Seeklight

Muffled noises from the far end of the room, then a door opened. Daenek watched as a man in a dingy white coat shuffled down the aisle towards him. When he reached the side of Daenek’s bed, he bent down and peered into Daenek’s face. The man’s own broad face spread into a grin, as he straightened up and sipped from a steaming cup he had carried with him. He turned away from the bed with a vague gesture of his hand. He spoke a few rapid words and hurried down the aisle to the door.

Daenek said nothing, his brain sparked into furious activity.

He had recognized the man’s language. Mertzer, he thought. I’m on board one of the caravans. Suddenly, he was aware of a deep subsonic vibration in the room, as from gigantic machines—the caravan’s engines. One hand flew to his forehead and kneaded the skin. Somehow an enormous gap had formed in his memory, from the storm to this warm, safe bed. He pulled himself up and rested his back against the wall at the head of the bed, and waited.

Several minutes later the door opened again. The same man as before entered in company with a taller, sour-faced older man.

As they approached the bed, Daenek noticed that the taller man’s white coat was clean, and that its wide pockets were stuffed with chrome-plated instruments. The man didn’t use any of the odd-shaped devices, though, but merely felt Daenek’s forehead with the back of his hand. With no change of expression on his deep-seamed face, he pulled down the bedcovers and examined the transparent dressing wrapped around Daenek’s thigh. The wound was a dark, but bloodless, red line running from Daenek’s groin to just above his knee. The man poked at the thin, porous membrane and grunted, apparently satisfied.

“Do you speak stone-cutters’ tongue?” said Daenek. The tall man glanced at him blankly, and the other grinned sheepishly.

“How about English?” he asked, switching to it. “The language they speak in the Capitol?”

No response. The tall man turned away from the bed and whispered to the other mertzer. When his companion had hurried away, the tall man sauntered lazily to the round window and gazed out of it, bored. Paying no further attention to Daenek, he took one of the shiny instruments from his coat pocket and began cleaning his fingernails with it.

A longer time passed before the door opened again. The first mertzer re-entered leading still another figure. This one was grey-haired and stoop-shouldered with age.

The old man lowered himself slowly onto the bed next to Daenek’s. He leaned forward. “How—” he spoke awkwardly in the stone-cutters’ language,—“how feel you?”

“All right, I guess,” Daenek smoothed the blanket with his hand. “Hungry, though.”

In the mertzer tongue, the old man relayed the information to the tall man, who shrugged without enthusiasm and headed for the door.

The old guy must be one of the translators, thought Daenek.

That handle the negotiations in all of the villages.

“Uhh—” The old man scratched his fringe of hair as he looked at Daenek.

“Is English easier for you?” asked Daenek in that language.

“You know, the Capitol tongue?”

The old man’s expression brightened. “Really?” he said, shifting into the same vocabulary. “That’s wonderful. Very nice. I haven’t talked like this for—it seems like years.” He paused, studying Daenek. “We just assumed that you only knew stone-cutter—you babbled in it for some time while you were unconscious.”

“How long—how long was I out?”

“Let me think. This would make it, ah, three days after they found you.”

“They?” Daenek shook his head, trying to clear away the fog of lapsed memory. “Who’s they?”

“A bunch of our mechanics.” The translator rubbed his speckled chin. “When the caravans had halted to wait for the storm to pass that night, the mechanics found that one of the tread plates had come off several kilometers back. About a dozen of them went hiking after it in the rain, to fetch it before it got rusted. Lucky for you that they stumbled across you as well.

Seemed just about gone when they flopped you into the infirmary here.”

Daenek hesitated, cautiously weighing his next question.

“Were there,” he spoke quietly, “any—others around?”

The translator smiled, his expression becoming conspiratorial. “Oh, a few. Some local subthane’s strongarmers, all befuddled with booze and confusion. The mechs had no trouble losing them.”

Daenek tensed. How much do they know? And if they do know I’m the thane’s son . . . what then? “Did you find out, um, why they were looking for me?”