“How’s the boy doing?” Megan inquired.
Susannah shook her head in admiration. “Ghirra seems to have pulled him through.” She gave a self-deprecating chuckle. “Even without benefit of Terran medicine.”
They walked for several minutes, passing no one but the stone multitudes thronging the walls. At last, Liphar halted beside an arched doorway. Intricately carved flames of ruddy marble licked about paired portal columns as thick as twin oak trees. The tall arch was fitted with heavy wooden doors. The doors were paneled with miniature frieze carvings. They had no latch, just a huge pair of elaborate iron pulls. They were shaped as tongues of flame rising out of the familiar trefoil, the motif of the three interlocking circles.
Megan bent to study the ironwork. “The first bit of decorative metal I’ve seen in the Caves,” she noted.
Liphar stepped forward and knocked respectfully on the oiled wood. They waited only a moment, then the giant doors cracked and swung open on superbly balanced hinges. A golden-skinned child appeared, bathed in ruddy light, and motioned them inward.
21
Stepping into the doorway, Susannah recoiled.
Fire!
The glare beat at her eyes so that she could not focus. The child was a wavering silhouette retreating calmly into the roaring heart of the inferno. Susannah dared not breathe, dared not cry out. The heat would sear her lungs. She braced for the screams and the horror of burning flesh.
Stavros was beside her. “I could use some help setting up,” he suggested and moved briskly into the fire with his cases, all dark efficiency against the brilliant red.
Susannah forced her eyes to adjust. The room was not on fire. The fire was in the center of the room, contained to a circular hearth of glazed brick. The hearth sat in the middle of a circular floor, which was laid with the same brick. Six concentric brick tiers rose around it to form a horseshoe-shaped amphitheater whose opening faced the doors. The brick was glazed with a hard reflective gloss that magnified the firelight, tossing it from surface to surface, up the rise of the tiers and around the surrounding wall. The wall rose and curled overhead into a dome. Wall and dome were smoothly plastered. The flames that appeared to be consuming them were painted on their curving surface. They began low on the wall, sinuous tongues with bright yellow cores and sinister darker outlines. They raged through gold and orange and vermilion to scarlet at the apex of the dome. In the high center of the vault they flickered into sooted crimson around a well-used smokehole.
The sharpness of burning dung was a calming familiarity. Susannah gave the hall a more leisured careful study. The red light reflected on the faces of a group of apprentice priests sitting on an upper tier. The rest of the tiers were sparsely occupied by families with wide-eyed children and several elderly men and women.
“What is this place?” Susannah whispered to Megan.
“I think it’s a StoryHall. Dedicated to Lagri, I’ll bet.”
Susannah’s throat was as parched as if the flames were real. “I can see why. If this event is so special, where’s everybody else?”
“Most of them have probably heard this tale at one time or another,” shrugged Megan. “Would you expect the world to show up for a staged reading of the Bible?”
Still encumbered with equipment, Liphar waved them to places on the lowest tier. When she was finally seated, facing the central hearth, Susannah noticed the old man on the far side of the fire.
He too was seated on the bottom tier. His hands rested lightly on his knees. His brown garments draped around him softly, like a layer of autumn leaves. His head was shriveled and hairless but for a silver stubble dusting his sunken cheeks. His back was ramrod-straight, which seemed like a miracle to Susannah. She thought that she had never seen an older human being, certainly not one who could still sit upright. The tawny child waited at his feet, one hand laid lightly over his. Susannah for a moment could believe that should he but stir or the child remove her hand’s feathery restraint, the old man might be swept up by the fire’s draft to drift and swirl into the sooted vent at the top of the dome, set free with the smoke.
Her hand touched Stavros’s knee in unconscious imitation. “Does he live here?”
He frowned, unlatching his cases, and moved slightly away. “Of course not. He lives downstairs with his family. That little girl is one of his great-granddaughters.”
She resented that he made her feel stupid, when it was only the illusion of inferno still clinging to her that slowed her responses. “This is Lagri’s hall?”
“Yes,” he replied, as if it were obvious.
“Does Valla Ired have a hall as well?”
“Do not say that name in here,” hissed Stavros. Liphar threw a shocked glance over his shoulder as he struggled with the latching of his own case. In a lower voice, Stavros added, “She has one at the other end of the FriezeHall.”
“What’s it like?” Susannah wondered if it would be as dank as this one was dry.
“It’s been locked up tight since we’ve been here—only locked door in the Caves, that I know of.” Stavros passed her the plug ends of several cables. “They won’t set foot in it now, not until Lagri shows signs of a comeback.”
“The Sawls feel it’s in their best interests to promote an even balance,” added Megan skeptically.
“So, performing this tale-chant is a pitch for Lagri?”
“Performing it here,” he replied.
“It’s what the Sawls would call hedging their bets,” Megan needled. “Have you heard what happens if V—if she wins?”
Susannah looked to Stavros, who was matter-of-fact. “The legends call it Phena Cilm,” he said. “The Wet Death. Total devastation. The world will drown.” He adjusted his keypad on his knees and leaned over to plug it into the translator’s screen.
“I can certainly sympathize with that anxiety,” remarked Susannah, thinking of the flood that had nearly meant her own wet death.
“If Lagri wins, it’s Phena Nar, death by fire. The Two Deaths.”
Megan raised her eyes to the flaming dome and sang softly, “Lord said a fire not a flood next time…”
Stavros’s jaw twitched but he held his tongue. He took the plugs Susannah had been holding uselessly and fitted them into the battery pack. “You mentioned sensing a general anxiety a while ago?” he said to her. “Well, the specter of a Wet Death is in everyone’s mind at the moment, as all signs indicate that Lagri’s losing ground more rapidly and for a longer period than usual. They think our arrival may have something to do with this, which is the real reason we’re here.”
“Is this like a prayer to Lagri?”
“More like an homage, a show of support. The Sawls don’t pray, exactly. The Sisters aren’t likely to listen to that sort of thing.”
“Oh.” Susannah felt a vague prickle chilling her urge to smile. The fiery magic of the hall and the still presence of the frail old man lent credibility to the linguist’s tone of utter conviction. She envied Megan her reflex skepticism and retreated to the safety of scientific objectivity. “Has that ever happened before, one goddess winning? I mean, is there any historical basis for the legend?”
Stavros shot a give-me-a-chance glance at Megan, and Susannah prepared herself for another bit of disputed information.
Stavros set his keypad aside. “We know that the five thousand or so in the Caves don’t represent the total Sawl population on Fiix, but Liphar has given me estimates for the other settlements, and even allowing for a large margin of error and the various social structures to prevent inbreeding, the figures seem abnormally small for so large a world.” He looked to Megan, who nodded her agreement with his report thus far. “So I asked Liphar why that was the case, and he said that every hundred and thirty generations, more or less, a near victory for one of the Sisters wipes out most of the population.”
Susannah raised an eyebrow at Megan, who shrugged. “That is what he said. I was there.”
“He also implied,” Stavros continued,
“that a hundred and thirty generations is usually the time it takes for the population to build up again to excess levels.”
“An interesting correlation,” remarked Megan.
“Excess for what?” asked Susannah, unable to fathom such a possibility on Fiix.
“That’s not quite clear,” admitted Stavros. “More people than they can feed, I guess. Liphar just says ‘too many people.’ ” He nodded at the ancient priest, who still sat as if unaware of their presence. “So you can believe Kav Daven will be pouring everything he’s got into this performance.”
He beckoned Liphar to him and strapped a small power pack around the Sawl’s narrow waist. Liphar received the little video gun and cradled it in one arm nonchalantly while stealing a sidelong glance at Susannah to be sure that she noticed how expert he looked.
“Ready?” Stavros powered up the translator without waiting for affirmation. “Our silence will tell him we’re set up.”
Megan and Susannah settled themselves. Liphar moved a few paces out onto the brick floor and dropped to one knee, video gun aimed at the central hearth. They waited in the brilliant room for long unmoving minutes, listening to the fire snap and spit. Around the edges of the coals, spent dung crumbled into ash. The flames sank into blue and lavender, and the hall darkened until the dome pressed in like a midnight fog. Susannah started when the old priest moved. It was ever so slight, just the raising of a hand, but in such mesmerizing stillness, it had the power of a scream.
The hand lifted from the knee, a bird of bones floating independent of its body. The smoothly scarred palm gleamed in the firelight. The child stood quickly and crossed to the big double doors. She barred them with a beam that seemed too heavy for her to lift, then padded to the hearth. Digging her hands into the peripheral ash, she raked great chalky mounds onto the brick floor. With practiced sweeps, she spread the ash in a thick even layer, forming a perfect disk. She stood, scrutinizing her work, then retreated to the far side of the fire and nestled down beside a stack of dung cakes. Her delicate face was solemn as she fed several cakes into the sunken coals. She leaned and blew gently into the glow. The fire sputtered. A miasma of black smoke billowed toward the dome, and as the flames rekindled, Kav Daven rose.
Stavros poised his hands above the keypad like a concert soloist awaiting his cue. Liphar adjusted the video gun in the crook of his arm. Susannah realized that she was holding her breath.
The old priest’s rising was liquid, a flowing of spirit from one bit of flesh into the next, boneless and unmuscled, as if gravity disdained to drag on so insubstantial a mass. He did not acknowledge his visitors, but glided across the glossy brick to the disk of ash. Its whiteness vibrated against the ceramic orange. He circled it without looking at it, his bare feet tracing its circumference with intimate familiarity. He seemed to hardly move his arm, yet from some concealment produced a long tapering reed. He brandished it at the fire. The gesture was both an introduction and the conducting of an opening cadence, a rise and fall that took its tempo from the reaching flames.
The girl fed in more fuel and the blaze rose higher. Kav Daven began to dance a subtle crooked minuet around the disk of ashes. He hummed tunelessly and his bony shoulder dipped toward the fire, then toward the center of the ash, then back again. The tip of the reed and the silken folds of his garments flirted with the leaping heat as if his floating body could be the bridge to bring fire back to lifeless ash.
His hum slipped into a murmur. Syllables came and went like whispers. Stavros touched his keys, impatient, enrapt, then held back, chewing his lip. His breath came short and tight.
The old priest stilled. The tip of his long reed drew every eye as he dropped it to the disk to draw in the white ash. In the center he raked the outline of a human figure. He lifted the reed and resumed his circling. Then, in a conversational tone, he began the tale, like a neighbor man relating the local gossip.
Stavros bent to his keypad. The old man illustrated his words with floating one-handed mime and a widening spiral of tiny scratchings in the ash. Eyes glued to his screen, Stavros waved Liphar in for a close-up. The translation unfolded in green phosphor turned sallow by the fire’s brilliance.
The words came slowly. There were frequent gaps. Severed from CRI’s master brain and library, the little translator could only stagger along like a cripple. Still, Susannah was impressed as she and Megan crowded in to peer at the screen. Stavros’s word-substitution program managed to nearly mimic the machine sentience of a vast data cruncher like CRI.
Stavros’s hands danced in frustration over a word he could not transliterate. “There’s words I’ve never heard before in this tale,” he muttered. “It’s always the priests…”
“Priests often have a secret or ritual language,” Megan reminded him quietly.
Stavros grunted, his fingers flying again, and the thought was lost as the translation picked up after a lengthy gap.
“In the very earliest generations,” the screen read. “before the five great (destructions) (deaths) (?)…” The translator added its own question mark here to indicate dissatisfaction with both possible meanings. “… the great (large) king (parent) ruled the land (planet) (world).” All word choices but the preferred one were put in parentheses. “The king was wise and skilled in the ways of (power) (weather) (?), and the kingdom prospered without sickness or (war) (destruction) (darkness) for one thousand generations…”
“King?” said Megan.
“Sssh!” said Stavros.
Kav Daven paused to draw three new figures in the ash, in careful detail. Those on either side were looking away from the one in the middle, who was smaller than the other two. Across the fire, the silent girl added more dung cakes.
“… the king had three beautiful children (daughters). The three were as one to the king. The eldest was tall and white (cold) with eyes of shining ice. The youngest was dark with eyes of fire. The middle child was mild and practical (craft-skilled). The middle child was…” Here the translator registered a complete blank, but as Stavros watched Kav Daven dig parallel furrows in the ash, he revised the data. “… a farmer…”
There was a soft knock at the double doors. The girl glanced up, frowning slightly. A sharper rapping followed and voices could be heard through the thick wooden panels. The apprentices on the back tier murmured, but Kav Daven ignored the disturbance and no one made a move to answer the knock.
The translator continued its stumbling interpretation. “… though the middle child was weakest, she was much loved by the king, and the king charged her stronger siblings (sisters) with her protection…”
The knocking at the door had ceased. Kav Daven withdrew into himself, cringing before the fire. Suddenly he sprang up, then danced aside to rail and slash his reed at the space where he had been. His yell echoed around the dome like erupting thunder. His body seemed to shed decades with every whirling step. Building her pace with his, the girl threw dung cakes at the fire as if slinging stones. The flames roared and reached for the ceiling. Water trickling down the smokehole lent a rhythmic hiss of annihilation. The translator stuttered as the girl took up a thin staccato chant that underscored the priest’s wailing with tones of threat. Liphar, still manning the video gun, chanted along with her under his breath.
Stavros’s fingers rippled over the keys. Lost to the rhythm of the chanting, his body moved to Kav Daven’s movement. His lips tried to form the words as the old priest sang them.
“… and then it happened,” read the translator, “that the war (darkness) arrived (neared) and the king grew old (ripe) (dark). Not the healers or the priests could save (heal) him/her…” The translator showed a sudden confusion about gender. “… The king divided the land among his three children, and bade the two strong siblings to protect the weaker. But when the king died (darkened), the world fell into strife. The eldest child and the youngest child were blinded by the warring (darkness) and disobeyed (forgot) the king’s charge to them. They grew dissatisfied (bored) and
battled (wrestled) (gamed)…”
Stavros shot a sudden finger to the screen. “That’s ‘arrah’ there, the verb form. You see the ambiguity?”
“… for control of the whole kingdom (world). Their battleground (arena) (gaming board) was the lands of the middle child. War (darkness) settled over the world. The war (game) had begun.”
Kav Daven halted and for the first time looked straight at his audience. Susannah ground her fingernails against the hard brick to steady her surprise. The old priest’s pupils were milky white.
“Blind!” breathed Megan.
The girl’s chant rose like an animal howl, then ceased midnote. The priest’s opaque eyes commanded even the taking of a breath. Behind him, the fire wheezed and sighed. Stavros raised his head from the screen, eager for the next line. The priest’s whole body swiveled until he faced Stavros directly. Stavros stared back, transfixed, his jaw sagging open. Kav Daven lowered his reed and after a frozen pause, he offered a dazzling smile that crinkled his sightless eyes with elfin humor and showed a mouth full of strong yellow teeth.
Then brief as a bird shadow, the smile was gone. His years settled over him again. He turned away and shuffled across the brick, scuffing a trail through his pictures so carefully drawn in the ash. One leg dragged a little behind. The girl went to his side and helped him to sit.
Megan leaned back with a spent sigh that was echoed by the Sawls on the upper tiers. Liphar remained kneeling on the brick. The video gun lolled forgotten on his arm. He gazed at Stavros with admiration and then back at the old priest, as if searching , out his own future in the old man’s image. Even the fire seemed to recognize a culmination. It sank down exhausted. The inferno dimmed and became a round room painted with flame. Stavros did not move.
“Why doesn’t she fight back, the middle one?” Megan queried reasonably.
Susannah smiled and shook her head, moved to silence by the performer’s magic and the shock of his sudden vanishing smile.
The Wave and the Flame Page 18
