by S. L. Viehl
Ygrelda turned to the large woman who had laughed at Resa. “You see, Mlap? She learns.”
“Like a beast does.” A peak formed in Mlap’s top lip. “Better you hitch her to the jlorra master’s pack sled, or you may find yourself carrying her about like an unweaned babe.”
Resa thought of what Hurgot had said to her after the burning-eyed woman had made her lip do the same thing and used the carry word. Perhaps what Hurgot had said to her then would also please this woman who had shown her kindness.
“At least you do not weigh very much,” Resa told Ygrelda, using the same vocal intonations that Hurgot had.
Every woman in the shelter stopped talking and stared at her. Mlap’s chin sagged and her face grew red, but the other women made the huh-huh-huh sound, quite loudly, as did Ygrelda until her eyes became wet.
Feeling yes, very good, Resa drank from her bowl.
Teulon’s dream always began with the League general’s words.
There will be never be peace, and it is time that your people learned that.
The guards had come out of nowhere. Later, Teulon would kill them and many of the others who came to take their place. But hearing the general’s first words had left him too stunned to react. He had been invited to the League ship as a neutral moderator, to bring peace between two old enemies.
Teulon had tried to warn them of the consequences. If you kill me, my House Clan will not rest until you are dead.
The mouth of the League general stretched out. That is easily remedied.
Darkness swallowed him, and then the world filled with voices blending anger and terror with words that still made no sense. It will make it appear as if the stardrive malfunctioned…. Fire on all League vessels within the vicinity of the ship and destroy them…. I have given the order to defend the fleet….
Even then, Teulon had not fought. He had fallen to his knees. He had begged for them. Be merciful. Spare them.
Hold him up. I want him to watch. I want him to remember—
White light filled white eyes.
Teulon woke to the taste of blood and the sound of Hasal’s voice. He sat up and removed the leather strap he had tied over his mouth while his eyes adjusted to the darkness. “What is it?”
“Recon sighted by our sky monitors.” The silhouette of his second appeared near the shelter flap.
Although the heatarc had been banked for the night, sweat soaked Teulon’s hair and slicked his skin. The center piece of the leather strap bore many indentations from other nights; this time his teeth had bitten through it and torn at his lower lip.
He closed his hand oyer the strap. “How many?”
Hasal stood with his back toward Teulon. “Ten Tos’ scouts and thirty tankers.”
For a moment Teulon contemplated summoning his forces and taking down the skim-city invaders. Forty vessels meant nothing; Skjonn’s skyforce consisted of thousands of ships. He knew why Gohliya had sent them. A skirmish now would serve to pinpoint the location of the central encampment, which Teulon had been careful to change every twelve hours. Once the Kangal’s general knew where they were, he would immediately send more, better-equipped troops down to attack.
Attack us. Teulon’s fingers became claws.
As tempting as the prospect of battle was, the coordinated assault on the occupied trenches had been planned, and had to be executed before the next phase of the rebellion. Confronting the Kangal’s army—and beginning the war—would have to wait.
“Maintain cover,” he told his second. “Track them until they have returned to Skjonn.”
“There is also report of an offworlder vessel that came unescorted from orbit and docked at Skjonn earlier today,” Hasal said.
Had the Kangal sent for support troops? “Vessel type?”
“A small passenger transport launch. The pilot used an open-channel, multilingual relay to request permission to dock.”
The League would not send a diplomat experienced enough to traverse the kvinka merely to pay a courtesy call on the Kangal. “Track the League transport, as well. If it attempts to leave the planet, shoot it down.” Hasal took a step but hesitated at the flap. “What more?”
“It is cold.” Hasal inhaled slow and deep. “Men do not sleep alone in the cold. In all things Iisleg are as one. We would see to our Raktar’s comfort.”
Comfort on Akkabarr was a synonym for women.
Many of the Iisleg had brought their women with them, but their rigid, misogynistic customs prohibited the females from fighting or participating in any manner of aggression. Indeed, the tribes had more rules about what women could not do than what was permitted them. Teulon had tolerated the presence of the Iisleg females because they stayed out of the way and kept to the shelters, where they prepared meals and provided sexual relief for the men.
From the beginning, the troops had believed that Teulon would take two women from those who were still unclaimed and keep them in his shelter. That he had not yet done this had generated a great deal of talk and growing concern.
More warriors were sending for their women, and the ratio of females to males was close to doubling. Another annoying aspect of Iisleg culture was that every man was entitled to two women.
“I have no need,” Teulon told Hasal.
His second gave him a curious look. “It is the way.”
Like most customs of the Iisleg, polygamy dated back to when their ancestors had been brought as slaves to Akkabarr. Evidently there had been an imbalance among the captured humans, with twice as many women as men. The Toskald also learned that the female slaves were less able to withstand the rigors of working on the ice. Better shelters were provided, and the women assigned to domestic duties, while each male slave was ordered to take two mates.
Teulon imagined that enlarging the slave population more rapidly had also appealed to the Toskald. With two mates, a normal male could expect to sire at least one child per year. There was no question of non-compliance from the slaves; the Toskald believed in swift, harsh punishment. Any order that was protested or disobeyed resulted in immediate execution.
Teulon could have ordered Hasal from the shelter, but he needed to put an end to this. “It is not my way.”
Hasal gestured to the flap. “The men do not understand this. Neither do I. They are only women.”
Teulon’s second was not unique in his attitude. Iisleg indifference to females had been growing for centuries, ever since the Iisleg’s ancestors forgot their former monogamous existence on Terra and began to evolve a new society. Over the centuries what had been a rapid breeding strategy became a foundation for preferential treatment that evolved into a brutal gender bias. Males not only considered themselves more valuable than females; they utterly subjugated their women. Eventually the Iisleg were permitted more freedom, but the females never enjoyed it. By that time their social status had been completely eradicated, and it never improved. Even now, the females were as much slaves to their men as the Iisleg’s ancient ancestors had been to the Toskald.
“I am not Iisleg,” Teulon said. “The women would be frightened by my differences.”
Hasal made an impatient sound. “Their fear means nothing. If they do not please you, they will be punished.”
Any woman who disobeyed a man was immediately and permanently outcast from the tribe. Most were beaten to death or driven out to die on the ice.
I have killed enough women.
“Do none of the women here please the Raktar?” Hasal asked, misinterpreting Teulon’s lengthy silence. “Should we send for other females?”
“No.” Explaining his true reasons for preserving his solitude would be worthless; the Iisleg were not capable of understanding it. His claws distended, straining against his flesh, and then he thought of something. “You have no women in your shelter.”
“I desire men, not women,” Hasal said, very matter-of-fact.
Same-gender sex, too, was an accepted practice among the Iisleg. Teulon could not lie and claim to have
the same preference; his second would simply bring him males from which to choose. He had to find words to explain that there was no viable alternative to his solitary state.
“It is that you desire no one, woman or man,” Hasal said, as if the thought had been spoken aloud.
“Desire.” On Teulon’s homeworld, it was not used in such references. “My people Choose a single woman. That Choice is for life.” He made the hand gesture of bonding, to emphasize this. “Two become one. One that never becomes two again.”
It was, perhaps, the longest speech Teulon had ever made in front of his second, who was now gaping at him. Hasal could not understand what Choice meant to the Jorenians, or that it was a privilege.
You no longer have the privilege of choice, slave.
Teulon’s second stared at him as if seeing him clearly for the first time. “I think I understand.” He made a protective sign, directed at Teulon rather than over himself. “What is done can never be undone.”
No, it cannot. “Go now.”
“As you command, Raktar.” Hasal slipped out of the shelter and secured the flap from outside.
Not yet.
Teulon’s claws became fingers once more, and he replaced the blades he had taken from his forearm and chest sheaths. The strap was bitten through; he would have to make a new one.
This made the seventh strap he had gnawed through in his sleep.
Hasal had been the one to introduce Teulon to the strap one morning some months past, when he had seen his general washing blood from his mouth. “This you may find useful, Raktar.”
He had examined it and saw how it was made of a single long piece of leather wrapped around a small cylinder of salvaged plas. “How so?”
“We give it to those who are wounded.” His second had sounded a little too casual. “It helps them when they cannot … be silent.”
Since that time Teulon had rarely slept for more than an hour at a time, but when he did, he tied the strap over his mouth and set the center piece between his teeth. Crude as it was, it worked as well as the restraints and silencers that had been used on him on the journey to this world, where he had been brought to be sold as a slave.
You no longer have the privilege of choice.
Teulon rose and went to sluice the sweat from his skin. He had modified one leg of the heatarc to accommodate a shallow basin, in which he melted snow for cleansing. When he had first come to the Iisleg, they had thought his hygiene practices strange. That changed after he and Bsak demonstrated how much easier it was to track a man who did not bathe than one who did. Now all the heatarcs in the camp were modified with meltwater basins, and every man bathed before leaving camp.
Hygiene had not been a priority during his brief time as a Toskald slave. Do not clean him, was the first thing Teulon’s owner had said. We like how the blood and the sweat make his skin gleam.
Teulon thought it a pity he could not peel back his skull and cleanse that single voice from his mind. There had been a time when he might have tried, but for the other voices. The ones that repeated what had been said in the past, and the ones that drowned in silence, unable to speak again. Both reinforced the necessity of carrying on and continuing along the path that had brought him here.
He could not deny them. He could not fail them.
He used his damp shirt to remove the excess moisture from his body before he put on dry, clean garments and his outfurs. The outside temperature had dropped, he saw when he extracted the weather stick Hasal had inserted into one of the shelter’s seams. The Iisleg coveted the fossilized twigs, which contained ancient resins that expanded with heat and contracted with cold. Learning to read the tiny beads enabled one to measure the climate with incredible accuracy. At this hour, no resin bubbled through the stony grain of the stick that had been exposed on the other side of the seam. That meant that the outside air temperature had dropped enough to damage unprotected derma and lung tissue, a night when no sane man would venture far from warmth and shelter.
It is good that I am no longer sane.
From his weapons cache Teulon took a long slender spear and his seven-bladed sword. He was not sure why he kept crossing the ice to visit a small, abandoned ice cave. He had found it, and the thing that haunted it, purely by accident. He could not say if the spirit of the cave was real or something his mind had invented. It never spoke. He had never brought anyone to the cave to learn if others could see the ghost.
Instead, Teulon went there regularly. Illusion or ghost, whatever inhabited the cave comforted him simply by being something that defied explanation.
Outside the shelter, the sky was a remote, dark hand holding back the vicious kvinka. Across it lay faint, many-colored light streams, made of starlight refracted and distorted by the upper atmosphere. Bsak lay waiting—like Teulon, the cat needed little sleep—and rose on all six feet when he saw the Raktar.
“Patrol.”
The jlorra released air in a short, compressed exhalation—the only sound it was capable of making—and came to Teulon’s side. He had tried leaving the cat behind in camp when he went on his solitary treks, but the animal always caught up with him before he traveled half a kim.
Teulon moved through the shelters, automatically inspecting rigging and cover as he went. The men had become adept at securing and concealing their bivouac, but he never took that for granted. Low grunting, the sound of Iisleg intimacy, made him pause by a skim pilot’s shelter.
Men do not sleep alone in the cold.
Teulon used the end of his spear to make a slash mark on the outside flap of the shelter. In the hour before dawn, when the rebels collapsed the shelters and moved the camp, the pilot would see the mark and know that he had been heard. He would reinforce the walls of the shelter until they were soundproofed, or abandon it and share another’s. Teulon’s men had responded instantly to the silent discipline; he never had to make a second slash mark. He turned away, but not before he heard a softer sigh from within the shelter.
I fear for you.
Teulon and the cat walked out of the camp and into the cold night, where the winds scoured away all sound and blended together to become the birth wail of a new world.
SIX
“You make my ears ache with your ceaseless chatter, Terran.”
Reever glanced at Aledver, the weapons trader Orjakis had sent to accompany him on his search. He had not, in fact, said a word to the young Toskald since boarding, despite the fact that Aledver had made several humorous remarks to illustrate his affability.
A recording drone would have been slightly less obvious, Reever thought. “You wish to converse?”
“I wish not to die of boredom,” Aledver said as he powered up the launch’s engines. “Forgive me, but I usually deal with species who are nonverbal or interested only in obtaining the best of a deal.” His expression changed to one of amused tolerance. “You might have made a better bargain with the Kangal, you know. Perhaps in the future, I might advise you on how to achieve such.”
There was another provocative remark, the logical response to which would be to ask Aledver’s advice or confide in him.
“Thank you for the offer.” Persuasive charisma seemed to be requisite among the Kangal’s lackeys, Reever thought. Aledver, however, had the eyes of a man who would use other, less palatable means when his charm failed. Not a courtier, but adept at playing one. “How long have you served the Kangal?”
“Of which do you speak? I have served the Kangal Present, the Kangal Before, and the Kangal Once Before.” The trader disengaged the docking mechanisms and slowly guided the ship out into the calm corridor of air immediately surrounding Skjonn. “I know what you are thinking.”
Reever observed the maneuver, silently completing his calculations for the flight trajectory and how he would deal with the weapons trader once they reached the surface. “I doubt it.”
Aledver laughed. “Come now, Colonel. You see before you a young man, but I am at least twice your age. We Toskald treasure pe
rfection in all things, and thus we do not permit our bodies to show the ravages of age.”
Toskald body worship was no different from the cultural quirks of a thousand other species, Reever thought. It had roots in the ancient Toskald’s reproductive habits, in which males used crude body paint and botanical extracts to make themselves appear more attractive to their females, and thus secure a mate. That it had evolved into extreme vanity and obsession with maintaining an illusion of youth was predictable, if somewhat annoying and often more than a little silly.
“You have achieved a high level of perfection in your own appearance,” Reever assured the trader, knowing it was the compliment he was waiting to hear.
“Yes, I know.” Aledver released one hand grip and touched the groomed, gilded waves of his hair as his gaze shifted from the pilot’s console to Reever’s face. “The great mystery is why our Kangal found you so intriguing. Do signal for permission to depart.”
Reever engaged the navcomm. “Transport, this is League colonel Stuart. Request permission to depart for the surface.”
“Acknowledged, Colonel,” a drone voice replied. “You are cleared for city-to-surface jaunt.”
“I haven’t been on a surface jaunt in months.” Aledver moved away from the docking area. “While we’re down there, I’ll show you around one of the native camps. Iiskars, they call them. You can buy outfurs like mine from them, blend in a bit better. It’s incredible to view firsthand the conditions in which they live.”
The trader used positioning jets to set the launch at the precise angle needed for the planned descent. The lower winds were more dangerous than those above the skim city, and could easily tear a ship apart before it had the opportunity to crash-land. “It was my understanding that the surface dwellers are preparing to stage a rebellion.”
Aledver made a languid gesture. “Oh, that. A trivial squabble over tribute, nothing more.”
“The rumors we have heard indicate it is more serious than a ‘squabble.’” Reever glanced at him. “It is said that the Iisleg intend to go to war with the Toskald.”
