L. Modesitt - The Chaos Balance

“Daaa!” called Weryl, thrusting a chubby fist into the moist air.

“Daaa to you, too,” answered Nylan.

“Waaa-daaaa…”

“All right, all right,” said Ayrlyn as she reached for the water bottle. “Try not to drool all over me.”

“Good luck.” Nylan laughed.

“I’m doing this because of my great good will…and because I love you, you hardheaded smith, but don’t push it. That shoulder is getting well enough.”

“Thanks to you.”

“The order-healing helps, especially against infection, but we really need antiseptics.”

“We could distill alcohol out of wine.”

“How? Isn’t tubing and that sort of thing hard to forge?” She eased the bottle to the boy’s lips. Surprisingly, little spilled.

“You’re good at that.”

“Of course.” Ayrlyn grinned as she slipped the cork back in the bottle and stowed it in the holder.

“Hmmm…tubing would be hard, but maybe only a little has to be metal. Fire and glaze the rest. Also, we could increase the alcohol content by freezing the wine or whatever, and removing the ice. They used to make winter-wine that way.”

“I thought you’d think up a way.” Ayrlyn disengaged Weryl’s hand from the hilt of her blade. “Was there anything else about your dream?”

“There must have been. It seemed to last a long time, but the order and the chaos and the trees were all mixed together.”

“It means something,” mused Ayrlyn.

A shadow passed across the road, extending far around the curve, as a cloud scudded across the sun.

“Probably.” But what? That trees needed both order and chaos? Nylan frowned. True chaos would kill trees…wouldn’t it? And what did the trees have to do with the future-another idea pushed forward by his subconscious that indicated how mixed up he was? He pushed the ideas to the back of his mind, then glanced upward. The sky remained the same mixture of sun and clouds, but the breeze seemed cooler without the sunlight.

“How far to Lornth?” he asked after a time.

“Another five days or so.”

“Five days?” Nylan groaned.

“Or so.”

Nylan glanced at the road, at the seemingly endless range of ironwoods to his right. Maybe there were other ironwood areas. He couldn’t believe that a stretch of ironwoods that took five days to ride was worthless.

Then, a lot of Candar took some believing, starting with his own abilities and those of Ayrlyn. He shook his head, and shifted his weight in the saddle. Five more days?

Weryl gurgled happily and jabbed an elbow into Ayrlyn’s ribs again. She took his arm firmly and moved it. “No.”

Nylan could almost feel the mental force of that denial.

Weryl’s face crumpled, and he began to cry.

Ayrlyn shook her head. “He can’t be allowed to hurt people.” Then she reached down and hugged him with one arm. “It’s all right.”

The boy sobbed for a few hundred cubits more, then stared at the cattle on the south side of the road once more. But he didn’t jab Ayrlyn with his elbows again.

Nylan looked up from the way station’s hearth fire as Ayrlyn slipped inside, bearing Weryl’s damp clothes. She left the sagging door open, mainly for light, since there was but a single window with loose-fitting shutters. Her hands were red from the cold stream water.

The smith extended an arm to bar the silver-haired boy from nearing the few flames that rose from the shavings. “No.”

Weryl looked puzzled, but stopped trying to climb over his father’s limb.

“He understands,” said Ayrlyn.

“He’s too young to understand. I learned that years ago in child psychology.”

“Child psychology? You were an engineer.” Ayrlyn hung the undersquares and Weryl’s trousers and shirt across a low roof brace. “He’s going to need larger clothes before long. These are getting tight.”

“I know. Maybe we can find a tailor or something in Lornth.”

“Ha! People here make children’s clothes.”

“I forget about things like that.” Nylan added more of the pencil wood to the fire, his eyes half on Weryl as he did, but the boy remained on hands and knees, just looking at the small tongues of flame from the shavings that licked at the wood.

“Child psychology?” prompted the healer. “You never answered.”

“Distributional requirements. I wasn’t from the Institute. I had to take courses at the university in something other than power physics. I thought I might have children some day; so child psychology seemed more useful than institutional behavior, sociology of the exotics, or alien metapsychology.” Nylan added another chunk of slightly larger wood to the growing hearth fire, glancing at the two pots that waited.

“Child psychology or not, he understands ‘no.’”

Nylan shrugged, wondering if Weryl were already sensitive to the order fields, if somehow he’d picked up on the emotional energy or disturbance or something associated with negatives. If so, they’d have to be careful, very careful. He wanted to groan again. It seemed like everywhere he turned, he had to be careful.

“Why the groan?”

“Because…if you’re right, and Weryl understands no…” He went on to explain the sensitivity problems.

Ayrlyn bent down, picked up Weryl, and hugged him, then eased him into a more comfortable position. “You have to give him lots of affection. It can’t be false, either, then, because he’ll know the difference.”

The engineer wanted to groan again. He didn’t need a son who was an emotional lie detector. Then, his son hadn’t exactly asked for the talent, and Nylan and Ayrlyn both had some abilities in that direction, as had Istril. Why was every talent a curse as well?

He slipped a larger chunk of wood onto the fire and swung the single bracket that bore both pots over the flames. The wrought iron creaked and wobbled, as if it might pull out of the crudely mortared stones-but it held.

“It will be a while before the stew, such as it is, is ready,” he said absently. “I’m glad you found those wild onions. They’ll help with the seasoning.”

Nylan folded the wax away from the cheese and carefully sliced small slivers so that they dropped onto outer cloth that had covered the wax. When he had a small stack, he offered the first to Weryl, who half-chewed, half-gummed the sliver before swallowing and opening his mouth for more.

“He’s hungry,” affirmed Ayrlyn, after sitting on the hearth stones and holding Weryl so that Nylan could feed him.

“Aren’t we all? That unplanned stop took more food.” The smith offered more cheese and glanced at the fire. “It’s going to be a while.”

“That’s all right. He’s going to need his exercise anyway.”

“At least we’ve been making good time-and only one storm since we left your first hamlet-the one without a name.”

“It has a name. I just never learned it.”

“I’m glad they have some of these way stations. It’s good to have a roof, especially with Weryl, and I get an uneasy feeling when I think about staying in an inn or in some of the towns.”

“The way stations are mostly for traders, I think. Lornth isn’t nearly as well populated as the lands east of the Westhorns, and they need more trade, I’d guess.”

“Wonder if that’s because of the ironwoods. We’ve seen a lot of them.”

Ayrlyn frowned.

“It takes time, good tools, and manpower to clear them. They’re not much good for anything, and some of the bigger ones you couldn’t budge with heavy industrial equipment. That means it’s a slow tedious business-”

“That could be. I don’t know.”

Nylan crumbled more of the hard cheese into little pieces, and tried to coax more of it into Weryl’s mouth. Without milk, trying to balance the nutrients for his son was hard, especially since fruits and vegetables weren’t in season.