Back | Next
Contents

Thirty-Eight

Three years past, the steep-sided draw above Hidden Haven had held a decent wagon road. Then a mud and rock slide sloughed off the south wall, blocking road and creek, forming a pond behind the mass of dirt and rock until the water cut a new course around it, leaving a morass behind.

Now a unit of army engineers, tough brawny men with callused hands, had labored with crowbars, shovels and picks, kaabors and kaabor-drawn barrows. They'd dug and ditched and leveled until the draw was passable for a wagon again.

Amaadio knew it was passable because a wagonload of building supplies, two of lumber, another of baggage and food, and a ponderous wagonload of roofing tiles had all passed down ahead of him. To cross the mud, the engineers had rough-cobbled the new wagon road with native stones of whatever size. Amaadio Akrosstos winced and swore as the large army wagon lurched over rocks and down the draw, carrying his precious equipment. The glassware and light crockery was what he worried most about, that and the carboys of liquid reagents. He'd packed them himself in large baskets, not sparing the straw, that they'd take no harm. But he winced anyway.

He'd rather have stayed home and done the job there. But it was for Hrumma and for Hrum, secrecy was wanted, and there'd need to be explosions. Deliberate explosions! So they'd picked this Hrum-forsaken place. He'd shaken his head when they'd told him about the explosions; to a Hrummean herbalist, an explosion was an accident, something to be avoided. Dangerous, a significant source of injuries and death to venturesome herbalists, though fumes killed more of them or left them strange . . .

But the job would be interesting and different, and they were paying him well. Besides which, Trinnia had liked the idea of spending a week or two, even a working week or two, away from the city and close to a beach.

They left the slide behind, and now he could see past a shoulder of land to the inlet and the hamlet above it. They'd been abandoned since the slide had buried the road, but from a distance it looked as if people still lived there.

* * *

Reeno and Brokols had examined Hidden Haven before they'd chosen it, and when they'd decided, Reeno had made a hurried list of what needed to be done to make it useable. Juliassa had visited yesterday, with Torissia and three guards, on pretense of a day's outing.

It was small, even for a hamlet: six stone dwellings plus sheds and other outbuildings, built near the creek eighty yards above the beach. Below the slide, the creek was too muddy now for drinking or for Amaadio's professional needs, so the army had built a small weir upstream of the slide, with a pipe on trestles carrying water to the hamlet, where it filled a small cistern.

The hamlet had been there a long time. Its markets had been three inland villages. It had never been much more than a subsistence operation, in recent decades exporting its youth to Theedalit and the distant but increasingly prosperous east coast towns. So when the slide had blocked the road to their markets, the fisherfolk had left.

The inlet itself was deep and well-sheltered, some four hundred yards long and more than a hundred wide. Close beyond the narrow mouth, a rocky isle, like some great rude menhir, hid the opening, and in rough weather made entry a matter of skill and care.

Juliassa had found two weatherbeaten old skiffs upside down above the beach. Their gunnels had rotted enough that the tholepins had broken out, but there was a paddle beneath each of them, and she'd imagined paddling one of them out on the inlet or maybe beyond.

The inlet itself was occupied; some serpents used it as a nursery. That especially pleased Juliassa, and she wondered if a human could learn to speak with them. They were said to make sounds above water, but serpents were well known to be shy, or perhaps aloof. As far as that was concerned, she didn't even have permission to work there yet, but she had no doubt at all that she'd get it.

* * *

When the wagon train arrived, the only woman with it was Amaadio's wife; Trinnia Akrosstas had hired on as a cook. Besides Amaadio and Trinnia, Brokols and Reeno had brought a handyman, Carrnos Frimattos, and four builders who would reroof the buildings the project would use, and do minor repairs. They began with an all-hands project, all but Trinnia, tearing the thatch roof off the building most of them would live in. Dusk was settling, and they were dirty, sweaty, and tired, before they finished reroofing it.

Back | Next
Framed