Passage - Lois McMaster Bujold [92]
“You’d guess right. They lost nearly half their people, about five hundred folk in all, including almost all their children, because you know a malice goes for youngsters first. Absent gods, you should have seen that malice when we slew it, after that fair feast. I never knew one could grow so ghastly beautiful. Sessiles, early molts, they’re crude and ugly creatures, and you get to thinking ugliness is what malices are all about, but it’s not. It’s not.” Dag fell silent, but then shook off the haunting memory and forged on while he still had Remo’s ground and mind open. “I took my patrol through Greenspring on the way home, and we came upon some townsmen who’d come back to bury their dead. It was high summer, but most of the victims had been ground-ripped, so they were slow to rot. I counted down the row, so pale they were, like ice children in that gray heat…How long a trench do you think you’d have to dig, Remo, to bury all the youngsters in Silver Shoals?”
Remo’s lips parted; he shook his head.
“It’d be about a mile long, I figure,” said Dag evenly. “At the least estimate. I’d have dragged every Lakewalker I know down that row if I could have, but I couldn’t, so now I have to do it with words.” And maybe his clumsy words were working better here, with Silver Shoals spread in front of Remo’s eyes, than they would have in the comfortable isolation of Pearl Riffle Camp.
“I can see the problem,” said Remo slowly.
Absent gods be praised!
“But I don’t see what more we can do about it. I mean, we’re already patrolling as hard as we can.”
“It’s not our patrolling that needs to change. It’s…see, the thing is, if the Greenspring folks had known more about malices, about Lakewalkers, about all we do, someone might have got out with word earlier. More lives—not all, I know, but more—might have been saved at Greenspring, and Bonemarsh need not have been blighted any, if we could have been warned and taken the malice quick before it started to move south. And the only way I know to get farmers to know more is to start teaching ’em.”
Remo’s eyes widened as he gauged the lights of the town. “How could we possibly teach them all?”
Already Remo was past the usual response, How could we teach any of ’em? Farmers can’t… followed by whatever Lakerwalkerish conceit first occurred. Dag nearly smiled. “Well, now, if we had to lift and carry each and every farmer all at once, we’d break our backs, sure. But if we could start by teaching some farmers, someplace—maybe after that they could teach each other. Save each other. If they can only grab the right tools. These folks are good at tools, I find.” He raised his left arm; his hook and the buckles of his harness gleamed briefly in the faint yellow lantern lights.
Remo fell silent, staring up the shore.
After a while, Dag said, “Fawn and Whit are mad to see the town mint tomorrow morning, before we go on down the river. Want to come along?”
Remo’s ground closed altogether. “Is it safe for Lakewalkers alone up there?” Remo had barely ventured off the Fetch; if he hadn’t been pressed into helping with the unloading earlier, Dag wasn’t sure he would have set foot on land at all.
“Yes,” said Dag recklessly. He suspected that Remo would follow him from sheer habit if he displayed a patrol leader’s confidence, and no need to enlighten the youth as to how hollow a confidence that so often was. “Besides, we won’t be alone.”
“I’ll think about it,” said Remo cautiously. He added after a little silence, “Whit sure likes his money. Yet it’s nothing, in its ground. Just metal chips.”
“If money has a ground, it exists inside folks’ heads,” Dag agreed. “But it’s mighty convenient for trade. It’s like a memory of trade you can hold in your hand, and take anywhere.” Anywhere it was recognized. Four great farmer towns—all along this river system, curiously enough—coined their own money these days, in addition to odd lots of coin left from the ancient days that turned up from time to time. The clerks in the goods-sheds were gaining a lot of practice in figuring, Dag