A Time of Omens - Katharine Kerr [154]
“It gladdens my heart to see you,” Jill said in Deverrian. “What brings you to me?”
“Just concern. Evandar said you’d been ill.”
“I have been, truly, and I’ve been told I still am, though I feel mended. I’ve had a shaking fever. I picked it up in the jungle. They have a tree there, whose bark has the virtue to cure the symptoms, but they say it gets in your blood and lies quiet for years and years, only to flare up when you get yourself cold or tired or suchlike.”
“That’s a grave thing, then.”
Jill merely shrugged, turning to snap at the dogs bounding round them. With little whines they lay down on the hard-packed reddish ground.
“Where are we?” Dallandra said.
“Outside the guest house of… well, the only word I can find for it in my own language is temple, but it’s not that. It’s a place where a few scholars of the People keep lore alive, and teach it to any who ask.”
“I’ve heard about such places from the days of the Seven Kings. I think the People sent their children to them as a matter of course, but I’m not sure why.”
For a moment they both turned, looking at the huddled longhouses, some hardly better than huts, that sheltered what was left of one of the finest university systems the world has ever known, then or now, not that either of them realized what such a word meant, of course. Once Dallandra saw a man of the People, dressed in a long gray tunic gathered at the waist with a rope belt, crossing from one house to another, but he never so much as looked their way.
“It’s so lonely up here,” Dallandra remarked at last. “Why did they choose this place?”
“See those mountains over there? Well, on the other side and down below them lies the jungle. All the clouds that come from the sea fetch up against those peaks and drop their rain. So up here, the air’s dry as a bone, and books and scrolls last a fair bit longer than they would down in the jungles. It was a long hard journey getting here, let me tell you, and of course, I had to go and get sick on the way.”
“Oh, come now! Don’t blame yourself for that.”
“I should have been able to turn it aside.” Jill sounded genuinely aggrieved. “Well, but it’s too late now to worry about it, I suppose. What’s done is done. I must say, I’ve come to have a lot of respect for the physicking your People know.”
“Oh, by the gods! Forgive me, I feel like a dolt, but you know, it’s just dawned on me what all of this means.” Dallandra waved her hand round at the buildings. “It’s true, isn’t it? Refugees did reach the islands.”
“Quite a few of them, Dalla, quite a few.” All at once she grinned, a flash of her old humor. “Here, I’ve forgotten all my courtesies! Won’t you come in?”
Dallandra hesitated, suddenly afraid, wondering why she should be afraid rather than eager to learn this ancient lore of her people.
“I can’t stay long. I need to get back to Elessario. She might be in danger.”
“Ah. Forgive me. Of course, you’ve got your own work to do. Don’t worry about me. I’m as well as I need to be. And you know where to find me now.”
“So I do. I take it you’ll be here a long while?”
“Oh, you could spend a life here, if you had one to spare. It’s amazing, Dalla, just simply amazing! They’ve managed to preserve so much, most, I’ll wager, of what they brought with them. It’s their whole life, up here, copying things. You know, my teacher here, Meranaldan, his name is, told me that men risked their lives—gods! some actually died, saving these books when the city was falling.” She shook her head in something like sadness. “The history of your race, their songs and poems, some of their magic, though not as much of that as I’d like to see, and all sorts of odd bits of craft lore and learning—scrolls and codices, heaps of them. A true marvel it is, all of it.”
All at once Dalla knew why she was afraid, and that she’d have to face that fear.
“And what of the Guardians? Do they speak of them?”
“They do, but I don’t suppose they know much about their true nature.