West of January

—7— THE TRADERS

THE TROUBLE WITH THE ANTS, KETTLE SAID, was that they did not understand pain.

I disagree.

This exchange took place in a room known only as “Cloud Nine.” No one knew where so absurd a name could have come from, and Kettle claimed to have seen it mentioned in very old records. It was the recreation nook for the cherubim, just big enough for five tables and a tangle of mismatched stools and chairs. Dark and stuffy, cramped and loud, Cloud Nine was where the apprentice angels gathered for relaxation. There was singing there and arguing and much drinking of a brew that was given the courtesy tide of “beer,” although its progenitors were fermented fungi, not grain. Storms might rage in the darkness outside and icy gales might shriek; damp furs might often stink in heaps by the doorway and snow might eddy in around ill-fitting antique casements; but within its smelly squalor there was warmth and laughter and the rambunctious fellowship of young men bound by a common dedication and a purpose shared. Angels scorned the place, having their own establishment—angels usually regarded themselves as beyond consorting with mere cherubim anyway—but sometimes a saint would drop in, and once in a while even one of the archangels, although a presence so august tended to dampen the joviality considerably.

Saint Kettle was a regular visitor. A true scholar, was Kettle. He had studied more of the arcane lore than anyone, even Gabriel, his nominal superior. He was a wonderful teacher and great company. Knowing ten times as much as the curriculum required him to teach, he tried to teach all the rest anyway. He liked nothing better, even after a long session of lecturing, than to join a group of us around a table in a snug and shadowed corner of Cloud Nine and let us ply him with foam-capped steins of ale. Then the conversation would range over all of Vernier and all the wisdom of the ancients, while the gleam of lanterns painted fresh young faces on the circling dark.

Kettle’s own round, seaman face would wax ruddier and ruddier, the girdle constricting his voluminous purple gown would strain tighter and tighter, and his laugh would roll louder and louder and louder from the shadows; but he would still be booming out triple-distilled wisdom when all his juvenile listeners were much too befuddled to understand a word of it. I knew how to switch steins unobtrusively in the gloom, although the smart ones eventually learned that beer seemed more potent when they sat next to me.

It was in Cloud Nine that Kettle and I argued about the ants. With Kettle argument was always permissible, and in Cloud Nine he blatantly provoked it.

There were six of us on that occasion, squashed in around the table beside him—Ginger, Dusty, the Fox, and me, plus two young newcomers known as Ham and Beef. None of them were ants. Indeed, I only ever knew two ants in Heaven and both were angels, so I never heard their original names.

By custom, no cherub ever addressed another cherub by his true name, either. Every cherub naturally expected to win his wheels eventually and be known thereafter only by a color scheme, so perhaps that preference for nicknames was not merely a juvenile aping of the angels, but also a sort of hopeful superstition. Moreover, a man’s real name was a reminder of his racial origin, and we were always careful not to reveal prejudices about those. All cherubim were equal, at least in theory. Of course in practice the subject was skirted often, in cautious teasing and careful testing. That was education also, for angels need to know the idiosyncrasies of all races, but in Cloud Nine I was neither Knobil nor Golden. Usually they called me the Old Man, which I did not mind, and sometimes Roo, which I did.

On this occasion, Kettle had challenged the racial matter head-on, stamping all over our usual taboo. He had been explaining why people differed—why herdfolk men were much larger than their women, but trader women larger than their men, or why seamen like himself had lungs like water butts—

And bellies like beer barrels, Ginger remarked dryly, and was sent for the next round in consequence.

Good times.

There were three reasons for races to differ, Kettle said. First was just culture, and he pointed out that a, say, wetlander raised in a, say, herdfolk tribe would think like a herdman because of his upbringing—not that herdmen thought much at all, of course. That was a calculated taunt, so I vowed violence upon him and anyone else seen smiling, as I was expected to.

“Second, of course,” he said, “is natural selection. Human beings are less susceptible than other species, because we can control our own environment, but obviously a seaman with a big chest is less likely to drown than a skinny one.”

Thereupon I raised my stein in a silent and solitary toast to a departed friend. In all the world, and all of Heaven, I had found no better man.

“And selection explains why ants have skulls like marble bowling-nuts, less likely to be damaged if banged into a tunnel roof—”

“Does it explain their big shoulders?” asked Ham, who was well endowed thereabouts himself.

Pleased by this posing of a new problem, Kettle pondered, then wobbled jowls in dissent. “I doubt it can be directly survival of the fittest, no. In a human culture, even a weaker man is rarely forced to starve. He can usually still reproduce. Sexual selection, perhaps—a woman may choose the mate best able to provide, and so pass on to her daughters a preference for husky men. But yet…a young man who found mining difficult would be more likely to leave the nest and seek other pursuits, wouldn’t he? Emigration of the unfit—if it was deliberate, I suppose that would be a uniquely human subcategory?”

Awed into silence, Ham nodded.

“Was that a yes or a no?” I asked.

“Certainly!” Kettle quaffed long, then wiped foam from his lips and chuckled. “Who can say?” Unlike some saints, he was never reluctant to admit ignorance. He taught us that the best questions have no answers.

“The third reason is the founder effect, as the texts call it. There were so few of the firstfolk to start with, and when they divided at the time of the Great Compact and then fragmented and later sub-fragmented into all the various tribes and peoples and races—some of those groups that seem so numerous now must be descended from a mere handful of men and women. And if even one of them had a conspicuous deformity—red hair, say—then it would not be unlikely…”

And Ginger, copper-haired man of the deserts, calmly promised violence upon him and anyone seen smiling.

Some raucous forestfolk right behind me were growing loud in one of their tribal rondeaux, accompanied by much complex drumming on the table. We had to raise our voices to compete.

“Then consider wetlanders,” Kettle continued, unperturbed, “since Roo has already undertaken to slay me, and he can only do so once. The normal brown or black colors of human hair and skin are due to the presence of a pigment called melanin. Roos hair and eyes lack it, so he is a blond. His skin will produce it under the influence of sunlight, so bright sunlight would soon darken him from that pretty baby pink shade he is at the moment to about your color, Fox. Conversely if you were to put Roo in complete darkness…”

He dried up. During all my long stay in Heaven, that was the only time I ever saw Kettle embarrassed. The others noticed and were puzzled. Our table fell silent, while the others clamored as loudly as before around us.

I was about to reach for my tankard, but my hand had started to shake, so I quickly put both hands under the table. “That’s all right,” I assured him, although I knew that nightmares would haunt my next sleep. “Pray continue, holiness.”

Much redder than usual—almost maroon in the dimness—Kettle drank beer while the others exchanged perplexed and wary glances. Then he launched forth again, slightly less loudly. “Now, in areas of low sun and cloudy weather, fair skin is an advantage. There is some evidence that blue eyes see better under misty conditions. We know from a reference in the ancient texts”—here he beamed smugly, to indicate that the reference was some extremely obscure passage that he had discovered himself—“that some of the firstfolk had those blond characteristics. Indeed, the firstfolk seem to have included all of the shades we have now, from Roo to Beef there!”

Beef was almost invisible in dim light, but his teeth and eyes flashed now in a grin.

“I thought,” the Fox said, “that the Venerable Ones all had skin of the same color, and Our Lady Sun punished—”

He was drowned out in boos and groans. Religion was never discussed in Heaven.

Kettle chuckled. “Not the firstfolk! But a few generations later the annals mention that almost everyone was by then becoming a sort of middle brown color, because of inbreeding—I don’t think we need take that too literally!” He peered around pugnaciously, but no one argued.

“So the redivergence into different races came later still?” Ginger asked.

“Exactly! Environments on Vernier were selected for the same adaptations as similar environments had on First World. Of course! Hook noses in dry climates, for example. Persistence of the lactase enzyme into adulthood among cattle-herding peoples. That sort of thing. But we have a question, class! Are the wetlanders descended from original blonds—by chance—or have they been selected for blondness by their environment, or did blond humans deliberately choose a climate that suited their blond coloring? Hmm?”

After a long pause I said, “Tell us the answer then.”

“I have absolutely no idea,” Kettle boomed triumphantly, “and I can think of no way to find out! That’s why people are so interesting.”

That was also why, Ginger muttered darkly, the most ancient texts told of saints being martyred.

But ants had been mentioned, and ants were always of interest to me, who still nursed secret dreams of vengeance. I had never mentioned these dreams to anyone, but everyone in Heaven must have known of my obsession with ants. Where did ants get their sadism? I asked. Which of the three causes produced that?

Natural selection, Kettle thought. “Survival of the ruthless? A squeamish ant would leave, probably, or be driven out.”

“Or founder effect?” I suggested. “Someone must have invented slave owning.”

He agreed, rather grudgingly. The conversation began to drift elsewhere, but Kettle suddenly dragged it back with his remark about ants not understanding pain.

I replied that they used pain so effectively that they must obviously understand it. Knowing how I had come by the disability that led them to call me Roo, the others fell silent, but Kettle argued. He eventually convinced me that the ants would be able to use their slaves more efficiently if they terrorized them less. Or he almost convinced me, for I knew that I would never have worked so hard for so long under a kinder rule.

“But talk to Blue-red,” he added. “Get him to tell you about the ant with half a foot!”

Blue-red was not then in Heaven, so of course we all demanded that Kettle himself tell us about the ant with half a foot, and after another long draft of beer, he did so.

Blue-red-brown had once met an ant. The encounter had been quite amicable, for although the ant had been part of an army on the move, Blue-red had been unable to prove anything against that particular ant or his companions. This ant, Blue-red said, had been missing half of his right foot. When younger, he had gone to sleep before a roaring fire. A burning log had rolled and charred his toes before he awoke.

“Are you saying that ants don’t feel pain?” I demanded, astonished and suddenly enraged. I could remember Hrarrh having his blisters licked. That had been a true ordeal for him, and the other ants have been impressed by his stoicism.

“They may feel some,” Kettle said sympathetically, “but not as much as we…others—not like we others do. I’ve seen an ant stick a knife through his hand on a bet! It may be a founder effect. It may be an adaptation—a banged elbow in a mine is painful, but not an indication of great danger. I don’t know, cherub, but I am sure that ants do not feel pain as much as you do.”

As I had…

“Tell me, holiness,” inquired the Fox, who was a trader-slasher cross, a studious and smart little fellow, a born saint but never angel timber. “Can founder effects explain some of the sexual differentiation characteristics?”

Kettle’s teacher eyes flickered over the blank expression on the faces of Beef and Ham. “You mean like herdmen being so much larger than herdwomen? Or like trader males being smarter than their females?”

That raised a small chuckle. Before the Fox could work out a believable retaliation, I unthinkingly said, “I’m sure that’s not true, Kettle. I think trader women are a lot smarter than they like to make out. I knew one who certainly was.”

Across the table from me, Beef smirked. “Hot stuff, was she, Old Man?”

My tankard and its contents hit him in the face just as the room made one of its frequent lurches. That lurch distracted the others, and even a cripple can be effective at close quarters. I had overturned the table and Beef also before they could block me, and then Beef and I were both on the floor, with me on top and my thumbs on his carotid arteries. Fortunately even that grip takes a moment to kill a man, and I had not thought to try anything more sudden, like crushing his larynx. Ginger and Dusty methodically broke my hold and lifted me off my victim. They pushed me back in my chair and held me there until my fit passed and I stopped screaming. The furniture was righted, the beer replaced, and the rest of Cloud Nine’s clientele persuaded to overlook the incident.

Beef was a big kid, but he knew that he had just missed something nasty, and he did not know how to fight a cripple twice his age and half his size. He allowed himself to be restrained. He even apologized, still not understanding his offense. The others were looking to Kettle, wondering why I was not being immediately hurled from Heaven for such a display of violence. Of course, my status in Heaven was not orthodox, and Kettle certainly was aware of that. Even more certainly, he was not going to discuss it in Cloud Nine.

With difficulty, I mumbled an apology, still quivering with the urge to maim Beef.

Kettle growled. “That’s not enough, Roo! You owe him an explanation. There were special circumstances. Tell them.”

I muttered mutinously, but eventually I explained how I had journeyed with the traders and found love.

Of course the traders were incensed. Mol Jar, the one who had bought me, insisted that the goods had been damaged after purchase. By then he had discovered my lacerations as well as my smashed knees, but my lacerations had been done beforehand, so he had no hope of recourse for those. Hobbling meant shackling, he insisted.

Hobbling meant breaking a leg, Minemaster Krarurh replied, and any time he had sold a wetlander to a trader, that was how he had delivered it. It was mere inexperience that had led Hrarrh to smash both my knees instead—a trifling excess of juvenile zeal. The esteemed trader had been offered free hobbling, not shackling, and he had accepted that offer. Had he wanted chains applied, then he should have said so and supplied them, because Krarurh did not include chains when he sold slaves.

The traders demanded their bale of silk back, offering to return the cat food. They threatened to blacklist the mine.

The ants leaned toward ripping the traders to shreds and feeding them to their panthers, while retaining the horses, wagons, and goods. Violence began to seem likely.

Meanwhile I was dangling head-down and feet-down across the back of a horse nearby. Even when the darkness lifted briefly from my mind, the thunder of my pain drowned out the talk. I learned about it later, at third or fourth hand.

Hrarrh eventually became fearful that I would not be accepted as valid merchandise, and he persuaded his father-in-law to settle the matter by throwing in another ten sacks of ore to compensate for the second knee. He also promised to work his gang overtime to replace it. Grumpily the traders departed with their loads, which included one crippled wetlander, who was unlikely ever to come out of his coma.

The relative value of ten sacks of phosphate ore and one bale of silk is debatable. It is possible to argue that the traders were being paid to haul me away like trash. And there, I think, is the most despicable of all Hrarrh’s villainies—that he was willing to torment his wretched slaves even harder, solely to provide himself with the personal satisfaction of sending me off to the worst fate he could imagine.

I wish I could have heard the settlements made over me. Traders’ business affairs are much akin to a school of minnows in a whirlpool, and I never came to understand more than one flicker of them. The men have incredible memories for the details of their dealings, all of which are done verbally. Mol Jar owned one bale of silk and in return could offer ten sacks of phosphate ore and one dying man. The phosphate had value; I did not. He obviously had no use for me himself, because he was heading in the wrong direction, and Kal Gos, who had owned the silk, did not want me either.

The argument between the traders and the ants would have been trivial compared to the bizarre and acrimonious hagglings that regularly took place between the traders themselves, both before they traded with outsiders and even more so afterward. The varied goods from a dozen wagons might be offered, but always one man would be deputized to do the dealing, with another sent along as witness. The respective values of everything sold and everything purchased must then be agreed upon and the profits fairly distributed. The system is contentious, inefficient, and utterly beyond an outsider’s comprehension. The traders love it.

As far as I ever could understand, I was exchanged by Mol Jar for one more sack of phosphate, then traded to somebody else for a quantity of assorted fabrics. After a few more exchanges I ended up being owned nineteen twenty-sevenths by Jat Lon, five twenty-sevenths by Lon Kiv, and three twenty-sevenths by Misi Nada. Her share was a conditional payment for services, if she could keep me alive. Had I died, then she would have owned no part of me, but that would not have stopped Jat Lon and Lon Kiv from disputing their respective residual interests in a worthless corpse.

And so I began my life with the traders. Astonishingly Misi Nada did keep me alive. At first I was barely aware of her. Between pain, shock, and loss of blood, I was barely aware of anything. Later my wounds became fevered, and I screamed and babbled insanely while she cradled me in her great arms. She fed and bathed me, and treated me with herbals and potions collected from all over Vernier, sternly denying me the release I craved.

Slowly the fogs began to clear, and I would catch glimpses of bloated features that seemed like one more figment of delirium—a face baggy and shapeless, with an obvious mustache, with brown skin as coarse as a wood rasp, rimmed by ragged lank brown hair. Always she wore a drab sacklike garment, long-sleeved and all-enveloping. I had heard in the mine that trader women were big, but I had not realized how huge they could be. I had seen few herdmasters, even, who would have outweighed Misi Nada.

Slowly I came to understand that I was not to be allowed to die. I saw her then as an enemy, imprisoning me in a life that held only worse terrors in store. Hrarrh himself had once warned me to stay away from traders.

“Why?” I whispered, staring up at that globular face hanging high above me, a brown moon against a sky of well-crafted wooden planks. “Why?”

For a long time I was too incoherent to frame my question properly, and Misi was apparently too stupid to understand. Trader women were not only huge but also moronic, or so I had been told. Eventually she seemed to grasp what I was trying to ask: Why did traders, who sold slaves to the ants, buy wetlanders from them?

Then Misi paused in her endless chewing of paka leaves. Her amusement reminded me of the leather sack in which Pebble had brought home live eels. Squirming and pulsing, Misi’s face rearranged itself in surges of apparently unrelated motions until it wore a parody of a smile.

“Lucky!” she boomed. “Wetlanders bring good luck.”

“No! No!” I wanted to weep. “You cant expect me to believe that!”

She nodded, all her chins flexing. A finger like a sausage stroked along my beard, which she had already trimmed short in trader fashion. “Hair gold, like Our Lady Sun. Eyes like sky. Dawn child!”

Then she chuckled, which in Misi was a huge subterranean woofing sound. She bent over. Breasts like meal sacks crushed briefly down on me as she placed a big wet kiss on my forehead. I caught a whiff of the turpentine odor of paka. “Dawn child!” she repeated.

I had heard of Dawn, of course, a land of surging glaciers and sudden catastrophic floods. It is a place where few travelers venture, in whose misty twilight landscape of snow and storms, blond, blue-eyed men like me skim their canoes through icy waters. Of all the peoples of Vernier, only the seafolk and the wetlanders live beyond the reach of trader wagons.

“Sun child!” Misi said, straightening up. “Blessed!”

Traders worshipped the sun, and with that explanation I had to be content. There was no way to argue with Misi Nada. Later, when I felt stronger, I tried the same question on Jat Lon.

Trader wagons are long and narrow, balanced high on many pairs of wheels. Most of their length is taken up with the storage area, a blank box entered from the side doors. At the front is an open cab for the owners and their families. Among the traders, women usually own the equipment, and men, the livestock. The men do the trading mostly, although the goods may belong to either.

Misi’s cab was of standard design, being square with three sides taken up by big windows. Those could be closed off with shutters when the weather was bad, and their low sills allowed them to also serve as doors. This box was Misi’s home and my sickroom. It was furnished with a collection of cubical chests, and these she shifted around to suit her needs of the moment. Put together they made a bed large enough even for her; spread around they formed benches. With my legs immobilized in splints, I sat or lay on these and watched the world go by.

The wagon was driven by either Misi or Pula Misi, who was obviously her daughter. As my wits began to return, I came to realize that Pula was barely more than a child, although she was already taller than I was. Had she wanted, Pula could have been striking, even beautiful, for she had an unconscious grace and the inner glow of youth; but Pula invariably wore shapeless muumuus of sickly green, her hair was a greasy tangle, and her face stayed as blank as a cloud.

Trader wagons move very slowly, but hippos, like woollies, never sleep, and their inexorable crawl will eat up any distance eventually. Usually wagons are linked in pairs, a combination that the traders call a “train.” Rich owners may hook up three or even four wagons in that fashion, but any combination will allow the women to spell each other off at driving. Pula also owned a wagon, and hers was towed by Misi’s, its living quarters facing the rear.

Other trains came and went, although always we had three or four in our company. Trader men came calling quite often, the women very seldom. The locals I met not at all, and by far my most frequent companions were Misi and her family. The oldest was gray-haired Lon Kiv, but I soon decided that the true leader of the group was his son, Jat Lon.

Jat was younger than me, short and lean and fast as a blink. His russet beard was trimmed to a point and his mustache twirled up in horns. He wore tan leather trousers piped in bright colors and emblazoned with swirls of beadwork, and his shirt was intricately embroidered. I never met a man more dapper than Jat Lon, or more sociable. Gems flickered on his fingers and his ears and on the hilt of the rapier hanging from his belt. His hazel eyes flashed with intelligence, gazing intently at me when I spoke, studying my reaction when he did. Misi I had already dismissed as a kindly moron, capable of only a few very limited endeavors, but I could see that Jat Lon missed nothing. His penetrating gaze was only bearable because of the understanding half-smile that always accompanied it.

Misi and Pula, Lon and Jat…and there was a fifth member of the family. Dot Jat was a lop-toothed lad, whose uneven grin already showed much native charm. At times in my delirium I had hallucinated that he was my lost son Merry, but all the babies I had sired with the seawomen would have by then grown beyond the tooth-dropping stage. Obviously Dot Jat was son of Jat Lon, who was son of Lon Kiv.

Jat spoke to Misi as one might address a very slow child—firmly yet not without affection. He called her anything from Momma to Big Pig, depending on his mood. Jat was Pula’s brother, I surmised, and Lon must be Misi’s husband. Dot’s mother seemed to be missing, but certainly Jat was the brains of the family. The older Lon Kiv seemed a much less sinister, more easygoing man. My danger, whatever it was, lurked behind the smile of Jat Lon.

The first time I held a true conversation with Jat, the cab was unusually crowded. He was kneeling on the floor, oiling a saddle. I was reclining on the bed, watching the scrub and the far-off hazy shapes of the Andes, almost lost now over the bend of the world. Another train was sometimes visible in the distance, grinding through the chaparral on a path paralleling our own. Misi, for once, had chosen to sleep in her own cab. Mostly she preferred to go to the rear and the privacy of Pula’s wagon, but now she lay at my side like a mislaid mountain, and her monstrous snores echoed back from the hills. Immobile as I was, I could not shake an uneasy belief that a bad lurch would roll her bulk on top of me and crush me to paste. Pula, shapeless in her wind-rippled green tent, was sitting out front on the step, holding the traces and gazing over the hippos’ backs in mindless silence.

Little Dot sat sleepily in one corner, doing double-jointed finger exercises. Traders’ hands are extraordinarily supple. When two traders trade they wave their fingers at each other all the time, either calculating or pretending to do so. They can count any number up to 59,048 that way, in a simple ternary system. My fingers never learned to move independently of one another so I never could make the symbols, but I learned to read them well enough, a skill that other traders did not expect in me.

“Jat,” I asked, “will you answer a couple of questions?”

Jat flickered his inevitable little smile. “Of course! But not necessarily truthfully.”

I was too tense to smile back, as I was meant to. “All right. You bought me. Why?”

“Because I can never resist a bargain.”

“Huh?”

He chuckled and sat back on his heels. Then he wiped his hands fastidiously on a rag. “I paid Kan one shirt for you. You looked dead already, but Misi said she thought you could be saved, and one shirt is a very good price for a wetlander.”

So far I could believe him. So I asked the big black question: “And what will you do with me now?”

“Oh, you’re not mine, Knobil. I gave you to Momma right away. That was why I bought you—as a gift for her.”

“A gift?”

“Misi wouldn’t have taken all this trouble doctoring you if she didn’t care for you, now would she?” Jat’s smile was not Pebble’s smile. Pebble’s had been happiness and sharing; Jat’s was calculated reassurance.

“Or if she thought I was vulnerable.” I was still very feeble, but my wits were coming back—slowly. “So why does she want me? What will she do with me?”

“Free you.” His pale brown face was as guileless as the sky.

“Why? Why go to all this trouble over a crippled slave?”

“Ex-slave.”

“But why?”

“Because we worship the sun,” Jat said solemnly. “Wetlanders are Our Lady Sun’s children—they have blue eyes and golden hair. To free a wetlander slave is a deed of great merit, well rewarded always.”

I studied him in baffled doubt. “You believe this?”

Jat peered past me at the sleeping Misi and then turned his head to look first at Pula, who was seemingly engrossed in guiding the teams, and then at Dot, intent on his finger-wiggling.

“Maybe not quite as much as some do,” Jat admitted quietly. “But…there have been cases, Knobil. I only ever met one man who’d done it—but the wealth! Four wagons, loaded to the roof. And the women…!” He sighed avariciously.

I did not believe, but I could think of no alternative explanation. Hrarrh had left me almost dead and certainly maimed for life. As a working slave I was now worthless. Why indeed should Misi struggle to heal me? Why should these hardheaded merchants waste food and shelter on me? Hrarrh himself had said that traders would buy wetlanders regardless of age or sex or health. I could think of no logical reason except what Jat and Misi were telling me—if a reason based only on religion could be called logical.

In my weakened state I was no match for Jat Lon. At outright lying I never was, I suppose. He saw my doubts, and again his eyes strayed toward Misi’s thunderous snores. He smirked.

“Momma was very grateful for the gift! I tell you, Knobil, she’s a lot of woman always, and that session was a bone-breaker! I thought I wouldn’t survive such gratitude!” He chortled lecherously. “But what a way to die, you know?”

“Huh? You mean she’s…she’s not your mother?”

Jat guffawed, causing Dot to sit up with a jerk.

“Mother? Never! Ask Lon if you want to know about my mother. I don’t recall her at all. He may.” Jat s bright eyes twinkled. “No, Misi and I are cab partners. That’s what ‘Momma’ means among traders. And she’s some partner—but don’t you dare tell her I said so!”

I struggled to rearrange my understanding of these curious people. “Then Dot’s mother—”

“A woman called Dako Jeeba. We disagreed over some furs. Sons go with fathers, of course, and we had no daughter. Misi and I get along well, but we won’t stay partners till the sun sets, I’m sure.”

I nodded and glanced at the motionless green figure out on the step. “And Pula?”

Jat glanced again at Pula’s motionless back and then smirked quizzically at his son. “Dot?” he said. “Tell Knobil what’s negotiable.”

The kid grinned. “Everything.”

“Good boy!” His father nodded. “I admit I fancied Pula, Knobil. But Lon’s a horny old goat, and he outbid me.”

Pula? That child? Misi’s daughter and Jat’s gray-pated father?

Jat chuckled and rose, holding out a hand to his son. “Come, little twister, let’s go see about a meal. Now you know more about trader ways than most people do, Knobil.”

“Pula and Lon are cab partners also?”

“Right. He pays her by the trick. Misi pays me.”

Chuckling—I suppose at the expression on my face—he squeezed by Pula and sprang down to the ground, catching Dot as he jumped down after. That was neither the first nor the last time that Jat diverted a conversation away from subjects he wished to shun. He had explained some curious customs, but not what use traders had for a crippled wetlander.

Slowly my pain and fever subsided. I progressed to the point where I could attend to my own bodily needs, a highly undignified procedure that involved hanging my rear out a window, but a great triumph for a man with planks on his legs. Dot found the performance hilarious and would bring other junior members of the trader community to watch. I suspected he made them pay him.

Gradually, too, I became less of an animal and more of a human being again. Even conversation was a skill I had to regain. The traders’ life was pleasant by most folk’s standards, varied and even luxurious. Traders ate well and enjoyed material possessions I had forgotten or had never seen. Mirrors, for example. I had not viewed my face since I was only half as old, admiring the arrival of my mustache when Violet and I had just escaped from the grasslands. I saw nothing to admire now—pallid skin and deep ravages of suffering. The freakish blue eyes were the same, yet they looked older than the world itself. I wondered how anyone else could even bear to look at them.

Whatever dread destiny the traders had in mind for me—and I felt certain that Hrarrh knew exactly what it was, so dread was likely an optimistic outlook—I could see no chance of escape until my knees healed. Always there was a driver in the cab with me, either Misi or Pula, and never was I allowed to meet a non-trader.

My obvious strategy was to try to be as pleasant and cooperative as possible: grateful, helpful, and dumb. I asked Jat for things to do, and thereafter I peeled vegetables when it was his turn or Lon’s turn to cook for the caravan. I strung beads for him, sharpened knives, cleaned tack, polished pots, kneaded dough—anything to keep my mind off its fears. But it was never enough.

“Misi? Can I help you? Will you teach me to sew?”

The wagon was crawling across a level empty plain. With nothing but low scrub to eat, the team was making unusual speed—a fair walking pace—but the flat ground presented no challenge to the drivers. One side of the wagon was shuttered against a wicked dusty wind. Misi was sitting indoors, only rarely needing to interrupt her embroidery to lean out the front window and yank on the hippos’ traces. She was a skilled seamstress, producing the finest needlework imaginable with hands that could have strangled bulls.

After a moment the big onion eyes came up to stare at me. “Men don’t sew, Knobil.”

“There’s no reason why they shouldn’t. I can’t ride or hunt. Why not sew?”

She thought awhile, then made her strange subterranean chuckle noise. “I don’t know why not.” She heaved herself to her feet and began to rummage through the chest on which she had been sitting. She eventually produced a bundle of fabrics and brought it across with her bag of equipment, settling massively at my side. The wide bed no longer seemed spacious.

She opened the bundle, spilling forth a wide selection of fabrics in many colors, some plain and some already embroidered. She selected a beige rag and handed it to me. “For practice.”

I fingered it curiously. “What cloth is this?”

“Cotton, Knobil.”

“It is so fine! Not like woollie cloth. What sort of an animal has fleece so fine?”

“Not an animal.” She scowled, as if thinking hurt her. “Cotton comes from a plant. It grows in hot swamps; there aren’t many of them just now. When I was little, cotton was cheaper. Mostly costly now.”

A long speech for her! I tried to imagine Misi as little. I wondered how one sheared a plant. “What are all these others, then?”

She began handing them over and naming them. “Linen…taffeta…burlap…felt…”

“This shirt that you are sewing—what cloth is it?”

I had been watching the shirt blossom under her touch. A plain brown garment had sprouted a forest of flowers, arabesques, and insects, in an exploding rainbow of color. It was almost complete. This was the first time I had had the chance to handle it, but I had already noticed the fineness of the material.

Pause. “Silk,” she said reluctantly.

“And what does this come from—animal or plant?”

“Don’t know!” That was a very speedy retort by her standards.

“I was told—did you trade silk to the ants?”

“Might have done.”

“Where does it some from, then?”

She waved a great hand vaguely southward. “From forests.”

I fingered the shirt again. “When the ant women dressed up for their feasts, they wore very bright gowns. The gowns seemed to be made of very light material. Would those gowns have been silk?”

Misi nodded. I waited until she said, “Likely.”

“It’s beautiful.”

She began to roll up the bundle, but I took it from her and started to go through it, comparing the different cloths. I had found something that interested Misi! For the first time we were having a conversation that was not a wrestling match.

Then I found a tiny rag of something different. It was clear and iridescent, of no color and yet of all colors, so fine as to be very nearly transparent. I held it up in surprise. “What’s this?”

Another pause, and it was a long one. “Water silk.”

“It’s beautiful! I can almost see through it! What is the difference between water silk and ordinary silk?”

“Color.”

“That’s all?”

She nodded reluctantly, her chins bulging. But I had learned to wait, and finally she said, “Plain silk is brown. Light brown. Or dark brown. Black, the most common.”

“You can’t bleach it?” A herdwoman’s son knew all about bleaching.

Misi shook her head.

“Or dye it?”

“Can dye water silk. Not ordinary silk. Very rare.”

I admired the water silk some more. “It’s expensive, I suppose?”

A nod.

“How many bales of ordinary silk for one bale of water silk?” I knew now how the traders saw the world, in comparative values.

“Fifty or more.”

Her expression suggested that I should be impressed. She was watching me intently, as if frightened that I might damage her precious fragment or run off with it.

I whistled again, thinking that would be an appropriate reaction.

But I was not very interested in silk.

Male traders scout, hunt, and cook. The rest of the time, if there is no trading in progress with the locals, they haggle among themselves—just to keep their tongues in practice, Jat said. Two of the four hippos belonged to him; two to his father, Lon. Both men also owned horses, and the number of those varied continually, although Jat never parted with his favorite, a high-stepping bay mare. Horses, like all two-eyed creatures, need sleep; they need water and time to graze, so the community’s horses were rarely to be found near the wagons. The men took turns at tending them, and from time to time the whole herd would go thundering by, heading for fresh grass and water somewhere up ahead.

And the wagons continued their endless crawl. Rocks and rivers, woods and cliffs—our road was never straight for very long, but I assumed that we were heading mostly westward, because more often than not our shadows lay ahead of us. As a child, I had learned that sunward was east and that shadows pointed west. Given the limited range of woollies, that rule was accurate enough for all herdfolk purposes. Now the sun was already farther from the zenith than I had ever seen it.

But then a chance remark by Jat told me I was wrong: we were heading east. He proceeded to give me a lesson in basic geography.

We had just finished a wonderful meal, I recall. The scouts had encountered a band of hunters who had slain a grotesquely tusked animal that I had never heard of. Dot called it a “yum-yum,” and I could understand why. Jat had bartered a haunch in return for a sack of cubenuts and now, proud of his prowess as both cook and breadwinner, was leaning back complacently, digesting. Dot had curled up on Misi’s ample lap and gone to sleep. Pula and Lon were missing.

The terrain was light woodland, and the animals crunched and smashed as they grazed through the thin trunks. The wagon heaved and rocked. Every time it came down hard, Misi would belch. She had eaten more than all of the rest of us put together, and her eyes were even more glazed than usual. The reins lay slack in her ample hand.

“East?” I said. “How can you tell which way is east?”

“By the curl on the trees,” Jat replied, and he twirled his mustache triumphantly. “Trees always grow toward the sun.”

Any child knew that trees curved near the ground. On the grasslands their uppermost trunks had been nearly vertical, but here the tops curled over farther. East of the sun the vegetation is older, Jat explained, and farther north or south trees twist in a spiral. This may be one reason why traders worship the sun—given a glimpse of it and a few trees, a trader can make a very near guess as to where he is on Vernier. The angels have more accurate methods, of course, but the traders get by with trees.

Where were we, then? I inquired.

“The borderland.” He waved a hand. “North of the forest, south of the desert. Trader country, this!”

“Take it from the beginning,” I said humbly. So he did.

The world is born anew at Dawn, as Orange had once told me, but a couple of months to the east its childhood excesses of flood and storm come to an end. Plants colonize in the jumbled mud and rock and loess as the sun climbs higher in the sky. A fuzzy adolescence sets in, with trees and shrubs maturing into woodland and then nigh-impenetrable forest. In Wednesday, though, the sun climbs too quickly, choking off the tree growth and leaving the lonely grasslands I had known in my youth. High Summer eventually destroys even the grass, so that most of late Wednesday is desert. The hot desert is well named and barren, but the cool desert can be very fertile in spots, and it is inhabited.

The great forests are found in late Tuesday and Thursday, flanking the deserts. The borderlands between are highways for traders, with water and forage for their livestock, with a passable terrain and a mainly bearable climate. It was eastward through this country that Misi and Pula were driving their train, the path twisting incessantly, taking ten or twenty steps upon the ground to achieve one upon our path, wending up and down hills, flirting with desert and jungle, skirting rock and swamp. The borderlands are well settled, mainly by farmers of various types, and visits to their settlements added more meanderings to our route.

Finally Jat yawned. “Ask Lon. He’s been everywhere from the edge of Dawn all the way to Heaven.”

Later I did ask Lon. He told me of the mud that had barred his wagon’s way westward into Dawn, and also of the Dying Lands in the east, beyond which Heaven lurks amid the blizzards of Dusk. I did not want to discuss Heaven with the traders, though.

“Where are you heading now?” I asked Jat.

But of course that was a matter that Jat was reluctant to discuss with me. “To and fro,” he said, waving a lazy hand. “Borderlands give the best trading.”

Neither of us was aware that Vernier was about to spring yet another of its traps, although a fairly harmless one. Angels had been passing the word for some time, and Jat’s ignorance showed how reluctant traders are to share information among themselves.

The conversation had died of too much caution. The wagon paused and then lurched. Misi belched. She twisted her thick torso around so that she could look at me.

“Where do you want to go, Knobil?” she asked.

Misi had been listening to the talk, had understood every word, and had then asked outright the one question I preferred not to answer, but by then I was so completely convinced of her stupidity that I did not notice when the mask briefly slipped.

“Will I ever walk again?” I countered.

“Yes. Maybe not well, though.”

I eyed Jat, whom I still thought of as the brains of the partnership. “When I get these splints off, would you teach me to ride?”

“Of course, Knobil!” If he meant that, he had an exceptionally slow horse in mind for me. “Be glad to.”

“Then what, Knobil?” Misi asked. “Where will you ride to? Heaven?”

“Why should I do that?” I retorted, still not realizing that I was crossing wits with the woman I believed to be a mental snail. “I have no desire at all to go to Heaven!” and there, at least, I was speaking the truth.

“Thought you’d want to tell the angels about the slaves in the mine,” Jat remarked blandly.

This was dangerous ground. Whatever they said, these wily traders were harboring me only because they could smell profit—somewhere, somehow—and Hrarrh had not sent me on this journey out of benevolence. Angels would be able to give me advice and possibly rescue. And, yes, they would certainly ask me about slavery.

When I had denounced Anubyl for killing my mother, Violet had ignored my protest. Wiser now, I knew how angels defined violence. They would intervene only if the violence was between cultures. A herdman beating his women was not breaking the rules of his own group, and angels had already far too much to do without trying to change social patterns. But slavery crossed boundaries, and the angels would take action if they could.

Yes, the ants owned slaves. They bought them from traders. Heaven was powerless against a mine full of ants, but a trader caravan was vulnerable.

So I met that rapier gaze as steadily as I could. “I have a very low opinion of angels, Jat, very low!” Again I was being truthful. “You ever trade in slaves, Jat?”

Amused, he shook his head. “Not so far. It’s a mean way to make a living. But if I’m ever crossing the grasslands and a starving loner crawls up to me—I suppose I’d feed him. Then he’d owe me, wouldn’t he? It would be like having a plump doe drop dead on your campfire. Hard to refuse.”

“Let him starve! It would be kinder. But as far as I know, there are no slaves in your train nor in any of the others. If an angel comes by, I won’t make trouble. I’m very grateful to all of you. I won’t start cuddling up to angels.”

The little man nodded in unusual silence. I did have a strong suspicion, though, that one of the other wagons held slaves—I had seen some youths being exercised once, in the far distance. And I knew for certain that one of Misi’s storage chests had held a gun, because I had snooped, early in my recuperation. It had not been there the next time I looked, but it would be around somewhere. Angels would certainly want to know about that gun and where it had come from.

“So?” Misi said. “Not Heaven. Where do you want to go, Knobil?”

I had not been long enough out of the mine for my wits to have healed. I knew I must return to the grasslands, and I still vaguely believed that that was because I had business with the Heavenly Father there—but I also knew that I no longer believed in any of the myriad gods and goddesses I had heard worshipped in the slave compound. My logic needed more work, but my intent was clear. Back to scenes of my childhood I must go.

“If I can some how earn a horse of my own, then I shall head for the grasslands,” I said. “Being a seaman on the March Ocean was pleasant. The cold seas of Saturday don’t attract me.”

“Be a herdman?” Jat snorted in disbelief.

Misi pouted doughy lips. “That’s no life! They’re animals! You learn to ride and then stay with us! We’ll make a trader of you.”

She turned her attention back to the hippos as if the matter were now settled. Jat grinned at the passing scenery and said nothing. He was perhaps thinking, as I was, of Knobil and Misi as cab partners. My reaction had perhaps shown on my face.

I promised to consider Misi’s suggestion. I was quite sure that Jat had some other end in view for me, but I could do nothing until I got my legs back, except continue my attempts to seduce Misi Nada.

In retrospect, that conversation ought to have warned me that I had grievously underestimated Misi. How stubborn the human brain is, how reluctant to change any of its own opinions! I should have seen the evidence. A moron could not have hauled me from death’s gut as Misi had. A moron could not play apothecary and healer to the whole caravan, as Misi did. A moron would certainly not have been allowed to trade with the slashers.

We were now approaching the most fertile part of Vernier, where the inhabitants follow a form of agriculture called slash-and-burn. The women raise crops, harvest them, and then move west to where the men have already cleared new ground. After the planting and its associated rites, the men gradually slip away again westward to start the next clearing. In Heaven I met several slashers, and at least one had obvious trader blood in him. In theory, though, the male traders stayed away from the slasher women’s villages and sent in their own women to bargain. When Misi was chosen for this duty a second time, I at last began to wonder.

Part of my blindness certainly sprang from pride. Ever since Jat had explained the traders’ customs to me, I had been trying my wiles on Misi, the skills I had developed so highly in the seafolk’s grove. Whenever the two of us were alone, I expressed my desire by word and eye and hand. Misi’s reaction was one of complete incomprehension, leaving me baffled. I peevishly concluded that she could understand nothing more subtle than an outright business offer, and I had no trade goods. To admit that there was a mind inside that big head would be to admit that it had outsmarted me.

And when Misi began removing my splints for short periods, my suspicions became hard to ignore. I did not want to exercise my knees, for even the smallest bend produced fearful agony. Misi insisted, standing over me, threatening to use force. Cursing and screaming by turns, I would obey—but only because I believed her threats. And when I was incapable of bearing more, she would gently tie the planks to my legs again and wipe my streaming brow.

But she only did this when we were alone. When Jat asked how I was progressing, she told him straight lies. I was surprised, but I did not contradict her. So perhaps I had guessed.

In the end it was the shirt that convinced me. Ever since I had known her, Misi had been working on that shirt. Now bright thread hid every scrap of the underlying silk. It was obviously a man’s garment and, I assumed, intended for Jat. But traders gave nothing away, in spite of Jat’s tales of freeing slaves to bring good luck.

Taking advantage of some smooth terrain, I had been sleeping. I awoke to the sound of voices. For a moment I thought they were discussing me. When I opened my eyes, however, I saw Jat wearing the new shirt. Another lay discarded at my side, beside his leather coat. He was preening mightily, admiring as much of himself as he could contort into the little mirror. If one’s taste ran to such ostentation, then that shirt was the treasure of a lifetime. Even I could see that it was a masterpiece.

The dealing had started. Misi was sitting on one of the chests, set outside on the step, and had now turned around to plant her big feet flat inside the cab. Her meaty hands rested on her knees, and her eyes had shrunk back into sinister caverns of fat.

“Not one more twenty-seventh!” Jat said over his shoulder. “Pick something else, anything else but—oh, hi Knobil. Anything else at all.”

Misi’s pout became a glare.

“Fourteen sacks of phosphate?” Jat suggested, earning a loud snort. “Well, how about the dapple foal? Kan wants it. Nine-eighteenths of the copper pots?”

She seemed to like none of his ideas. She shrugged hugely. “The rest of the bronze pelts?”

Jat’s attention went to his fingers. “Nineteen thirty-thirds of my twenty-two thirtieths?”

“The molasses and your share of the oats?”

“Thirteen twenty-fourths of the wool and the bag of agates?”

“All the wool and two-thirds of the agates?”

“The bleach, the sickles, and the glass beads?”

They kept this up for some time, while I listened in amazement. I had seen Jat bargaining with Lon and even with some of the other men—it was their favorite occupation. But I never heard it done faster, with less hesitation, or with more authority. Offer and counteroffer went leaping around the cab like a herd of roos; speed was part of the technique. Misi apparently knew the details and values of Jat’s holding as well as he did.

Usually such session ended with an agreement, a handshake, and a repeat of the terms before a witness and in sunshine. But not this one. “Leave it, then,” Misi growled, and she swung around once more to attend to the team.

Angrily Jat pulled off the overpriced garment, threw it down, and flounced off like a sulky child. He was still fastening buttons as he cantered away.

Stunned, I stretched out to catch hold of the discarded shirt. I lifted it and had begun to fold it when I saw that Misi had twisted around to glare her grotesque face in my direction.

“Work those knees more, Knobil!”

“Yes, Misi,” I said humbly. “I will.”

If she had fooled me for so long, which one of us was the smarter?