The locals tilted their heads back so they looked up toward the sun. They must have had a trick for not looking right at it. Park didn’t know the trick. He kept on staring blearily upwards, dazzled and blinking, his eyes full of tears.
The Tawantiinsuujans held their hands up by their faces and loudly kissed the air. Somehow, again a beat slow, Park managed to do the same without toppling over into one of the people by him.
The priests on the platform began to sing a hymn. Still squatting, the squareful of worshipers joined in. Everybody — everybody but Park — knew the words. Some voices were good, others not. Taken all together, they were impressive, almost hypnotic, the way any massed singing becomes after a while.
The hymn was long. Park’s knees hurt too much to let him be hypnotized. Back in his New York days, he’d never thought much of baseball players as athletes, but now he started feeling no small respect for what catchers went through.
At last the hymn ended. People stood up. Another hymn started. When it was done, the Tawantiinsuujans squatted again. So, stifling a groan, did Allister Park. Yet another hymn began.
By the time the service was finally done, Park felt as though he’d caught a double-header. He also desperately needed to find a public jakes.
“Is that not a magnificent festival?” asked the Skrelling who’d inveigled him into going to the square of Kuusipata.
Well, maybe it hadn’t happened exactly like that, but at the moment Park’s memory was inclined to be selective.
“Most impressive,” he said, lying through his teeth.
“Raimii will go on for nine days in all,” the local told him, “each day’s worship being different from the last. Will you come to Kuusipata tomorrow, your foreign excellency?”
“If I can,” Park said, that seeming a more politic response than not on your life. After nine days of squatting, he was convinced he would walk like an arthritic chimp forevermore. Then something he had noticed but not thought about during the service sank home. “Nine days!” he exclaimed. “I saw no books for prayer among you. Do you remember all your songs and such?”
“Of course we do,” the Skrelling said proudly. “They are graven on our hearts. Only people whose faith is cold have to remind themselves of it. Books for prayer, indeed!” The very idea offended him.
Park was thoughtful as he filed toward the edge of the square. Reading was obviously easier and more trustworthy than memorizing, and therefore, to him anyway, obviously more desirable for keeping records straight. The Tawantiinsuujans, though, as he had already discovered in other contexts, did not think the same way he did.
Maybe that was what made him notice the goodwain parked near a wall fifty yards or so beyond the edge of the square. In New York, or even in New Belfast, he would not have given it a second glance: parking spaces were where you found them. In Kuuskoo, though, it surprised him. It impeded the flow of people coming out of Kuusipata, and that was unlike the orderly folk here.
The locals must have thought the same. A man climbed up onto the running board, reached out to unlatch the driver’s-side door so he could get in and move the truck out of the way.
The door wasn’t locked. Few were, in law-abiding Thwantiinsuuju. He yanked it open. The goodwain blew up.
Park felt the blast more than he heard it. The next thing he knew, he was on the ground. The cobbles were hard and bumpy. As if from very far away, he heard people shrieking.
He shook his head, trying to clear it, and scrambled to his feet. The carnage closer to the goodwain was appalling. He shivered as he saw how lucky he was. Only the bodies of the people in front of him had shielded him from the full force of the explosion.
Half a dozen men sprang up from behind the wall, which was of ancient megalithic stonework and hence undamaged by the blast. For a moment, Park thought they’d got up there to direct help to the writhing victims near them. Then he saw they all had air rifles. They raised them to their shoulders, started shooting into the crowd.
Allister Park had seen combat as a young man in his own world, and again during his brief tenure as Vinland’s assistant secretary of war. At the sound of the first sharp pop, he threw himself flat. He knocked over the person behind him. They fell together.
The men with guns shouted in unison as they fired. Park took a moment to notice, first that the shouts were not in Ketjwa, then that he understood them anyhow. “Allahu akbar!” the gunmen cried. “God is great! Allahu akbar!” Someone screamed, right in Park’s ear. Only then did he realize he was lying on a woman. Her fist pounded his shoulder. “Let me go!” she yelled. She tried to push him off her.
“No! Stay down!” By some miracle, he remembered to speak Ketjwa instead of English. As if to punctuate his words, a bullet felled a man standing not three paces away. The woman screamed again, and shuddered, but seemed to decide Park was protecting rather than attacking her. She quit struggling beneath him.
Around them, the noise of the crowd changed from horror to animal fury. People surged toward the men on the wall. Had the gunmen been carrying the automatic weapons Park’s world knew, they would have massacred their assailants. With air rifles that had to be pumped up after every shot, they slowed but could not stop the outraged mob.
“Allahu akbar!” Park lifted his head just in time to see the last gunman raise a defiant fist and jump down in back of the wall. The locals scrambled over it to give chase. One was shot, but more kept on. Others, men and women both, began to tend the scores of injured people near the twisted wreckage of the goodwain.
Park cautiously got to his feet. After a few seconds, he was convinced no more gun-toting fanatics were going to spring from nowhere. He stooped to help up the woman he had flattened when the shooting started.
“Thank you,” she said with some dignity, accepting his hand. “I am sorry I screamed at you. You saw the danger from those — madmen” — she shivered — “before almost anyone else.”
“I am glad you are not hurt,” Park said. For the first time, he had the leisure to take a look at her. She was, he guessed, only a few years younger than he; one or two white threads ran through the midnight mane that hung almost to her waist. She was attractive, in the long-faced, high-cheekboned local fashion. Her mantle and brightly striped skirt were of soft, fine wools.
The derby she’d been wearing was crushed beyond repair. She picked it up, made a wry face, threw it down again. Then she studied Allister Park with as much interest, or perhaps curiosity, as he showed her. “You are not one of us,” she said. “Why were you at the festival of Raimii?”
“To see what it was like,” he answered honestly. “I probably will never be in Kuuskoo again; while I am here, I want to learn and see as much as I can.”
She considered that, nodded. “Did the beauty of the service incline you toward the worship of the sun and Patjakamak?”
Despite wearing an ex-bishop’s body, Park wished people would stop asking him loaded religious questions. He temporized: “The services were very beautiful, ah-”
“My name is Kuurikwiljor,” she said.
Park gave his own or, rather, Ib Scoglund’s name, then said, “Kuurikwiljor-‘golden star.’ That’s very pretty. So, by the way, are you.” He played that game almost as automatically as he breathed; his attitude toward women was decidedly pragmatic. But just as genuine a sense of duty made him look around to make sure he was not needed here before he asked, “Where are you going now? May I walk there with you, so you will feel safe?”