The Gist Hunter (31 page)

Bandar recognized the setting: the front of the house was an open-air smithy—with anvil, forge, hammers and tongs, tub of water—and the older idiomat was a Smith while the younger was clearly a version of the Shiftless Apprentice. The noönaut now experienced a shiver of alarm as he noted that the Smith was a more than averagely realized idiomat. His intervention to save Bandar argued that he was at least partially formed of Hero-stuff, and therefore potentially a more significant figure in this Event, perhaps even one of its Principals or Subprincipals.

I should get away from here
, he thought as he bowed and gestured to disavow any need for the Smith's further care and solicitude. The pain in his abdomen was fading.

"If you say so," said the idiomat, returning to the anvil where he had been working before Bandar erupted into his yard, "but your friends might be waiting for you down the street. They didn't seem the kind to forgive and forget."

Bandar shrugged. Interaction with a Principal would accelerate his absorption. He needed to put distance between himself and this element of the Location. He bowed again, managed a grateful smile, and turned toward the gate.

"Good luck," he heard the Smith say. Then he heard something else: a
clink
of metal on metal, a
clink
that was precisely the tone of the second note in the seven-note emergency escape thran. Bandar turned back.

The work was not hard. Bandar took the place of the lazy idiomat boy who operated the bellows. This was a sewn-up goat-skin with two wooden handles that Bandar pulled aside and pushed together, filling and emptying the trapped air which rushed through the skin's neck to feed the glowing charcoal in the forge.

The overseer had come in the morning, Bully and Toady eager in his wake, to demand the runaway's return. The Smith had stood up to him, speaking in tones of genial reason.

"The Subgovernor constantly demands that the work proceed more quickly. He needs more tools, sharper tools. I need strong arms at the bellows. Why don't we go and ask His Excellency?"

Bandar saw alarm flicker in the Functionary's eyes. "We need not trouble the Subgovernor," the idiomat said.

"Then it is settled."

"My tally will be short."

The Smith gestured to the boy. "Take back this boy you gave me the last time I said I needed help. He's better at running errands than squatting at the bellows. Let him bring your cup and carry messages."

Faced with a combination of unyielding will and an avenue of lateral evasion, the overseer acceded. The boy went, Bandar stayed, and the Bully left with thunder in his face, cuffing the Toady out of his way at the gate.

Bandar easily settled into the rhythm of the Smith's days. In the early morning and evening he attended at the forge. When the heat grew oppressive, they worked in the relative cool of the mud-brick house, sharpening iron chisels and wedges with file and whetstone and shaping the molds of damp sand in which bronze and copper castings were made. The Smith seemed pleased with his efforts and they worked well together. For his part, Bandar felt comfortable in the role of helper. At least he was not involved in the inevitable strife that would pit Doomed Innocence's infatuation against the overseer's appetites. Nothing hastened a noönaut's absorption into a Location faster than joining in a conflict.

At midday, along with the rest of the town, they took their siesta, Bandar curling up on a rough mattress of coarse cloth stuffed with grass against the back wall of the smithy. He had never slept in the Commons before; sensible noönauts rarely stayed long enough to feel the need and when they did, they sang open a gate and left. He noted that he experienced no dreams, though this made sense to him when he thought about it: a conscious unconscious was enough of a contradiction in terms; the dreams of dreams were not to be thought of.

Every other day, in the evening, a wagon arrived, driven by an overseer drawn by a donkey and surrounded by a squad of guards armed with sword, spear and shield. When the entourage halted in the smithy's yard the gates were closed and the guards took up positions to secure the area. Bandar came out with the Smith and together they took from the overseer—this one the type classified as Exacting Functionary—three baskets of iron and bronze tools to be sharpened or repaired. They carried them into the smithy where, under the watchful eye of the overseer and the captain of the guards, each item was counted out and checked against a tally.

When the procedure was completed, the Smith brought out a second load of tools that had been refurbished over the preceding two days. Again, each tool was meticulously checked against a list written in charcoal on a roll of papyrus. When every piece had been accounted for, the wagon was loaded and reversed, and the guards alertly checked the street before allowing it to roll through the gate.

Once the days had settled into a routine, Bandar took action to change his situation. While the rest of the household napped in the heat of the day, he rose from his straw tick and went to the forge. To anyone who might chance to observe him, he was a smith's helper arranging tools and materials in better order on the workbench. But his true purpose was to strike each metal object with a small scrap of iron, listening to the note that rang in response.

The medium-sized tongs were what had made the note he had first heard, the second in the series of seven. A strip of iron banding, used to strengthen tubs and barrels, sounded with the frequency of the fourth note. That left five to be discovered. Bandar worked his way along the bench, found a punch that rang with the tone of the third.

He allowed himself a moment of happy anticipation. He had worked out the situation. The Multifacet had sent him here for some purpose. He was sure it had to do with Doomed Innocence, since he had been plunked down in the virtual body of a Sympathetic Mute who would have been the youthful idiomat's natural companion in the work gang. Bandar was supposed to learn a lesson of altruism, perhaps even of self-sacrifice, which would suit him for whatever task the Commons wished him to perform in the future.

But the noönaut had been too canny. He had broken out of the context in which he had been placed, found a new setting in which all that was required of him were his functioning arms. And now he was putting together the means to open a gate and leave this Location. After that, he would never again come unawares into the Commons; he knew techniques that would keep him safe once he was free of the stricture at his throat. The noösphere would have to find another patsy.

He turned his attention to some hoe blades heaped in the corner and after a few tries found one that rang with the frequency of note seven.
Three to go
, he thought, then he noticed a wooden plank beneath the hoes, set flush with the dirt floor and so discolored by ash and soot that it blended in with the packed earth around it.

Curious, Bandar brushed aside the Smith's tools and examined the wood. It seemed to be a small trapdoor. He used the edge of a hoe to pry it up and peered within, finding a layer of sacking. This he pulled up, disturbing what was underneath. He heard a
clonk
that, to his pitch-perfect noönaut's ear, was the exact sound of note number one in the seven-tone thran.
Another down and only two to go,
he thought, and reached into the hole.

His fingers closed around cold iron and he brought up what he had found. It was a broad-bladed spear point, needle sharp at the tip and razor edged down both sides. He tapped it with the little bar of iron and it rang true. He set it down and reached deeper into the darkness, careful of cutting himself, and found more spear heads then a long bundle wrapped in sackcloth that contained three rudimentary short swords. He struck one with his rod but the sound it produced was off-key and useless.

A horn-skinned hand closed about the back of Bandar's neck and he was pulled up and to his feet, then still higher so that his toes barely brushed the ground. He felt himself rotated until his eyes met those of an angry idiomat. The Smith shook the noönaut so that his virtual bones rattled within him.

"What are you doing?" was the Smith's first question. The second was, "Who sent you?"

Bandar opened his mouth, but no sound emerged. He tried to convey by facial expression alone that he was innocent of any ill intent, but he knew that his grimace of pain kept creeping in to overshadow the message. With a grunt of disgust, the Smith flung him toward a corner and Bandar landed hard on his back and one elbow. The pain felt very real.

He struggled to rise. He saw another face peeking into the smithy from the yard: the old man in a loincloth who had brought lunch to the work gang. But Bandar's attention was soon reclaimed by the Smith. The big idiomat had gone to the forge and was now turned toward him. In his hand was a heavy maul and behind the anger in his honest face was an underlying expression of reluctant determination.

The little iron rod Bandar had used to test for tones had rolled free. He reached for it and struggled to his knees. If he had read the situation correctly, his appealingness as a Sympathetic Mute, coupled with the Smith's beneficent nature, could deliver him from the latter's anger—provided Bandar performed the right action. He stood up and went to the workbench where he struck the tongs, then the punch, ringing two pure notes from the metal. He struck the strengthening band, then from the three he played a simple tune.

The Smith now regarded him with a mixed countenance. Bandar tried for his most appealing expression as he crossed to the hoe blades and spear points and brought one of each back to the bench. He arranged them in a simple scale then played another tune for the idiomat, wishing as he did so that he had all seven tones needed to open a gate. But the song and the innocence of Bandar's borrowed face were having the desired effect.

"You just wanted to make music," the Smith said.

Bandar enthusiastically signaled an affirmative and the idiomat put down the maul, his face showing almost as much relief as Bandar felt. The old man came into the smithy and said, "We should have known. He's too simple to be a spy for the Subgovernor. Come, let's get these things stowed before somebody sees them as shouldn't."

The noönaut enthusiastically helped transfer the weapons to baskets and hide them in the cart, and when the Smith unthinkingly counseled him to say nothing, he tapped his lips and smiled. They all laughed together, the Smith with a hearty boom and Bandar in heartfelt mime. The idiomats left him there and went into the house, doubtless to conspire further, Bandar thought. For his part, the noönaut assiduously fell to seeking the other two notes of the escape thran. He found tone number six in a copper ladle used to drip water on cooling metal, but the fifth and last note remained elusive.

Bandar struck his way about the forge with an energy that was increasingly desperate. This Location was not what he had thought it was: the Event was not a variant of The Building of the Grand Monument; it was an iteration of another great trope of the Commons—The Rising of the Oppressed. But, once again, Bandar's situation had started bad and become worse: the idiomat to whom he had attached himself was a Principal of this bloody Event. Worst of all, although Bandar was not particularly well-versed in Revolts, he was enough of an Institute scholar to know that they almost always culminated in a massacre of the rebels.

The clandestine weapon-making was a sophisticated operation. Every piece of iron that entered the smithy was accounted for, from the raw ingots sent down from the City under guard by troops of the Governor's own household to the tools and implements distributed and collected each day by the Subgovernor's men at the slave camp. Even the pots and pans in which the communal meals were prepared were kept under guard.

But midway along the route between the Monument and the town someone with a knowledgeable eye had noted an outcrop of iron ore. The area soon became a place where slaves would relieve themselves, an activity they were allowed to do without being closely watched, the guards being almost as likely to go unsandaled as most of the workers. Unobserved, the slaves would break off handfuls of the friable rock and deposit it in the baskets from which the old man distributed bread at lunchtime, and which found their way to the smithy where the Smith would smelt the ore into iron and fashion weapons from it.

The old man who brought the ore also took away the weapons, carrying them back to the communal huts where the women hid them in the thatch and beneath the dirt floors. Bandar deduced that the arming of the slaves had been going on for quite some time and, judging by the ancient courier's excitement, the Rising was imminent.

It was an inspired plan. Not for the first time in his career as an aficionado of the kaleidoscope of human experiences exemplified in the Commons, Bandar marveled at the ingenuity with which the simple contrived to counter oppression by the mighty. But he also knew that a talent for brilliant improvisation was rarely a match for phalanxes of trained and well-led soldiery. He definitely needed to find the missing fifth note and complete the thran.

Still, nothing rang with the right frequency, although the noönaut
tinked
and
tonked
on every possible object in the smithy and the attached household. His ability to search during his spare time grew limited, however, because the Smith required him to assemble various metallic items on the workbench and to reproduce tunes that the idiomat liked to hum while working at the forge.

It would not have been an intolerable existence but for the imminent threat of annihilation. Even so, Bandar found himself slipping into the routine of the days, taking pleasure in small things. The Smith was an agreeable sort, almost always of a pleasant disposition, being an idiomat idealist who lacked the full array of subtler sensibilities that would complexify the personality of even the most simple real human being. Bandar kept finding in himself an urge to be of help to the fellow, even to the point of wondering if there was some way he could prevent the cycle of the Event from fulfilling itself, which must surely end with the Smith heroically dead.