The Wave and the Flame

by Marjorie B. Kellogg

  Megan took up the issue in an attempt to defuse it. “Stav, its naive to think that Emil Clausen would ever have done something so blatant. Taylor maybe, on impulse, but not Emil. Not unless he was absolutely sure he could get away with it.”

  Stavros’s chin jutted righteously. “Who could have stopped him but us? Who but someone who knew what he was about?”

  Megan nodded reluctantly. “He’s got a point there.”

  “Maybe.” Susannah turned away, uneasy in her own ambivalence. “But the point is, Stav, you’re interpreting each of us for the Sawls as if we were mere bits of language. I am not a word. I am more complicated and, yes, more willful than any word. If you misjudged Emil, who else might you be wrong about? Can’t you let the Sawls make up their own minds?”

  Stavros scowled but without real confidence. A voice rose in complaint from the top of the scaffold. The apprentice stonecutter’s mournful eyes bounced from Stavros to Susannah and back again, begging for silence so his master might concentrate. Susannah lowered her voice guiltily, but her words still burst from her like whispered explosions. “Stav, I feel cheated! Is this why I can’t make contact with the Healers?”

  “No! Why would I warn them away from you?” he blurted unhappily. “Or anyone, except Danforth and Clausen?”

  Tyril stirred, and Megan offered her a reassuring smile. She suspected that it was equally clear to both of them that this debate had taken on a decidedly personal tone. “Let me put it this way,” she interposed, amused to find herself the arbitrator all of a sudden. It was not that Susannah’s objection was unimportant. But in exploring her own lack of indignation, Megan realized that her agreement with Stavros over the threat represented by Emil Clausen overrode her natural objection to being pigeonholed by a presumptuous colleague. “If you’re going to manipulate the Sawls’ vision of us, Stav,remember we have no defense until we’re as fluent in Sawlish as you are. By then, the damage, if there is any, will already be done. The best we can do is beg you to interpret with a clear head.”

  “And conscience,” threw in Susannah.

  Megan could see Stavros building up to his usual solution for ending a losing argument. She waited for him to level his nasty parting shot, then flee before Susannah had a chance to respond. Megan was more familiar with this technique than Susannah was, as Stavros did not pick fights often with Susannah and Susannah rarely picked fights at all.

  But Stavros surprised her. He leveled no parting thrust. He raked a hand through his ragged hair, muttered an unintelligible oath, then turned and staged a pensive retreat down the long hall into darkness.

  He’s hoping she’ll call him back and all will be forgiven, Megan decided. Fat chance.

  Susannah watched him go in silence. “Sorry I lost my temper,” she muttered to Megan.

  Megan grinned. “A rare sight, that. Surprised him, too, I think.”

  A woody groan resounded through the hall. It ended with a series of sharp cracks and a shout of alarm as the stonecutter’s foot crashed through a rotting board. The apprentice squealed as the legs of the scaffold unsupported by the wall bent outward, quivering like drawn longbows. A length of planking tumbled to the floor. A narrow ladder snapped free from one of the curving legs and fell in a long graceful are, narrowly missing Tyril as she roughly pulled Megan out of range. The stonecutter scrambled for the wall-side supports. He wrapped his arms and legs around a leg and clambered down as fast as he could manage. His high platform of timbers tilted, spilling tools and chalk. A ceramic water jug smashed into dust at Susannah’s feet. The apprentice dove under the creaking scaffold to snatch up the tools he had taken out of the basket. Fragments of rotten wood rained around his head. Susannah yelled at him to run clear, but he grinned wildly and uncomprehendingly and continued madly stuffing bits and pieces into the basket.

  The scaffold quaked as one outside leg bent to its limit and snapped. The stonecutter jumped free from several times his height and landed moaning on the marble tiles. Susannah lunged for the unwitting apprentice but had the wind knocked out of her as an arm shot around her waist, jerked her away and flung her clear of the falling timbers.

  Breathless from his return sprint, Stavros whirled back for the apprentice just as the second unsupported leg gave way with a splintering crack. The boy shrieked, pushing and tugging at the heavy basket. The end of a thick plank struck his shoulder as he abandoned the basket and tried to scramble away. He staggered, looking confused. Stavros grabbed for him but had to shield his own head with his arms as the remains of the upper platform thundered down on top of them.

  Tyril was into the wreckage instantly, heaving broken boards aside and shouting for help from the Terran women, who stood frozen in shock. The lump of splinters that was Stavros stirred and fell away as he staggered to his feet and went to work beside Tyril. Susannah shook herself into motion. She dropped down at the side of the dazed stonecarver and took his hand. He was not a young man. His landing had jarred him badly. He winced with each breath but he was not in agony. When he focused at last on the collapsed scaffold and the searchers frantic in the rubble, his eyes widened in horror and he struggled to rise and join them.

  Susannah soothed him and made him lie back. Gently, she began to probe for broken bones.

  “Is he all right?” demanded Megan at her side.

  “Shaken up, a few cracked ribs, I’d say… a bad ankle here, maybe a sprain, probably a fracture. What about the boy?”

  Megan looked over her shoulder. “They’re just getting to him now… Oh, my god. Poor little thing.”

  Susannah continued her examination. “Meg, I’m going to need water and…”

  “Susannah!” Stavros’s shout was shrill. “Get over here!”

  Susannah rose calmly as Tyril sped past at a dead run. Megan looked faint. “Meg, find this man some water,” she said firmly. “And don’t let him move!” Then she looked toward Stavros.

  The apprentice boy lay spread-eagled in a pool of blood. Stavros had stripped off his tunic and was pressing it in an awkward bundle to the boy’s thigh. His hands were wet. The blood had already soaked through the fabric. Two deep gashes on the boy’s shoulder and forehead bled heavily. His left arm was crooked at an unpleasant angle. He lay as limp as a broken doll.

  Susannah knelt at Stavros’s side. “How bad is it under there?”

  “Open from groin to knee,” he muttered. “Like with a carving knife.”

  “Okay. I need you to take that cloth away and tear it into strips as fast as you can.”

  “Whenever you’re ready.”

  Susannah took a breath. “Been a long time since I’ve done emergency medicine.” She opened her pocket knife. “Ready.”

  Stavros pulled away the reddening bundle. Blood welled up from a ragged slash as long as his arm and bone-deep. Tom fabric twisted with turned-back flaps of skin as if the child’s leg had been split open by a plow.

  “Jesus!” breathed Susannah. “What did that?” She sliced at the blood-drenched pant leg, wrenched aside the fabric, then quickly folded the loose skin and muscle back into the wound.

  She grabbed up the strips as fast as Stavros could tear them and wrapped the thigh as tightly as possible. Her fingers slippery with blood, she ripped the end of a final strip, tied a quick knot and began a second layer.

  “It’s slowing a little, I think,” she said. “When you’re done tearing, wrap the head wound just like I’m doing. Did Tyril go for help?”

  Stavros nodded. He brushed blood-damp hair from the boy’s forehead and then from his own. A slow trickle stained his cheek. He laid a strip of his tunic on the boy’s head gash.

  “He’ll need fluids,” Susannah muttered as she moved to cut shredded wool away from the shoulder wound. “You’ll have to explain to them about transfusing and then we’ll need to test for the right blood type.” As she bound the shoulder, her hand brushed a hard-edged object pinned under the boy’s body. She grasped it and yanked it free. It was the stonecutter’s chisel. It’s
long flat blade was shiny with blood.

  “Think I’ve found the culprit.” She tossed the chisel aside with far less reverence than the stonecutter would have used.

  “Metal has a way of becoming a weapon all of its own accord,” she added tightly.

  She knotted the bandage and sat back on her heels. “Now we’ve got to get him down where I can treat him properly. The old man, too. Meg…?” She turned to see Megan standing aside while two sturdy Sawl women lifted the stonecutter into a leather stretcher. Another woman holding a second stretcher waited next to a tall linen-smocked Sawl with tied-back curls and a dignified stoop. His intent gaze was fixed on Susannah.

  She knew him instantly, and smiled with relief and welcome, then sobered as she realized that he might view her with suspicion or even jealousy. She backed a bit away from the injured boy and gestured to the tall man to come and look for himself.

  “Is this your healer?” murmured Stavros.

  Susannah nodded nervously. She watched for a reaction as the man knelt beside the boy. His brown hands were large and long-fingered but delicately built. They explored and probed deftly, traveling the length of the boy’s limp body without haste, seeming often to hover just above the skin. Glancing up with some impatience, Susannah saw that the healer’s eyes were closed, his thin handsome face gone slack with concentration.

  When he opened them again, he looked straight at Susannah, his wide mouth held in an expressionless line. Then he nodded, as if in approval. When he spoke, his voice was soft and light.

  “He thanks us for our efforts on the boy’s behalf,” Stavros translated stiffly.

  “Ask his name,” whispered Susannah eagerly. “Tell him I’m… a healer, too, and I’d like to study with him.”

  The healer listened, his long head politely inclined.

  “Tell him the boy needs blood,” Susannah continued in a rush, “but if we take him down to our cave, I can get him sewn up in no time. And, Stav… please tell it to him straight.”

  Stavros stared at her, then drew back and replied coolly, “If you want to work with this guy, you’d better let him treat the boy himself.”

  “But how do I know he can deal with injury this serious?”

  “How do you know he can’t?”

  “Are we going to sit here arguing while this boy dies on us?”

  “No.” Stavros grasped her wrist and rose abruptly, as if having made a decision he was not quite happy about. He drew her firmly aside. “I wouldn’t make it look like a struggle, if I were you. That’s not likely to impress him.” He nodded to the healer, who waved over the woman with the second stretcher.

  Susannah looked to Megan.

  Megan shrugged and shook her head. “It’s not our place.”

  Helpless, Susannah watched the two Sawls ease the broken body onto the leather sling. Stavros loosed his grip on her wrist as the stretcher was raised. He spoke rapidly to the healer. The tall Sawl listened, holding one end of the stretcher, but his reply was brief and then he was gone with his patient down the dark FriezeHall. When Susannah made a move to follow, Stavros grabbed her arm again.

  “What did he say?” she demanded.

  “Said he’d think about it,” he replied. “More or less.”

  Susannah wrenched her wrist free with the strength of rage. “You can stick to your purism about the Noninterference Code when there’s a life at stake? Both of you! You too, Meg!”

  “Are you going to be around here forever to supply the knowledge and technology they lack?” Stavros returned, his usual defensiveness surfacing as the crisis passed. “Or do you just want to dazzle them with a few miracle cures and split, leaving guys like him feeling inadequate?”

  “And forever dissatisfied,” murmured Megan.

  Susannah stared and then dropped her eyes. She had the grace to admit when she was outmaneuvered. “All right. I’ll accept it but I don’t agree with it,” she stated finally.

  Now it was Stavros’s turn to look down and shift uneasily. Megan laughed inwardly. He knew how not to lose an argument but he didn’t know what to do when he won. In the end, he fell back on his habitual solution.

  “Fine,” he growled, then turned on his heel and walked away.

  17

  Stavros exhausted his frustration by swimming laps for twenty minutes, while Liphar soaked in the shallows and looked on in tolerant disbelief. The pools in the Baths were ill suited to aggressive swimming. Steaming water roiled over the tiled edges and sluiced across the glass floor. A pair of elderly Sawls at the next pool glanced up in mild irritation and began to wring out their piles of clean laundry all over again.

  He hauled himself up on the steps beside Liphar. “Out of shape,” he panted. He had an odd flashing memory of his high school swimming team, of a comradery reminiscent of his hours with Liphar in the Baths. For the first time, it seemed significant that he chose to spend so much of his time with a near-child. Certainly Megan would think so, he decided.

  And Susannah? He felt that he’d handled himself badly in the FriezeHall, yet had only done—and said—what he thought was right.

  They soaked for a while in silence. Liphar let his toes float up and stared at the fat white pipes suspended high above like tubular clouds. He watched the occasional droplet of condensation take the long fall into the pool.

  Stavros studied the other bathers. The golden cavern was crowded as always, but the mood was unusually subdued. A relative of the injured stonecutter described the accident to her fellow guildmen in vivid secondhand detail, but the clatter of the stones across the gaming tables was louder than her emphatic murmur. Even the children had withdrawn to the farthest corners to play their quietest games. Stavros saw many families enter the Baths, wash themselves and their clothing, then leave without the usual socializing.

  “So Kav Ashimmel still refuses to give us an answer?” he ventured at last.

  Liphar grunted his assent.

  “I guess she has some reason for not wanting me to see him?” Stavros prompted.

  The young Sawl’s shoulders hunched as he drew his knees up to his thin chest and hugged them. The green water sloshed gently. “O rek,” he muttered. “Gisti.”

  “I know she said that,” said Stavros, “but! don’t get it, Lifa. Why should she think the Wokind have anything to do with Valla Ired?”

  Liphar glanced about anxiously. His fingers toyed with the amulet on his wrist. “O wokind, kurm arma…” His voice dropped to a whisper. “Valla Ired.”

  “Us?” Stavros exclaimed. “Helping her?”

  Liphar edged closer, pulled in a long breath and launched into a rapid explanation so mumbled that Stavros had to make him slow down to catch even half of it. What he did understand appalled him.

  “She actually thinks the storm’s gone on so long because the Wokind have come to help Valla? Why would we want to do that? We’ve already lost two of us to the storm and nearly lost a third.”

  Liphar squirmed miserably as if he didn’t want to be identified with the suspicions he was passing on, but wouldn’t mind hearing them disproved. “Not like it, you,” he warned.

  “Try me,” Stavros persisted.

  “Okay. Wokind help Valla, then all Sawl gone. Wokind all here.”

  Stavros was stunned. Who put that idea into their heads? And then he knew. I did. With my warnings about Clausen and Danforth. Ah, Christ. He dropped his head into his hands. He had planted seeds of territoriality and distrust where the ground might have been free of them. So much for the purity of his Noninterference. The best he could do now was to try to squelch the weed before it ran rampant. “Lifa, please. We don’t want you gone! Clausen might have, but he’s gone himself, killed by Valla’s own storm! You are the reason we came here, to learn about you, from you. Nothing else! Do you believe me?”

  Liphar spread his palms mournfully. “Not important, I.”

  Stavros turned on one knee to face him. “There is no truth in Ashimmel’s accusations, I swear. With Clausen dead, F
iix will come to no harm at Terran hands.” He held out a flattened palm. “My own life on it.”

  Belatedly, he realized that he meant it. Eventually, if they ever made it back to Earth, he would have to discourage CONPLEX from sending a follow-up expedition, but he thought he could count on Megan’s help in writing the appropriate report.

  Liphar solemnly covered the open palm with his own. “Embriha Lagri,” he intoned. Then he sat back, elbows against the tile, and looked at least momentarily relieved.

  Time to get the others more involved, thought Stavros. Susannah is right that isolation leads to misunderstanding.

  And yet, he had his doubts. His self-assumed role of champion of the Sawls could not be shed between one bit of insight and another. He was unsure which of his colleagues could really be trusted to keep the Sawls’ best interests at heart. He stirred the water with limp fingers, then cupped his hand to feel the heat run out of it slowly.

  “Lifa,” he said finally, “there’s two things you could do for me. First, think of a way that we—the Wokind—can make a show of support for Lagri, to dispel Kav Ashimmel’s suspicions. Second—and this may be the hardest-would you dare to speak to Kav Daven for me yourself?”

  18

  In the middle of the Terran “day,” the Black Hole was usually deserted. Weng had retreated to her secret ivory tower and the company of her now handwritten scores. McPherson always left early to begin her daily vigil at the highest cave mouth, where she passed the hours by filling a notebook with a supposed letter to her mother back home. Megan had gone off with Tyril to the WeaverHall several hours ago, and Stavros hadn’t been seen in two days.

  Susannah reveled in a rare moment of solitude.

  She raised the wick of her oil lamp to a scandalously wasteful height and reread her most recent list. She was amazed by the variety of edibles the Sawls managed to produce in the virtual darkness of the Caves. Her current and rather long list only covered the fungi.

  That fungi were a staple was not surprising, given the Sawls’ cave-dwelling habit. What was remarkable was the range of shape, texture and taste. Some were grown in a compost that was nearly a hundred percent aged hakra manure. Other varieties grew on rotted wood or in damp sand, some on the naked rock. The slim translucent bells like Indian Pipe were Susannah’s favorite so far, but she had also liked the tiny spherical mil, and the giant cushion mushroom, whose thick broiled slices tasted just like Terran chicken.