"Clever you. You won't fluster me that way. 'Once in a blue sun' is just a word-fossil. Obviously we all once hailed from a world where the sun wasn't even a bit blue."
Yaleen inspected her fingerprint upon the wall. "Something else happened. I'm sure!"
"Didn't."
"Oh have it your own way. At least you'll agree we don't have to bother about sandstorms."
"We? Who's we?"
"Tam. Hasso. Me. Anyone else who's coming with us."
"Tam and Hasso, indeed! You'll have your work cut out."
"I can balance them. I can handle it."
"Now get this straight: I'm not coming along. Specially not to occupy Hasso while you're busy with Tam, and vice versa. That's why you really want me along, isn't it? Come on, confess."
"Oh, you."
"Hey, here come our diplomats." Peli hauled the window shut.
The sun had sunk by now. The blood was draining from the sky. From the Kirque a bell tolled lugubriously; and it occurred to Yaleen that during that strange moment a fortnight ago the whole world had seemed to ring like a bell. She fingered up more dust from the inside sill and placed the tip of her finger back upon the print on the plaster. When she took her hand away she could detect no smudging, no overlapping of the intricate whorls of skin-lines. She'd achieved a perfect fit. For some reason she found the lack of change in the print both gratifying and alarming.
"What are you playing at now?" said Peli. "They'll be famished and parched!"
As indeed they were. They, being senior Guildmistress Marti, her junior Tamath, Truthseeker Stamno, and Captain Martan of the 'jack army. The four 'jack soldiers who acted as escort and porters (and perhaps as a covert jungleguild caucus?) took themselves off to their own quarters.
In the dining room, Peli poured local mild ale for the diplomats while Yaleen unwrapped the buffet dinner of cold mutton and pickles.
"Do join us," invited Marti.
"Honoured, I'm sure," said Peli. "Thanks, 'Mistress." She poured ale for herself and Yaleen, but ignored plates; the two of them had eaten earlier.
"Though first, you might light something."
The dining room, with its stained saggy ceiling, its great creaky floorboards which old varnish and the dirt of years conspired to blacken, and its single window which didn't open, was growing gloomier by the moment. This was a lunky old house which the western Brotherhood had assigned to the mission from the recently victorious east; though at least it was close to the other governmental edifices, and spacious. Maybe for Manhome South it was the height of elegance. Peli hastened to flame an oil lamp.
"Reason why I asked you to stop," said Marti a while later, as she battled a slice of boiled sheep, "is that a couple of Sons are joining us after dinner. This pair'll be sent as ambassadors to us, so I want as many eyes as possible to look them over. They aren't true bigwigs yet, but they were close associates of a certain Doctor Edrick who died in the war. He was one of the biggest wigs of all."
"Do the most important Sons really wear wigs when they're in council?" asked Yaleen.
Marti smiled. "Of course. That's to hide the horns on their heads."
Peli cleared her throat circumspectly. "But 'Mistress, I thought the idea was for them to send women representatives? You know, to improve the status and dignity of women over here?"
Tamath laughed sourly. "Oh yes. We wanted their best women sent. There's a remarkable lack of candidates."
"Are the Sons putting obstacles in the way?"
"Not exactly, Peli," said Marti. "There just aren 't any best women —as yet. I'm sure there will be, after a few years of witnessing our embassy at work in Manhome. Things will change. But not overnight! Meanwhile, these two particular Sons seem the best of a bad bunch. At least they're comparatively sympathetic. And they're bright; more flexible than the prime bigwigs. We need to know this pair, um, informally. Maybe get them drunk. That's why I asked you to stay, Peli."
"Oh thank you, 'Mistress. Glad to hear that this old tosspot has her uses."
Marti laughed. "Okay, unfortunately phrased!" Noticing Yaleen staring at her, she added, "Oh yes, and you too, Yaleen. You're only a gairl, as they say over here. But you've won your ticket. You risked death by stingers to save Marrialla from drowning, that time she fell from the main yard; didn't you? You're already a good boatwoman, if wayward and flighty. You're proof of our way of life. So if those two Sons have a few drinks with us, they'll see—"
"How can I hold my tipple?"
The guildmistress sighed. "I was going to say, that we can all relax on equal terms."
"Pardon me, 'Mistress," said the 'jack Captain, Martan. "I'm not planning to relax too much. I want to winkle out of these two fellows how they're set up regarding the fungus drug. We never got very satisfactory answers to that, did we?"
"While for my part," declared Stamno, that unprepossessing Truthseeker with the mincing turn of phrase, "I should dearly like to explore the possible relationship between their drug, which suppresses riverphobia—and our drug, which allows us to glimpse the ineffable. Thus, to pierce those veils of obfuscation with which the world, and the people in it, wrap themselves!"
Peli hoisted an eyebrow. "He's obfusced me, all right," she murmured at Yaleen.
"You be a good Seeker and don't get too soaked," said Tamath. "See if you can detect when they're telling the truth."
"I should never contemplate blunting my faculties with excess alcohol!"
"Jolly party this'll be," remarked Peli to no one in particular.
"Oh I'll certainly make a show of drinking," Martan said. He turned to Stamno. "Tamath's just teasing you. Let's you and me try to find why they really ran out of their new drug, hmm?"
"And whether we can ever produce it for ourselves! And control the supply!" Yaleen exclaimed, though no one had asked her opinion.
Yaleen's intervention provoked a furious scowl from Tamath. Martan, on the other hand, looked thoughtful. Marti adopted an expression of nonchalant disinterest.
"Aha." Stamno's eyes crossed—this was one of his less endearing traits—as he focused upon the hidden truth of this moment. "Do I detect a naive young person happening to pierce one of those very veils to which I have just alluded? Let me see . . . We men, whether of west or of east, are all inhibited—are we not? The western Sons feel a huge instinctive revulsion against the river and its mighty flow. Whereas we in the east can sail the river once in our fives, and only once, to get wed. Now along comes a certain drug, discovered here in the west, whereby the western soldiery can overcome their inhibition temporarily—"
"We know all that." Tamath tried to shut him up.
"So they invade the east. Yet subsequently their supply of antiinhibitor drug dries up. Consequently they can't reinforce—and we win the war. In so doing we capture a small remaining stock of the drug, courtesy of which I am here today together with my good colleague Captain Martan.
"How do our 'pothecaries fare in their analysis of this drug? Not well, I hear. And maybe it is all for the best that they fare poorly? Maybe success on their part would turn our society topsy-turvy! And maybe, too, control of the source of the drug—namely the fungus, supposing that it grows in our own jungles—will set the political pattern of the future.
"This pattern might be envisaged in one style by the river guild— but in quite another style by our other guilds! From the point of view of the river guild the ideal situation might well be a useful trickle of the drug, but not a flood. Is it then coincidence that our two impending guests—those whom the guild prefers as ambassadors— are also reputedly the original discoverers of the fungus drug?"
"Reef your sails!" snapped Tamath. "You're racing headlong into Precipices."
"Oh gosh," said Yaleen, dismayed at what her guileless contribution had provoked.
Stamno swung round. He trapped her in his cross-eyed stare. His eyes focused on a point just before his own nose, in such a way that his gaze seemed to divide, bend around, and drill a hole through
the back of Yaleen's skull.
Stamno mightn't booze, but suddenly he was intoxicated—with himself. "I perceive a thin black barrier hundreds of leagues long running down the whole midstream of our river! This barrier is one which only men heed; and then, not with their eyes. It is inscribed only in the brain. For men to dare this barrier, is to risk madness, sickness, and death. Who inscribed it, but our distant ancestors? Those who were ancestors of our ancestors? Yet a drug erases its black ink for a while. What is written, can be unwritten. Then written again otherwise!"
"Control yourself!" Marti pitched her voice like a slap on the cheek. "Our guests will be here soon. You're babbling balderdash."
"Quite," said Martan. Martan was a practical man, to whom a tree was a tree. Far from stimulating his train of thought, Stamno's outburst had knocked it on the head. Repelled, he drew his chair noticeably away from the Truthseeker. Stamno refocused, and looked crestfallen.
A moment later the door-gong boomed.
The names of the two Sons were Jothan and Andri. Jothan was a red-head; Andri's hair was jet black. Both men wore beards which had recently seen scissor-work. Their drink was strong ale. Therefore jugs of this were poured, and replenished, and no one retired till nearly midnight.
Later, as Yaleen was about to bed down with a whirlpooling head, she recalled a sozzled Captain Martan blinking at her in a puzzled way at one stage, and muttering, "I shouldn't be here. Shouldn't at all. Dear me, what am I saying? I've no idea!" He covered his flagon with his palm. "Enough. Obviously I've had enough. Damn this ale. What am I doing here?"
'Mistress Marti patted his arm. "Whenever we're feeling confused, Captain, we should be guided by tradition."
"Exactly!" said he. "Exactly. But our guests are guided by their own traditions. That's the whole bother of it."
The Son called Andri grinned like a hound about to bite. "We're all of us guided by the words of life; that's a fact. What guides us is words a million million letters long, written in our flesh. Our words here in the west are spelt a bit different from youm in the east. And our words say 'no' to the river, while our women's words say summat contrary. Your men's words say 'no—except once'; and your women's words say the same as our women's. Who's to say which spelling is the right 'un? Happen youm's a prettier way to spell. Happen indeed." Andri regarded Yaleen across the table for rather too long a time, till with a creepy feeling Yaleen thought that the man fancied himself as owning her, using her for his amusement.
"You'll benefit by a spell in the east," she said to him. "Men know how to behave like human beings there."
"I never had no truck with incinerating women, let me tell you! And we've stopped that now. Part of our peace agreement, right? Now we'll receive fine wines and gems and oh, all sorts."
"The goods we'll trade aren't bribes to ensure good conduct, sir!" said Marti.
"Didn't say as they was. Though happen we'll pay for 'em sometimes in conduct rather than coin." Dismissing Marti from his attention, Andri returned his gaze to Yaleen.
Marti would not be so easily dismissed. "Plus a decent road to the riverside, sir, built by you. And a proper quayside there, with your women in charge of it."
"Yes, yes." Andri continued his scrutiny of Yaleen. "Have you thought," he said to her, "you so slim and fresh, with the nutbrown hair and that beautyspot on your neck all unveiled!—have you thought that mayhap the agency as wrote those words in our flesh intended all of us to act humanely, by limiting what us men can do? 'Cause we're descended from beasts with a taste for territory and flesh, and a yearning to shove our squirter into any woman as looks good; and when our dander rises we snarl and hack and rampage.
"Only, that agency limited us wrong—by making us men madly fear big stretches of water. We said a flat no to the river—and to our women, too, who like the waves. We didn't let women take the lead, as you did. We specialized ourselves, like piranha-mice as can only ravage whatever's in their way; then fall asleep oblivious. Truesoil, I'm saying now, sweet maid." He leered.
Eat dirt, thought Yaleen. But she buttoned her lip.
"In my opinion," said Marti, "our origins must needs remain a mystery—at least till such time in the far future when perhaps we can sail the sky, and find out. Right now, the shape of that future's up to us. We shall change what was written in the past. Bit by bit."
"Change what was written!" echoed Martan drunkenly. He hadn't done too well at only making a show of drinking.
Andri gazed at Marti. "Happen a person can wash out the dye he's first dipped in. Or leastways change the hue. Happen I need one of your fine gentle ladies to rub myself up against, to teach me graces? Get to know her really well.,, He took a swig of ale then tilted his flagon in Yaleen's direction. "As a human being."
Yaleen decided it was high time to knock her own ale-pot over. Or maybe the pot knocked itself over; she wasn't sure.
"Oops!"
Yaleen dreamt a peculiar dream. For as long as the dream endured— and who can say how long that is?—she was convinced that she was wide awake; until some backyard cockerel crowed, and the dream fled from her awareness. . . .
She was standing in the Kirque of Manhome South, a building she had never been inside. Even so, she knew that it was the Kirque.
The interior was blue and cavernous. Ribbed and buttressed walls curved upward to a vaulted roof. The floor was of bumpy turquoise cobbles, which felt strangely soft underfoot. Mauve-fronded ferns sprayed out from terracotta pots; the air smelled of dead fish.
In the midst of the Kirque stood a hillock of white marble, with steps mounting one side. Chiselled into the front of the hillock was a word, Ka-theodral, which meant nothing to her. From the apex rose a tall marble reading-stand carved in the shape of a flutterbye. The open wings held a heavy volume.
A man popped up behind the reading-stand. He was nude and totally bald of any hair. His whole body was as blanched and soft and sickly-looking as a war casualty's whose bandages have just been taken off. His flesh was poached egg-white. He looked like a giant jungle-grub. Yet from the man's cross-eyed expression Yaleen knew that he must be Truthseeker Stamno.
Gripping the open book, Stamno proclaimed at her:
"What you write, so let it be! But do you remember when the void bubbled up about you in the never-ever? You might have dived into a private time and place. Into a personal universe! Thus everything happening to you thereafter—"
"Voids?" cried Yaleen. "Bubbles? What are you talking about?"
"I don't say that you did do so. 1 only say that you may have done. Alternatively, when you died into the Ka-store—"
"The what?"
"—of the Worm—"
"whor
"—when you died with your mind split in madness, then also you might have woven a world-for-one. Or on the other hand the Worm might have woven it for you."
"I don't understand a word of this! Shut up!"
"Then again, maybe we should consider the effects of the time- stop drug? Unusual effects, in your case. Exceptional effects. While time halted, during the Pause a whole skein of private events might unwind."
"Pause? What do you know about the Pause?"
"I don't say that such suppositions are true. Merely, that they might be true."
"Who are you?"
The grub-man gurgled out a laugh. "Who am I, indeed? A Seeker of Truth? A ghost of a Worm? The voice of the void? Or of the assembly of the dead? Or of all the worlds which might have been?" The naked man stabbed an accusing finger at her. "Or am I simply you, Yaleen? Maybe everyone is you!"
Although Yaleen didn't understand this, she felt terrified. She fled from the Kirque out into the open air.
Where a cockerel crowed.
Whereupon she awoke.
And awaking, forgot.
As she lay abed, calmed by dawn light, listening to the doodle-do of the bird and the soft snores issuing from Peli in the neighbouring bed, to her astonishment Yaleen discovered that she was wearing a ring. A diamond ring! S
crambling from the covers, she darted to the window, the better to examine her discovery.
The ring must have cost upward of sixty fish!
She had never owned a ring before. Yet for some odd reason this particular ring seemed to belong on her finger—as though it had always been there, but invisibly and intangibly.
Quickly she roused her friend.
"Oh thank you, Peli dear! It's lovely. It's too much. What a surprise."
"Eh? Uh? What?" Peli struggled blearily to focus on the hand held before her face.
"Does this mean that you'll come along in the balloon, Peli? Does it? Or, oh dear, is it your way of saying sorry, no, adieu?"
"What are you talking 'bout?"
"This! Your gift. The ring you slipped on my finger while I was zonked out!"
Abruptly Peli sat up. "I did not. No such thing!" She seized Yaleen's hand. "You're joking. Where did you get that?"
"Do you swear by the river you didn't put this on my finger?"
"Honest. May I puke if I he."
"But if you didn't. ..." Yaleen's hand leapt to her mouth. "That man Andri! He was giving me the eye last night."
"An eye's one thing; a diamond ring's another."
"He must have come back in the wee hours! They chose the house for us—maybe there's a tunnel from outside leading to the cellar. He must have crept up here and done this without waking me."
"How romantic."
"I don't think it's romantic. He's put his mark on me, Peli, like a farmer tagging a cow. Probably thinks he owns me now. Or that I owe him something. Or whatever rogue thoughts infest their heads over here. I'm going to throw this away. I reject it. I'll leave it on the pillow."
"Don't be daft, a lovely ring like that."
Yaleen tugged tentatively at her finger. On second thoughts she settled the ring back. "I, um, I don't want to take it off."
"Don't! Wear it. Enjoy it. We'll be shot of this dump before you can say hickity-pickity. Why not write a rude message to him on the window pane? Then if he comes snooping once we're gone. . . . No, better not. He's s'posed to be one of the decent Sons, eh? I still can't credit he sneaked in here. But the nerve of it, if he did!" Peli inspected her own hands. Comically downcast, she said, "Don't I rate a ring, too?"
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