The Luck of Brin's Five

  The Luck of Brin’s Five

  Book 1 of the Torin Trilogy

  Cherry Wilder

  “Help Diver!” Yelled Brin.

  “Mamor . . . Roy . . .

  Can You Fight?”

  Diver had used his stun-gun with measured force; already those that he felled had bounced up again, and as he altered the setting two of the largest brutes leaped upon him. Vel Ragan, behind a tree now, fired his weapon, and I saw Red-Belt, the leader, clutch a wounded arm, pierced by a dart.

  “Devils!” panted Red-Belt. “Nest of devils!”

  I felt Old Gwin come closer, placing the whimpering Tomar in my arms. “Keep back, for the fire of Eenath has consumed your souls! We know you all, and you are all accursed! You will go down into fire . . .!”

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  BRIN

  MAMOR

  HARPER ROY

  OLD GWIN A Family of mountain weavers. All bear the family name Brinroyan (of Brin’s Five).

  ODD-EYE (Eddorn) BRINROYAN The first Luck of Brin’s Five.

  SCOTT GALE Lieutenant-Navigator of a Biosurvey team from the planet Earth. Adopted as the Luck of Brin’s Five. He is given the nickname DIVER and is also known as ESCOTT GARL BRINROYAN, a version of his name which is easier for Moruians to pronounce.

  DORN BRINROYAN Eldest child of Brin’s Five, who tells the story.

  NARNEEN Second child of Brin’s Five.

  TOMAR Youngest child of Brin’s Five.

  HUNTER GEER Neighbor of Brin’s Five on Hingstull Mountain.

  WHITEWING An albino. The Luck of Hunter Geer’s Five.

  BEETH ULGAN (Beeth the Weathermaker) A Diviner in Cullin, the local township. Friend and adviser of Brin’s Five.

  GORDO BEETHAN Her apprentice. A Witness or telepath.

  RILPO RILPROYAN GALTROY

  TEWL RILPROYAN GALTROY A married pair. Grandees of Clan Galtroy.

  TSAMMET Their servant. An omor: one of a caste of female workers noted for strength.

  MOONEEN A twirler or religious fanatic rescued by Diver and Harper Roy.

  PETSALEE, Host of Spirits Leader of the band of twirlers.

  ITHO

  LANAR

  MEEDO Three ancients who sailed a bird-boat on the river Troon and carried passengers.

  TIATH AVRAN PENTROY The Great Elder, elected leader of the Council of Five Elders, chosen from the five clans of Grandees. A powerful but unscrupulous governor and landowner, dedicated to preserving clan power. His nickname is Tiath Gargan, which means “Ropemaker,” “Lawmaker” or “Strangler.”

  NANTGEEB A powerful Diviner and scientist, out of favor with the Great Elder for the use of fire-metal-magic. Also known as the Maker of Engines.

  VARB’S FIVE A family of shepherds living at Whiterock Fold.

  AT THE BIRD CLAN

  THE LAUNCHER The leading Bird Clan official.

  ABLO A townee from Otolor who serves as Diver’s mechanic and remains with Brin’s Five. Later he is called Ablo Binigan or Ablo the Fixer, the one who picks up dropped stitches.

  JEBBAL FALDROYAN LUNTROY A pilot at the Bird Clan.

  VALDIN

  THANAR Her children.

  MATTROYAN A merchant of Itsik.

  ULLO MATTROYAN His child; a pilot at the Bird Clan.

  MURÑO PERAN PENTROY A young grandee, known as Blacklock. He is a popular hero on Torin for his athletic feats. A pilot at the Bird Clan and a pupil of Nantgeeb.

  SPINNER Blacklock’s first officer, who takes care of him.

  FER UTOVANGAN Blacklock’s copilot, whose name, which can mean Second Pilot or Former Bird Farmer, hints at his former identity. Antho, a birdfarmer from the outskirts of Fintoul, is a famous designer of flying machines whose adventures have passed into legend.

  DEEL GIRROYAN A town-grandee of Otolor, pilot at the Bird Clan.

  VEL RAGAN (Vel the Scribe) A scribe from Tsagul, the Fire-Town.

  ONNAR A Witness, in his service.

  VARADON

  MEETAL

  ARTHO

  TRANJE

  TROY

  ALLOO

  BANO Vassals in the service of Tiath Pentroy. Members of a Gulgavor or seven-fold band, who have sworn to capture Diver or die in the attempt.

  TILJE PAROYAN DOHTROY

  ARN LORGAN (the Bridgemaker) Friends of Vel Ragan, from Tsagul, where they were in the service of:

  TSORL-U-TSORL Former Deputy of Tsagul, who has disappeared on an errand for Tiath Pentroy.

  AT RINTOUL

  GUÑO GUNROYAN WENTROY The Wentroy Elder on the Council of Five. Known as Guño Deg—Old Crosspatch.

  LEETH LEETHROYAN GALTROY The Galtroy Elder on the Council.

  ORN ORNROYAN DOHTROY The Dohtroy Elder on the Council, known as Orn Margan—the Peacemaker.

  MARL NOONROYAN LUNTROY The Luntroy Elder on the Council. Known as Marl Udorn, Blind Marl—the Luck of Noon’s Five.

  AV AVRAN PENTROY Old Av, Tiath’s elder sibling, the head of his Family.

  URNAT AVRAN PENTROY A dwarf. The Luck of Av’s Five.

  Prologue

  A low mountain range straddled the northern coast of the continent; it was massive and striking, rising in places straight out of the grassy plain. The highest peaks lay to the north, snow-capped in summer because they were close to the polar circle. A hot summer sun burned down on the craggy lower slopes; there were stands of a straight-limbed tree with a red-brown trunk and small leaves of a particular bronze green. Campsites clustered among these trees; some were old and permanent as small villages, with a stone wall or a stockade. In summer many of the camps were empty: the campers had wandered off on their travels, to the fairground and the riverside. In other places there was a murmur of voices, the rhythmical clacking of looms; no open fires were lit, no smoke curled above the treetops.

  There were cool places to be found even in high summer; caverns full of the sound of rushing water; noisy brooks and torrents. Hunting trails ran along the tops of the ridges and dipped into the valleys that led down to the hot grass of the plain. There were natural plantations of a plant that looked like flax; its flat leaves rattled and shook, never still, in the prevailing north wind.

  A man, travelling through this rough, pleasant, hill country could drink at the streams, eat berries if he dared, breathe the mountain air. Yet the creatures that scrambled up the trees as he passed, the little bouncing deerlike animals that took off into the scrub, the slow, dipping flight of the birds would remind him, finally, that he was not on Earth.

  The continent and the world itself were called by the same name: Torin. When Esto, the Great Sun, set in the west, its strong golden light gave way to darkness, then to a silvery light, six times as strong as the reflected light of Earth’s moon . . . the light of Esder . . . the Far Sun. It was possible to read, to hunt, to maneuver a flying machine by the light of Esder.

  Down below on the plain, during Esder light, other flickering lights clustered at fords and river crossings. In an old shallow crater a sheet of water threw back the far sun’s light oddly; the water steamed and gave off its own phosphorescent glow. Beyond the northern bank of this lake twin peaks rose up, two of the highest in the range, and below them, on a stone terrace, stood a long oval building.

  It was a mild summer night in the year 274 of the New Age, two hundred and seventy-four Torin years since the last Torlogan or Great Builder handed power to the grandees. The only sounds here in the mountains were natural ones: bird calls, a stone dislodged that rolled down into a pool. When four Torin hours of darkness had passed and ten of Esder light, a new sound grew sharply in the clear air. The flying machine came buzzing in from the southwest and landed neatly on the terrace. It was strong and shapely, made of woven, stiffened fa
bric over a frame of bent wood. The wingspan was large; there was a propeller mounted on the nose and four smaller ones on the wing itself. On the hindmost panel, to the left, there was a row of painted characters; in the corresponding position to the right there were block letters: TOMARVAN II.

  A man climbed down out of the machine and reached up to help down his companion, a young Moruian, an inhabitant of Torin. They talked softly, as if the silence of the mountains made them lower their voices, but the man’s voice, his laughter, rang out sometimes. They came down from the terrace and began walking briskly towards the lake, just visible through the trees. The light of Esder picked out quite clearly their sameness and their difference. The man, Scott Gale, was well-built, broad-shouldered, and muscular, a head taller than his young companion. He wore a synthetic blue zipper suit, a regulation garment hardly weathered by four hard years of an alien climate.

  Dorn, the Moruian, was seventeen years old; he was wiry, thin, and long-limbed. He walked with a lithe, swinging motion; the carriage of his head, his hips, his thin, long-fingered hands, were all distinctive. By contrast Scott Gale was over-controlled, muscle-bound. Dorn had thick mid-brown hair, perfectly straight and cut off, carelessly, above the collar of his fine woollen tunic. His face was broad at the forehead, and tapering, with a straight nose, a long upper lip and a firm jaw. It might have been a human face, in certain attitudes, except for the eyes, which were widely spaced, very large, and set, up-curving, into his temples.

  Scott Gale was, in comparison, round faced and round headed, yet in cloak and hood he had often passed for a Moruian. His hair and beard were black; he had often, during his first days on Torin, cursed the Irish ancestors who gave him blue eyes. This strange pair walked on, talking in Moruian, until they came to the lake shore. Esto, the Great Sun, came over the shoulder of a mountain and turned the warm waters of the lake to gold.

  “There!” said Dorn, “and not even a stone for memorial!” Scott Gale laughed. “Memorial to the loss of a good air ship,” he said.

  “Ah, but it is strange!” exclaimed Dorn. “Don’t you feel it? To remember the past so clearly . . . We stand where the party from the hunting lodge was standing . . .”

  He looked back to the oval building on the terrace. “They carried torches and lances, that night, and a Galtroy banner . . . star and spindle.” He knelt at the water’s edge, wrinkling his forehead, and skipped a stone across the steamy water.

  “I’ve heard the story, from the Family,” said Gale, “until it’s like a story from my own childhood. I don’t know what I remember or what was told to me.” He pointed to a narrow beach on the far side of the lake.

  “Was it about there that you pulled me ashore?”

  “Yes,” said Dorn.

  They walked on, around the head of the lake, with Dorn running ahead and clambering over fallen logs. When Gale caught up again, Dorn was staring ahead at a particular rock above the little beach. Over the rock arched an old, gnarled tree, a mountain black-thorn, which had been struck by lightning and scarred along one side of its bent trunk. The rock was scratched and indented with written characters; the tree itself was strung with loose clumps of thread, of varying thickness, knotted in certain patterns.

  “Well, someone has not forgotten,” said Scott Gale. “What do the skeins say?”

  They walked to the tree, and Dorn climbed the rock and felt at the largest message skein. He read off the woven symbols: “Praise to our Mother, the North Wind, and to Eddorn who found great fortune for his Family.” Then he reached for another skein.

  “Send us a luck to equal the Luck of Brin’s Five.”

  Scott Gale shook his head and smiled sadly. “I wish them better luck than that,” he said. He came to the rock and stood with Dorn looking down, between the rock and the tree, at a narrow grave, carefully covered with round stones.

  They went down and sat on the strip of white sand by the water’s edge.

  “It should all be told,” said Dorn. “It is part of this world’s history.”

  “The way human beings came to Torin?”

  “Our part of it,” said Dorn, “the part that I remember . . . that first winter and the spring that came after it, when you first joined our Family and travelled with us.”

  “Then you must write it,” said Scott Gale. “No one else could do it so well. You will be Dorn Utragan pretty soon . . . Utragan, the scribe in two languages. The first on Torin.”

  “It has been a long time,” said Dorn. “I am hardly the same person.”

  “You are not an ancient yet . . .” Scott Gale grinned.

  Dorn blinked and laughed; he was about to throw a stone into the lake but instead he pointed, with a hand to his lips for silence. A bird, about the size of a large kingfisher, came gliding out of the trees and swung down low over the surface of the water; its wings flashed a dark, iridescent blue.

  “What is that called, then?” Dorn asked in a whisper.

  “Great Wind!” said Scott Gale, “it must be a Diver!” They laughed so loudly together at a shared joke that the bird flew off, startled.

  I

  I will tell how we found our luck, the great Luck of Brin’s Five, and how, being found, it led us on to good fortune beyond all dream-spinning.

  I am Dorn, eldest child of our Family. When the Luck came, I was twelve years old and we lived high on the slopes of Hingstull Mountain, near the Warm Lake. It was a hard winter: our fingers were stiff with cold as we worked at the looms; the snow bore down on the fabric of our house. A blizzard had ripped families of spinners from our home trees and rolled them down the mountainside like dead birds.

  Food was scarce; two families had quit the glebe and now only two were left. Hunter Geer, who boasted many thick pelts, and, as we said, a thick head and a thick hide, was bound in under a rock wall across the glebe, watching us perish with cold by the east gate.

  We could not go down the mountain because our Luck was dying. At first we sang; Old Gwin boiled herbs after scratching them from the snow; dearest Brin embraced us all; but it was no use. Mamor and Harper Roy talked all night apart, but they could not find a solution. Our Family, Brin’s Five, and a perfect five it had been, five adults with no outclips, was doomed. Odd-Eye lay in his bag, spinning yarns still in a dream voice, with the marks of death on his face.

  I remember Narneen weeping at night in the sleeping bag, because the spring would not come if our Luck died. It seemed perfectly possible to me. No good thing would ever happen again: the suns would not rise, the spring would not come, our webs would break and our youngest child, still hidden, would never be seen. In the city, as I have since observed, people live in a different way and have no Family, no Luck to bind them, and they survive very well, but as mountain people we followed the old threads.

  We did not give up easily. Every day we fought against our doom by searching for a new Luck. Sometimes Brin went out as far as the lake, alone or with Mamor. Harper Roy went out in the night, and we heard him singing against the storm and harping for our deliverance. When the wind died down, they sent Narneen and me to the lake shore, with instructions to walk in circles, to pray, to call, to bring back news of any stranger passing.

  It is strange to stand in winter by the Warm Lake. Clouds of steam rise up off the surface into the frosty air, and where the cold mist from the pass meets the steam they form spiral patterns. I remember once standing hand-in-hand with Narneen, letting the water play over our frozen feet. We looked up and saw two figures watching us from a crag, Hunter Geer and Whitewing. One fierce and ruddy, with hair the color of dried blood hanging over a wolf-skin tunic. The other even more frightening, immensely tall and thin and white as the snow, for Whitewing had no color. Whitewing was the Luck of Hunter Geer’s Five . . . white-haired, bloodless, from the first showing.

  From where we stood by the lake, we could not see those pink eyes flashing ill-will upon us. I bent down and seized a warm pebble, then molded snow around it. I flung it at Whitewing, high on the c
rag, crying out as it fell short, “We will find our Luck again!”

  Whitewing laughed aloud, a high, jagged laugh that rang and echoed from the farthest shore.

  Two days later we ate the last of the preserved game birds; there was nothing left but blackloaf and dried sunner. A blizzard was blowing, and Mamor could not hunt. Odd-Eye did not speak, and we felt sure our Luck was dying; but suddenly, towards noon on the second day, his mind became clear. Odd-Eye spoke to each of us in turn and prayed for the hidden child. I felt desolate and strange when my turn came to sit beside him. Odd-Eye had a long hatchet face; one of his eyes was green, the other brown. He was short and misshapen, but in all the time I could remember, he had been so agile I could not think of him as old. He was a good Luck, for he had made it his calling; he was “a Luck out of the bag.”

  Every Luck has suffered some misfortune: there are dwarfs and cripples, the blind, the deaf, the mad and the half-mad. I have never seen a hunchback who was not the Luck of some Family or some grandee. It is equally correct to adopt as a lucky person someone who has lost a leg or been scarred in a fire or maimed in some other fashion, though some say a “born Luck” is best.

  Odd-Eye said to me, when my turn came, “Cheer up, Dorn. I have dreams for you that are as fine as Blacklock’s mantle.”

  I could not help smiling. We had often talked in summer, at the loom or in the woods, of Blacklock, the swaggering hero from Rintoul. I had half-persuaded Odd-Eye to take me downriver, across the plains, to see the great city of Rintoul and watch Blacklock perform his feats. The fame of Blacklock had certainly reached our mountain. Hunter Geer, who had visited Rintoul, claimed to have shaken Blacklock by the hand, but Hunter Geer is a liar.

  “Now Dorn, you must take me!” said Odd-Eye in a quavering voice. “Take me out to the lakeside, to our rock under the burned tree, and I will have a last try. I must find my dear family a replacement.”

  They looked sideways at me, to make sure I was not afraid, then Harper Roy bound Odd-Eye upon our sled wrapped in the thickest rugs we had and covered with our only wolf pelt. I was wrapped up just about as tightly, and when the wind dropped, I started on my way.