Across the Great Barrier

CHAPTER 12

JUST LIKE I THOUGHT, PROFESSOR TORGESON TALKED WASH INTO letting us spend three days at the abandoned settlement, so we could survey whatever was living inside the settlement walls, as well as what was outside. It didn’t take as much time as I’d feared. The settlement had only been two years old, so it had only had the original settlement group to house, and they hadn’t wanted to take the time or labor to enclose any more than they absolutely had to. So there wasn’t much open ground inside for anything to grow on.

We did find a couple of mud swallow nests and the start of a bluehornet nest up under the eaves of the last house. Professor Torgeson got Wash to bring out a table that the settlers had left behind, and climbed up on it to examine the bluehornets. She spent over an hour standing there still as a stone, watching the hornets fly in and out. When she finally climbed down, she was stiff and frowning.

“Mr. Morris,” she said, “would there be any chance of finding another bluehornet nest nearby?”

“I doubt it,” Wash said.

“The ones building that nest have to have come from somewhere,” the professor persisted.

“We might get lucky and find the old nest within a hundred yards or so,” Wash replied. “But bluehornets sometimes fly three or four miles to start a new nest. It’d take a week for us to cover that much ground, even if a lot of the land nearby is cleared. An old nest isn’t easy to spot, either. I don’t think we have the time.”

Professor Torgeson made an annoyed sound. “I was afraid of that. Well, we’ll just have to wait, then. Or hope to be lucky. Eff, would you bring me my observation journal and then dig out one of the collection jars?”

I had her journal right there; I’d known she would want it as soon as she came down from the table. I was surprised about the collection jar, though. The jars were specially spelled to preserve whatever was put inside. They were supposed to be for new or unusual bugs we found, and they took up a lot of room, so we hadn’t brought very many. The only reason we had them at all was because everyone was still edgy about the mirror bugs. It seemed odd to be using one up on something as ordinary as a bluehornet.

My face must have shown some of what I was thinking, because the professor shook her head. “Explanations later, Miss Rothmer. I need to get my observations down while they’re still fresh.”

I left to dig through the packs for the collection jar she wanted. I found the little bottle of chloroform, too, though she hadn’t asked for it, because I knew she’d need it to kill the bluehornets. It took me a while, but I still had to wait for her to finish writing.

Professor Torgeson smiled and nodded in approval when she saw the chloroform. She put three drops on the little pad of cloth in the bottom of the collection jar, then climbed back onto the table and waited. I thought she was going to catch the next bluehornet that came back to the nest, but I was only half right. She waited for a bluehornet, all right, but when it came, she scooped the whole nest, hornet and all, into the collection jar and sealed it up. Then she handed me the jar and climbed quickly down from the table, and we headed back to camp before the rest of the bluehornets came looking for whatever had vanished their nest.

“Professor,” I started as soon as we were well away. “What —”

“Look,” the professor said, nodding at the jar.

I held it up. The nest looked a little like a bit of honeycomb made of blackish gray paper instead of beeswax. About half the cells were empty; the others were closed over. The bluehornet was lying at the bottom of the jar with its legs curled up. I frowned. “This isn’t — I mean, didn’t you want a better specimen? This hornet is missing a leg and one of its wings is crooked.”

“That’s precisely why I wanted it,” Professor Torgeson said. “Every bluehornet I saw this morning had something wrong with it, and they weren’t all the same things, either. Something is wrong with this nest, and I’m hoping to find out what and why. Keep an eye out tomorrow when we’re surveying outside the walls.”

We kept an eye out the next day, but none of us saw any more bluehornets or found another nest, then or the day after. I expected Professor Torgeson to be cross, but instead she was just thoughtful all through the ride to the next settlement.

Novokoros was a two-year-old settlement that had been started by a group of farmers from the easternmost part of Avrupa who’d been forced off their land by some Old Continent politics. They only had two people in the whole settlement who spoke English, so it was hard to tell whether they were suspicious of strange travelers or just shy of standing around watching a bunch of folks they couldn’t have a conversation with.

Once Wash arranged with the settlement magician for us to stay inside the palisade, Professor Torgeson said she had a few questions. The settlement magician frowned. He was a tall, stringy, stern man with an enormous curly beard, and he made it pretty clear that he didn’t approve of women being magicians or asking too many questions or riding around the frontier without a wagon and a lot of menfolk for protection.

The professor looked as if she wanted to roll her eyes, but she went ahead and asked very politely where the settlement’s mirror bug trap had been. The settlement magician told her, still frowning. The professor thanked him briskly, then turned to Wash and me. A few minutes later, we’d sent our packhorse off to the stable and ridden back out to look at the mirror bug trap.

The mirror bug trap was a spell that Papa and Wash and Professor Jeffries had worked out the previous summer, after I’d figured out how to use the bugs’ own magic against them. All the different stages of the mirror bugs’ life cycle — the grubs and the striped beetles and the mirror bugs themselves — were attracted to magic. If there was enough of it around, the grubs and beetles absorbed the magic and then popped into mirror bugs like chestnuts popping in a fire. Normally, the mirror bugs’ own magic protected them, but I’d found a way to keep their protection from working, so that the grubs and beetles absorbed the mirror bug magic and killed them. Then the grubs and beetles turned into mirror bugs themselves, and the next wave of grubs and beetles would absorb their magic and kill them. The cycle kept on until there was nothing left in range but a few mirror bugs.

The trouble was, the settlements couldn’t spare a magician to stand around holding the anti-mirror-bug spell for as long as it took to kill them all, or risk a magician running their magic to exhaustion keeping the spell going, so Papa and the others had come up with a way to use a little of the mirror bug magic to power the spell. Once all the grubs and beetles were gone, the trap spell used the last of its magic to kill the leftover mirror bugs and shut down. It worked a treat; almost all the grubs were gone by the end of summer, and the few that had turned up this spring had been killed off before they could do any more damage, or spread.

I had no idea why Professor Torgeson wanted to see the mirror bug trap. Usually, we did our plant surveying at stops along the ride, or just outside the settlement fields well away from the traps. After all, the whole idea was to find out what plants and animals normally lived between settlements, not what the settlers grew.

Novokoros had two mirror bug traps on opposite sides of the settlement, so as to be sure of drawing all the mirror bugs out of the cleared lands. The settlement magician had told Wash that he’d cast the spell again early in the spring, in case the bugs had laid eggs in the fields before they died the previous summer.

We spotted the trap well before we reached it. It looked like a little windmill with a bag underneath it, fastened to a pole at about eye level. The ground underneath it was bursting with plants. Professor Torgeson made a happy noise when she saw them.

“What is it, Professor?” I asked.

“Later. I want to get this finished by sunset,” she replied. “Mr. Morris, would you measure out and mark circles around the pole? One-foot intervals should do. Eff, record the distance from the mirror bug trap along with the usual information. You work from that side; I’ll work from this one.”

I nodded and got to work. I noticed right off that I was finding a lot of plants I hadn’t seen since we got into the area that the grubs had devastated — cloudflower and lady’s lace, fire nettle and goldengrass, greater goosegrass and witchvine. It didn’t take me much longer to figure out that all of them were magical plants, or that the farther I got from the mirror bug trap, the shorter the plants were and the more natural plants were mixed in.

Five feet from the pole, the number of magical plants fell off sharply and more and more of them looked stunted or malformed. Ten feet away, all I could find were the natural plants of the prairie: bluestem and switchgrass, yarrow and catchfly, milkweed and clover.

We worked until the light started to go, then rode back to the settlement. On the way, I told the professor what I’d noticed. She looked real pleased.

“Just what I was hoping to find,” she said. “We’ll have to check the settlement perimeter tomorrow, and the other mirror bug trap. And from now on, we’ll have to check the traps at every settlement, but I’ve no doubt they’ll confirm it.”

“Confirm what?” I said. “That magical plants only grow around mirror bug traps now?”

“That is a symptom,” the professor said, nodding. “The grubs and beetles absorbed magic in order to become mirror bugs. When they were killed in great numbers near the trap, they released that magic. So the areas where the grubs grew were temporarily depleted of magic, and few magical plants can grow there, while the area close to the traps has an unnaturally high concentration of magic and therefore a much greater than normal number of magical plants.”

Wash pursed his lips, considering. “Interesting idea,” he said after a moment. “It’d explain a few things, that’s sure.”

“It fits our observations so far,” the professor said cautiously. “And I suspect that the reduction in the available magic is the reason for the malformed bluehornets we found at the last settlement.”

“We haven’t seen any of the magical animals, either,” I put in. “Well, except for the sphinxes.”

“Which were part of a mixed pride,” Wash said, looking thoughtful. “With the bison and the deer moving back in, I’d expected to see wallers and silverhooves as well, and maybe some of the critters that hunt them.”

“But we haven’t.”

“Predators will take longer to return than plant eaters,” the professor said. “A reduction in the available magic in the soil shouldn’t affect the silverhooves or other magical herbivores —”

“Unless they need to eat magical plants,” Wash pointed out. “Even if all they need are a few every now and then, they won’t come very far back until the plants do.”

“It’s still only a theory,” Professor Torgeson reminded us. “It’s a pity we haven’t more people available to study the statistical distribution of plant species. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

“But next year —” I stopped, remembering what she’d told Brant back in Oak River. “Oh! You mean that by next year, the magic will start coming back.”

Professor Torgeson nodded. “And so will the plants. It will take a few years for the balance to get completely back to normal, I expect. We really don’t have any data to compare this to. And the distribution of the mirror bug traps — and the magic that’s been collected around them — could make a big difference.”

We’d nearly reached the settlement gates. I frowned. “Wash,” I said slowly, “do you think anyone here grows calsters or hexberries in their kitchen gardens? They’re both magical plants, and if the mirror bugs pulled all the magic out of the ground …”

“They shouldn’t grow much better than the native magical plants are currently growing,” Professor Torgeson finished. “Which is to say, hardly at all.”

“I’ll ask,” Wash said. As we rode into the settlement and dismounted, he went on, “Professor, I know you’d like more proof of this idea, but I’m thinking we should let the Settlement Office know as soon as may be. Oats and barley aren’t magical crops, but meadow rice and Scandian wheat are, and I’ve heard talk of settlements trying to make up for the last few years by putting in a second, magical crop once their first one’s been harvested.”

The professor didn’t look too happy about the idea, but she said she’d think on it. Wash went off to talk to the settlement magician, and found out that a lot of the magical plants in the settlement’s kitchen gardens hadn’t come up at all, and the ones that had were doing poorly. When he told the professor, she got real thoughtful, and next morning she agreed to send a report to the Settlement Office. She even said that as long as we were out as far as we were, we should tell the settlements we passed.

We only spent the one night in Novokoros. The settlers all seemed to have the same feelings about women magicians as the settlement magician had, and Professor Torgeson didn’t much like their attitude. Also, she was eager to see if the mirror bug traps at other settlements had the same kind of magical plant growth. We let Wash tell them our idea about the magic, and then we left.

As she’d promised, Professor Torgeson wrote out a short report for the Settlement Office when we stopped for lunch, and we sent it off at the next settlement we passed. She grumbled a little about not having enough proof, though. Wash paid it no heed.

At the next three settlements, we checked the mirror bug traps. They were all the same as the one at Novokoros — lots of magical plants growing around the traps, and none anywhere else. I talked to some to the childings who had the chore of weeding the kitchen gardens, and found that ever since the grubs showed up, they hadn’t had any fire nettles or other magical weeds to pull. Also, the hexberries and calsters and other magical plants weren’t growing well, or at all.

The more we found out, the happier Professor Torgeson got. She even stopped complaining about passing on rumors, which is what she called Wash telling the settlers about magical crops maybe not growing for a year or two.

We worked our way northward through the rest of June and into July. The hills got lower and more rolling, and we saw larger and larger patches of grub-killed forest. We were moving right along the western edge of the settlement line, so all the places we stopped were new settlements that hadn’t earned out their allotments yet. Some were only a year or two old. All of them were struggling to come back after the grub infestation, hoping to finally get a good crop after two years of failure.

The last week in June, we had another run-in with wildlife. This time it was a bear that was hungry enough to push right through the protection spells around our camp to get at our supplies. It took Wash three shots to kill it.

In mid-July, we reached St. Jacques du Fleuve on the Red River, right at the farthest edge of the frontier.