Across the Great Barrier fm-2

by Patricia C. Wrede

  Mama’s letters were mostly family news and fussing about me eating right and behaving like a lady. She said Professor Jeffries sent his regards, and Professor Graham had been ill but was feeling better.

  Lan’s letter was next. He was still complaining about Professor Warren. They’d rubbed each other wrong from the start, and Lan wasn’t too happy about having to work with him all summer on the spell classifications. He was particularly worked up about a Hijero-Cathayan spell for digging out a new lake that he and his friends thought should be like a standard Avrupan excavation spell, but that Professor Warren thought should be in the same class as the Major Spells, like calling a storm or calming the ocean. I still didn’t understand half what Lan said, but it was pretty clear he didn’t mean me to. He just wanted someone to grumble at who wouldn’t argue back.

  I saved William’s letter for last. He said that building railroad cars was heavy work and he didn’t much like it, but it paid well enough, and after that he talked about all the studying he was doing evenings. He especially wanted to take a class that compared all the different types of magic, particularly the three main schools. Since he already knew a good bit of Avrupan magic and had a passing familiarity with Aphrikan, he was studying up on Hijero-Cathayan magic to get ready. He asked how I was liking the Far West and whether I’d seen any interesting critters or had any adventures yet. He didn’t ask if I’d heard anything from home.

  After I read my mail, I added a bit to each of the letters I’d been writing in the evenings. I’d already told everyone about the saber cats (though when I’d written Mama and Lan, I’d made it sound a bit safer than it really was). I told Lan and William that they were both studying the same kind of magic and they should maybe talk to each other, and I told William what Mama had said about his father.

  Then I sat and looked at my letter to Mama for a long time. I’d already said as much about the settlements and the survey as I thought she’d be interested in hearing, but I’d been puzzled as to what to say about Rennie, so I hadn’t yet said anything at all.

  Mama had been prostrated when Rennie eloped, and they hadn’t seen each other since, because Rennie hadn’t been back to Mill City. Mama didn’t talk much about her, either, not even to worry about her living out in the settlements. They’d written letters, though, ever since little Albert was born. And Mama had quizzed Papa and me and Lan as much as she could manage when we came back from visiting Oak River last summer.

  Finally, I started with the children. A year makes for a big change in childings, and I knew Mama would want to hear every detail, even if Rennie had already written her with all of them. When I finished, I thought some more.

  Rennie looked tired, but otherwise well, I wrote at last. I think it wears on her that she hasn’t been away from Oak River for six years. I’d started to write since she was married, but I didn’t want to remind Mama of any unpleasantness. I certainly didn’t want to bring up the anti-magic notions that were growing in the settlement. Maybe we could invite them to visit in the fall, after they’re done with the harvesting? With the boys gone, we have lots of room for them to stay.

  I signed my name and sealed up the letter without reading it over, then gave it to Wash to take to the settlement branch office before I could think better of it. I liked rattling around the big old house since everyone except me, Allie, and Robbie had gone. Sometimes, though, you have to do things for family, even if you’d rather not. I figured I could stand it for a month or so if Rennie came to visit. I just hoped that if it came to it, Mama would be happier for seeing Rennie face-to-face.

  I expected to have a restless night, but I slept like a log. The next day, we took our return letters to the settlement branch office to send out, then spent the morning buying supplies. In the afternoon, the professor and I went down to the river to count plants and animals, and the day after, we left.

  We followed the Red River north for a while, then cut east through a dead forest. A few of the trees had tufts of green leaves on one or two branches, but most of them had been killed outright by the grubs. “Keep an eye out,” Wash said, pointing to several of the trees that were leaning to one side or the other. “If one starts to go down, it’ll knock a string of others over.”

  The professor and I nodded. We got a close-up look at what Wash meant a half hour later, when we had to find a way around a huge tangle of fallen trees. It took us an hour, and we hit two more before we got out of the forested area.

  “It’s a good thing we’re past nesting season for cinderdwellers,” the professor said after we passed the second blow-down. “The last thing we need is a wildfire in a dead wood.”

  “Cinderdwellers don’t go for the forests,” Wash said. “They’re a plains bird.”

  “Grass fires spread. And this is nothing but a woodpile; all it would take is a spark.”

  “Too true.” Wash nodded. “All we can do is hope for a string of wet summers, the next few years.”

  “Wet enough for quickrot to get a good hold,” the professor agreed. “At least there’s been plenty of rain so far this summer.”

  I stared at them for a minute, then looked at the forest with new eyes. All the dead trees would be drying out more and more as time went by, and there were so many of them…. There’d be no stopping a fire, once one got started. Fire protection spells were difficult and draining, so a lot of people didn’t bother with trying to find someone to cast them on their homes or even just their roof. Also, the spells only helped keep a fire from starting — they weren’t much good against something that was already burning. I wondered what the settlements would do if the forest around them caught fire.

  Suddenly, Wash pulled his horse to a stop. His eyes were fixed on the upper branches of a tree about thirty feet in front of us. Near the top was a big untidy mess of old leaves, like an extra-large squirrel’s nest. “Razorquarls,” he told the professor and me without looking at us. “Back up.”

  I swallowed hard. Razorquarls were nearly as bad as swarming weasels, and a lot more mobile. Their teeth and claws were bigger and sharper than weasels’, and their legs were longer. They had a fold of skin that they could stretch out between their front and back legs to make a kind of wing, so that they could even fly short distances. They looked a little like misshapen black squirrels, and about the only halfway good thing about them was that there weren’t ever very many of them. Still, even three or four was too many.

  The professor looked up at the tree, nodded once, and then realized Wash wasn’t looking at her. “Right,” she said in a low voice.

  The two of us backed our horses a few steps, then turned them and rode slowly away. I heard Wash start a sort of muttering, half chant and half hum, and I felt the prickle of magic down my arms. “How far?” I said softly to the professor.

  “Here,” she said, reining in. “Any more and we’ll ride out of the travel protection spells. I don’t think that would be a good idea just now.”

  We waited. After about ten minutes, the feel of magic lessened and Wash rode back to join us. He gave us each an approving nod and said, “They’ll sleep for two hours, if nothing rouses them. We’ll take the long way around.”

  As we went farther into the forest, the trees started looking less and less dead. It only took me a little while to figure out why. It was just like Oak River — the grubs had been attracted to magic, and the settlement protection spells were the strongest magic around. Wherever there was enough space between settlements, the grubs had been drawn away and hadn’t done as much damage.

  What with avoiding the razorquarls and all the blow-downs, we hadn’t gotten anywhere near the Promised Land settlement by nightfall and we had to camp in the forest. It was the first time on the trip that we’d spent the night outside a wagonrest or settlement, but it didn’t feel too different, except that we didn’t dare start a cookfire in case a spark got into all the dead wood. We made do with jerky and dried apples, and Wash didn’t even grumble about having no coffee. He and the professo
r set extra-strong spells around our camp, and we took turns watching all night, just in case something nasty came along, anyway. I had the last watch, but all I saw was a white-tailed deer, just before dawn, that bounded away when I moved too suddenly.

  We finally reached Promised Land at mid-morning. From the moment we rode out of the forest into the cleared fields, I knew it wasn’t the same as the other settlements we’d seen. It felt different, for one thing. I’d gotten used to the cold feeling of the grub-ravaged settlements; it leaked through even when I wasn’t doing any world-sensing. But Promised Land felt different — not normal and warm, exactly, but not so bitterly cold as the other places we’d been.

  As Wash led us around the fields, I looked for the settlement itself. It took me a minute to find it. Most settlements are on top of a hill, with a high log wall around them and all the houses crowded inside. Promised Land was spread out on flat ground at the far edge of the fields. There was a log wall around part of it, but it only came up about as high as my shoulder. The houses looked short, too, and they weren’t made of logs or boards like the ones I was used to seeing. Their walls looked like bushes, all bare and twiggy. People were moving among them, and there were several folk on the far side of the fields with hoes. The whole place was a lot bigger than I was expecting.

  “Looks like an interesting place,” Professor Torgeson commented with a sidelong look at Wash. “Well established.”

  I didn’t blame the professor for sounding surprised. Except for a few trading towns like St. Jacques du Fleuve, I’d thought all the settlements this far west were only a year old, two at most. The first settlers to come west of the Great Barrier Spell had mostly stuck close to the Mammoth River, so they could get back to safety quick and easy if there was need. The rest of the North Plains Territory had been slowly filling up from there. Nobody wanted to go too far if they didn’t have to, on account of so many people not coming back.

  “Promised Land was settled shortly after the war,” Wash said. “Officially.”

  “Officially?” I asked.

  Wash tipped his hat back and looked out over the fields. “Unofficially, this was one of the latest and last endpoints of the Underground Railroad.”

  CHAPTER 14

  PROFESSOR TORGESON GAVE WASH A DISAPPROVING LOOK. “You might have mentioned that earlier, Mr. Morris,” she said, and then started right in asking questions. Wash spent the rest of the ride answering them.

  A few years before the Secession War, the abolitionists who ran the Underground Railroad had started having problems hiding and protecting the slaves they’d helped escape to freedom in the North. Some of the Southern plantation owners started putting tracking spells and control spells on slaves they figured were especially dangerous or likely to run away. A bunch of abolitionists got arrested as a result, and a whole batch of people who thought they’d gotten away ended up being sent back into slavery.

  So the Northern abolitionists decided they needed some help. They went to the anti-slavery advocates from New Asante and Tswala and all the rest of the Aphrikan colonies in South Columbia. The South Columbians had been working on stopping the slave trade for years. Some of them wanted to stick to diplomacy and economic methods, but there were plenty of others who were willing to send money and magicians to help out.

  The first thing they did was find ways to interfere with the tracking and control spells so that slaves could get away safely. Then they had to figure out where to send them, and someone thought of the Western Territories.

  Back then, nobody but a few squatters lived west of the Mammoth River. The magicians in the Frontier Management Department were still working on inventing protection spells to keep the wildlife away from settlers and travelers, and there was still a good bit of safe land east of the river that hadn’t been settled yet, so most folks felt that heading West wasn’t worth the risk.

  But the South Columbian magicians had developed their own ways of dealing with the wildlife, on account of not having a Great Barrier Spell to protect part of their colonies, and everyone agreed that no one would look for runaway slaves in the West. Even if someone followed a slave up to the river, they’d figure that once he crossed, the wildlife would get him for sure, so they’d quit looking.

  The abolitionists started sending runaway slaves west to hidden settlements in the unexplored territory. Seven different South Columbian colonies sent money to pay for seed and tools, and magicians to teach the Aphrikan magic they used to protect their own towns. The settlements did pretty well for being new and unprotected; Wash said they had fewer deaths than the first few years’ worth of settlements that the Settlement Office approved later on.

  When the Western Territories opened up for settlement right after the Secession War, some of the hidden ex-slave settlements applied for official recognition. Others pretended they were ordinary groups of settlers applying for allotments. There was some trouble over it, until the Settlement Office pointed out that all the ex-slave settlements were so far away from the Mammoth River that nobody else wanted to live there, anyway.

  Promised Land was one of the last batch of hidden settlements that the abolitionists and ex-slaves had set up. It was founded in the 1820s, just before the Secession War. By then, the abolitionists and the South Columbians really knew what they were doing, so the settlement had done well right from the start. They’d picked a site along one of the creeks that fed the Red River, where there were plenty of trees for building. Just below the town, the creek flattened out into wetlands full of black rice that the settlers could harvest, and they had the trading camp up the river, which became St. Jacques du Fleuve, where they could trade furs for tools and seed with Gaulish trappers who didn’t care one way or the other about them being former slaves.

  To hear Wash tell it, the settlers were actually pretty relieved when the Secession War broke out, because once it did, they didn’t have to fret over the Southern states getting the Frontier Management Department to send any ex-slaves they caught back to the owners they’d run away from. The settlers were even better pleased when President John Sergeant signed the Abolition Proclamation forbidding slavery anywhere in the United States of Columbia or its territories.

  After the war, Promised Land was one of the first of the hidden settlements to get all official with the new Homestead Claims and Settlement Office. They’d been growing at a good clip for the past nineteen years, some from the childings I could see running around and some from new settlers moving up from the Southern states.

  By the time Wash finished up all his explaining, we were close in to the settlement, and I could tell that the houses weren’t bushes after all. The walls were made of twigs woven together, like the chairs some of the lumbermen made, and the houses were short because they were partly dug into the ground. I wondered what they were like in winter. The settlement was about thirty years old; they had to be warm enough, or people would have changed to a different kind of building.

  “Folks here look to be a lot better off than most of the settlements we’ve been to,” I said.

  “Promised Land didn’t have quite such a bad time of things with the grubs,” Wash said. “They only lost about half their regular crop, and they had the black rice to fall back on.” Seeing my curious expression, he went on, “Black rice grows in shallow water; any grubs that tried to get at it drowned.”

  “Only half the crop,” Professor Torgeson said thoughtfully. “That’s interesting. I wonder why that would be? The woodlands here are as dead as everywhere else.”

  Wash shrugged, looking uncomfortable. “Promised Land was settled before the magicians in Washington worked out the settlement protection spells, and they weren’t official, anyway, so they had to work out other ways to keep safe from the wildlife. What they do must not have been quite so interesting to the grubs as the regular spells.”

  “Are the other settlements established by the South Columbians in similarly good shape?” the professor asked.

  “I’m afraid I don�
��t know, Professor,” Wash said. “Most of them are down in the Middle Plains Territory, or even farther south. This is the only one on my circuit.”

  The professor hmphed. “And probably the only one affected by the grubs, then; I don’t think the dratted things got down to the Middle Plains. Still, we’ll have to look into it. Do you know what spells these people use in place of the standard settlement protection spells?”

  “You’ll have to ask them,” Wash said.

  The professor narrowed her eyes at him. “I’ll do that, Mr. Morris.”

  Right about then, six childings came running toward us, yelling Wash’s name. Their ages ranged from six or seven to around sixteen, I thought, and their skin tone from a deep tan to black as widow’s weeds. Wash pulled up and called out, “Lattie, Tam, all of you — stop right there! You know better than to chance spooking a horse.”

  The childings slowed to a walk, but they kept on coming. “Stop, I said,” Wash told them. “Else I’ll stable these horses myself, and send you all off to tell Mr. Ajani and Mrs. Turner exactly why I’m slow coming to see them.”

  All of the childings froze instantly. I was impressed. Either those childings thought Mr. Ajani and Mrs. Turner were fearsome people, or else they really, really liked being the ones who stabled Wash’s horse.

  Wash dismounted, and the professor and I followed. “Now, then,” Wash said, studying the group. “Jefferson, Siri, Martin, why don’t you take the horses, and Chrissy can follow to make sure you do a good job.” He winked at the littlest childing, who straightened up proudly. “Lattie, if you would go tell Mr. Ajani —”

  One of the girls stepped forward, scowling. “Who are they?” she demanded, waving at Professor Torgeson and me. “Why did you bring them? They’re Avrupans!”

  “No, we’re not,” I said without thinking.

  Lattie stuck her nose up in the air. “I wasn’t talking to you. And you are so Avrupan.”