“What was that?”
“The signal that—like stabled graats—they are now consenting to feed us. Are you hungry?”
She nodded.
“Come then.”
Maddalena-Melisma tried to ignore the sour looks of those who waited on line before the door through which drifted the succulent smell of food. Mostly now it was the women who glowered, seeing her so finely dressed and so healthy and attractive. Though they must all have been quite young, the refugee women were prematurely aged by worry and privation. Two or three young men leered until Saikmar took half a pace toward them; then they quickly looked another way.
“Who exactly are these people?” Maddalena asked in a low voice. Equally quietly, so that she had to watch his lips to catch every word, Saikmar explained.
“Like myself, they have claimed the immemorial right of asylum here—to avoid unjust accusation, to escape punishment for debt, or because they have been exiled from their own cities and have no skills to support themselves in a strange country.”
“Why are they so—so resentful?”
“They are without hope, without a future. They cannot even look forward to honor from their descendants, for their children are taught by the priestesses to forget their parents, little by little, and then trained in the mysteries. It is the only source from which the priesthood can be recruited. The priestesses, must be virgins, and the priests are—uh—no longer equipped to father children.”
Melisma’s incredulity must have shown on her face. At that moment the line began to move, and Saikmar gestured ahead of them. “In that room you will understand,” he said.
And she did. The room was thick with steam, and moreover poorly lighted, but she could see that it was serving its original purpose as a canteen. Behind a metal counter pitted with rust, fat persons in robes stood ladling stew into bowls that the refugees held out, adding to the stew a chunk of coarse bread and a strip of some kind of dried fish on which salt granules glittered. These persons sometimes snapped angrily at children who were disorderly while waiting their turn, and their voices were high and querulous.
Priests, no longer equipped …
She turned it over in her mind and shortly came up with a reason for this barbaric custom. Of course, when the refugees fled from Zarathustra there was still a ban on spacecrew fathering or mothering children; proper hard-radiation screening had not been developed, and their only legal way to become parents was by making a deposit in a sperm-and-ovum bank beforehand. Some petty tyrant, ignorant of the grounds for the ban, must have institutionalized it by the crude means which came to hand. It was another example of the same process that had turned the stranded ship into an inviolate sanctuary. To people who had been saved by the ship from the fury of a star-going nova, the mental step from ship-equals-escape to ship-equals-safety must have been a very small one.
Surveying the canteen as the line moved irregularly forward, she was struck by the fact that instead of the refugees going to tables or benches to eat their food, they left the room—presumably to return to their cabins. Why were there no tables? Ah: the counter was not in its original position; it had been cut loose and dragged several feet across the floor, no doubt making the room too crowded for everyone to eat together.
Behind the serving priests, big urns of stew bubbled. Through the steam which rose from them she could just discern that the walls and roof were buckled and gashed. Pipes ran through the gashes into darkness beyond.
The implications of that shook her so much that she stopped in her tracks, and only Saikmar’s nudging made her aware that it was her turn to take a bowl and have it filled. Hastily complying, she said, “Behind the wall yonder—what is there?”
Saikmar shrugged. “Something magical, I presume, the business of the mysteries. I know nothing of them.”
“Is it always hot in here?”
“Oh yes, even in midwinter, and there is always stew or broth, or at least chay to comfort the stomach.”
Chay, she recalled from her briefing, was an infusion of dried leaves containing a stimulant similar in its effects to coca, but much milder. It had to be made with boiling water, she had learned—it was one of the necessary accomplishments for the role of hetaira she was supposed to adopt.
So down there in the dark there must still be a source of power! Obviously not the main generators of the ship—they would have been smashed in the landing, as she could deduce from the glimpses she had had already. Indeed, it was a minor miracle that they hadn’t blown up and destroyed the ship completely. Probably the survivors had jury-rigged something to see them through their first winter. However that might be, what counted was that it was still operating.
When she got the chance, she must definitely investigate.
She accompanied Saikmar back to the cabin to eat their meal. The food was oddly flavored, but the stew was hot and the coarse bread was very filling. The dried fish, though, was stale despite generous salting; after a trial nibble she put the rest by.
“Tell me,” she said as she wiped the last drops from her bowl with the last crust of bread, “what did Graddo mean—?”
Saikmar threw up his hand in horror. “Never speak that name!” he whispered. “It has been accursed!”
“Oh, for…!” But she recovered herself; she could not afford to slight the customs of the local people. Obediently, she changed her phrasing. “What did the man who attacked us mean when he accused your city of stopping caravans and keeping the pickings for themselves?”
Saikmar explained, admitting that for all he knew the charge was justified, but insisting on what was certainly true: that it was unfair to accuse his own or any other of the genuine Carrig clans of being responsible. If the guilt lay anywhere, it must be at the door of the usurper Belfeor and his cronies, a banditlike horde conjured as if by magic—presumably from some hiding place in the hills—to enforce with strange, terrible weapons their leader’s right to rule.
From there he went on into a bitter tirade against Belfeor, to which Maddalena listened carefully, extracting the salient points. She was both disappointed and horrified:—horrified because it became clear that the people of Carrig were used to a leisurely, secure life where change came slowly if at all, and in such a society one ruthless man could already have wrought irremediable harm; disappointed because Saikmar could retail her no news that was less than a year old, and from it she could not determine whether she had to deal with a mere gang of adventurers who fancied the idea of playing the despot for a while, or with a well-organized plot to enslave Carrig and milk it of its rich resources.
Still, there was no point in railing against fate. She had been fortunate enough to fall in with Saikmar rather than Graddo on her arrival, and that was some consolation. But she gloomily wondered how she was going to sweat out the winter without breaking down completely, knowing that with every passing hour Belfeor was closing his grip more tightly on his miserable victims.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Time passed. Firmly instructing herself not to fret, Maddalena began to get the measure of the enclosed society she had landed among. Whether it was due to the coming of winter or whether things were the same the year around, she could not yet tell; but most of the refugees were half in hibernation—wakeful, but so lacking in vitality they were apathetic. Twice a day a great gong boomed to announce an issue of food, and that was the only real event so far as most of them were concerned. Even the children, who were playful enough at the age of four or five, seemed to have the spirit systematically drained out of them, and by the time they were eight or ten they were miniature parodies of the priestly staff. Some, like the little girl who was Nyloo’s constant companion, contrived it very young indeed.
Shortly after the day’s second meal, the light in the sanctuary dimmed to a twilight level; two-thirds of the way toward the first meal of the next day, the brightness increased again. She was so used to sourceless illumination that she recognized this only as further proof of still-functioni
ng power-sources when Saikmar commented on it as an example of the reasons why the mysteries must be taken seriously.
Well, if it was the only way of persuading people to undertake maintenance for seven centuries …
Despite her impatience, she kept reminding herself that she was here chiefly on sufferance. The other refugees scowled at her whenever she appeared in the canteen, and it was as yet not known whether Saikmar’s oath concerning her had been enough to convince Nyloo that she must be allowed to stay. She dared not do anything risky, such as stealing into the canteen to look behind that gashed wall, until she was absolutely confident of not being caught.
Meanwhile she was thrown exclusively into Saikmar’s company. At first the prospect had worried her, but after a day or two she was quite pleased. He was a far cry from the rough barbarians she had expected to encounter here—indeed, he was unfailingly courteous and considerate, never making the least imposition on her, his whole attitude utterly different from the patronizing arrogance she had been led to imagine. It did not take her long to see that this was due to him being in awe of her; his veneer of sophistication was thin, and hid an unfathomable depth of superstition concerning, above all, parradiles.
Whether the other refugees were also awed, or whether the expulsion of Graddo had made them frightened for more rational reasons, her few attempts to make conversation with them were a fiasco. She had thought the atmosphere of a Corps base was oppressive enough; this, though, was frightening. According to what Saikmar told her, no one in the sanctuary seemed to have enough imagination to invent ways to pass the time. Once the snow-wall had closed off the entrance until spring there was almost literally nothing to do except sleep, moon around, and quarrel. Often the sound of fights, begun purely to relieve the monotony, shattered the ears of all the refugees in their close-packed cabins.
Himself accustomed to a full life at home, Saikmar offered his guest what he could. Immediately he discovered she could read—a rare accomplishment, she gathered, among Carrig’s women—he produced from a locked chest the few books he had managed to bring with him. But despite their enormous size the handwritten pages of all of them together held less than one recording-spool such as she was accustomed to, and she knew the contents by heart within hours. There were two books of lyric poems with indications for harp accompaniment; two books chronicling the history of Carrig: volume one was almost entirely fabulous, although the second looked like a fairly factual, if bald, account of the city’s last two centuries; and, finally, a sort of breviary of the Carrig religion, indicating by means of a laboriously worked-out calendar the proper times for various festivals such as the king-hunt.
Even the rapid briefing she had undergone had told her more about Fourteen than these books compiled on the spot.
Afraid of her own weaknesses, foreseeing how easily she might crack, being cooped up here for months on end, she wondered about the possibility of escape. But the more she considered it the more absurd it became. Granted that all kinds of survival gear were built into her suit they were meant primarily for survival in space or on airless asteroids; the compass was almost the only exception. The one thing the sanctuary wasn’t short of was water, but even if she managed to electrolyze some and compress the hydrogen into tanks, the weight of the tanks would probably be too much for the suit-jets to lift—they were meant to stabilize and slow down the wearer during a fall, not to hoist him or her off the ground and over mountain ranges. The technology to make collapsed-hydrogen lozenges had been available before the Zarathustra nova, but she didn’t know whether the principle had diffused that far; and even if by a miracle she found some hidden in a remote corner of tike sanctuary, she would never be able to transfer them from their hypermagnetic storage cases to the magazine on the suit. Immediately they were removed from the enclosing energy field they would expand by a factor of about eight thousand, and it would take the output of a fair-sized fusion reactor to put them back again.
Thinking of fusion reactors …
Time and again she came back to the same conclusion: she must sneak into the priestly zone beyond the canteen and find out what manner of machine was still working there. But she dared not share that intention even with Saikmar; to him all such matters were magical, and he had been brought up not to meddle with them. As for the idea that the priests and priestesses themselves might tell her, it was ridiculous. They guarded their secrets more jealously than life.
She planned her strategy with care. First of all, she persuaded Saikmar to take her on a guided tour of all those parts of the sanctuary that were open to the refugees, which she estimated at about a third of the original hull-volume. A further third, or slightly less, was reserved to the staff, and in it they taught the children they had recruited; studied ancient writings without comprehension, and assigned them symbolic meanings in line with their own experience of reality; and conducted such rituals as they had. This was not a god-centered cult, Maddalena found; the planet-wide term ordinarily translated as “the gods” referred here to abstract principles or ungraspable concepts: creation, speed, the generation of storms, heat cold, and light. There was no idea that they must be propitiated, only that they must be served because that was the nature of the universe. It seemed as though the further they drifted from their original landing, the more the natives of Fourteen had garbled the traditions they had inherited, and by now the link between this cult and—say—the religion of Carrig was hardly recognizable.
As to the last third of the original ship, it had either been crushed on landing, or had been ripped open and was now unusable thanks to hundreds of winters of drifting snow.
Somewhere on the borderline of the priestly zone, therefore, she must seek the resources she needed.
Though Saikmar slept soundly, he was sometimes disturbed by dreams which, as he told Maddalena, sprang from memories of what he had seen Belfeor do in Carrig. Most often he dreamed of how he had been cheated of his right to kill the king. In keeping with her role as a southlander she had made appropriate religious gestures and awed exclamations when she heard about the usurper’s power to hurl bolts of lightning, and it was not entirely pretense. She could clearly imagine the impact of energy guns on the ignorant and unprepared.
Following such a dream, Saikmar invariably fell into very deep sleep from which, as she took pains to establish, virtually nothing could rouse him. Accordingly, several days after her arrival, she waited patiently in the twilit cabin until she heard him writhing in the grip of nightmare, and then a while longer until his breathing grew regular again. Now was her chance. She groped under her bunk until she located the headlight of her space helmet, and silently unscrewed it from its mount It would run for months without recharging, and its beam could be narrowed to a mere pencil of light, ideal for her surreptitious wanderings.
It was difficult to get out of the cabin and not make a noise owing to the metal frame across the entrance. Lowering it on a blanket, however, solved that problem, and she stole into the corridor. Somewhere a fractious baby was crying, but aside from that the place was quiet. Most of the refugees enjoyed their sleep; dreams offered escape from reality.
Seeing and hearing no one, she made her way along the familiar route to the canteen. A scent of food still clung in the air hereabouts, and her mouth watered without warning, reminding her that like all the refugees she was on a bare subsistence diet now and invariably hungry. The air was warmer here, too, than in the cabin she had left.
The door of the canteen was among the few which still functioned. It was shut, naturally, and moreover it seemed to be locked on the far side. No matter how hard she leaned on the sliding panel she could not make it budge. But she had half-expected this, and come prepared. The frame of the ship was so badly buckled that any door that still operated must have loosened in its grooves, just as those that did not work had been jammed in them. Playing her flashlight on the door, she saw she was right in her guess. There was a gap easily wide enough to admit the tip of her survival kni
fe, which she had also removed from her spacesuit and brought with her.
Five minutes’ fiddling work with the knife enabled her to press the catch of the lock back into its socket and free the panel.
Having listened a moment for sounds of snoring or even breathing, which might betray someone keeping overnight watch in this pleasantly warm room, she crossed the floor silently and went behind the service counter. She inspected the big urns where they cooked the soups and stews that formed the mainstay of the refugees’ diet They were cold at the moment, but the means whereby they were heated was clear: they were connected to steam pipes—leaky, corroded, and plugged with the same pitchlike material used for gaps in the hull All the pipes led through holes in the wall behind. Studying these holes, she saw that they must indeed date back to the days just after the ship had crashed; to protect the exposed edges of the metal from rust plastic had been sprayed on. What little remained was black and brittle with age.
So down there …
She played her flashlight through the largest hole, one big enough for her to crawl through, and saw that there was a compartment beyond containing a confused array of machinery. Promptly she decided she was going to crawl through.
Once again she made sure there was no one sleeping here to guard against intrusion—it was unlikely in view of the refugees’ superstitious regard for the priestly mysteries, but one never knew—and then she wriggled with maximum patience past the steam pipes and into the new room.
When she took a good look at what it contained, she suffered a twinge of alarm. The entire arrangement was incredibly makeshift. She calmed herself by reflecting that if it had worked for so many centuries it probably wouldn’t explode now, and if it did there was nothing she could do about it anyway. Cautiously inspecting everything with her flashlight, but touching nothing, she walked around the room.