“Kav Daven didn’t seem surprised at all,” Stavros reflected vaguely.
“He makes some game, this Kav.” Ghirra pushed the hand aside, murmuring deprecations about the PriestGuild that sounded more perfunctory than heartfelt.
“Ghirra, please believe me,” Stavros begged.
The physician buried his hands in the pockets of his smock and stood rocking gently on his heels. His eyes seemed to have absorbed an echo of Stavros’s pain. “But, Ibi, if this is true, where is the science in this?” he demanded quietly.
Stavros foundered. “I don’t know,” he admitted. He recalled his mad promise once again. Was this “miracle” a sign of the divinity of the Sister-Goddesses or was it, as Ghirra suggested, a trick of Kav Daven’s? What “game” would the old priest be playing with an offworld stranger? Stavros could not shed the sensation of having received that very blessing he had knelt for, that his purpose had been somehow sanctified. For there was more than just the disappearance of the guar to be explained. How would the physician react to claims of inexplicable visitations of Power that offered self-knowledge and sudden cures for long-term mental instability in return for visions of annihilation? How to explain the falling away of his helplessness and rage in the face of this new calm and strength of purpose? Stavros prevaricated, for his friend’s peace of mind. “Back on Earth, you know, there are all kinds of religious fanatics who can dance on burning coals with no apparent damage to the skin. And on Ba-hore, the fertility rites include flame-walking.” He held out his palm with an unconvincing grin. “I’m small change compared to that.”
Ghirra regarded him without humor. “Are you a religious fanatic?”
Stavros dropped the hand into his lap, into the protective curl of the other, so that the lingering phantom pain was held centered in his body. “Of course not,” he said. “Though this is the sort of thing that could make you one… I don’t know. Mass psychosis? Belief and knowledge again, Ghirra.”
“Science or miracle,” echoed Ghirra unhappily.
Stavros discarded his efforts at easy explanation. They would not satisfy the Master Healer any more than himself. And then, unable to withhold it any longer, he added softly, “But, Ghirra: I must tell you, I felt such… joy out there, despite the pain. I feel…”
“There you are!” called Megan from the head of the wagons. Beside her. Susannah peered in at them with concern.
“Stav? You all right? Ghirra, is he all right?”
“… whole,” Stavros finished lamely. The more he tried to express it in words, the more it began to sound like simply growing up.
“There’s one hell of a storm brewing out here again,” Megan warned.
The pain in Ghirra’s eyes softened as his healer’s instincts responded to Stavros’s fervent relief. “I am glad for you, Ibi,” he replied.
Susannah came into the shadow of the wagons. “What happened, Stav?”
Megan followed. “All happened so fast.”
So fast, yes… but it felt like forever.
With their entrance, the moment of Power had passed into history. But it had left a residue of Power behind. Stavros could feel its workings through the pain in his hands. Now it remained to him to integrate his miracle with the reality around him, either to find a “scientific” explanation, or to simply let the miracle live within him as an anomalous moment of mysticism that was all the more precious for having no explanation. He knew Ghirra would not be happy with that solution. He forced himself to resume using his hands as if they were a normal part of his body, ignoring the ghostly fires in his palms.
“Nothing much,” he replied easily. “Just a little send-off ritual.”
“The sun,” Ghirra offered to Susannah. “But he is better now.”
Megan found a free crate to sit on. The wicker creaked. She eyed it dubiously and got up again. “A send-off ritual that includes Terrans?”
Stavros nodded, spread his hands in a Sawl-Iike shrug. “Kav Daven’s gesture to ecumenicism.”
Thunder cracked overhead. Through the space between the tall wagons, Stavros saw shadows scudding across the bright face of the cliff.
“May have all been for nothing,” commented Megan darkly, following his glance. “Shall we get back out there to watch Ashimmel have the final word after all?”
Ghirra’s concern had already shifted to the sky. He lingered long enough to see Stavros pull himself successfully to his feet, then moved out into the open. Megan followed. Susannah waited while Stavros tested his balance.
“The sun, indeed,” she sniffed. “Are you sure you’re all right?” He was relieved to hear no pity in her voice. He found his physical strength returning, even while the pain remained to haunt his palms. “Oh yes,” he smiled at her, wishing he could tell her why and what had happened and about the new strength he had found. “Better than I’ve ever been.”
Susannah laughed. “No need to exaggerate for my sake. I believe you.”
She led the way to join Megan and Ghirra.
The chanting had stopped. The assembled population stood silent, backed against the cliff face where it was possible to gain a view of the northeastern horizon over the tops of the wagon lines. Stavros saw McPherson corral two Sawls to help carry Danforth up to where he would be able to see. Weng stood with Ghirra and Aguidran in the front ranks of the crowd. Megan had found Tyril and was holding the baby while the weaver comforted a frightened older child. Seeing them gathered there, Sawl and Terran, he felt suddenly as possessive of them as a father, and a part of them as well. My people, he thought happily. Glancing higher, he spotted Clausen sitting on the cliff stairs, halfway up the second flight. He smiled with relief to see no less than three of Aguidran’s biggest rangers spread out across the first step of the next flight up.
How foolish to have let myself think I was doing this alone!
Shadows sped past as Stavros crossed the dusty rock. Reaching Ghirra’s side, he turned to look out over the plain.
“Oh my loving god,” he breathed, and realized once again that Clausen and his megacorp were only part of the survival problem.
Valla’s forces had massed for the attack.
A towering cloud front advanced from the Vallegar, at the measured inexorable pace of crack infantry. The clouds cut a straight line across the full eighty-kilometer width of the Dop Arek, stretching from the far western hills to the knobby Talche in the east. Along the leading edge marched a Himalayan range of thunderheads, their distant cloud tops shining like golden helmets in the sun, their bottoms roiling brown and black and spitting forked lightning like a den of dragons. The plain beneath was sunk in darkness shattered by the nightmare flash of green and yellow.
“No rain out there,” Stavros observed to Ghirra.
“She saves the water for her Sister,” Ghirra replied tightly.
Stavros recognized the physician’s undertone of rage and despair. The crops were not yet ripe. There was no help for them. The wagons were hard-roofed and shuttered tight. They were as safe as it was possible for them to be outside the Caves. Still, it felt wrong to stand by and let destruction happen. He had learned that helplessness came from within as well as without. He glanced around at the stilled crowd. “Shouldn’t we do something?”
“What, Ibi? Tell me what can be done!” Ghirra glowered and gestured at the approaching cloud bank helplessly. “The storm comes again. No trade in Ogo Dul. The food dies in the fields. We die in our Caves. You see how it is with these Sisters, Ibi?”
Stavros gripped the physician’s hunched shoulders with a compassionate hand. For once, it was he who had comfort to offer. Though the pain in his palms still lingered, he found it mattered little whether he used his hands or not. “Yes, my friend, but please, it’s not over yet.”
“No,” Ghirra agreed darkly. “Lagri waits her time.”
The cloud scouts sped northward past the sun to be swallowed by the approaching darkness, as if recalled to deliver their report. The front continued to advance. Stavros no
ticed Kav Daven’s canopied sedan chair, left out in the open between the crowd and the line of wagons. He saw one bare gnarled foot nosing through the front curtain of ribbons.
High above the Dop Arek, the fast-moving little cloud puffs detached once more from the main front, this time scudding straight across the plain. Behind them, the thunderheads discharged a brilliant electrical display and roared a deafening challenge. The thunder hit the cliffs and rolled off in echoing crescendos as palpable as shock waves.
A warm breeze lifted Stavros’s hair. Ghirra straightened expectantly.
“Now we will see it,” he declared.
The breeze picked up, gusting at first, then steadying into an unnaturally even blow like the wind from a stationary fan. Its temperature increased. Static sang like cicadas in the hot dry air. The assembled throng jostled with eagerness and dread, loving the anticipation of battle, fearing the outcome. Softly they invoked Lagri’s name. Stavros heard several fatalistic wagers being exchanged.
The cloud scouts approached in a neat and widely spaced row, a cautious vanguard. They slowed as they neared the southern edge of the plain. Suddenly there was a wavering of the air around the easternmost scout. Like a desert mirage, it shimmered and vanished. The next in line quickly met a similar fate, and the next, while the others reversed themselves and fled back toward the main column.
The black towers of cloud kept up their slow steady advance. The strange shimmering of the air spread itself east and west in a line parallel to the oncoming cloud. It extended itself as high as the tallest thunderhead. The front became a dark distortion behind a plane of dancing air. The hot wind blew with eerie consistency at Stavros’s back. Its static tension played like fingers on his skin and made him shiver. The wavering line across the plain uncannily resembled the silvery undulations of a force field, though his brain ached to imagine the energy required to sustain a field barrier eighty kilometers long.
“What is it?”
“The fire,” said Ghirra. “Lagri’s tshael.”
“Heat weapon.” Not totally irrelevantly, Stavros thought of Clausen’s laser.
“Now Valla will answer,” the Master Healer predicted.
A roil of motion erupted behind the shimmering curtain of heat. Blinding shocks of lightning lit the distorted darkness. Thunder cracked and rolled and shook the rock they stood on. The heat barrier glowed and rippled like an opalescent curtain blowing in the wind. Sparks danced along its curves. Giant hissing clouds of steam billowed up along its length. A child began to wail in the rear of the throng. Stavros’s eye was caught by a movement in Kav Daven’s chair. The old priest was rising once again from its shadowed depths.
He climbed out of the chair with agonizing slowness, balanced on his unsteady legs, shuffled a few steps away from the chair, then straightened, facing the plain. He stood like a sentinel as the heat curtain glowed and billowed and the steam clouds mushroomed up to obscure it in a dense white fog suffused with light. And then he began to dance.
He twisted and turned in the same boneless minuet that had accompanied his tale-chant in Lagri’s StoryHall. In a single voice, the populace raised a keening wail that sent chills snaking up Stavros’s spine and drowned out the boom of the thunder. The diffused flash and glow of the heat barrier turned the veil of steam into a wall of light. The brightness increased until it hurt to look at it. Steam clouds rolled overhead, obscuring the sky and dimming the sun until the fog was the brighter glow.
Then, as Kav Daven danced, the hot wind stilled and died. A heated deadly calm settled in against the cliff face. The crowd held a collective breath. Just as the tension became unbearable, a touch of chill brushed past, a cooling current of dampness from the direction of the plain. The white fog coalesced into a low-slung cloud cover that gathered about the cliff lops, and finally it began to rain, no violent torrent, no slashing downpour, but a soft warm springlike rain that tasted sweet on the tongue. It settled the ochre dust and brought a shine to the wagon canopies and the yellow leaves in the fields. The wall of light glistened like a million rainbows through the gentle shower, and then the hot wind sprang up again in one sudden shuddering gust. The light wall broke up into a rain of sparkles. The sun brightened. The white fog thinned and vanished. The towering front was gone. The sky above the wide Dop Arek was empty, restored to its singing turquoise clarity.
A murmur of delighted awe swept through the throng. Kav Daven lifted his brown hands to the last drops of gentle rain, then slowly shuffled back to his chair and hauled himself inside.
Celebration broke out along the rock flat. The priesthorns bellowed from the cliff top. The jubilant populace danced and cheered and congratulated each other for their narrow escape. Aguidran mobilized her rangers at once to hurry the final preparations for leavetaking. The guild masters rushed to see to the hanging of the guild seals on the sides of their lead wagons. Even Ashimmel looked pleased and relieved, and took it upon herself, still dressed in full regalia, to bend low to check the harness of all the teams pulling the PriestGuild wagons. The other Terrans gathered in quiet astonishment around Danforth’s stretcher as McPherson and Susannah tried to calm the apoplectic planetologist.
Stavros thought to himself, Truly, anything is possible. He grinned happily at Ghirra. “Slipped by that time, GuildMaster.”
Ghirra nodded solemnly, then relented. He let his face relax into a smile that bled the worry from his eyes. “That time, ’TavrosIbia. But next time…?”
“Ibi!” Liphar was breathless at his elbow, fumbling the tall banner he carried into the crook of his arm to snatch up Stavros’s hand and stare at his palm with something akin to reverence. “Ibi, a wonder!”
While Ghirra looked on with bemused pride, Stavros threw one arm about the young man’s shoulders and hugged him tight.
“Yes, Lifa, a wonder!” he declared joyfully.
With the other hand, he seized the brilliant orange banner sewn with the wave-and-flame, the PriestGuild symbol for the Warrior Sisters, and raised it high above the crowd. Pain flared into molten agony in his palms. The shaft of the banner hummed like a tuning fork within his grip. Stavros heard the voidwind howl at his back, felt its power brush him and was not afraid. His people were around him and he had a job to do for them. He hugged Liphar closer and turned his pain into an ecstatic roar of triumph.
“EMBRIHA LAGRI!!” he proclaimed.
Along the cliff face, five thousand voices echoed his call.
And in the shadow of his chair, Kav Daven smiled.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
M. BRADLEY KELLOGG lives in New York City and designs scenery for the theater. Her first novel, A Rumor of Angels, was published by Signet in 1983.
WILLIAM B. ROSSOW is a space scientist with NASA, studying planetary atmospheres and climate. He lives in New York City with Lynne Kemen and their two cats.
The Wave and the Flame Page 40
