by Shannah Jay
The wisemen Benner had consulted said that the temples were covered by great invisible domes. Or at least, they’d said so at first, and got themselves killed for their honesty. Now, everyone pretended that the Serpent had put up the barrier to lock away such dangerous places.
Those sick-minded Initiates of the Inner Shrine were fools if they thought anyone apart from the most blind of fanatics would believe that. Those temples were visible proof that the Sisters' magic was not dead, as Those of the Serpent claimed; it was just lying dormant, waiting for its moment to pounce. And the sooner that moment came, the happier Giff and the other traders would be. The Serpent had brought stagnation upon the land and if its followers couldn't smell the rot under their noses, Giff could.
He had to continue trading and travelling, despite how dangerous it had become nowadays, because he would have suffocated if confined to one town. Besides, even Those of the Serpent still had need of some trade goods. You just had to choose what you sold more carefully, making sure it was things people absolutely couldn't do without, and you had to tread more warily whenever you were in a town.
One day, surely, this violence would all pass and sanity return to the Twelve Claims. Giff tried to keep on believing that.
'What do you think it is, Pa?' Ivo asked eagerly, jigging up and down like a great soft child.
' Will you fools stop asking me that? How in the name of chaos do I know what it is? Shut up, and use your eyes and ears like I'm doing, then you might learn something yourselves for once!'
Ivo shut up, but he stuck closely to his Pa, just as fascinated as the older man by the sight of something so unusual and mysterious, but a little more fearful than his father for his own safety. Few people had Giff's unshakeable belief in their own ability to survive.
The water lapped around the object and the sun shone upon it, making its creamy surface gleam, except where there were brown scorch marks. There was no sign of life from it, no sign of the cylinder opening, nothing but the sound of water slapping gently at its smooth sides. There was also the sound of Giff's heavy breathing, as he contemplated the object and chewed furiously on some more nuts. Gradually, one step at a time, he moved closer to the thing, always listening and watching, ready to run away if anything threatened.
Ivo loosened his dagger and followed in his Pa's footsteps.
'It looks like it should open along the sides,' said Giff at last, thinking aloud. 'See, there's a fine crack all the way round.'
'Shall I get an axe, Pa? Maybe we could - '
'An axe! Isn't that typical of you! An axe, indeed! And break it to pieces before we even know what it is?
You're as stupid as your brothers!' Giff stretched out his stubby fingers and very gently touched the side of the cylinder. 'Still warm,' he muttered. He stroked the smooth, shiny surface. 'What is it made of? Never seen anything like this stuff before. You'd never get wood so smooth, not if you worked on it for a year!'
Inside the transcap, Soo was starting to regain consciousness. She groaned as she tried to move her head.
Ivo jerked backwards. 'It spoke!'
Giff became very still, but stood his ground. 'That sounded to me like someone moaning.' The noise came again. 'It is moaning! There's someone shut up inside it!' His eyes were fairly sparkling with excitement.
'Be careful!' called Nyris again from the wagon.
Giff ignored her. Heedless that he was up to his knees in water and ruining his good leather shoes, he walked all the way around the cylinder, muttering to himself and occasionally touching it. He lingered for a while by the spent jets; near them the cylinder's surface was brown and roughened. It had obviously borne great heat, but it wasn’t cracked in any way! He moved slowly back to where he’d started and stretched out his hand to rap sharply on the cylinder.
Behind him, further up the shore, Nyris uttered a little whimper. 'Giff! Oh, Giff, don't!'
'Shut up, you smothersome fool!' He rapped again. 'Is anyone there?'
Inside, Soo opened her eyes and stared muzzily around. Was that a voice outside?
The knocking came again and muffled words she had difficulty in understanding.
It was a voice! Someone was there! It took her a moment to gather her wits and press the button that opened the transcap top. The effort made her head swim and she had to close her eyes again. When she opened them, the top was fully open and a man's face was framed against the sky, a fat face with weatherbeaten skin and dark, greying hair. Not Mak!
'Are you all right?' the man was saying.
Soo blinked at him. The words he used were strange, but recognisable. Sunril. On the satellite they had coined that name for the language of the planet Sunrise, when they first started observing it. Like Davred, she’d learned the language, but she didn’t have his fluency, and besides, it was one thing to listen and understand, another entirely to converse in the language.
'Who are you?' the man asked patiently.
He didn’t seem to be hostile, so she tried to reply, to tell him her name, but the darkness began to roar around her again and she moaned as she whirled down into a black bottomless pit.
When she opened her eyes some time later, she was outside the transcap, lying on a blanket on some sandy ground near a lake. A woman was bathing her forehead, a woman covered from head to toe in voluminous garments. She was plump, like the man, and she had even darker skin than he had, with long grey-flecked hair rolled into a neat netted bundle at the nape of her neck.
'Where am I?' Soo spoke automatically in Galactic Standard and it took her a minute to realise they didn’t understand her. With an effort, she managed to frame the same question in halting Sunril, stumbling a little over the words. She was fairly confident of being understood, because people spoke the language of Tenebron in all the claims, but there were many variations in accent and intonation, which made it harder to understand some of them.
'You're in the forests, in the north of Setheron. We're traders, heading towards Fen-Halani. Next town's Pinderak.' Giff paused. 'Who are you?' he asked slowly and loudly. 'And what's that thing you were in?'
Soo tried hard to take in what he was saying, but her head was throbbing and he had a very strange way of pronouncing the words.
'Can't you see that she's hurt?' hissed Nyris. 'You keep your questions to yourself till she's better, Giff Bel-Nathryn! You always want to know everything at once, you do! Too impatient by half. Well, this one's in no fit state to tell you anything! She must've banged her head in that - that thing. And she's broken her arm, too, if I'm not mistaken. You just leave her to me till she's better!'
Soo roused enough to exclaim, 'Mak!' and stare around desperately. She could see no sign of him, no sign at all of another transcap. 'Mak! Where is he?' She realised that she’d lapsed into Galactic Standard again and took a deep breath to steady herself. 'Please, have you seen another transcap?' she asked the man. 'I must find Mak.' But the effort was too much and she relapsed into unconsciousness.
'There! What did I tell you. Leave the poor girl alone!' Nyris pushed Giff away, and since it was obvious that the stranger couldn’t be moved for a while, she stayed by the woman's side and gave orders to make camp.
That roused Giff momentarily from his fascination with the transcap and its passenger. 'But we're already two days late, after replacing that strut on Bree's wagon!'
'So it'll be another day now! Go and put a marker on the road for Chand, in case he comes back to look for us. We can't leave her here, and she's certainly not fit to travel.' Nyris looked around approvingly. 'Besides, this is a good place to stop. It's about time we had a washday, and you can all bathe in the lake. When we do arrive, we'll be able to look really smart. We always sell more when we look clean and smart.'
Giff scowled. 'What's the point, when Those of the Serpent take away half our profits?'
'Those of the Serpent won't last for ever.'
'They seem to be going pretty strongly to me.'
Nyris set her hands to her hips. Thi
s was one of the few points on which she didn’t follow Giff's lead.
'Don't you dare talk like that!'
'We have to face reality.'
'If you go over to them, I'll leave you!'
'Go over to them! Do you think I'm mad?'
'I wonder sometimes, especially when you ask me what the point is in trading any more.' Like her husband, she too came from a long line of traders and was proud of her ancestry.
Giff sighed. Normally Nyris was very biddable, but when she took something to heart there was no gainsaying her.
'The point is,' she continued fiercely, 'that we want to keep our trade routes alive, ready for the better times. And the only way to do that is to keep trading, as you very well know. If we don't keep trading, they'll stop us on suspicion of having money saved. So we have to pay their taxes and keep on trading. That way we can keep the special licence they gave us in Merlanik.'
'Gave! I paid good coin for that!'
'Well, you shouldn't need me to remind you of it, then, should you?'
Giff sighed, opened his mouth to roar at her, then took a deep breath and refrained from putting her in her place. After all, Nyris was good at caring for sick people, and this stranger who had flown across the sky looked very sick to him. 'All right! All right! We'll stop here for the night.' He stood up and looked towards the strange object. 'Transcap,' he murmured. 'I'm sure that's what she called it. But what is it for?'
He left the others to make camp and walked over to the object. 'Transcap,' he murmured, rolling the word around his mouth. 'But what is a transcap for?' he repeated, then slapped his hand against his forehead as inspiration struck. 'Why, it's a flying wagon! Of course! Ha! Why didn't I realise? It can't be anything else. A flying wagon, that's what it is! Just imagine that!'
He left the stranger to Nyris's attentions and concentrated on the flying wagon. If there was one thing his wife loved, it was nursing sick people, and she could put a person together again after an accident better than anyone he'd ever met, except for the Sister-Healers, of course.
As Giff stood by the water's edge, he continued to murmur the word 'transcap' to himself like a password.
Ivo sidled up behind him, still curious about the strange object. He cleared his throat. 'Have you thought what it is, Pa?'
Giff jumped in shock. 'What do you mean, creeping up on a man like that, you fool?'
'I just wanted to see the thing again. Have you, Pa? Have you thought what it is?'
'Yes, of course I have. We're not all feather-witted. It's a flying wagon, of course! That's quite obvious to anyone with a cupful of intelligence. What else could it be, Ivo, tell me that? Though who built this and where that girl comes from is more than I know. She’s from somewhere outside the Twelve Claims, that's for sure.
Must be a strange sort of settlement, if it produces things like that and sends people flying across the skies.'
Ivo nodded, awed. Trust his Pa to work things out. He eyed him with respect and awe, then went back to studying the transcap. Yes, it could be a flying wagon, a very small one, and made for a single traveller only.
But how did they make the thing go through the air without something to pull it?
'And there must be another flying wagon somewhere around,' went on Giff. 'You heard her ask about
"Mak". What do you think a "Mak" is? Or is it a person's name?'
They both stopped to think about that and Ivo nodded. 'I reckon it's a name, Pa. The way she said it, it must be. She sounded like she was calling out to someone. She was looking round for this Mak, as well. The two of them must've got separated.'
Giff grunted. He didn’t like anyone else to make intelligent guesses.
They stood and considered the transcap together, the family resemblance showing strongly. Two large men, the older running to fat, the younger all muscle. Giff made yet another complete circuit of the object, with Ivo splashing along one step behind.
'Well, it doesn't look dangerous,' said Giff, when they got back to their starting point. 'Only one way to make sure of that, though.' He swung his leg over the edge of the transcap and paused, waiting to see if anything happened.
'Pa! Be careful!' cried Ivo, afraid of this bold step.
'Shut up, nerid brain! You're as bad as your mother sometimes!' Giff felt a surge of something that had driven him as a younger man to explore the wildwoods north of his home claim of Mer-Halani on his own and see how far he could get. He’d been disappointed at how similar the terrain was and he hadn’t found any great settlements, only an occasional small group close to the other side of the border, then nothing. But he hadn’t discovered any of the dangers folk prophesied, either.
Only boredom had driven him back to his family. And boredom had sent him on the roads again, on his own with a rickety wagon and two nerids. Within a few kloms of the town, a deleff had come out of the woods to pull the wagon, and Giff had known then that he was accepted as a trader. The profit from the nerids had financed a larger range of trade goods and he hadn’t looked back since.
He took a deep breath and pulled himself back to the present. What was he doing, thinking about the old days like that? He set his lips. Well, he might be a good deal older now, but he hadn’t lost his courage yet or his enjoyment of the unknown.
The rest of the family had moved away from the unexciting sight of Nyris tending the stranger's unconscious body and had drifted over to the lakeside. They were now waiting there, providing Giff with the audience he loved. They gasped in concert as he climbed right into the transcap and he gave a tight smile of satisfaction.
'Look out, Pa!' muttered Ivo.
'You shut up and keep an eye on this thing! If it tries to close, you're to lie across it and keep it open till I get out again.'
Ivo gulped but braced himself. 'Yes, Pa.'
Giff eased himself down in the seat with some difficulty, for it was meant for a much slimmer person, and began to examine the interior from that new vantage point. The control panel meant nothing to him, though he ran his fingertips several times across the indentations and bright inscriptions. Of much more interest were the packages of supplies. 'Aaah!' he breathed. 'They did bring things with them. Trading goods, I shouldn't wonder.' He touched the tightly wedged packages lightly and when nothing untoward happened, he pulled one out. He turned it round in his great meaty hands, hands that could be as gentle as silk with the goods he traded.
Suddenly, decision taken, he yelled, 'Hey! You lot! Cowards, all of you! Come over here and help me unload!'
His family hesitated, then, as he roared at them again, some of them began to edge forward, each trying to push the other closer to the transcap. Giff passed the first package out to Ivo, with a loud injunction to, 'Treat it like a pelish's egg!' He turned to the others who had ventured close. 'Anyone who drops these goods will be thrown into the deepest part of the lake by myself, personally! You hear that, you beetle-brained fools?'
They nodded, knowing from experience that Pa was easier to deal with if they showed that they were listening to his diatribes than if they ignored his insults. Within a short time, the transcap was unloaded and the goods were spread out neatly on a spare tarpaulin.
'Hadn't we better leave them alone now, Pa?' asked Ivo, as Giff started to tug at the wrappings of a particularly big package.
'No! We had not better leave them alone! What most of us had better do is keep our distance and leave those of us with a bit of sense in our brain-boxes to examine the goods. How can we trade with that woman if we don't know what she's selling?'
But the goods Soo had brought with her baffled even Giff. He unpacked one thing after another, not recognising any of them. And though some of it looked like food, he wasn’t game to risk a taste.
In the end, he rewrapped it all and said loftily. 'I shall leave the objects now until she regains her senses. It's a good thing that young woman fell among honest traders. Those of the Serpent would have stripped her of everything she owned.'
'What
sort of goods are they?' Tia ventured.
'New stuff. How should I know? We'll have to ask her about them when she recovers her senses. In the meantime, you children can get some more tarpaulins and cover these things up, in case it rains. Make a two-day camp. This is important. I'll need to think seriously about everything. We'll want to pay as little as possible in taxes, if we're to make our profits.' He always spoke as if they were living from hand to mouth, though they generally lived as comfortably as was possible on the road, and had property and investments scattered across the claims.
Under Nyris's deft ministrations, Soo was persuaded to swallow a herbal mixture that sent her into a long, dreamless sleep. Giff railed against this in vain, furious at the delay, but Nyris was adamant.
'You can talk to her when she's stronger and not until!' she said, pushing him away. 'Go on! Do something else! Leave me to look after this poor girl. I have to set that arm for her and I can't do that properly if she's awake and screaming, now can I?'
Two of the deleff came to stand near Nyris and Soo, and refused to be moved away.
'Never seen anything like this!' said Ivo to his brother Bree. 'Where do you think she comes from?'
'How should I know?'
'And just look at Shalash and Falthor. You'd think the deleff knew something unusual was going on, wouldn't you?'
'They're always inquisitive, deleff are. They're probably enjoying all this.'
Giff overheard them. ' I have never seen anything like you two lazy puff-blossoms. Do you think the work's going to do itself? Get those wagon wheels wedged properly and start cleaning out the water barrels. There's a few things needing attention, and if we must stay here for a day or two, I'm not going to waste the time.'
Nyris patted Soo's hand absent-mindedly and for once just sat and watched the camp take shape. Unlike her husband, she didn’t shout or threaten, but a quiet word from her had just as big an effect on her family.
She was tired of travelling, lately, and soul-sick of all this bowing to the demands of Those of the Serpent in town after town. Filth, they were, and sick-minded perverts into the bargain.
