Reign of Fire

by Marjorie B. Kellogg

  Early in the third throw past Imvalla, faint firefly sparkles sprang to life across the savannah in the direction of Ogo Dul. A ragged cheer rose among the wagons. The hjalk pricked up their ears and snuffled.

  “The welcome lamps,” Ghirra explained. “Our cookfires say we come.”

  His smile was relieved and he ruffled Dwingen’s hair as the boy trudged beside him. The child’s thin face was taut from fighting exhaustion and the heat, but he perked up at his guildmaster’s touch and walked a little straighter.

  Sweating rangers trotted past with orders for running lanterns to be lit. A near impalpable stirring of the heat-laden air brought a scent of salt and the growling sigh of distant surf. The weary guildsmen found the energy to revive their long-discarded discussions of market strategy.

  Peering ahead at the meager pinpricks of light, Susannah could discover no other sign of a city. The steep fjords to the north towered darkly visible against a darker sky. The broken sickle shape of the ocean bay tossed back a glimmering reflection of the Cluster.

  “How will the people of Ogo Dul feel about offworld visitors, do you think?” she asked Ghirra.

  He did not respond immediately. Then he said, “They will think as most here, that your ‘other world’ means a Cave more far than they have knowing.”

  “You mean, just another settlement here, but very distant?”

  “Yes. They will think this, and none will say them no.”

  “Stay undercover, he’s saying,” Megan interposed. She tugged at her Sawlish pants. “Shouldn’t be hard, so tanned, and dressed as we are.”

  “But why?”

  “The signs is not so good to bring strangeness here,” said Ghirra.

  “Ashimmel was ready once before to blame Valla’s strength on us,” Megan reminded her. “No point taking that chance again with a whole new group.”

  Ghirra nodded gravely. “I am glad you see this, Meghan.”

  The lights of Ogo Dul did not seem to grow bigger and brighter as they neared. Susannah still waited to see the gaily lit windows of a bustling town at night. When the running lights of the lead wagons began to thread among those isolated sparkles, she realized that their seeming distance was a deception of the darkness. The sparkles were indeed just lamps, as Ghirra had said, small lanterns suspended on poles stuck into the sandy ground. A few pale streamers rustled at the base of each lamp as the wagons passed by.

  The poles were set several hundred paces apart in a broad northward snaking curve. They picked out a road worn through the savannah grass to a base of fine sand that shone white in the starlight. At the end of the curve, free-moving lights bobbed among the larger flames of a double row of stationary torches. Beyond the final pair of torches was velvet darkness.

  Susannah watched carefully, forewarned by her experience at the precipice, and sure enough, when the lead wagon reached the last bright torches, its running lights set like tiny moons as it passed over an invisible edge. Chanting and music rose up past the descending wagon. A faint glow from below caught on its torn and mended canopy as it disappeared. As he had at Imvalla, the Master Healer led them both forward to the rim, this time to gaze down on Ogo Dul, his birthplace.

  Where the torches ended, the white sand road swerved to drop along the side of a deep ravine. The incline was steep and neatly paved, walled on the dropside by a shoulder-high stone balustrade. The railing was an arm’s span wide and carved of thickly veined and polished marble. The balusters were thinner slabs cut in the design of the three interlocking circles.

  Susannah leaned across the slick wide marble and saw dark water filling the ravine far below.

  A dozen pairs of bridges spanned the seawater canyon, joining five tiers of shops and dwellings hollowed out of the solid rock walls. Each tier was fronted by a lamplit portico of marble columns and arches. The inner walls were pierced by half-moon doorways and round windows glazed with colored glass. The interlocking circle design was repeated in the portico railings and along the low walls of the bridges. The salt smell was sharp, and the wave sigh magnified by the reflecting rock, growling a bass accompaniment to the chatter of the crowds that filled the tiers and flowed across the bridges beneath strings of swaying lanterns.

  “This is Trader’s Finger,” Ghirra announced, then considered his own hand, fingers outstretched. “No. How do you call the finger of a plant?”

  “A leaf? A twig?” supplied Megan. “No, a branch.”

  “A branch. Trader’s Branch, it is then.” He gestured into the darkness toward the glimmering ocean bay. “Along here, there is many cuts into the cliff. This is each a branch, and the large branch has also small branch. They come by tunnel through the rock, like DulElesi. Or if Valla allow, you travel by chresin.”

  Ghirra pointed straight down at the black water. Narrow boats with lanterns at stern and bow poled back and forth between rows of floating docks lining the water’s edge. He smiled boyishly. “By chresin is more fun.”

  “You were born here.” Susannah recalled.

  “It’s like Venice was,” murmured Megan in an attack of nostalgia.

  Ghirra’s smile saddened as he pointed into the further darkness. “In Potter’s Branch, I was. Very big, with many small branch. When we come back here first time, my sister and me go there to discover which cave was ours, but we cannot. Too many, there are.”

  “No other family?” asked Megan.

  “My three-father is too old to go that time, but he is dead when I come back to Ogo Dul. The other ones, all was dead in the mud, and many other not my family. My sister and I had luck. The mud fell not near us.”

  He allowed the lantern-jewelled boats on the water far below a long moment of his attention, then shook himself free of his melancholy with a soft self-scolding laugh. “This is old rememberings, not for now. Much here to see that is not sad. I will show you this.” He smiled at them to prove the return of a cheerful mood and added. “We will go by chresin.”

  The travellers descended to the highest tier on the heels of the dawdling dairy herd. The incline was paved with rounded oblongs like cobblestones to assure secure footing, but the young hekkers chose to snort and shy about and give the herdsmen needless anxiety until they were on level ground once more, swinging their heads about in bovine curiosity as they waded through the crowds thronging the noisy columned street.

  The portico was several wagons wide, from its pierced marble railing to its smoothly polished inside wall. The columns were as thick as a man’s torso and skinned with shallow carvings that told the histories of the Goddesses in spiraling panels.

  In the brightly lit shops that honeycombed the inner wall, the guildsmen of Ogo Dul bustled about, chatting a local patron toward a choice, moving goods around and restocking shelves in preparation for the new influx of customers.

  The street was hot and stuffy, though open to the air along one side. Susannah stuck close to Ghirra, avoiding the brighter lights, but no one paid two Terran woman in Sawl clothing any particular notice. After two and a half weeks of sunshine. Megan, whose skin was naturally darker than Susannah’s, was the close image of a sturdy Sawl matron. Like Ghirra and his sister, the ocean folk of Ogo Dul were generally taller and broader of frame than their cousins from DulElesi. And though Susannah had never seen a Sawl who could be considered anything but thin, the heat and the constant walking had slimmed Megan considerably, and hardened them both.

  “We’ll fit right in,” Megan assured herself. “As long as we don’t open our mouths.”

  “Too bad we haven’t got anything to trade,” said Susannah wistfully, her eye caught by the colorful clothing hanging in the shop windows.

  The columned street twisted right, conforming to the natural shape of the ravine, which soon opened out to admit a narrow side branch. The portico wrapped around into the branch and a wide bridge carried the major traffic across the cut. A muffled racket of snorts and bleats and conversational lowing rose out of the side branch. The herdsmen turned the hekkers aside wit
h loud whistling and mock gruffness. As Ghirra led his companions across the bridge, the rich animal smells from five tiers of stabling joined the pervasive tang of salt air and iodine.

  They caught up with the end of the caravan where it was stalled on the far side of the bridge, a jumble of small wagons and two-carts and tired families. The street was wide enough for a wagon to be drawn up against the inner wall and still allow passage along the outside. In place of the shops were many smaller rooms and suites of rooms to serve as temporary dwellings and trade stalls. Susannah poked her head into one where a single lamp burned in a corner niche. The arrangement was familiar from the domestic caverns of DulElesi: a stone sink with ceramic piping, a raised hearth surrounding a sunken firepit, a neatly swept stone floor and no furniture or decoration.

  Further down the line, they found the Infirmary wagon, its dented yellow canopy grazing the vaulted ceiling. Xifa explained the delay as a problem with the assignment of quarters, since the population was larger than on past trips. She noted with good-natured disapproval that the crowd was unusually impatient and disagreeable in the heat and congestion, while Susannah pondered questions of population growth and the straining of psychological as well as biological resources.

  The FoodGuild began passing out sour beer rations by hand to hand relay, unable to squeeze their little delivery two-carts through the press. Ghirra disappeared into the sweating throng and returned a while later with a tray piled with bread ends and bits of cheese, all that the FoodGuild could manage until their giant wagons could be maneuvered into the larger halls intended for their use.

  Megan was uncommonly grateful for stale bread and cheese. “Is it always this bad?”

  Ghirra laughed, sipping his beer, and repeated the query to Xifa and Ampiar as if it were a modest sort of joke. Xifa joined his laugh but Ampiar nodded darkly.

  “Not so much heat, most time before,” Ghirra admitted. “Also, this time we are too many.”

  Eventually, the crush eased, just when Megan thought that the last molecule of hot salty air had been exhaled as waste. Proper quarters were found, with much doubling up among related families. The carts and wagons were lined up in tight formation against the wall.

  The medical staff was assigned two large adjoining rooms on the second tier. The wagon was driven down and unloaded as Ghirra set them immediately to converting the larger one into a mini-infirmary to deal with the sickness and minor injuries already accumulated during the confusion of their arrival.

  Hours later the FoodGuild brought them dinner, lukewarm and soggy, and still the parents were turning up at the door with wailing infants and snuffling older siblings. Susannah worked hard to maintain her patience with the endless apparently psychosomatic complaints. The elderly in particular were finding the unrelenting heat a difficulty. She kept at it doggedly until Ghirra took pity. He came over and gently removed the cloth and bowl of herbal disinfectant from her trembling hands, and sent her into the other room to sleep. Megan had long since found her bed.

  The smaller room was close and humid. The single window was draped with a tom tunic to muffle the noise from the street. Dwingen and Phea had crowded into the back of the room with the older apprentices. Megan lay crossways at their feet, head to the wall, breathing thickly. Susannah laid out her bedroll next to Megan and collapsed.

  She woke later to the soft clink of a lantern being set down nearby. Ghirra rolled out his pad, pulled off his loose shirt and made a pillow of it. He lay down on his back with a tired sigh, giving himself a moment of contemplative stillness before he doused the lantern.

  Susannah feigned sleep, watching him through lidded eyes. She enjoyed watching men when they were unaware of being observed and unwittingly offering clues to their inner selves.

  Where does Ghirra go in his head? she wondered.

  His face was delicately orchestrated, a harmony of elements tuned like a fine instrument, color and line flowing together without one feature standing out, unless it was his wide gentle mouth, and that only because it so often smiled.

  Though not so much of late, she reflected.

  Age had hardly lined his brown skin, but for the weary crinkles at the corners of his eyes. She guessed him to be over forty in Earth years. He looked ten years younger.

  He turned his head, reaching for the lamp, and found her watching him.

  Susannah smiled and raised herself up on one elbow. “You look exhausted. What a night! Did they keep coming in at that rate?”

  Ghirra mirrored her pose. “My sister needs my talking with the priests and the Kethed and the Kethed of Ogo Dul.”

  “What was the matter? Ashimmel up on her high horse again?”

  He gave a soft chuckle that turned into a yawn. “Suzhannah, you must talk English at least to me.”

  “What, a horse? It’s like a… never mind. What’s Ashimmel’s problem?”

  “The word comes not good from other far settlements. The PriestGuild worry that it is so hot now everywhere. The FoodGuild worry about the plantings. All want to go back very soon.”

  “Early, you mean? Poor Aguidran, always getting caught in the middle.”

  Ghirra shook his head. “This time she speaks not for the Kethed. She worries also, talking to her guildsmen from south on DulValla. Everywhere it is not good.”

  “Aguidran agreeing with the priests? Wow.” Susannah was surprised that this small bit of information should have the power to chill her so. She had come to rest total confidence in the Master Ranger’s judgment, as did her brother. “We’ll go back early then?”

  “Yes.” He rubbed his eyes and forehead, holding back another yawn. “When the FoodGuild wagons is full for the return, and the broken parts is made again. This is two, three cycles.” He focused on her and managed a smile. “This is small time for you here, to see Ogo Dul.”

  “And you promised me a chresin ride,” she teased.

  His laugh was a hoarse tired whisper. He leaned to blowout the lamp. “This promise I keep, Suzhannah.”

  Susannah lay in the stuffy darkness, listening first to his breathing as it evened into sleep, then to the sounds of the alien city, the muted lapping of the sea canals three tiers below, the cries of the boatmen ferrying across the dark water, the steady murmur from the upper tier as the traders got underway a half cycle early to make up for time that would be lost to a premature departure.

  She decided that if Aguidran was worried, then so was she, and she fell asleep to dream fitfully of broiling on the slow spit of the planet’s unnatural heat.

  15

  “… Suit was brought by the heirs of Michael J. Halloran…”

  Stavros muttered as he wrote but his next glance at the screen stopped him cold. Not only did this case involve CONPLEX, but among the names listed by the complainants in the suit was one Emil Friedrich Clausen.

  It was like dropping anchor after a long drift at sea. A chill of remembered humiliation and fear dispelled the dream-like aura of recent cycles. The threat of Clausen and CONPLEX became real again.

  He asked CRI for press reports on the Halloran incident. They were scanty, suspiciously inconclusive. Halloran had been the staff anthropologist on a CONPLEX-funded expedition into the Perseus sector. He had advised a hold on mining activities to allow for the exploration and cataloguing of certain extensive ruins on a small world that CONPLEX later developed into a colossal source of titanium. When Halloran died in a landslide on that world, his heirs sued for negligence. The company prospector with the expedition was Emil Clausen.

  Stavros felt sure that poor Halloran had been good and dead long before this convenient landslide had occurred.

  Noises in the outer hall spooked him. He sprang up, knocking over his bench, and shrank into the darkness at the back of the room.

  Liphar pattered around the corner. He halted in dismay at the sight of the deserted console, the toppled bench and the single oil lamp burning low. Feeling foolish, Stavros moved back into the light.

  Liphar jumped, c
learly on edge himself.

  Edan arrived at her more measured pace, appearing silently in the arch behind him. Stavros waited. The pair came empty-handed and brimming with what looked to be bad news.

  “Clazzan,” Edan hissed.

  Stavros was amazed to discover that one’s heart rally can react with sudden thunder to such announcements. “Here? Now?”

  Liphar nodded. “He come now, with Furzon,from the Grigar.”

  Stavros breathed a little easier. Not here then. Not in the Caves.

  “McPherson,” he corrected automatically, thinking that Liphar would never make it as a Scot.

  “Yeah,” Liphar replied. His best ear was for the colloquial. “Very mad, him.”

  “I’ll bet,” said Stavros grimly. “He’s down at the Lander? Have they got the Sled?”

  “Come soon, they say.”

  Stavros pressed his eyes shut. A desperate urge to run was expanding like a bubble inside his chest. The cavern was hot and dark and close, too much like a trap. Only the knowledge that it was hotter outside than in sobered him out of this seizure of the old panic.

  “Our grace time has ended,” he murmured. “Now the battle begins in earnest.”

  He knew activity would distract him from his creeping sense of helplessness against the corporate juggernaut Clausen represented. Such fears only played into the prospector’s hand, and here on Fiix, Clausen was still only one man, however skilled, well-armed and ruthless he might be.

  Stavros asked Edan to post an all-cycle watch to report on goings-on at the Lander. He described the antenna, emphasizing the need to observe and report all changes in it carefully, so that he could assess the progress being made toward reestablishing contact with CRI. He also asked for a tail on Clausen.

  After listening at length, Edan threw him one of her odd looks that mixed a growing deference with her own edgy reminder that he was not after all her real boss, then turned and strode off down the tunnel.

  Only after she had left did Stavros begin to pace. Liphar stood watching with solemn concern while the linguist wore out his surprise burst of adrenalin.