Fire Time

THIRTEEN

Jill finished the ancient words which she had put into the tongue of Sehala—for Ishtarians who didn’t know English were often eager to hear the music of Earth—and kept her guitar ringing on while she whistled in the way of a wind over cold seas. It flitted through her awareness that she had always taken such performances for granted; but what would the unknown maker of the ballad think, could he be called from the dust and across a thousand light-years to this night?

In it, Larreka’s party were camped on the northern slope of the Red Hills. Ahead of them reached the Badlands, the Dalag. and at last the’ coast where they would take a legionary ship. In that open tropical country, under two suns most of the day, they would travel after dark as much as might be. But here they had forest to shade them, and to make them half blind, thus slow, when stars and moons alone gave light. Therefore, they rested.

A low fire tinged faces, manes, forequarters of her companions, where they reposed in a circle and every eye gleamed toward her. Further off among shadows glinted the spearheads of the watch; if nothing else, tree lions might be made sufficiently desperate by dwindling game to attack sophonts. Closer hunched the bales of supplies and a tent raised for her protection against any sudden, flayingly violent storm. She didn’t expect one. The forest wailed this glade in unstirring murk, stars smoldered above, the air hung warm and tull of heavy pungencies. She planned to shed her few garments and sleep outside on top of her bag. Still, nobody could tell for sure what weather Anu might bring.

Her tones died away. For a time, legionaries and porters lay thoughtful, only switching their tails in the male sign for “Thank you.”

Finally a young trooper asked, “What did the females do?”

“Eh?” Jill was brought from a reverie. Ah, well, just speculating about what it all means, life and death, suns and worlds, the kind of question which has to get asked over and over but I don’t suppose can ever be answered. “The human females in the song? They mourned.”

“Yes, but how?”

“Oh. I see. At first, when someone they love dies, most humans sob and, uh, shed water from their eyes. Afterward they carry on their lives as best they’re able.”

“Who helps them through?”

“We… we don’t have institutions like yours to uphold the bereaved. Prayers and some ceremonies are all, and not everyone uses them. The need is less.” Quickly, Jill added, “I don’t think this is because we care for each other less than your kind does. How could you measure?” Her mind presented an image of a dolorimeter, neatly crackle-finished for maximum sales, calibrated against the International Standard Snake whose belly people feel as low as (thus making the unit of grief a length). It did not quite undermine her seriousness. “Besides, when this particular song was composed, people believed they would meet again in an afterlife.”

“Like the Valennen barbarians,” observed a soldier. “I reckon that’s what keeps them going. They don’t seem to have much else, except for eating their dead if they can.”

Larreka sat up on his haunches, abruptly looming over Jill, who was on the ground leaned back against a leatherbark bole. “Don’t despise ’em for that, son,” he drawled. An Ishtarian voice carried so many nuances that the other might just as well have spoken words of open contempt. “Giving your body is your last service in a hungry land; and they think that eating it is a service to you, freeing the soul faster than ordinary decay would.” Reflectively: “My guess is, the notion got started in the Dalag, same as a lot of different religious notions did. And there are a lot of them, never forget. Who’re we to say any system—including what humans have worked out—is better than the rest?”

“Well, sir, I’ve seen a few practices myself, and heard of more,” the trooper replied. “Most make sense. But who could take some of them seriously? Like, ng-ng, in the back country on Little Iren they torture themselves after a death. I’ve actually seen an old female stick her hand into boiling water.”

“Certain humans used to practice self-mutilation in sorrow,” Jill told them. “Less extreme; but then, our bodies can’t repair themselves as fast or fully as yours. Pain in the flesh—in your case, the effort to control it—covers pain in the spirit. Not that I’d try it myself, understand.”

Larreka took forth pipe and tobacco pouch and began to stuff the bowl. “What’s right is what works for you,” he said, “and no two yous are alike. A good thing about the Gathering, maybe the best thing, is it gives you a chance to look around and find what way of life suits you the closest—or start a new way, if you can corral a few disciples.”

Without being preachy, his tone was unwontedly earnest. Jill thought: I read you. Uncle. You want to strengthen the faith in these males. They’re young, they don’t have your perspective on civilization, throughout their lives they’ve known only that it’s likely to go under in the time that’s now on us. In such a case, a legionary in his first or second eight-year enlistment might wonder if it’s worth standing fast and dying for. Especially when it won’t support us in the lonely place where we’re bound. You’ll take every chance you can get to tell them.

She felt sure she was correct when he went slowly on:

“Take me. If it weren’t for the Gathering I might’ve become a bandit, or at best dragged out a pretty dreary existence. Instead, well, life’s done me right, chopped me up a bit here and there but no more than was reasonable for all I’ve gotten out of it.”

Ears pricked. Jill’s would have too, were they able. Larreka had told her scores of stories from his career, but few from his beginnings.

“Would you like to hear?” he asked. “I’m in a kind of backward-looking mood tonight—”

You dear old fraud! Jill thought. Or, if you really feel reminiscent, you’ve got a king-sized ulterior motive as well.

“—and the happenings are too long ago and far away to be very personal.” They murmured assent. “Okay,” Larreka said, a word which had passed into the Sehalan dialect. He paused to kindle his pipe.

The fire sputtered sparks. A porter fueled it and the flames licked higher, red and yellow. Stars touched with faint light the smoke which rose straight toward them. Out in the darkness an animal hooted, the single forest sound.

“You know I’m a Haelener born,” Larreka commenced, between puffs. “Spent my first fifty-odd years there. The song Jill gave us raised these memories, because Haelen is like what she’s told me about that Scotland on Earth, only more so, I imagine, being out-and-out polar. Even in summer, when the sun—the proper sun—never sets over most of the country, even then it’s cloudy, misty, rainy, stormy, moors and bare mountains, treacherous gray seas beating on stony shores… well, you’ve heard. No wonder Haeleners have a name for being skinflints, and many of them become soldiers or merchant sailors or whatever will get them out.

“But me, I wasn’t restless. Clan Kerazzi, that I belonged to, counts for wealthy. You know they’re organized in clans, the Haeleners. Mine holds first-rank fishing and sea-hunting waters, and inland a wide chunk of grounds for what game can be found, not that that’s much by Beronnen standards. And my family was well off. My father owned the sloop he captained and a share in three more. We lived in a big snug house on the coast, at a spot where currents brought driftwood. Not needing to buy coal, we could trade our catches for other things. Yai-ai, a pretty good life.

“Haeleners marry young, like around twenty-four, barely out of adolescence. They have to. because they lose a lot of kids in that climate and need all the breeding years they can manage. Besides, since you marry into a different clan, everybody’s anxious to make ties. Could be that’s the reason for the law of a single spouse at a time and outside romps theoretically forbidden. Parents arrange the marriages, but do check with the youngsters; when your life may depend on your partner, you’d better have one who likes you.”

Larreka smoked for a while in silence. When he continued, his vision was past them and into the night woods. “Saren and I were happy. We could’ve asked our families to raise us a house near my parents’, and I could’ve gone on working for my father. But we wanted independence. So the Kerazzis deeded us a spread on Northwind Bay, bleak as a usurer and sterile as his wife but with, ng-ng-ng, possibilities. You see, the fishing wasn’t bad (hereabouts; and storms often drove in big critters, well worth the trouble and risk of hunting; and in the hills behind, a tin mine was getting started. The miners took the stuff off overland, but I figured in time they’d be digging out enough to make sea transport better—and any ships which put into that bay would need a pilot who knew it. Eventually this came true, and we opened a small tavern as well. Saren’s cooking tasted mighty good to sailors in from a long haul, and I was a popular tapster, I don’t mind boasting. Meanwhile, we had four kids who lived, three males and a female, fine ’uns.

“Sure, I’d no reason not to sacrifice to the gods. Having yarned with a lot of outlanders, I knew our gods didn’t rule the universe. In fact, I sort of doubted they were more than a story. However, we’d suffered less than most folk, and fair’s fair. Besides, respectability’s useful to have. Why not go through the rites?

“Until, after twenty-three years, we were bound for Daystead—”

Larreka broke off. Jill stroked his back. He threw her a smile… of thanks?

“Daystead, sir?” asked a solider from the Fiery Sea.

“A rally place,” Larreka said. “Or maybe you don’t know about those? Well, think. Most of Haelen gets no sun in winter. Your skin-plants would die, that long in the dark. A few peninsulas stick north of the Circle and catch a little daylight. Everybody has to crowd into them in season. Law and custom turn on this. The clans pitch in to build and maintain housing, stock food—all the necessities, including ways to keep people from hating each other after they’ve been packed in like that for a while.

“We, my family belonged at Daystead. We’d always gone to and fro by boat, there being a mountain range in between which is apt to have killingly foul weather. This year”—Larreka’s tone flattened—“the weather was at sea. We got dismasted, swamped, and driven into the surf. None but me made shore alive. I’d kept a grip on my daughter’s mane, but the vines tore loose… Never mind. I raised a cairn over what drifted to the strand and limped on into Daystead, mainly to let our kinfolk know.”

He puffed again for a spell, during which the flames died back, the darkness crept near, and then very slowly, almost timidly, a crooked Urania rose above treetops which it tinted silver, the sole cool thing in the night except for his memories of winter Haelen.

“I’ve gone on like this,” he said at last, “not to make you feel sorry for me, but to show you the situation. One more thing you must know. Remember, different nations have different ways of taking a member over a loss. What the clans do is to provide him or her company, day and night, until the wound seems to’ve healed. Somebody’s always beside the mourner, ready to lend a hand or talk or whatever. Usually several persons are. For most this is good. At least it’s better than brooding alone, in a country which is often ghastly empty. Besides, the way of Haelen is to help your neighbor without stint—you save your grasping greed for outsiders—because you never know when you might need him. Yes, people meant well by me.

“But… for the past three octads, my household had dwelt aside. We had visitors, but they were hunters, miners, sailors, fishers, traders—friends but not intimates, if you follow me. I’d gotten used to being on my own, me and my wife and our children. We hated the crowding at Daystead, and kept to ourselves as much as might be without giving offense. Here, suddenly, I was allowed no privacy. And—well, Jill will understand. I hurt like fury, but there was no call to treat me as if I’d lost a family I’d had two or three sixty-fours. They did. It was the custom. Also, I suppose, it was something to do. to keep interested in, during those stretched-out blacknesses between glimmers of sun.

“And they expected me to honor the gods! ‘After what the gods have done to me?’ I answered. That shocked my clan worse than it would have otherwise, midwinter being a time when you live on such a thin edge. Me, I challenged the gods to come down and fight like honest males.

“No reason to say much more. I’m sure you can see how trouble got worse and worse, the bulk of it my fault.”

They didn’t assume he’d gone a bit crazy, and bear with him till he recovered, Jill thought, because Ishtarians practically never do go crazy.

“In the end, I walked out,” Larreka said. “By then, the sun was far enough returned that I could live off the country, though that was mighty lean living, what shellers and seaweed I could scrounge on the beaches, what fist-sized animals I could knock down with a rock inland. Yet my bad temper was lucky for me after a fashion. You see, soon afterward, a late blizzard hit Daystead, really vicious. It brought the deaths of several people and great hardship to the rest when fuel gave out.

“Now, mostly the Haeleners are not ignorant. Mostly they didn’t think my ranting at the gods and our folkways had caused this. But a few did. I don’t blame them for falling back into old superstitions. You northerners can’t know what that season does to your soul, the cold and gloom, aye, the auroras that’re called the Dead Fires… As for the majority, well, I was not popular. I’d make it hard for them to get through winter.

“So I wasn’t likely to be offered another wife. And a bachelor there can’t hope to be more than an ill-paid hireling. Unless he turns robber, which in my bitterness I actually considered.

“Yes—there was the Gathering. There was the trade it makes possible. In the spring, the merchant ships started coming again for our hides, minerals, salted ichthy, preserved bipen eggs. By then I was in sorry shape, but somehow talked myself into a deckhand’s stall.

“And for the next forty-eight-odd years I wandered half the world. I’d never imagined how big and wonderful it is. Eventually I joined the Zera, and later found me the female I still have. Everything came to me out of the Gathering.

“Lads, this isn’t all that civilization is about, not by a long spearcast. But it’s a sizeable part of the thing. Take a while to imagine what your lives would’ve been like without the Gathering. Ask yourselves if you don’t owe an equal chance to your children.”

Larreka folded his forelegs and settled back down. The group took the hint that he wished to speak no further, and made ready to retire. Jill scrambled to kneel beside him and throw an arm across his neck. The mane rustled scratchily. His warmth, the blent smells of iron maleness and tobacco smoke, a sense of rubbery muscles beneath the moss-like pelt, flowed through her.

“Uncle, you never told me,” she said in English.

“Never got around to it before.” He left unspoken:

How much can I tell you of a life which has already been four times as long as the most you can hope for?

“What say we get some sleep?” he went on immediately “Anu’ll soon be up. blast its bloated belly; and we’ve stiff country to cross. Never miss a chance to flop your bones, soldier.”

“Yes, sir. Good night.” She brushed lips across a leathery cheek. The cat-whiskers tickled her.

Stretched out on the bag, arm across eyes, she wondered what he would choose to dream of. And what would come to her?

Or who? If she could pick, whom would she most like to have join her in dream?