This time she went first down the ladder.
Luncheon was served outside on the northern patio by floating servitors and Daeman chatted amiably with some of the young people—it seemed that several more guests had faxed in for the evening’s “pour”—whatever that was to be—and after the meal, many of the guests found couches in the house or comfortable lounge chairs on the shaded lawn in which to recline while draping their turin cloths over their eyes. The usual time under turin was an hour, so Daeman strolled near the edge of the trees, keeping an eye out for butterflies as he walked.
Ada joined him near the bottom of the hill. “You do not use the turin, Cousin Daeman?”
“I do not,” he said, hearing that he had sounded more prissy than he had intended. “I’ve accustomed myself to the things after almost a decade, but I don’t indulge. You also abstain, Ada, my dear?”
“Not always,” said the young woman. She was twirling a peach-colored parasol as she strolled, and the soft light gave her pale complexion a beautiful glow. “I check in on the events now and again, but I seem to be too busy to become as addicted as so many are these days.”
“Turins do seem to be ubiquitous.”
Ada paused in the shade of a giant elm with broad, low branches. She lowered and closed the parasol. “Have you tried it?”
“Oh, yes. It was all the rage halfway between my Twenties. I spent some weeks enjoying the . . . excess of it all.” He could not completely strain out the tone of distaste at the memory. “Since then, no.”
“Do you object to the violence, cousin?”
Daeman made a neutral gesture. “I object to its . . . vicariousness.”
Ada laughed softly. “Precisely Harman’s reason for never indulging. You two have something in common.”
The thought of this was so unlikely that Daeman’s only response was to flick away dead leaves on the ground with the point of his walking stick.
Ada looked up at the sun rather than calling up a time function on her palm. “They will be rousing themselves soon. ‘One hour under the cloth equals eight hours of turgid experience.’ “
“Ah,” said Daeman, wondering if her use of the cliché had been in the form of a double entendre. Her expression, always pleasant but bordering on the mischievous, gave no clue. “This pour thing—will it last long?”
“It’s scheduled to go most of the night.”
Daeman blinked in surprise. “Surely we’re not bivouacking down at the river or wherever this event is to be staged?” He wondered if sleeping out under the stars and rings would improve his chances of spending the night with this young woman.
“There will be provisions for those who want to stay all night at the pour site,” said Ada. “Hannah promises that this will be quite spectacular. But most of us will come back up to the manor sometime after midnight.”
“Will there be wine and other drinks at the . . . ah . . . pour?” asked Daeman.
“Most assuredly.”
It was Daeman’s turn to smile. Let the others stay for this spectacle, he would keep pouring Ada drinks through the evening, follow up on her “turgid” line of suggestive conversation, accompany her home (with luck and proper planning, just the two of them in a small carriole), pour the full force of his not-inconsiderable powers of attention upon her—and, with only an added bit of additional luck, this night he would not have to dream of women.
By late afternoon, the twenty or so guests at the manor—some babbling about the day’s turin-experienced events, going on and on about Menelaus being shot by a poisoned arrow or somesuch nonsense—were gathered together by helpful servitors and everyone departed for the “pour site” in a caravan of droshkies and carrioles. Voynix pulled the vehicles while other voynix trotted alongside as security, although—Daeman thought—if there were no tyrannosauruses in the woods, he failed to see a reason for security.
He had maneuvered to be in the lead carriole with their hostess, and Ada pointed out interesting trees, glens, and streams as they rumbled and hummed two or more miles down the dirt path toward the river. Daeman took up more room on their side of the red leather bench than he had to even given his pleasant plumpness, and was rewarded with the feel of Ada’s thigh alongside his for the duration of the voyage.
Their destination, he saw as they came out on the limestone ridge above the river valley, was not the river, exactly, but a tributary to the main channel, a literal backwater some hundred yards across, where erosion and flooding had created a wide shelf of sand—a sort of beach—on which a tall, rickety structure of logs, branches, ladders, troughs, ramps, and stairways had been constructed. It looked like a crude gallows to Daeman, although he had never seen an actual gallows, of course. Torches rose from the shallow tributary and the rickety contraption itself stood half on sand and half over water. A hundred yards out, blocking this channel from the actual river was a narrow island—overgrown with cycads and horsehair ferns—from which birds and small flying reptiles exploded into flight with a maximum of cries and frenzied flapping. Daeman wondered idly if there were butterflies on the isle.
On a grassy area above the beach, colorful silken tents, lounge chairs, and long tables of food had been set up. Servitors floated to and fro, sometimes bobbing above the heads of the arriving guests.
Walking behind Ada from the carriole, Daeman recognized some of the workers on the strange scaffolding: Hannah at the apex, tying on more structural elements, a red bandana tied around her head; the demented man, Harman, shirtless, sweating, showing bizarrely tanned skin, was stoking a contained fire twenty feet below Hannah; other young people, presumably friends of Hannah’s and Ada’s, shuttled back and forth up the wooden ramps and ladders, carrying heavy loads of sand and extra branches for construction and round stones. A raging fire burned in the clay core of the structure and sparks rose into the early evening sky. All of the workers’ actions appeared purposeful, even though Daeman could see no possible purpose to the tall stack of sticks and troughs and clay and sand and flame.
A servitor floated by and offered him a drink. Daeman accepted and went off in search of a lounge chair in the shade.
“This is the cupola,” Hannah explained to the assembled guests later that evening. “We’ve been working on it for about a week, floating materials down the river in canoes. Cutting and bending branches to fit.”
It was after a fine dinner. Sunlight still illuminated the high hills on the near side of the river, but the valley itself was in the shadows and both rings were glowing bright in the darkening sky. Sparks leaped and floated toward the rings and the puff of bellows and roar of furnace were very loud. Daeman took another drink, his eight or tenth of the evening, and lifted a second one for Ada, who shook her head and turned her attention back to Hannah.
“We’ve woven wood into a basket shape and coated the center of the furnace—the well—with refractory clay. We made this by shovel, mixing dry sand, bentonite, and some water. Then we rolled the claylike goop into balls, wrapped them in wet ferns and leaves to keep them from drying out, and lined the furnace well with the stuff. That’s what keeps the whole wooden cupola structure from catching fire.”
Daeman had no idea what the woman was going on about. Why build a big, gawky structure of wood and then set a fire at its center if you don’t want the thing to burn down? This place was an asylum.
“Mostly,” continued Hannah, “we’ve spent the last few days feeding the fire while putting out all the little fires the cupola furnace started. That’s why we built this thing near the river.”
“Wonderful,” muttered Daeman and went in search of another drink while Hannah and her friends—even the insufferable Harman—droned on, using nonsensical terms such as “coke bed,” “wind belt,” “tuyere” (which Hannah was explaining meant some little air entrance on their clay-lined furnace, near which the young woman named Emme kept working the wheezing bellows) and “melting zone” and “molding sand” and “taphole” and “slag hole.” It all sounded barbarous and vaguely obscene to Daeman.