Glory Season (63 page)

It seemed to last far longer than her own laborious ascent. Maia’s abused muscles quivered worse than ever by the time his huffing gasps came near. Somehow, drawing on reserves, she kept tension in the rope until Brod finally surged over the ledge in one gasping heave, landing halfway on top of her. In exhaustion they lay that way for some time, heartbeats pounding chest to chest, each breathing the other’s ragged exhalations, each tasting a salty patch of the other’s skin.

We must stop meeting like this
, thought a distant, wry part of her.
Still, it’s more than most women get out of a man, this time of year.
To Maia’s surprise, his weight felt pleasant, in a strange, unanticipated way.

“Uh … sorry,” Brod said as he rolled off. “And thanks for saving my life.”

“It’s no more’n you did for us on the ketch, this morning,”
she replied, covering embarrassment. “Though I guess by now that was yesterday.”

“Yesterday.” He paused to ponder, then abruptly shouted. “Hey, look at that!”

Maia sat up, puzzled. Since she couldn’t see Brod well enough to make out where he pointed, she began scanning on her own, and eventually found something amid the awful gloom. Opposite their ledge, about forty degrees higher toward the zenith, she made out a delicate glitter of—she counted—five beautiful stars.

I believe it’s part of the Hearth.
…

Abruptly reminded, Maia grasped along her left arm and sighed in relief when she found her forgotten sextant, still encased within the scratched but intact leather cover.
It’s probably ruined. But it’s mine. The only thing that’s mine.

“So, Madam Navigator,” Brod asked. “Can you tell from those stars just where we are?”

Maia shook her head seriously. “Too little data. Besides, we know where we are. If there were more to see, I might be able to tell the time—”

She cut short, tensing as Brod laughed aloud. Then, noting only affection in his gentle teasing, Maia relaxed. She laughed, too, letting go as the fact sank in that they would live awhile longer, to struggle on. The reavers hadn’t won, not yet. And Renna was nearby.

Brod lay back alongside her, sharing warmth as they watched their sole, tiny window on the universe. Stratos turned slowly beneath them, and there passed a parade of brief, stellar performances. Together, they feasted on a show neither had expected ever to see again.

By day, the cave seemed less mysterious … and far more so.

Less, because dawn’s filtered light revealed outlines that had seemed at once both limitless and stifling in pitch
darkness. A mountain of rubble blocked what had been a generous cave entrance. Sunlight and ocean tides streamed through narrow, jagged gaps in the avalanche, beyond which the two escapees made out a new, foamy reef, created by the recent barrage.

There would be no escape the way they’d arrived; that much was clear.

Increased
mystery came associated with both hope and frustration. Soon after awakening to the new day, Maia got up and followed the ledge to its far end, where it joined a set of stairs chiseled deep into the cave wall. At the top there was another landing, cut even deeper, which terminated in a massive door, over three meters wide.

At least she thought it was a door. It seemed the place for one. A door was desperately called for at this point.

Only it looked more like a piece of sculpture. Several score hexagonal plates lay upon a broad, smooth, vertical surface made of some obdurate, blood-colored, impervious alloy.

Impervious because others had apparently tried to break through, in the past. Wherever a crack or chink hinted at separable parts, Maia noticed burnished edges where someone must have tried prying away, probably with wedges or crowbars, and succeeded only in rubbing off a layer of tarnish. Soot-stained areas told where fire had been used, presumably in efforts to weaken the metal, and striated patches showed signs of acid-etching—all to no avail.

“Here are your pants,” Brod said, coming up from behind, startling Maia from her intense inspection. “I thought you might want them,” he added nonchalantly.

“Oh, thanks,” she replied, taking the trousers and moving aside to slip them on. They were ripped in too many places to count, and hardly seemed worth the effort. Still, she felt abashed without them, last night’s fatigued intimacy notwithstanding.

While struggling into the pants, gingerly avoiding her worst cuts and contusions, Maia noticed that her arms were pale once more, as well as what hair she could pull into view. Without a mirror, she couldn’t be sure, but recent multiple dunkings appeared to have washed out the effects of Leie’s makeshift dye job.

Meanwhile Brod perused the array of six-sided plates, some clustered and touching, some standing apart, many of them embellished with symbols of animals, objects, or geometric forms. The youth seemed oblivious to his physical condition, though under his torn shirt Maia saw too many scratches and abrasions to count. He moved with a limp, favoring the heels. Looking back the way he had come, she saw specks of blood on the floor, left by wounds on his feet. Maia deliberately avoided cataloging her own injuries, though no doubt she looked much the same.

It had been quite a night, spent listening to tides surge ever closer, wondering if the assumed “high-water mark” meant anything when three moons lay in the same part of the sky. Surges of air pressure had made them yawn repeatedly to relieve their abused ears. The shelf grew slippery from spray. For what felt like hours, the two summerlings held onto each other as waves had lapped near, hunting them with fingers of spume.…

“I can’t even figure what the thing’s
made
of,” Brod said, peering closely at the mysterious barrier. “You have any idea what it’s for?”

“Yeah, I think. I’m afraid so.”

He looked at her as she returned. Maia spread her arms before the metal wall. “I’ve seen this kind of thing before,” she told her companion. “It’s a puzzle.”

“A
puzzle
?”

“Mm. One apparently so hard that lots of folks tried cheating, and failed.”

“A puzzle,” he repeated, mulling the concept.

“One with a big prize for solving it, I imagine.”

“Oh yeah?” Brod’s eyes lit. “What prize do you think?”

Maia stepped back a couple of paces, tilting her head to look at the elaborate portal from another angle. “I couldn’t say what the others were after,” she said in a low voice. “But
our
goal’s simple. We must solve this … or die.”

There had been another riddle wall once, a long time ago. That one hadn’t been made of strange metal, but ordinary stone and wood and iron, yet it had been hard enough to stymie a pair of bright four-year-olds filled with curiosity and determination. What were the Lamai mothers hiding behind the carven cellar wall, inset with chiseled stars and twining snakes? Unlike the puzzle now before her, that one had been no massive work of unparalleled craftsmanship, but the principle was dearly the same. A combination lock. One in which the number of possible arrangements of objects far exceeded any chance of random guessing. One whose correct answer must remain unforgettable, intuitively obvious to the initiated, and forever obscure to outsiders.

Shared context.
That was the key. Simple memory proved unreliable over generations. But one thing you could count on. If you established a clan—your distant great-great-granddaughters would think a lot like you, with similar upbringing and near-identical brains. What had been forgotten, they would recover by re-creating your thought processes.

That insight had opened the way, after Maia failed in her first attempts in the Lamatia Hold wine cellar, and Leie’s efforts with a small hydraulic jack threatened to break the mechanism, rather than persuade it. Even Leie had agreed that curiosity wasn’t worth the kind of punishment
that
would bring on. So Maia had reconsidered the
problem, this time trying to think like a Lamai. It wasn’t as easy as it sounded.

She had grown up surrounded by Lamai mothers, aunts, half sisters, knowing the patterns they exhibited at each phase of life. The cautious enthusiasm of late three-year-olds, for instance, which quickly took cover behind a cynical mask by the time each towheaded girl turned four. A romantic outburst in adolescence, followed by withdrawal and withering contempt for anything or anyone non-Lamai—a disdain that intensified, the more worthy any outsider seemed. And finally, in late middle-age, a mellowing, a relaxation of the armor, just enough for the ruling age-group to make alliances and deal successfully with the outer world. The first young Lamai var, the founder, must have been lucky, or very clever, to reach that age of tact all by herself. From then on, matters grew easier as each generation fine-tuned the art of being that continuous single entity, Lamatia.

Pondering the problem, Maia had realized she knew nothing of how individual Lamais felt, deep within. Mentally squinting, she pictured a Lamai sister looking in the mirror and using words like
integrity … honor … dignity.
They did not see themselves as mean, capricious, or spiteful. Rather, they viewed others as inherently unreliable, dangerous.

Fear.
That was the key! Maia had not been able to speak after that flash of intuition, on realizing what drove her mother clan.

It was more than fear. A type of dread that no amount of wealth or security could wipe out, because it was so woven into the personality matrix of the type. The genetic luck of the draw, reinforced by an upbringing in which self perpetually reinforced self, compounding and augmenting over and over again.

It was no crippling terror, or else the offshoots of that one var could never have turned themselves into a nation.
Rather, Lamatia rationalized it,
used
it as a motivator, as a driving force. Lamais weren’t happy people. But they were successful. They even raised more than their share of successful summer progeny.

There are worse
, Maia recalled thinking on the day she had had that insight, while turning a crank to lower the dumbwaiter into that crypt below the kitchens.
Who am I to judge what works?

Her mind afroth with possibilities, Maia had approached the wall with new concepts in mind.
Lamais aren’t logical, though they pretend to be. I’ve been trying to solve the puzzle rationally, as a series of orderly symbols, but I’ll bet it’s a sequence based on emotion!

That day (it felt like ages ago), she had lifted her lantern to scan familiar patterns of stone figures. Stars and snakes, dragons and upturned bowls. The symbol for Man. The symbol for Woman. The emblem of Death.

Picture yourself standing here with an errand to perform
, Maia thought.
You’re a confident, busy, older Lamai. High-class daughter of a noble clan. Proud, dignified, impatient.

Now add one more ingredient, underneath it all. A hidden layer of jibbering terror.…

One long year later, and a quarter of the way around the globe, Maia tried the same exercise, attempting to put herself in the shoes of
another
type of person. The kind who might have left a complex jigsaw of hexagonal plates upon a metal wall. An enigma standing between two desperate survivors and their only hope of escaping a death trap.

“This place is old,” she told Brod in a soft voice.

“Old?” He laughed. “It was a different world! You’ve seen the ruins. This whole archipelago was filled with sanctuaries, bigger than any known today. It must’ve been the focus, the very center of the Great Defense. It might even have been the one place in all of Stratos history
where men had any real say in goings on … till those King fanatics got big heads and ruined it all.”

Maia nodded. “A whole region, run by men.”

“Partly. Until the banishment. I know, it’s hard to imagine. I guess that’s how the Church and Council were able to suppress even the memory.”

Brod was making sense. Even with the evidence all around her, Maia had trouble with the concept. Oh, there was no denying that males could be quite intelligent, but planning further than a single human lifespan was supposedly beyond even their brightest leaders. Yet, here in front of her lay a counterexample.

“In that case, this puzzle was designed to be solved by men, perhaps with the specific purpose of keeping women out.”

Brod rubbed his jaw. “Maybe so. Anyway, standing around staring won’t get us much. Let’s see what happens if I push one of these hexagon slabs.”

Maia had already stroked the metal surface, which was curiously cool and smooth to the touch, but she hadn’t yet tried moving anything, preferring to evaluate first. She almost spoke up, then stopped.
Differences in personality … one providing what the other lacks. It’s a weakness in the clan system, where the same type just amplifies itself.
Maia no longer felt a heretical thrill, pondering thoughts critical of Lysos, Mother of All.

Brod tried pushing one hexagonal plate with a circle design etched upon it, standing by itself on an open patch of metal wall. Direct pressure achieved nothing, but a shear force,
along
the plane of the wall, caused movement! The piece seemed to glide as if being slid edgewise through an incredibly viscous fluid. When Brod let go, Maia expected it to stop, but it kept going in the same direction for several more seconds before slowing and finally coming to rest. Then, as she watched in surprise, the hexagon began sliding
backward
, in the exact opposite direction,
retracing its path unhurriedly until at last settling precisely where Brod had first found it.

“Huh!” the young man commented. “Hard to imagine accomplishing a lot
that
way.” He experimented with more plates, and found that about a third of them would move, but only directly along one of six directions perpendicular to the hexagonal plate-edges. There was no sign of any sort of rail system holding the slabs in track, so the queer behavior must be due to some mechanism behind the plane of the wall itself, utilizing forces beyond anything Maia had been taught as physics.

It’s
not magic
, she told herself while Brod pushed away, trying variations. Maia experienced a shiver, and knew that it wasn’t due to awe or superstitious fear, but something akin to
jealousy.
The gliding interplay of matter and motion was achingly beautiful to behold. She hungered to grasp how and why it worked.