Analog Science Fiction and Fact - July-Agust 2014
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Analog Science Fiction and Fact
Kindle Edition, 2014 © Penny Publications
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The Journeyman: Against the Green
Michael F. Flynn | 18716 words
Illustrated by Tomislav Tikulin
"The Road goes ever on and on down from the door where it began."
—J. R. R. Tolkien
A Rise to the Top
Teodorq sunna Nagarajan the Ironhand was sparring with Filovolos Jo at the longsword when the princess Anya entered the practice yard dressed in her hunting leathers and summoned the yar commanding the legion as if he were a mere servant. The Foreign Legion consisted of men pressed with varying degrees of willingness into the services of the kospathin of Cliffside Keep. Some were men who had fled their homelands for reasons well and true, but some like Teodorq had simply been passing through the fodanny of House Tiger and had been given the choice of service or the Spit.
The princess handed Yar Yoodavig a scrap of parchment that he held close to his nose, as if he were sniffing out the runes. Then he nodded. "Overnight pass in order," he announced in the shortgrass plavver that the legion used as a common tongue. "Teodorq, follow the lady and do what she says."
Sammi o' th' Eagles speculated in the hill lingo on the nature of the services to be rendered, and Karakalan sunna Vikeram volunteered that he could render far better service than "the yngling." But the princess turned on him and repeated in heavily accented sprock a number of words that women on the Great Grass did not use. Like her uncle, she had been learning the languages of the Far West. Just in case the ironclad horsemen that followed the Little Father of the North thought to send their lances in that direction.
The princess mounted beside an armored eridzar named Matyas, leaving Teodorq to follow on foot. "Don't worry," Anya told him. "It isn't far."
Teodorq shrugged and began to tell her of the time he had walked twenty ridings through the Great Grass after the Pheasants had killed his horse from under him for innocently over-branding a few of their calves. But the princess turned sharply about and kicked her steed into motion. Teodorq, caught in mid-story, looked to the eridzar, but that worthy had slid closed the visor on his iron hat and paid him no mind.
On the Great Grass, even the veriest youth would hop a-horseback rather than walk, even if to visit the tent aside his own. But he could walk if need be, and this seemed one of those times.
The kettle-head rode in the fore and bellowed a path through the village for the lady. Teodorq brought up the rear and enjoyed an edifying view of the lady's horse, but stepped nimbly to avoid the consequences. Dogs challenged their progress; chickens chuckled and scurried out of the way. A hauler clattered a load of charcoal into a bunker beside the smithy. Now and then, Teodorq spotted men he had met and women he would like to meet and greeted them cheerfully, as if the progress were his and the lady and knight merely his escorts.
Cliffside Keep lay at the base of a tall, sheer scarp that ran along the northern edge of World as far as anyone had traveled. That people lived atop the plateau had been known since the Fall from Heaven, but there had been no encounter between the high-up folk and the bottomlands until now.
A handful of generations before, men in iron suits had descended from a southward spur of the plateau to build stone fastnesses along its base, driving off the shortgrassmen who had lived there since the creation of World. Cliffside Keep itself sat at the very tip of the spur and warded the passage between the prairie to the west and the forest to the east. Teodorq, who had lived most of his life on the horizontal, was unclear how this vertical feat had been accomplished, although he supposed it might be easier to jump off a cliff than to climb up.
On the western face of the spur an enormous fall of water created a wide mist-shrouded lake choked with cat-tails and lily pads, and gave birth to a daughter river that meandered southwest, away from the village. But a portion of the fall had been captured in sluices directed toward an array of great wooden wheels, turning them at various speeds. The plainsman knew a moment of awe that these people had not only tamed iron, but commanded the very gravity of World.
According to the Lore of the Great Grass, the first men had possessed preternatural powers, called hiteq in the languages of hill, plains, and prairie alike; and Teodorq might have inclined to call these sluices and water-wheels hiteq, save that he had once seen the wreckage of Shuttle Starbright–17 out near the western edge of the shortgrass. This shuttle had tumbled from the sky in the Long Ago and still hosted puissant hiteq watched over by Jamly-the-ghost, a drawing that somehow moved and spoke. He and Sammi had escaped from Jamly only by accepting commissions from the Commonwealth of Suns to search out the villages of the star men and send succor. Teodorq did not believe that there was any longer a Commonwealth of Suns or that its commission meant anything; but it had gotten them safely away, and he continued to paint the three red stripes across his biceps and ask after the two towns Jamly had told him to seek. So far, no one had aught of them.
Each water-wheel was affixed to a shed and through the open doors of one Teodorq saw that the wheel rotated numerous fixtures on its axle. A toothed wheel turned a millstone. A smooth half-oval raised and dropped an enormous hammer onto a slab of glowing iron. This was the thumping sound he had been hearing ever since coming to the stronghold. Still a third worked a bellows blowing air into a furnace of red-hot charcoal. Iron moved smoothly from furnace to trip-hammer to grinding wheel.
Teodorq had paused to contemplate the work and, either sensing this or expecting it, Lady Anya paused a few paces ahead and turned in her saddle. "What do you think of our 'quarter of industriousness,' my westland wildling?"
Teodorq schooled his face to betray no emotion. Cool was drummed into a plainsman from childhood. His initial awe had given way to a keen observation. He did not know how these devices were made—only later did he learn words like "cam" and "crank" and "crown gear"—but he owned a keen geometrical sense and quickly discerned how they transformed the downward force of the waterfall into the rotary motion of the great wheel and then into the reciprocal motions of the various implements. He even deduced that the force and speed of the bellows, hammers, and wheels depended on the strength of the water's current and the drop of the fall, to which the princess gave the names "amperage" and "voltage." And no sooner had he wondered how the ironmen kept the wooden members from rubbing themselves aflame than he saw a workman inside the shed apply a swab of grease to a moving joint to "lower the resistance."
The prairieman nodded his head in approval and answered that the work seemed efficiently arranged and he expected the forgings to be more uniform than those the smithy wrought by hand, but that the smith would no doubt need to carry out the fine work. Whether this was the answer the princess had looked for, or indeed even the kind of answer she had looked for, she made no sign but turned about and motioned Matyas to continue their progress. Her uncle, she said, was waiting for them.
Finally, the party cut between two wheel houses and proceeded to the base of the cliff. There, twin scaffolds were attached to the face of the precipice, and Teodorq could not help but tilt his head back to follow their skyward progress. A barred cage hung from ropes inside the right-hand scaffold. The axle of a nearby wheelhouse was attached to a wheel there, but it was not turning.
When the princess stepped into the cage, Teodorq hesitated—caging was a punishment on the Great Grass—and the kettle-head, mistaking his hesitancy, spoke for the first time in their sojourn. "Don't worry, walshiq. It's safe. Kind of."
"Stairs climb between scaffolds," Teodorq pointed out in passable yashiq.
Teo resolutely stepped within the cage. A yeoman joined them, closed the gate on the cage, and checked that it was securely latched. Then he spoke into a tube. "Everything eyoké. Five, four, three, two, one, nishin."
Something in the wheelhouse thumped and the water-wheel began turning. When it was up to speed, something else thumped and the axle attached to the scaffold began turning with it. Ropes grew taught and took the strain and the cage began rising. Teodorq gripped the bars tightly. "We have lift-off," said the yeoman just before the speaking tube detached and swung away.
Teodorq saw the ground dropping away beneath him, and swallowed his vertigo. Life on the Great Grass was primarily horizontal. He had never been higher off the ground than the back of his horse. This was hiteq indeed! But he kept his cool. Corridors in the wrecked shuttle had gone off in wrong directions, too; and he wondered if they were not some more magical rendition of the vertical cart he now rode.
"Well?" said the princess with a sly expectation. "Aren't you afraid?"
Teodorq turned to her, suddenly alarmed. "You mean it's not supposed to do this?"
The princess scowled. The kettle-head turned his face away and bit down hard on his lip. The yeoman pretended to be deaf. But the cage was clearly intended to be raised or lowered by a block-and-tackle; so why should it amaze him that it did so? The genuine marvel had been the water-wheels. He had never before seen anything moved other than by the muscle power of man or beast. But when he fell to considering, he thought that a harness thrown on water or wind would surely accomplish similar results to a harness thrown on a horse.
A Glimpse of a Sun
The cage stopped at the top of the cliff and men there made it fast. Teodorq stepped out of the cliff-climber into the courtyard of a strong, stone keep. The Wisdom was waiting for him. The lady's uncle owned a peculiar interest in the things of the world: making maps, preparing simples and compounds, comparing languages, and preserving specimens of animals and plants. A lover of the wisdom of nature, he styled himself—as well as a canny advisor to his brother, the kospathin.
"Welcome to Top-of-World," he said, tugging his long white beard. "Matyas, show our young legionnaire to the barracks, then bring him to me in the Eye-room."
The Eye-room proved to be an open patio atop a tall tower on the south wall. There, the Wisdom waited with a servant and a table set with wine and a charcoal brazier. On a tripod beside the table was affixed a brass tube. Teodorq looked about with interest and noted a breath-taking vista of the countryside below. The shortgrass prairie rolled away to the west, disappearing into the haze of distance. On the east, a broad, farm-filled valley rose toward a bluish, tree-covered ridge. Southward, past the hunting preserve in which he and Sammi had been captured, Teodorq thought he could just make out the edge of the swamplands. Everything looked very small, like the toy horses and men oft fashioned for children. Despite being closer to Sun, the air was sensibly cooler than on the lowlands.
"Yuh can see almost to the edge of World," he said in admiration.
The princess laughed, but the Wisdom stroked his beard and asked carefully, "What shape do you suppose World has?"
Teodorq had never given the shape of World much thought. He was more interested in the shape of the landscape immediately about him, where an enemy might lie hidden in the enveloping grass or in the ravines out among the Breaks. "Most say that World is a flat blanket," he said, "over which the tent of the sky has been thrown—the Big Top, we call it."
"Most say. But what does Teo say?"
Teodorq desired above all else to keep the good will of the Wisdom. It had been the gray-beard's interest in the Commonwealth of Suns that had saved him from a seat on the kospathin's Spit. "On the Great Grass," he said slowly, "World runs in all directions as flat as makes no difference, and one may see Sun and Sperm and the other gods roll across the Big Top. So it ain't too surprising folks think that. But it seems to me that if World was a flat blanket, Sun would rise at the same time everywhere, but take longer to come over the center of the blanket than over the east. Yet, as Teodorq sunna Nagarajan the Ironhand traveled east, I saw noon come no sooner after sunrise. So I figger World is curved, more like the back of a giant turtle."
The Wisdom grinned and favored the princess with a significant look. "There, you see?" Then, to Teodorq, "World is actually a great ball around which moons and suns and wanderers turn. And the wanderers are not gods, but other spheres just like World. Two have brilliant rings. Several have moons that put our paltry two to shame.
Teodorq thought the remarks impolitic. If the wanderers were not gods, there was no harm. But if they were, they might take such comments amiss and bring on hail storms and tornados. He settled for a noncommittal, "How 'bout that."
The tableland to the north was garbed with sedge and bright flowers and strange, needle-bearing trees. A bright blue lake glistened in the cold sunlight, neatly blocking any approach from that direction and feeding the waterfall that powered the industrial quarter. Beyond the lake, a meadow rich with violet wild-flowers hosted a strange giant deer on long, spindly legs, whose dolorous face was crowned by a heavy rack.
"Those are losse," the Wisdom said. "Also called 'moose' in Eastern Yashiq. They appear clumsy and ungainly, but it is unwise to approach them. They and the grizzlebar rule the thoogu."
"The thoogu," Teodorq repeated. "A strange land."
"And yet not without its beauty. Vokh, the one-God, gave it to our people in times before memory, when we were expelled from the heavens into this vale of tears."
All the folk that Teodorq had encountered told the same tale—in the hill country, on the Great Grass, on the shortgrass, and now here on the thoogu. Man at first had wielded preternatural powers in a wondrous land of plenty, but through sin had fallen into a harsh and unforgiving life. He recalled what Jamly-the-ghost had said about the ancient fight in the sky with the People of Sand and Iron, and thought perhaps the Fall had been no more than literal truth, burnished a little from the polish of many tellings.
Shading his eyes, Teodorq could make out another fortress farther north on the far side of the lake.
"That is House Lynex," said the Wisdom, matching Teodorq's gaze. "Like House Tiger, they have come off the Shield to honor the Little Father. To the northeast you can see House Losse. Here, use the far-seer." He introduced Teodorq to the brass tube and showed him how to use it.
When Teodorq peered through the tube, everything seemed to leap toward him and it took all his cool not to flinch. But he recalled that the Wisdom used glass on his eyes to make runes appear closer, and supposed this only an extension of that art.
The stronghold off to the northeast was small, even with the look-glass. There was a hint of a cliff climber on the face below it, and Teo guessed that a sawak like Cliffside Keep lay at its base. Then he turned the tube on the lowlands to the east. "What's beyond that there ridge?" he asked. "Another valley, much like ours but uncleared," the Wisdom answered. "The Nobeshtinny. Beyond that a great forest and the unknown."
"Anybody live there?"
"A few settlers and freeholders. The forest men have been cleared off of Woody Ridge by our legion, save for outlaw gangs. But they have villages in the Great Eastern Forest and in parts of the Nobeshtinny. They are less accomplished than the shortgrass men. They hunt and garden in clearings they make by barking trees, but unlike the 'sodbusters' they have no plows."
Teodorq shortly found what he knew must be: watchtowers planted among the trees at the crest of Woody Ridge. He grunted in satisfaction. The Wisdom's saddle was not uncinched. The bear went over the mountain, Sammi's folk were wont to say. He imagined armsmen were posted in the towers with look-glasses very like this one, and for the same reason that had motivated the bear. To see what they could see.
"What's out yonder," he asked, "that you need the watchtowers?" Not the forestmen, he thought. There were no such watcht
owers on the short grass.
The Wisdom tugged on his beard and scowled at the horizon. "The greenies," he said. "Unhuman creatures, green of flesh, who fight with thunder and lightning. They have only appeared in this generation to bedevil the forest men beyond the Nobeshtinny Valley."
That can't be good, Teodorq told himself. He remembered his oath to the Commonwealth of Suns had pledged defense against "all enemies, human and inhuman," and he half-consciously rubbed the three stripes.
The Wisdom rubbed his hands. "Ah, here comes the princess, and Great Sun is near setting."
Teodorq glanced at the brass tube, then at the reddening sky, and finally and more appreciatively at the approaching girl. She was bundled up in furs against the chill and her breath made puffs of white.
"It is the wrong time of year for looking at the Commonwealth..." The Wisdom meant the milky band of light that ran across the winter sky, not the league of sky-villages that Jamly-the-ghost had described. "... but will you trust me if I tell you that the look-glass shows it to be made of myriads of individual lights?"
"Of course." Teo's people had called the milky band the Treasure Fleet. "Jamly told us that they once formed a vast Commonwealth headed by the village called 'Terra.'"
"They were masters of all arts," the Wisdom agreed, "those men of the Long Ago. Our legends tell us they 'touched the genes of men.'"
"What are genes?"
The Wisdom shrugged. "No man knows, but we have usually taken it to mean the 'heart' or 'core' or 'inmost being' of men."
"It's getting cold, Uncle," complained the princess. "Show him what you fetched him up to show, so we can all bundle up and wait for the morning splashdown."
"Did you suitably awe him as you said you would?" the Wisdom asked in the yashiq, perhaps not kenning how much of the ironmen's talk Teodorq already grasped.