Indomitus Oriens (The Fovean Chronicles)
Page 28
“The gods are important here?” she asked, finally. “They get right down into your lives?”
Glynn sat her mount silently for a minute or more. Both sat sidesaddles, their dresses’ skirts draped over their mounts’ butts. The plains stood open and the day quiet, the cool breeze in their faces.
“It is forbidden,” Glynn said, finally, “for a god to touch the life of a mortal on this world. With what we know now, there are some Uman-Chi who believe this is why the god War sought the Conqueror. War can direct this ‘Lupus,’ this wolf, directly, and break the rules.”
“So the Mountain and I?” Melissa couldn’t finish the question, for all it implied.
Glynn nodded. “You have not, then, been contacted, heard any voice in your head, directing you?”
Melissa shook her head. “How would I tell?” she asked. “I mean, what would it sound like?”
“Honestly, I have no idea,” Glynn said. “The Emperor would know, if I am correct, but then how would one ask him?”
“Yeah,” Melissa said. “Kind of late for that now.”
They continued in silence. A cool breeze blew from the west and tugged at both women’s hair. She’d been forced to take a side-saddle because all of the ones for men were in use when she was leaving. She shifted on it, giving Xinto the opportunity to move his hands on her waist.
“The Mountain hasn’t told me anything about any voices,” she said, finally.
Glynn nodded, and said nothing.
“Maybe we have to—you know—pledge ourselves to a god first?” Melissa asked.
“Would you do that?” Xinto said. “Forsake your deity, who created you, who cared for you, for another, whose intentions you do not know?”
Melissa thought of the ones who had created her—a mother who had made her life hell, and a father who had let her down, chosen her loser sister over her, trashed her chances at college.
She considered the god who had let them.
And in the end she said nothing.
* * *
Little Storm’s hooves drummed the plain, faster than any horse should move.
The Mountain—he had to force himself to think of himself as that now—had spent his time on horseback before. Growing up on a farm, he’d enjoyed the Appaloosa ponies his father raised as a side business, and had broken many of them to saddle himself.
Appy’s were a great breed, but they didn’t run this fast. Thoroughbreds ran fast, but the fastest of them wouldn’t have kept pace with Little Storm, and none of the fast ones had his stamina.
The Mountain turned his head and looked back down the road, no longer able to see the markers for Galnesh Eldador, much less the city spires. That shouldn’t have happened so soon, he thought.
It was another two hours before he came to a decent-sized town, if you could call it that, the Mountain thought to himself. Approaching from the North, he saw a few sod houses dug up out of the dirt and, past them, a central building made of dirt and sticks. They kept a few horses and a few cows that he could see, the cows looking bushier than the cows of Earth. Domestic bovines had been bred thousands of years ago from aurochs, and he wondered if he saw that now. He didn’t see a bull.
He slowed the horse as he found what was likely a market. It consisted mostly of Uman and a few swarthy Men, their wares on blankets before them, and children of both races running between. To their west, a solid wooden building had to be an outhouse from the reek coming off of it.
The swarthy Men turned out to be Volkhydran immigrants. Bill walked himself right up to them, staying on his horse, and introduced himself.
“Mountain—there is a funny name,” one said. “There is no Volkhydran called that.”
“What’s a common Volkhydran name?” the Mountain asked.
“Krell—that’s common,” one woman said, a toothless grandmother with children at her feet. Lupus had explained the Eldadorian custom meant keeping your fields away from your home. Farmers staked a claim and declared it to the Empire, and farmed it, but walked to the farm and lived on land that wasn’t as fit for farming.
“Nantar, too,” another woman, just as old, said. They dressed in loose fitting cotton dresses, died in purples and blues. They kept their hair loose behind them. “Because of Nantar of the Daff Kanaar. Agtar, Kafar—those are good Volkhydran names.”
“Jack,” the first woman said. “I know a Jack from Kendo.”
“Jack?” the Mountain asked. He could live with Jack. He had an uncle named Jack.
She nodded. “You see these furs?” she pointed toward the piles on the blanket before her. Flies buzzed around them. “These are Hydran furs, but Volkans wear them. You put these on, you look like a Volkhydran.”
The Mountain put his hands to his wide belt, about to explain that he didn’t have any money, when he found a bag attached to it that he didn’t remember putting there.
He pulled it from his belt and it jingled. He opened it and found a collection of gold, silver and copper coins, which the locals called ‘Tabaars.”
“Got anything an Andaran girl would wear?” the Mountain asked.
“Do they wear anything?” the first old woman joked. The second sniggered. “I thought they didn’t waste time with clothes. Took too much time to take off.”
“Isn’t the Empress an Andaran?” the Mountain asked.
“What of it?” the second asked. “All that means is Lupus is insatiable.”
“He is insatiable,” the first old woman said. “He has an appetite for everything.”
“He does?” the Mountain asked.
“Well, he doesn’t tax as bad as our old lord,” the first said. “But you have to pay it all—I don’t know that we are better off. I lived in Alun, and our lord demanded half of our planting. I don’t think we ever gave him more than a tenth part, though. We knew how to hide it. Here, they take fifteen of a hundred, which is hard to figure out. We grow a lot of corn—you have to actually take a hundred ears to get fifteen. Same with spuds, same with squashes. The magistrate comes ‘round with the local bull—he takes one calf in seven.”
“It’s a game—the game here is the same game as the game there,” the second said, and took a fur back from Bill. “I didn’t mean to have that one in the pile.”
“But it was in the pile,” he said, his salesman sense sparking.
“But I didn’t mean to have it there,” she said. “That’s a nice fur.”
“I want a nice fur.”
“Well, it’s more.”
She and Bill began to haggle. Bill didn’t know the local currency, but a good rule of thumb was to ask for twice what you expected to get for your wares. The first old lady turned behind her and pulled out a tangle of leather.
“I can let you have this for a silver,” she said. “It is off of an Andaran woman, I know it. Put a skirt on your girl and a horsehide robe, and she’ll look like any Andaran.”
“Do you have the skirt and the robe?”
“I know someone who does—can you wait?”
“I can wait.”
“Will you be wanting a girl?” she asked him.
Bill straightened. “What?”
“Oh, don’t be embarrassed,” the old woman made a ‘shooing’ motion with her hand. “Man comes off the trail, come to a town, he’ll eventually look for a girl.”
Bill sighed. “Well, I am looking for a girl, actually a couple girls, who may have come through here.”
The one old woman poked the other. “He’s chasing a girl,” he said.
“That is more like a Volkhydran man,” the other answered.
“Was a young girl came through here with an Uman-Chi and a Scitai feller,” the first told him, squinting into his eyes. “But unless you want another daughter, she’s too young for you.”
“Where were they bound?” Bill asked.
The two women exchanged a glance.
Bill leaned forward. “She is my daughter,” he said. “And the Uman-Chi thinks she looks like the Empress. I don�
��t think they have any good plans for her.”
“Knew that Uman-Chi was a liar,” the second woman said.
“Was with a Scitai,” the first agreed. “You know they do nuthin’ but steal.”
“Your daughter went south to find Brinn’s Hostel,” The second informed him, laying the Andaran clothes out for him. “They’ll be there the end of the day if they go a normal pace. I don’t know as you can push that draft to catch ‘em.”
“Overland he could,” a man said from behind them.
Bill turned to see another Volkhydran, probably his own age but looking much the worse for wear, with grey-shot hair and puckered skin. He dressed in worn leathers and sandals.
“The road takes a gentle curve,” he informed Bill. “You take the straight, keep a point on the south, you’ll save yourself three daheeri, like as cut them off.”
The Uman-Chi had educated Bill and Melissa on standards of measure. Daheeri were each a tenth of the distance from one horizon to the next on a flat plain, or about 1.2 miles, if this planet was about the same size as Earth. The gravity didn’t make him think otherwise.
“Is there a point you know of?” Bill asked him. It wasn’t easy to keep your bearings when you travelled, less so when you went fast. Any animal tends to want to circle to one side or the other.
“I can sell you a comm—pass,” he said.
That word was just too similar.
Sure enough, the Emperor had introduced the compass to these people, along with the secret of making them. Bill spent six silvers on clothes for himself and for Melissa, for the compass and a meal while he was here. They threw hay to his horse for free. A couple Uman whores presented themselves to him but he declined their services. They were more persistent than Bill would have liked.
* * *
Glynn and Raven arrived at the Eldadorian hostel as the sun set. They unsaddled their own horses in a public stable, with plenty of hay and grain, outside of a big, stone holding, three stories tall, with a gigantic tub in front and a fire next to that.
Dark skinned Men, no less than six of them, filled the tub, laughing and splashing each other. One stood beside the tub, stoking up the fire under an animal like a deer turning on a spit cranked by two children.
Raven laughed to herself. Glynn turned her nose up in disgust.
“I know, I know,” Raven said. “Men acting as the animals they are. Keep reminding yourself, Glynn.”
“I am reminded sufficiently, thank you,” Glynn said. “I think that we must needs wait here for my friend to find us.”
“Why?”
“Because we have no males,” Glynn said. “And I don’t fancy my breasts to be pawed by a flock of rude Men.”
Raven covered her breasts reflexively. “They would do that?”
“Draw near them and find out,” Xinto said. “And don’t think I’m going to fight ten Toorians for your honor.”
Raven straightened. “I think there’s a male already here,” she said.
“What?” Glynn said, and looked into her face. The ambiguous eyes turned different colors in the twilight. “You sense him, or you see him?”
“I see Little Storm, in the stable,” she said. She pointed to a stall on the other end of the stable.
The Uman-Chi turned her head to where Raven’s outstretched finger pointed, but Raven didn’t. Once again, by the scrub grass past the far barn door, she saw the swish, the ‘not there.’ This time she saw something like a serpent’s tail, with green scales, appear for an instant in the grass.
Glynn sighed. “For whatever reason, your guardian protector has found us,” she said. “Let us pray he didn’t bring an Eldadorian escort with him.”
“I don’t see Eldadorian livery,” Xinto said. “I’m surprised to say, I think your warrior came alone.”
They approached the hostel. The Men in the tub went quiet as the women approached. Two started licking their lips—a bad sign.
“Dahara,” one said.
“Jumbo,” Glynn answered.
“Faharra mtisaa?” he said, and stood, showing that he was naked in the tub. Raven blushed and looked down.
“Dem zakahi,” Glynn said. “Jang daheeri, tafooza gaballa Mountain.”
The Man shook his head. “We saw an old Man,” he said, in thickly accented Uman. “A Volkhydran, but he calls himself ‘Jack.’”
“Jack?” Raven said.
“It is a common enough Volkhydran name,” Glynn said.
The dark-skinned man picked up a robe from the side of the tub and put it on. It hung on his muscular form, drenched with water, but he didn’t seem to care. He stepped out of the tub toward them.
“Forgive me, please,” he said. “But I cannot help to mention, I have seen you before.”
“You have?” Glynn asked him.
He nodded. “In a dream, I called you Magee—a singing woman. You sang of my destiny and then floated into the sun.”
Raven straightened, and Glynn sang to him:
* * *
“On Fovea, on Fovea, find a noble young and old,
A foreigner among his kind
A hero, fate foretold
One who fights as does the Sun
Waits in a sacred place
A guardian will bring you there
With a devil born and raised”
He nodded. “I know these words, and yet I wonder, I cannot sing this song.”
“Might I ask your name, Sirrah?” Glynn asked him.
“I am Jahunga,” he said. “I am come north from Toor, to see the people from the Silent Isle, and ask them why I dream of them.”
“If you would escort us to our male friends, then I would explain it to you,” Glynn said.
Raven found herself speechless.
Chapter Nineteen:
An Untoucha ble One
The ale was warm, the meat was tough, and the vegetables were soggy. The rough stool he sat upon teetered precariously on three uneven legs, but it was the only one close to a wall, and Jerod wasn’t here to rearrange the future.
He sat hunched over the table—a long, wide board, rough cut and gouged from a thousand knives and forks, placed on saw horses and stained by the overflow of plates and mugs.
‘Why not just eat on the dirt?’ Jerod wondered, licking the sour foam from his lips.
“Do you like this?” an old Man pretending to be a Volkhydran asked him.
He called himself, ‘Jack.’ Common enough name; Jerod knew a share of Jack’s, Jehk’s, Ju’huks and other names to confuse this one with.
“I like it better than being sober in my hunger,” Jerod said, and stabbed at the thready beef on the wooden plate before him. “I like it less than what I got from sailors when I travelled here.”
Jack chewed and chewed, taking beef and vegetables in the same mouthful. An auroch with a cud made for more appetizing company.
He swallowed forcefully and said, “I was thinking the same thing. It isn’t good, and I don’t like beer this bitter.”
“Then maybe you should shut up and go to your rooms,” Jerod growled at him. He dressed in furs almost the same as Jack’s, but wasn’t as large or as tall. He felt the scar on his face twitch in irritation.
He’d been waiting here for days, and he’d be leaving in the morning, his time wasted by an Uman-Chi. They didn’t think of anything but themselves, and that left Jerod irritated.
“Maybe you should make me,” Jack returned immediately. “Or maybe I should teach you some respect for your elders.”
“You want to see my sword in your guts?” Jerod pressed him and stood, his hand on the hilt of the weapon at his hip. “Curious to see what that looks like?”
He might not be Volkhydran, but the gaffer knew how to act Volkhydran, anyway. He stood up on the other side of the table.
“If you want to get kicked out of the hostel for sword fighting,” the older man said, in Uman. “If you want to fight bare-fisted, I can take you outside and beat your ass for you.”
�
��Gentlemen, please,” an Uman woman said in Uman. The hostel staff consisted entirely of Uman, and they had already started clearing plates. Eldadorian hostels had a no-swords rule, and you took your fights outside. If you tore the place up, sometimes they kept your horse as payment for the damage, and sometimes they sent you to Eldador. A good many Wolf Soldiers had gotten their start right here.
“With fists, then,” the Jerod said, in Uman this time. “I’m fine with fists. Want to make it interesting?”
“I’m going to hit you until you apologize,” the old man said. “I’m interested in that.”
“Two Tabaars on the gaffer,” a Scitai said, entering the room as others filed out. Jerod didn’t know him. “If you show them to me, first.”
“I will take that,” another Uman said, from a different board. Everyone started standing now. Plates vanished and chairs followed them—if the fight didn’t make it outside, there wouldn’t be as much to keep it going in here.
A waif-like Uman removed the old man’s chair as he turned and marched out of the one door to the hostel, the Scitai behind him. Jerod watched them both. The old man’s anger surprised him, but the Scitai made him suspicious. As he followed them out the door, he wondered that this might be a set up of some kind.
Travelers needed to watch their fates on the road, or have them made for them. Still, what threat could come from an old man and a Scitai? Most likely the Man had been a warrior once, and thought he still had fight in him.
* * *
Outside, Melissa started when Xinto entered the hostel, and a flood of people came running out of it.
Among them she saw Bill and Xinto, and people were approaching Xinto and showing him their gold and silver. Men and some women were collecting around a circle, and Bill pulled some furs he was wearing over his head as he stepped into it.
More than a handful of naked Toorians climbed out of the communal tub, pulling on the thick white robes they wore and stepping into thonged sandals, the laces dragging behind them. Men and Uman filed from the hostel to the circle where Bill was waiting. Xinto seemed to be taking wagers from more than a dozen spectators.
Bill sported a big stomach covered with thick, gray and black hair. Another Man stepped into the circle opposite him. He stood smaller by a head, but Melissa saw no fat on him. The abdominals, the pectorals, the biceps looked pronounced, and all smaller than Jack’s. The younger man would have speed, but the older probably strength.