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CHAPTER 16

Paula's hand turned. The palm began to knead his skin. So it had been with her, the explanations falling away one by one. Her hand moved along his chest and her face came into veiw at his shoulder. Sliding her fingers in among the roots of his hair, she pressed upon his lips a drowsy kiss. Then she pulled back. "Horses!"

They snatched their tunics and ran out, shouting, "Get up! Let's go! Pahid!" Hoofbeats echoed in the thesha trees. Klyne destroyed the fire with a kick.

The camp was on a rise between a mown field and a stream, both dangerous crossing on foot if they were persued by horses. Rather than be run down from behind, the women would fight. They sent the children to hide along the streambed and gathered under the trees, their faces pale, holding knives. Dew shimmered along the blades and fell in droplets from the quivering points.

There was no time to organize. Paula tied a small knife to her thigh in case she were taken again. She was looking around for a bigger one to use now, when Akiva handed her his own.

"What will you fight with?" she asked.

"There is no one to fight," he replied. He took a glowing stick from the fire's embers and swung it around his head until it flared. The sun was rising as he walked down to the field. Mist caught the light to form a golden wall that hid everything beyond. Akiva sunk into the mist. They heard the horses rush toward him.

"Decoy!" Clark said. The others began to throw burning sticks in all directions, though they knew it was too late.

The sun rose higher. The haze above the dew-silvered field now divided into curls and columns, thinned and turned white. Akiva was on the shining grass, leading a train of five horses toward them. Beside him walked Berthe.

They all shared the horses, riding and walking, showered with every breeze by red and yellow leaves that left the trees more and more bare to the open sky. The world seemed new. Clark walked with his head tipped up, enjoying the sunlight, the smell of the horses, the color of the leaves against the blue, organizing in his mind all that Ma Zauber and Berthe had told him about medicine on Paffir Haretz. He would write them a textbook, like the Books of Healing at home, not Reshecomp beads that required a decoder but simply a collection of notes that anyone could read. Later, when beads and machines to read them became available--but he could barely speak low Paffir and that, of course, must be the language of the book.

"Can you write, Berthe?" he asked, without stopping to recall the unanimous negative he had gotten at Ma Zauber's.

"Yes," she replied. As simple as that.

"I think we should write down what you know about medicine."

"Why? Other women know about it. Besides, none of them can read except me."

"We'll teach them."

"They never learn." And she told him about the herbal alphabet and the scrolls and the women sitting around them with fists clenched, waiting for the voice inside to speak.

"I can read," Neshar interrupted. "Clarek showed us all how. And he told us how straws work."

Clark had taught them the high Paffir alphabet at the rate of one letter a day on the road from the Wolf River to Ebur, and now the children liked to follow him around asking questions as he worked. They egged him into making speeches. Trees, bird flight, fire, grass and the chemical properties of water became his subjects. Lectures grew, burned and flowed all around him. Neshar's favorite had been delivered when some boys and girls happened to find Clark drinking through a straw. "A straw looks empty," Neshar recited, "But it is full of air."

Berthe traced the spiral of Neshar's hair with her finger, laying the snaky curls flat around the center. She tapped the flat spot, then kissed it. "So it is. Pahid would say, what then?" She looked at the red cord around her arm.

"Why?" Clark asked.

"Because knowledge is useless. Learning for its own sake is like eating when you aren't hungry. Knowledge comes second to understanding. 'Neshar!' he would say. 'What are you doing?'"

"Sitting on a horse."

"No, he would have you think of the big thing you are doing. Not what you are doing right now. He would have you say, I am helping to bring the world to Ayekar."

"The two are the same," Akiva interjected. He was walking on the other side of Berthe's horse.

"At least, one is part of the other."

Akiva stopped the horse by taking hold of its mane. "The two are the same," he repeated. He let go and the horse moved forward again.

"In any case, my women can't read. I tried to teach a few letters at a time--we couldn't meet often enough for one letter a day--and each time I gave them a few more of the leaves and berries that stood for letters and they took them back to other women. Nowadays you may see women in villages as far off as the coast with sprigs and seeds worked into their red cords in sign that they have been taught this and that much of the alphabet, and not one of them can read. We can only learn as children."

That's not true, Clark insisted inwardly, but he remembered trying to teach some of the men and women, and how quickly their interest had died. "But you were grown up when you learned," he said.

She turned her head sharply to look at him. Now he felt weighed down by complications, dangers and difficulties. Everything took so long here, everything followed a meandering course. The sun had grown hot. Acrid dust from trodden leaves adhered to his sweat.

"Yes, I was," she said grimly.

"What does that mean?" Clark demanded. Was she from off-planet? A Resheborian? Outlander? Some kind of a spy, like Krup? But Akiva had known the priest who helped to deliver Berthe.

Suddenly Neshar began to cry. "Poor Neshar," Akiva said, lifting him from his mother's lap. "My own child, and hardly mine at all," he said to Clark.

"Don't give me away!" Neshar sobbed.

Clark gave up. She was a peasant; clever peasants had no place in this world. Being able to read was an embarrassment.

[~*~]

He dropped back to Paula's side and they walked most of the day in comfortable silence, looking at things together and hearing sounds. If something called for comment, a touch often served. Clark could feel everything. Seeing a drop of water slide down a leaf to fall on the ground, he felt the cool trail across the leaf's back, the the quick descent and the yielding change from earth to mud. A bird tugged at a worm; he felt the hunger, the pain and the vital combat. His empathy outstripped reason. When light clouds softened the sunlight, he felt himself tinge the world with the colors of joy.

The women came up behind them to tell Paula what they had heard in Ma Zauber's house. Everyone there revered Berthe, including Ma Zauber herself who was the formost witch in the Middle Plains and eighth in an unbroken line. "But there's a Zauber in every generation," observed one, a flighty young woman with the peculiar name of Augenblau who had run away from her husband and wanted to be a witch. "Berthe is rare. Paula, do you see the red string on her arm? All the herbalists have them. Will we get them, too?"

"Do you know what that cord means? Pahid. It's his mark. They pay him for those. They're Lir Temple Red."

The woman answered gently, "No, they aren't. It's called Earth Red. It's a sign that all the other women know you."

"She made the cords in Pahid's temple! She spun them from cotton grown by Lir priests," Paula insisted.

Augenblau started a little, then smiled. "No, no, no. Some of it was made according to him, on a spindle. But the good ones were spun on a wheel."

"On a wheel? What difference--?" She sounded almost like Tiyar.

"Pahid burned the wheel, but some of the cord survived. That's the good cord. You can tell by the thickness of it, how even it is. You know they re-collected the tax in her province because of the wheel. The Lir Temple refused wheel-spun cloth, and they came back in spring. In the middle of spring, when people are hungry, they took everything in their path. Many people died. The good cord has their curse."

"Who's they?"

"They? Er--Pahid."

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CONTINUE.....................

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