“Sun child!” Misi said, straightening up. “Blessed!”
Traders worshipped the sun, and with that explanation I had to be content. There was no way to argue with Misi Nada. Later, when I felt stronger, I tried the same question on Jat Lon.
Trader wagons are long and narrow, balanced high on many pairs of wheels. Most of their length is taken up with the storage area, a blank box entered from the side doors. At the front is an open cab for the owners and their families. Among the traders, women usually own the equipment, and men, the livestock. The men do the trading mostly, although the goods may belong to either.
Misi’s cab was of standard design, being square with three sides taken up by big windows. Those could be closed off with shutters when the weather was bad, and their low sills allowed them to also serve as doors. This box was Misi’s home and my sickroom. It was furnished with a collection of cubical chests, and these she shifted around to suit her needs of the moment. Put together they made a bed large enough even for her; spread around they formed benches. With my legs immobilized in splints, I sat or lay on these and watched the world go by.
The wagon was driven by either Misi or Pula Misi, who was obviously her daughter. As my wits began to return, I came to realize that Pula was barely more than a child, although she was already taller than I was. Had she wanted, Pula could have been striking, even beautiful, for she had an unconscious grace and the inner glow of youth; but Pula invariably wore shapeless muumuus of sickly green, her hair was a greasy tangle, and her face stayed as blank as a cloud.
Trader wagons move very slowly, but hippos, like woollies, never sleep, and their inexorable crawl will eat up any distance eventually. Usually wagons are linked in pairs, a combination that the traders call a “train.” Rich owners may hook up three or even four wagons in that fashion, but any combination will allow the women to spell each other off at driving. Pula also owned a wagon, and hers was towed by Misi’s, its living quarters facing the rear.
Other trains came and went, although always we had three or four in our company. Trader men came calling quite often, the women very seldom. The locals I met not at all, and by far my most frequent companions were Misi and her family. The oldest was gray-haired Lon Kiv, but I soon decided that the true leader of the group was his son, Jat Lon.
Jat was younger than me, short and lean and fast as a blink. His russet beard was trimmed to a point and his mustache twirled up in horns. He wore tan leather trousers piped in bright colors and emblazoned with swirls of beadwork, and his shirt was intricately embroidered. I never met a man more dapper than Jat Lon, or more sociable. Gems flickered on his fingers and his ears and on the hilt of the rapier hanging from his belt. His hazel eyes flashed with intelligence, gazing intently at me when I spoke, studying my reaction when he did. Misi I had already dismissed as a kindly moron, capable of only a few very limited endeavors, but I could see that Jat Lon missed nothing. His penetrating gaze was only bearable because of the understanding half-smile that always accompanied it.
Misi and Pula, Lon and Jat…and there was a fifth member of the family. Dot Jat was a lop-toothed lad, whose uneven grin already showed much native charm. At times in my delirium I had hallucinated that he was my lost son Merry, but all the babies I had sired with the seawomen would have by then grown beyond the tooth-dropping stage. Obviously Dot Jat was son of Jat Lon, who was son of Lon Kiv.
Jat spoke to Misi as one might address a very slow child—firmly yet not without affection. He called her anything from Momma to Big Pig, depending on his mood. Jat was Pula’s brother, I surmised, and Lon must be Misi’s husband. Dot’s mother seemed to be missing, but certainly Jat was the brains of the family. The older Lon Kiv seemed a much less sinister, more easygoing man. My danger, whatever it was, lurked behind the smile of Jat Lon.
The first time I held a true conversation with Jat, the cab was unusually crowded. He was kneeling on the floor, oiling a saddle. I was reclining on the bed, watching the scrub and the far-off hazy shapes of the Andes, almost lost now over the bend of the world. Another train was sometimes visible in the distance, grinding through the chaparral on a path paralleling our own. Misi, for once, had chosen to sleep in her own cab. Mostly she preferred to go to the rear and the privacy of Pula’s wagon, but now she lay at my side like a mislaid mountain, and her monstrous snores echoed back from the hills. Immobile as I was, I could not shake an uneasy belief that a bad lurch would roll her bulk on top of me and crush me to paste. Pula, shapeless in her wind-rippled green tent, was sitting out front on the step, holding the traces and gazing over the hippos’ backs in mindless silence.
Little Dot sat sleepily in one corner, doing double-jointed finger exercises. Traders’ hands are extraordinarily supple. When two traders trade they wave their fingers at each other all the time, either calculating or pretending to do so. They can count any number up to 59,048 that way, in a simple ternary system. My fingers never learned to move independently of one another so I never could make the symbols, but I learned to read them well enough, a skill that other traders did not expect in me.
“Jat,” I asked, “will you answer a couple of questions?”
Jat flickered his inevitable little smile. “Of course! But not necessarily truthfully.”
I was too tense to smile back, as I was meant to. “All right. You bought me. Why?”
“Because I can never resist a bargain.”
“Huh?”
He chuckled and sat back on his heels. Then he wiped his hands fastidiously on a rag. “I paid Kan one shirt for you. You looked dead already, but Misi said she thought you could be saved, and one shirt is a very good price for a wetlander.”
So far I could believe him. So I asked the big black question: “And what will you do with me now?”
“Oh, you’re not mine, Knobil. I gave you to Momma right away. That was why I bought you—as a gift for her.”
“A gift?”
“Misi wouldn’t have taken all this trouble doctoring you if she didn’t care for you, now would she?” Jat’s smile was not Pebble’s smile. Pebble’s had been happiness and sharing; Jat’s was calculated reassurance.
“Or if she thought I was vulnerable.” I was still very feeble, but my wits were coming back—slowly. “So why does she want me? What will she do with me?”
“Free you.” His pale brown face was as guileless as the sky.
“Why? Why go to all this trouble over a crippled slave?”
“Ex-slave.”
“But why?”
“Because we worship the sun,” Jat said solemnly. “Wetlanders are Our Lady Sun’s children—they have blue eyes and golden hair. To free a wetlander slave is a deed of great merit, well rewarded always.”
I studied him in baffled doubt. “You believe this?”
Jat peered past me at the sleeping Misi and then turned his head to look first at Pula, who was seemingly engrossed in guiding the teams, and then at Dot, intent on his finger-wiggling.
“Maybe not quite as much as some do,” Jat admitted quietly. “But…there have been cases, Knobil. I only ever met one man who’d done it—but the wealth! Four wagons, loaded to the roof. And the women…!” He sighed avariciously.
I did not believe, but I could think of no alternative explanation. Hrarrh had left me almost dead and certainly maimed for life. As a working slave I was now worthless. Why indeed should Misi struggle to heal me? Why should these hardheaded merchants waste food and shelter on me? Hrarrh himself had said that traders would buy wetlanders regardless of age or sex or health. I could think of no logical reason except what Jat and Misi were telling me—if a reason based only on religion could be called logical.