Passage - Lois McMaster Bujold [63]
Whit came up behind her shoulder, wide-eyed, and whispered in her ear, “Are they following all this?”
She whispered back, “I’m guessing one in three are smart or sober enough. That makes a good half-dozen, by my reckoning.” But the crowd of keelers and townsmen had all stopped muttering and rustling amongst themselves, and the folks leaning on the nearby boat rails looked as entertained as if Dag were a stump speaker.
To Fawn’s greater astonishment, when Dag finished with groundwork and malice blight, he glanced over his shoulder and went right on with sharing knives. And then the silence grew as rapt as if folks were listening to a ghost story. “Which was why,” Dag finished, “when that fool patroller boy broke his bone knife in the fight up behind the landing the other night, all those Pearl Riffle Lakewalkers acted like someone had murdered his grandmother. Because that’s pretty near just what happened. That’s why they’ve all been so blighted touchy with you lately, see…”
And, Fawn thought, at least some of the men listening did seem to see. Or at least, they nodded wisely and murmured canny comments, or parted their lips in wonder, round-mouthed and silent.
“Some of you may be wondering why no Lakewalker has told you these things before. The answer is standing beside you, or maybe it’s in your own hand. You say you’re afraid of us, our sorcery and our secrets. Well, we’re mortal afraid of you, too. Of your numbers, and of your misunderstandings. Ask poor Verel, the camp medicine maker, if he’d dare to go near a farmer again soon. The reasons Lakewalkers don’t explain things to you as we should aren’t our fault alone.”
A number of the men clutching cudgels looked at one another and lowered them discreetly to their sides, or even behind their backs. One shamefaced townsman dropped his altogether, glanced to either side, and folded his arms somewhat defiantly.
Dag drew a long breath, letting his gaze pass over the crowd; each fellow whose eyes he met rose a bit on his toes, so that a ripple passed along them in response, as though Dag had run his hand through the still water of a horse trough. “Now, Mark-carpenter here asked if groundwork was magic, and I told him no. Ground is part of the world, and groundwork works best running with the grain of the world and not against it. Like the difference between splitting a log or cutting it crossways. And it isn’t miracle either, at least no more than planting corn is a miracle, which it kind of is, really. Farmer puts four kernels in the ground, and hopes one will sprout, or two will let him break even, or three will let him get ahead, and if it ever came up all four, he’d likely call it a miracle. Groundwork doesn’t make miracles any oftener than planting, but some days, we do break even.”
Dag glanced again over his shoulder. “Now, if you folks will excuse me, I have some groundwork to try. And if you all are the hoping sort, you can hope with me that tonight I can break even.”
He finished with his old self-deprecating head-duck and salute, and turned back to his waiting—patient, Fawn decided. He’s sure not fooling now.
“Absent gods,” he breathed to Fawn’s ear alone. “If there’s any rules left to bust, I can’t think of ’em.”
“Flyin’, patroller?” she breathed back. That had been Aunt Nattie’s shrewd description of Dag the night he’d mended that glass bowl so gloriously, surprising himself even more than he’d surprised the Bluefields.
His lips tweaked up in shared memory, but then his gaze grew grave again. He went back to Cress’s side and lowered himself, folding his long legs awkwardly. Hitching his shoulders, he leaned forward and went absent again.
Just as quick as that: here, then gone…there, wherever there was.