"She took it in her hands," said Naba, the man from the deep village.
The three maz were at the wreck, in it.
Shui was kneeling near it, smashing something furiously, methodically, with a rock. The remains of a transmitter, Sutty saw. Stone Age revenge, her mind said coldly.
Her mind seemed to be very cold, detached from the rest of her, as if frostbitten.
She went closer and looked at the smashed helicopter. It had burst open in a strange way. The pilot was hanging in his seat straps, almost upside down. His face was mostly hidden by a blood-soaked woollen scarf. She saw his eyes, bits of jelly.
On the stony ground, between Odiedin and Siez, another man lay. His eyes were alive. He was staring up at her. After a while she recognised him.
Tobadan, the healer, was quickly, lightly running his hands over the man’s body and limbs, though surely he couldn’t tell much through the heavy clothing. He kept talking as if to keep the man awake. "Can you take off your helmet?" he asked. After a while the man tried to comply, fumbling with the fastening. Tobadan helped him. He continued gazing up at Sutty with a look of dull puzzlement. His face, always set and hard, was now slack.
"Is he hurt?"
"Yes," Tobadan said. "This knee. His back. Not broken, I think."
"You were lucky," Sutty’s cold mind said, speaking aloud.
The man stared, looked away, made a weak gesture, tried to sit up. Odiedin pressed down gently on his shoulders, saying, "Be quiet. Wait. Sutty, don’t let him get up. We need to get the other man out. People will be here soon."
Looking back into the cirque, toward the caves, she saw little figures hurrying to them across the snow.
She took Odiedin’s place, standing over the Monitor. He lay flat on the dirt with his arms crossed on his chest. He shuddered violently every now and then. She herself was shivering. Her teeth chattered. She wrapped her arms around her body.
"Your pilot is dead," she said.
He said nothing. He trembled.
Suddenly there were people around them. They worked with efficiency, strapping the man onto a makeshift stretcher and lifting it and setting off for the caves, all within a minute or two. Others carried the dead man. Some gathered around Odiedin and the young maz. There was a soft buzz of voices that did nothing but buzz in Sutty’s head, meaningless as the speech of flies.
She looked for Long, joined him, and walked with him across the cirque. It was farther than it had seemed to the mountain wall and the entrance to the caves. Overhead a pair of geyma soared in long, lazy spirals. The sun was already behind the top of the barrier wall. Silong’s vast shadow rose blue against Zubuam.
The caves were like nothing she had ever seen. There were many of them, hundreds, some tiny, no more than bubbles in the rock, some big as the doors of hangars. They made a lacework of circles interlocking and overlapping in the wall of rock, patterns, traceries. The edges of the entrances were fretted with clusters of lesser circles, silvery stone shining against black shadow, like soapsuds, like foam, like the edges of Mandelbrot figures.
Against one entrance a little fence had been set up. Sutty looked in as they passed, and the white face of a young minule looked back at her with dark, quiet eyes. There was a whole stable of the animals built back into the caves. She could smell the pungent, warm, grassy odor of them. The entrances to the caves had been widened and brought down to ground level where necessary, but they kept their circularity. The people she and Long were following entered one of these great round doors into the mountain. Inside, she looked back for a moment at the entrance and saw daylight as a blazing, perfect circle set in dead black.
SEVEN
It was not a city with banners and golden processions, a temple with drums and bells and the chanting of priests. It was very cold, very dark, very poor. It was silent.
Food, bedding, oil for lamps, stoves and heating devices, everything that made it possible for anyone to live at the Lap of Silong had to be brought up from the eastern hill country on the backs of minules or human beings, little by little, in tiny caravans that would attract no attention, during the few months when it was possible to reach the place at all. In the summer thirty or forty men and women stayed there, living in the caves. Some of them brought books, papers, texts of the Telling. They stayed to arrange and protect all the books already there, the thousands and thousands of volumes brought over the decades from all over the great continent. They stayed to read and study, to be with the books, to be in the caves full of being.
Sutty moved in her first days there through a dream of darkness, strangeness. The caves themselves were bewildering: endless bubble chambers interconnecting, interfacing, dark walls, floors, ceilings all curved into one another seamlessly, so disorienting that sometimes she felt she was floating weightless. Sounds echoed so they had no direction. There was never enough light.
Her group of pilgrims set up their tents in a great vaulted chamber and slept in them, huddled into them for warmth as they had done during their trek. In other caves were other little constellations of tents. One maz couple had taken a three-meter, almost perfectly spherical hollow and made a private nest of it. Cookstoves and tables were in a large, flat-floored cave that received daylight through a couple of high vents, and everybody met there at mealtimes. The cooks scrupulously shared out the food. Never quite enough, and the same few things over and over: thin tea, boiled bean meal, dry cheese, dried leaves of spinach-like yota, a taste of hot pickle. Winter food, though it was summer. Food for the roots, for endurance.
The maz and the students and guides staying there this summer were all from the north and east, the vast hill countries and plains of the continent’s center, Amareza, Doy, Kangnegne. These maz were city people, far more learned and sophisticated than those of the little hill city Sutty knew. Trained in a profound and still unbroken intellectual and bodily and spiritual discipline, heirs to a tradition vaster, even in its ruin and enforced secrecy, than she had ever conceived, they had an impersonality about them as well as great personal authority. They did not play the pundit (Uncle Hurree’s phrase), but even the mildest of them was surrounded by a kind of aura or field — Sutty hated such words yet had to use them — that kept one from informal approach. They were aloof, absorbed in the telling, the books, the treasures of the caves.
The morning after the newcomers’ arrival, the maz named Igneba and Ikak took them to and through what they called the Library. Numbers daubed in luminous paint over the openings corresponded to a chart of the caves that the maz showed them. By going always to a lower number, if you lost your way in the labyrinth — and it was quite easy to do so — you would always return to the outer caves. The man, Igneba Ikak, carried an electric torch, but like so much Akan manufacture it was unreliable or defective and kept failing. Ikak Igneba carried an oil lantern. From it once or twice she lighted lamps hanging on the walls, to illuminate the caves of being, the round rooms full of words, where the Telling lay hidden, in silence. Under rock, under snow.
Books, thousands of books, in leather and cloth and wooden and paper bindings, unbound manuscripts in carved and painted boxes and jewelled caskets, fragments of ancient writing blazing with gold leaf, scrolls in tubes and boxes or tied with tape, books on vellum, parchment, rag paper, pulp paper, handwritten, printed, books on the floors, in boxes, in small crates, on rickety low shelves made of scrap wood from the crates. In one big cave the volumes stood ranked on two shelves, at waist height and eye level, dug into the walls right around the circumference. Those shelves were the work of long ago, Ikak said, carved by maz living here when it was a small umyazu and that one room had been all its library. Those maz had had the time and means for such work. Now all they could do was lay plastic sheeting to keep the books from the dirt or bare rock, stack or arrange them as best they could, try to sort them to some degree, and keep them hidden, keep them safe. Protect them, guard them, and, when there was time, read them.