Ancient Light

by Mary Gentle

  ‘The shuttle’s on Kumiel. Damn tech restrictions!’ Doug’s brevity and irritation were uncharacteristic.

  ‘Look.’

  As we hurried down the cliff-walk, I indicated the mass of Ortheans in the Square. Nothing but a mosaic of heads and bodies: impenetrable. In fascination I saw waves of shock travel out from those nearest to the great Wellhouse entrance, heard the buzz of confusion, and realized it must mean news was coming in on the rashaku-relay. Then we were down in the hot, humid air at Crown Gate.

  I caught a glimpse of black. Cory? Before I could call to her, she commandeered a skurrai-carriage, and her harsh authoritarian voice rang out, clearing away the nearest crowds. And the Peace Force shuttles are on Kumiel too – I had a blackly humorous urge to laugh. Then a pointed muzzle showed between a group of fur-clad Roehmonders. I seized Doug’s arm, pulled him into the skurrai-jasin and caught up the harness, and as the squat beast heaved the wooden vehicle off over the flagstones a weight made it dip. Startled, I glanced round. Blaize Meduenin swung himself up on the back.

  ‘One of the T’ans must see Melkathi, and quickly,’ he said. Doug blinked, and then muttered agreement.

  We have to know what’s happening, have to know if it is an attack; how bad, what size force, what damage –

  Skurrai-jasin are not fast. As we trotted down between telestre-houses in that sweltering noon, I was rigid with impatience; coaxing every advantage from the beast. I caught my face growing heated, aware that we presented a ridiculous spectacle.

  ‘I can’t get a response from the Coast base,’ Doug said, mouth to wristlink. ‘Nor from the orbiter. It must be the storms.’

  Will it take us longer to cross the city, to come to the harbour, to be ferried out to Kumiel, than to fly the shuttle a hundred miles down the coast of Melkathi – yes, dammit, yes. And while we’re doing this, what’s happening there?

  I pulled the skurrai’s harness and the beast shouldered its way between stalls in the Guild-Ring. Doors were shut here, entrances barricaded; and anxious Ortheans in Rimon and Ymirian dress stood by the wooden display platforms. No trade in this market now.

  ‘They know,’ Blaize said softly. Membrane slid over his whiteless blue eyes. He gripped the back of the skurrai-jasin, boots planted firmly on the wheel-guard. When Ortheans tried to stop the carriage, he bawled at them with all the authority of a mercenary commander.

  Coming down to the docks, the city was in uproar. Arguments, fights, panic-stricken barring of telestre-house entrances. Then suddenly it was open sunlight, salty air, as we swung on to the quay. Across the bright water, a jath-rai was already tacking for Kumiel. Cory Mendez? If we could only get through to Molly Rachel – what will she order the Peace Force to do?

  ‘Damn all proscriptions of technology,’ Doug Clifford muttered.

  Blaize jumped down on to the stones of the quay. Harur-blades jingled. He signalled to a jath-rai moored at steps near us, had brief words with the ship-master. I glanced back as I got down from the skurrai-jasin, but the shoulder of the hill hid the Citadel now.

  ‘This is what we get for keeping to the rules.’ I looked at Doug. ‘Cory Mendez won’t put up with these restrictions now, you realize that? And if Sethri and the Anzhadi do have black-market Earth technology – they won’t keep to the rules.’

  A moment of stillness. Doug squinted against the brilliance of Carrick’s Star on Tathcaer harbour, scratched at his grizzled red-grey hair.

  ‘Another boundary crossed,’ he said. ‘Another restriction removed.’

  There are protections that are intangible, only noticed when they’re gone; and I had time to shiver, quite literally, and think, How long before there are no rules at all? and then Blaize called, and hurried us up the swaying plank to the jath-rai’s deck.

  The small craft rocked in the swell. Kumiel Island hardly seemed to grow closer. The cool wind left my hair stiff with salt and lips dry, and I gratefully took the flask of stir that Blaize handed me, and drank as I stood at the ship’s rail, and saw the Peace Force shuttle lift off from Kumiel with a hurried roar. The heat of Carrick’s Star made rocks, sea and craft shimmer.

  ‘Sunmother!’ Blaize hit one stocky fist into his open hand. ‘For ships to cross the Inner Sea in Stormsun –’ and then he grinned crookedly: ‘Sethri Anzhadi. He would have made a good mercenary.’

  ‘How can you say that?’

  ‘Pride in the skills of war,’ Blaize Meduenin said. ‘You should listen to your Corazon Mendez, S’aranth. If this is to become an Earth war, perhaps it should be ended by Earth’s ways.’

  That scarred face was open, honest; and he met my gaze as if this was a serious possibility he discussed. Once a mercenary, always a mercenary? Before I could say more, the jath-rai scraped Kumiel’s tiny quay.

  Doug Clifford spared no backwards glance for us, barely giving us time to enter the government shuttle before he palmed the exit shut. Sunlight replaced by green interior light: summer’s heat by cool air, and I fell into the pilot’s seat and put the console through as fast a take-off sequence as I ever hope to, and before the lurch that announced liftoff, Douggie was halfway to keying in record on the holotank and simultaneously opening all channels on the comlink. Blaize Meduenin leaned on the back of my chair, studying the small navigation-holo.

  ‘I’ll key us to follow the coastline east,’ I said.

  ‘A hundred and fifty seri,’ Blaize directed. ‘Christie, use the Melkathi sandflats to place us.’

  Say, a hundred and eighty miles. By the time I’d keyed a recognition pattern, Doug had the comlink at last functioning:

  ‘– visual contact made 01.76.345/97.31.823; repeat, 01.76 –’

  ‘– Ottoway, report. Report position. Where is Green Two?’

  ‘– Green Two repor –’

  White noise blanked all channels, then faded intermittently.

  ‘– drop into low orbit from the hi-orbit station, form up on latitude 65: stabilize and observe.’

  ‘Error-rate on satellite survey equipment up to 83%. Fucking hell, what kind of atmospherics does this world –’

  Doug keyed the volume low. The three of us moved to the large holotank, studying exterior-image. A haze partly obscured the land beneath us. Blue-grey sea merged with Ymir’s blue-grey hills. One highlight from Carrick’s Star blazed off the water, following us eastwards. At this low level of flight, no more than two thousand feet, the roads that mark telestre-boundaries are visible as white threads; telestre-houses are perfect miniatures. They were fewer and further between, now, as we began to fly over Melkathi, that sandy, barren land.

  ‘Keep the heat-sensors trained,’ Doug ordered.

  ‘It could be just a skirmish. One ship or two, or –’

  ‘The rashaku-relay says fifty jath warships,’ Blaize said. ‘Exaggeration, of course. But by how much?’

  The shuttle bucked, kicked in empty air; and I leaned back to the pilot’s console, saw we were registering other air traffic – Cory’s shuttle and the low-level orbital surveillance craft – and corrected for it. So long as her ships stick to surveillance …

  ‘Why don’t they answer?’ Douggie said, frustrated; and then made an abrupt shift to public voice as Pramila Ishida’s face came on the comlink screen. ‘Put me in contact with Molly Rachel, please. I must speak with the Company representative.’

  ‘I don’t have time for this. We have our own problems,’ the Pacifican girl said, her expression somewhere between exasperation and fear. ‘Molly Rachel is in Kel Harantish, no contact is possible, I’m afraid –’

  I leaned over Douggie and said to her, ‘Has Cory Mendez been in touch with Molly? Does Molly know what’s happening here?’

  White noise cut her speech, the image fuzzed and died. I was still working out whether it was a breakdown or a delicate cutting of the contact when Blaize stabbed one claw-nailed finger at the main holotank: ‘There!’

  Flat land baked under the light of Carrick’s Star. Here the coast ran down into mudflats an
d sandbars, fringed with white surf. Black smoke smeared the eastern horizon. I swung the shuttle seawards, then inland, dropping down below one thousand feet. The black smear became a tower of smoke, billowing up, spreading at the crown; seeping across the sky as we came closer to it, and we entered a sepia light.

  ‘Those are Coast jath,’ Blaize said.

  Hoop-masted metal ships gleamed on the sandflats, and as we came closer I saw how they listed to one side, beached; the sand churned up round them. Nothing moved.

  Doug’s hands were poised delicately over the sensor controls, his face showing an intent concentration, as if he were a musician or engraver. ‘The heat-sensors aren’t picking up anything large enough to be humanoid life … That fire is some thirty miles inland.’

  ‘Rimnith,’ Blaize said.

  Even Doug looked up at that tone. I felt how earth is kin to Ortheans, that crumbling warm and fertile earth as close to them as their skin: to hurt it is to hurt them.

  I swung the shuttle inland, and the smoke of the burning grew thicker. The root of that dark tower was a spot near low hills, and smoke billowed up thick and black, and at its foot there was a tiny spark of orange. White specks in the air resolved into shuttles on hover-mode: Cory Mendez and the Peace Force. I let us overshoot, skimming the edge of walls of darkness, smoke that rose up and blotted out all light. Even with air-purifiers, the smell of burning leaked through into the cabin.

  ‘I want to go in,’ I said.

  Doug turned from monitoring the holo-record. ‘That would be very unwise, Lynne.’

  ‘Look down there.’

  From this height they were only dots, hardly moving on a track that must be (given the speed we were moving) another ten or fifteen miles inland. But there were too many of them. Blaize said nothing, but I knew he recognized that pattern. Refugees.

  ‘I’m taking us down. There might be something we can do.’ I looked at Doug. ‘Record it. Put it out on the WEBs; this is proof of what the Company’s caused here, it might help stop it before it goes any further.’

  Blaize said nothing as I keyed in a landing-pattern, and the shuttle sank down, drifted in hover-mode to settle astride an earthtrack on a barren and sandy heath. As the power died, he touched the hilt of harur-blades.

  ‘We know where the hiyeks were,’ he said then, curtly nodding at the holo-image of burning land. ‘We don’t know where they are now.’

  We all have our own ghosts. I never thought that I should stand again in Melkathi and smell burning.

  Even here, a dozen miles distant, the air was citrine; flecks of black ash drifting down from no detectable source. The earth felt warm underfoot. Here was little but sand, and sparse hanelys-tanglebush and siir. The heath’s dips and hollows made it impossible to see far in any direction. Blaize, stepping from the shuttle-ramp, unselfconsciously bent down to touch the earth, and to sign himself on the breast with the Circle of the Goddess. Doug Clifford joined us, shutting off his wristlink.

  ‘Cory wants to know precisely what we civilians are doing in a hostile area,’ he said. ‘I thought a communications failure might be tactful at this juncture. After I told her that we had a temporary power-fault.’

  ‘Listen –’ And I realized I’d automatically stepped to one side, CAS IV loose in its holster, the old Service training surfacing after all these years. I didn’t draw the stungun. Blaize looked perfectly relaxed, and I know how fast he can move.

  Because the terrain was so irregular, we heard them before we saw them. The pad of marhaz and the jingle of their harness, loud in that noon heat and silence, and voices … The first marhaz topped the rise, a dozen yards away. A thin beast, black-and-cream pelt eaten by parasites, horns uncropped and gleaming wickedly in the smoky light. Its rider was equally thin and shabby, a fair-skinned and dark-maned ashiren some fourteen seasons old.

  ‘Give you greeting,’ Blaize called, ‘in Her name.’

  Two other marhaz joined the first. One carried its pad as if lame. A red-maned ashiren turned in the saddle and held up kir hand, but the straggling procession took no notice, and only gradually halted as they saw us. Young Ortheans, from three-births still in arms to ashiren old as the riders, and all ages between. Still they came over the low rise, until there were fifty or sixty of them; all with black or red manes, most with strongly similar faces – all the ashiren of one telestre? I thought, remembering Blaize’s voice when he said Rimnith.

  The Meduenin said, ‘Where do you travel, ashiren-te?’

  ‘Keverilde telestre.’ The red-maned child’s voice came harshly. ‘If there is Keverilde, still. T’an, they burned Rimnith –’

  ‘Where are your elders?’

  Ke was silent, but another of the riders, a ten-or eleven-year-old ashiren, said, ‘Gone into other telestres to wait.’

  ‘Wait until we can fight –’

  ‘– they burned –’

  ‘– burned the land –’

  ‘We offered them guest-right,’ the red-maned ashiren cut in, over the babble of other voices. Ke picked absently at soot smears on kir thin, tawny robe. ‘We offered them guest-right and they burned the land, t’an.’

  No time for saryl-kabriz poison, I thought. Cassirur, what now?

  Blaize Meduenin stared back the way they had come. Nothing was visible but that black wall of smoke in the south.

  ‘Keverilde is too close,’ he said. ‘Eirye, or Beriah … Ashiren-te, will you be afraid to fly, as offworlders do? We will take you all, in turns – but the beasts you must leave. Will you go, ashiren-te?’

  ‘Now wait a minute –’ Doug broke off. He watched the Orthean children.

  All the Orthean features are delicate on a child: feathery mane rooting down the spine, slender clawed fingers and high-arched feet; the eyes that blur with translucent membrane. Alien, unsexed. The red-maned rider let kir beast pad closer to Blaize Meduenin, until ke could look down at him.

  ‘Take the youngest of us,’ the rider said, with precarious adolescent dignity. ‘For myself, I’d sooner ride into Shadow than travel with those who are friends to the Coast.’

  ‘That’s foolish. You’ll be weary, and in danger,’ Blaize reminded kir.

  The rider smiled, and it was adult, cynical. Ke said, ‘All of us are in danger now, t’an. Now that the Coast raiders have s’aranthi weapons.’

  Doug, with an exaggerated sigh, glanced from the rabble of children to the shuttle. ‘Three trips,’ he estimated, ‘and God knows we won’t get any help from Cory Mendez. I wouldn’t take the risk if these weren’t children. What in God’s name are their people doing sending them away alone?’

  A remembered voice in my head said, Who’d harm ashiren? Who’d dare? When I looked across at Blaize, I knew he had no faith in that now. The restrictions have broken down.

  Two hours later, back on the same spot; nothing changed but Carrick’s Star declined slightly from noon.

  ‘Link your navigation-data in,’ said the thin, blond man in Peace Force coveralls. His name was Ottoway, I gathered; he had prematurely creased and tanned skin, and in his eyes something of the same look as Corazon Mendez. He said, ‘It’s funny. They seem more afraid of a ship on their soil than of the actual flight.’

  I watched the remaining ashiren and marhaz file up the ramp and into the F90, whose shining white bulk dwarfed the government shuttle. Blaize Meduenin stood at the top of the ramp, preparatory to going with them.

  They remember flight, in the days of the Golden Empire … and it isn’t to reassure them about flight that the Meduenin is going with them. They don’t trust offworlders, now.

  ‘Thank Cory when you see her,’ I said. ‘We’d have been some time taking the last group over to Beriah, and we’re getting low on fuel.’

  ‘Just getting non-combatants out of a hostile area,’ Ottoway said. ‘About yourself, Ms Christie, and the government envoy, Clifford –’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ I smiled. And made for the government shuttle, before he should realize I’d reassured him ab
out absolutely nothing. Away in the south there was the sound of shuttles and observer-craft, there where the horizon still was yellow with smoke. I palmed the lock shut, cutting out the faint smell of combustion on the wind.

  ‘We’re going to have to do something soon,’ I said, taking the seat beside Doug at the holotank.

  ‘Mmm.’ He reached out to the console. ‘You might find this interesting. I got a signal some few minutes ago that I failed to identify immediately. Eventually I realized that it was being relayed through the Morvren communication-link from Thierry’s World … Listen.’

  ‘– been requesting permission from the Company to land, but they’ve refused. I couldn’t get in contact with you, envoy Clifford –’

  The replay-image showed a young woman’s face. I recognized those heavy, slanting brows: the ‘caster from the Trismegistus WEB. Doug ran the record forward.

  ‘– there are ‘casters from three or four other WEBs on Thierry, but transport to Carrick V is under so many Company restrictions that it’s impossible to get through. Envoy, I want to ‘cast from the surface of Carrick’s world itself. I want to show the Home Worlds and the Heart Worlds just exactly what’s happening here –’

  Doug keyed out the image. ‘I sent her the record of the refugees here in Melkathi. I’ve authorized the government base on Thierry’s World to finance transport for any WEB-casters travelling to Orthe.’ With uncharacteristic vindictiveness, he added, ‘It won’t do Representative Rachel any harm to have WEBcasters following her every move.’

  ‘I’d sooner keep friendly relations with Cory’s people. We may need them. I was talking to Ottoway,’ I said, as I leaned back in the bucket seat, and reached over to key a container of coffee from the supply-panel. ‘He says the area round Rimnith is quiet, the fires are dying down.’

  And was it a wet spring, a wet summer? I remember when Orhlandis burned the whole countryside was in danger –