David Brin - Glory Season

The man looked dubious. He, too, had taken losses when the Zeus vanished. “Yer welcome with us. Ye’d have a home till spring, an’ each three-quarter year after.”

In its way it was a generous offer. Other women, such as Naroin, had taken that path, living and working in the periphery of the strange world of men. But Maia shook her head. “I’ve got to be here, in case Leie shows.”

She saw him accept her choice with a sigh, and Maia wondered how this could be the same person she had dismissed so two-dimensionally, back in Port Sanger. Flaws were still apparent, but now they comprised part of a surprisingly complex blend for so simple a creature as a man. After handing her bag down to the pilot of the waiting barge, topped off with a consignment of dark coal, Captain Pegyul drew from one of his pockets a compact brass tool.

“It’s m’second-best sextant,” he explained, showing her how the three sighting arms unfolded. There were two leather straps for attaching it to the owner’s arm. “Portable job. Been meanin’ t’fix the main reflector, ret here. See? Sort o’ hair loom, it is. Even had a redout for the Old Net, see here?”

Maia marveled at the miniaturized workmanship. The old readout dials would never light again, of course. They marked it as a relic of another age, battered and no match for the finely hand-wrought devices produced in modern sanctuary workshops. Still, the sextant was an object of both reverence and utility.

“It is very beautiful,” she said. When he refolded it, Maia saw that the watchcase cover bore an engraving of an airship—a flamboyant, fanciful design that obviously could never fly.

“It’s yers.”

Maia looked up in surprise. “I … couldn’t.”

He shrugged, trying to make matter-of-fact what she could tell was an emotion-laden gesture. “I heard how ye tried to save Micah with the bucket. Fast thinkin’. Mighta worked … if luck was diff’rent.”

“I didn’t really—”

“He was me own boy, Micah. Great, hulkin’, cheerful lad. Too much Ortyn in him, though, if y’know what I mean. Never would of learned to use a sextant right, anyway.”

Pegyul took Maia’s smaller hand in his huge callused one and put the brass instrument firmly in her palm, closing her fingers around the cool, smooth disk. “God keep ye,” he finished with a quaver in his voice.

Maia answered numbly. “And Lysos guide you. Eia.” He nodded with a faint jerk, and turned away.

Fully loaded, the coal barge slowly crossed the glassy bay. Grange Head didn’t look like much, Maia thought glumly. There was little industry besides transhipping produce for countless farming holds strewn across the inland plains, accessing the sea here by narrow-gauge solar railway. Sunlight wasn’t enough to lift fully laden trains over the steep coastal hills, so a small generating plant offered a steady market for Port Sanger coal. The solitary pier lacked draft to let old Wotan dock, so its cargo came ashore boatload by boatload.

Naroin smoked her pipe, quietly regarding Maia.. “Been meanin’ to tell you,” she said at last. “That was some trick you pulled durin’ the avalanche.”

Maia sighed, wishing it had occurred to her to lie about the damned bucket, instead of semiconsciously babbling the whole story to her rescuers.. Her impulsive act hadn’t been thought-out enough to be called generous, let alone heroic. Sheer instinct, that was all. Anyway, the futile gesture hadn’t saved the poor fellow.

However, Naroin wasn’t referring to that part of the episode, it turned out. “Usin’ the shovel the way you did,” she said. “That was quick thinking. The blade gave you a little cave to breathe in. And raisin’ the handle signaled us where to dig. But tell me this, did you know we make those hafts out o’ hollow bamboo? Did you figure air might pass through?”

Maia wondered where Naroin kept herself summers, so she could avoid ever being trapped in the same town. “Luck, bosun. You’re out of season if you see more in it. Just dumb luck.”

The master-at-arms shrugged. “Expected you’d say that.” To Maia’s relief, the older woman let it drop there, allowing Maia to ride the rest of the way in silence. When the barge bumped along the town dock, with its row of hand-built wooden cranes, the bosun stood up and shouted. “All right, scum, let’s get at it. Maybe we can clear this hole in the coast before the tide!”

Maia waited till the barge was tied securely, and the others had scrambled ashore, before stepping carefully across the gangplank with her duffel. The rock-steady pier made her feel momentarily queasy, as if the roll of a ship were more natural than a surface anchored to rock. Pressing her lips in order to not show her pain, Maia set off for town without a backward glance. Counting her bonus, she could afford to rest and heal for a while before looking for work. Still, the coming weeks would be a time of trial, staring out to sea, clutching the magnifier on her little sextant in forlorn hope each time a sail rounded those jagged bluffs, fighting to keep depression from enveloping her like a shroud.

“So long, Lamai brat!” someone shouted at her back—presumably the sharp-faced var who had been so hostile, that first day at sea. This time the insult was without bite, and probably meant with offhand respect. Maia lacked the will to reply, even with the obligatory, amiably obscene gesture. She just didn’t have the heart.

“In ancient days, in olden tribes, men obliged their wives and daughters to worship a stern-browed male god. A vengeful deity of lightning and well-ordered rules, whose way it was to shout and thunder at great length, then lapse into fits of maudlin, all-forgiving sentimentality. It was a god like men themselves—a lord of extremes. Wrangling priests interpreted their Creator’s endless, complex ordinances. Abstract disputes led to persecution and war.

“Women could have told them,” Lysos supposedly continued. “If men had only stopped their bickering and asked our opinion. Creation itself might have been a bold stroke of genius, a laying down of laws. But the regular, day to day tending of the world is a messy business, more like the inspired chaos of a kitchen than the sterile precision of a chartroom, or study.”

Intermittent breezes ruffled the page she was reading. Leaning on the crumbling stone wall of a temple orchard, looking past the sloping tile roofs of Grange Head, Maia lifted her gaze to watch low clouds briefly occult a brightly speckled, placid sea, its green shoals aflicker with silver schools of fish and the flapping shadows of hovering swoop-birds. The variegated colors were lush, voluptuous. Mixing with scents carried by the moist, heavy wind, they made a stew for the senses, spiced with fecund exudates of life.

The beauty was heavy-handed, adamantly consoling. She got the point—that life goes on.

With a sigh, Maia picked up the slim volume again.

“A living planet is a much more complex metaphor for deity than just a bigger Father, with a bigger fist,” the passage went on. “If an omniscient, all-powerful Dad ignores your prayers, it’s taken personally. Hear only silence long enough, and you start wondering about His power. His fairness. His very existence.

“But if a World-Mother doesn’t reply, Her excuse is simple. She never claimed conceited omnipotence. She has countless others clinging to Her apron strings, including myriad species unable to speak for themselves. To Her elder offspring She says—go raid the fridge. Go play outside. Go get a job.

“Or better yet, lend me a hand! I have no time for idle whining.”

Maia closed the slim volume with a sigh. She had spent a good part of the afternoon pondering this excerpt, purported to have been written by the Great Founder herself. The passage was not part of formal scripture. Yet, even while working in the temple garden, Maia kept thinking about it. Priestess-Mother Kalor had lent her the book when more traditional readings failed to help ease her heart-pain. Against all expectation it had helped. The tone, more open and casual than liturgy, was poignantly humorous in parts. For the first time, Maia found she could picture Lysos as a person she might have liked to know. After weeks of depression, Maia managed her first, tentative smile.