Harry Turtledove - Down in The Bottomlands (and Other Places)

Half a dozen men sprang up from behind the wall, which was of ancient megalithic stonework and hence undamaged by the blast. For a moment, Park thought they’d got up there to direct help to the writhing victims near them. Then he saw they all had air rifles. They raised them to their shoulders, started shooting into the crowd.

Allister Park had seen combat as a young man in his own world, and again during his brief tenure as Vinland’s assistant secretary of war. At the sound of the first sharp pop, he threw himself flat. He knocked over the person behind him. They fell together.

The men with guns shouted in unison as they fired. Park took a moment to notice, first that the shouts were not in Ketjwa, then that he understood them anyhow. “Allahu akbar!” the gunmen cried. “God is great! Allahu akbar! ” Someone screamed, right in Park’s ear. Only then did he realize he was lying on a woman. Her fist pounded his shoulder. “Let me go!” she yelled. She tried to push him off her.

“No! Stay down!” By some miracle, he remembered to speak Ketjwa instead of English. As if to punctuate his words, a bullet felled a man standing not three paces away. The woman screamed again, and shuddered, but seemed to decide Park was protecting rather than attacking her. She quit struggling beneath him.

Around them, the noise of the crowd changed from horror to animal fury. People surged toward the men on the wall. Had the gunmen been carrying the automatic weapons Park’s world knew, they would have massacred their assailants. With air rifles that had to be pumped up after every shot, they slowed but could not stop the outraged mob.

“Allahu akbar!” Park lifted his head just in time to see the last gunman raise a defiant fist and jump down in back of the wall. The locals scrambled over it to give chase. One was shot, but more kept on. Others, men and women both, began to tend the scores of injured people near the twisted wreckage of the goodwain.

Park cautiously got to his feet. After a few seconds, he was convinced no more gun-toting fanatics were going to spring from nowhere. He stooped to help up the woman he had flattened when the shooting started.

“Thank you,” she said with some dignity, accepting his hand. “I am sorry I screamed at you. You saw the danger from those — madmen” — she shivered — “before almost anyone else.”

“I am glad you are not hurt,” Park said. For the first time, he had the leisure to take a look at her. She was, he guessed, only a few years younger than he; one or two white threads ran through the midnight mane that hung almost to her waist. She was attractive, in the long-faced, high-cheekboned local fashion. Her mantle and brightly striped skirt were of soft, fine wools.

The derby she’d been wearing was crushed beyond repair. She picked it up, made a wry face, threw it down again. Then she studied Allister Park with as much interest, or perhaps curiosity, as he showed her. “You are not one of us,” she said. “Why were you at the festival of Raimii?”

“To see what it was like,” he answered honestly. “I probably will never be in Kuuskoo again; while I am here, I want to learn and see as much as I can.”

She considered that, nodded. “Did the beauty of the service incline you toward the worship of the sun and Patjakamak?”

Despite wearing an ex-bishop’s body, Park wished people would stop asking him loaded religious questions. He temporized: “The services were very beautiful, ah-”

“My name is Kuurikwiljor,” she said.

Park gave his own or, rather, Ib Scoglund’s name, then said, “Kuurikwiljor-‘golden star.’ That’s very pretty. So, by the way, are you.” He played that game almost as automatically as he breathed; his attitude toward women was decidedly pragmatic. But just as genuine a sense of duty made him look around to make sure he was not needed here before he asked, “Where are you going now? May I walk there with you, so you will feel safe?”

Kuurikwiljor, he saw with approval, looked toward the wounded herself before she answered. With the usual Tawantiinsuujan efficiency, teams of uniformed medics were already on the scene. They slapped on bandages, set broken bones, and loaded the worst hurt onto stretchers for more extensive treatment elsewhere. They did not seem to need any unskilled help.

Park also saw Kuurikwiljor eye him appraisingly. He did not mind that; he was sensible enough to think well of good sense in others. Whatever Kuurikwiljor saw must have satisfied her, for she said, “Thank you. I am staying at my brother’s house, in the district of Puumatjupan.”

That district, Park knew, was in the southern part of the city. With Kuurikwiljor following, he started in that direction. “On to the house of your brother,” he declared. He thought he sounded rather grand, but Kuurikwiljor giggled.

He mentally reviewed what he’d just said. “Oh, hell,” he muttered in English. Then he switched back to Ketjwa, more careful Ketjwa this time: “I mean the house of your waukej , not your toora .” He’d tripped himself up by echoing Kuurikwiljor; waukej was the word men used for brother, while toora was reserved for women.

“That’s better,” Kuurikwiljor said. “You don’t speak badly. From what I’ve heard, most foreigners would never have noticed their mistake, Ib Scogljund.”

In his turn, he tried to get her to say the “l” in his name without pronouncing it as if it were “ly.” He had no luck; the simple “l” sound did not exist in Ketjwa. After teasing her a little, he gave up. “Never mind. It sounds charming as you say it.”

“But I should be right,” Kuurikwiljor said seriously. “Ib Scog-Scog-Scog ljund . Oh, a pestilence!” They both laughed.

The fumbling with languages and names helped break the ice between them. They talked all the way down to Kuurikwiljor’s brother’s house. Park learned she was a childless widow. That sort of thing was only too common in this world, which knew less of medicine — and a lot less about immunization — than his own. Kuurikwiljor sounded suitably impressed about Park’s reasons for coming to Tawantiinsuuju.

“We need to find some way to live at peace with the Emir,” she said. “Either that, or wipe his country from the face of the earth. Sometimes I think Muslims are viler than the dog-eating Wankas. The way those terrible men took advantage of the accident to work even more harm on us-” She shook her head. “My mantle is all splashed with blood.”

Truly, Park thought, this world was more naпve than the one from which he’d come. As gently as he could, he said, “Kuurikwiljor, I don’t think that was an accident. I think they made that truck blow up. I think they were waiting for it to blow up, so they would have a confused and frightened crowd to shoot at.”

She stared at him. “What a dreadful thing to say!” But after walking a few steps in silence, she went on, “That does make sense, doesn’t it? They would hardly be waiting with guns just in case there was an explosion.”

“Hardly,” Park agreed. He let it go at that; telling her the Tawantiinsuujans were little kinder to Muslims would have accomplished nothing.

Her brother’s house was a large, impressive stone building next to one of the streams that defined the boundaries of Puumatjupan. Servants came rushing out when they saw Kuurikwiljor. They exclaimed over her bedraggled state and, once they found Park had helped her come home safe, praised him to the skies and pressed llama meat, cornmeal mush, and aka on him.

Before long, he found himself meeting Kuurikwiljor’s brother, a stocky, solemn man of about his own age named Pauljuu. “Most kind of you, foreign sir, and most generous,” Pauljuu said. “I know you sought none, but let me reward you for the service you have done my family.” He drew a heavy gold signet ring from his right thumb, tried to hand it to Park.