The Burning City by Jerry Pournelle Page A

honey for the first time.
    â€œName Whandall of Serpent’s Walk. Happy meet you, Tras,” he said in Condigeano. He’d practiced the words while he and others eavesdropped on the lookers.
    â€œHappy meet you, Whandall,” Tras said in bad talk-to-strangers speech. “I talk to other… you call
Lordkin?”
    â€œLordkin, yes, of Serpent’s Walk.”
    â€œTell me how you live.”
    He understood the words
how you live
, but Whandall couldn’t make sense of them. “How I guard my self? My brothers teach—
will
teach me how to use a knife. I walk without one until I know.”
    â€œWhat you do yesterday?”
    â€œHid in the… hid. Watched this house. Can’t see roof. No Lordkin around. Climb house next door, look at roof. Go for blanket, come back, sleep on roof. Wait for you. Tras, speak Condigeo.”
    Tras said in his own speech, “Are a lot of your days like that?”
    â€œSome.”
    â€œMaybe…. Tell me how the
kinless
live.”
    â€œI don’t know.”
    â€œMmm.” Disappointed.
    Whandall said, “I know how woodsmen live. Woodsmen are kinless.”
    â€œTell me.”
    Whandall began to speak of what he’d learned. The dangerous plants, their names, how to recognize and avoid them. The rite that woodsmen performed before they felled a redwood and cut it up. What they ate. How they talked. Why none but Kreeg Miller would help injured Lordkin children. How they came to accept Whandall.
    Tras listened intently, nodding, smiling. When Whandall ran down he said, “There, now, you’ve told me a lot about yourself. You rescued yourbrother. Lordkin don’t work, but you carried water when you saw there was need. Lordkin don’t learn about the forest, even the ones who go in as children. Lordkin like to watch without being seen. You gather, but the kinless try to stop you, because what you gather is what they make or sell or use. You don’t worship trees, but you worship Yangin-Atep. You see?”
    â€œTras? Show me what you say. Tell me how you live.”
    Tras Preetror talked.
    He had come to watch the Burning, to travel afterward and tell what he’d seen. “If you want to see the world, a teller is what you want to be. Wherever you go, they want to know what it’s like where you came from. Of course you should know the speech. My family could afford a woman of the Incas to teach me and my brothers and sisters and cousins. We learned geometry and numbers and incantations, but I learned Inca speech too….”
    Tras mangled the words and rhythms of normal speech until Whandall’s head hurt. Sometimes he didn’t have the words. Finding them turned into lessons in Condigeano speech.
    â€œâ€¦
Rich
. If I was rich, I could get my own ship and take it where I wanted.”
    â€œTras, someone could take it away and go where
he
wants.”
    â€œPirates? Sure. You have to be better armed than they are or carry a better wizard or somehow persuade a pirate that you do.
    â€œOnce upon a time, two Torovan privateers had us bracketed far from shore. Privateers are pirates, but a government gives them a license to steal—I mean gather. Who has a better right?” Tras laughed and said, “But
Wave Walker
carried a wizard that trip.
    â€œWe watched. Acrimegus—he was
our
wizard—sent a beam of orange light from his hand down into the water near one of the other ships. It was just bright enough to see in twilight. He held it there, on and on, while we maneuvered and the two ships countermaneuvered and came closer and closer. Then the water boiled at that one spot. When Acrimegus gave us the signal, we all pulled the sails down and then crowded along the rail. The privateers must have thought we were crazy.
    â€œA head broke the surface. It was almost the same size as the nearest ship. All of us shrieked and went running below, all but Acrimegus. I stuck my head