Роберт Бюттнер - Orphan's Journey

I nodded. “Brendin talked to Blackbeard about trading us for fancy armor. But what do the Fisheaters get in return?”

Howard pointed at the mounded bags in front of us. “I expect we’re about to find out.”

Yulen had been sitting on a rock, edging his sword with a sharpening stone. He looked up and snorted. “Now my aching Fisheaters wag their tongues like women. Then you’re rested enough to do women’s work.”

Yulen pointed his sword at the hide bags, which made a mountain taller than he was. Alongside them sat wooden tubs of river water, coarse-bristled brushes, and empty, iron-banded chests. “Clean Stones go in the chests.”

He drew his sword back behind his shoulder, one handed, then spun a blue peach in the air with the other, like a juggler.

Yulen’s sword flashed, and the peach fell in two dicotyledonous halves. “Steal one Stone, that’s your hand. Steal two Stones, that’s your head.”

Yulen must have known that his demonstration kept Stone washers honest, because he backed off thirty yards, sat with his back against a tree, and propped his helmet over his eyes.

I yanked a pillow-case-sized hide bag from the pile, staggering backwards as it popped loose. “It’s like feathers!”

I tipped the bag, and a hundred dried mud balls the size of eggs and walnuts bounced to the ground.

Howard dipped one in a bucket, then sluiced mud off the Stone with a brush.

The rough rock in Howard’s hand glittered. I don’t just mean like jewelry. It glowed, blood-red, even in the afternoon sunlight, like a plugged-in light bulb. I had to squint to look at it.

Howard lifted his Eternad helmet off the equipment pile behind us, unsnapped the optics headring, and peered through the lenses at the Stone, like a jeweler louping the Hope Diamond. “Holy moly!”

“What is it?”

Howard peeled off his headring and handed the ’ring and Stone to me. I hefted the Stone. “It’s like a ping pong ball!”

Howard said, “It just feels that way.”

“Huh?” I manual-focused Howard’s optics on the Stone’s surface. The Stone itself didn’t glow. It was a water-rounded cobble of sedimentary rock. Just a naturally cemented sand and silt grain lump, as common as any kid ever picked out of any creek on Earth. The glow shone from transparent spherules, as tiny as pinheads, scattered among the mundane grains.

Jude said, “What are they, Howard?”

Howard paused. Then he said. “Well… A black hole core weighs gigatons. It sucks in light. The material encased in those spherules lightens the rock around it, and it reflects light so perfectly the whole Stone seems to glow. I can only think of one explanation.”

“Cavorite? In these little red blobs?”

He nodded. “So this is the natural state of interuniversal Cavorite.”

“You said Cavorite came from the edge of the universe. This place is the armpit of the universe, definitely not the edge.”

Howard shook his head. “The universes commingle at their interface. The spherules are bits of Cavorite that crossed over, and picked up a coating of material from our side. Somewhere out beyond the edge, there are probably similar bits of our universe in adjacent ones. The Firewitch powerplant just mimicked one of these spherules, with shutters added to release and direct the Cavorite effect.”

Jude said, “But we’re not at the boundary.”

“Meteorites normally originate within their own star system. But intergalactic bolides are certainly possible.” Howard held up another washed Stone, between his thumb and forefinger. “I’ll bet a carton of cigarettes that these spherules fell on Bren eons ago, got buried, lithified, then eroded out over geologic time.”

Howard laid the Stone he had cleaned in an empty chest. “Spring thaw would erode new Stones from the mountain outcrops.” He gazed into the distance. “The Stones are so light that the spring rains wash them downstream. The Tassini prospectors must mine the placers all summer. That’s why the Trade Fair is in the fall.”

Ord had already filled one chest with washed Stones. He gazed at the peaked tents, banners now flapping in the afternoon breeze, and at the ship sails swaying beyond them. “Do these river people use these Stones to fly in space?”

Yulen sat up beneath his tree, and cupped his hands. “If you’ve time to talk, I’ll fetch Stones enough to keep you busy all night! Or I could cut out your tongues.”

The bag pile’s shadow had already lengthened. We all shut up and scrubbed.

We finished scrubbing at dusk, then Yulen staked us down for the night. He found us an abandoned yurt in the encampment’s Casuni quarter.

Our minders stationed themselves in a ring around the tent’s perimeter.

Jude ran his hands over the yurt’s hide wall, tested the ropes that hobbled his legs, then turned to me. “Isn’t it time to escape now? If everybody gets as drunk as they got last night, we could sneak past the guards.”

“And then what?” I shook my head. “Tomorrow, Blackbeard’s going to trade us to the Fisheaters.”

Howard said, “The Marini seem more genteel than the Casuni. We’d probably be better off with them. I vote we stay put tonight.”

I raised my eyebrows at Ord.

“We’re not immediately threatened, Sir. Our resources are limited. Our intelligence is nonexistent. And we lack an objective.”

I tugged off my boots. “Okay. Let’s make tonight’s objective sleep.”

Outside, singing began — throaty, off-key, and destined to worsen as kegs emptied. But after what we’d been through, I drifted off to sleep in minutes.

Yulen and Blackbeard woke us at dawn, made us wash, and dressed us in plain cloth tunics over our underlayer, then remounted us on our duckbills. They and a half dozen others led us back through the yurt encampment, until we emerged onto a grass midway. Awninged tents and stalls cut it up into a rabbit-warren of a bazaar, teeming with people, some mounted like us, most dismounted.

I rode alongside Yulen, eavesdropping while he pointed out passers-by to the blond youngster Yulen had taken under his wing.

I had already learned volumes listening around the campfires on the journey here.

Across the midway, two men wore sun-cheating robes over bodies as thin and brown as rusted wire. Indigo dye stained their foreheads. Yulen grinned as he pointed. “Tassini. The more purple on their heads, the higher their station.”

The pitiful Tassini roamed the Plains’ arid south. Noble and dashing Casuni raiders routinely burned Tassini encampments. The cowardly Tassini did exactly the same to Casuni encampments whenever they got the chance.

This cycle pretty much described Plains-Politics- according-to-Yulen, for three centuries. The closest thing to a Plains-Clan Constitution was a proverb, “Blood Feud is bread.”

The Plains Clans may have been peevish with each other, but they agreed on one thing. They hated the Marini worse.

Yulen pointed at a half-dozen Earthling-sized men and women. The men wore wide-sleeved shirts under brocaded vests and eschewed facial hair. The women walked alongside them unveiled. Men and women seemed to have a skin fold above the eye that made them look sleepy. Yulen said to the boy, “God made Marini look tired because they sleep beside the devil.”

Clan Marini, a.k.a. the Fisheaters, were Bren’s worldly traders and navigators, and controlled the lush, temperate Coastal Plain. A transfer to the Marini looked like our most promising way forward.

Our bound wrists drew a few looks as we rode, but most of the crowd was buzzed on mead, hungover from same, or bargain hunting.

Rosy, my mare, ignored the first Fisheaters we passed.

But we came up behind one Marini who wore a black-lacquered breastplate and cheek-plated helmet, and boasted rippled forearms. Rosy reared and squealed as we passed him. The Fisheater had a hint of scent about him. But to me, it was nothing to thrash one’s tail about.