The Children of Kings

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  The celebration turned increasingly raucous after the women withdrew. The feasters passed round-bellied skins around the circle. When one came to Gareth, he lifted it to his lips before he caught Rahelle’s expression of warning. He tipped it back, pretending to drink. Enough remained on his lips, burning like liquid fire, to convince him of the drink’s potency.

  In his years at court, Gareth had perfected the appearance of drunkenness. He knew he had little head for anything stronger than ale or watered wine. He also knew that men like Octavien Vallonde deliberately plied him with much stronger liquors in order to render him more malleable. Surreptitiously, he glanced around the circle to see how the others responded to the drink. In this way, he noticed he was not the only one who lifted the skin with every appearance of enjoyment but did not swallow. The other man was Cuinn.

  The villager who’d carried back the antelope showed no such restraint. His face flushed in the reflected glow of the fire. Every few moments, he or one of his friends burst out in coarse laughter, shouting out bits of tales and jokes. Someone would begin a song and others would join in for a verse or two, usually a variant of the victory song.

  Every aspect of the feast showed Gareth how poor these villagers were, how marginal and precarious their existence. They lived surrounded by potential catastrophe. A season without rain, a well that failed, predators that decimated their flocks, raiders or disease—any of these things would mean the end of their tiny community. No wonder they celebrated the rare bounty of the hunt with such intense abandon. No wonder Cuinn would not speak of the blasters, for fear of losing their tenuous advantage.

  “Sing for us, man of Carthon!” one of the men called.

  “My songs are too poor for such an occasion,” Gareth protested.

  “A song!” the others shouted. “A song to praise our brave hunters!”

  “A tribute to the kihar and prowess of all Nuriya!”

  “Nuriya, Jewel of the Sands!”

  Gareth let them go on in this manner while he racked his brains for a suitable song. He had a fairly good voice, but most of what he knew was in casta, the language of the Comyn. The respite paid off, for he remembered several of the ditties sung by Cyrillon’s men on the road to Carthon. The melodies were strong and simple, the words a patois of Dry Towns dialect and cahuenga, and the subjects frankly bawdy. Such songs would never be performed for the Elhalyn Prince. His parents would have been scandalized, and so he had been delighted.

  He performed three of them, slurring his voice and making up nonsense syllables when he could not remember the exact phrases. With any luck, he’d sound like a drunken stranger from far-off Carthon. As he’d hoped, his singing elicited generalized merriment, both at what the men could understand of the lyrics and at his own bumbling rendition.

  By this time, the women had come back and taken away the remains of the food, most likely to share it among themselves. A few of the men staggered away from the circle, but most of them remained, drinking and singing, and telling stories.

  One of those who left, quietly and unobtrusively, was Cuinn. Gareth marked the direction the headman took. He waited for a moment when he could follow without being noticed. Luck was with him, for two or three of the village men began a dance outside the circle on the side opposite from where Gareth sat. Kicking and whirling, staggering and howling in laughter, the dancers drew all other eyes to them. The audience called out encouragement as each dancer strove to outdo the others.

  Gareth crawled backward away from the circle. Once past the circle of firelight, he stood up and threaded his way between the clusters of huts. There was no sign of Cuinn. Gareth hurried, caught by a sudden fear that he’d lost his quarry. His own footsteps, leather over bare soil, sounded overly loud.

  At the base of the nearest hill, Gareth halted. What if he’d made a mistake and Cuinn had taken some other route? Or been about some perfect ordinary business within the village?

  Then I will have to go on alone. It would be insane to wander into those hills at night. The chance of stumbling on the Federation base was slim, especially compared to the risk of some mishap, a fall most certainly, or an encounter with a predator. He didn’t know what kind of beast might hunt here, but the antelope must have natural enemies besides the villagers.

  Behind him, a pebble rolled over hard dirt. It was the faintest sound, one that Gareth might not have heard, had he not been straining for any sign of the headman. He froze, not daring to breathe. The sound had come from behind him, but how far? In what direction?

  Laughter erupted from the celebrants around the fire. Whoever was following Gareth might advance another step or three, the sound masked by cheering. Ordinary senses were useless. Gareth slipped his starstone from the Nebran amulet and reached out with his laran.

  The village took on a completely different appearance. Pinpoints and globes of living energy flared, most likely mice and sleeping children and beasts in their pens. The bonfire of activity behind him must be the circle. He probed the motes of brilliance, separating human from animal, animal from the dying embers of harvested plants. The villagers gave off only the unfocused mental chatter and emotional surges of those without laran, but behind him . . . like the single ringing of a bell, sweet sound and color and the smell of a meadow after a storm . . . a flicker of warmth . . .

  He knew her. He would have known her anywhere.

  “There!” Rahelle whispered, so close that her breath touched his cheek.

  Slipping the starstone back into the locket, he looked where she pointed. Shadows wavered, dark shifting upon dark, in a fold of the hills.

  There was no use trying to convince Rahelle to stay behind. He thought of a dozen reasons why it was too dangerous, knowing she would interpret them all as insults. The truth was that he could not stop her. The harder truth was that without her keen sight, he would not have noticed the man-sized flicker of movement against the hills. So they went on together. He tried not to think what might happen, tried not to see her as Rahelle but as Rakhal, tough and resourceful.

  They had not gone far into the hills, following the erosion gullies, when the village passed out of sight behind them. The trail led steeply upward, cradled between the jutting ridges. Fortunately, the night was clear and the skies unclouded. Once or twice, Gareth heard a cry from above, most likely a desert owl.

  The hills were not entirely bare, as they had appeared from a distance. Curling grasses lined the trail to either side. Things rustled in their dried stalks, perhaps the natural prey of the hunter aloft. The smell of the earth shifted as they climbed, here and there hinting of moisture, of things still green, of the honey-musk of ripe seed-heads.

  The moons set, casting the ash-dark hills into near darkness. Only a few stars glimmered in the west, while from beyond the eastern ridge, a faint intimation of light tainted the sky.

  Gareth tripped over an unseen obstacle, most likely a rock, caught himself, and kept going. One foot and then the next, he climbed. Climbed and stumbled, stumbled and climbed, until he realized with a start that he could see his feet.

  At last they came to a crest, a flat place before the trail dipped downward. Dawn, red and oblique, sifted into a wide valley floor ringed by sharply rising walls. Much of it was hidden by the outcropping below. There was no sign of the village headman.

  Gareth took in the sight, his thoughts racing. His first impression was of a crater, although as far as he knew, Darkover had no significant volcanic activity. It might as well be a natural formation, weathered by the passing of many seasons in such a way as to now appear like an enormous bowl.

  They started down the trail, slipping on the loose pebbles, until they came around a shoulder of splintered rock. Below them, the basin now looked broad and flat. Shadows stretched from the eastern rim except where, not too far distant from the wall on which they stood, strings of yellow lights glared from poles. A field of actinic brightne
ss surrounded arch-roofed buildings, sheds, and tall stacks of crates. . . and what surely must be the smallest, ugliest starship in creation.

  No distinctive insignia marked the craft, at least none that Gareth could see. Its outer surfaces looked dull, in places blackened or deeply scored, as if it had been raked by the claws of a celestial predator. It squatted in the middle of an irregular patch of fused sand.

  Like most others of his caste and generation, Gareth had gone through a spasm of space fever. He’d visited the Thendara spaceport, properly supervised of course, and watched the great Federation ships take off. On one memorable occasion, he and his escort had been permitted on board. The captain had given him a sheaf of beautifully rendered images of the various types of craft capable of planetary landings. Although that had been some years before the Federation withdrew from Darkover, Gareth remembered their sleek, functional lines and impeccable maintenance.

  This craft hardly looked big enough for a crew, let alone any cargo. It reminded Gareth of one of those short-coupled, muscular horses of the Valeron Plains that could turn on a spot no bigger than the span of his hand, and launch itself from standing to a full-out gallop within a single stride.

  Quick. Agile. And, by the look of it, without the luxury of tending to appearances.

  A few men moved between the crates, the buildings, and the opposite side of the ship, where the hatch must be located. None of them wore uniforms.

  Rahelle murmured under her breath, “So you were right about the Federation landing here.”

  He found his voice. “That’s no Federation ship.”

  17

  “What is it, then?”

  “I don’t know. I need to get closer.”

  “We.”

  Argument would have been useless. He closed his eyes, prayed for patience, and said nothing.

  Rahelle touched his arm and pointed below, drawing his attention to the trail and the places where rough protrusions of rock provided cover. They would still be exposed from time to time, but chances were good the off-worlders would not look in the right place at the right time to see them.

  To go any farther would entail a criminally irresponsible risk. He ought to return the way they’d come, race back to Nuriya, locate Adahab, and get himself back to Thendara. He ought to be anywhere but here.

  Although Rahelle posed a dilemma, her presence steadied him. She held herself so still, hardly breathing, and yet in his mind, she was like one of the oases they had passed across the Sands of the Sun. At the very edge of his mental awareness, he sensed the steady beating of her heart, the glow that was her spirit. He remembered staring up at the swath of stars on clear nights, and if he held his gaze very steady, he could just barely discern the pale wisps of distant galaxies. The instant he looked directly at them, they vanished from his sight. His laran perception of Rahelle was like that. He dared not look directly at her for fear that she, like those glorious, unreachable stars, would vanish.

  Instead, he reached out a hand, bone and blood, nerve and sinew. He touched small, strong fingers, and felt them tighten around his own.

  He went down, crouched and gliding, to the first of the outcrops. She followed like his shadow. Here they paused, studying the men at their work below.

  After another step and then another, voices sounded below, indistinct. Gareth thought the men spoke Terran Standard, but he could not make out the words. He was gathering himself to slip down to the next lookout point when three men emerged from behind a piece of landing apparatus shaped like a stubby paddle. Two of them were clearly off-worlder, and both wore one-piece, dark brown garments. One was unremarkable in stature, but the other resembled a bloated spider with spindly, elongated legs and massive shoulders. The blue-tinted pattern over his hairless skull might have been a fuzz of hair or a tattoo.

  The third man was Cuinn.

  By his posture, the headman was not at all pleased with the conversation. He accompanied his words with a gesture that indicated an urgency, a matter of kihar. The thin-legged man gave no sign he’d understood either words or hand movements. He turned to his fellow, who consulted a palm-sized instrument, perhaps a dictionary or translation device. Gareth had heard about such things from Lew Alton’s friend Jeram, who had once fought with the Terranan and then stayed behind when they left.

  The discussion went on for some minutes more. Cuinn grew visibly more agitated, yet the off-worlders seemed as oblivious or as uncaring as before.

  What were they saying? Gareth itched with curiosity. He considered and as quickly discarded the notion of using his starstone. Rahelle would demand an explanation, and he doubted that even with the gem’s capacity to amplify psychic energy, he would be able to pick up much of value. Cuinn might not be a city Dry Towner, but his people must have sprung from the same roots, and no one had ever reported them having any laran. The only reason Rahelle had even a trace of psychic ability was through her paternal Domains ancestry.

  As for the off-worlders . . . Watching the casual arrogance of their stance and the way they persistently ignored the increasing intensity of Cuinn’s demands, Gareth was not at all sure he wanted to sense their thoughts.

  Cuinn reached into the front folds of his tunic. Gareth’s muscles tightened reflexively. His body recognized, if his mind did not yet, the shift from words to action. An instant later, two more off-worlders stepped from behind the landing apparatus to flank their leader. One wore the same dark-brown garment, but the other was dressed in trousers and sleeveless vest, both bulging with pockets. Wide belts of some glossy material circled their waists, and from these hung a variety of what Gareth assumed were tools . . . except for the blasters beside their right hands. Clearly, they expected trouble.

  The village headman paused. The off-world leader barked out something in Terran Standard. Cuinn reached into the folds of his shirt and drew out a blaster. He moved slowly, holding it muzzle downward. With his other hand, he pointed to the chief off-worlder, then to the weapon, and finally back toward the hills where Gareth and Rahelle crouched.

  He can’t know we’re here, Gareth told himself. He must mean the village.

  The guards shifted ominously. Gareth could almost see the way their eyes narrowed and smell the adrenaline in the air. One of them curled the fingers of his right hand around the handle of his blaster.

  The off-worlder conferred with his interpreter. Cuinn repeated his gestures, this time emphasizing them with a step toward the hill, then turning to point again at his blaster and that of the two guards.

  Blasters. He’s got one, and he wants more.

  Rahelle’s fingers tightened around Gareth’s arm. He dared not speak aloud.

  The translator consulted his device again. His voice was too low for Gareth to catch any more than a muted rumble. Then the leader turned to face Cuinn. Head high and spine rigid, the villager held his ground.

  The off-worlder no longer looked vaguely comical, but as eerie as a gigantic scorpion-ant and as deadly. He took his time replying, and when he spoke, it was with a few words only.

  Gareth needed no laran to sense Cuinn’s answer, delivered as much in the single step he took toward the leader as any verbal outburst. Did this off-worlder not realize he was driving a man of pride and dignity, perhaps the only things of value Cuinn possessed, to the brink? Or did he simply not care?

  Rahelle saw it, too. She cursed softly under her breath.

  A stillness like the shadow beneath a storm front spread across the scene below. The off-world leader tilted his head, a movement so slight and so compelling, it fractured the quiet. Moving with catman-like speed, the two guards bracketed Cuinn. The next instant, one had relieved the headman of his blaster and the second stood ready to restrain him.

  Whatever these strangers might be, Cuinn was no fool. He remained still, a statue of frost and flame. In Gareth’s imagination, the air around Cuinn shimmered with his outrag
e.

  The off-world leader was speaking again, more rapidly now, and gesturing, although in an unfamiliar pattern. He sounded to Gareth like a courtier making a speech, but one that conveyed the threat of power and the will to use it, not idle mouthing of words.

  Cuinn was no underling to be cowed by a show of strength. Anyone who understood even a little of the customs of the Dry Towns would have known better than to try intimidation. Gareth would not have been surprised if Cuinn had hurled himself at the off-worlder, armed only with his own teeth.

  Cuinn made no such move. Wiliness and the slow nurturing of revenge were said to be highly prized by the Dry Towners, and he must have been steeped and seasoned in those ways. He might be dismissed, but he was not beaten.

  There would, in the words of the Terranan, be hell to pay.

  The off-world leader seemed oblivious to the grudge he was creating. Gareth saw unbridled self-assurance in the way he addressed himself to Cuinn, not as one proud man to another but as someone so superior that he could dispense with common courtesy.

  He sees a savage, ignorant and superstitious, with no more effective weapons against blasters than a few stones and a sling. So had the Federation once regarded the men of the Domains. That was before Sharra, the immensely powerful matrix stone that had ravened through the hills at Caer Donn, leaving the city itself a blasted ruin . . . and brought down a starship.

  After that, the Federation had scrupulously enforced the Compact. These off-worlders had no experience of weapons more advanced then their own.

  Hence, ignorant savages.

  Gareth ducked behind the rocky shoulder just as Cuinn turned and, with infinite dignity and even more menace, headed back up the trail.

  Rahelle tugged at Gareth’s arm. As soundlessly as he could, he crept back. He hugged the rock until he had put it between himself and the trail.

  Cuinn made no effort to conceal himself as he climbed. He moved quickly, with the assured step of a man in full command of his own destiny. Grit crunched beneath his feet, and pebbles went tumbling down the trail. Air currents swirled in his wake.