Genna would have known. Genna always took things apart and put them together with her mind.
“Tell me something,” I said. Ancenon looked at me. “How long has it been since the Fovean High Council forbade war among the seven nations?”
“Eighty years,” Ancenon told me. “You seem to lack knowledge in the very basic world around you for one whose thoughts run so deep, Lupus.”
Had he been talking to D’gattis about this? I wondered.
“And since then?” I asked, ignoring the dig. “How do raids and such things, pretty squabbles and boundary fights get settled?”
Ancenon sighed. “There are a series of channels within the High Council, allowing for grievances to be aired and reviewed –“ he began,
I interrupted him. “No,” I said. “For example, how will Conflu retaliate against Trenbon for this?”
Ancenon thought for a moment. “Well, there is no proof that Trenbon sanctioned this raid,” he began. That came as a surprise, because until then I didn’t know Trenbon had sanctioned it.
“I would suppose that there will be formal protests lodged – the possibility of an inquiry –“
“You are too smart for that and they know it,” I said, interrupting again. “Men want revenge, Ancenon – how will the Confluni get it?”
“Oh,” Ancenon sighed, “I foresee that our ships will catch fire in Sarn or Kimer – without explanation, of course. Confluni make poor Wizards and will likely not be able to do without our goods, so no embargo – “
“But no military action,” I pressed him.
“Against the Silent Isle?” Ancenon sputtered. Obviously he hadn’t even thought of the idea. “We have the premier fleet – our walls are impregnable – and the Fovean High Council –“
“Would unite the armies of Fovea against them,” I finished.
Ancenon nodded.
“What if they could hire mercenaries to do that for them,” I asked.
Ancenon fell quiet again.
“There is no law preventing hiring mercenaries,” he finally said. “It has been done before, but mercenaries are – well, by their very nature –“
“You can’t rely on men who kill for pay,” I said, finishing for him.
Ancenon looked into my eyes and nodded. I smiled.
“That is just what I wanted to hear,” I told him.
Chapter Seventeen
Southern Hospitality
The captain’s cabin was still and musty in its gloom. Strong light hurt Genna’s eyes.
She lay naked under a thin sheet, her leathers hanging from a peg in the wall. The bed she lay on folded into the wall when not in use. Its mattress looked thin and uncomfortable.
Her face had become pale and her skin felt either dry or slightly clammy. Dark circles showed under her eyes. Her hair lay limp from not being washed. One moment she would have her strength, and the next it would leave her. This made her cranky and hard to be with.
I sat with her because I felt it was my responsibility. We talked, sometimes I held her hand if she could stand it. Genna’s life was about motion and lying still irked her.
“Ancenon have anything else to say?” she asked me.
Ancenon had visited her twice since we left Conflu. The first time he had used equipment that he kept on the ship because he didn’t want to carry it through Conflu. The second time had quite obviously been to comfort her.
Both times the same result: although it was early to tell, it appeared her body fought the poison and was winning. That explained the lapses as the poison and the body fought.
“No,” I told her. “It has only been a day.”
She sighed irritably. “Every day is going to be like this. I can’t stand it.”
“I’m sure they will get better than this.”
She glared at me. “You don’t know that.”
“That’s what Ancenon seemed to think.”
“That isn’t what he said.”
“Sure it is.”
“Maybe he is telling you things he isn’t telling me, is that it?”
This time I sighed. “We’ve had this discussion.”
“We have not.”
This argument repeated itself in various forms. After a day I was done with it.
I stood. “I need to go check the horses.”
“They’re asleep in the hold.”
“Still need to be checked.”
“In other words, you’re sick of me.”
I just looked at her.
“You know you are,” she said. “I meant only one thing to you, and if you aren’t getting it then you don’t want to waste your time.”
“If that’s true then I’m sure you don’t want me around.”
“No, I don’t,” she said. “Get out of here, and keep my knives. You should have a trophy for your conquest.”
“If you want your knives back you can have them.”
“I said keep them!” she screamed at me. “I can’t use them anymore. Keep them and show them to the next slut you lure into your bed, when you’re bragging about the last slut you lured.”
I felt like saying something really nasty but instead I just left.
I was sure I heard a very soft, “Don’t go” as I left, but I didn’t go back to ask.
Two days later we pulled into the Andaran port-city of Chatoos. Where I considered Volkhydran ports to be rough and busy, and Outpost IX had been grand and noble, Chatoos had a sort of old English charm to it. The wharves were wooden, reaching out at an angle to the Bay. Using the Kimer peninsula as a breakwater, and the mouth of The Safe River as a means of commerce, they sported high-drafted, wide-sailed merchant vessels like our own and seemed to be doing a good trade in the fall harvest.
The city itself seemed to be carved of stone. Walls, streets and houses, places of business and random towers throughout the city – all were made of tight-chinked field stone, either grey or painted in earth colors. Thankfully unlike Volkhydro, no putrid stench wafted off the city as the wind turned to greet us. I know that Outpost IX had some amount of indoor plumbing, and I assumed that the same was true here.
A wall surrounded the inland side of Chatoos, providing it with protection from Confluni infantry, although only on the Andaran side. Batteries of ballistae and heavy catapults lined the shore of Tren Bay, obviously manned and stationed along the wharves where soldiers stood ready. A stone wall no higher than twenty feet ran about a half mile inland on the riverside. No gates broke its gray perfection. Tight-waisted, oared ships rowed up the river until they could un-step their masts and sail.
Thorn stood next to me as our ship pulled in. Beyond the city I saw vast plains, miles upon miles of hay waving in the wind like some great, golden ocean. I knew that I had best be on his back when Blizzard saw those plains or I would likely not see him again for days, if ever. The huge beast had been penned up for too long and needed to stretch his legs.
Genna still lay in the captain’s cabin, her condition unchanged. I didn’t plan to visit her again, not that she’d let me. She verbally ripped apart anyone but Ancenon who went in there.
“Thinking about running that stallion?” Thorn asked me, as if he could read my mind.
“Is it that obvious?” I said.
“Yep.”
We were quiet. The sails snapped and the rigging creaked as we tacked into port. Already a smaller ship directed us to berthing.
“In my country,” Thorn said, “a man has a legal right to fight you for that horse.”
I looked at him and raised an eyebrow without saying anything.
He didn’t look back, just kept staring at Chatoos as if it were some beacon to him. “If you kill the man, no one will come after you, so long as it is a fair fight. Also, someone is eventually going to offer to trade you something – a bunch of mares, a young daughter, maybe gold, though we mostly barter – for your stud rights. If you turn him down flat then they will think you are rude, and try to steal your horse. Better you should just ask for
too much – and take your chances that you really did ask for too much.”
“What would you consider fair for his services?” I asked.
Thorn thought on that. “Honestly?” he asked me. I nodded.
“You are the only man ever to ride off of the Wild Horse Plains with one of that herd, and you got a big, white stallion. He could sire by the hundreds over the next few years – and then maybe for four generations before the line started to get diluted. In Andoran, I doubt if any price would be unfair – you have the makings of the next best herd in the world, right in the hold of this ship.”
“Could likely take all of my gold now, buy mares, and live pretty well for the rest of my life, right here, huh?” I asked him.
He looked at me again. “You would be a force to be reckoned with, that is for sure.” Then he turned back toward the city.
“Do that and there are going to be men coming out of the woodwork to run your herds. You could probably have yourself a mongrel tribe in a year and, if no one raided you and took everything you had, get the right to run with the big herds in five years or so.”
It seemed like a nice idea, but I really didn’t think that seriously about it. War didn’t put me through all of this to be a rancher, much as every growing boy wants to be a cowboy, and Thorn was right: if there were big herds and big tribes here, then they weren’t going to just let me just step in and run the place.
“Sounds like too much work,” I said. “I think I’m just going to let Ancenon and D’gattis unload and count our stores for the next week, while I go let Blizzard stretch his legs.
“And Genna?” he asked me.
I still remembered his comment to me on the deck of this same ship when Genna swam off alone to kill ten CNG. That had pissed me off so much. I still smarted from it, especially now.
Truth was, I didn’t want her. I never wanted her. The relationship had been a convenience. I had never pretended otherwise – she had been the one to fall in love, not me.
“I think that is done,” I said.
“The adventure is over?”
I shook my head. “Was a mistake to get into it,” I said. “She’s just up there, pissed off and bitter, now.”
“Couldn’t go with you if she wanted to,” Thorn said, looking out at the fields.
“Nope.”
We stood there watching Andoran together. The Uman sailors scampered through the rigging, deft as monkeys, directing the ship to port.
“You coming?” I asked him finally.
“Yeah,” he told me.
Together we watched the ship pull in, until the time came to go unchain the horses.
Blizzard’s hooves beat the plains, his neck stretched out and his chin just topping tufts of hayseeds. With his tail up and his stiff mane bristling in my face, joy almost radiated from him like a blanket that enveloped us both.
I looked over my shoulder and saw Thorn and Nantar, just two specs behind me. In a moment I would turn the huge stallion and circle back to keep the two of them in view.
We had decided on Chatoos instead of Outpost IX for all of the obvious reasons. We could get here easily. It was near Outpost X. This portion of the world remained relatively stable and not one of us would trust Ancenon and D’gattis to set up our gold in the royal treasury. No one believed that they would just let us have access to it whenever we wanted.
From here we could either go our own ways or congregate. The Andarans were a fiercely independent people, divided between their city-bred citizens and their wide-ranging tribes and sufficiently trustworthy. If we bought ourselves a building or a tower in town and took precautions to guard our gold there, no one would specifically come and knock the place down with a battering ram to see what lay inside. From what little I understood, that was an uncommon trait.
Blizzard turned with some pressure from my knee and we circled back toward Nantar and Thorn. Much as I had come to this world a “tenderfoot” I had grown to truly love horseback riding with Blizzard. When he really stretched his legs and flew across the plains, my whole world changed. Tears in my eyes from the wind whipping through my eyelashes, the smell of crushed grass and torn earth in my nose, the thrum of iron-shod hooves in the ground and the intoxication of Blizzard’s excitement to just run – this was my life now. The ride had been going on for three hours and the horses were exhausted. Blizzard had started to lather as well, and I thought I should get him to rest.
When we ran through the waving grass, no sick girl glowered at me with guilt and self-pity. When the horse beat the ground and defied the wind, he ran free and I ran free with him.
D’gattis had pitched a fit when we told him we were leaving the transport of our gold up to him and Drekk and Ancenon, but that made logical sense and he knew it. Arath claimed to be familiar enough with the area to get us someplace permanent. Drekk would scout out the city for us (we needed him to, actually, and he did that sort of thing alone) and the two Uman-Chi were better suited to the more cerebral pursuits of negotiating, investing, and transporting our gold.
Genna had to be transported and had made it very clear that she didn’t want me doing it. In fact, she wanted me away from her.
I had felt a little twinge of suspicion about leaving them alone but everyone assured me that the fire bond would keep the lot of us honest, myself included. Adriam would painfully destroy the one who violated so serious an oath, administered by one of His chosen. Still – He had marked me with the color black. If not before, I felt sure that War’s purpose had been revealed both to Him and to Ancenon.
Yet Ancenon had approached me in the hold of his ship. Whatever he had learned, he wanted to be a part of it.
Genna remained too sick to join the bond and too sick to do anything to betray us. She had sworn that she would enter the bond when she could.
I turned the stallion to the left and galloped toward Nantar and Thorn. Both sat their horses and watched me coming, parting the field of hay like a ship through the sea. It was then that I noticed men on horseback watching us in the distance. Blizzard moved fast enough to make my eyes sting, which sometimes used to blind me until I had finally learned that I could turn my head forty-five degrees and squint one eye, looking through my lashes. Blizzard could be trusted to avoid gopher holes and keep the course with only mild adjustment when we ran on the plains like this.
It took me only moments to regain Thorn and Nantar and stand Blizzard by their side. By then, the men who had been watching us closed in and were following me. They wanted the huge stallion tired, knowing that we would have a harder time breaking for the city. Little did they know! Blizzard might be lathered, but he could keep this pace up all day and had before.
Thorn pointed behind me as I approached, and Nantar unsheathed his sword, laying it across the pommel of his saddle. Their mounts were exhausted, but Thorn came from here. We might be outnumbered but I didn’t worry – at least, not yet.
There were ten of them in all, though I guessed that more waited where I couldn’t see them. They were Men like Thorn - burned by the sun, light brown and black hair, dark eyes and suspicious faces. Their leader had long mustachios almost a foot past his chin and long black hair pulled back over his shoulders. He wore a tooled leather armor that looked more decorative than functional, and sat his horse with confidence, as if he were an extension of it, and it of him.
“That’s a big horse,” he said, indicating Blizzard with a tilt of his jaw. The stallion snorted as if to answer. I nodded but said nothing, waiting.
“I don’t recognize your armor,” he said further, looking me in the eye. His were brown; his hands sat the pommel of his saddle, idly holding the reins. I could see the hilt of a sword over his shoulder. All of his men had bows already strung at their sides. Together they formed a semi-circle around us. If we broke and ran, we would have to turn our horses or go right through them, and either way they would be ready.
“Be surprised if you did,” I said.
“What will you take for that s
tallion?” he finally asked me.
“Not for sale,” I said flatly, still holding his eyes with mine.
“Didn’t ask if he was for sale,” the leader countered. He hadn’t bothered to introduce himself. I hadn’t bothered to ask.
“I asked what you would take for him.”
“Your life,” I said. I heard Thorn mumble, but I grew tired of this. “And the lives of as many of your men as the three of us can, if they get involved.”
The other man drew his sword and I drew mine. His carried a scimitar: a blade that curved like a tongue of fire. Curving the weapon like that made it stronger and, although shorter than a normal sword for the same weight, did more damage at close range. That gave him advantages in close fighting but cost him at a distance.
He stared at the Sword of War, then narrowed his eyes. Blizzard stomped and bobbed his head, clearly not very exhausted.
“Fight to first blood,” he said, starting to dismount.
“Fight to the death,” I countered. He stopped and sat straight up on his horse. His men shifted.
“And why would you want to do that?” he asked.
Hell, I don’t know why I wanted to do that – I was just posturing like him! I had it in my mind that he wanted to say “first blood” because he didn’t know if he could take me in my heavier armor, but felt like it might make me slow enough for him to pink me. Even then, there would be no shame in him losing that way, while backing down might cost him a few points in his men’s eyes.
“Not leaving here without my horse,” I said, finally. “Starting to think I don’t want to leave here without yours, either.”
Thorn urged his mount up next to mine and intervened, just as the other Andaran opened his mouth to say something that I doubt we both could have lived with.
“You are Long Manes?” he asked.
The other nodded.
Thorn indicated me with a jerk of his thumb. “This is his first time here. I am Thorn, a Hunter, and I can say of this man that he has left a trail that is long, wide and red from the Wild Horse Plains to here.”
Indomitus Est (The Fovean Chronicles) Page 26
