Across the Great Barrier

CHAPTER 10

WHAT WITH THE SABER CATS AND ALL THE STOPPING AND STARTING to count plants, it took us nearly three weeks to get from Puerta del Oeste to the Oak River settlement. The professors had planned for it to be our first long stop because that was where we’d been staying the summer before when Papa and Professor Jeffries had been looking into the grubs and mirror bugs, and because it was the only Rationalist settlement anywhere in the North Plains Territory.

Since the Rationalists didn’t believe in using magic, their territory hadn’t attracted grubs and mirror bugs the way the other settlements had, and it was easy to tell when we were getting close. Long before we came in sight of the settlement, we came across bushes and trees that had leafed out. I hadn’t realized what a relief it would be to see a perfectly ordinary tree again, instead of all the bare, black skeletons we’d been passing. Professor Torgeson got all excited; I think she would have insisted on stopping to do a survey if it hadn’t been so late in the day, and if we hadn’t been so close to the settlement.

The Oak River settlement looked a lot like the pictures of Old Continent castles from my day school history books, except the castles were made of stone and the settlement was made of wood. The Rationalists had to depend on their walls and watchtowers, because they didn’t believe in using magic even for settlement protection, and they’d made quite a job of it. Two log walls surrounded the hilltop, far enough apart that nothing could climb the top of the first wall and then just jump up to the top of the second, and they had manned watchtowers on either side of the settlement.

Oak River didn’t have a wagonrest nearby, on purpose. The Rationalists didn’t want magic used anywhere on their settlement lands, not even the protection spells that everyone used when they were traveling. Putting up a wagonrest would have encouraged travelers, on top of which they’d have had to keep sending people out to remind anyone who camped there not to use spells. So they’d persuaded the Settlement Office not to build one. Anyone who came by Oak River had to stay in the settlement itself, so the Rationalists could keep a close eye on the magicians in the group.

Papa had sent off a message to my brother-in-law Brant Wilson, to let him and Rennie know we were coming. Sure enough, Brant was waiting inside when the inner gates swung open. He seemed tired and worried, and more than a little fidgety, but he relaxed some when he saw me. “Welcome back, Eff, Mr. Morris,” he said. “Glad you made it. We were expecting you last week.”

“Nice to see you again, Mr. Wilson,” Wash said, touching his hat brim. He dismounted and went on, “We had a little run-in with some saber cats back Bejmar way, and couldn’t come on until the main pride had been taken care of. Sorry to be late.”

“Saber cats?” Brant frowned. “That close?”

“Mixed pride, saber cats and Columbian sphinxes,” Wash said. “We’re not sure whether they came in from the west or up from the south. They’re gone now, and I doubt there are more to fret over. The ones we killed were starving.”

“Toller and the rest of the Settlement Council will want details, I expect,” Brant said. “But that can wait.” He looked past Wash at me and smiled. “How are you liking rattling around the settlements, Eff?”

“Well enough, so far,” I told him. I felt Professor Torgeson come up close behind me, and remembered my company manners. “Professor Torgeson, I’d like you to meet my brother-in-law, Brant Wilson. Brant, this is Professor Torgeson.”

“Pleased to meet you, Professor.” Brant offered his hand, and she shook it. “You’ll be staying with my wife and me.” He hesitated, then said, “If you’ll all come this way?”

It didn’t take me long to figure out what that little hesitation of Brant’s meant. The year before, when the whole group of us had come out to visit Rennie and look into the grub problem, most of the settlers in Oak River had just ignored us. Sometimes it was a kind of pointed ignoring, but mostly people pretended we weren’t there. This year, the few folks who were out glared, and two women made a point of crossing the street to avoid us.

Wash appeared to take no notice of the reaction we were getting, though I didn’t believe for a second that he hadn’t seen. Professor Torgeson’s eyes got narrower and narrower and her back got stiffer and straighter the farther we walked. I thought it was a good thing we didn’t have far to go.

Rennie must have been keeping an eye out for us, because the door of the house swung open before we even got close. She motioned to us all to come on in, and shut the door right quick once we did. We stood there staring uncomfortably at each other for a long minute, and then Albert and Seren Louise came running in and distracted everyone. The baby, Lewis, toddled after them; he was just over a year old, and still trying to get the hang of this walking thing.

I was almost as excited as the childings were. I had other nephews and nieces out East, but these were the only ones I’d seen more than once. Mama had given me presents for each of them — a toy horse for Albert, a rag doll for Seren Louise, and a wooden train engine with a string for baby Lewis to pull along behind him.

I thought the awkwardness with Rennie would go away by the time we got the childings settled down and everyone introduced, but it was no such thing. Oh, Rennie was polite enough, but even the professor, who’d never met her before, could tell that her heart wasn’t in it. As soon as the introductions were finished, Rennie gave Brant a dark look and said, “I’ll just go and add a bit to the kettle, if you’ll excuse me.”

Anyone who knew my sister could tell that she meant to turn her back and stalk off. Trouble was, the front room of the little two-room house wasn’t large enough for dramatic gestures. It was barely large enough to hold the five of us and the three rambunctious childings.

Brant glanced at the door, then at Rennie’s back. He sighed and said, “Albert, have you finished your chores?”

Albert nodded, suddenly too shy to speak.

“Then why don’t you and your sister go over to Mrs. Abramson’s and —”

“The Abramson girls aren’t allowed to play with Albert and Seren Louise anymore,” Rennie said without turning.

Brant shut his eyes for just a second. Then he opened them and made a grimace that was maybe supposed to look like a smile. “You three go in the bedroom and play for a minute,” he said. “We’re going to talk grown-up talk now.”

Albert nodded solemnly. He took his sister’s hand and ducked between the layers of fly-block netting that separated the front room from the equally small sleeping area. As he did, I frowned. When Papa and Lan and I had stayed with Rennie the summer before, there’d been a spell on the fly-block netting — nothing big or fancy, just a touch of magic to make it work a little better. Now there wasn’t one.

There’d been a bunch of other spells like that last summer, little things that Rennie’d done to make life easier and more comfortable, things the Rationalists wouldn’t notice. I slipped into the Aphrikan world-sensing, and saw that they were all gone, too. I glanced over at Rennie, but her back was still turned on the rest of us.

“I apologize for the cool welcome, Mr. Morris,” Brant said. “Things have gotten a mite tense since you passed through last fall.”

I tried to remember back to October, when Wash brought the golden firefoxes to the menagerie, but if he’d said anything about stopping by the Rationalist settlement, he hadn’t said it in my hearing.

“Just what is going on here, Mr. Wilson?” Professor Torgeson asked.

Rennie snorted but didn’t turn around. Brant raked his hand through his hair. “Like I said, things have been a mite tense. A few of the folks here —”

“A few!” Rennie whirled, still holding the wooden spoon she’d been stirring with. Thick brown drippings ran down the handle and dropped onto the floor, but she didn’t seem to notice. “Half the settlement, more than like!”

“Not that many,” Brant said with a sigh. I got the feeling from the way he stood that this was an old argument between them. Still, I wished the floor would open up and swallow us. Watching Rennie scold was bad enough; watching her scold while Wash and Professor Torgeson looked on was awful, even if it wasn’t me she was scolding at.

“Too many!” Rennie retorted. “And you’re just letting it happen. Even when they take it out on your children!”

“Rennie, I’ve talked till I’m blue in the face,” Brant said. “What more do you want? I can’t force people to behave —”

“Rationally?” Rennie snapped. She pointed the spoon at Brant. “Next to Toller Lewis, you’ve more influence than anyone else in this settlement. Use it!”

“If I tried what you’re suggesting, it’d split the settlement!” Brant snapped back. “Is that what you want?”

“I want my children to be safe,” Rennie said. “And I want them to have choices, and a proper education. And if that means burning your precious settlement to the ground, I —”

Wash cleared his throat very loudly. Rennie broke off and looked at us like she’d only just remembered we were all standing there, then flushed beet red and turned back to her cookpot to hide her face. Brant rubbed the back of his neck, trying and not succeeding very well to look like he wasn’t embarrassed.

“Perhaps we should step outside for a few minutes?” Professor Torgeson suggested.

“No!” Brant and Rennie said together.

“Why not?” I asked bluntly. I could see Professor Torgeson was going to keep trying to be polite, in a no-nonsense sort of way, but politeness never worked once Rennie’d gotten up on her high horse.

“Anti-magic sentiment has been growing all winter,” Brant said heavily after a moment. “I wouldn’t put it past some to try to … provoke you into using magic in violation of the settlement rules.”

“It’s bad enough they know you’re here,” Rennie put in. “It’d be worse to have you loitering outside our door, making it clear that this is where you’re staying.”

“If you’d rather we spent the night somewhere else —” Professor Torgeson began.

“There isn’t anywhere else!” Rennie said. “And no matter what they say, Eff’s family. I’ve given up a lot, but I’m not giving up that.”

I looked at her in surprise as Brant said soothingly, “No one’s asking you to.”

“You mean, you aren’t asking me to,” Rennie said, but she didn’t sound quite as snappish as she had before. “The rest of the settlement’s another matter.”

Everyone looked at her a little warily, and Rennie sighed. “Oh, sit down, the lot of you. It’s too late now; the damage is done.”

We looked at each other, then took seats at the little table. Brant glanced once at Rennie’s stiff back, then leaned up against the wall with another quiet sigh.

“What happened?” I said when it was clear nobody else was going to ask, or even speak.

Brant didn’t pretend to misunderstand. “It started last summer, after your visit. After everyone realized that the whole reason our fields weren’t infested with grubs was that the grubs and beetles were drawn away by the magic that all the other settlements practice.”

“Like going after bait in a trap,” I said, nodding. “Except it wasn’t on purpose.”

“Yes, well, some of our people feel that we’ve benefited from magic as a result, even if we didn’t do it deliberately,” Brant said.

“And they object to that?” Professor Torgeson said. “That’s ridiculous! Every adult in this settlement has benefited from magic all their lives long, right up until they crossed the Mammoth River on their way here. Don’t they realize that?”

“Some do,” Brant replied, “but they still don’t like it. We believe that magic is a crutch and people would be stronger and better off if they didn’t depend on it. The whole point of this settlement was to show that we don’t need magic, not the way people east of the Mammoth do.”

“Was it? Even so, you don’t sound as if you’re sure it’s such a good idea any longer,” Wash commented mildly.

“I —” Brant glanced at Rennie, then looked down. “I don’t know. But it’s one thing to refuse to use spells ourselves, and it’s another thing entirely to talk of deliberately bringing in a lot of grubs in order to destroy the natural magic in our settlement lands forever.”

“What!” the professor, Rennie, and I all burst out at once. Wash just stroked his chin and looked thoughtful.

“I thought you must have heard,” Brant said to Rennie. “Charlie came up with the idea last month. I didn’t think anyone would take it seriously, but …”

“But some of them are,” Rennie finished. “I told —” She snapped her mouth shut on the last of the sentence. I was impressed. Marriage must have been good for Rennie, if she’d learned to stop before she finished saying “I told you so.”

“That,” Professor Torgeson said after a minute, “has to be one of the stupidest ideas I’ve ever heard, even apart from the fact that it won’t work.”

“Why?” I asked. “I mean, I can see all sorts of reasons why it’s a bad idea, but why won’t it work?”

“Because you can’t permanently destroy ambient magic,” Professor Torgeson said. “Helmholz proved that ten years ago. You can drain an area of magic temporarily, but it always returns to normal within a few years.”

“The land does,” Wash said. “Draining animals or people … that’s different.”

“Different how?” I asked.

“Animals and people regenerate their magic a lot faster than land. Providing there’s anything left to regenerate — drain a living creature too far, and it dies. Hard to recover from that.”

“But the mirror bugs didn’t drain animals or people,” Brant said.

“Not directly,” Professor Torgeson said. “Not as far as we know at present.”

“Not directly?”

“We actually know very little about the life cycle and abilities of the mirror bugs,” Professor Torgeson said. “However, we have considerable evidence that both grubs and beetles could absorb magic from cast spells, and certainly from each other. That is how the trap spell kills them, after all — by using their own ability to drain magic against them. It is not inconceivable that a sufficient number of mirror bugs could drain animals or even people. It’s not an experiment I would ever wish to perform.”

“I should think not!” Rennie said.

“This is … I’m going to have to tell people right away.” Brant raked a hand through his hair. “I just hope they believe me.”

Rennie made a face, but she just nodded and went to call the children back to wash up for dinner. We had a solemn meal that night, and Brant went off in the morning to talk to his uncle, Toller Lewis, who headed up the Oak River settlement. He returned just before Wash and the professor and I left Oak River, and he didn’t look happy. He and Wash had a low-voiced conversation that didn’t make Brant look any happier, and then we retrieved our horses from the settlement stable and left. But Wash was real thoughtful all morning.

I couldn’t help wondering a bit myself. When I first found out about the Rationalists, I’d thought they lived up to their name. For a while, I’d even wanted to be one. But I could tell from the way Brant and Rennie whisked us out of sight when we arrived, and from some of the talk they’d had, that things had changed in Oak River since I’d been there the previous summer. It just might be that the settlers would be crazy enough to get a lot of mirror bug grubs to clear the magic out of their land, even after what Professor Torgeson said. Heck, they might decide they couldn’t believe anything a magician told them, and never mind that Professor Torgeson was a college professor and Wash was a circuit magician with more experience of the Far West than practically anybody! I just hoped that Rennie and Brant would have sense enough to take their childings and get out before things went too far. I had a notion that Rennie would be pleased enough to have a chance to leave, but Brant …

I felt a little hollow. Rennie had never been my favorite sister, not by a long shot, and she was in a mess of her own making. Still, she was family. I wanted to help, but all I could think of was to make sure I wrote to her more often. It wasn’t much, and it for sure and certain wasn’t enough, and I didn’t like either of those things one little bit. I didn’t have any other choices, though. You can’t force folks to have good sense, even if they’re family. Maybe especially then.