He bent before it. And then, as suddenly as it had come, he realized that he had strength to meet it. He raised his eyes gravely to Kennard and said aloud, “Look, my friend”—(he used the word bredu) “—I did not know this. I did not make my people’s laws, no more than you caused the feud that set the bandits on our hunting party.” And he was amazed at the steady force with which he countered the furious assault of rage.
Slowly, Kennard quieted. Larry felt the red surges of Kennard’s fury receding, until at last the Darkovan boy stood before him silent, just a kid again and a scared one. He didn’t apologize, but Larry didn’t expect him to. He said, simply, “So it’s a matter of time, you see, Lerrys.” The Darkovan form of Larry’s name was, Larry knew, tacit apoloogy. “And as you care for your people, I care for my father. And this is the first day of the rainy season. I had hoped to be out of these hills, and through the passes, before this. We were delayed by the trailmen, or we should be safe now, and a message of your safety on its way to your father. If I had the starstone still—” he was silent, then shrugged. “Well, that is the Comyn law.” He drew a deep breath. “Now, which way did you say you thought was west?”
“I didn’t say,” Larry said, honestly. He did not know until much later just how rare a thing he had done; he had faced the unleashed wrath of an Alton and a telepath—and been unharmed. Later, he remembered it and shook in his shoes; but now he just felt relieved that Kennard had calmed down.
“But,” he said, “there’s no point in going in circles. All these canyons look exactly alike to me. If we had a compass—” He broke off. He began to search frantically in his pockets. The bandits had not taken it from him because the main blade was broken. The trailmen had not even seen it. As a weapon it was worthless. He had not even been able to use it to help Kennard clean and gut the birds they had eaten.
But it had a magnetized blade!
And a magnetized blade, properly used, could make an improvised compass . . . .
The first turn-out of his pockets failed to find it; then he remembered that during their time with the trailmen, fearing they might regard any tool, however small, as a weapon, he had thrust it into his medical kit. He took it out, and snapped the magnetized blade off against a stone, then tested it against the metal of the broken main blade. It retained its magnetism. Now if he could only remember how it was done. It had been a footnote in one of his mathematics texts in childhood, half forgotten. Kennard, meanwhile, watched as if Larry’s brain had snapped, while Larry experimented with a bit of string and finally, looking at Kennard’s long, square-cut hair, demanded, “Give me one of your hairs.”
“Are you out of your wits?”
“No,” Larry said. “I think I may be in them, at last. I should have thought of this from the beginning. If I could have taken a bearing when the sun was still shining, and we had a clear view of the pass ahead of us, I’d know—”
Without raising his head, he accepted the hair which Kennard gave him gingerly, as if he were humoring a lunatic. He knotted the hair around the magnetized blade and waited. The blade was tiny and light, hardly bigger than the needles which had been the first improvised compasses. It swung wildly for a few moments; stopped.
“What superstitious rigamarole—” Kennard began, stopped. “You must have something on your mind,” he conceded, “but what?”
Larry began to explain the theory by which the magnetic compass worked; Kennard cut him short.
“Everyone knows that a certain kind of metal—you call it a magnet—will attract metal. But how can this help us?”
For a moment Larry despaired. He had forgotten the level of Darkovan technology—or lack of it—and how could he, in one easy lesson, explain the two magnetic poles of a planet, the theory of the magnetic compass which pointed to the true pole at all times, the manner of taking a compass direction and following? He started, but he was making very heavy weather of explaining the magnetic field around a planet. To begin with, he simply did not have the technological vocabulary in Darkovan—if there was one, which he doubted. He was reminded of the trailman chief calling fire “the red thing which eats the woods.” He felt like that, while he tried to explain about iron filings and magnetic currents. Finally he gave up, holding the improvised compass in one hand.