by John Dalmas
"Ah! To speak of a script is simply a way of talking about it. Anything we say can only be a way of talking about it. But I will talk of it nonetheless. Before our body leaves the womb, before we have merged with it to enter the stage, we have ourselves prepared, or accepted, a script complete with furnishings. Everyone: villain and hero, vanquished and victor—everyone has their own script."
The sage chuckled, grinning at the merchant. "And there is no director, unless Hrum chooses to take a hand. Which is not often, not at all. And more: Each actor is born both knowing the script and not knowing the script, living it as best he can, revising, rewriting, creating the play, the action, moment by moment in the ever-changing circumstances of Hrum's stage." He looked almost archly at Rantrelli then. "It can even happen that one assumes a certain role in Act One simply to prepare a different role in Act Two."
Rantrelli peered cautiously at him. "And what use is meditation in all this?" he asked.
Again Panni laughed. "All or none whatever. Any player can benefit from Wisdom, Wisdom being simply the right action at the right time to attain the purpose of the role. And for some roles, meditation opens the channels to Wisdom. Wisdom is not Hrum whispering in your ear. It is not words. Any whispering is an addition by Hrum-In-Thee, which may make Wisdom easier to accept."
"And I may come to your cave and meditate with you?"
"If you wish. But you are used to comfort, and you may also meditate with me while kneeling alone in your garden, or even sitting in your admirable hot tub, while I sit on my mountain."
"And if I would meditate with you, what time would be best?"
"Follow your knowingness and your need. If you decide that a certain time is the time, it is. I am usually meditating from nightfall until midnight, and often well after."
Panni half-turned then, as if to join his two waiting disciples. "Go with Hrum," he said to Rantrelli, and walked down the steps.
Rantrelli watched them start across the square, then went down the steps to his own waiting people, and they walked to his carriage together. His employees said nothing, in keeping with Rantrelli's mood.
* * *
Leonessto Hanorissio had been told of the gathering crowd, and had gone to a window to watch. He hadn't been able to hear Rantrelli's talk, but the crowd's chant had reached him clearly, its volume stunning him. He'd seen Allbarin mount the platform, and if he couldn't hear his words, he'd seen their effect. Then Panni had arrived and spoken, and the cheers that followed were a different phenomenon from the earlier chanting.
After they'd dispersed, he'd returned to his office. Allbarin would tell him what had happened.
Which he did. "And do you believe it?" Leonessto asked. "That if we do all we can, Hrum will give us victory?"
"Milord, that is what the Trumpet said. But it isn't what Panni said. He said, in effect, that if we do all we can, not depending on help at all, Hrum may decide we are indeed his foster children. And it seems to me now that that is more the actuality of it."
The amirr looked at it thoughtfully. "Well, that's what we must do, in any case. Unless we'd give up."
And knowing his history, and what had been learned from Brokols' mind about emperors and a sad country called Kelthos, he had no intention of giving up.
Thirty-Eight
Three years past, the steep-sided draw above Hidden Haven had held a decent wagon road. Then a mud and rock slide sloughed off the south wall, blocking road and creek, forming a pond behind the mass of dirt and rock until the water cut a new course around it, leaving a morass behind.
Now a unit of army engineers, tough brawny men with callused hands, had labored with crowbars, shovels and picks, kaabors and kaabor-drawn barrows. They'd dug and ditched and leveled until the draw was passable for a wagon again.
Amaadio knew it was passable because a wagonload of building supplies, two of lumber, another of baggage and food, and a ponderous wagonload of roofing tiles had all passed down ahead of him. To cross the mud, the engineers had rough-cobbled the new wagon road with native stones of whatever size. Amaadio Akrosstos winced and swore as the large army wagon lurched over rocks and down the draw, carrying his precious equipment. The glassware and light crockery was what he worried most about, that and the carboys of liquid reagents. He'd packed them himself in large baskets, not sparing the straw, that they'd take no harm. But he winced anyway.
He'd rather have stayed home and done the job there. But it was for Hrumma and for Hrum, secrecy was wanted, and there'd need to be explosions. Deliberate explosions! So they'd picked this Hrum-forsaken place. He'd shaken his head when they'd told him about the explosions; to a Hrummean herbalist, an explosion was an accident, something to be avoided. Dangerous, a significant source of injuries and death to venturesome herbalists, though fumes killed more of them or left them strange . . .
But the job would be interesting and different, and they were paying him well. Besides which, Trinnia had liked the idea of spending a week or two, even a working week or two, away from the city and close to a beach.
They left the slide behind, and now he could see past a shoulder of land to the inlet and the hamlet above it. They'd been abandoned since the slide had buried the road, but from a distance it looked as if people still lived there.
* * *
Reeno and Brokols had examined Hidden Haven before they'd chosen it, and when they'd decided, Reeno had made a hurried list of what needed to be done to make it useable. Juliassa had visited yesterday, with Torissia and three guards, on pretense of a day's outing.
It was small, even for a hamlet: six stone dwellings plus sheds and other outbuildings, built near the creek eighty yards above the beach. Below the slide, the creek was too muddy now for drinking or for Amaadio's professional needs, so the army had built a small weir upstream of the slide, with a pipe on trestles carrying water to the hamlet, where it filled a small cistern.
The hamlet had been there a long time. Its markets had been three inland villages. It had never been much more than a subsistence operation, in recent decades exporting its youth to Theedalit and the distant but increasingly prosperous east coast towns. So when the slide had blocked the road to their markets, the fisherfolk had left.
The inlet itself was deep and well-sheltered, some four hundred yards long and more than a hundred wide. Close beyond the narrow mouth, a rocky isle, like some great rude menhir, hid the opening, and in rough weather made entry a matter of skill and care.
Juliassa had found two weatherbeaten old skiffs upside down above the beach. Their gunnels had rotted enough that the tholepins had broken out, but there was a paddle beneath each of them, and she'd imagined paddling one of them out on the inlet or maybe beyond.
The inlet itself was occupied; some serpents used it as a nursery. That especially pleased Juliassa, and she wondered if a human could learn to speak with them. They were said to make sounds above water, but serpents were well known to be shy, or perhaps aloof. As far as that was concerned, she didn't even have permission to work there yet, but she had no doubt at all that she'd get it.
* * *
When the wagon train arrived, the only woman with it was Amaadio's wife; Trinnia Akrosstas had hired on as a cook. Besides Amaadio and Trinnia, Brokols and Reeno had brought a handyman, Carrnos Frimattos, and four builders who would reroof the buildings the project would use, and do minor repairs. They began with an all-hands project, all but Trinnia, tearing the thatch roof off the building most of them would live in. Dusk was settling, and they were dirty, sweaty, and tired, before they finished reroofing it.
Thirty-Nine
The next morning Brokols helped Amaadio build work tables and shelves. At noon Juliassa and Torissia arrived, followed by a hawk-eyed Jonkka with two pack kaabors in tow. The women wore rough clothes. Juliassa seemed quiet, for her, and businesslike, almost ignoring Brokols when she arrived. She gave Reeno a paper of some sort and he put her right to work. Climbing a ladder, she began to help the building crew tear old thatch fro
m another building, a heavy, dirty, even somewhat hazardous job. Meanwhile Torissia led their kaabors back up the draw to the pasture the engineers had fenced, and left them to graze, then put baggage away in a separate hut that could be reroofed later. Jonkka had climbed another hut, where he squatted on the ridgepole, spying the country round.
During a rain break, a man arrived with a cartload of covered baskets—the guano. Reeno called Juliassa down from the roof, and Amaadio had her sweep the floor of a shed and empty the baskets so he could see if the guano was dry. That done, Reeno gave her a pitchfork and a great, deep-bellied wheelbarrow, to haul away old roof thatch and burn it.
Brokols wondered what was going on; why they were giving a namirrna orders like that, and why she was obeying them.
They worked till the sun was low, then bathed briefly in the inlet before supper. When they'd eaten, Juliassa slipped away from Torissia in the dusk, to the beach again. Jonkka saw her leave, and followed. She walked along it to the skiffs and dragged them into the water, filling them and weighing them down with rocks so the seams would swell shut.
When she'd finished, she sensed a movement in the dusk, or perhaps a sound, and looked up. Thirty yards offshore, a very large old sea serpent watched her, its head half a dozen feet above the water. On an impulse she called to it in sullsi.
"Hello! I am called Juliassa. What are you called?"
The answer came in sullsit as atrocious as her own—differently atrocious, full of hisses and sonorities—sullsit spoken slowly, accommodated to different vocal equipment. "Hello, Suliassa. I am called K'sthuump. You must be the human told about, friend of the sellsu Sleekit."
"I am! I am! Do you know Sleekit?"
"I know of Sleekit, and of you. Sullsi love to tell stories. His, of you, are new and widely told now. Excites to think of talking with land people! How wonderful that I meet you! People say Sleekit ssould have gotten more stories from you. Land people must have stransse and marvelous things to tell."
"I'm afraid he spent most of our time teaching me to speak. It wasn't easy. I had to spend so much of my time with him, to master it, that I did hardly any duties."
A resonant grunting issued from reptilian lungs, and she realized K'sthuump was laughing. "You do well. K'sthuump loves you. And it would not be easy to tell sullsi of land things, things they have never seen or dreamed of. They would have no picsures for them. It is easier for me than for Sleekit to receive your stories. I will see your mind picsures beneath them. I would love to spend time talking with you."
"And I with you!" Juliassa said. "But I have many duties here, my pack and I. My tribe prepares for great death fight with another. I must help it prepare. I can talk with you mainly at night."
"Ah!" The exclamation was a sort of laryngeal grunt. "At night is my main time of duty. I am the old mother, old beyond breeding. At night I patrol outside, listen for sarrkas. Very soon I must go. When light leaves the sky."
"Can we talk other times when the light is dimming?" Juliassa asked.
"I will be here every time. If you are here also, we will talk. I wiss to know more of this great death fight."
"A question," Juliassa said. "Have you heard that the big-ship people killed two of the Vrronnkiess?"
"All of the Vrronnkiess know it."
"The big-ship people are one tribe which my tribe will fight. We do not know how we can beat them, but we will try, and maybe Hrum, the Great Sea Lord, will help us."
A sound resonated from the serpentine throat, like the Hrum uttered by monks at meditation. Juliassa wasn't sure what to make of it. "One of the Vrronnkiess killed a big-ship person yesterday," she went on. "Did that clear half the blood debt?"
"Vrronnkiess are different from sullsi. Recognise no blood debts. It was that . . . to kill the big-ssip person seemed the correct act."
"You know about it then. Did you see it?"
"Not as you mean. I was not there. It is known."
"How is it known?" the girl persisted.
"Humans are like the sullsi; one human does not know what other humans know. Every Vrronnkiess knows what every other knows."
The voice stopped, as if K'sthuump was contemplating Juliassa. Or her pictures. Then the serpent spoke again. "If one of us learns something, we all know it. If it is important to all Vrronnkiess, then we are aware that we know it. And the coming of big-ssip people is very important." The old serpent floated quiet for a moment, then went on. "Stransser things will happen than human and sullsi talking, serpent and human talking. A time of testing is coming, has come, to the world."
Neither said anything more for a minute. "I must go to duty now," the serpent said finally. "K'sdiuump loves Suliassa." She began to swim away, holding her head high above the water.
"Juliassa loves K'sthuump!" the girl called after her.
There was no answer. The serpent receded into the thickening darkness, till at a hundred yards she could scarcely be seen. Then she dove, disappeared, Juliassa staring after her, feeling loss at the departure. I'll learn to be an adept, she told herself. I'll get Panni Vempravvo to teach me, so I can see K'sthuump's pictures, and I can learn the stories the serpents tell. Right after I marry Elver. But she felt no confidence. Not even all the masters had adept powers, and she'd never shown the slightest talent for them.
Thoughtfully, unsmiling, she turned to walk back to the hamlet. She didn't remember Jonkka until she almost ran into him where he squatted in the dark.
"I saw the serpent," he said. "It sounded like you were talking with him."
"With her," Juliassa corrected. "She speaks sullsit. K'sthuump is an old mother of her pod. Like a grandmother, I guess. She has to stand sentry duty now, outside the inlet. To listen for sarrkas."
"Hmm. Juliassa Hanorissia, you are an unusual person." Jonkka got up and they started for the hamlet. Before they got there, they met several of the others going to the shore: Brokols, Reeno, and Torissia. Juliassa and Jonkka turned back and went with them. The men gathered dead branches from shrubs at the foot of the cliff, and with a match, Reeno lit a small fire on the beach.
They sat around it talking, and Juliassa began to tell about K'sthuump.
"Really?" Brokols was impressed, not skeptical. "You talked with a serpent? What did he say?"
"She. K'sthuump is a she." Juliassa described the conversation.
Knowing at a distance, from one mind to another. It bothered Brokols to hear her accept such superstition so uncritically. "I find that hard to believe," he said cautiously. "That the serpents can know what each other knows—without talking about it, that is. There's no medium for direct thought transfer." He paused thoughtfully. "Unless it's done through water somehow."
She stared at his face, lit by flickering firelight. "Do you mean," she said, "that you've spent all these days with Reeno Venreeno and don't believe that one person can read another's thoughts and see their pictures?"
Brokols peered at her. "Are you telling me," he said slowly, "that such powers exist? And that Reeno . . ."
"Of course," she said. "And Allbarin and . . ." She stopped, suddenly chagrined, realizing she shouldn't have told him, that undoubtedly he wasn't to know, and turned to Reeno.
Chills washed over Brokols in long waves almost painfully intense, as ambiguities, mysteries, scores of unfitted data began falling into place. Everyone felt it a little. Reeno watched intently, and when Brokols had settled out somewhat, spoke to him.
"That's right, Elver. You needn't wonder any longer."
There was another silence before Brokols said anything. "And Eltrienn?"
"No, not Eltrienn. And not Juliassa or the amirr. Fewer than one of us in a thousand. The sages, most masters, all adepts. And almost no others."
Brokols sat a moment longer, seemingly lost in thought, then stood up and looked around. "Excuse me," he said, "I have to go away. To be alone." He started off, began to jog.
"Elver?" Juliassa called tentatively. Reeno stilled her with a gesture.
Brokols st
opped, looked back. "From how far away can you—look into someone else's mind?" he asked.
"If I can see you, and if there aren't many other people around, perhaps a hundred feet. In a crowd not more than—twenty perhaps. In an excited crowd I might have to touch you." He shrugged. "Apparently serpents are much more able than human adepts. But then, they're the Messengers of Hrum.
"And if it's any help to you, I can't read you freely now, because you know about us, about adepts. When a person knows he can be read, or suspects it, his mind curtains itself automatically. To read you at all now, I'd have to question you. Questions can bring things to the surface of the mind, or near it—not necessarily the things we're interested in—and lets them be seen.
