“We race for the moon, in my own era. Conquering space is only the first stage in a lengthy struggle. Having been first to launch unmanned satellites, then first to launch animals, and then first to launch first men and then women into orbit, the Soviet Union which is my proud home is the most likely to reach the moon before all others. But it is not a certainty. I worry, should the decadent West with whom we vie reach the lunar surface, that they will simply make a giant billboard of the celestial sphere, to better sell products to their spoiled citizenry.” She shook her head, an expression of distaste twisting her features. “The American pursues his own arrogant pride and vanity, while the Soviet pursues knowledge.”
“And yet you seem quite prideful of your nation's achievements,” Hieronymus observed with a slight smile. “But I mean no offense,” he hastened to add, seeing her scowl in the low moonlight. He sighed deeply, and turned his gaze back to the moon hanging overhead. “I just cannot fathom the idea of sailing into space, much less the notion that men of my own kind have accomplished such things back on Earth. And so soon after my own age.”
Hieronymus turned back to Leena, and their eyes met.
“I envy you the sights you have seen, little sister. The vantage of Earth from so high above, the stars laid out before you like a Persian carpet.”
Leena drew a heavy breath, and nodded. “I remember the Earth spinning slowly below me, the mountains and deserts and gray hillocks of ocean swells. The lands all one, the seas all one. And the realization that all boundaries between nations are the artificial constructs of cartographers, and that though imperialist governments keep peoples separated for their own gain, all the Earth's people are one, and that someday we will all be joined together in a single collective with the coming of the Soviet man. It was…it was indescribable.”
“No,” Hieronymus said, drawing near, “I think you describe it quite well.”
Their hands brushed against one another, and they drew back fractionally, their fingertips almost touching. Without another word between them, they looked overhead, side by side, and watched the heavens wheel on in silence.
One morning, Leena was on deck, her gaze drifting across the horizon purposelessly. Balam lay a short distance away, stretched out lengthwise on the deck, sunning himself in the bright midday sun.
Spatha came up from below, wearing a linen loincloth and a strophium, a kind of soft leather belt wrapped around her chest holding her breasts in place. She was otherwise unclothed, and likewise unarmed.
“Arise, thou lazy beast,” Spatha said, kicking at Balam's head with her bare foot. The jaguar man rolled out of the way just before her kick connected, and growled sleepily. “Rouse thyself.”
“What do you want, demon woman?” The Sinaa shaded his eyes with an outstretched hand and regarded Spatha warily.
“To spar, naturally. If we don't keep our wits honed to a razor's edge, how can we possibly be prepared for the travails which life may place in our path?” Spatha crouched down beside him, sitting back on her heels.
“We sparred yesterday, and the day before,” Balam moaned. “And besides, I'm quite certain my wits are honed just as sharply as they're going to be. Any sharpness beyond this point would be a needless indulgence.”
Spatha's hand snaked forward, quick as lightning, and snatched the emerald pendant hanging from Balam's ear.
“Thy wits could use some sharpening still, it appears.” Spatha leapt to her feet, dangling the emerald between her fingers, a sly smile on her face.
In a heartbeat, Balam surged off the deck, lunging forward and grabbing Spatha by the neck with one hand, pincering the hand that held his emerald with the other. His lips curved back over saber-teeth, his eyes flashing, Balam lifted her bodily off the ground, trembling with rage.
“Give. That. Back.” The words seethed through the jaguar man's clenched teeth.
Leena jumped to her feet, and watched helplessly as the warrior woman blinked slowly, smiling a broad, incongruous smile.
“Certainly,” Spatha managed to hiss through her constricted larynx, and released her hold on the emerald.
As the pendant dropped towards the deck, Balam immediately released his hold on Spatha, and snatched the emerald out of midair.
“I'm…sorry.” Balam began slowly to regain his composure, and cradled the emerald in his two hands for a moment, looking at it lovingly, before slipping it back into place on his ear.
“I seem to have struck a nerve,” Spatha said, rubbing her throat, the marks of Balam's grip standing out like red welts against her dark skin.
“Balam?” Leena stepped forward and laid a tenuous hand on his tensed shoulder. “Are you all right?”
“Yes,” Balam answered, with some difficulty. “It is merely…” He took a heavy breath. “This gem was once worn by my late wife, Ailuros. When she died, all I had left as proof of our love and time together was this emerald, and our daughter, Menchit. When my cousin Gerjis forced me from the throne of the Sinaa, and drove me from our lands, my daughter was taken from me, to be raised by my sisters, Sakhmet and Bastet. I attempted to take Menchit with me, of course, to prize her from the hands of my scheming cousin and deluded sisters, but the numbers of the faithful Sinaa at their backs were too great, and I was forced to abandon her to their care. My only consolation is the knowledge that my sisters, as misguided as they are, truly love their niece, my daughter, and that among them, at least, she will know safety.” He paused, and tapped the emerald at his ear with an outstretched claw. “Were I to lose this gem, though, I would sever my last connection to my lost wife. And that,” he said, his gaze darting angrily towards Spatha, “I will not allow.”
“My sincere apologies for giving offense,” Spatha said, bowing, a smile on her face, “but my compliments on thy attack. Strong, swift, and unexpected. A praiseworthy assault.” She dropped into a martial stance and raised her hands before her, in a ready position. “Wouldst thou care to give it another try?”
Balam's lips split in a toothy grin, and without another word he lunged for her. As Spatha parried his attack, using his own momentum to throw Balam to the deck, Leena hurriedly stepped out of the way, and when Balam leapt back to his feet for another attack, Leena was already safely on the other side of the deck.
One night at sunset, the company gathered in the captain's cabin for the evening meal. The menu consisted of fish and seaweed, as had all their meals for some weeks, all of them prepared from foodstuffs brought up from the depths by Kakere. On this evening, though, the fish was not prepared in the manner of Drift, but breaded and fried in oils.
“I apologize for the somewhat meager fare aboard the Acoetes Zephyrus,” Tyrel said expressively, “but we had not yet taken on all our supplies when your arrival forced our somewhat premature departure from Masjid Empor. We've stores enough of necessities to last until our next landfall at Masjid Logos, particularly when supplemented by the daily haulings of our Ichthyandaro here, but we've been forced to do without some delicacies.”
“Fortunate, then, that we have a cook of Balam's caliber in our company,” Hieronymus said.
Leena mumbled appreciatively in agreement, around a mouthful of fish
“But you've cooked the taste right out of it,” Kakere said, wrinkling his nose in displeasure. His head and hands were bare, but he wore soaked robes wrapped around his torso, arms, and legs.
Balam nodded. “Though I prefer my meat fully cooked, I allow that fish is invariably better served as nature intended, cold and raw, lightly seasoned with oils at best. But I'm afraid our companions don't share our opinions, and so we're forced to make do.” Balam gestured with a bandaged hand at the tureen sitting at the middle of the table. “Though perhaps you'd find the seaweed stew more to your liking.”
“You've cut yourself?” Benu pointed to Balam's hand. “Is it something that you'd like me to look at? My knowledge of physiology is unparalleled, if you'll excuse the lack of false humility, and perhaps I could help to mend your injury.”
>
“No, it's nothing.” Balam shook his head. “Spatha and I were doing a bit of fencing on deck this afternoon, and I was a bit too slow in the riposte, and paid the price for it. It's a minor wound at best, though, and the bandage—and the scar that will no doubt linger—serves only to remind me not to become complacent.”
“Thou hast left me a scar or two of my own,” Spatha said from across the table, raising her mug in salute. “Those are lessons I'll not soon forget, either.”
“That reminds me,” Leena said casually, leaning forward with her elbows on the table, her chin propped on her hands. “I've been meaning to ask you about your unusual facial scars.” Leena pointed to the symbol carved into Spatha's left cheek. “Does it have some significance? And is there meaning in the fact that your right cheek is unmarred?”
Spatha bristled, eyes narrowed, and her hand tightened on her cutlery in a white-knuckled grip. She opened her mouth and emitted a wordless bellow of rage, and made to lunge across the table at Leena.
“Hold!” Balam shouted, grabbing Spatha's arm and dragging her back into her seat.
Spatha's eyes flashed, and she turned on the jaguar man, her ceramic dinner knife sweeping in a wide arc. The jaguar man's grip on her arm remained firm, and the knife drew no nearer to his chest.
“She is a stranger to our land,” Balam said calmly, indicating Leena with a nod of his head. “She doesn't know about the Nonae, nor what your cheek suggests.”
“Intent or no, thy companion has given grievous offense,” Spatha snarled.
“That is as may be,” Hieronymus said from Spatha's other side, on his lips a smile that didn't reach his eyes, “but if you bring harm to any of my friends, I'll be forced to revenge. And no one wants that.” He laid a hand on Spatha's shoulder, in a manner far from comradely.
“What does her cheek suggest, anyway?” Kakere said with a shrug.
Reluctantly, Spatha nodded, and through gritted teeth said, “Pax.” She released her grip on the dinner knife, and it clattered harmlessly to the table.
“My apologies,” Spatha said as Balam released his hold on her arm and Hieronymus drew back his hand. “I forget, from time to time, that I travel among barbarous savages, who often know little about my culture.” She reached up and touched the unmarred skin of her right cheek. “Thy question,” she said, gaze darting grimly to Leena, “touches upon the very reason for my exile from my own people, and the situation that leaves me with no option but to wander the wide world, a warrior without a nation to defend.”
Dozens of centuries ago, Spatha Sekundus said, after the metamen had broken the back of the Black Sun Empire, but before they rose up and divided the world between the empires of Metamankind, the whole of Paragaea was brought together beneath the banner of the Nonae. The rule of the Nonae, though, lasted no more than a millennium, a brief flickering instant of order and stability, before collapsing under pressure from without and corruption from within.
We Nonae, though, did not fade gracefully into the pages of history like the forgotten nations of the past, nor seal ourselves away like the Black Sun Empire of Atla before us. Pulling back from the farthest reaches of our influence's sphere, we retreated into our arid home in the Eastern Desert, there to train and wait for the next turn of fortune's wheel. We were a nation always mobilized for war, divided into our family cohorts, meeting together only once every turn of the seasons for the Convocation and the exchange of cadets.
Among the Nonae, men and women play an equal role in every aspect of society, whether military, or hunting duties, or the rearing of children. Our offspring are raised in common by elders selected for the task, each child knowing no parent but the cohort itself. The elders, drill paters and drill maters, are responsible for a child's upbringing from infancy until the trials at the end of adolescence, when the child becomes an adult and a full member of a cohort.
Cadets, as all Nonae children are known, are not considered full citizens of the Nonae nation. Only when the cadet has taken and passed the maturation trials at the end of their sixteenth summer can they be accepted as members of the nation. It is at this time that their left cheek is emblazoned with the ix, the sigil of the Nonae. Until the new-made citizen is accepted by a cohort other than the one into which they were born, though, they are not yet adults. These citizen cadets must wait for the Convocation, which tradition demands be held every summer.
Cadets are forbidden from joining the cohort in which they are born, to prevent inbreeding and to ensure that the blood is distributed throughout the Nonae nation. For a man and woman born into the same cohort to lay together and beget a child is the rankest offense to the Nonae sensibility, our gravest taboo.
When I was a child, our drill mater told us about the Convocations of her youth, in which dozens of cohorts would gather together out on the high deserts. The tents of the gathered families would spread as far as thy eye could see, and when the martial trials were held—in which the caputs of each cohort could evaluate the latest crop of cadets, and determine which to invite into their families—the numbers of cadets in the ring numbered in the hundreds, if not even thousands. At the end of the martial trials, the cohorts would barter to exchange the cadets, and at the close of the Convocation the citizen cadets would have the insignia of their new cohort branded onto their right cheeks, signifying that they were now full adults.
When I reached my sixteenth summer, and had the ix burned onto my left cheek, I was the last cadet in my cohort. Our caputs were a pair of ancient men, so enfeebled they could scarcely stand, and aside from them and my drill mater, there were just a handful of men and women, rapidly approaching senescence. The other cadets of my childhood had either fallen to injury or disease, been snatched away by raiders, or had already graduated from cadets to adults when they joined other cohorts.
I was eager to leave the old ones of my birth cohort behind, and find a place for myself in a fresh, virile cohort. But as the months turned into seasons, turned into years, our cohort found no sign of any others in our roaming through the desert wastes. There had not been a Convocation since I'd been just eight summers old, and even then it had been just three cohorts, who exchanged a half-dozen cadets after halfhearted martial trials before disappearing back into the arid wilds.
My drill mater died when I was twenty summers old. One of the caputs when I was twenty-one. By the time I was twenty-three summers old, only three old women and two old men constituted the members of our cohort, not counting myself. And since my right cheek was still unmarred, I did not count, after all. I was not an adult, and not a true member of the Nonae, but was still a citizen cadet at my advanced age. There had not been a Convocation in fifteen summers, and we'd not seen another family of Nonae in almost half that long.
I left my birth cohort before I'd reached twenty-four summers, and made my way to the west. I've traveled around the circumference of the Inner Sea, from the mouth of the river Pison to the shadow of the Lathe Mountains, hiring out my good right arm to whomever can spare the coin. I've soldiered, guarded, bullied, assassinated, and stolen. Whatever ends my employers would have me turn my talents towards, so long as they exercise the martial skills with which I was raised.
The last of my birth cohort may have died in my absence and, for all I know, I might well be the last of the Nonae. A once-great nation, that gathered together all the lands of Paragaea under its banner in the distant reaches of memory, now degraded to one sword for hire, eking out a meager existence at the fringes of barbarous cultures, still a child in the eyes of her vanished people. And when I die, the final indignity will be that I was never a true adult, never a full member of the people who may well live on only as long as I myself do.
At last, their course turned again towards the east, and they approached the southern inlet of the Parousian peninsula. They sailed along with the Parousian coast at their port side for some days, until they reached the point where the shore curved before them before continuing back to the south and west.
/> “This is the nearest landfall to Keir-Leystall,” Tyrel explained to Leena and Hieronymus, who had joined him in the wheelhouse, maps and charts spread before them.
“And if what our companion Benu says is correct,” Hieronymus said, pointing to a crosshatched patch of darkness a few finger widths from their current position on the map, “the oracular forest itself can be found there, many days' journey overland to the east.”
“Then what are we waiting for?” Leena said, straightening. “I'm ready to be off this tub and on our way.”
“You've no time to waste on pleasantries, lassie, which I respect.” Tyrel flashed an easy smile, but a scowl lurked at the corners of his mouth. “You're on my ship still, though, and I'll thank you kindly not to impugn the good name of the good ship Acoetes Zephyrus.”
“She meant no offense, Captain,” Hieronymus said, stepping between them and clapping an arm around Tyrel's shoulder. “Your dhow is one of the worthiest vessels upon which I've sailed, and I count it a privilege to have served, if only briefly and by half measures, as one of her crew.” Hieronymus skillfully steered Tyrel away from the maps, towards the cabin door, and out onto the deck.
“You're a rank flatterer, lad,” Tyrel said with a grin, “but I'll do you the favor of believing every lie. If I was to be forced to smuggle unfortunates from the clutches of the Masjid Emporean constabulary, I consider it my good fortune that one of you, at least, had sea legs beneath you, and did not shrink from a bit of honest work.”
Balam and Spatha were resting on the deck, having passed another morning sparring, while Kakere sat looking on in the shadow of the wheelhouse, and Benu calmly studied the horizon.
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