Across the Great Barrier fm-2 Page 10

  I couldn’t help wondering a bit myself. When I first found out about the Rationalists, I’d thought they lived up to their name. For a while, I’d even wanted to be one. But I could tell from the way Brant and Rennie whisked us out of sight when we arrived, and from some of the talk they’d had, that things had changed in Oak River since I’d been there the previous summer. It just might be that the settlers would be crazy enough to get a lot of mirror bug grubs to clear the magic out of their land, even after what Professor Torgeson said. Heck, they might decide they couldn’t believe anything a magician told them, and never mind that Professor Torgeson was a college professor and Wash was a circuit magician with more experience of the Far West than practically anybody! I just hoped that Rennie and Brant would have sense enough to take their childings and get out before things went too far. I had a notion that Rennie would be pleased enough to have a chance to leave, but Brant …

  I felt a little hollow. Rennie had never been my favorite sister, not by a long shot, and she was in a mess of her own making. Still, she was family. I wanted to help, but all I could think of was to make sure I wrote to her more often. It wasn’t much, and it for sure and certain wasn’t enough, and I didn’t like either of those things one little bit. I didn’t have any other choices, though. You can’t force folks to have good sense, even if they’re family. Maybe especially then.

  CHAPTER 11

  PROFESSOR TORGESON WAS DISAPPOINTED THAT WE DIDN’T GET TO spend more time in Oak River, because she’d hoped to spend several days surveying the plants and animals there. She agreed, though, that we were best off staying out of settlement politics, and we needed to make up a few days, anyway, because of the saber cats. So we made do with riding real slow and watching extra careful until we were off the Rationalist allotment, and then taking a little longer to write it all down when we stopped for lunch.

  After we left Oak River, the days fell into a rhythm for a while, like sweeping a floor or hoeing the garden. We alternated days riding to the next wagonrest with days where Professor Torgeson and I worked on the survey while Wash went hunting. If we were close to a settlement, we’d stop and trade papers and gossip, and maybe pick up a few provisions if we were running low.

  The settlements we stopped at were all different. If I’d thought about it at all, I’d thought most of them would be smaller versions of Puerta del Oeste, the way Puerta del Oeste was a smaller version of West Landing and West Landing was a smaller version of Mill City. They weren’t. Most of them were more like Oak River — a bunch of friends and relatives from the same place, or folks with the same ideas of how to make a go of things, who’d gotten up a settlement group and come West together.

  We passed three settlements in a row that were all settled from Scandia. Nobody but their settlement magicians spoke any English at all. Wash said that the only reason all the settlement magicians spoke English was because the Settlement Office made it a requirement, and the only reason they did that was to make sure the settlement magicians could learn any new spells the Settlement Office came up with, without needing a translator. He also said that the Settlement Office couldn’t make up their mind whether to assign land so that all the immigrants bunched up in one place or so they were scattered around, so sometimes you got clumps of five or six settlements that were all from one country and sometimes every settlement you came to was different from the last four.

  Professor Torgeson did pretty well getting people to collect data for the college, even though she wasn’t actually from Scandia. The first settlers on Vinland had come from Scandia, and even though that was a good five or six centuries ago, the language was still close enough to Scandian that she could get across what she wanted. She had less luck at the Polish settlement that came next, but she just shrugged and said the college didn’t need an observer at every single settlement we came to.

  “This isn’t nearly as exciting as I thought it would be,” I told the professor one evening when we were setting up camp at a wagonrest.

  “Forgotten the saber cats already?” Wash said, raising his eyebrows.

  “I’ll take boring any day,” Professor Torgeson said, nodding.

  “I didn’t say it was boring!” I protested.

  Professor Torgeson just looked at me. “Gathering base data is just as important as making entirely new observations. More important, sometimes; you can’t tell whether something’s changed if you don’t know what it was like to begin with.”

  As we went farther west, the wagonrests got smaller and the settlements got newer and less finished, until we finally got out where everything was so new they hadn’t built up any wagonrests at all yet. We had to camp inside the settlement palisades. The newest settlements didn’t have much to spare for travelers, whether that was in the way of space or food or time, so whenever we stopped at one, Wash was real careful about helping out with whatever work was going forward.

  Mostly, that meant cutting trees. The grubs had killed most of them by eating away their roots, but the wood was still good for building, as long as someone got to it before the charcoal beetles and the ruby pit borers and all the other things did. Sometimes helping out meant hunting the animals that were coming back along with the plants and ground cover. Usually, they were small critters, like raccoons and foxes and squirrels, but about three miles outside the Greenleaf settlement, we passed a small herd of bison.

  When we got to Greenleaf and Wash told the settlers, they reacted like an anthill that had been stirred up with a stick. In less time than it took to tell about it, half the settlers were saddled up with their rifles to hand. Professor Torgeson decided to join them, so I went along, too.

  Wash led the group quietly behind some low hills, downwind of the herd. Once he made sure of where the bison were, the hunters crept up to the hilltop and fired down into the animals. All of the bison jerked at the sound of the gunshots, and two of them fell over. In the half second before the whole herd took off running, Wash gave a loud yell. Two of the settlers — ones who’d stayed mounted — did the same.

  The bison took one look at the yelling settlers and stampeded away from us. They kicked up quite a dust running away, and I could feel the ground shaking under my feet from the pounding of their hooves. The hunters dropped another one before they got too far away to hit, then most of them remounted and rode after the herd to make sure they kept going. The rest of us went down to start dealing with the dead bison.

  One of the settlers rode back to Greenleaf for a wagon to haul the bison skins and meat back to the settlement for smoking and drying and tanning. With everyone helping, we had the hot, dirty job of butchering the animals all done by sunset. The settlers were double happy, first on account of having a lot of meat drop into their laps unexpectedly, and second because they’d gotten to the bison herd and stampeded it off before the bison got into their fields and tore up their crops.

  Wash had been over unloading the wagon, but I saw his head whip around when he heard someone say that, and a minute later he was over where we stood, frowning.

  “What was that you just said?”

  The settler gave Wash a puzzled look. “I said it was a good thing we chased the herd off before they got to the fields. We can’t afford to lose any of the crops this year.”

  “Mmmm.” I knew that noise; it was the sound Wash always made when he had a powerfully strong opinion on something, but wasn’t going to say it until he was sure he had all the facts. “Where’s your Mr. Farrel?”

  Sebastian Farrel was the settlement magician for Greenleaf. The settler looked puzzled for a minute, then cupped his hands to make a speaking trumpet and yelled, “Hey, Sebastian! Wash wants a word.”

  A medium-sized man with thinning blond hair broke away from a clump of people standing near the settlement gate and trudged over to us. He tried to thank Wash again, but Wash cut him off before he could rightly get started.

  “How far out do you have your protection spells set?” Wash asked.

  Mr. Farrel st
raightened up a little. “Inner layer goes to the settlement wall; the outer layer runs to the stone markers at the edge of the fields. Why?”

  “And have you had trouble with the wildlife getting into your crops? Apart from the grubs the last few years, I mean.”

  “Not what you’d call trouble out here,” the settlement magician said. “The spells aren’t a hundred percent effective, but —”

  “What have you had that you don’t call trouble, then?”

  “Some of the natural wildlife has crossed the outer layer of spells a time or two,” Mr. Farrel said. “Mainly the larger animals, like the bison, which is why everyone was glad to see them run off. A lone deer or prairie wolf doesn’t do much damage before we chase them away, but a whole herd …”

  “I think you’d best show me your spells close up,” Wash said. The two of them went off for half an hour, and when they came back, Wash pretty near had steam coming out his ears. He told the settlers straight out that some of them had been taking shortcuts when it was their turn to help with the spells, and he told Mr. Farrel that it was part of his job as settlement magician to make sure that his helpers did the job right.

  Then he told everyone that they needed to take a lot more care about casting spells that might conflict with the settlement protection spells, especially when they were outside the walls, working. He pointed out that they’d been lucky to have just a deer or two get past the outer layer of spells, and not a saber cat or a terror bird. He was perfectly polite about it, but by the time he finished you could just see that half the people there wanted the ground to open up and swallow them right down.

  In the end, Wash and Professor Torgeson spent the rest of the evening and most of the next day working with the settlement magician and the settlers, drilling them all on what to do and what not to do. They even had me go over the basic spells, the way they taught them in upper school. I felt awkward and unhappy — it didn’t seem right that I would be tutoring a bunch of folks when I’d only just finished my schooling a couple of months back, especially since magic was just about my worst subject. At least Wash didn’t try to have me demonstrate anything.

  A few of the settlers got grumpy about all the lessons, but Wash just shrugged and said a lot of greenhorn settlers started off thinking they didn’t need to be as careful as the Settlement Office and the experienced settlers said, and they were welcome to get themselves killed as long as they didn’t take the rest of the settlement with them. That shut up the complainers, and the rest of the settlers were mostly grateful that they hadn’t lost their crops or had the protection spells fail at an even worse time.

  We stayed at Greenleaf for an extra two days to do a really thorough survey of the plants and wildlife around the settlement (and to make sure the settlers were doing the spells right) and then rode on. We’d gone nearly a hundred and fifty miles west of Mill City when it finally came time to turn north. We stopped that night in an abandoned settlement, one of the seventeen that had failed because of the grubs. The settlers had given up and gone back right before winter set in, when they realized they didn’t have enough food to last them, and the settlement was an empty, spooky place.

  Wash made the professor and me stay outside the palisade with all the travel protection spells still going strong, while he went in to make sure no dangerous wildlife had taken up residence. A few gray squirrels or daybats wouldn’t have been a problem, but a colony of swarming weasels or a black bear could have been trouble.

  We were lucky; nothing nasty had moved in, so we put our horses in the stable and made camp. We could have stayed in one of the empty buildings, but nobody suggested it. It was creepy enough camping by the palisade wall with the dim, silent shapes looming behind us.

  “I thought the Settlement Office reassigned empty settlements right away,” Professor Torgeson said after a while.

  “They do, usually,” Wash replied. “It keeps the wildlife from homing in. Just now, though, the Settlement Office isn’t assigning anyone new to allotments, whether they’re brand-new places or ones that someone tried previously.”

  Professor Torgeson frowned. “That’s shortsighted, I think. By next year, something could have moved into these buildings that’ll be next to impossible to root out.”

  Wash shrugged. “When they finally decide on a new lot of folks, I’ll come out with the settlement magicians to make sure everything is in order before the first batch of settlers arrives.”

  “Wash!” I said, slightly shocked by his casual acceptance of such a risk.

  “What? I’ve done it before, more than once. It’s part of a circuit magician’s job.” He leaned back against the palisade wall and smiled at the campfire. “The hard part is making sure all the buildings are fit for living in. Chasing the squirrels and raccoons and daybats out isn’t hard, but if quickrot or termites have gotten into the roof beams or walls, the houses can come down without warning.”

  Professor Torgeson’s eyes narrowed. “Has anyone ever done a test to see what conditions promote that sort of rapid deterioration?”

  “Not that I know of, Professor,” Wash said. “Sounds as if it’d be a right useful thing to do, though.”

  The professor was looking out into the dark shadows with a speculative expression I’d learned to recognize. I made a bet with myself that we’d be spending an extra day or two here, too, so as to check what wildlife might have sprung up inside the settlement palisade and how it was different from what was outside.

  That night I had the second dream.

  I dreamed of walking down the hall of the house in Mill City where Lan and I had grown up. I climbed out onto the roof of the porch and jumped off, but instead of falling, I flew. First I skimmed over the rooftops of Mill City, watching shifting lights and colors flicker past beneath me; then I rose until I could see the whole patchwork of magic below me. The railroad tracks shone like the obsidian in the science laboratory at the college, slashing through the middle of the rainbow sheen that covered the rest of the city. To the west, I could see the wide silver ribbon of the Mammoth River curling around the city.

  I felt the wind whispering through my fingers and tangling my hair. I circled up and away from the glitter of the Great Barrier Spell, hanging like a curtain above and along the indent of the Mammoth River as far as I could see. I climbed higher, until I was well above it, and flew west over the settlements that surrounded a patch of lakes and swampland, then farther west over a shining lacework of creeks and rivers that cut through the dark, icy land.

  Clouds rolled in around me like thick fog. I tried to fly lower, then almost panicked, thinking I would crash into the ground if I couldn’t see it. Just before I started to fall, I dropped out of the clouds and found myself high above Helvan Shores, the town back East where I’d grown up.

  The first thing I thought was that Helvan Shores looked different from Mill City. It wasn’t just that the shiny black line of the railroad tracks skimmed by the edge of town instead of cutting through the indent and coming to a dead stop. The whole town was paler somehow, and less active. The colors moved stiffly, and there were gray areas that didn’t shift at all.

  I dipped lower, and saw that there was a wall around the outside of the town. It reminded me of the Great Barrier Spell, only it was darker, more solid, and much less shimmery. I flew lower still, and suddenly I started falling.

  I flailed my arms around, knowing I had no idea how to stop falling and fly again. The wind whipped my hair and tore at my skirts … and I landed with a thump in my bedroll. My eyes jerked open and I found myself staring at the embers of the campfire, cold and panting as if I had been running hard.

  I lay there for a while, waiting for my heart to stop pounding, and thought about the dream. I knew it was like the first dream, and yet it wasn’t. The first time, I had been terrified the whole time, until I woke up shaking. This time, I hadn’t been scared until right at the end when I started falling. I knew they weren’t normal dreams. They felt as if they meant someth
ing, but try as I might, I couldn’t think what. It was a long time before I fell back asleep.

  CHAPTER 12

  JUST LIKE I THOUGHT, PROFESSOR TORGESON TALKED WASH INTO letting us spend three days at the abandoned settlement, so we could survey whatever was living inside the settlement walls, as well as what was outside. It didn’t take as much time as I’d feared. The settlement had only been two years old, so it had only had the original settlement group to house, and they hadn’t wanted to take the time or labor to enclose any more than they absolutely had to. So there wasn’t much open ground inside for anything to grow on.

  We did find a couple of mud swallow nests and the start of a bluehornet nest up under the eaves of the last house. Professor Torgeson got Wash to bring out a table that the settlers had left behind, and climbed up on it to examine the bluehornets. She spent over an hour standing there still as a stone, watching the hornets fly in and out. When she finally climbed down, she was stiff and frowning.

  “Mr. Morris,” she said, “would there be any chance of finding another bluehornet nest nearby?”

  “I doubt it,” Wash said.

  “The ones building that nest have to have come from somewhere,” the professor persisted.

  “We might get lucky and find the old nest within a hundred yards or so,” Wash replied. “But bluehornets sometimes fly three or four miles to start a new nest. It’d take a week for us to cover that much ground, even if a lot of the land nearby is cleared. An old nest isn’t easy to spot, either. I don’t think we have the time.”