The Master Healer was discussing remedies for arthritis with Megan. As he detailed his preparations of certain herbs, Susannah lounged next to him, smiling, attentive to every word. Even Weng seemed enrapt. Stavros retreated to the consolation of his notes and photographs.
Then if she won’t have me, I’ll find someone else.
Who, then? He could not imagine himself and McPherson as lovers, but he did know many Sawl women who were interesting and desirable. Taking a Sawl lover seemed both a positive solution to his dilemma and a natural extension of his work. The Sawls would have no objection. Their sexual taboos centered around avoiding inappropriate childbirth and inbreeding. Liphar had already nosed him in the direction of a lovely young weaver, though Stavros suspected him of excess generosity in that case. He guessed that Liphar was interested in the girl himself.
He enjoyed a moment of sudden calm, during which he convinced himself that his apparent infatuation with Susannah was due mainly to a lack of initiative. He just hadn’t done enough looking around. He pictured an everyday life in the Caves. It was a saner, more placid vision than the passion and drama heating his dreams of Susannah. He relaxed. He laid aside his paperwork, his decision made, and looked up to find Susannah watching him. His calm vanished.
Damn! Why didn’t I see this earlier when I could have stopped it!
Her smile was warm and lazy. “You do realize you’re making us all feel guilty, sitting in a corner working while we play.”
“Stavros never learned to play,” muttered Megan. “Deprived childhood.”
Ghirra refilled their mugs from the tall misted pitcher he had brought with him. His brown eyes rested on Stavros for the first time.
“Check,” said Weng.
“Again?”
“If you’d pay closer attention, Dr. Levy…”
Stavros pretended deep concentration, but Susannah would not let him off the hook. “Surely Kav Daven’s tale will keep till tomorrow,” she teased, and for a moment he thought her smile acknowledged his confusion.
She knows! He thought that was probably the last thing he wanted but wasn’t sure.
But then she yawned and stretched, merely friendly, and turned away as Ghirra asked a question in his gallant halting English.
Stavros lapsed into relief, happy for the time to let the Master Healer’s insatiable curiosity for things Terran occupy Susannah’s interest. He was not ready. He still retained romantic visions of waiting until the Right Moment, which of course only he would recognize. Part of it was needing to be sure he would not be refused.
“Mate,” declared Weng without much satisfaction.
Megan slumped away from the board with a thankful sigh.
Weng gathered the venerable ebony and teak chessmen into a drawstringed pouch of threadbare velvet and tied it to her belt.
“Oh-one-hundred. It’s late,” she commented, squinting up through the open-weave tenting. The fat sun hovered halfway to zenith, midmorning by the Fiixian clock.
“It’s late, said the White Queen,” Susannah murmured.
“That was the rabbit,” Megan corrected.
“Ah.”
“The White Rabbit. The guy with the pocket watch.”
“I remember.”
Stavros smiled. He too preferred Susannah’s image of Weng as the looking-glass queen, with that wisp of silver hair straying from the neat bun at the back of her neck, insisting that nonsense made sense, that it could be late though the sun was still rising.
“I think I shall retire,” said Weng. Ghirra rose as she did, exhibiting a sensitive eye for Terran manners. “Tomorrow work must begin in earnest,” she stated.
“Yeah, no more of this fartin’ around,” said Megan in a passable imitation of McPherson’s comic drawl. She rolled her eyes at Susannah. “Weng, sometimes I wonder what part of the universe you operate in! We’ve all been busy as bees since the snow melted!”
Weng straightened her spotless uniform as if camouflaging a shrug and turned to Stavros. “Perhaps you might have the comlink reestablished within the next ship’s day?”
Stavros blinked. “Uhh… I’ll try, Commander.”
“Excellent. If the lieutenant returns, I assume someone will inform me?”
“Of course, Commander,” chorused the civilians like three loyal ensigns.
Ghirra took advantage of her leaving to excuse himself also, murmuring of further social obligations. Megan gazed after him wistfully, as one gazes upon the unattainable, but commented only, “I wonder if that stuff he was describing really works.”
“Ghirra and his herbalists could give most pharmaceutical houses a run for their money,” smiled Susannah as she took a long cool sip from her mug.
Weng’s leaving removed a certain tension. In an easier silence, they watched her weave a slow and stately path among the canopies, pausing only to smile at the children she met along the way. As she passed out of the woven shadow into the sun, she blazed white like a vision of angels. She headed down a wide dirt track, newly graded but already rutted from cartwheels. From the edge of the rock flat, it wound among the still-muddy acres of open field and the repeating tiers of mirrored terraces. A half mile out, a smaller side track would lead her to the Lander, where she had once more taken up residence.
The Lander’s solidity and improbable tilt made it look pasted on against the background of plain and sky. Stavros thought that the gleaming cone of scoured metal had never looked more alien.
“That’s a long walk in this heat,” said Megan.
“She’ll make it,” Susannah replied with admiration. “Tough old bird.”
“How long did McPherson say they’d be out?”
“Supplies for two earthweeks, she said. More than a week left still.”
“She won’t come in before she has to,” Stavros put in.
“Not unless…”
“Not a chance.”
“I suppose not.”
Megan shrugged and stood, shaking out her legs with a series of groans. “Got to get me some of Ghirra’s magic potion. Well, I’m off to pay Tyril that return visit. Don’t forget to go watch Liphar dance.”
“We’ll be there,” Susannah replied.
Megan wandered off. Susannah lay back on her pillows with a contented sigh. The cries from the games had quietened. An old man snored several canopies away. Stavros watched Susannah covertly, hoping for a sign. She seemed both beautiful and terrifying to him now, lying in the dappling sun.
Is this the Right Moment? he wondered. If it was, he feared he was going to have to let it pass. He was not yet up to it. It seemed the worst kind of injustice that he should suffer this sensuous attack when he felt least prepared to make good on it.
Susannah turned on her pillows and regarded him slyly across the emptied stretch of carpet. For one horrifying moment, he thought she was going to steal his moment from him. In all his fantasies, he was the seducer, not the seduced. But she tilted her head and the look in her eyes was coolly speculative.
“Are you happy here?” she asked.
He was startled out of his silence. “That’s a weird question.”
“And that is an evasion.”
She was always more direct in person than in his memory. “Why do you ask?” he countered.
She sat up and shook her long hair behind her. “Because instinct tells me you’re in no rush to get the comlink fixed.”
He caught his breath. The sensation inside him was that of a well-oiled bolt sliding into place. “You mean, do I want to stay here?” he asked, trying to sound incredulous.
Susannah’s shrug was indulgent. “Well, for a while at least. I didn’t mean forever.” Then she leaned forward as if reconsidering. “Did I? Is that what you want, Stav?”
He shook his head, but less in denial than in awe of the hidden realms of possibility that were suddenly revealing themselves. His attempt at a careless grin stiffened on his lips. “What ever gave you that idea?”
Susannah let silence and an a
ppraising stare be her reply. Stavros was again aware of the heat of the sun and the thick knobby texture of the rug. Is that what I want? Her stare weighed down on him as heavily as the sun. Defensively he met her eyes and knew that he had suspected correctly the first time. She knew. She knew everything about him. His desire, his secretive guilt were as clear to her as if he had shouted them out loud.
“Susannah…” he began hoarsely. It was not at all the moment he had imagined, and now that he thought about it, her directness intimidated him far more than her beauty. His own romanticizing had remained simple, centering around bodies and bed. The realities had been neatly avoided, that painful delicious tension inevitable when two individuals attempt to share the same point in space and time.
How did this get so complicated? All I wanted was a roll in the hay… I think.
“Susannah,” he began again, and again he failed and fell silent. In the distance, from over the fields, he heard singing.
Susannah rose, smoothing her short robe, tightening its braided sash. “I’m going to walk some of this meal off,” she announced in a tone that was not quite an invitation. A rejection, he wondered, or was she giving him back his solitude because he so obviously needed it? “It looks like the priests are starting their dance down on the plain.”
She passed deliberately close to him as she left, and trailed her hand across the top of his head so that his glossy hair slipped through her fingers. He jammed his eyes shut in pain and to keep himself from grabbing at the billowing hem of her robe to pull her down beneath him.
I should. That would settle it, one way or the other.
But he did not, and she said nothing more, only moved away beneath the rainbowed canopies, following Weng’s path toward the new roadway. Stunned and miserable, Stavros remained hunched in the half-shadow. The singing drew him with its rising joyful cadence but he could not move.
I will not run after the woman like a sorry puppy.
All around him a new bustle arose with the singing. There was a general stretching and moving toward the fields amid building happy chatter that echoed in minor key the euphoria of the Planting exodus. He heard his name called. He gazed blankly at Megan as she lumbered across the scattering of carpets and cushions.
“Aren’t you going down?” she called. From the cliff top boomed the first deep notes of the ceremonial horns.
Stavros knew it would be childish to shrug.
“Nobody will tell me what it’s all about,” she complained as she reached him. “They all just smile and say, wait, see.”
Megan would be his escort, he decided. No lovelorn pursuit, but two colleagues arriving to observe the local rituals. He scrambled up, mobilized. He packed his photos and notes away in his field pack and slung it to his shoulder, then thought again and extracted a small notebook and pencil.
Megan lifted her empty hands. “How come I never come equipped?”
“I’ll take notes for both of us,” he promised, his brisk edge returning as purpose renewed itself.
At the edge of the rock ledges, they fell in with another long procession to the fields. In place of tools this time, many carried full mugs of beer. The woodworker next to Stavros munched a thick slice of kamad-root pie while his friends nudged him and joked about the size of his belly.
They followed the new road as it dipped from the plateau at the base of the cliffs. It wove across the tops of the flooded terraces, then curled past the Lander and continued outward. Weng’s small footprints broke the thick mud of the turnoff. Stavros saw her standing in the shadow of the Underbelly, hand shading her brow.
Megan pointed ahead. “It’s really too far to tell, but I think they’re gathering around that field Susannah and I watched Kav Daven planting.”
“The Kav sowed the first seed because it was his song that gave Lagri the strength to drive back Valla Ired.” Stavros reflexively slipped into the dogmatic tone he had always used to tease her, but as he spoke, he heard more in his voice than teasing. He heard conviction, and saw Megan glance at him swiftly as if she too heard something different, something new.
“Right,” she said, eyes narrowing.
Beyond the turnoff to the Lander, they spotted Susannah working her way back through the crowd. She signaled frantically when she saw them. “Hurry!” she cried over the singing and the boom of the horns. She turned and dove back into the throng. Stavros edged through the joyful mob to the side of the road and broke into a run. Megan struggled along behind him gamely.
At the top of a rise, the procession backed up into a tightly packed and sweating mass. Politely but firmly, Stavros forced a pathway through. No one seemed to mind, for cheerful hands patted him and helped him along, while those at the edges of the throng balanced carefully to avoid stepping down into the planted terraces. Ahead, the road dropped into the bottom of a gully. Down in the crowded hollow, Stavros could see Susannah head and shoulders above the others. He called to her, had to call three times before she heard him. She turned and gestured him forward, whirling back again so quickly that her face, glanced at only briefly, left him with an image of eyes wide with confusion and amazement. Then she dropped from view completely, as if she had knelt or fallen.
The singing distracted him. Its throaty volume and richness caught at him in a way he had experienced only in the great cathedrals of Earth. It was impossible to resist such a voicing of joy, impossible not to accept this celebration of renewal as his own. The pressure in his chest was his own desire to exult, to laugh and sing without restraint.
Hands urged him gently forward. The throng thinned in front of him. He glimpsed Kav Daven shin-deep in the middle of a water-filled terrace. The priest’s bony arms were outstretched, his head thrown back in blissful benediction. Stavros eased toward the front rows of celebrants. Kav Ashimmel waited behind Kav Daven, wearing a pale tabard embroidered in red and gold. The long ends trailed in the muddy water. The rest of the PriestGuild ranked behind her, a hundred strong, in rows ascending the tiers. The senior priests and journeymen filled the first rows. Behind them, along the ridge above the highest terrace, the apprentices raised banners of triumphant yellow and red. Liphar stood among them, banner held high, his dark young face transcendent with joy.
“Can you believe it!” Susannah exclaimed as she appeared at Stavros’s side.
He nodded, absorbed by the bliss on Kav Daven’s face.
She grabbed his sleeve and pulled him through the press of bodies to the front of the crowd. “I mean this. Look!”
Stavros looked. He had not noticed at first, but in addition to water and priests, the terraces were full of bright yellow shoots. The tallest reached to Kav Daven’s thigh and already showed strong secondary leaves uncurling from the stalk like the fronds of a fern.
Susannah was struggling to remain coherent. “That seed went in less than four days ago! There wasn’t a sign of life out here yesterday! These things shot up in a matter of hours!” She paced toward the bottom earthwork and back to him, gesturing. “I swear they’ve grown measurable centimeters since I’ve been standing here!”
“Wow.” he breathed, for lack of a more appropriate reply.
“But that’s impossible!” Megan accused as she pushed in beside him.
Stavros’s instinctive glance back to Kav Daven met the old priest’s blind eyes directly. It shook him thoroughly. The impression of sight without seeing was stronger than ever. A touch of amusement seemed to curl the priest’s bloodless lips.
Ashimmel ignored the Terran outburst of astonishment. She nodded to an acolyte, who scurried up the terraces into the ranks of waiting apprentices. The ranks parted smartly to clear a broad space along the ridge. Two dozen senior apprentices, Liphar among them, passed their banners to a neighbor and fell into a dance formation, filling the open space with three interlocking circles. The younger apprentices began a high-pitched rhythmic wail. The journeymen priests joined in a lower key. The circles broke and reformed, revolved and broke again.
Kav Dav
en held Stavros’s eye. The linguist waited for explanations to come to him, but the priest was once more perturbing his reality in a way that defied simple understanding. The chanting built a wall of sound around them.
Then from the cliff top, the wooden horns blared a new and dissonant note. The singing stilled. Kav Ashimmel looked puzzled and annoyed, but Kav Daven’s amusement broadened into an elfin grin. He nodded slowly to Stavros as if sharing a joke, then lifted a parched hand toward the cliff, an invitation to observe.
Stavros turned. At first he could see nothing unusual, just the amber brilliance of the rock and the green sky beyond. Bright spots of motion spaced regularly along the scarp indicated the nine teams of horn bearers, each manning their giant instrument.
The throng rumbled. Then a sharp-eyed young ranger cheered and pointed. Others saw now, and a chorus of cheering broke out. Stavros felt himself once again propelled through the crowd, this time back toward the cliffs. Hands patted his back, faces smiled at him, congratulating.
Behind him Megan murmured, “Oh my loving god.”
Then he saw it. Motion along the horizon of the cliff between two of the horn emplacements. Spots of dull color against the sky, beginning to descend the easternmost ledge. He made out two figures, no, three, tall Aguidran unmistakable in the lead, the third in white nearly invisible against the pale hot rock. They supported something dark between them.
“It’s Ronnie!” Susannah exclaimed. “She’s found them!”
Stavros swore without thinking. “And one of them’s walking!” He turned back to find Kav Daven still smiling and thought with dread and disappointment, Doesn’t he understand this is the worst thing that could happen?
The Wave and the Flame Page 24
