It will be Autumn-End Day soon, Maia thought, watching the constellation Thalia climb slowly toward zenith. They'll be putting up decorations in Port Sanger. All the pleasure houses will close till midwinter, and men from the sanctuaries will stroll through wide-open gates, making paper airplanes of their old visitor passes. They'll get sweets and cider, and children will ride their shoulders, pulling their beards, making them laugh.
Although rutting time had been effectively over before she and Leie departed on their ill-starred voyage, Autumn-End Day would mark the true start of winter's extended time of peace, lasting for nearly half of the long, uneven track of seasons, during which males were as harmless as lugars and the biggest problem was getting them to look up from their books, or whittling, or game boards. Half of the City Watch would disband till springtime. What need for patrols, with the streets as safe as houses?
Maia had known she would probably never again celebrate Autumn-End in Port Sanger. But she hadn't figured on spending a festival day in prison. Would she still be here at Farsun Time, as well? Somehow, she doubted her jailers would throw a gala then, either — offering hot punch and luck tokens to passersby. (What passersby?) Nor were any of the Guel guards likely to dress up as the Frost Lady, carrying her magic ladder, waving a wand of plenty, and giving treats and noisemakers to good little girls.
No, dammit! By Farsun Day, I'm going to be far away from here! She quashed a wave of homesickness.
Maia shook away distracting thoughts and lifted her miniature sextant, concentrating on the immediate problem. She could not be sure of the exact time, let alone the date. Without an accurate clock, it was impossible to fix her east-west position accurately, even if the instrument was in perfect working order. Longitude was going to be fuzzy.
But you don't need the exact time to figure latitude. You just have to know the sky.
I wish I had my book of ephemerides, she thought, wondering if the stationmistress at Holly Lock had thrown out her duffel yet, along with her meager possessions. The slim volume carried the positions of major sighting stars to all the accuracy she'd ever need. Without it, memory would have to do.
Maia rested her elbows on the sill of the narrow opening in the wall, and took another reference on Taranis, a compact stellar cluster where it was said the Enemy long ago laid waste to two planets before coming here to meet defeat on Stratos. Twisting a dial moved the image in her cross-hairs till it kissed the south horizon's prairie-sharp edge in the sextant's tiny mirror. She lowered the device in order to peer at the dial, and jotted another figure in her notebook.
At least there had been a ready solution to the problem of writing implements. Near the base of her makeshift observing pyramid, awkwardly covered by piled-up rags, lay the broken rain of a storage box. Maia had struggled for over an hour, soon after sunset, to heave the crate all the way up here by the window. Then, just half a second after she pushed it off, the box lost all that altitude, hitting the stone floor edge-on.The crash made a horrible racket, bringing guards to the door with muttered inquiries. But she had managed to appease the Guels, shouting that she'd only fallen while exercising. "I'm all right, though. Thank you for being concerned!"
After a long pause, the Guels finally went away, grumbling. Maia dared not count on their incuriosity surviving a repetition. Fortunately, the crash had loosened several slats, spilling paper and writing utensils onto the floor. By then, the stars were out. For the next hour, she applied her rusty navigation skills to fixing the location of this high-plains prison.
Maia lifted the notebook into Durga's wan light and added up the final result. Longitude is close to the one in the message, she thought. And latitude's nearly identical!
At first, contemplating the communique that had appeared so astonishingly on the Game of Life board, she concluded it must be a bad joke. Someone at the factory must have inserted the plea — the way, as kids, she and Leie used to carefully pry open petu nuts and replace the meat with slips of paper saying, "Help! Squirrels are holding us in a petu tree!"
Now she knew better. The message had not been coded before shipment. Whoever logged the memorandum had done so in a location very close to here. Within tens of kilometers. Yet she had seen no sign of any towns or habitations near this stone monolith. It was doubtful the countryside could support any.
In effect, that could only mean the writer dwelt in this same tower, perhaps just meters away. Maia felt a bit guilty that another person's predicament could bring such joy. I'm not happy you're in jail, she thought of her fellow prisoner. But Lysos! It's good not to be alone anymore!
