[Fic] "Ashes" part 8 -- original, NaNo 2010
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Ashes, part 8
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[She smiled. "Of course, we in the Clan of the Hawk have built on what the acolytes of the World-Mind discovered. Gydra's people have also learned. I am curious to know what you in Zerlon have done with your ancestors' legacy."]
Riam took a deep breath, counted to eight, and let go of his irritation. Morgalen was being deliberately provoking, and if he could see the humor when she skewered Tir, the least he could do was apply that same perspective when he was her target. And he had interrupted her, after all.
"For one thing, we've obviously kept Zerlon from dying," he said, and then wanted to hit himself. He didn't lose his temper -- that was Zalir's trick.
Tir, evidently listening in, kicked his ankle in unspoken warning.
But Morgalen's flicker-flash smile broke out on her mouth as well as in her eyes, as if she appreciated Riam's brief loss of composure. "A good first step, it's true," she said. "A single step makes for a very short journey, though."
"I guess you'd know," Riam said, thinking of the time it took to cross Zerlon from north to south, and of how very, very small his home was compared to the vast stretch of the earth. "How long were you traveling? And how did you and Gydra stand going out into the tainted lands over and over?"
"Those are understandable questions, but you are changing the subject," Morgalen said. "Tell me what you know of binding, and then -- after supper, as I promised -- I will tell the story of my quest, and how and why Gydra came to join me." She picked up her knife and spoon and resumed eating her dumplings and pie.
"She did ask first," Sular said, shooting Riam a smile over Morgalen's head. "It's only fair for you to answer first."
Maybe so, but Tir was kicking his ankle again, which probably meant she didn't want to him to give too much away. And come to think of giving things away, he wasn't supposed to tell Morgalen that Sular was his apprentice, was he? No wonder Tir was annoyed, even if she was still determinedly talking to Zalir.
Oh well, once the fire leapt the break, there was no sense trying to hold that particular line.
"I'm not the only binder at this table," Riam said. "Why don't you demonstrate to me how useful my lessons have been by telling Morgalen what I've taught you." He grinned back at Sular. "Don't worry -- I'll correct you if you forget anything."
Morgalen glanced from Riam to Sular, then back again. "Strange, to teach a grown person how to bind the world. We teach the patterns while the students are young; it is easier for children to learn new ways of seeing the world and their connection to it. Gydra's people also teach binders before they are fully grown. Why do you take the time to teach a woman rather than a girl?"
Riam blinked. "Teach children to be binders? But they're not old enough to choose the responsibility -- no one is trained until their eighteenth year, not in anything more than meditation to touch the soul of the world. We only train those who ask for the burden."
Sular nodded. "I was always quick to touch the world, but I wanted to be a farmer, not a binder. I'm training now because my children are grown and my husband dead. I'm used to looking after people, and I thought I might as well look after everyone, if I turned out to have the knack."
"Which you do," Riam said. "I don't think children could learn faster -- and anyway," he added to Morgalen, "children don't have enough life behind them to understand why binding is so important, and their bodies and minds aren't often stable enough to hold a binding without active attention. I know when I played around as a boy, I always lost my grip on my wards the minute I got distracted, let alone fell asleep."
Morgalen looked down at her half-finished meal, and pushed her plate away. "Maybe so, but children grow and they remember the skills they learn. If you train people from childhood, there is no need to search for the few who have a 'knack' for touching the World-Mind. Anyone can be taught if you begin early enough."
"Any thing can be taught if you start early enough," Sular said sharply. "That doesn't mean everything is good to teach. But enough of this. When I asked to train, the first thing Riam had me do was quiet my mind and touch the soul of the world. Then he asked me if I could take the sense of how-things-are and concentrate it, until it formed a little ball -- or a very loud, pure note, which is how I sense the root of a binding. It took me three weeks to manage that. Usually people get eight weeks to try, and if they can't take that first step, the apprenticeship ends."
"Three weeks is fast -- most people take six or seven to get that far," Riam said to Morgalen, in case she didn't realize how talented Sular was.
"You shaped a dome the first time Zudam asked you to just touch the world," Sular shot back. "You played with wards before you had any training. If my knack is a lamp, yours is a wildfire."
Morgalen looked at Riam, her eyebrow raised in skeptical challenge.
Riam waved his hand, accidentally dropping fried sunflower seeds on her left shoulder. "Sular's exaggerating. I figured out how to make wards by accident because Zalir and I were stupid as children -- we snuck out into the tainted lands without any saltwater to refresh our breath masks, we got lost, and the miasma nearly killed us before I had the crazy idea to try putting up a binding and waiting until the miasma drifted out and left us with clean air. We should have died, and it would have served us right for being that reckless."
It was an old story, and he had a lot of practice making it sound unimportant. "I held the ward until Zalir woke up, and once she wasn't dizzy from miasma-poisoning, she figured out how to get us home. We were punished, of course -- Tir wouldn't talk to us for weeks -- but after that Zalir decided to be a guard and I figured I would apprentice to our old binder as soon as I could." Riam shrugged. "So it's not that I have a special knack. I just really needed to learn how to make bindings, the same way the contemplatives really needed to learn two hundred years ago."
Morgalen made an indecipherable noise, something like a choked off laugh. "Nobody in all the world could manage a binding until the acolytes of Zerlon taught them, no matter how many were choked and smothered and poisoned to death before the people in Ulei discovered the trick with saltwater. You taught yourself. That sounds like a 'knack' to me."
"I knew it could be done," Riam pointed out. "It's not the same. And it's not an advance on what the contemplatives taught, which is what I thought you were interested in, not my childhood stupidity."
Morgalen made another indecipherable noise.
Sular's hand hovered in the air, as if she wanted to touch Morgalen's shoulder but was unsure if the contact would be welcome. "Maybe you could tell us about your people's advances, so we know the kind of thing you're looking for," she said. "Otherwise I'll be talking for hours about chords and discord, while Riam talks about temperature and shapes, and none of it will mean anything to you unless you're a binder yourself."
"Magicians can't be binders," Morgalen said, her husky voice gone cold.
"Oh. Well. Yes," Sular said.
"But you might have been a binder before," Riam added, trying to rescue his apprentice.
"I wasn't," said Morgalen. She pulled her plate back toward her and picked up her knife, stabbing a potato dumpling as if it had personally offended her. "My brother is. Or was."
She sliced the dumpling in half as Riam wondered how to respond to that.
"In Shani, we train binders from their sixth year onward. My brother was our father's heir, and he was skilled at his work," Morgalen said. She shrugged. "As for our advances, we still haven't found a way for two binders to hold the same ward, but if they are precise enough, they can hold boundaries so tight against each other that they form a contiguous stretch of clean and living territory. Furthermore, when bindings touch, the binders can use them to send messages faster than drum signals, flag signals, heliographs, or messenger birds. Binders can ride with armies and shape smaller wards inside the territory borders, to transmit orders from the general to the distant troops."
Morgalen sliced the dumpling again and pushed one of the quarters onto her spoon.
"That would, I suppose, be irrelevant here," she continued. "You don't have enough untainted land for a proper battle, and your only opponents would seem to be taint-twisted scum like the flesh-sacks who chased me and Gydra into your territory. Also, you would need to have more than two or three binders, which is unlikely to ever occur, given your lax training methods -- to be honest, I'm surprised you've kept Zerlon from dying, since it would be so easy for someone to kill all your binders in one strike." She looked pointedly from Riam to Sular to the flame in the ceiling lamp over her head, and then shrugged, as if such failings were only to be expected from a land so distant from her obviously superior home.
"You still have wars in the north?" Sular asked, her face tight with horror and distaste. "Even with the world so broken, people still prefer to kill each other rather than work together?"
"I was trained to be my brother's general," Morgalen said. "Before he left, we fought several battles on our father's behalf -- one to put down rebellion in Luntebarad, one to turn back an invasion from Gurleysa, and one to win control of a trade road between Sigores and Efesha, so our father could collect its tolls. We won them all." She chewed on the piece of dumpling with a blank expression.
Riam wanted to be sick.
Zalir and Tir had killed people, of course. He knew that. But they only fought in defense of Zerlon and the freeholds that pledged alliance in return for the protection of the patrols and a share in grain and vegetables grown in Zerlon's untainted soil. The idea of killing people because they wanted to choose a different ruler, or because one person wanted to control a road that should have been free to all, was wrong -- nearly as wrong as the feel of miasma and its taint. It was the sort of thing that taint-twisted free riders might try, not how settled people should behave.
"I'm sorry," he said. "No one should have to do anything like that, no matter who asks."
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1) Well, that conversation went in a completely different direction from what I expected! I was trying to get Riam and Sular to explain the mechanics of binding in more detail, but instead we get cultural differences between Shani and Zerlon, plus backstory on Morgalen and Riam. Oh, whatever -- that information needed to come out sooner or later, and this works as well as anything, I suppose.
2) About the saltwater thing: I realized at some point that in order to make the world-building backstory work, the miasma needed to be deadly relatively quickly, in order to depopulate the south... but that would make travel between protected areas next to impossible. Hence the idea of low-tech gas masks, or the equivalent thereof. They must be damp to keep working, so travelers have to carry not just drinking water but also saltwater to keep refreshing their facemasks so they won't, you know, die of a combination of oxygen deprivation and miasma-poisoning. My handwave is that a few people in a seacoast town used to use that trick when dealing with, I dunno, the stink of gutted fish or a sulfur-heavy hot springs or something, and someone tried it as a desperate remedy against the miasma that turned out to actually work.
3) slowmercury pointed out that Riam told Morgalen that Sular was a binder, even though Tir had previously told him not to do that. Internal continuity error for the lose! (This is what happens when I write without editing. *headdesk*) Anyway, I decided to make Riam's slip a character point and see what happens.
4) 1,825 words today, 11,150 total. (That means I'm over 5,500 words behind on aiming for 50,000 words, but still on track for my more realistic goal of 30,000, which I will take as a conditional win. *wry*)
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Ashes, part 8
---------------------------------------------
[She smiled. "Of course, we in the Clan of the Hawk have built on what the acolytes of the World-Mind discovered. Gydra's people have also learned. I am curious to know what you in Zerlon have done with your ancestors' legacy."]
Riam took a deep breath, counted to eight, and let go of his irritation. Morgalen was being deliberately provoking, and if he could see the humor when she skewered Tir, the least he could do was apply that same perspective when he was her target. And he had interrupted her, after all.
"For one thing, we've obviously kept Zerlon from dying," he said, and then wanted to hit himself. He didn't lose his temper -- that was Zalir's trick.
Tir, evidently listening in, kicked his ankle in unspoken warning.
But Morgalen's flicker-flash smile broke out on her mouth as well as in her eyes, as if she appreciated Riam's brief loss of composure. "A good first step, it's true," she said. "A single step makes for a very short journey, though."
"I guess you'd know," Riam said, thinking of the time it took to cross Zerlon from north to south, and of how very, very small his home was compared to the vast stretch of the earth. "How long were you traveling? And how did you and Gydra stand going out into the tainted lands over and over?"
"Those are understandable questions, but you are changing the subject," Morgalen said. "Tell me what you know of binding, and then -- after supper, as I promised -- I will tell the story of my quest, and how and why Gydra came to join me." She picked up her knife and spoon and resumed eating her dumplings and pie.
"She did ask first," Sular said, shooting Riam a smile over Morgalen's head. "It's only fair for you to answer first."
Maybe so, but Tir was kicking his ankle again, which probably meant she didn't want to him to give too much away. And come to think of giving things away, he wasn't supposed to tell Morgalen that Sular was his apprentice, was he? No wonder Tir was annoyed, even if she was still determinedly talking to Zalir.
Oh well, once the fire leapt the break, there was no sense trying to hold that particular line.
"I'm not the only binder at this table," Riam said. "Why don't you demonstrate to me how useful my lessons have been by telling Morgalen what I've taught you." He grinned back at Sular. "Don't worry -- I'll correct you if you forget anything."
Morgalen glanced from Riam to Sular, then back again. "Strange, to teach a grown person how to bind the world. We teach the patterns while the students are young; it is easier for children to learn new ways of seeing the world and their connection to it. Gydra's people also teach binders before they are fully grown. Why do you take the time to teach a woman rather than a girl?"
Riam blinked. "Teach children to be binders? But they're not old enough to choose the responsibility -- no one is trained until their eighteenth year, not in anything more than meditation to touch the soul of the world. We only train those who ask for the burden."
Sular nodded. "I was always quick to touch the world, but I wanted to be a farmer, not a binder. I'm training now because my children are grown and my husband dead. I'm used to looking after people, and I thought I might as well look after everyone, if I turned out to have the knack."
"Which you do," Riam said. "I don't think children could learn faster -- and anyway," he added to Morgalen, "children don't have enough life behind them to understand why binding is so important, and their bodies and minds aren't often stable enough to hold a binding without active attention. I know when I played around as a boy, I always lost my grip on my wards the minute I got distracted, let alone fell asleep."
Morgalen looked down at her half-finished meal, and pushed her plate away. "Maybe so, but children grow and they remember the skills they learn. If you train people from childhood, there is no need to search for the few who have a 'knack' for touching the World-Mind. Anyone can be taught if you begin early enough."
"Any thing can be taught if you start early enough," Sular said sharply. "That doesn't mean everything is good to teach. But enough of this. When I asked to train, the first thing Riam had me do was quiet my mind and touch the soul of the world. Then he asked me if I could take the sense of how-things-are and concentrate it, until it formed a little ball -- or a very loud, pure note, which is how I sense the root of a binding. It took me three weeks to manage that. Usually people get eight weeks to try, and if they can't take that first step, the apprenticeship ends."
"Three weeks is fast -- most people take six or seven to get that far," Riam said to Morgalen, in case she didn't realize how talented Sular was.
"You shaped a dome the first time Zudam asked you to just touch the world," Sular shot back. "You played with wards before you had any training. If my knack is a lamp, yours is a wildfire."
Morgalen looked at Riam, her eyebrow raised in skeptical challenge.
Riam waved his hand, accidentally dropping fried sunflower seeds on her left shoulder. "Sular's exaggerating. I figured out how to make wards by accident because Zalir and I were stupid as children -- we snuck out into the tainted lands without any saltwater to refresh our breath masks, we got lost, and the miasma nearly killed us before I had the crazy idea to try putting up a binding and waiting until the miasma drifted out and left us with clean air. We should have died, and it would have served us right for being that reckless."
It was an old story, and he had a lot of practice making it sound unimportant. "I held the ward until Zalir woke up, and once she wasn't dizzy from miasma-poisoning, she figured out how to get us home. We were punished, of course -- Tir wouldn't talk to us for weeks -- but after that Zalir decided to be a guard and I figured I would apprentice to our old binder as soon as I could." Riam shrugged. "So it's not that I have a special knack. I just really needed to learn how to make bindings, the same way the contemplatives really needed to learn two hundred years ago."
Morgalen made an indecipherable noise, something like a choked off laugh. "Nobody in all the world could manage a binding until the acolytes of Zerlon taught them, no matter how many were choked and smothered and poisoned to death before the people in Ulei discovered the trick with saltwater. You taught yourself. That sounds like a 'knack' to me."
"I knew it could be done," Riam pointed out. "It's not the same. And it's not an advance on what the contemplatives taught, which is what I thought you were interested in, not my childhood stupidity."
Morgalen made another indecipherable noise.
Sular's hand hovered in the air, as if she wanted to touch Morgalen's shoulder but was unsure if the contact would be welcome. "Maybe you could tell us about your people's advances, so we know the kind of thing you're looking for," she said. "Otherwise I'll be talking for hours about chords and discord, while Riam talks about temperature and shapes, and none of it will mean anything to you unless you're a binder yourself."
"Magicians can't be binders," Morgalen said, her husky voice gone cold.
"Oh. Well. Yes," Sular said.
"But you might have been a binder before," Riam added, trying to rescue his apprentice.
"I wasn't," said Morgalen. She pulled her plate back toward her and picked up her knife, stabbing a potato dumpling as if it had personally offended her. "My brother is. Or was."
She sliced the dumpling in half as Riam wondered how to respond to that.
"In Shani, we train binders from their sixth year onward. My brother was our father's heir, and he was skilled at his work," Morgalen said. She shrugged. "As for our advances, we still haven't found a way for two binders to hold the same ward, but if they are precise enough, they can hold boundaries so tight against each other that they form a contiguous stretch of clean and living territory. Furthermore, when bindings touch, the binders can use them to send messages faster than drum signals, flag signals, heliographs, or messenger birds. Binders can ride with armies and shape smaller wards inside the territory borders, to transmit orders from the general to the distant troops."
Morgalen sliced the dumpling again and pushed one of the quarters onto her spoon.
"That would, I suppose, be irrelevant here," she continued. "You don't have enough untainted land for a proper battle, and your only opponents would seem to be taint-twisted scum like the flesh-sacks who chased me and Gydra into your territory. Also, you would need to have more than two or three binders, which is unlikely to ever occur, given your lax training methods -- to be honest, I'm surprised you've kept Zerlon from dying, since it would be so easy for someone to kill all your binders in one strike." She looked pointedly from Riam to Sular to the flame in the ceiling lamp over her head, and then shrugged, as if such failings were only to be expected from a land so distant from her obviously superior home.
"You still have wars in the north?" Sular asked, her face tight with horror and distaste. "Even with the world so broken, people still prefer to kill each other rather than work together?"
"I was trained to be my brother's general," Morgalen said. "Before he left, we fought several battles on our father's behalf -- one to put down rebellion in Luntebarad, one to turn back an invasion from Gurleysa, and one to win control of a trade road between Sigores and Efesha, so our father could collect its tolls. We won them all." She chewed on the piece of dumpling with a blank expression.
Riam wanted to be sick.
Zalir and Tir had killed people, of course. He knew that. But they only fought in defense of Zerlon and the freeholds that pledged alliance in return for the protection of the patrols and a share in grain and vegetables grown in Zerlon's untainted soil. The idea of killing people because they wanted to choose a different ruler, or because one person wanted to control a road that should have been free to all, was wrong -- nearly as wrong as the feel of miasma and its taint. It was the sort of thing that taint-twisted free riders might try, not how settled people should behave.
"I'm sorry," he said. "No one should have to do anything like that, no matter who asks."
---------------
---------------
---------------
1) Well, that conversation went in a completely different direction from what I expected! I was trying to get Riam and Sular to explain the mechanics of binding in more detail, but instead we get cultural differences between Shani and Zerlon, plus backstory on Morgalen and Riam. Oh, whatever -- that information needed to come out sooner or later, and this works as well as anything, I suppose.
2) About the saltwater thing: I realized at some point that in order to make the world-building backstory work, the miasma needed to be deadly relatively quickly, in order to depopulate the south... but that would make travel between protected areas next to impossible. Hence the idea of low-tech gas masks, or the equivalent thereof. They must be damp to keep working, so travelers have to carry not just drinking water but also saltwater to keep refreshing their facemasks so they won't, you know, die of a combination of oxygen deprivation and miasma-poisoning. My handwave is that a few people in a seacoast town used to use that trick when dealing with, I dunno, the stink of gutted fish or a sulfur-heavy hot springs or something, and someone tried it as a desperate remedy against the miasma that turned out to actually work.
3) slowmercury pointed out that Riam told Morgalen that Sular was a binder, even though Tir had previously told him not to do that. Internal continuity error for the lose! (This is what happens when I write without editing. *headdesk*) Anyway, I decided to make Riam's slip a character point and see what happens.
4) 1,825 words today, 11,150 total. (That means I'm over 5,500 words behind on aiming for 50,000 words, but still on track for my more realistic goal of 30,000, which I will take as a conditional win. *wry*)
You can also read this entry on Dreamwidth, where there are currently (
comments)