“You know what the star-folk have taught us. You know they have always held, in the House of the Banner, that they will not give us what we cannot learn to make for ourselves, lest we become dependent on it and then one day they must leave us. What we have gotten from them has led us to progress of our own, slower than we might like but firmly rooted and ever growing. Think of better steel than aforetime, or glassmaking, or painkillers and deep surgery, or postal couriers, or what else you will. Yet it is no longer enough, when the Ice is coming. Unaided, we will lose it all; our descendants will forget.
“You know, too, that I am intimate with the chieftain of the star-folk, Banner herself.” Oath-sister, where are you? You promised you would join me. “You know I have asked her for their help, and she has told me this lies not within her power. But she has told me further, of late, that perhaps help may be gotten elsewhere.”
Wion stiffened on his seat. The Seekers present remained impassive as was their wont, save for Erannda, who half spread his vanes and crooked his fingers as if to attack.
“You wonder how this may be,” Yewwl continued. “It—” She broke off. The voice was in her.
“Yewwl, are you awake? Do you want me? Good. . . . Oh, has your meeting begun already? I’m sorry. I didn’t think you’d arrive so fast, and—” a hesitation; a shyness?— “private matters engaged me more than they should have. How are you faring? What can I do?”
Wion leaned forward. “Is aught amiss, clan-head?” he asked. Eyes stared from the benches.
“No. I, I pause to gather words,” Yewwl said. “I wish to put things as briefly as may be, lest we wrangle till nightfall.”
—“Don’t you want them to know I’m listening?” Banner asked.
—“No, best not, I believe,” Yewwl replied in her hidden speech. “Erannda is here, by vile luck. You’ve seen how he hates your kind. Give him no arrows for his quiver.”
There flashed through her: Once the Seekers of Wisdom alone possessed the high knowledge, arcane mysteries, healing, poetry, music, history. Traveling from stead to stead, they were the carriers of news and of lore about distant places. They counselled, mediated, consoled, heartened, chastised, taught, set a lofty example. Yes, our ancestors did right to hold them in awe.
That is gone. Respect remains, unless among the most impatient of the young. The Seekers still do good. They could do more. But for that, they must change, as the rest of us have changed, because of the star-folk. Some of the Seekers are willing. Others are not. Erannda leads that faction; and many in the clans still heed him.
She hastened to inform Banner of what had happened thus far: fortunately, very little. The unseen presence fell silent, and Yewwl resumed speaking:
“You may or may not be aware that the star-folk maintain a second outpost.” And outposts on two moons, but best not remind them of that. Erannda calls it a defilement. “It is no secret; sometimes people have come here from there. However, yon settlement has had nothing to do with us, since it lies far off, beyond the territories and what we know of the wilderness. Thus we have had no cause to think about it.
“I have newly learned that it is not like the House of the Banner. It is larger, stronger, and its purpose is not simply to gather knowledge, but to maintain industries. Furthermore, its chiefs have more freedom of decision. As near as I have learned”—which is not near at all, for I cannot understand; but my oath-sister would not lie to me—“they can act even in weighty matters, without having first to get permission elsewhere.
“I, my following, and those for whom we speak propose this. Let me take a party there and ask for help. I cannot foresay if they will grant it; and if they will, I cannot foresay what form it may take. Perhaps they will give us firearms, that we may hunt more easily; perhaps they will let us have onsarless vehicles; perhaps they will supply us with fireless heat-makers; perhaps they will build huge, warm shelters for our herds—I know not, and I have not ventured to ask Banner.”
No need. She has long since told me that such things are possible, yes, that it is possible to turn the Ice back, but she and her fellows do not command the means, nor has she been able to get the yea of those who do.
“For this, we would no doubt have to make return. What, I do not know either. Trade, maybe; we have furs, hides, minerals. Labor, maybe; they might need native hands. The cost may prove too much and the clans refuse to pay. Very well, then. But it may not. The bargain may actually leave us better off than we ever were before.
“I propose to go ask, and negotiate if I can, and bring back word for an assembly to consider. To do this, I must go for our whole folk.
“Therefore, Lord of the Volcano, I, my following, and those for whom we speak demand of you that you grant us the right to act on behalf of the clans, and give me a letter attesting that this is so.”
Yewwl snapped her vanes open and shut, to show that she had finished, and waited for questions.
They seethed about her. Was it not a dangerous journey, and many days in length? “Yes, but I am willing, and have friends who are willing too. How else can I strike back at the Ice, that robbed me of my darlings?”
Why could the party not simply be flown there? “We cannot breathe air as thin as the star-folk do. Not for years has the House of the Banner possessed a large flying machine with a cabin that can be left open, since it was wrecked in a dusk-storm. They have lacked the wealth to replace it. Their lesser vehicles can carry but a single person besides the pilot, and he would fall ill of heaviness on so long a flight.”
Why cannot Banner herself go speak for us, or talk across distance as we know they are able to? “She fears she would be refused. Remember, the rule that she is under forbids giving us things like that. She doubts if I am being wise. Also, her kind are not innocent of rivalries and jealousies. The other chiefs might not welcome a proposal that would put her in the lead, yet listen to us if she is out of it.”
Several more; and then Erannda came down, and Yewwl whispered, unheard here—“Now the fight begins.”
Tall in his white garb, the Seeker struck a shivery chord from his harp. Silence pounced and gripped. His bard’s voice rolled forth:
“Lord of the Volcano, colleagues, clanfolk, hear me. Harken when I say that this is either the maddest thought that ever was flung out, or else the evillest.
“Slowly have the aliens wrought among us, oh, very slowly and cunningly. Centuries have passed since first they came, avowing they did but wish to learn of us and of our country. Be it confessed, the College of those days welcomed them, seeing in them kindred spirits, and hoping in turn to range through new realms of knowledge. Yes, we too trusted them . . . in those days. But the College has a long memory; and today we look back, against the wind of time, and what we see is not what we endure.
“Piece by piece, the new things, the new words slipped in among us; and we thought they were good, and never paused to reckon the cost. New skills, new arts and crafts seemed to make life richer; but it came to pass that those who practiced them could not be free rovers, nor could each household provide for every need of its own. So died the wholeness of the folk.
“Behold this chaplet. It has been given from old hand to young hand for five hundred years. It can never be replaced. The making of such beauty in bronze is lost to our craftspeople. This may seem little, when instead we have steel; but the ugly coppersmithing of today cannot uplift the soul, and this is but the smallest token of the emptiness within us. Who now sings the ancient epics, who now honors the ancient wisdom and righteousness? The links of kinship corrode, as youth mocks at age and wants its way in everything. And why not? Is not our whole world a mere dust-fleck adrift in limitless, meaningless hollowness? Are we ourselves anything save wind made flesh, chance-formed, impotent, and foredoomed? This is the teaching the strangers have sent seeping into us, a teaching of despair so deep that few of us even recognize it as despair.”
The harp rang. “But you have heard me chant this lay before. What of the present ga
thering? What shall we say?
“I bid you think. Yewwl has never hidden that she is the creature of an alien. What she does keep hidden is what that alien may have bidden her do, for its cold purposes. Long have they declared, at the House of the Banner, that we must not become dependent for our lives on things of theirs. This is true; but has it been a truth uttered to lull our wariness? For at last Yewwl proposes that we do indeed make such things necessary to our survival. I tell you, if that happens, we will be helpless before the demands of their makers. And what might those demands be? Who can tell? Yewwl herself admits she does not understand the strangers.
“Perhaps”—sarcasm ran venomous—“she is honest in her intent, in what she thinks she has said. Perhaps. But then, how can she hope to deal for us? What miscomprehensions might result, and what disasters follow? Better the glacier grind down across this whole country, and we flee to impoverished exile. At least we will remain free.
“Deny yonder witch. Cast her hence!”
The harp snarled to a finish.
Skogda sprang onto his bench, vanes wide. “You slime-soul, you dare speak thus of my mother!” he yelled. Almost, he launched himself against the Seeker. Two friends barely pulled him down and quieted him.
Erannda gave Yewwl a triumphant look. “That,” he murmured, “deserves I put a satire upon him, and upon you.”
—“Banner, what shall I do? I haven’t his word-skill. If he makes a poem against me, I will be unheeded in council for the rest of my world-faring.”
—“Oh! . . . But hold, Yewwl, don’t panic, stand fast. I thought about this, that you might someday run into just this danger, years ago. I didn’t discuss it with you, because it was a nasty subject, for you much more than for me; but I did prepare—”
Wion stirred on the dais. “It is a terrible thing you would do, Erannda,” he warned. “Worse than the outburst of a way-wearied young male calls for. Such excess could bring reproach on you and the whole College. Best let him humble himself to you.”
“I will that,” Erannda replied, “if his mother and her gang will abandon their crazy scheme.”
Banner had been whispering, fast and fiercely. The sense of her nearness in spirit sufficed by itself to kindle the heart anew. Yewwl stood forth and said:
“No. Are we not yet gorged with senseless rantings? What does he preach but fear and subservience—fear of tomorrow, subservience first to him and later to doom? Yes, the star-folk have caused changes, and in those changes is loss. But would you call it wrong that as your child grows, you lose the warmth of his little body in your pouch? Do you not, instead, rejoice to watch him soar forth?
“What threat have the star-folk ever been, save to those who would fetter us down and require we honor them into the bargain? The threat is from them, I tell you. If they prevail, everything we have achieved will perish, and likewise countless of us and our children and children’s children. Shall we not even have a chance to seek help?”
Her audience listened aghast. Nobody had ever defied a senior Seeker thus openly, and before the very Lord of the Volcano.
Yewwl’s words had been her own, following the advice she received from Banner. Having uttered them, she stalked toward Erannda, her vanes open, fur a-bristle, fangs bare. She said, before she herself could be appalled at what it was:
“I will lay a satire on you instead, old one, that all may ken you for what you truly are.”
He controlled his rage, made his harp laugh, and retorted, “You? And what poetics have you studied?”
“I begin,” she answered, halting close to him. And she declaimed Banner’s words, as they were given her:
“Wind, be the witness of this withering!
Carry abroad, crying, calling,
The name I shall name. Let nobody
Forget who the fool was, or fail
To know how never once the not-wise
Had counsel worth keeping, in time of care—”
“Stop!” he yelled. As he lurched back, his harp dropped to the clay floor.
He would have needed a night or longer to compose his satire. She threw hers at him, in perfect form, on the instant.
—“Don’t be vengeful,” Banner urged. “Leave him a way out.”
—“Oh, yes,” Yewwl agreed. Pity surprised her.
Erannda straightened, gathered around him what was left of his dignity, and said, almost too low to hear: “Lord of the Volcano, colleagues, clanfolk . . . I have opposed the proposal. I could possibly be mistaken. There is no mistaking that quarrels among us . . . like this . . . are worse than anything else that might happen. Better we be destroyed by outsiders than by each other. . . . I withdraw my opposition.”
He turned and stumbled toward his bench. On impulse, Yewwl picked up his harp and gave it to him.
After a hush, Wion said, not quite steadily, “If none has further speech, let the thing be done.”
The inscribed parchment felt stiff in her fingers, and somehow cold.
She tucked it carefully into her travel pack, which lay by her saddle. Not far off, her tethered onsar cropped, loud in the quietness roundabout. Yewwl had wanted a while alone, to bring her whirling thoughts back groundward. Now she walked toward the camp, for they would be making Oneness.
They were out on the plain. The short, stiff nullfire that grew here glowed in the last light of the sun, a red step pyramid enormous amidst horizon mists. Lurid colors in the west gave way to blue-gray that, eastward, deepened to purple. In the north, Mount Gungnor was an uplooming of blackness; flames tinged the smoke of it, which blurred a moon. Northwestward the oncoming storm towered, flashed, and rumbled. The air was cold and getting colder. It slid sighing around Yewwl, stirring her fur.
Ahead, a fire ate scrubwood that the party had collected and waxed ever more high and more high. She heard it brawl, she began to feel its warmth. They were six who spread their vanes to soak up that radiance. The others were already homebound. Skogda, his retainer and companion Ych (oh, memory), Zh of Arachan were male; Yewwl’s retainers Iyaai and Kuzhinn, and Ngaru of Raava, were female; Yewwl herself made the seventh. More were not needed. Maybe seven were too many. But they had wanted to go, from loyalty to her or from clan-honor, and she could not deny them.
Let them therefore make Oneness, and later rest a while; then she would call Banner, who would be standing by about the time that Fathermoon rose. And the ship would come—the new ship, whereof a part could hold breathable air—and carry them east at wizard speed.
Yewwl winced. She had not liked lying before the assembly. Yet she must. Else Wion would never have understood why she needed a credential which, undated as was usual, made no mention, either, of cooperation by the star-folk. After all, he would have asked, were they not star-folk too in—?—but he would have failed to remember what the place was called, Dukeston. Yewwl herself had trouble doing that, when the noise was practically impossible to utter.
She likewise had trouble comprehending that star-folk could be at strife, and in the deadly way Banner had intimated. Why? How? What did it portend? The idea was as bewildering as it was terrifying. But she must needs keep trust in her oath-sister.
Oneness would comfort, bring inner peace and the strength to go onward. Skogda had started to beat a tomtom, Kuzhinn to pipe forth a tune. Feet were beginning to move in the earliest rhythms of dance. Zh cast fragrant herbs onto the fire.
It would be an ordinary Oneness, for everybody was not perfectly familiar with everybody else. They would just lose themselves in dance, in music, in chanted words, in winds and distances, until they ceased to have names; finally the world would have no name. Afterward would be sleep, and awakening renewed. Was this remotely akin to what Banner called, in her language, “worship?” No, worship involved a supposed entity dwelling beyond the stars—
Yewwl put that question from her. It was too reminding of the strangeness she would soon enter, not as an emissary—whatever she pretended—but as a spy. She hastened toward her folk.
Clouds made night out of dusk, save again and again when lightning coursed among them. Then it was as if every huge raindrop stood forth to sight, while thunder, in that thick air, was like being under bombardment. Though the wind thrust hard, it was slow, its voice more drumroll than shriek. The rain fell almost straight down, but struck in explosive violence. Through it winged those small devil shapes that humans called storm bats.
Hooligan descended. Even using her detectors, it had not been easy, in such weather, to home on Yewwl’s communicator. It might have been impossible, had Banner not supplied landmarks for radars and infrascopes to pick out. Nor was it easy to land; Flandry and the vessel’s systems must work together, and he felt how sweat ran pungent over his skin after he was down.
But time was likely too short for a sigh of relief and a cigarette. He swept a searchbeam about, and found the encampment. The Ramnuans were busy striking a tent they had raised for shelter, a sturdy affair of hide stretched over poles. He swore at the delay. They’d have no use for the thing where they were bound—except, of course, to help make plausible their story that they had fared overland. He might as well have that smoke.
And talk to Banner. He keyed for her specially rigged extension. “Hello. Me. We’re here,” he said, hearing every word march by on little platitude feet.
“Yes, I see,” came her voice from Wainwright Station. More remoteness blurred it than lay in the hundreds of kilometers between them. She was hooked into her co-experience circuit, she was with Yewwl and of Yewwl. The extension was audio only because there would have been no point in scanning her face; she never looked away from the screen. Yet Flandry would have given much for a glimpse of her.
“Anything happen since I left?” he asked, mainly against a silence that the racket of the gale deepened.
Flandry's Legacy: The Technic Civilization Saga Page 11
