by Karen Miller
“Honor guard means we’re going to stand around while important people talk,” Ronon said.
“Don’t be a sourpuss,” Ara said. “We’ll have all that off-duty time to spend in the capital. Come on, you grew up there. Don’t tell me you don’t know all the best dance halls.”
“Or at least all the worst bars,” Tyre said.
Ronon didn’t particularly feel like pointing out that he’d been seventeen when he’d left the city to begin his years of military training, and that his mother would have dragged him out of a dance hall by his ear if he’d ever ventured inside. “Sure.”
“See? We’ll be in good hands,” Ara said.
“If we keep out of Kell’s way.”
“That’s the beauty of it,” Tyre said. “He’s the Task Master, so he’s going to wind up entertaining the dignitaries.”
“Or at least having a seat somewhere far down the table from the dignitaries,” Ara said.
“I don’t know, I get the impression he’s in good with some people,” Tyre said. “In any event, he’ll be busy, and as long as we report for duty in the morning reasonably sober —”
“And don’t get arrested,” Ronon said.
“Then we’ve got the whole city for our playground.”
The city had never seemed much like a playground to Ronon when he was younger, just the dull concrete and brick backdrop he trudged through on his way to and from school. He’d been happier out in the woods with his grandfather, learning to track and hunt on crisp mornings when his breath fogged the air. He had to admit it would be different, though, coming back to the city in a sharp uniform, and heading out for the evening into streets filled with bright lights and laughter and music.
“We probably shouldn’t get arrested,” Ara said.
“You worry too much,” Tyre said. “We’ll be fine. And there’ll be all that sweet Traveler merchandise on sale, too.”
“Marked up about five hundred percent from what it would sell for anywhere but Sateda,” Ronon said.
“It will be by the time it gets into stores,” Tyre said. “But we can get it directly from the source.”
“We’re not really going to get to talk to the Travelers,” Ronon said, and tried not to wonder how much one of the Travelers’ energy pistols would sell for. About a year’s pay, he figured, even at the prices the Travelers charged at the trading fair on Belkan. By the time the stores in the Satedan capital marked them up, nobody below Kell’s rank would be able to get their hands on one. He’d seen pictures, though, and couldn’t help dreaming.
They were rattling their way downhill when the train began slowing. A chorus of complaints and catcalls arose throughout the train compartment.
“This isn’t a local!” someone yelled.
“Maybe we ought to get out and push!”
“Hey, conductor, want to buy a map?”
Ronon frowned. “Think the train’s broken down?”
“No,” Ara said, pushing the smudged window down and leaning halfway out to see, her hands braced on the window frame. “The flag’s out.”
“Something on the line, maybe,” Ronon said. But they were past the mountain cuts where loose rock slid down to block the tracks every spring, shaken free as the winter’s ice melted. The tracks here ran through a wide river valley, the river itself lazy and tame where it spilled from the towering dam that overshadowed the valley.
The train shuddered to a stop, and then sat unmoving. As the delay dragged on, the complaints increased in both volume and profanity until the compartment door finally opened and Kell stepped through.
The noise cut off abruptly, and the troops scrambled to attention, Ronon finding the best compromise he could between standing straight and knocking his head against the low roof of the train compartment.
“We’ll be getting off here,” Kell said. He cut off the beginnings of a roar of protest with his expression alone. Some of the officers at the training camp had done a lot of shouting, but Kell had never needed to. He was the kind of man soldiers listened to, the kind of man they respected. The kind of man Ronon wanted to be himself, one day, although he hoped he wouldn’t have thinning hair by the time he wore a commander’s uniform.
“Yes, Task Master!” he said, which he hoped excused adding, “What’s the holdup, Task Master?”
“A good question, and one that’s going to get an answer, because that wasn’t either a complaint or unprintable — yes, I heard you, Viren, so watch your mouth. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the town of Ironlode. This morning, an earthquake brought down a rockslide that destroyed several farms and a good part of the town as well. They’ve got missing people, wounded people, and no one to sort it out but a handful of nurses who happened to be on the last train through. We will be sorting it out for them.” Kell looked around the compartment. “Any questions?”
“No, Task Master!” Ronon said, and pushed disappointment firmly aside. Being in the army was supposed to be about helping people, not about being admired in his uniform. Besides, if they sorted it out quickly enough, they might not miss the party entirely.
He clambered down from the train and out onto the platform. The town nestled in a valley between two high hills, one rising to the top of the dam, with a winding trail climbing up to the cataract of water that rushed from the dam face, and the other sheltering the town to the south. The southward hill was marred by the broad scar of a mudslide, and Ronon could see the tumbled houses and broken trees at the base of the hill.
It was bad, but not as bad as he’d been afraid it might be. The town still stood, and although he saw a few burnt-out roofs, any fires caused by tipped-over lanterns or cooking fires had clearly already been extinguished. The smoke that rose from chimneys was scented with the smell of cooking food.
Tyre followed his gaze to the burned houses, and then looked up at the dam. “I thought the point of the dam was to get electricity out here.”
“Electricity still costs money,” Ronon said. “My grandfather lived in a little town like this. He still chopped firewood and used kerosene lamps. Said it was a waste of money to use electricity for anything but listening to the radio.”
Some of his earliest childhood memories were of hunting in the woods near his grandfather’s cabin. Later, after his grandfather succumbed to the Second Childhood, he’d gone out to the cabin with his father, and finally alone. Now, with his army duties, it might be months or years before he got back. This place smelled the same, though, the sharp smell of evergreen trees and the earthy smell of clay.
Kell was organizing the troops into patrols, forming them up on the wooden train platform and sending them off in small groups. Ronon took a step toward him, and then stopped as a young woman hurried up the steps to the platform, stumbled on the last step, and nearly pitched off the wooden platform into the shrubs below.
He steadied her on her feet, and she gave him a tired and seemingly automatic smile before her eyes focused on his face. “Are you in charge here?”
He shook his head with an answering smile and nodded toward Kell, who was surrounded by men waiting for their assignments. Her face fell.
“I’m a nurse. I have patients who need to be evacuated to the city. There isn’t even a real doctor here, just a chemist’s shop…”
“That’s what I figured,” Ronon said. The honey-blond woman’s dress was streaked with rusty blood and darker soot. “It’s lucky you were here.”
She shrugged one shoulder, dismissing the importance of luck, or maybe of her efforts. “I was on holiday with my friends. We’re all hospital nurses, so of course we got off here when we heard what had happened.”
“It’s not ‘of course’.”
“It is for a nurse.” She nodded toward a large building that Ronon guessed was the town hall, its doors wide open and people camped outside o
n the lawn. “We’ve got half a dozen patients who need to be in a hospital. If we have to wait until the train comes in the morning, we may lose one of them. Is the troop train going to wait for us to get them loaded on board?”
“Hey, Task Master!” Ronon called.
Kell’s head came up, his immediate frown softening as he saw the nurse. He waved off the soldiers gathered around him and strode down the platform to Ronon. “What’s the problem, specialist?”
“This is…” Ronon began, and then realized he didn’t know the woman’s name.
“Melena Omi,” the nurse said.
“She’s got wounded people who need to evacuate by train.”
“We’ll hold the train rather than sending it on without us,” Kell said. “You three help get the wounded loaded.”
“Thanks so much,” Ara said under her breath as they followed Melena into the town hall.
“What are you, squeamish?”
She elbowed him in the ribs, not gently. “No, I just prefer to deal with people who are bleeding because I hurt them. Not because they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. That doesn’t seem fair.”
“Most of what happens to people isn’t fair,” Tyre said.
Ronon wasn’t sure he agreed, but as Melena led him to the side of a little girl who couldn’t have been more than six years old, he thought Tyre might have a point. Below the tourniquet on her leg, the skin of her ankle was gray above the heavy club of her bandaged foot, and the bandages were soaked through with dark blood. A hospital might pull her through, but she’d probably lose the foot.
The town hall was a single room with heavy trestle tables pushed up against the walls, probably the site of holiday dinners and town meetings. Now it was a makeshift infirmary for what seemed like half the town, every chair and much of the floor occupied by people who were bleeding or nursing broken limbs. The worst of them were laid out on the tables, like the girl in front of him.
“Let’s get you onto the train,” he said, and bent to hoist her. She was clutching a rag doll in the crook of her arm, and clung to it desperately tight as he lifted her off the ground. Someone had made makeshift stretchers, but he didn’t need help to carry her, as small as she was. She huddled in an unhappy knot, her lips moving against the doll’s hair as if mouthing words of empty comfort.
He carried her out to the platform and handed her up to two other soldiers who were waiting to load people aboard the train, hoping one of them knew more than he did about children. When he got back to the town hall, Tyre was struggling to settle a restless man on his stretcher so that he and Ara could lift it.
“Just be still,” Melena said at the man’s head. She shook her head worriedly. “I’m afraid there’s some internal bleeding. We need to get you to a hospital.”
“You have to get out,” the man said. “Get the children out.”
Ronon frowned at Tyre, unsure of what to say. There might still be survivors buried under the rubble, but after so many hours, it was increasingly unlikely that anyone else would be found alive.
“There are patrols out looking for survivors right now,” Tyre said, lifting the head of the stretcher while Ara hoisted the other end. “I’m sure we’ll find them.”
“No!” the man shouted, grabbing Tyre’s wrist and almost tumbling off the stretcher to the dirt below. Ronon steadied the stretcher, and Melena grasped the man’s shoulder, pressing him back down against the canvas.
“Hold still,” Ronon said.
“Get them all out. The iron horse is gone. The earthquake is coming. You can’t stay here.”
“You’re exactly right,” Melena said, shooting Tyre a sharp look when he opened his mouth. “You can’t stay here, because of the earthquake. That’s why we’re taking you to the train.”
The man sagged back against the canvas as if abruptly running out of energy to protest. “Out of here. Yes. The earthquake is coming. Get them out.”
Tyre and Ara hauled him away, and Ronon looked questioningly at Melena.
“He’s confused,” she said. “Not a surprise.”
“He’s right,” an old man sitting in a chair nearby said. One arm was splinted, and there were dark bruises down one side of his tan face, but he sat ramrod straight, gazing out the window not in the direction of the rockslide, but up toward the distant shadow of the dam. “There’ll be another quake.”
“Sometimes there are aftershocks,” Ronon said. “But they’re usually not as bad as the first earthquake.”
The man shook his head, uncomforted. “This morning was just the beginning. They’ve taken the iron horse away, and we’ll all be buried or drowned soon enough.”
“Iron horse,” Ronon said. He looked up questioningly at Melena, who shrugged as if to say that she didn’t know what the man was talking about either.
“A charm,” the man said. “A statue. Up in the shrine at the top of the falls. That’s where it’s been since before the Wraith last came — more than two hundred years, it’s been there. Maybe a lot longer than that. We found the shrine in my grandfather’s time, when this town was building up and people started logging up in the hills. But we showed the proper respect. We kept the iron horse safe. And in return it’s protected us all this time. Kept the earth from moving.”
Ara and Tyre came back in at that point, and Ronon waved them over but motioned for them to stay quiet. “How does it do that?”
“How should I know? I only know it keeps us safe. It kept us safe. Until those city folk came in to build that dam. We told them that the iron horse had to be kept in its place, and they promised they would. Even built a little nook to put it in, out on the dam. And they hired on some of us to do maintenance up at the dam, and put in this electricity. Electric lights and all that. But they were only thieves in the end.”
“You think the earthquake is because someone moved a magical charm?” Melena asked. Her voice was kind, but she didn’t sound like she believed it.
“I know they did. Kif, the one who’s bleeding into his belly, he was up at the dam when the earthquake came. He saw himself that the iron horse was gone, right before the quake hit.”
“Huh,” Ronon said.
“And I’ll tell you another thing. Those city folk up at the dam, they made a lot of fuss over that horse when they first came, saying it should be in the Museum. I expect they sent it off there, and now we’re the ones who have to pay for it.”
“We’ll see if we can find out what’s happened to it,” Melena said. “But now you have to rest. You’re not a young man.”
“I’m not going to get any older,” the man said, and set his mouth in a firm line that discouraged any more attempts at conversation.
Melena drew Ronon and his friends aside. “People grasp at any kind of explanation when bad things happen to them,” she said. “I just hope this rumor isn’t flying around making everyone worry that there’s going to be another earthquake.”
Ronon shrugged. “What if it’s true?”
“Come on,” Tyre said. “An iron horse in a shrine that prevents earthquakes?”
Ara shrugged. “I’ve heard of stranger things.”
“There’s no such thing as magic,” Melena said firmly. “This is just an unfortunate superstition.”
“I didn’t say it was magic,” Ronon said. “But Ara’s right. The villagers believe this thing works —”
“Because they’ve never had an earthquake since the town was founded. Just like a lot of other places. It’s a coincidence.”
“And the fact that it was missing this morning?”
“A coincidence,” Tyre said, although he sounded less confident.
“If it even happened,” Melena said. “The townspeople believe that the charm protects them from earthquakes, they have an earthquake, and, big surprise, someone who�
�s badly injured and confused remembers seeing that the charm was missing from the shrine. I’d be more surprised if no one claimed the charm was missing.”
“I think we ought to tell Kell,” Ronon said.
“And I think you’re crazy,” Tyre said. “If you want to convince our Task Master that you believe in every campfire story you hear —”
“Maybe we should go up on the dam and take a look,” Ara said. “At least we can see whether the thing is still there or not.”
The town hall door burst open at that moment, and a woman in coveralls stood in the doorway, her face grim. “You can’t let anyone go up on the dam,” she said. “You’ve got to evacuate the town. There’s going to be another earthquake, and I don’t think the dam is going to stand the strain.”
Shocked voices rose in alarm.
“You’re all going to be fine,” Melena said. “Wait for the soldiers to help you board the train.” Tyre and Ara picked up the nearest stretcher, moving with more urgency now, as Melena caught the newcomer by the arm and dragged her past the door into the town hall’s kitchen. Ronon followed.
“I have injured patients here!” Melena rounded on the newcomer. “You can’t come in here and frighten them like that.”
“They ought to be frightened,” the other woman said. A nameplate on her coverall pronounced her name to be Soro. Her heavy braids were straggling down out of a knot at the back of her neck, and her brown skin was streaked with blood, but she didn’t seem badly hurt. “The iron horse that should be up at the dam is missing.”
“It’s just a superstition,” Melena said.
“You sound awfully certain about something you know nothing about,” Soro said, more wearily than angrily. “Are you a structural engineer? Or a seismologist?”
Bright spots of color stood out in Melena’s cheeks. “No. Are you?”
“I’m an engineer. But our seismologists were the ones who examined the artifact that was found up at the dam site. The statue is local workmanship, probably five hundred years old. The device inside the statue was made by the Ancestors. It’s meant to neutralize tectonic forces — do you know what that means?”
