The Luck of Brin's Five Page 5

  “Avert!”

  The twirlers, in ecstasy on the bruised grass, took up the cry in echoing tones. “Avert! Avert! Avert!”

  “Avert the Demon!”

  Again the shout went round. “Avert the Demon . . . who comes from the Void . . . who flies on Hingstull . . . who flies in the night, encased in metal . . . with claws for hands!”

  The crowd hissed with fear. The Pentroy vassals, I saw, had an officer, a grim figure in a leather mask-helmet, who was drawing them together.

  “Avaunt!” screamed the twirlers. “Devil came down! Descended on Cullin! The devilish Silver Ship was shipped through the town! Here! Where is the Devil! The Devil! The Devil! The Demon with claws! The Devil is here!”

  The Leader’s voice was high and chilling; I wondered, how did the twirlers know? I shivered and clutched Diver’s arm, to reassure myself that he was no devil. Roy led the way through the edges of the crowd, heading for Side-street Four, where Beeth Ulgan’s house stood.

  Suddenly the Pentroy officer made a booming blast on his roarer and the vassals moved in. The twirlers, disturbed in ecstasy, fought and screamed like mad things. A panic spread among the poor wintry citizens; a few ran to help the twirlers or beat feebly at the vassals who were hustling them out of the way. The burly members of the Town Watch waded into the fray, striking—I saw—mainly at vassals and calling aloud for the townees to clear the streets.

  Through an opening in the crowd came two vassals struggling with a poor naked twirler, wide-eyed and streaked with blood. I tried to dive out of the way, but a movement of the crowd bore me to the ground. I remember flailing about and screaming like a twirler myself before Diver hauled me up again. We tried to continue on our way, but the vassals and their prisoner were behind us, pressing against the frightened, angry bystanders. Some of them, including the Harper, set up a shout.

  “Let the twirler go! Shame! Set down the spirit-warrior! Out Pentroy! To blazes with the vassals!”

  The vassals came on, grim-faced.

  “They’ll dump the twirler in Street Four,” said the Harper, in my ear. We struggled out of their path; and when the crowd drew back, we followed the vassals and their shrieking burden into the dark mouth of the street.

  Diver had taken the lead. My heart was pounding; I thought I knew what he was about to do, but I was wrong. He had no need for a weapon. When we were out of sight of the crowd, he threw back his cloak and downed one of the vassals. Diver had an extraordinary way of fighting. I have seen no one to match him save Blacklock himself. He chopped the vassal across the back of the neck with the side of his hand, and the creature dropped like a stone.

  “One for you!” he shouted to Harper Roy.

  The Harper, nothing loath, did a hip roll on the other. I got into position, crying, “Tree trunk,” and together we took the staggering vassal by the arms and ran it headfirst into the nearest wall. The tree trunk, which is the oldest mountain wrestling trick in the skein, works even better in a town, there are so many walls. I was trembling with excitement and fear; the experience of using the tree trunk to bring down a person, instead of practicing it in sport and stopping long before the head hit the tree, was too much for me.

  We turned to the twirler, who was propped upright against a wall. The Harper moved in, uttering soothing words, but the twirler was still mad. A hand laid on the shivering brown arm caused more shrieks, more kicking. Already the mouth of the street was full of townees.

  “Come on!” said Diver. He seized the slight figure of the twirler, trying to pinion those flailing arms and sharp shells.

  “Quiet!” he said in his clumsy Moruian. For an instant the torchlight rested on Diver’s face: then with one shriek—at the sight of those blue eyes—the twirler fainted away.

  Diver hoisted the limp body, and we ran off into the shadows. Round two corners, with the sound of the riot fading, and Harper Roy was hammering on the door of Beeth Ulgan’s house, beside the weathermaker’s shuttered booth. We stood shivering until a deep voice answered.

  “Who?”

  “Brin’s Five!” cried the Harper. “Dear Ulgan, open to friends in need!”

  There was the sound of the door-pole being hastily drawn, and on the threshold in the dim light stood the tall, sagging figure of the Diviner.

  “Great North Wind!” cried Beeth Ulgan. “Harper . . . and your eldest . . .”

  “Refuge we pray . . .” panted the Harper. “Pentroy vassals . . .”

  “I’m not surprised. Come in.”

  We pressed on into the house, where it was beautifully warm, warm as a proper tent. The outer room had a metal stove that scared Old Gwin to death when we visited. Beside it lay the Ulgan’s apprentice, a young townee, a male, not much older than myself. Diver laid down his burden on a pile of mats in a corner, and the apprentice went over curiously to attend to the twirler.

  The Ulgan held up a candlecone. “Let me look at you . . . What have you got there . . . a wounded twirler? And an outclip? An extra member for Brin’s Five? Winds forbid! How’s Brin? How’s the hidden child? How is Eddorn Brinroyan?”

  “Odd-Eye is dead,” said Harper Roy, standing like a child, with bent head, before the Ulgan.

  “Alas . . .” Beeth Ulgan stood clutching the candlecone and murmured a prayer of departure.

  The Diviner surprised me every time I beheld her. For a start she was fat, the only fat person I ever beheld before we went to Otolor and to Rintoul, and she was also very tall. Beeth Ulgan had a long, drooping face, very smooth and brown, with thick handfuls of white hair, plaited into great curtains and baskets around the head. The Diviner’s robe was of soft wool, of our own weaving, thickly embroidered, with loose sleeves full of magical trinkets, sweets and nuts and message skeins.

  “You come in sad time,” she said, laying a gentle hand on my head, “but I must ask you again. Has my old teacher’s prophecy been fulfilled? How is the destiny of Brin’s Five?”

  “You have asked that question for years now,” said Roy, “and at last I have an answer for you . . .”

  “We are blessed with a New Luck . . .” I babbled.

  “Hush!” said Harper Roy, pressing Brin’s message skein into the Diviner’s hand.

  “Beeth Ulgan, you were ever our friend and guide. What we show must be secret—”

  “Secrets?” The hooded eyes flashed in the dim light; Beeth Ulgan stared at the Harper as she fingered the message skein.

  “Diver,” said Harper Roy. Diver, rearranged in his cloak, stepped forward.

  “New Luck . . .” whispered Beeth, “from Hingstull. Oh great earth and sky!” She seized Diver’s hand and led us all into the inner room, a wonderful bright place, full of tapestries and cushions.

  Diver stood erect before her, and his hood fell back. We had lived too much in shadow. Now the bright light of a dozen candlecones and two lanterns showed Diver for what he was. Utterly strange, a creature of essential difference, bred in the body’s weft. By comparison the grandees, whose fine trappings had made me gape, were like our very blood kin. A pale face, blunt-featured, a round head, curling hair with its true darkness still visible at the nape of the strong neck. Keen, round, frontal eyes of bright blue.

  Beeth Ulgan drew breath steadily, holding Diver’s gaze.

  “Who . . . what . . . are you?” she demanded. “What sort of being do you call yourself?”

  And Diver answered formally. “I am a man. My name is Scott Gale.”

  “Where do you come from?”

  “From another world.”

  It was an odd formula we had worked out while teaching him our language. Diver went on to repeat his identification in his own tongue. By now I recognized it pretty well. The learning went in two ways—we all had a few words of his speech.

  “Scott Gale 20496, Lieutenant Navigator, World Space Service/Satellite Station Terra-Sol XNV34, Biosurvey Team One, Planet 4, 70 Ophiuchi A.”

  Beeth Ulgan peered heavily at Diver. Finally she turned away, shaking her gran
d loops of hair as she flicked through a bundle of silk scrolls and fixed one on the rack. I could see that it was a chart of some kind, finely woven, like all the Diviner’s scrolls, and overstitched in black thread on the cream and gold body of the work. Diver stepped close and looked very hard, turning his head to find a direction. Then he pointed. I saw with a thump of excitement that it was a star chart with the constellations traced out in black, and red points inwoven for the stars themselves.

  There was the Sun and the Far Sun. There were the sibling worlds of Torin: Derin or Far-World and the twins Thune and Tholen and the strange distant world that we called Derindar, Even-Further-World, but which astronomers call Veer. Beyond our web of worlds were the constellations: Eenath, the spirit warrior, with her bow; Vano, the great bird; the Spindle; and the Box-Harp. There was the great constellation of the Loom; Diver had pointed to a star in the loom bench, where the great weaver sits.

  He brought out a chart of his own and other objects from his pocket vest and laid them on the Diviner’s worktable. Beeth Ulgan examined everything with an intense concentration, poised over the worktable with a solemn face and hands hovering, as if she were working a conjuration for some grandee. Roy stood by and acted as interpreter, although Diver used the words that he had pretty well. He displayed and demonstrated his wonders; we knew some of them already. There was the flat box, no bigger than the palm of my hand, that tells again what is spoken into it. There was a thin, fine apparatus like a silkbeam . . . and Diver was surprised in his turn when the Ulgan showed him a box of silkbeam copies.

  There was the terrible weapon that he had turned on the Pentroy vassals in our glebe. He aimed it at a tall vase, and I cringed, but the vase toppled gently onto a cushion . . . the power of the thing could be altered from a stunning blow to a feather touch. There were the lightsticks and a set of metal tools and the tiny buzzer that Diver used to shave his face and something called a recharger to make all the marvellous engines well again when their power diminished.

  While the Ulgan marvelled at all these things, Diver asked for a map of Torin, and she gave him a colored “Fortune Map” on good willow paper, the kind she had made up by the printmaker two doors away, to sell in her booth. He stared at it sadly and compared it with a map of his own. Then Beeth Ulgan produced larger maps, one on silk, one on parchment, but on these maps also the islands were no clearer, and the distances, though vague, were just as great.

  The Diviner looked at Diver’s map and shook her head. “As I thought,” she said. “We know nothing about the islands.”

  The islands on her maps, beyond the western edge of the land of Torin, were huge patches of green, coastlines unfinished or fantastically drawn into bays and sounds. On the old silk map there were the sea sunners, giant water beasts embroidered, and strange beasts on land too. There were five mountains breathing red fire that had split the world asunder in ancient times. Diver could still hazard a guess. He pointed on all the maps to a place on the largest island, the one called Tsabeggan or Nearest Fire.

  There were his people—three of his own kind—and they might as well have been on a distant star. Whatever way he chose to reach them—and by contrast the land of Torin, with its plain and rivers and mountains and the desert, was all finely mapped—he must cross a continent and sail the ocean sea. He turned to Beeth Ulgan with a look of despair and spread his hands in a gesture that said plainly, “What shall I do?”

  The Diviner took one of his hands and looked at the palm lines, then turned it away from her, as if it were a scroll in a strange tongue that she found too fascinating. “Are your people safe in the islands?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is their tent strong?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is there food and water?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you the leader of this Family?”

  “No.”

  “Have they another air ship?”

  “Yes, a larger one.”

  “Then they will come seeking you!”

  “No,” said Diver sadly. He explained, and finally we grasped his meaning. His people must follow certain rules; they could search around the camp and the sea nearby, but the larger air ship was of no use in the search. It was not an air vessel at all, but a ship for the void where there is no air. It was for taking the man Family back to the space station or larger sky town around Derin. Diver explained that he had done his people a terrible wrong in depriving them of his little ship, which went in the air or out of it, and was meant for short journeys. His people must continue their scholarly tasks, testing the air, numbering the flowers and the creatures, until their time of two hundred days had elapsed and they would return to the space station.

  I found it difficult to believe that they would obey such harsh rules; surely they would continue searching for him and go further afield. His instructions were equally harsh and plain: if he could not return to the party, he must shift for himself.

  Beeth Ulgan stared keenly at Diver. “Your people have flown around Torin. You must know there are cities.”

  Diver nodded. They had reports of inhabited places made some time ago from a great distance. But his people . . . the Biosurvey Team . . . were not envoys; their duty was only to discover how well man might live on Torin.

  Harper Roy laughed aloud. “Great North Wind! You have picked a bad spot. The islands are choking hot, full of fever and poison stings.”

  “Perhaps that’s another Diviner’s tale,” grinned Beeth Ulgan.

  Diver smiled and sawed his hand as if to say, “more or less.” “It’s hot.”

  “Are you under rule not to find other beings?” asked Beeth. Again Diver sawed the air.

  “I flew too far,” he admitted sadly. “I hoped, always, to find . . . others. The ship failed on my second journey.”

  Beeth Ulgan was pacing now, with her long hands pressed together in an attitude of thought. “Escott Garl Brinroyan,” she said formally, translating the name or at least making it easier to pronounce, “what have you in mind?”

  “To find my ship.”

  “Will it fly again?”

  “Maybe not,” said Diver, “but it has ‘radio’, to speak with my friends in the islands.”

  “Ha!” said Beeth, “I think this magic is known here. It resembles the voice-wire.”

  “The voice-wire is forbidden in Rintoul,” said Harper Roy.

  “Still used in the Fire-Town,” said the Ulgan, “and I could do with one now, though the Winds know it would take a long wire to reach from here to Rintoul. How does your speaking device work, Diver?”

  “The words travel through the air . . . no wire is needed.”

  The Ulgan held up her hands as if she would cry out all the way to Rintoul.

  “Oh, these things will be known!” she cried triumphantly. “This will indeed be what the charts proclaim . . . a three comet year. There are others; there is a great one in Rintoul who must know these things.”

  “The Great Elder?” asked Diver innocently. “Should I go to Tiath Pentroy? To the Elders in Rintoul?”

  For the first time Beeth Ulgan made an averting sign. “No! Winds forbid!”

  “Why not?”

  “It might mean your life and the life of Brin’s Five.”

  “This Elder would take our lives?”

  “If he could do it secretly,” said Beeth Ulgan.

  Harper Roy protested. “Even the Great Elder is bound by law; he must follow the old threads. . . .”

  “That’s true,” said Beeth, “but very often he may weave those threads in his pattern.”

  “But why kill us?” burst out Diver. “From fear? Why should he fear a lone man? I come in peace. Why should this grandee kill a stranger when simple folk have shown me nothing but kindness and love . . . when Brin’s Five has adopted me without a trace of fear?”

  “You bring power and skill!” said the Ulgan. “You bring fire-metal-magic. We might have had all these things ourselves from Tsagul, long ago. But t
he Elders, the clans, will brook no change in their power. They cannot see the way the world must go.”

  Diver studied the maps and traced on one the course of the river Datse down to the sea. “Should I go to Tsagul?” he asked.

  “No!” said Beeth Ulgan sharply. “If you found friends there, it would split the world like the blast of a fire-mountain.”

  “Besides,” said Harper Roy, “it is a bleak place. Mamor was there once and did a stint in the mines. Mountain folk do not care for the place.”

  “Do not be too sure, Roy Brinroyan,” smiled the Diviner. “There may be one of your kin well known in the Fire-Town.”

  The Harper shook his head and began numbering our kin on his fingers.

  “No,” pronounced Beeth Ulgan, “be ruled by me, Diver. Go with Brin’s Five, be patient.”

  “Where shall we go?” I asked.

  “To my fixed house at Whiterock Fold,” she said. “And my own barge will take you all downriver.”

  “Very well,” said Diver, “if Brin will go there . . . if it serves all the Five well . . .”

  “There is one in Rintoul who will weave all these threads into a safe web,” said the Diviner.

  “But who, Beeth Ulgan?” I cried. “Who will save us? “Who is more powerful than Strangler Tiath? Is it . . . is it Blacklock?”

  Beeth Ulgan laughed aloud. “Well, you are not far from wrong, child. I will not say the name, but it is the one who gives Blacklock—young Murno Pentroy—his wings to fly with.”

  I had to be satisfied with this. In fact it was many days before any of us heard the name she would not utter . . . but from this time we were aware of the presence of this subtle magician, this Maker of Engines.

  Beeth Ulgan clapped her hands and went bustling into the other room again. “There is much to be done!”

  We followed and found her kneeling beside the twirler. The apprentice had sponged down the poor creature and covered the thin body with a blanket, but still it had not awakened.

  “What are the twirlers?” Diver asked softly.

  “Outcasts,” said Beeth Ulgan, “vagabonds. They fly from a sad fate that haunts all Moruians. Do you know what that is?”