Yohai talked some more. I studied the smith. He or she wore a leather apron and sandals. Nothing more. I got a good look at him or her: broad shoulders, a deep chest, and powerful-looking arms. This was a formidable creature. The fur that covered him or her was reddish brown. An unusual color. Hadn’t there been someone like this at the party on the night I arrived?
Yohai stopped talking.
The smith made another gesture, then looked at me. “I am Nia. You will stay here.”
I made the gesture of assent.
Yohai said something to me. Was it good-bye? She turned and walked away, moving quickly. In a minute or two she was gone.
“Sit down,” said Nia. “I—” He or she waved at the fire.
“I understand.”
I settled in a corner. Nia added charcoal to the fire, then began to pump the bellows: a large bag, made of leather, with a stick attached to it. Nia raised and lowered the stick. The bag filled and emptied. The fire brightened. After a while Nia picked up tongs and laid the metal in the fire.
“What is that?” I asked and pointed.
Nia told me the word for iron, then went back to work. He or she beat the piece of iron till it was flat, then heated it and folded it, then beat it flat again. This was done over and over. I got tired watching.
Sometime in the afternoon Nia stopped working. He or she sighed and stretched. “Food.”
“Yes.” I stood up.
We went to the other building. Inside it was empty except for a pile of furs and a couple of jars. Nia took off the apron, then rummaged among the furs and found a tunic. She put it on.
“Here.” She pulled bread out of one jar. The other jar was full of a liquid: the pungent narcotic I’d drunk at the party.
We sat down in the doorway and ate and drank.
“Where are you from?” asked Nia. Her mouth was full of food. I didn’t understand her, and she had to repeat the question.
“Not around here,” I answered.
“I am of the Iron People,” she said. “They are far away. There.” She pointed toward the sun. “You?”
I waved in the opposite direction, eastward.
“Ya.” She drank more of the liquid. “These people are hard to understand.” She got up and went to the smithy.
I stayed where I was until I heard the sound of Nia’s hammer. Then I got out my radio and called Eddie.
After he heard what had happened, he said, “I ought to pull you out.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t think I’m in any danger, and if I am … Eddie, we all knew how dangerous this might be. We could have sent down robots. We sent down people because we wanted whatever it is that people bring to a situation. The human perspective. We voted to take the risk. It got a clear majority.”
Eddie was silent.
“I want to stay. That’s my human perspective. This is the reason I left Earth—not to sit in a room in the goddamn ship. I’m finally able to carry on a conversation, and I’m starting to learn how the natives work iron. You know I’m interested in technology.”
There was more silence, then a sigh. “I opposed using robots because I thought they’d be more disruptive than people. Okay. Stay. But I think you’re wrong.”
“About what? The situation?”
“No. Technology. It’s a typical Western bias. You think a tool is more important than a dream because a tool can be measured and a dream cannot.”
I made a noncommittal noise.
“The Greeks are to blame,” he said.
“What?”
“They were the ones who decided that reality was mathematical. A crazy idea! An ethical value isn’t like a triangle. A religious vision can’t be reduced to a formula. Yet both are real. Both are important.”
“You have no fight with me. I don’t know enough about Western philosophy to defend it. And I have to get off the air.”
“Give me a call tomorrow.”
“Okay.”
At twilight Nia came back. She divided her pile of furs in two. “You sleep there.” She pointed at one pile.
I woke at sunrise. Nia was up and putting on her apron. “Yohai says you can learn. Come.”
We went to the smithy. Nia got the fire going, then taught me how to work the bellows. That morning she made the blade for a hoe. The blade was pointed and had two barbs at the back—for weeding, I decided, though it looked as if it could be used as a weapon.
I had not seen any real weapons. No swords. No pikes. No battleaxes or battle clubs. Nothing that was clearly designed to harm another person.
That was interesting. Maybe the men—wherever they were—had the tools for killing.
At noon we stopped and ate. I asked Nia the names of several things: the hoe blade, the hammer, and so on. She frowned and told me. I had a feeling that she wasn’t going to be a very good teacher. She seemed laconic by nature.
We went back to work. My arms started to ache, then my back, and finally my legs. The smoke was bothering my eyes, and I wasn’t too crazy about the clouds of steam produced when Nia dropped the glowing blade into a bucket of water. She did this twice. Finally she took the blade outside. She examined it in the sunlight, then made the gesture that meant “yes.”
“Is it good?” I asked.
“Yes. I will make another one.”
Damn her. She did. By the time she was finished, I was exhausted. I went outside and lay on the ground, while she banked the fire and put her tools away. She was meticulously neat in her work. Her house was a shambles, though. The day—I noticed for the first time—was bright and cool. A lovely day, now almost over. I decided not to call Eddie. It was too much effort. Instead I went to bed.
The next day Nia made wire. I worked the bellows and learned a new phrase. “Pump evenly, you idiot.”
In the evening we sat in Nia’s house and drank the pungent liquid. We both got a little drunk. Nia began chanting to herself, slapping one hand against her thigh to keep time. Her eyes were half-shut. She looked dreamy.
I leaned against the wall and watched smoke rise from the fire. This was a change for the better, I decided. Nia was taciturn and short-tempered, but she wasn’t melancholy. Nahusai had spent a lot of time sitting and brooding, and Yohai had almost always been busy. I found that unrestful.
Nia stopped chanting. I looked at her. She was lying down. A minute later she began to snore. A very restful companion, I told myself.
Nothing much happened in the next ten days. I helped Nia in the smithy. At night I talked to Eddie.
“There’s no question about your language,” he said one evening. “It’s pidgin, which explains why it’s so easy to learn.
“The big continent has a trade language, too—a different one, in no way related to yours. Yvonne and Santha are learning it. Meiling is learning something else. A local language, horrifying in its complexity.”
“And Gregory?” I asked.
“Another local language, but less difficult. Oh, an interesting thing happened to Gregory…”
I waited expectantly. Eddie, I had learned, tended to save the really important information till the end of a conversation.
“His people found out he was male. They told him to leave. He asked why? The question was a stunner, apparently. They couldn’t believe he was asking it. But in the end they told him. In their society the men live alone, up in the high mountains. They take care of the flocks, and they never come to the houses where the women live. The idea is shameful. Gregory says, he couldn’t think of a polite way to ask about procreation.”
“Did they throw him out?”
“No. He told them he didn’t know how to stay alive alone in the mountains. They had a long argument, then decided to let him stay in one of the outbuildings—a barn of some kind. And there he remains.J’y suis, j’y reste, he says.”