by Larry Niven
“Some of us may still have talismans to trade,” a lean merchant said cautiously, looking a bit like a predatory bird himself.
Tower said, “We wondered why you didn’t use magic to finish the wall.”
The mayor barked, “Hah! Magic pulls the birds! Spells aimed at the birds fade to nothing. Shaman—Clever Squirrel—haven’t you tried magic on the terror birds?”
“We don’t have the manna,” Squirrel said.
“Lucky. We’re used to magic. We were horrified when we saw nightmare birds gathering around wizards and hogans and any bespelled thing. They grew more powerful, on our magic! We locked all our talismans behind cold iron, and I had to hang two shamans who wouldn’t give theirs up. We finished the wall with plows and our hands! That was before the birds grew so thick, else they would have killed us all. Our shamans dare not so much as heal the sick or bless a hogan. Some of us died of colds last year!
“Manna still leaks a little, not from talismans but from where they were once used. There will be more birds, I think. How can we fight them?”
Sandry said, “We can teach your soldiers, if we’re here long enough. Mayor, we’ll have to go back to Condigeo as soon as Green Stone is done trading.”
“You can’t stay to help us? We’ll make it worth your time,” the mayor said.
“The wagons have to go back,” Sandry said, “and my men to guard them. Perhaps someone can stay to help you.”
“We would be most grateful.” The mayor gestured helplessly. “Our guards are mostly ceremonial or police. We’ve always defended ourselves with magic.”
The hawk-faced merchant leaned over to speak to the mayor. Buzzard at Play nodded. “And more. The Emperor is impatient. We must send our tribute, and soon, but we dare not travel among those birds! I say earnestly, Green Stone and Lord Sandry, we need your help, and we will be generous if you provide it.”
“So none of your men has ever killed a bird with spear and shield?” Sandry asked.
“No, and we don’t have those chariots of yours, either. Our horses are mostly mares; we use them to breed mules.”
“You have donkeys, then?”
“A few.”
“Can mules draw chariots?”
“I never saw that done. Perhaps the Emperor has chariot warriors,” the mayor said.
“That is twice you have mentioned an emperor,” Burning Tower said.
“The Emperor in Aztlan. Very old, very wise. His dominions end east of here, but none trade on the Golden Road without his permission. We don’t ever see him,” the Mayor said. “No one goes to Aztlan without his invitation.”
And that’s fine with you, Sandry speculated. “But you don’t have fighting chariots and horses?”
“No, we use donkeys to carry loads.” He pointed, where what looked like a small gray horse with very long ears was weighted down with a large cook pot, and two more carried bundles of driftwood. “There are few left. We ate most of the animals during the siege. Now that the siege is lifted, more will come in from the South along the Golden Road, enough to pull wagons on the road to Aztlan.”
“I thought no one goes to Aztlan.”
The Mayor nodded. “True. The road goes there, but we never go farther than the trading posts. Those are big enough, one’s nearly a city. Once in a while someone gets an invitation to the island, but I never have.”
“Where do the birds come from?” Sandry asked.
“They’ve always lived here,” the mayor said. “Never many. You had to be careful, of course…guard the children and old ones, carry a stick…When I was a boy, I was taught to go for the eyes. Then, suddenly, they were everywhere, drawn to magic and stronger than magic.”
“A god,” Clever Squirrel said.
“Our wizards thought so. I thought so,” the mayor said. “But what was to be done? Who can fight a god? It was just an excuse to give up.”
Clever Squirrel edged closer to the mayor. She held out a crude bird carved of semiprecious stone, orange and green, which no longer glowed. “Buzzard at Play, what do you think of this?”
The mayor took what she was holding. “Nightmare bird,” he said promptly. “It’s dead now, but it must have held power. It’s stonewood, good quality, from the stone forests.”
“Stone forests? Really? Where do we find those?”
While the mayor hesitated, one of the merchants answered. “Aztlan. The Island City of Aztlan. That is where they make such things.”
Chapter Eighteen
Divination
Merchants had set up shops along the main road, all the way from the gate to the harbor. They arrayed their wares on blankets in front of conical tents. In one of the shops, Burning Tower bought a congealed droplet of melted sand.
You could see through it. It made things bigger. She’d heard of a lens of far-seeing, somewhere. She showed it to Squirrel and Green Stone. They took it to the Feasting Heights.
They called it that now, the Feasting Heights, the place where they’d killed the birds. It stank, and ants held territory there, but the Heights offered a wonderful view of the harbor.
Green Stone picked out the Angie Queen, a toy on the water. The lens made it larger.
Sandry found them there. Tower showed Sandry the lens. Sandry watched for a bit, then said, “That’s Captain Saziff in the hammock.”
They spent an hour watching the town, the harbor, the Angie Queen. Then the women went wandering while Stone and Sandry walked down to the harbor.
The mayor had pointed it out when they passed, a big square building built of stone. He called it a sweatbath house. Tower was intrigued. She and Squirrel went back to see.
The proprietor, Snail Rock, was most pleased to see them. “You’re the wizards who trapped the nightmare birds!”
Snail Rock led them through a locker room with an attendant who handed them handfuls of dried moss…to wipe off sweat, Tower surmised, and dirt and dead skin. There were benches too, and two men asleep on them, naked.
The sweatbath house was already in use. Snail Rock took them in anyway, past half a dozen naked men. The women smiled at them in some embarrassment. The men grinned back and casually covered their private parts with dried moss.
“Your bodies accumulate poisons.” Snail Rock lectured them all. “Every month or so, you should sweat them out. It leaves you feeling completely relaxed. You should nap afterward, or at least rest. Doesn’t anyone practice sweatbathing along the Hemp Road?”
Tower hoped the tour went quickly. It was hot in there!
In truth, there wasn’t much to see, and that was obscured by thick steam. The bath was a single big square room with thick walls and roof. Three walls were solid granite, with benches around them. The fourth was of porous stone. Snail Rock explained that it was tuff, a form of lava. Behind the tuff was an oven. Light the oven, the tuff wall got hot, too hot to touch. A vat of water stood waist high, with several clay dippers. Use the water to wash and to cool off. Snail Rock explained that his clients threw water on the tuff to make it flash to steam, to sweat even more.
They came out dripping wet. “If you’d like to wait,” Snail Rock said, “I can give you the bath for yourselves alone. Women only. Many barbarians flinch from our custom of mixing—”
“No, thank you,” Burning Tower said, while Clever Squirrel was saying, “Yes, that would be delightful.”
They came back an hour later. The attendant gave them cotton robes and presently took their clothes and shoes and a few items they’d bought in shops.
They sat on the stone bench, sweating. Burning Tower said, “This didn’t sound like fun even when Snail Rock was raving. Are you chasing something magical?”
“Don’t have to,” Squirrel said. “Extreme states bring visions. This whole town is alive in manna, now that they’ve lifted the restrictions on open talismans. Any vision will be magical.” She stretched out on the bench. “I’m going to sleep if I can. Care to try?”
“No, you go ahead. Squirrel?”
; “Yes?”
Tower didn’t answer.
“What’s eating you?” Squirrel asked. “You have not been yourself since the battle.”
Tower felt the heat seeping into her. It wasn’t unpleasant—more like a new state of being. Eyes closed, she asked, “Does it show that much?”
“Not to everyone. To me, sure.” Squirrel grinned. “I can see into the hearts of men and women—”
“No, you can’t!”
“Well, no, but you’d be surprised at how many believe it. So what’s your problem?”
“I don’t know. It’s just…there’s nothing scarier than terror birds, but they were obeying me, going to their deaths. Me and Spike together. And you and Sandry and his men and Condigeo’s and Bison’s, all working like some huge machine. I rode the wind. With Spike to obey me! Squirrel, I never felt so alive!”
“Battles do that.”
“Yes, Father always said so. But he was ashamed.”
“Whandall Feathersnake was ashamed,” Squirrel said. “He never enjoyed killing. But Coyote isn’t ashamed.”
“Coyote’s your father, not mine. But I wasn’t ashamed of anything. I was—it was wonderful, and it may be that I will never do that again.” She paused. “You once told me it was overrated.”
“I don’t have to ask what you’re talking about, do I? I said I thought it was overrated. But I haven’t been in love, and I didn’t mate for life. It will be different for you.”
Tower didn’t answer, and after a while she thought Squirrel had gone to sleep. But presently the shaman said, “Lick yourself.”
Curious, Tower licked sweat off her shoulder. It tasted fresh. She said, “We must have sweated off a lot of salt.”
“Yeah.”
“How much is enough?”
“You heard Snail Rock. When you think you can’t stand any more, throw water on the wall.”
Heat accumulated near the roof. You could avoid it by lying down. Tower felt herself drifting off, then woke with a start. She was melting like wax!
Squirrel seemed deeply asleep.
Fine. Tower picked up a dipperful of water and threw it at the tuff wall. It hissed and was gone. She threw more water, and then she felt the wash of heat. She dipped cool water over her hair, and watched Squirrel.
Squirrel sat upright with a moan.
“Enough?”
“I dreamed,” Squirrel said. “Yes, enough.”
They lay on the benches in the locker room, worn out, as if they’d hiked all day. Squirrel talked in a monotone.
“I can do anything. Men and women serve me their whole lives. Every animal is my prey; nothing can escape my jaws and the daggers in my hands. But something comes down from the northwest. It falls on me, traps me, and I shrink.
“I shrink. Almost I disappear. Death would be better. The time to come would be no more disturbing than a wall across my sight, if it were only death. But I shrink to the size of a man’s thumb, and I don’t die. I live in endless impotent fury. My worshippers are the lowest of the low, and every one of them towers over me like a mountain, for ten thousand years and more.
“I see it coming. I have to stop it.
“I can feel the power as my beak crunches through a bison’s thick bones…Tower, I know its name. The god’s name is Left-Handed Hummingbird.”
“You’re kidding?”
“It might be an old joke. A terror bird is the opposite of a hummingbird, isn’t it? Big instead of small, runs instead of flies, daggers instead of wings, tears animals to pieces for meat instead of sipping flower nectar. Left-Handed Hummingbird sees us coming.”
“I didn’t have any kind of dream,” Tower said. “Could it be that you just went nuts from too much heat?”
“Oh…sure. There are other kinds of divination. Let’s see what I can find.”
They were directed to a shaman, a woman who reminded Tower of Twisted Cloud. Her name was Fur Slipper.
Clever Squirrel told the shaman as much as she thought she needed to know of the dream in the sweatbath. “Fur Slipper, what else might we use to see our fate?”
“Augury is my specialty,” Fur Slipper said, “but I know some other work. Have you seen the Cliff Writings?”
The Rainbow River split into a thousand streams where it fanned out into the Salty Sea. A few of the streams had names. This stream, bigger than others, was named Messenger.
A tumble of dark rock spilled down to a narrow beach. The slope ran to north and south as far as the eye could see. There were white scrawls on some of the granite blocks.
Three women and Lord Sandry stood on the beach. The women were looking up.
“I only say that you should have taken guards when you went bathing,” Sandry said coldly. “And shopping, and sightseeing. You should be guarded at all times. Curse, woman, if you’re shopping, it’s clear you’ve got money! Bait for gatherers! And if you’re bathing—”
Clever Squirrel seemed hypnotized, her mouth slightly open, her eyes fixed. Burning Tower turned to Fur Slipper and pointed, showing Sandry her back. “These are writings? I can’t make them out.”
“They’re beautiful!” Clever Squirrel said. “All the mountain sheep running, spears flying…”
There were rows of vertical lines and dots. There were straight lines with hooks at both ends, lots of those, and vertical lines each with a small circle at the top. There was cross-hatching. There were sketches of sheep and deer. No dye had been used. Scrape away the weathered black surface, and the exposed rock was white, until it weathered and faded under a dark desert patina. You could tell a drawing’s age at a glance.
“Where do you see spears?” Tower asked.
“Oh, here, let me,” said Fur Slipper. She touched Burning Tower’s eyelids, then Sandry’s.
Now the drawings moved.
Sandry gaped. On a face of black rock, sketchy bighorned sheep ran from sketchy men. The men hurled a kind of hooked stick with a spear caught in the far end. The spears flew fast, thudded deep into flesh. Rams fell, got up, ran again, the men threw again, round and round, while torrents of rain fell and slacked and fell.
Burning Tower was climbing.
“Watch it!” Fur Slipper called. “These rocks roll. You too, Lord Sandry—don’t stand below.”
“What are these?” Sandry climbed toward a faded row of hooked sticks several paces high. When he got close, they swung like whips, somehow hurling ghostly spears. “Wait, I think I see. With the stick in your hand, it’s like your arm is longer. You throw harder. Tower, this is how they killed those birds we found at the last camping ground.”
“Show you something,” Fur Slipper said. “This boulder split under its own weight, and this side slid, and it split a drawing in half.”
On the leftmost fragment, taller than a man, were cross-hatching and stick figures, and most of a set of concentric circles: a target? On the right and lower down—but that wasn’t part of a target. It was horizontal flow lines, but they matched up. “It’s a shooting star,” Sandry said.
Fur Slipper said, “It’s the Sunfall meteor. We see it in dreams, sometimes. It struck east of here, halfway and more to Aztlan. It left a place like a dish, flat, with a circular rim.”
Chapter Nineteen
The Angie Queen
Captain Saziff was frantically busy when Green Stone arrived. There were boxes stacked on the dock, and more boxes being carried about by muscular wretches who must be oarsmen. Green Stone watched for a time. Captain Saziff looked to be dressed for a banquet, in gold earrings and a new yellow silk shirt, hair in a thousand braids.
The ship had been quite idle when they watched him from the Feasting Heights. Was Saziff putting on a show?
Sandry called from the dock. “Captain Saziff!”
A seaman Sandry remembered as Raililiee led them aft.
The harried captain left off his bellowing. “Excuse me, Lords,” he said. “You’d be of the wagon folk? And”—a bit startled—“Lord…Sandry. Of the Burning City.”
<
br /> “Yes, Captain. My Aunt Shanda had a commission for you.”
“Yes. Yes, of course. The money is with the city moneychanger, Lord Sandry, but that oarsman jumped ship with the teller’s guardsman and left the teller’s corpse behind. Excuse my distraction, Lords.”
Sandry fumbled his way through that. “You don’t have Regapisk?”
“No. Lord Reg is gone. As for the money that was to be his, it’s—”
“With the moneychanger. Good.” Not quite yet, he suspected. If Sandry hadn’t showed up, Regapisk’s funds would have stayed with Captain Saziff. “Was Regapisk involved in murder, then?”
“I would hate to think so. The teller, Tras Preetror—he seems to have just died. At his desk. We buried him at sea. I can get you his last words.”
Green Stone spoke up. “I should have that, I think. My father knew Tras Preetror. He’ll want to know.”
“Yes. Tras was in the habit of summoning Regapisk to hear his stories. He and his servant Arshur seem to have taken everything of Tras’s that they could swim with.”
“Curse.” Sandry noticed Green Stone’s bewilderment. “Aunt Shanda had intended to pay Regapisk a certain sum every moon as long as he picked it up here. She hoped that that would keep him from coming home. But he wasn’t to know any of that until he arrived in Crescent City. Until then, he was an oarsman. Did he drown, do you think, Captain?”
“I would think that if a man jumps ship, it must be that he can swim.”
Sandry thought back to Regapisk and the harbor. “He can swim. He talks to mers.”
“Can he now? Had I known that, I might have employed him differently.” Saziff shrugged. “It was a calm night; it is unlikely he drowned. Might have starved afterward, though. I’m sorry, Lord. If you tried to teach him a lesson, he learned the wrong one.”
“He has that habit. What of Tras Preetror’s last words?”
