Although – well, Plik seemed a person worth talking with, but perhaps not when this drunk and fulsome. And Sesi had arranged her posture of adoration to give Iern a good look down her cleavage.
‘Now never mind that,’ he said. Rising, he bent over, grasped her beneath the arms, and helped her to her feet. She stumbled against him. The sensation was delightful. ‘Let’s be friends together,’ he urged.
‘But this is so marvelous,’ she breathed. ‘I’m actually in, in your embrace.’
‘Sesi, the Aerogens doesn’t really encourage superstitions about itself. We’re men and women like any others.’
She dipped her lashes. ‘A most handsome man, sir.’ She raised them and plucked his sleeve. ‘Could we go off in a corner for just a second? Please? You don’t mind, do you, Plik?’
The poet sent her a wry smile and returned to his wine.
Sesi led Iern aside, stood on tiptoe very close, laid her hands over his, and whispered rapidly: ‘Please don’t think I’m bold or wanton or anything. If you tell me no, well, I know my station in life, and only being in the same room with you this afternoon is something I’ll always remember. But I’ve adored you ever since – Anyway, on week nights the landlord, he’ll tend bar later, the landlord generally closes up about twenty hundred, because the kind of customers we get have to go to work early. I’m sure you’re staying somewhere too fine for the likes of me. But if you felt like it, I do sleep in a room upstairs, and I’d be so honored –’
Iern consulted his conscience. Faylis? No. After nearly two years of marriage she remained indifferent in bed; she loved the glamour and luxury of being his wife, but when they were alone she was apt to rail at him; she was reading Gaean texts, and he knew she corre
sponded with Talence Jovain Aurillac, who was a Gaean convert. This wouldn’t be his first romp away from her. Besides, few Clansfolk took such things seriously anymore.
But Plik. He would like to see Plik again, get to know that curious man better, hear more songs.
He cast a glance yonder. The poet met it, grinned on the left side of his face, hoisted his goblet in toast, and said: ‘No fears. I’m used to this. Doubtless I’ll pass out before long, and awaken with a headache and stagger off to my lodgings. Besides, my Vineleaf can do no wrong.’
‘Orion shall rise.’
Those were the first words that Ronica Birken remembered uttering. Earlier recollections out of childhood stood apart from each other, vaguely perceived, like islands in a fog – her mother singing her to sleep each night; her father (home on leave from the war, he must have been) flinging her in the air and catching her while she laughed for joy; a stately wapiti that hung around the village as a sort of public pet and took lettuce leaves from her fingers; hours of practice at throwing a ball, for she was determined to do it as well as the boys; rain on the windows of a darkened house wherein her mother wept –
But she remembered how she came home, saw Uncle Emon and another man in the living room with Anneth, was so struck by the grimness on all three that she stopped in the doorway and stood unobserved while the other man (Rikko Torsun? He was the local Lodgemaster of the Wolves then; but his face was unclear in her mind) spoke of winning back freedom, and from her uncle rolled forth the words she did not understand (for the starry Hunter
would
gleam again above snowfields – wouldn’t he?) but that held a deep and shivery magic.
The very next day, or almost, the stranger came. She did not recall what name he gave himself, but his size and alien features remained always with her, vivid as a scar; and though he talked gently, it was of Daddy’s death he talked, and he was one of the troll Maurai, the first she had ever seen. At last she hurled the magic words at him for a lightning bolt. Nothing happened except that Mother took her away. However, from that hour onward, Ronica’s memories were more and more linked, as if this marked the beginning of her real life.
In a way it did. Soon after, the family moved to Portanjels on the
Strait of Wandy Fuca, where Anneth took a job about which she told her children merely that it was for her Lodge. (A minor harbor, therefore scarcely noticed by the Maurai Inspectorate, the town was an excellent terminal for the seaborne part of the secret traffic with Kenai; and recordkeepers were no less indispensable to the growth of that traffic than were sailors, engineers, or armed guards.) Presently she married Tom Jamis, also of the Wolf Lodge (and also in the secret, as a computerman concerned with procuring hardware). In the course of a few years, the undertaking reached a point where their services were in demand at the volcanoes. The family moved to Kenai, and there – later in the forests behind it, on into the vastness that was Laska – Ronica grew up. By her mid-teens, through alertness and thinking, she had gained a shrewd idea of what the thunders really were that sometimes rolled from behind the mountains across the inlet.
She kept silence. At that time, she was aiming to become a Survivor; and she did learn, pass her tests, start to act as a guide and provider, occasionally a tracker and rescuer of lost persons, for those who would reclaim the wilderness for man. She also became a postulant of the Wolf Lodge. That was nearly inevitable, for not only was it her family’s, it had by far the largest membership in the area. (Here as elsewhere, Injuns and Eskimos generally preferred their own traditional groupings, though some belonged to it.) At the age of eighteen, she completed her studies, performed her First Duty – in her case, backpacking medicines to a snowbound settlement that had radioed news of its need – and stood her Vigil.
When she had been ceremoniously initiated, Lodgemaster Benyo Smith called her to his office. With him were her stepfather Tom Jamis and that Eygar Dreng who was rarely seen in Kenai. The men wore blue robes, and Benyo kept a hat on his head and gripped his emblematic staff. It was clearly a solemn moment. Above the Lodgemaster’s desk, carved into the wainscot, the wolf that had broken its chain ran free.
‘Ronica,’ Benyo said, ‘your elders have watched you for a long while, and by and large, what we’ve seen has pleased us. You’re intelligent, brave and adventurous but not reckless, loyal, and … discreet.’ He paused. ‘How much do you know of what’s going on amongst us?’
Her throat felt thick. ‘Orion shall rise,’ she got out past the thutter of blood.
Benyo nodded. ‘Let’s not say anything more just yet. A work this big, this meaningful – aimed at the upheaval of the whole world – is hard enough to hide. It would have been impossible to hide, year after year, before the Doom War made places like Kenai lonely again. It gets harder to hide as it goes.’
He gusted a sigh. ‘We’ve got to recruit new people, and not simply because many of us have grown old or died in the service of Orion. We’ve come so far along that we require some special new combinations of abilities. You seem promising. But let me first warn you, it won’t be a lot: of thrills – scarcely ever. Mostly it’ll be labor and sacrifice, for a cause of liberation that you can hardly have noticed in this backwater where the Maurai never come. If you aren’t prepared to give up a great deal of what you enjoy, what you love, well, tell us right now, straight out. There’ll be no hard feelings, I promise you. You can continue your life as you’ve been leading it. After all, a Survivor is socially useful.’
‘But I’ll have to stay in Laska,’ she foretold.
‘Until Orion rises,’ Benyo answered.
‘If ever it does,’ Eygar Dreng said. ‘We don’t yet have what we must have. Maybe we never will.’
Tom Jamis gave his stepdaughter a crooked smile.
‘Yes,
the Lodge will expect you to avoid civilization,’ he told her. ‘I myself haven’t left these parts for ten years, you recall. It’s not that anyone’s afraid I’ll betray them, it’s that I can do my work right here; and why take an added risk? But I like it well enough, and you’re entirely at home, aren’t you?’
Ronica wet her lips. ‘What… would you want me … to do?’
Eygar Dreng regarded her for a span that felt long before he replied slowly: ‘I’ve examined your school records and talked with your teachers. You could be an engineer. You could work on Orion – not as a leader; frankly, you aren’t brilliant in that area – but as a valuable junior… when you aren’t using your Survivor skills in a search that is vital to us. We’d like to send you south, to study at the University of Vittohrya. It’d be on a scholarship of the kind that Lodges regularly
give
deserving kids.’
‘The first thing you must think about, and think hard,’ Benyo Smith added, ‘is whether, in that atmosphere, at your age, you can keep the greatest secret on the planet. If you have any least doubt, say no, and we’ll thank you.’
‘Couldn’t you teach me, you people?’ Ronica wondered.
Though this interview was not altogether unexpected, she was half stunned by the implications. ‘My brother Bill – he’s already vanished across the water, into the mountains.’
‘And your brother Zakki
is
reasonably content to be a lumberman,’ Tom said. ‘Yes, we do have in-house facilities for education, and that’s where Bill is, but – You’re different, Ronica. If you join, you’ll need to know more about the world outside.’
Of course she accepted.
Four years passed before she returned, and then she was soon off again, this time northward and into wilderness.
2
She came afoot and alone over the Chugach Mountains and down to the peninsula. Her entire journey she had made thus, for it was through country where none but a few hunting tribes dwelt. Except when she happened on one of these and took hospitality, she herself traveled as a hunter and gatherer.
That did not slow her much. Her rabbit stick knocked down small game along the way; her eye was quick to find berries, roots, every edible that the land yielded so abundantly; water was never a problem; in the evenings, after she had spent maybe half an hour putting together a brushwood shelter, collecting fuel, starting a fire, she might construct a deadfall while her dinner cooked, with a good prospect of finding a squirrel or the like in it next morning. When perchance she went hungry for a day or two, it was the sort of minor discomfort that she ignored. Occasionally she stopped to wash and dry her clothes, or to inquire among natives in what pidgin she and they could improvise. Otherwise she strode.
Nevertheless, hers became a three months’ faring. The subarctic fall was well along when she reentered the tamed country. Here forests had dwindled to woodlots while meadows grew into pastures. Down the shore road she went, Cook Inlet aglitter on her right and snowpeaks rising sheer behind, aspen and birch still yellow amidst the darkling spruce on her left, more mountains beyond them, smoke blowing ragged from the chimneys of stoutly timbered houses, sometimes an eagle at hover with its wings golden against sky and clouds, and past this the ramparts of the peninsula itself, staving off the bleakness of the sea – this and more she saw, when rain was not falling. Rain fell most of the time, but she
ignored it too; else she would never have gotten far.
Now she could spend her nights beneath roofs, among friends. Dwellers were not so many but that everybody knew almost everybody else. Folk were eager to have company. In Ronica’s case, the older sons of a household were especially happy.
At twenty-two years of age, she was tall, long-limbed, broad in shoulders and hips, full-bosomed; her face was wide, with green eyes under level dark brows, blunt nose, strong mouth and chin, fair and slightly freckled complexion; wavy amber-colored hair, contained by a beaded headband, fell to the base of her neck. Not that she was anything exotic. Her woolen shirt, trousers, and hat were battered and travel-stained, and scarcely more was in her backpack than a change of clothes and boots, a couple of utensils, and her prospecting gear. In these parts she had discarded her rabbit stick and fire drill, which she could make anytime.
Regardless, she was handsome, and lately come back from her studies in Vittohrya,
the
city. Young men speculated about her morals, were disappointed, and settled down with their kin to hear whatever she chose to tell of her experiences outside these horizons. She gave them gossip, generally amusing, from the South, and they were content. Of her present expedition, begun shortly after she returned home, she said nothing specific, and nobody inquired. For nearly two decades, Wolf had been doing something hereabouts, aided by individuals from other Lodges, but it did not especially touch inhabitants in their lives and they had an ethic of minding their own business. Also, the majority belonged to Wolf themselves; they heeded the Lodgemaster’s hints and discouraged any neighbors who grew unduly curious.
Besides, Ronica Birken was a Survivor, who had been four years away from her wilds. It was understandable that she would wish to refresh her knowledge of them, and perhaps meanwhile do a little surveying or investigating – or whatever – on behalf of her Lodge and people.
Therefore she walked undisturbed to Kenai.
One by one, landmarks hove in view and fell behind. Long abandoned, a fortress from the early Mong Wars period crumbled toward the same oblivion as that Ancrage from which most of its materials had been quarried. Ammonia Hill was a grave mound above what was left of an ancient petrochemical plant after it too had been stripped of its useful substances, hundreds of years ago. A
fairly modern industrial building also lay deserted, since the last trickle of the natural gas that it processed gave out, and roots and weather were reclaiming what parts of it man had not removed.
Not far onward, though, stood a newer and hopeful workplace, turning waste and by-products such as sawdust into fuel for today; and this was on the edge of Kenai, which lived as intensely as ever.
Five thousand inhabitants made the town the principal community in an enormous area. Houses clustered along irregular streets, many of which were paved with asphalt rather than wood blocks. Most were gaudily carved and painted, like those in the hinterland. Some belonged to traders, merchants, brokers, doctors, veterinarians, and other professionals, who conducted their business on the ground floors. There were a few warehouses, factories, smokehouses, a lumberyard … an inn, a bar and grill, a school, two churches and a pagan shrine-park … looming over the rest, triple-tiered, with shingle roofs, totem colonnade, and watchtower, the Wolf Lodge Hall, which included such things as municipal auditorium and library… emblems on private homes telling that various other Lodges met in them. … Fishing boats were out, but three freighters lay at the docks, their spars rakish athwart the mists that hid the farther heights; and a ferry threshed with ox-driven paddle-wheels on its way across the channel from Tyonek.