall.”

  The Toronexti were waiting for them.

  Just after first light on the fifth day, the wagon train rounded a curve to see a thick wedge of grass cleared of creeper and brush, leading like a funnel to a brick gatehouse. Seven men in leathers, wearing fancy hats with tassels perched ridiculously above their leather masks, stood in a line in front of the brick gatehouse. More were on the roof, and Whandall thought there were others concealed in the thick chaparral on both sides of the road. The seven were armed but their weapons were sheathed. Whandall couldn’t see the men in the gatehouse. Beyond the gatehouse four men tended a big cook fire with an iron pot suspended over it.

  As the last wagon rounded the bend, Lurk dropped away from the wagon train.