by Jim Grimsley
Tarma gestured at him impatiently. “I didn’t send it. I don’t know what our people were thinking.” Still looking at Tuk, who sat like a piece of wood. Jedda thought that out of the uniform he might have looked like a midlevel bureaucrat, his face indeterminately smooth and bland, his body frail. “But nevertheless, the plane came and these people brought it down by some means or other, and disabled one of our best soldiers.”
Tuk shook his head. His voice was slightly feminine. “I don’t believe it.”
“Your own pilot said as much, General.”
The people from the ministries were becoming very agitated now, even Himmer, because they were not used to any visible interaction with the military, it was not customary, but Tarma was glaring at Tuk. “I’m only repeating her words. The jet was headed here, trying to locate us by stat and then something took it over and landed it in a field.”
“The jet malfunctioned,” Tuk said. “The pilot managed to land. It would have been a simple malfunction.”
“Where did it land?” Himmer asked. “Near Karsk?”
“Yes,” Tarma said, “very near Karsk, where we got on the wagons.”
She never saw the connection. But Himmer and Jedda looked at one another.
Tarma dismissed them a little later, telling them all to remember what she had said, that this could be considered an act of war. Since they had no stats, it was important to remember, for later, when the stats were online again.
Jedda passed the night in Himmer’s room, lying on his warm, hairy belly, admiring the robust pink tip of his nipple, and listening to the wind. His body was firm, not yielding or soft, in spite of his size. He had spent part of the late evening learning to adjust the windows so that he could keep open the tiniest crack, the wind making a low sound in the room. He was fascinated by the wind. For herself, for the moment, she liked the size and warmth of him, and, this second night, she liked even more the fact that his krys name was superior and yet there was no stat to record the exchange between them. The lack of a record made the sex seem subversive in some way. Himmer was responsive as a partner, but when they were done with sex, he could have been any good companion, they talked freely, and she had a feeling they would be friends even when they stopped being lovers.
Afterward in the dark he asked, “What do you think of Vitter?”
“I’m wary of him,” she said. “But he knows a lot about this place.”
“That’s what I think, too.” Himmer had looped an arm around her, and she could smell the wine on his breath. “A lot of what he’s telling us isn’t on stat. Not even at Tarma’s level.”
It took her a moment to realize what he was saying.
She put an elbow on his ribs, looked him in the eye. “So?”
“So either he’s studying on his own, or he’s part of a group doing research that’s not on stat. Or else he has access at such a high level that I really don’t want to talk to him anymore. He might even know a Minister.”
This is one of those jokes that was always funny to a Hormling on Senal, and they both laughed.
“I think he’s studying on his own,” Jedda said. “There are people like him.” She went on to tell Opit’s story, that he had been one of the first people to come here when the gate was discovered, that he had lived here for a long time, studying, and had brought her here as his pupil.
Himmer absorbed all that she said without surprise, and then noted, “We always say it that way, you know? That the gate was discovered.”
“Yes?”
He looked her in the eye. “The gate was built, Jedda. I was baiting Vitter, before, but we all know it’s true. The gate was built and it was opened. Somebody opened it. From this side.”
“You think you know who? Malin?”
He shook his head. He was drawn, anxious. “No,” letting out breath, “not her. Irion.”
“You think he’s real?”
“Yes.”
She was listening to his heart, which had picked up a beat. She had the feeling, suddenly, that she was in the presence of someone special, someone who could see ahead. Her tone changed. “Tell me.”
“Irion made the gate,” he said. “He opened it, and he can close it. That’s what Vitter says we’re being told by the Erejhen, and that’s what I’ve heard, too. The message is too simple for us, though; we can’t understand it, because we’ve decided they’re primitive and that Irion is probably mythical. But all these people believe he’s real. They talk about him like they saw him yesterday.”
“You sound like my friend Opit.”
He hesitated another moment. “I’ve studied everything Opit uploaded about this place.”
She was amazed and drew away from him. The memory became piercing, the last time she saw Opit, dressed for travel and framed in a doorway saying good-bye with his weak eyes and sad face. Opit the last time he went north, to the city that had recently been opened, Telyar. Never seen again, vanished. Now, added to that, a man with ten letters in his krys name who knew of Opit’s work; among the Hormling, there is no higher compliment, and, often, no greater threat.
Himmer had the sense to let her think about what he had said. After a while he drew her down again, and she allowed herself to be weighted under his hairy arm. Soon after, he was snoring, and she was starting to drowse herself.
In the morning, a frantic knocking sounded at the door, light coming through the windows. Himmer slung a robe around his bulk and staggered to the door as Jedda hid under the covers. Melda’s voice. “We’re to meet Tarma in the forecourt as soon as we can get there.”
“What for?”
“I don’t know.”
“Krys believer,” Himmer muttered. “All right, I’ll get dressed.”
“I can’t get Jedda to answer. Have you seen her?”
“No. I’m sure she’s heard you, she’s just being stubborn.”
He closed the door in Melda’s face.
Jedda dressed in her clothes from the night before, rushed to her room, and dressed again. She hurried down the stairs with the sting of cold water still in her eyes.
Within moments Vitter shuffled into the forecourt, last to arrive. Tarma was standing with the Krii in the forecourt, then came back. “Malin is here and wants to see us right now.”
“Well, that’s wonderful,” Melda said.
But Tarma appeared to have her doubts. She was hesitant a moment, then, when the Krii stepped toward us, appeared to resign herself. “All right. This is what we came here for.”
So everyone followed her outside, to a pair of open carriages parked in the carriageway. There would be no time to put on more formal clothes, Kurn was complaining about that. Melda had forgotten she would be going outside and had to rush upstairs for her coat, her bony rump pinching the coveralls. The rest waited in the carriages, the Krii standing by attentively, till everyone had assembled, then speaking to the driver of the lead carriage, again using that mode of Erejhen Jedda could not follow.
The Krii and his retinue rode ahead of the carriages, another detachment of horse at the back. The party drew some attention in the streets, especially from customers in the street markets and sightseers along the causeways. Outlanders, the crowd was muttering, though only Jedda understood the word and the distrust it invoked.
The Hormling, ignorant of this reaction, were enchanted by the Erejhen, finding them to be almost morbidly beautiful.
“Look,” Tarma remarked, with a desultory wave of the hand, “every one of them, look. They’re all perfect, as if we’d designed them.”
“It’s eerie,” Melda admitted.
“It’s almost tedious,” Vitter said, but he was looking at the people on the streets the same as everybody else, almost smacking those thin, sharp lips.
Jedda said nothing, simply sat beside the comfortable warmth of Himmer, who was also quiet.
The ride carried them across the city and up to the highest part of the mountain, behind the towers and nearly level with them at the summit, up a swi
tchback street. Ahead she could see the mountain, and the name of the place, the Krii had told them, was Shurhala, which meant “face of the mountain” in Erejhen. A huge carving, bas-relief, in the mountainside, a female hunter and a mountain stag, and at the bottom of this immense sculpture a grand plaza and entry court leading to the interior. They rode into the side of the mountain through doors so high it would appear they had been meant to accommodate giants. Down a long stone gallery they rode into the heart of the mountain, and there, at the end of the road, in the outer courtyard of Shurhala, the seven delegates disembarked.
Here was magnificence to impress even an Orminy heiress. They were in a hall carved out of rock. Exquisite columns spiraled upward, delicate and airy, to support high vaulted ceilings that were as bright as if the sun were shining there in the peak of the roof. Some illusion of light, Jedda thought, some trick, because the carriages had led them inside the mountain, right into the heart. A party of people in the same costume as the Krii met them, soldiers accompanying them; and the men and women in Prin dress led the Hormling delegation forward through the formal halls of Shurhala, moving quietly, soldiers flanking them.
Tarma had been quiet through the latter part of the ride, and now that she was here, she had shrunken somewhat in aspect. Her hair had even flattened against her skull, and she appeared quite tiny in the expanse of the vault.
At the end of a final long room, on a dais, stood a woman, shaded beneath a canopy of stone. An intricate lattice was carved to resemble a flowered vine, parts of it plated with a silver that shone with reflected light. A long, curved wall behind her was carved with a wonderful relief, one that instantly reminded Jedda of the tapestry in her room at the guest house, a long thin strand between beach and sheer mountains, a chaos of a battlefield along the beach, and a tower on a mountainside beginning to crack and crumble. The beautiful carving had a sense of flow and proportion, the staggering mountains and the fabulous battle being waged at the foot. Jedda found herself so taken by the carving that she had eyes only for it, until a voice began to speak, supple and sinuous, and she turned to see what person could make that sound.
“Welcome to my house,” Malin said, in Alenke.
Taller than anyone in the room, she looked down at them, a good head above their shoulders. Himmer was a tall man and she topped him by a brow and a half. She was slender, dressed in one of those fabrics the Erejhen weave, supple as silk but with the thickness and softness of fine wool, jeweled chains to tie the dress in place along with a draping robe across her shoulder, her hair pulled back from her face, braided and long, decorated with delicate silver chains and small gems.
Tarma opened her hands at the palm. “We are pleased to be your guests.”
“You are not my guests.” She had a face, Jedda thought, like nothing else in the world. Eyes limpid and green as emeralds, clear and full of light. Skin tinged the color of iron. Hair white and soft. She tilted her head to the side and looked away for a moment, over Tarma’s head, into space, and then she looked back at Tarma. “We’ve told your people we won’t tolerate any of your air machines crossing into our country. But I find that you actually planned for this to happen. You have arranged this incident to provoke me to some act. Why?”
Tarma reacted with an uncharacteristic calm, and this led Jedda to watch her closely. “We’ve done what? Arranged for an incident? But I explained that to your Krii.”
“I’ve heard your words.” She stepped close to Tarma now, towering over her. “But I find them to be misleading, when I understand the truth that you know inside you. What is this thing?”
She had come close to Tarma, bent and lifted the stat from her waist. Tarma never moved, unnaturally still, and when Malin drew back, Tarma drew a gasping breath, as if she had been released from some grip.
Malin held the stat to her ear. She closed her eyes. She looked at Tarma.
“You can send your army and your navy against us if you like, I’ll let them pass through the gate. If that’s what you want. If the war you are already fighting is not enough for you, you are free to try to start another.”
Tarma blushed, sputtered, “That’s not at all what I want, or what any of us want.”
“But the ships are already on the way,” Malin said, “I can see them.”
Silence. Tuk’s jaw was working, he had made a tight fist. Tarma looked at him, and Malin looked at her, and at him, and said to Tarma, “You really didn’t know, did you? But this one did.”
Tuk backed away from Malin when she walked toward him; he was fingering some buttons on his belt. But at a certain point he simply stood still and watched her, and she walked up to him and took the belt device. She released him then. That time she made a sign with her hand so he could see it was she who had been holding him, some invisible force. She turned his device, a small silver disk, over in her hand, listened to it. She handed it to one of her attendants and said, “This is one of the technologies we have asked that you not bring here as well. A listening device. We will keep it.”
Tuk was shaking with rage and fear, in equal measures, his body torn between. She walked away from him.
To Tarma, she said, “You can’t be blamed that your people have decided to test us. But I don’t want you here in my city anymore. You’re to go south to Evess and wait there till your army and your navy come.”
“No one is sending ships here,” Tarma said. “I came here to apologize for the incident with the aircraft, to talk to you about increased trade.”
“You came to talk about land,” Malin answered. “You want ours. Your own world is full. You have few resources left and far too many people. You are fighting a war that costs you greatly in all the places where you live. And you have come to suspect just how large our world is. We have land. We have resources in plenty. We have so many things you need. You would like to come and take them, you want to test us to find out whether you’re stronger. There’s no way to stop you from trying, you’re bound to do it, so we may as well have it happen now. So I think you ought to go south, and that way you can be there to see what happens when your army tries to come ashore.”
Tuk was sputtering, trying to say something, not able quite to make words. Malin looked at him. She said a word and he slumped to the floor. She was tenths away from him when he fell and never laid a hand on him. Her people caught him. She had already turned her back on the rest of the delegates. “Never send anyone like him to my country again, or if you do, don’t expect him back.”
She had them ushered out of her house and into the carriages. The whole way across the city, Jedda was certain Tuk was dead, though he was riding in the other carriage and she couldn’t know for sure. He had fallen to the floor like lifeless weight. Tarma was holding her stat, staring blankly ahead.
When the carriages reached the guesthouse, there were wagons already waiting, loaded with the baggage that had been brought down from their rooms, everything packed for them. Tarma went white when she understood the household staff had been through the delegates’ rooms, though what is there ever to find in a Hormling’s room? There’s a bed and a stat. That’s another of those jokes that’s always funny to a Hormling, and Jedda laughed when she thought of it. She was liking the Erejhen more and more.
Tuk came to consciousness in the courtyard lying beside a fountain with something that looked like a shaggy fern hanging over its lips. Melda helped him up, though she behaved as though he were porcelain, and attempted to avert her face from his in order to avoid offending him. Tarma asked him, rather coldly, if he was all right. “It appears they’re taking us out of town in these wagons right away.”
“I’ll be fine,” said Tuk, brushing off his coveralls, averting his eyes.
Her mouth was working as she looked at him. The Erejhen were all around, packing bags into the wagons and tying them in place, adding provisions and water. She managed to hold her tongue. As for him, he had the look of a drunk awakening after a long binge, as though he were not quite sure where he was.<
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Without any warning the Krii appeared in the street with his retinue, sent in his householder to announce him, and followed himself in very short order, the briefest interval their ideas of politeness would allow. Jedda had once watched the full entry ritual in a wealthy house in Charnos, one of the southern cities, when the exchange of greetings, while it was admittedly being drawn out for her entertainment, went on for nearly a twentieth of the day. This considered, one might as well say the Krii burst in the room.
“How kind of your Malin to send you to say good-bye to us.” Tarma bowed her head and spoke to her in her coolest voice.
“Malin has no words for you,” the Krii said. “I’ve come to watch you leave.”
Tarma turned her back on them all to get in the wagon. She was seething. No one would look at her or speak to her for fear she would remember it later. But everyone was waiting, except Tuk An, who sat with his smooth, thin hands folded in his lap. Tarma stared at him. She was standing on the wagon step when she slowly turned and said to the Krii, “You have no idea how sorry you’ll be for this, all of you. If we really are sending our army and navy here, we will overrun you in a matter of days. You have no idea how many of us there are.”
“There are thirty billion of the Hormling on this world alone,” the Krii said. “We already know the number. I hope for you to have a pleasant journey.”
Jedda, settled beside the comfortable warmth of Himmer, waited for the wagons to move, keeping her gaze on the carpet, where it could do no harm. Something about what the Krii had said caused her to remember the remark. Within moments, the escort that would ride with them called out a signal and the party lurched forward. She watched the Krii in the distance, tall and slender, dark skinned and dark haired. “Good-bye, good Kirin,” she muttered, and Vitter looked at her.
4
Two days in the hard wagon, then the journey south by putter. As soon as they were in the putters, the stats came online again.
