The Wave and the Flame

by Marjorie B. Kellogg

  “What’s it like outside?” asked Stavros abruptly.

  McPherson shrugged again. “Same old shit. Black as pitch and blowin’ like hell.” She rubbed her eyes with muddied fingers. “When’s this gonna stop?”

  “Only another week until dawn,” Susannah offered.

  The others just looked at her.

  “Well, it’ll help with the darkness, at least,” she defended weakly.

  Stavros knelt beside the lantern, making his fingernails greasier by trying to clean them on his shirt. “Got running water now, Ron.”

  McPherson grunted. Megan searched out a clean bowl and dipped it into the stew. Juice dripped hissing into the coals as she passed it over to McPherson. “No sign of them, eh?”

  “Sign? Shit.” The pilot dug into the stew without looking up. “We could walk right by ’em in this crap and never know it.”

  Megan sat back. “Tyril says the Master Ranger doesn’t think there’s much point prolonging the search,” she told Susannah quietly. “She doesn’t want to risk any more of her people out there.”

  “Aguidran’s an idiot,” McPherson growled between swallows.

  Stavros glanced up sharply but kept his rebuke to a monotone. “She’s an idiot because she won’t let you go out there alone?”

  McPherson threw down her half-empty bowl. It spun around, splattering stew, and clattered into the bricked firepit. She leaped up and bolted the length of the cavern to the raised sleeping platform. She yanked aside a blanket partition and pulled it shut behind her.

  “Nice work, Ibiá,” remarked Megan.

  “Not my fucking fault,” muttered the linguist. “You’d think that goddamned Sled was the Holy Grail! She should let it go for a few days and get some sleep!”

  “You of all people say this?” Megan barked. “You, our resident lunatic?” She contemplated a tirade, but sighed deeply instead and said with patience that she did not feel, “It’s not the Sled so much, you know that. It’s Taylor. Have some sympathy for her feelings.”

  Stavros drew up his shoulders sullenly.

  “Besides, there is still hope,” Susannah put in, without much conviction. “Emil was a veteran pilot, and the Sleds are provisioned for at least a couple of weeks.”

  “They’re gone,” Stavros stated.

  “Weng’s kept the homing beacon broadcasting, bless her heart,” Megan observed.

  “They’re gone,” repeated Stavros more loudly.

  Megan gave him a sour eye. “You’re working real hard at being a creep today, Ibiá.’

  “Meg, they are gone.” He spread his palms like the most reasonable of men. “Why is everybody pretending otherwise? Two weeks out in the open, in this? We’re wasting precious resources running after dead men!” He stood, visibly restraining his indignation. “We should be digging in, maximizing what we have left to us! We need McPherson here, not out on some wild goose chase! We need the emergency power that’s feeding that damned beacon! When are the rest of you going to wake up to the fact that we’ve got to take an active interest in our own survival on this world? We’re probably going to be here awhile!” He clenched his fists, then released an explosive sigh and stalked from the cavern.

  Megan stared after him but could only shake her head.

  Susannah studied her fingers and the even regiments of colored thread marching across the weave of her blanket. The dung fire crackled, its coals crumbling into ash. “He’ll be sorry soon as he’s calmed down,” she murmured.

  Megan stirred finally to add more fuel to the dying fire. “In a way, he’s right, though I hate to admit it. Leave it to youth to be so unsentimental.”

  “McPherson’s younger than he is,” Susannah reminded her.

  “McPherson was in love.”

  “Ummm.” Susannah sucked her cheek, thinking: The hard thing about Stav is that he’s always at his most unreasonable when he’s right.

  15

  Stavros regretted that he must go empty-handed into Kav Ashimmel’s presence, but he had requested the audience, thus he must observe its requirements. The battered canvas pack that had carried his recorder and notebooks throughout his university career was set aside at the blunt-columned entrance of the PriestHall. It was not, Liphar assured him, that any threat was seen in the little gray box that repeated every word if was told. A subtle Sawl eye roll implied that priests and even apprentice priests lived elbow to elbow with mysteries equally as unfathomable. But tradition dictated, he explained, that everything but the body and its coverings be left behind upon entering the place of priestly studies.

  Stavros had to discard another expectation once inside the hallowed portal. The PriestHall held a prime location in the Caves, being on the same level and only one entry to the east of the great central MeetingHall. He anticipated a cavern on the same grand scale, with lofty vaulting and enormous walk-in fireplaces. Instead, Liphar ushered him with great excitement and ceremony into a smoky warren of a hall, bustling with comings and goings, humming with the sounds of lecture and debate. The low-ceilinged space might have been the crypt of a Romanesque cathedral, though considerably more lively. It was divided by a dozen long rows of smoothly cylindrical columns, each as thick as a man’s arm span. They were set much closer together than their great girth and the low vaulting would seem to require. In each shaft, a small oil lamp burned in an eye-level niche. Straw matting rustled underfoot as Stavros followed in Liphar’s circuitous wake. They threaded through several rows of the fat stone cylinders, avoiding the clots of priests and student priests who sat in cross-legged discussion while bending over mugs of hot tea and musty books, waving chunks of crusty orange bread to emphasize a favorite point.

  Stavros wondered when he would discover some concrete trace of mysticism in the Sawl religion. His instincts insisted that the Sawls’ relationship to their goddesses was not so pragmatic as Megan proposed. But so far, his only real evidence lay in the weather mythos which pervaded every aspect of Sawl life and language. When he was honest with himself, he would admit that it was not simple mysticism he was after, but a hint at genuine power. A part of him wanted to believe that the Sawl priests were more than skilled guessers. He longed for proof that they could actually foretell the vagaries of the Fiixian climate by means of their magical relationship with the cosmos.

  But he was not likely to discover magic in the PriestHall, he decided as he peered about. This was not a place of worship or even meditation. Stavros recognized the stolid aura of academia drifting among the pillars with the lamp smoke. He felt both at home and suddenly claustrophobic. At any moment, his old semiotics professor might come wheeling out from behind a nearby column. Stavros laughed aloud to relieve a creeping panic, and several apprentices turned from their studies to stare at him as he passed. Ahead, a seated gathering blocked their path. A trio of priests were conducting a highly vocal seminar with several dozen older students. Liphar turned aside, but their presence had already caused a lull in the intense debate. Stavros wished he were shorter and slimmer. His Sawl clothing was not enough disguise to allow him to pass among the Sawls unnoticed.

  Ignoring the stares, Liphar urged him onward with quick little beckonings. One long wall of the hall was now visible as a tapestry of muted color striped by the darker silhouettes of the columns. As they moved closer, Stavros could see that the rock was honeycombed with niches, longer, deeper and more regular than the usual lamp niches. They mounted one on top of the other like a legion of shelves. They were crammed with wrapped parcels of every conceivable size and description. Wooden ladders propped against the shelves accessed the higher stacks.

  Stavros gazed through the dim smoky light at the rows and rows of leather—and cloth-shrouded bundles. He knew those wrappings. The wave-and-flame seal of the PriestGuild decorated everyone.

  Megan would kill to see this, he thought with satisfaction. This is the PriestGuild Library.

  Liphar waited at his elbow with unusual patience, savoring his awe.

  “How many, Lif
a?” Stavros asked, a little breathlessly.

  Liphar considered his ten fingers, struggling with the newness of Terran numbers. “Hunderd hunderd, maybe,” he stated finally but then splayed both palms in the Sawlish shrug.

  Stavros delighted him with an amazed whistle. “Are they very old?”

  The young Sawl shook his curls indignantly. “Ibi! Give mo’t good care, we!”

  Stavros smiled. ET linguistics theory had warned him that concepts of age might be tricky to communicate, time being among the most relative of phenomena. The Sawl astronomical year was roughly equivalent to 209 Earth days, little over half a Terran year, and the Sawls did not use it as a significant time marker. Instead, they measured long time periods in generations. Stavros had not yet been able to determine the formal duration of a generation, as he and Liphar still lacked a common yardstick. He was left with only the more physical markers of age to point to, which inevitably led Liphar to misunderstand “old” as meaning “damaged” or “disabled.” Stavros collected such near misses. His favorite character in all literature was Mrs. Malaprop, though this was a secret that would die with him. These glancing errors were not only funny. They taught lessons about the relationship of language and perception. Liphar seemed to appreciate this as well, since nothing could start him giggling faster than Stavros attempting to choose, from a battery of at least a dozen separate words meaning “rain,” the one word that properly described a particular kind of rain falling at a particular moment. Stavros’s senses were not yet tuned to the fine distinctions that a Sawl naturally applied to an issue as critical as the weather.

  He moved closer to the wall of swaddled volumes to inspect a particularly shredded and fading wrapping. He drank in the musty smell of aged leather. Libraries were always his favorite places of refuge. Liphar sighed and looked troubled. He pointed at the bundle but did not touch it.

  “Make new very soon, we,” he offered. He cycled his hands one around the other, carefully enshrouding an invisible treasure. “New itra.”

  “Itra?” Stavros repeated the gesture, and Liphar nodded.

  Stavros wondered how many times this particular ancient text had been rebound, had had new wrappings made for it. He noted some interesting variations in the wave-and-flame designs between the older and newer-looking itras. He would happily have lingered, having forgotten Kav Ashimmel for the moment, but Liphar tugged his sleeve and continued onward. This time, his palm was to his mouth, bidding silence.

  They followed the last row of columns toward the deepest corner of the cavern. Stavros heard the voice long before he could see the speaker. It was the voice of a woman who clearly did not care if her lecture disturbed any other nearby gatherings. A good deal of open space surrounded her group as if others had moved off out of range.

  As they slipped into the outer edge of the gathering, Liphar found space on the floor among the listeners and signaled Stavros to do the same. “Kav Ashimmel,” he said, nodding at the speaker.

  Stavros settled cross-legged on the matting with his back against a column. Now his un-Sawlish height allowed him an excellent view over the heads of the others. Kav Ashimmel was a brusque and stocky priest with graying curls. She wore her guildseal robe neatly fastened from hem to embroidered collar, but the long wide sleeves of her undertunic were rolled up to her elbows to allow for the greatest possible freedom of gesture. The smooth blank palms of her hands shone like silk in the lamplight. She paced as she spoke, and seemed occasionally to slip into a private distraction, out of which she broke with renewed vigor for her argument.

  Stavros ached for his translator. This was far more complex than everyday conversational Sawlish, or even than most of the tale-chants he had begun to translate. The cadences of Ashimmel’s presentation suggested an almost Talmudic disputation on the interpretation of a certain piece of text. Much of the vocabulary he was familiar with, having mostly to do with the goddesses and the weather. But her use of tenses left him in a muddle, and now and then she would pause for emphasis to repeat a long and carefully articulated phrase that was totally incomprehensible to him. It did not even sound like quite the same language.

  A corrupt form? Stavros thought that unlikely. A more formal form, for ritual use?

  He leaned close to Liphar. “Lifa, what’s she saying?”

  Liphar’s eyes widened in distress. His palm flew to his open mouth.

  Stavros drew in his shoulders in apology and nodded his promise to be silent. He heard Lagri’s name mentioned then, and seconds later, Ashimmel growled the name of the sister-goddess, Valla Ired. A rustle breathed through the gathering as the listeners rubbed their talisman beads. As the storm continued into the second half of the long Fiixian night, most laymen avoided speaking Valla’s name for fear it might add to her strength. Stavros noticed that many wore smaller red clay beads alongside the usual green malachite, and that Kav Ashimmel was now using words from a vocabulary that Liphar was just beginning to teach him: the terms used to describe the various climatic weapons used by the goddesses to fight the arrah, the weather war. The word “arrah” was itself ambiguous. It did not seem to mean war per se, but rather “struggle” or perhaps “wrestling,” which is what Liphar did to define its meaning, or even simply “game.” What “arrah” did seem to imply was the condition of endlessness, not as in “eternal,” Stavros decided, but as in “for-goddamn—bloody-ever.”

  Then, as Kav Ashimmel once again intoned her untranslatable bit of text, Stavros heard within it familiar syllables, a phrase that might have been “atoph phenar.” Liphar often used this phrase to explain to Stavros what would happen if one of the Sisters ever defeated the other. Stavros had it loosely translated as “stillness of death,” but however large his margin of error, he knew it meant bad news.

  With this final repetition, Ashimmel ended her lecture. Her sober eyes surveyed her audience warningly, raking back and forth until they met Stavros’s unflinching Terran gaze. They narrowed, then moved on until she had made eye contact with each and every listener. Then she dismissed them with a few brisk exhortations, waited solemnly as they rose and filed away, then stalked across the floor to confront Stavros with her arms folded.

  Liphar remained seated, looking cowed. Stavros elected to follow suit. He did not want to stand and be forced to look down on this impressive priest. Ashimmel stared for a moment, then barked a question at Liphar. The young Sawl answered eagerly and at length. Stavros heard his own name mentioned with that of Kav Daven, whom Liphar called the Talesinger. Kav Daven was the priest whom Stavros really wanted to see. Within the PriestGuild, Daven was the informal keeper of myth and ritual. He was also extremely old, said Liphar (as in “disabled”), and secluded by the other priests like a precious treasure. Thus Ashimmel, as GuildMaster, dispensed or withheld any permission for an audience with Kav Daven.

  But frail as he was, Kav Daven, Liphar had implied, very much maintained a will of his own. The same iron stubbornness that kept him moving and breathing at such an advanced age also encouraged him to prolong his refusal to settle on a permanent apprentice. The entire Guild agreed that it was long past time for young blood to begin training in the ancient complications of the ritual lore, eventually to succeed the old priest, who surely could not manage to live forever. Many candidates had been offered. But when challenged, Kav Daven (said Liphar) would smile and nod and continue to turn away each hopeful apprentice as unsuitable for this reason or that. Stavros contemplated the politics of the gesture, then decided that perhaps it was simply an old man’s way of clinging eagerly to life.

  Ashimmel asked Liphar another curt question, one that Stavros understood and that caused him to glance up at her in surprise.

  Since the Wokind appeared in snow, she demanded of the young man, what proof does this one offer that he is not some new strategy of Valla Ired’s?

  Stavros had been wondering when that suspicion would be voiced. Liphar drew himself up somewhat and offered the defense that there was no proof the Wokind were not
sent by Lagri to weaken Valla Ired at a time when she seemed to hold the planet in a deathgrip.

  As humbly as he could, Stavros returned Kav Ashimmel’s stare. “I am human, Kav,” he said. “Kho sue epele, as yourself.”

  Ashimmel blinked and looked interested at the sound of her language on the alien’s tongue. She stared a moment longer, then nodded abruptly to herself and stalked away, her sandals flapping authoritatively through the forest of pillars.

  Liphar let out a deep sigh and sprawled a little easier on the matting.

  “Will she let me see him, Lifa?”

  Liphar opened his palms. “Kav Daven say yes, say no. If he want, you come.”

  But how will he ever know if he wants it, worried Stavros, with a tough old soldier like Ashimmel standing in my way?

  He stood, and Liphar scrambled up beside him.

  “O cilmillar, Ibi?” The young man grinned eagerly.

  Stavros laughed. Liphar was coming to know him too well. “Okay, Lifa, you’re on. What better way to forget your troubles, eh? To the Baths!”

  16

  Susannah followed Megan and Tyril through the entry corridor. As Megan’s oil lantern disappeared around a bend, Susannah felt her way along in darkness, avoiding the drip from the new water pipes hanging just above her head. The comfort of their new home still had room for improvement. The entry needed widening. The larger access tunnel that joined this westernmost excavation to the rest of the Caves was rough-hewn and unlit. When the Sawls had offered the (as Megan insistently called it) Black Hole to the Terrans, their apologies for its unfinished state had included the eager assurance that it lacked only a generation or so until completion.

  “Have you noticed these?” asked Susannah as they emerged into the dark outer tunnel.

  Megan raised her lantern. The sharp-edged rock around the mouth of the entryway was hung with many long strips of cloth. She moved the lamp closer. Even in the dim light, the colors of the cloth showed clearly: sun-bright yellows and flaming oranges, smoldering vermilion and strong, deep reds. Susannah drew one strip gently through her hand. The fabric was soft and fine. It had several small terra-cotta beads worked into a knot tied at the end.