The Sparrow (37 page)

T
HE PRECARIOUSNESS OF
their existence on this planet was once again in the forefront of their minds and D.W.'s probable recovery did not remove the sense of dancing on a high wire. By the time Emilio came out to the terrace, rubbing his face muzzily in the midmorning light, George and Sofia were trying to decide if they could rig some kind of rope ladder so somebody could jump off the Ultra-Light as she flew over the clearing at the slowest possible air speed, and then could clear the brush before she attempted to land. Anne was providing graphic descriptions of the sort of really interesting compound fractures that were likely to result from this plan while Marc argued that he might be able to tell from the air whether the growth that had undoubtedly begun to fill in the runway was woody or soft. Emilio, stupefied, stared at them for a few moments before turning away and going back to bed after an interlude at the river.

He slept another couple of hours and when he came back out to the terrace, even D.W. was up, pale and rumpled but feeling a little better and making jokes about Runa's Revenge. Jimmy was back from wherever he'd been, and it appeared that at least one problem was about to resolve itself. That morning, Jimmy had learned that the villagers were about to leave for some kind of harvest.

"
Pik
root," Emilio said, yawning. "I heard about that last night."

"They want to know if we're coming," Jimmy told them.

"Do they want us to?" George asked.

"I don't think so. One of them said it was a long walk and asked me if I was going to carry all of you," Jimmy said. "It was obviously a big joke. Lots of tail twitching and huffing. I don't think they'd mind if we stay home." In fact, it was his impression that the Runa would be just as happy to find out that the foreigners weren't coming. The troop moved at the pace of the slowest member, which had often been Anne or Sofia. No one complained, but it was obvious when they got where they were going that some of the flowers had passed their peak.

"If they all leave, we won't have to explain about the plane," Emilio said, sitting down. The sky was hazy and it felt like it was going to be very hot. Sofia handed him a cup of coffee. Askama spotted him from two terraces away and scampered over, full of questions about D.W., whom she was too shy to address directly, and why had Meelo slept so late and was everyone coming to dig
pik
root?

"
Sipaj
, Askama," Emilio said. "Dee was very sick. Someone thinks we will stay here with him while he rests." The child looked crestfallen, ears at half-mast and tail drooping, but undaunted, she devoted the next half hour to cajolery, trying to talk them into coming. When it became plain that this wouldn't work, she declared herself "
porai
" and threatened to get sick like Dee because her heart was sad. Anne saw an opportunity to start working out what all this "heart sickness" and "
porai
" stuff was about and took Askama off to another terrace.

"Okay. Listen up," D.W. said when Askama and Anne were out of earshot. He was still pretty shaky, but it was important to reestablish command. "Plan A: As soon as the coast is clear, George puts the Ultra-Light back together and Mendes here takes Robichaux in for a look-see. We rely on Marc's fear of untimely death to balance Mendes's overconfidence as a pilot. If he thinks they can land okay, she gives it a shot. Their reward for not crashin' is they get to clean up the runway. If Marc decides it's crazy to land, you turn back, Mendes. No arguments."

"And then what?" Sofia asked.

"Then we'll try Plan B."

"Which is?"

"I ain't thought that one up yet. Shee-it," said Dalton Wesley Yarbrough, Father Superior of the Jesuit mission to the village of Kashan on Rakhat, amid cries of derision. "Get off my back! Hell, I'm a sick man."

R
UNA DISCUSSIONS TENDED
to drag on for days but once a decision was made, the village mobilized with impressive efficiency. George and Sofia hardly waited until the last tail had disappeared before setting out in the opposite direction for the Ultra-Light cache. The little plane was reassembled within the hour, and Sofia took it up for a quick test run. Jimmy, linked to systems aboard the
Stella Maris
, established that the weather was okay on both sides of the mountain range. There was about seven hours of useful light left.

With unsettling dispatch, Marc and Sofia climbed aboard, strapped in and made ready to leave, the others watching as Yarbrough leaned into the little cockpit, hands moving through the air, miming emergency maneuvers. When Sofia started the motor, D.W. stepped back and hollered with specious sternness, "Don't crash, y'hear? That's an order. We only got one damn Ultra-Light. Come back safe!"

Sofia laughed and shouted, "Be here safe when we get back!" And then they were gone, the little plane rising quickly into the sky, wings tipping twice in farewell.

"I hate this," Anne said, when they couldn't hear the motor any longer.

"You are a worrywart," George said, but he put his arms around Anne from behind and kissed the top of her head.

Jimmy said nothing but he wished now that he'd had George take a look at the weather front coming in from the southwest before he okayed the flight.

"I think they will be fine," Emilio said. And D.W. added, "She's a damn good pilot."

"All the same," Anne said stubbornly. "I hate it all the same."

S
EVEN DAYS' JOURNEY
north of them, in his wharfside compound overlooking the high seawall that bordered his property, Supaari VaGayjur began that day with a similar sense of the precariousness of his existence. He was about to risk not life and limb but status and dignity. If he failed, it would put an end to dreams he hardly dared acknowledge. The stakes were very high, in that sense.

He broke his fast with a handsome meal, gorging carefully: enough so that he would not need to consider meat again that day but not so much as to slow his thoughts. He spent the morning attending to business with the single-minded intensity of a first-born military man and the plodding thoroughness of a second-born bureaucrat. The only time his concentration broke was when he passed through the courtyard on his way to a storage building. He could not keep himself from glancing upward toward Galatna Palace, set apart like its inhabitant: splendid and useless.

Around him, the city rang and vibrated and rumbled with the noise of manufacture and trade, the treble clang and shriek of metalworking momentarily dimmed by the bass of wooden wheels thundering over cobbles just outside his warehouse; the clamor of craft and commerce merging with the noise of the docks, where six hundred vessels, laden with cargo from all over the southern coast of Rakhat's largest continent, shouldered in toward the wharves of Gayjur, their largest market.

Driven early from his natal compound, Supaari had been drawn to Gayjur as a two-moon tide is drawn to shore. He took passage downriver on a Runa freighter bringing huge baskets of carmine and violet
datinsa
to market. Pride was an expense he could not afford: he helped the Runa cook prepare the sailors' meals to work off his fare. He expected humiliation and rejection; it was all he'd known. But in the four days he spent on that boat moving past the sea-carved filigree of the Masna'a Tafa'i coast, Supaari experienced more kindness and friendship than in all his childhood. The Runa were despised but so was he; by the time he tasted the harsh metallic vapors and oily scents of Gayjur as they hove into Radina Bay, the cook had called him brother and Supaari felt less a youth condemned to exile than a man about to find a treasure, if only he has the wit to recognize it.

Within a season, exhilarated by the challenges and risks of trade in the world's largest commercial city, Supaari knew he had found his place and had formally taken his landname, VaGayjur. He began as a runner, working for another third who had come to Gayjur only five years earlier and who was already prospering beyond Supaari's youthful ability to imagine wealth. He learned the universal laws of trade: buy low and sell high; cut losses and let profits run; smell the emotion of the market but don't give way to it. And he discovered his own niche: a willingness, an eagerness to learn from the Runa, to speak their language and respect their ways and deal with them directly.

His fortune was founded on a chance remark by a Runao from the midlands, visiting Gayjur to find a better market for her village's weaving. There had been unusual rain in the high plateau of Sintaron, she said and commented, "
Rakari
should be good this year." Later that day, Supaari checked with several shippers who worked the Pon riverway. They were making the trip in under five days. The river was high, they told him, with a good, fast current. Using everything he'd saved and pledging two years of his labor against default, Supaari contracted to deliver
rakari
for three
bhali
per bale at the end of the season. He quit as a runner, traveled inland to the
rakar
fields, where the bumper crop was being harvested, and arranged to buy every bale at half a
bhal
. The pickers were pleased to get so much, the
rakar
processors were forced to pay the contract price, and Supaari VaGayjur bought his first yard on the profit.

He developed a reputation for knowing what was happening among the Runa, and while his knowledge was profitable and his wealth envied, its source was disdained and he remained an outsider among the respectable Jana'ata of Gayjur. His world consisted of other thirds, who were his competitors, and the Runa, who were, for all that he enjoyed their company, his prey.

His exclusion from society galled him, but there was a more fundamental source of discontent—something which sucked the savor from Supaari's life, which made him wonder what the point of all his effort was. His brothers, whose inheritance tied them to the small and backward town of their birth, seemed less enviable to him now as he looked around his large and well-managed compound, with its servants and warehouse workers, its runners and office staff, its bustling purposefulness. And yet his brothers had what every third was barred from: descendants, heirs, posterity.

There were ways out of this trap. The death without issue of an older sibling would open the way for a third child, providing it could be proved that the heir had not assassinated the first- or second-born. Sterility, if the older was willing to declare the condition's permanence publicly and yield status to the younger, could also make a family possible. And, in exceedingly rare cases, a third could be rendered Founder and establish a new lineage.

On this last possibility—and on seven small brown kernels of extraordinary scent and the exquisite boredom of Hlavin Kitheri—Supaari VaGayjur now pinned his hopes.

By midday, his ordinary business concluded, Supaari was ready to hire a skimmer to pole across the bay to Fatzna Island, the glassmakers' quarter. As the shallow-drafted boat slid onto fine white sand, the thought occurred to him belatedly that he might have done well to bring Chaypas with him, to advise him on the selection of a vacuum flask. Too late, he thought as he paid off the poler and asked the woman to return for him after first sundown. Then he began a systematic hunt through the shops. In the end, he bought not one but three small presentation flasks, each the finest of its type in his judgment, ranging from the classically ornate to a pure crystal simplicity.

When the poler returned, he asked to be let off near Ezao. Noting with satisfaction the large number of people already wearing the waterfall of ribbons, Supaari tracked Chaypas to one of the cook shops and, explaining briefly, asked her opinion of the flasks.

Chaypas stood. Leaving her meal and Supaari behind, she walked outside and then a short way uphill to a vantage point that gave her a view of Galatna Palace, with its twisted marble columns, its finely wrought and silvered gates, its silken awnings, its glazed tile walls gilded and sparkling in the reflections from the paired three-sided fountains sending droplets of precious scented oils like fire sparks into the sunlight.