“If your sign points us in this way,” he observed, “we may not be the only ones to find your storage place. The Traders, or whoever has combed this city, seem to have passed here in force.”
The girl shook her head. “I do not believe that any Trader knows of what we seek. It is not metal, the work of Before Men’s hands, rather it is work of their minds. I know of no Trader who would concern himself with such.”
“Do you know of all the Trader clans?” he countered. “We, on the plains, have contact with four bands who come regularly, nearly thirty men in all. We have never seen their women. How many came to Padford?”
“I can remember twenty,” she answered promptly. “And my father—but he was no Trader. There may be others like him, seekers of knowledge.”
“Yet he traveled with the Traders,” Sander pressed. “And it is known that that is not their way, to allow any not of their kin to follow their trails.”
“My mother said that those who brought him treated him oddly, almost as if they feared him in some manner. Yet he was not a man who carried his weapons loosed or who quarreled easily. She said she was sure that the Trader chief was pleased when they left and my father chose to remain behind for the winter. Yet he said he would go with them when they came again, for he thought to travel even further to the south to learn what lay there. And they did not refuse him when he spoke.”
Sander grew a little tired of this mysterious father who had been laid in his grave place before even Fanyi was born. He seemed to have made such an impression on the Shaman mother who had taken him to her house that she treated him with a reverence and awe that was not usual among her sex.
The women of the Mob chose their mates. Yes, and discarded them if they were not satisfied with their bargains. His father had been chosen twice. But the latter time he had declined the proposal, for he already had a son to learn his mysteries. And no smith wanted to divide his power when the days came that his own arm was no longer strong enough to swing the greatest hammer. Sander had been raised mainly in a household of men: his father, his uncle, who had so sharp a tongue and narrow a mind that no woman had ever looked upon him with favor, himself who was apprentice.
Any tenthold was eager to supply a smith with well-worked clothing, a portion of baked meal cakes, blankets woven from the wool of the herds, in exchange for what his father could fashion in return. Those of their own tent had never gone empty of belly or cold of body, even though no woman’s loom or cooking pots rode in their travel wagon.
But for the most part a man owned only his weapon and his tools, all else belonged to a woman. It was she who fitted out her daughter, when the maid came to choose, and counseled her to choose wisely and with an eye for the future, mainly among the older men and not the youths whose skills were yet unproven.
Was this custom also held among Fanyi’s people? If that were true, and Sander expected it was, then the women of Padford could well have drawn aside from a stranger such as her father, seeing no security in such a union that was bound to be a short one. However, their Shaman had welcomed him, spoke of him with unusual respect, nursed him until his death. The unknown traveler must indeed have had some force of character to win such a response.
“It is not usual,” Fanyi continued, “for a Shaman to wed. Her powers should not be limited by showing favor to any one man. Yet it is also necessary that she breed a daughter to follow her in her craft. Therefore, when my mother chose a far traveler, the village was content. Only she found him to be much more than she supposed. And when he died, her mourning was not of ceremony only but from the heart.”
“You say”—Sander felt a little uncomfortable at that note in his companion’s voice, as if he had walked into the private portion of a tent without being so urged by its owner—”that a Shaman must bear a daughter. But what if there comes a son—?”
Fanyi laughed. “That will never happen, smith. We have our own secrets and in some things we can even outwill the ways of nature. The first of my clan, she who survived the Dark Times, had a learning new even then. And this she gave to her daughter, and from daughter to daughter that was passed. We do not breed sons, only daughters—and only one to each generation. For that is our will—though it can be altered if we are minded, only we are not. For there is no place for a boy-child in a Shaman’s house.”
As they were journeying, the land had opened out before them. The outline of an abrupt rise ahead showed such sharp pinnacles, such knife-edged clefts as Sander had never sighted before. Here the river rushed faster, with a roar. They rounded a point to see before them a mighty falls, a mist half-veiling the falling water, spinning out in filmy threads to hide the full length of that downpour.
On the other side of the river the land lay more level, those nodules of saw-edged rock less discernible. Sander halted in some dismay as he sighted plainly what lay ahead. Some great force had twisted and rent this land. Flows of lava had caught blocks of stone, tangles of warped metal, now rusted and eroded. The landscape was such a gigantic mixture of things made by man held captive by nature, frozen into what seemed an impenetrable barrier, that it daunted them.
Yet the ruts of the cart tracks headed directly forward into a country they would have sworn no wheel could cross. Fanyi stared at that jumbled barrier across the land.
“A wave—a wave that swept in from the sea,” she murmured. “A wave as high as a mountain. A wave that carried with it most of the city—a wave that broke here and so lost its hold upon that which was heaviest. Such a wave as it is said carried the ship of my people inland. Now I marvel that they survived—unless their wave was smaller.”
“It does not matter how this was made.” Sander came directly to the point. “We are concerned with finding a way through, if your guide still tells us that must be done.”
She studied the pendant and then nodded. “The indicated path still lies straight before us. But these”—she pointed to the wagon ruts—”say that others must have found a road, one large enough to take their carts.”
Sander did not point out that traveling such a well-marked path might well be inviting ambush. For the moment he could see no other chance of penetrating that unbelievable mass ahead.
“Look!” Fanyi pointed. “A building!”
For a moment he was startled by what she pointed out. Then he saw the wreckage was not a complete building, merely blocks still perhaps connected by the metal sinews the Before People used to tie together their masses of stone; but enough of those blocks were intact to make a shell of sorts hard-rammed against a pinnacle.
The hugeness of the disaster that had left its own monument here was overpowering. He had accepted all his life the tales of the Dark Times, of the titanic forces that had overpowered the Before World; he had seen the rubble of tumbled cities, the sea-desert. But not until he stood before this breath-taking crumbled mass that been thrown by the force of a raging sea upon tormented and shaken earth, there to be rooted after the water’s retreat, had it even been directly brought home to him what fury had been loose upon his kind and their world. As Fanyi had said, it was hard to believe that any man could have escaped what had struck in the Dark Time. Even the chants of the Rememberers did not reveal the deep despair of those who must have fled, only to be licked away by water or engulfed when quakes opened the very land under their feet.
Fanyi had covered her face with her hands.
“It is—” She could not find words, he realized. Any more than he could summon them at this moment.
He put his arm about her shaking shoulders, drew her against him, two small humans standing before the death sign of a world.
At length Sander, with difficulty, wrenched his gaze away from that incredible wall.
“Do not look at it,” he told her. “Watch the ruts; maybe you are right and those will guide us through.”