Down in The Bottomlands (and Other Places)

by Harry Turtledove

  “Good. I will call soon. May I also use the wirecaller now, to let my own people know I am all right? They will be wondering after me.”

  “Of course,” Pauljuu said again. “Come this way.”

  He stood up to take Park to wherever he kept the phone. Park rose too. As he followed Pauljuu out, Kuurikwiljor called after him, “Thank you for looking after me so.” Fortunately, Pauljuu’s house had high doors and tall ceilings. Otherwise, Park thought, he was so swelled up with pride that he might have bumped his head on them.

  He let Pauljuu place the call for him. Before long, he heard Eric Dunedin’s reedy voice on the other end of the line. “Hallow-uh, Judge Scoglund!” Monkey-face exclaimed. “Are you hale? Where have you been? With the burg all bestirred by the goodwain blast, I was afeared after you!”

  “I’m fine, Eric, and among friends.” Park repeated himself in Ketjwa for Pauljuu’s benefit, then returned to English: “I’ll be home soon. See you then. Take care of yourself. ’Bye.” He put the mouthpiece back into the big square box on the wall, said his goodbyes to Pauljuu, and started back to the small house he and Dunedin were sharing.

  He whistled as he walked north through the streets of Kuuskoo. He hadn’t met a woman like Kuurikwiljor since — since he came to this world, he thought, and that was a goodly while now. She was pretty, had some brains, and seemed to think well of him. He liked the combination, liked it a lot.

  Of course, he reminded himself as he walked a little farther, one reason she interested him so much was that he hadn’t had much to do with women since he’d come here. Celtic Christian bishops were depressingly celibate, and he’d stayed discreet even after he left the church. Judges didn’t have to avoid women, but they did need to keep away from scandal.

  Yes, Park thought, if Kuurikwiljor were just one of the girls I was seeing, I might think she was pretty ordinary. But at the moment, she was the only girl he was seeing. That automatically made her special. Park grinned a wolfly grin. He’d enjoy whatever happened, and keep his wits about him while he did so.

  Keeping his wits about him meant taking a wide detour around the plaza of Kuusipata. He hadn’t had a good look at the gunmen there. For all he knew, they could have been converted Skrellings. Even so, the locals, especially those near the square, were liable to be jumpy about anyone who looked foreign. Better safe, he thought.

  He never found out whether his precautions were needed. He did get home safe and sound, which was the idea. Tawantijnsuujan doors had neither knockers nor bells. A polite person here clapped his hands outside a house and waited to be admitted. At the moment, Park didn’t care whether he was polite by local standards. He pounded on the door.

  From the speed with which Dunedin opened it, he must have been waiting just inside. His welcoming smile turned into a grimace of dismay when he saw his master. “Hallow Patrick’s shinbone!” he gasped. “What befell you?”

  “What are you talking about?” Park said irritably. “I’m downrightly fine — nothing wrong with me at all. I mistrust I need a bath, but that’s no big dealing. Why are you looking at me as if I just grew a twoth head?” Dunedin’s smile returned, hesitantly. “You do, ah, sound like your ain self, Judge Scoglund. Maybe you ock to peer into the spickle-glass, though-”

  Park let his servant lead him to the mirror. His jaw dropped as he stood in front of it. He looked as though he’d been through a war-on the losing side. He was dirty, his cloak was ripped, and there was blood both on it and on the side of his face.

  He’d seen how bedraggled Kuurikwiljor was after the truck blew up, yet never thought to wonder whether he was the same. As a matter of fact, he wasn’t the same. He was worse. “It’s not my blood,” he said, feeling like a fool.

  “Praise God and the hallows for that,” Dunedin said. “Now shall I get the bath you spoke of ready?”

  “Aye, put the kettle on,” Park said. Kuuskoo had cold running water, but not hot, and cold water here was cold water. The judge looked at himself again. He was filthy. “I’m near lured into not waiting for it.”

  “When you were bishop, you’d have been well bethock for mortifying your flesh so,” Dunedin said. “Shall I draw you a cold bath, then?”

  “Hell, no! I’m not bishop any more, thank God, and my flesh came too damn close to being mortified for good this afternoon, thank you very much.”

  Dunedin’s eyes got big. Hearing such language from his boss could still shock him, though he knew someone new was living in that formerly saintly brain. “I’ll get the kettle filled,” he said.

  Park felt a prick of guilt. Turning Monkey-face’s wrinkled cheeks red was a cheap thrill. “Thanks, Eric,” he said.

  “While you’re back there, why don’t you see if our hosts have given us anything stronger than aka? If they have, find a couple of glasses and join me.”

  Tawantiinsuujan whiskey tasted like raw corn liquor. Park had never gotten drunk in a bathtub before. It was fun. After a couple of protests for effect, Dunedin got drunk too. Park taught him “Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall.” He liked it. They got louder with every bottle that fell.

  After some considerable while, Monkey-face asked: “Ish — is that forty-two bottles left, or forty-one?”

  “I-hic! — can’t bethink.” Park tried to find an appropriately judicial solution. “We’ll jusht have to start over.”

  But Dunedin was sprawled against the side of the tub, snoring softly. He was almost as wet as his master; a good deal of splashing had accompanied the singing. The water, Park noticed, was cold. He wondered how long it had been that way. He started to sing solo, discovered his teeth were chattering. It had been cold for a while, then.

  He pulled the pottery stopper from the drain, climbed out of the tub. “Eric?” he said. Dunedin kept on snoring. Park dragged him to his bed. Then he staggered into his own bedroom and collapsed.

  The next morning, altitude turned what would have been a bad hangover into a killer. Coca tea helped a little, but not enough. Park wished for aspirins and black coffee. Wishing failed to produce them.

  Eric Dunedin was still out like a light. Envying him, Park got dressed and braved the vicious sunlight outside as he walked over to the foreign ministry.

  The handful of guards outside the building had been replaced by a platoon of troopers. A good many of them were standing in a tight circle around someone. They waved their arms and shouted at whoever it was.

  At the moment, Park disliked shouting on general principles. “What’s going on here?” he said. Then he saw for himself. The man in the midst of the angry Tawantiinsuujan soldiers was Da’ud ibn Tariq.

  Heads turned his way. “Another foreigner,” one of the troopers growled. He lifted his air rifle, not quite pointing it at Park.

  His headache made Park even more irascible than usual. “Go ahead,” he said scornfully. “Shoot me and the emirate’s ambassador both, why don’t you? See if Tawantiinsuuju has a friend left in the world the moment after you do.”

  The officer who had noted — and knotted — Park’s previous arrival on the kiipuu recognized him now. “It is the judge of the International Court,” he said. “Stand aside. Let him by.”

  “Let Da’ud ibn Tariq come too,” Park said. “I think the minister Tjiimpuu will be interested in seeing him.”

  “Exactly what I’ve been trying to tell them,” Da’ud said. “I was summoned here by the minister himself.”

  “Maybe we don’t care about that, murderer,” a soldier said. “Maybe we’d sooner cut out your guts with a tuumii-knife.” The Tawantiinsuujans’ ceremonial knife had a half-moon blade on a long handle. They did not practice human sacrifice any more (even Aztecia had given it up), not officially, anyhow. But they remembered.

  “Stop that!” Park yelled, and flinched at the sound of his own voice. “You are not at war with the Emirate of the Dar al-Harb. Even if you were, your own embassy in Ramiah may answer for how you treat Da’ud. So let him come with me, and stop acting like dog-eating W
anka fools.”

  Park’s gibe struck home. All the other tribes in the Tawantiinsuujan empire mocked the Wankas for their addiction to cynophagy. The officer said grudgingly, “The judge may be right. Our overlords will treat the wretch as he deserves. Let him through.”

  Sullenly, the soldiers obeyed. One of them slammed the big trapezoidal double doors behind the two foreigners, so hard that Park thought the top of his head would come off. He rather hoped it would.

  “I am in your debt, Judge Scoglund,” Da’ud said in English, bowing deeply.

  “It’s nothing. I was just trying to get them to shut up.”

  The Moor glanced at him. One elegant eyebrow rose. “Perhaps I should backpay the debt by talking you into ontaking Islam. That I would seek to do anyhow, for the good of your ghost. Now, though, it strikes me your body would also be the better for having wine-bibbing forbidden it.”

  “It wasn’t wine, and it’s not your dealing,” Park snapped.

  “Seeking to win a good man to Islam is the dealing of any Muslim,” Da’ud said. Park was about to snarl at him when he went on smoothly, “But here we are at Tjiimpuu’s door, so let us backturn to Ketjwa and perhaps speak of this another time.”

  “You were not bidden to come here, Judge Scoglund,” the foreign minister’s secretary said when he saw Park.

  “Yes, I know, but here I am, and what are you going to do about it?” Park followed Da’ud ibn Tariq into Tjiimpuu’s private office. Having failed once already, the secretary didn’t do anything about it.

  To Park’s surprise, Tjiimpuu didn’t fuss about his walking in. In fact, a grim smile briefly lit the foreign minister’s face. “Well met, Judge Scoglund,” he said. “Now the world will have an impartial account of the latest outrage the Emirate of the Dar al-Harb has visited upon us.”

  “The Emirate has done nothing against Tawantiinsuuju,” Da’ud said. “I presume you are referring to yesterday’s explosion here.”

  “And the gunmen who set it off and took advantage of the terror it caused to kill even more,” Tjiimpuu said.

  “Ninety-one people are dead at last count, more than three hundred wounded. Two of the murderers survived being captured. Both are Muslims; both say they and the rest wanted to strike a blow against the true holy worship of Patjakamak and the sun.”

  “Heaven will receive our dead, as it receives all who fall in the jihad,” Da’ud replied, “but they did not act by the will of the Emir, Allah’s peace be upon him. The Emirate is blameless.”

  “I do not believe you,” Tjiimpuu ground out. “Nor does the Son of the Sun. This looks to be — this is — all of a piece with the murder and banditry your people engage in throughout the border provinces. We can tolerate it no more.” The foreign minister breathed heavily. “I am sorry, Judge Scoglund, but your presence in Kuuskoo is no longer required. It will be war.”

  “Wait!” Allister Park said immediately, then realized he had no idea what to tell Tjiimpuu to wait for. He thought frantically. “If, ah, if the Emir — without admitting guilt — expresses his sorrow for those killed at the Raimii festival, will that not show enough, ah, good feeling from him for talks to go on?”

  Tjiimpuu frowned. “The Emir Hussein has never been known for his compassion.”

  “That is not so,” Da’ud said at once. “His Highness feels more compassion for pagans than for Muslims, in fact, as he knows that when pagans die they have only the pangs of hell to anticipate.”

  “Then let him say so,” Park urged.

  “Such a statement, were it to come; would surely be looked on with pleasure by the Son of the Sun,” Tjiimpuu agreed. “If you think it might arrive, Da’ud ibn Tariq, I will urge Maita Kapak — ” he shaded his eyes for a moment “ — to delay the declaration.”

  “I do not know whether the Emir would make such a statement,” Da’ud said. “In any case, I do not intend to seek it of him.”

  “What? Why the hell not?” Park exclaimed, startled out of both his diplomatic manners and his Ketjwa; he got no satisfaction from cursing in a tongue he had just learned.

  “Because of this.” Da’ud drew a rolled sheet of paper from inside his robe, handed it with a sober flourish to Tjiimpuu. When the Tawantiinsuujan undid the ribbon that held it closed, Park saw the sinuous characters of Arabic. He was learning to speak that tongue, but could read it only very slowly.

  Tjiimpuu, plainly, had no problem with it. He looked up in sharp surprise at Da’ud. “This is not a forgery you made up this past evening after you knew I had summoned you?”

  “By Allah I swear it is not.” Da’ud turned to Allister Park, explaining, “Last night I received a courier dispatch from Ramiah. Not far outside the city, a mosque was put to the torch at the hour of evening prayer some days ago. Many are dead, how many no one knows. On a wall nearby was scrawled the name ‘Patjakamak’.”

  “Jesus,” Park said. He supposed both Tjiimpuu and Da’ud thought he was swearing by his own god. He was swearing, all right, but not in that sense of the word.

  “I will take this to the Son of the Sun,” Tjiirnpuu said slowly.

  “Do so,” Da’ud agreed. “We have as much cause for war as you. More, since you claim lands rightfully ours.”

  “They are ours,” Tjiimpuu said.

  “Wait!” Park said again. “This whole business of the lands has been stewing for a generation. A few days more won’t matter, one way or another. What we need to do right now is to get each of you to stop trying to harm the other over what you find holy. Maybe knowing how much even a few zealots can hurt you will make both sides think twice.”

  “I will take your words to the Son of the Sun,” Tjiimpuu said. It was as big a concession as Park had seen him make. From the way Da’ud ibn Tariq bowed, it might have been as big a concession as he’d seen, too.

  He and Park left the foreign minister’s office together. Tjiimpuu’s secretary smiled nastily. “Is it to be war?” he asked, as if he already knew the answer.

  “No,” Park told him, and watched his face fall.

  The judge and ambassador walked out toward the doorway. Park tried his halting Arabic: “A lesson here.”

  “Ah? And would you deign to enlighten this ignorant one, O sage of wisdom?” Flowery in any language, Da’ud grew downright grandiloquent when using his own.

  As usual, Park spoke plainly: “Keep your holy warriors in line, and maybe the other fellow will too.” Not quite the Golden Rule the real Ib Scoglund would have preached, he thought, but a step in that direction, anyhow.

  “Wisdom indeed, and fit for the Emir’s ear,” Da’ud said, “save only this: what if those who delight in fighting the jihad refuse to be held in check so?”

  “Who is stronger then?” Park asked in turn. “The Emir, or them?” Da’ud gave his beard a thoughtful tug and did not answer.

  Under the hostile glare of the soldiers outside the foreign ministry, the two men went their separate ways. Park hurried home to take care of Eric Dunedin, who, as he’d thought, still had a case of the galloping jimjams.

  “You ockn’t to be tending me,” Monkey-face protested feebly. “I’m your thane, not the other way round.”

  “Oh, keep quiet,” Park said. “Here, drink some more of this.”

  Coca-leaf tea, soup, and, finally, a small shot of Tawantiinsuujan moonshine in tomato juice restored Dunedin to a mournful semblance of life. Park had a makeshift Bloody Mary himself; he figured he’d earned it. Thus fortified, he picked up the telephone receiver. “Whom are you wirecalling?” Dunedin asked.

  “Keep quiet,” Park said again. He shifted to Ketjwa as the operator came on the line: “Could you please connect me to the house of Pauljuu, son of Ruuminjavii, in the district of Puumatjupan?”

  When he showed up at Pauljuu’s house that evening, Park was carrying a large bouquet of pink kantuuts. He didn’t know if flowers were customary here, but didn’t think they’d hurt. From the way the maid who opened the door exclaimed over them, he’d guessed right.<
br />
  Kuurikwiljor exclaimed over them too, and had a servant fill a bowl with water so they could float in it. “Very lovely,” she said. “Such an unusual gift.” So they weren’t customary, he thought. They were a hit anyhow. In a way, that was even better. It got him points for originality.

  A moment later, he had to risk them: “Where shall we go?” he asked. “What shall we do? This is your city, not mine.” This world had never invented movies, eliminating one obvious way for couples to spend decorous time together.

  “We could walk the walls of Saxawaman,” Kuurikwiljor suggested.

  “The old fortress?” Park said, surprised. She nodded. He shrugged. It wasn’t what he’d had in mind, but — “Why not?”

  Before they could walk Saxawaman’s walls, they had to walk to Saxawaman, which lay on a hill north and west of the built-up area of Kuuskoo. Park let Kuurikwiljor take the lead; to him, one poorly lit street seemed much like another.

  “You don’t have many robbers here, do you?” he asked, impressed by the way she confidently strode ahead. In his New York or Vinland’s New Belfast, he would have been nervous about strolling around like this after dark.

  But Kuurikwiljor only answered, “No, not many,” as if the idea that things could be otherwise had never entered her mind. Park suspected it hadn’t. She was lucky, he thought.

  A path zigzagged up the hillside to the fortress. Park puffed along after Kuurikwiljor. He’d long since put Ib Scoglund’s body on a calisthenics program, but no lowland man could match someone equally fit and native to this altitude. When he finally struggled up a stone stairway to the top of a wall, he panted, “Could we — rest — on the walls of Saxawaman?”

  “Of course,” Kuurikwiljor said. To his relief, his admission of weakness did not make her scornful. She went on, “The view is magnificent, is it not?”

  “Hmm? Why, so it is.” Kuuskoo lay spread out before them. Flickering torches and the occasional brighter, steadier glow of electric light defined its irregular grid of streets. One square in the northern part of the city was especially well-lit. Park pointed to it. “What’s that?”