01. Midnight At the Well of Souls (18 page)

"Some sign of injury or shock," he responded, almost in a clinical tone. "Here, girl, stick out your tongue. No, I mean it. Stick it out."

She did, feeling somewhat foolish, and he examined it. It was a big tongue, flat and broad, and a gray-pink in color.

"All right, you can stick it back in now," he told her. "No coating, either. If you'd have had some kind of shock or disease, it'd show."

"Maybe she's been witched, Jol," the spotted gray centaur suggested, and drew back a little.

"Maybe," he conceded, "but, if so, it's nothin' to concern us."

"What d'you think we oughta do?" his girlfriend asked.

Jol turned and for the first time Julee saw he had some kind of saddlebag strapped around his waist.

"First we take our shower," he answered, removing an irregular bar of what must have been soap, some cloths, and towels from the bag, then unstrapping it and letting it fall to the ground. "Then we'll take our mystery girl here to the village and let somebody smarter than we are take over."

And they proceeded to do just that. After some more hesitation, she joined them, following their actions and sharing a towel.

"You don't have to get too dry," the girl, whose name was Dal, told her. "You'll air-dry pretty good."

Together the three of them set off back down the trail.

As they left the forest the village and lands beyond came into view.

It was a beautiful land, she thought. The stream flowed out of majestic, snow-capped mountains which spread out on both sides to reveal a rich valley and gently rolling hills.

The village—a collection of rough but sturdy log buildings by the side of a blue-green lake—bustled with activity. The fields were properly plowed and planted, and she saw a few centaurs checking and tending between stalks of unknown grain.

The whole place didn't seem as if it could support, or had, more than a few hundred people, she thought and commented on that to her companions.

Jol laughed. "That proves you must be from down-lake," he said. "Some pretty big communities down there. Actually, there's close to a thousand in the valley, here, but we're spread out all over the landscape. Only fifty or sixty live in town all the time."

The main street was broad and maintained much like the trails, of which she had seen quite a few, a thick covering of sawdust making the paving.

Most of the buildings had an open side facing the street. The largest building was the first one they reached. It contained a huge forge on which several male and female centaurs worked hot metal. She saw with curiosity one woman lift a hind leg while a brawny male, wearing a protective bib, hammered something on her foot, apparently painlessly.

Other buildings proved to be stores selling farm implements, seed, and the like. There was even a barbershop and a bar, closed at the moment but unmistakable in its huge kegs and large steins.

"Is it always this warm and humid here?" she asked Jol.

He chuckled again in that friendly way he had about him. "No, this is a four-season hex," he explained enigmatically. "Then we all get out our
gammot
fur coats and hats and gloves and romp in the cold snow."

A
gammot
, she discovered, was one of the large rodents she had spied down by the stream.

"It must be a huge coat," she remarked, and Dal and Jol both laughed.

"You
really
do have amnesia!" Dal responded. "The hair on our bodies and a nice, thick layer of fat put on in summer and fall are pretty good insulators. Only our hairless parts need protection."

"You can see the fireplaces and chimneys," Jol pointed out. "In the fall the fronts are put back on and they become warm as today inside."

Julee started to ask what happened when it rained, but she saw that the roofs and ledges were angled and the buildings so placed that it would take a really terrible storm to get much rain inside.

"It looks as if anyone dishonest could steal anything he wanted here," Julee commented.

They both stopped and looked at her strangely. "That just isn't done here—not by any Dillian," he huffed.

His reaction startled her, and she apologized. "I—I'm sorry. I don't know why I think like that."

"We do get some alien traders from other hexes in once in a while and they've tried taking stuff," Dal put in to defuse the issue. "Won't do 'em no good here, though. Only way in is by the lake—forty kilometers, almost as deep as it is long. Nobody can beat us in the woods, and anybody who wants to climb six kilometers of mountain at steep grade and below zero temperatures would lose more than he could take."

They reached a small building about two-thirds of the way down the thirty or so buildings of the town's lone street. A wooden sign hung on a post, a hexagonal symbol of two small trees flanking a huge one, burned in with some sort of tool. Inside stood an elderly centaur with long, white hair and unkempt beard reaching down below his nipples. He had once been coal black, she realized, but now the body hair was flecked with silvery white.

He would look very officious standing there at his cluttered desk, she thought, amused, if he wasn't sound asleep and snoring loudly.

"That's Yomax," Jol told her. "The closest thing we've got to a government in the village. He's sort of the mayor, postmaster, chief forester, and game warden here. He always opens up at seven o'clock like the duty book says, but since the boat doesn't get in until eleven-thirty, he usually goes back to sleep until just before then." He yelled, "Hey! Yomax! Wake up! Official business!"

The old man stirred, then wiped his eyes and stretched, not only his arms but also his entire long body.

"Hmph! Whazzit?" he snorted. "Some damned brat's always foolin' with me," he muttered, then turned to see who stood there.

His eyes fixed on Wu Julee, and he suddenly came fully awake.

"Well! Hello!" he greeted in a friendly but puzzled tone. "I don't remember seein' you around before."

"She's lost her memory, Yomax," Jol explained. "We found her down by Three Falls."

"She don't know nothin' about nothin'," Dal put in. "Didn't even know 'bout winter and coats and all."

The old man frowned, and came up to her. Ignoring Jol's protests that he had done it already, Yomax proceeded to go through the same examination Julee had had earlier—with similar negative results.

Yomax scratched his beard and thought. "And you don't remember
nothin'?"
he asked for the fifth or sixth time, and for at least that many times she answered, "No."

"Mighty strange," he said. Then, suddenly, he brightened. "Lift your right foreleg," he instructed. She did, and he grasped the hoof firmly and turned it up.

"I think she's been witched," Dal maintained.

"Com'mere and lookit this," Yomax said softly. The other two crowded in to see.

"She ain't got no shoes!" Dal exclaimed.

"Not only that," the old one pointed out, "there's no sign that she ever had any."

"Don't prove nothin'," Dal persisted. "I know lots'a folks what don't wear shoes, particularly up-valley."

"That's true," admitted Yomax, dropping the leg and straightening up, for which Julee was thankful. She felt circulation start to return. "But," the old centaur continued, "that's a virgin hoof. No deep stains, no imbedded stones, nothing. Hers are like a newborn's."

"Aw, that ain't possible," Jol said scornfully.

"I told ya she was witched," Dal insisted.

"You two get along and do your chores or whatever," Yomax told them, waving them away with his hands. "I think I know at least part of what this is about."

They left reluctantly and then started to return. Yomax had to bellow at them several times.

"Now, then, young lady," he began, satisfied of some privacy at last, "let me throw some names at you. Let's see if any of 'em strike a bell."

"Go ahead," she urged him, intrigued.

"Nathun Brazzle," he began, trying to make do with the strange names on a paper he had fished from a crowded drawer in his desk. "Vardya Dipla Twelve Sixty-one. Dayton Hain. Wo Jolie. Anythin'?"

She shook her head slowly from side to side. "I've never heard any of those names before," she told him. "At least—I don't think so."

"Hmmm . . ." the old man mused. "I'm sure I'm right. Only possible explanation. Well, tell you what. Got one test when the boat comes in. Old Entry from the same neck of the woods as these folks—ten, fifteen years ago. He pilots the ferry now, since old Gletin refused to see how old he was and went overboard in a storm 'couple years back," Yomax told her. "He'll still remember the old language. I'll git him to spout some of that alien gibberish at ya, and we'll see if ya understand it."

They passed the time talking until the ferry arrived, the old man telling about his land and people with pride and affection. During the course of his rambling but entertaining memoir/travelogue, which she was sure was almost half-true, a great many facts emerged. She learned about the Well World, and what the hexes were. She learned about Zone and gates, and the strange creatures that wandered around. She found that, although the Dillians lived to be well over a hundred Well World years on the average, the population was relatively small. Females went into heat only every other year, then only for a short period, and invariably bore but a single young—which had about an even chance of surviving its first year.

If you made it through puberty, about a twenty percent chance, then you would live a long life—because you would already be immune to most of what would kill you.

The various colors—Yomax said there were hundreds of combinations—of the people didn't seem to meld with interbreeding, she was told, since all color genes were recessives.

"Rank comes with age," Yomax told her. "When you get too old to plow, or build, or chop and haul wood, they put you in charge of things. Since nobody likes to admit they're old when the job's so little—you saw how much respect I got from the young ones—I wound up bein' about everything the village needs."

The mother was the ultimate authority in child-rearing, he explained, but the family group shared moral responsibility. Since customs like marriage and inheritances were unknown—everything was simplistically communal—people formed family groups with other people they liked, without much regard to sex. The groups were mostly traditional now, but occasionally new ones of three to six would be formed by the young after puberty.

The entire hex was a collection of small towns and villages, she learned, because of the low birthrate and also because of innate limits on technology here. Anything more ambitious than the most basic steam engine just wouldn't work in Dillia.

That kept things extremely simple and pastoral, but also stable, peaceful, and uncluttered.

"In some hexes you can't even tell what sort of place it once was," Yomax told her. "All them machines and smelly stuff, everybody livin' in air-conditioned bubbles. Then they want to come
here
to get back to nature! They do some tourist business in other parts of the country, but this place is so isolated nobody's discovered it yet. And, when they do, they'll find us damned hostile, I can tell you!"

With that impassioned statement, there came the long, deep sound of a steam whistle, its call echoing across the mountains.

Yomax grabbed a simple cloth sack tied with twine and invited her down to the lakefront about 150 meters from town. She saw a simple wooden wharf with several huge posts, nothing more. A few townspeople waited just off the dock, apparently having business downlake or awaiting passengers.

Coming up on the wharf was the strangest craft she had ever seen. A giant oval raft, it looked like, with another raft built on top of it and supported by solid log cross-bracing. In the middle was a single, huge, black boiler, with a stack going up through the second tier and several meters beyond, belching white smoke.

A single centaur, black and white striped all over, a crazy-looking broad-brimmed hat on his head, stood at a large wheel, which was flanked by two levers. The levers went down through to the boiler level and seemed to do nothing but signal a brown centaur-engineer to turn some control or other on the boiler. The boiler was attached by what looked more like thick rope than chain to a small, wooden paddle wheel in the back.

About twenty varicolored Dillians stood on the first deck, some between oaken trunks full of unguessable cargo. Under the cross-bracing there seemed to be a counter and some kegs and steins. A large bale of grain flanked it.

Wu Julee could guess that this was the snack bar. She had already had a brunch with Yomax and discovered that the centaurs were herbivores who occasionally cooked various dishes but mostly ate raw grains and grasses grown in their fields. Tasted good, too, she had found.

Ropes from wooden posts on the side of the primitive steamer were tossed to a couple of villagers on the dock who tied the boat off. Satisfied, the captain went to the back and came down an almost disguised grooved ramp to the first deck.

Yomax tossed the mail to a crewman who idly threw it toward the center of the boat. The captain picked up a similar sack and jumped off to the dock, clasping hands with Yomax and then handing the old official the sack.

Yomax introduced the steamer captain to Wu Julee.

"This here's Klamath," the old man told her. "Not a proper name for a good Dillian, but he was born with it."

"Please to meet you, Lady um . . . ?" The captain's expression prompted a lead.

"She don't know her name, Klammy," Yomax explained. "Just kinda showed up all blanked out early this mornin'. I think she's an Entry, and thought maybe you could help." Quickly he explained his language idea to the captain.

"Harder than you think," the captain replied thoughtfully. "It's true that I think in the old tongue, but everything's instantly and automatically translated in and out. It'd be easier if I could write something for her."

Julee shook her head sadly. "I am certain that I never learned to read. I just know it."

"Hmmm. . . . Well, Yomax, you're the control," Klamath said. "It's going to take a lot of concentration to get out some old word stuff through the translation process, and I'm not really going to know if I'm successful or not. It all sounds the same to me. If she understands it and you don't, then we'll have it made."