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Fishy freshwater breezes entered the hatch now, wafting away some of the stench of the transport.
The fast leg of our journey had been accomplished in a freighter, with us as piggyback cargo. At nine hundred souls, we were too few to justify, or to afford, hiring an entire transport, which can carry, they say, up to fifteen thousand people. I'd hate to imagine such crowding, and turned my attention back to my immediate surroundings.
We heard sounds of water lapping, a lone bird or something calling out in harsh joy, and the murmur at our backs of the nine hundred Chosen, each eager for a first glimpse of the new, the promised, land. With darkness behind us, we stood in the hatch in orange light, squinting.
I studied Reverend Castell's eyes, seeking a clue. Did he see his destiny as he absorbed the first sights of his hard-won, costly last chance? Did he smell on the chilly air a cornucopia of plenty, or the stench of decay? Were any of his senses of this world, or all?
Someone said our First Prayer, "Be still as the silence/At the heart of the note/As it swells to fill the song," as if intoning a hymn, and Reverend Castell broke his pose to step forward. The shuttle bumped the dock.
The next thing I knew a look of surprise crossed his face and he sprawled forward onto the dirt levee on which the dock was built.
So it was that my first step onto our new home was a leap of consternation and mortification. "Reverend," I said, along with three other acolytes, kneeling to help him rise. Knowing it had been my foot which had caused this undignified advent upon Haven, I blushed and tried to stammer an apology.
His electric gray eyes sparked a gaze toward me. That old familiar tingle of, what? Awe? Terror? It held me, that feeling, and my mouth fumbled into silence as he said, "We must all embrace our home, this Haven." And he gestured for us to lie down, too.
Word passed back in a chain of whispers as near to silence as the circumstance allowed, and the next few Chosen jumped down from the ship and fell prostrate for a few seconds. It was the inauguration of Reverend Castell's ritual of return, which he used at the termination of every journey thereafter.
Of course the ship's crew jeered and shouted catcalls. Our church had hired their transport ship and a crew, but we hadn't even made a bid for their support or loyalty. "Clumsy lot," one tough said. Another spat at us repeatedly. To them, we were rag-tag fanatics off on some wild goose hegira, a doomed group of dupes led by a megalomaniac with a simplistic Christ complex.
I'd heard all that and more, during our purgatorial months of motion between Earth and Haven, and not all of it muttered or whispered, either. We bore their assaults upon our dignity with stoic silence, some of us not even bothering to wipe the spittle from our faces or hair.
Some of us may have wondered of what use a tiny act of cleanliness might be to a group as filthy as we, after fourteen months in the transport vessel, washing only with gritty drysoap and handheld ionizers, perfumed only by the food-pastes smeared or spilled. Odors were among the least of our burdens, anyway. Old bruises from tests of our pacifism, administered by the ship's brutal crew bored between duties, kept some of us moving stiffly.
Also, at least one of our women was probably pregnant from a rape I'd unknowingly witnessed one sleep-period, when, in utter silence, the blanketed bunk-pallet beside mine had erupted into thrashing. Only when the crewman rose up from his victim had I realized what had occurred, and my shame and fury were such that I barely spoke for a week as I sought harmony with the event.
Now I shivered as I watched the others jump down from the hatch.
One of the men in a rowboat, still holding the rope by which the shuttle had been winched to shore after splashdown, called out lewd suggestions to our women and girls. I saw at least one of our men grow somber. His eyes grew hard and his mouth set sternly, for one of the prettiest women was his daughter, but none of us broke the peace as we sought to harmonize with the strains of Haven.
I stood with Reverend Castell to one side as he supervised both the advent of his flock upon Haven and the unloading of our supplies. "Each of us must do our part," he said once, bending to lift a parcel that a contemptuous crewmember had dropped. Smiling, Reverend Castell carried it to the stack of goods growing on the splintery bare-plank wharf. Although our supplies had all fit into the same shuttle that had brought us down from the orbiting transport vessel, they were sufficient to keep us going for as many as three years, even if Haven granted us nothing.
A shudder rippled through me as I avoided thinking past those three years. I bent to lift a sack of seeds, but a brother acolyte stopped me. "Let our beasts of burden do the heavy work," he said, gesturing at the laboring, infidel crewmembers.
Glancing at the joker, Reverend Castell said, "Take that man's place, and give him a rest." He pointed to a particularly loudmouthed space-faring lout, who had berated us worse with every load he carried.
Keeping my gaze on the hem of my robe, I balanced my conflicting humors and thought I understood the reverend's actions. "An aspect of respect is the ability to know another's lot in life," now made more sense to me. It was no longer just a tenet from the Writings.
A crane and several hoists helped complete our unloading, but it was past first, or Byers' dusk by the time we finished. By then we acolytes had done as much as anyone else, and the Ke
Faces showed fatigue, but a few showed more. Some openly grumbled, others gaped at the bleak landscape surrounding them as if trapped, and all of us shivered in our robes. My own hood I kept up, but many seemed to enjoy having their ears turn blue. Rubbing the tip of my nose helped, but only for a few seconds.
Aside from the cold was the air itself, which seemed somehow hard to breathe, unsatisfying to the lungs. A ringing in my ears and a dizziness assailed me, too, but I ignored such trifles in my earnest desire to be worthy of the reverend's respect and trust. Being acolyte to such a man is no small thing, and no small things can be allowed to interfere.
As the Shangr?-La Valley was turned away from Byers' for a while, Cat's Eye peered down in quarter phase, its horizontal pupil balefully dark as the rest cast dim light over us. Jagged mountains tore at the bottom of the sky in menacing silhouette, while the lake itself glittered with phosphorescent blue-green flashes and orange Eyeshine. I think I saw Hecate, or Ayesha, or Brynhild, one of Haven's companion moons, but it may have been something else, or nothing outside my overloaded mind.
"Our balbriggens don't suffice," Reverend Castell said to me, having noticed my shivers. His use of Gaelic words meant he was in a good mood, I knew. "We must layer." He tapped the satchel I carried for him and I put it on the ground. He knelt and tugged out another robe, as plain and pocketless as the one he wore. "Pass the word," he said, a grimace of meaning on his face.
Sibilance behind us was the only hint that the Chosen had heard and obeyed. It struck me that some of us had been waiting only for an example, because no sooner was the Reverend Castell layered in the rough cotton cloth than many of the Chosen were pulling on their second or third garments. Surely they'd had them out ahead of time.
Such thoughts are best not voiced, however, so I do