by Mary Gentle
‘Put us on an evasion-pattern. I want voicecast-contact with that jath-ship. Give me a close-in image.’ I bent over the holotank, one hand tight against my ribs, wincing. ‘I thought I’d seen that before … Pramila, that’s one of the ships with Anzhadi-hiyek on board. You come here. I want you on voicecast. You tell them, we want a truce, we want a meeting, and if we don’t get it – if they fire again –’
‘Yes?’ And she smiled.
‘Then we’ll try another ship.’ Breath was coming back to me, and a degree of calmness. ‘I think it’ll be easier, however, to make contact where you and I are known. Even if that isn’t essential.’
She hesitantly came to sit down in the seat I vacated, and took the comlink now on narrowcast. There was an expression almost of disappointment on her round face. As if it would have pleased her to have the Company threaten violence against Coast hiyeks – to have her worst fears realized?
‘Kethrial-shamaz shan’tai Anzhadi –’
Her voice, magnified, quite clearly reached the deck of the jath below us. I saw how pale-maned Ortheans looked up at the hovering shuttle; the image in real-time, and clear enough to show expressions on faces: fear, confusion, hope.
‘– I was of Anzhadi’s Ninth raiku, and the shan’tai Christie has been received in siiran. We would speak with you, without the firing of weapons. If you knew Sethri-safere of Ninth raiku, then listen; it would have been his will –’
She keyed out the narrowcast, and sat for a moment without speaking. There were bright streaks on her face, hardly visible in the dim green light, and yet she smiled: an Orthean expression on a human face.
As the YV9’s equipment picked up and sorted voices from below, filtering out the noise of the shuttle’s power-hum, the wind and the waves, Ruric again reached over to touch my arm and indicate the holo-image of the jath’s deck.
‘Those two? They’re Anzhadi, yes, I know them.’
‘Not them. There: the Harantish Witchbreed,’ Ruric said. ‘You must remember, I have had my people in the port of Harantish, and on the canals. That is a face you will not know, but I do, though we have never met. That is Oreys, of the science bloodline Kethalu.’
The pod opened, after what seemed like an hour of darkness and buffeting, and I stepped on to the swaying deck of the jath, Pramila Ishida close behind me, and, behind her, the robed and masked figure of the Hexenmeister. Bright sun blinded me. I took a quick squint into the brilliant sky, seeing the shuttle’s bulk hovering overhead; and then through dazzles saw hiyek-Ortheans on the deck. The jath dipped, rose; and I staggered, catching my balance.
A cool voice said, ‘Give you greeting, shan’tai Christie.’ The sound was pitched to carry over the slap of waves on the metal hull, and the chattering of ashiren who now flocked towards the pod. They scattered as it rose, drawn back aboard the YV9.
‘Give you greeting –’ I spoke to the two hiyek-Ortheans I recognized: a stocky female, and, leaning on her shoulder, a thin and weary male ‘– shan’tai Feriksushar, shan’tai Hildrindi.’
Pramila came up beside me, and said softly, ‘Greeting to Anzhadi, and to all hiyeks here.’
Ortheans crowded the upper and the inner deck, some in the rigging; dozens of faces all turned in this direction. Their manes were white or yellow, they were small of stature, and thin; and I thought, How can we stop them? This is crazy. For diplomacy to work, it has to work before we’ve got to this stage –
But that won’t stop me trying.
Feriksushar said bluntly, ‘What do you want, shan’tai Ishida?’
The Pacifican girl glanced at me, and then back at the older Orthean female. She let her gaze travel across the lines of Ortheans, and said, ‘Sethri-safere of Ninth raiku is dead. It was a Harantish woman who killed him. You have Harantish here. Let him speak with us.’
The wind whipped hair into my eyes. I began to get the feel of balance, on that sun-heated metal deck. All the faces that I saw had a stolid impassivity, but I thought there was some reaction at the mention of Harantish Witchbreed, and I said to the thin male, ‘Shan’tai Hildrindi, has the Company now to negotiate with the people of Kel Harantish, about the affairs of the hiyek-families?’
His hand was clenched on Feriksushar’s shoulder, bunching the thin material of her meshabi-robe. The bright sun on his face showed deep lines, and blue shadows about his mouth; and it came to me how few months it must be since I’d spoken with him in Maherwa, and how far his illness had progressed.
‘You think to anger us,’ he said, smiling. ‘Anger speaks unwisely. We took your present approach for an attack on us: that was unwise. Or was it only premature?’
I should know better than to fence with you, I thought. Hildrindi-keretne, like Feriksushar, carried a hook-bladed knife at his belt; she had a winchbow slung across her back. It was when I looked over their heads, to the GHD4 beampulser now shrouded in patched cloth, that I saw the Harantish male.
‘Give you greeting,’ I called, ‘Shan’tai Oreys Kethalu. Come down and speak with s’aranthi, since you command this ship –’
The crowd parted and let him through. He was tall, loose-limbed, with a feline agility to catch points of balance as the deck dipped and swayed beneath him; and he came lightly down the steps from the upper deck to stand beside Hildrindi. He was pale-skinned, dressed in the brown scale-mail of Harantish; and at first I thought him white-maned, but as he came closer, I saw the roots of it were black. The eyes in his narrow-chinned face weren’t golden, but brown.
‘These are allies.’ Oreys Kethalu’s voice was harsh, speaking the common hiyek slang. ‘Not servants, allies. Allies of the city Kel Harantish, and the Empress Calil –’
‘Calil killed Sethri-safere!’
The young Pacifican woman stumbled on the metal deck as she stepped forward, face contorted. I half reached out a hand to stop her; then thought better of it. Anger speaks unwisely, as Hildrindi says; and provokes unwise speech in others.
Her human tongue stumbled with the formal speech of the siirans: ‘Listen, raiku of Anzhadi-hiyek! How many centuries have the families been slaves to the Harantish Witchbreed? This was your chance to win free – there’s land on the north continent that you can have, that isn’t telestre land; land that doesn’t need canals, doesn’t need siiran. The price is peace, that’s all; and you could have it, but what do you do? You invite the Witchbreed to command you again!’
Feriksushar snorted, and over the shouted comments of the surrounding Ortheans said, ‘Sethri said he could free us from the desert so we followed him. If the Empress-in-Exile can win us land here, we’ll follow her. And if you could win it for us, shan’tai s’aranthi, we’d follow you. Hunger’s hard on principles.’
Oreys Kethalu held up a blunt-fingered hand for silence. ‘We’ve been shut up in that pestilent city for more ages than you s’aranthi can easily count. If the hiyek-families were our servants, so were we servants to them. Now both our peoples have a free alliance.’
Membrane slid across his eyes as he met my gaze, and then slid back. More quietly, he added, ‘Yes, we had from them food and water, that we could not get ourselves. And yes, they had from us our knowledge to keep canals and siiran alive. Who was then the slave, shan’tai?’
His unexpected honesty stopped me. A moment of stillness in all that movement: the rocking ocean, the wind, the clash of sails, the deep thrum of the hovering YV9. Something brushed my arm then, and it was a robe of coarse brown cloth. The dark Orthean woman stepped forward: Ruric Hexenmeister.
‘It’s an old quarrel, that between Kel Harantish and the Hundred Thousand. Centuries have not seen the end of it. Now you enter that quarrel and call it an alliance, a hope of gaining freedom – shan’tai Feriksushar, do you think you will have freedom, under Calil bel-Rioch’s rule?’
The stocky hiyek female shrugged. ‘The Hundred Thousand doesn’t need canals to keep it fertile, so the Witchbreed – your pardon, shan’tai Kethalu – have no hold over us.’
Salt was bi
tter on my lips, stiff in my hair. I suddenly had to clasp my hands together, behind my back, so that no one would see how they were shaking. Delayed, the shock of that attack on the shuttle hit all the harder. I let the fear again fuel action:
‘You’ve got s’aranthi weapons, shan’tai, we know that. We’d know it even if Pramila hadn’t told us –’ I registered Hildrindi’s ironic amusement ‘– and that’s a matter for concern. Despite all that’s happened, the Company’s very reluctant to get involved in fighting a war. But now I’ll ask you something – has the shan’tai Kethalu told you how Calil plans to subdue the Hundred Thousand? Has he told you what weapon she’ll hold over their heads?’
Another Anzhadi stepped forward to talk urgently with Hildrindi-keretne. The babble of voices drowned all other conversation, all the hiyek males and females seemingly shouting at once; and the younger ashiren took refuge in the deck-tents.
‘There was –’ Feriksushar’s drill-sergeant shout rose over other voices; she added more quietly, ‘there was some talk of weaponry, shan’tai s’aranthi. What of it?’
Beside me, Ruric reached up to put back the hood of her robe. That tangled black mane rooted down her spine, silvered a little with age; and her narrow, masked face turned, surveying all the hiyek-Ortheans. When she spoke, her voice was pitched so that they must strain to hear it over wind and waves: an old orator’s trick.
‘Let me tell you,’ she said. ‘You have memories. There are keretne among you. Let me recall to you a weapon of the Golden Witchbreed, that made the Elansiir and the Glittering Plain, and that Twilight Shore that lies in the arctic north of the Barrens. There is a weapon that ate like a cancer at the face of the world. There is a weapon that, when the Empire was at its height, when it was of such magnificence that even its slaves must be amazed at such a grandeur of tyranny – a weapon that, in that moment, brought the Empire to its fall. And that is the weapon Calil bel-Rioch claims to have.’
The rhythms of the Coast’s semi-formal language lulled them, as much as her Tower robes caught their attention. It was a deliberate piece of theatre, that must now be built upon to reach something real.
Oreys Kethalu, almost shamefaced, said, ‘It’s a threat, no more.’
With all the Hexenmeister’s authority, sensed without their knowing who she was, Ruric said, ‘I have seen cities of crystal, dead, and turning to slow dust. That is the threat, shan’tai Hildrindi, shan’tai Feriksushar. Hiyek-Anzhadi, if the Empress-in-Exile has that, it is a threat to the Hundred Thousand, and a threat to you too.’
Feriksushar glanced at Oreys Kethalu with something very like contempt. ‘The Harantish are few. We are many.’
I said, The Hundred Thousand are many, now, and you hiyeks are few. If you can hold a threat over them, the Harantish Witchbreed can hold that threat over you. But this isn’t a very fruitful discussion, shan’tai. If we could talk of the land to the north of the Hundred Thousand –’
Overhead, the shuttle’s hum deepened. The white hull flashed in the sun as it rose, circling slowly to the north; and I was about to make comlink-contact when I realized it was cruising between this jath and another that approached us. The second jath veered slowly away. I licked my lips, salt-bitter, thinking, if they’d offer us hospitality we’d be halfway to a discussion, but we ’re talking ourselves out of time and patience here.
Oreys Kethalu stared at the brown-robed Hexenmeister. ‘You are from the Tower, shan’tai? The Tower is no friend to Kel Harantish.’
Feriksushar said, ‘Nor to the hiyeks. No friend to the hiyeks was ever found in the Brown Tower.’
Ruric chuckled, startling both of them, and said, ‘You fired on us just now, and yet the shan’tai Christie didn’t retaliate. That’s one friend you have, and she has the closest connections with the Tower.’
Kethalu, irritated, said, ‘That isn’t what I meant.’
She sees him as the key, I thought. The Harantish, not the hiyeks. And she’s keeping him off balance very nicely.
Ruric, in a practical tone, went on: ‘Just now, I said that we were slaves to the Empire, and that was true. Neither you, shan’tai Kethalu, nor the hiyek people here, are slaves. The Coast was not slavery and tyranny, but a pattern of survival that you were locked into; the only way you could live in a land that, by all rights, shouldn’t support life. And believe me if I tell you, all the Tower has ever done is correct that balance when either of your peoples forgot it.’
Bodies brushed my elbows and my back, and I realized that the hiyek-Ortheans had crowded in close. Only minimum sail kept the jath into the wind: all other attention was on us. Pramila, myself, Ruric: the Witchbreed male, and the Anzhadi. There was the dirt and musk scent of the siiran in that close contact.
Hildrindi-keretne, still leaning on Feriksushar’s arm, said, ‘And now?’
Ruric’s face was invisible behind the mask. I sensed them straining to guess her intentions.
She said, ‘Now, even you and the Harantish Golden can’t make that desolation support life for many more decades. Shan’tai, go to the Northern Wilderness. The telestre land isn’t yours to take, nor theirs to give up. The T’An Suthai-Telestre has said he will give you free passage north, to the empty lands.’
‘On whose authority?’ Feriksushar grunted.
‘On his own.’
Oreys Kethalu again put up a hand for silence. Metal sails creaked; heavy water hit and echoed against the hull of the jath.
‘And on the Tower’s authority?’ he asked.
‘Yes, shan’tai.’
‘Well, I do not believe you,’ he said, and his brown eyes gleamed. ‘You are the Tower’s messenger, you claim, but I do not believe the Tower would loose us from its grip. Not our city Kel Harantish; not the hiyeks that serve it. No, shan’tai.’
The Orthean woman reached up, pulling at the strings and removing her mask. The light of Carrick’s Star was harsh white on her fine-grained skin. She smiled to feel the air on her face; and I could see, as she looked around, her knowledge that no one could recognize the exile’s scar on her forehead, no one could name her as Hexenmeister. Only this nameless woman, without authority, to persuade the hiyeks and the Witchbreed … and yet she has authority, I realized. You cannot carry the Hexenmeister’s many lives, and seem unchanged.
‘There have been those to whom the Tower deferred,’ she said mildly. ‘You will have heard of Beth’ru-elen Ashirenin, who came to Kasabaarde’s inner city, and who founded the province of Peir-Dadeni – and who made our religion of the Goddess real.’
Oreys Kethalu blinked, two layers of membrane sliding down, inner and outer lids.
‘The keretne here will know what I say is true. Your link with Her is blood and water. In the north, the link is the earth itself, and the wells of Her water; and if you make that link, you are the Goddess and She is you, and you can no more harm the earth than you can cut out your own heart. And the Tower will not go against that.’ Ruric paused.
‘You were from a telestre before you reached the Tower,’ the Witchbreed male said contemptuously, speaking under cover of the hiyek-families’ loud reaction to what she said.
Then Ruric reached out, gripping his shoulder with her single hand. Before he could react, she said, ‘Look at me – look. Yes. I’m what you are, half Golden-blooded. Yes. If the truth were made clear, my Coast mother may have come from Kel Harantish itself. I have no past-memories. All I have is what the Tower tells me.’
Hammerblows of shock opened his eyes: for a second defenceless, he stared at her. ‘I don’t understand –’
‘We’re not like them,’ Ruric said. ‘We have no keretne, no past-memory. If the past isn’t with us, we’re not controlled by it. I’ve lived in this world, not in the days of the Empire. If Santhendor’lin-sandru could love death enough to give it to half a world, that doesn’t mean I must, or that you can or will do the same.’
He shook his head in bewilderment, this loose-limbed male in brown armour; and his dyed-white mane whipped in the se
a wind. I shot a glance at Ruric: saw the wide-set yellow eyes glowing in that dark face.
‘Be free of it,’ she said. ‘What you’re doing isn’t the only way. If the Tower can change, then so can the Hundred Thousand, and so can the Harantish Golden.’
Almost sulkily, Oreys Kethalu said, ‘But I know nothing of northern lands, this “Northern Wilderness” the T’An Suthai-Telestre speaks of. It may be no better than the Coast –’
Hildrindi leaned forward and with deliberate irony said, ‘Shan’tai, it could hardly be worse!’
Kethalu rounded on him, dragging him aside and speaking in a furious undertone. Both of them glanced at us from time to time. When I looked to see Pramila, she was amongst a group of other Anzhadi; then I realized our tight little grouping had broken up, was dispersing among the crowd of hiyek-Ortheans. The shrouded bulk of the beampulser stood abandoned on the upper deck.
‘And if they can change,’ the dark Orthean woman said, ‘so can s’aranthu. Christie, I’ve got Oreys Kethalu to the point where he’ll admit the possibility of change, if nothing more. Can I get you to that point?’
‘Me?’ I shrugged, then. ‘The Company doesn’t change.’
Ruric nodded at Pramila Ishida, where the Pacifican woman stood with Feriksushar and the rest of Twenty-Eighth raiku. ‘What of her? And does your Corazon Mendez think as she once did, now that she’s seen the burning of Morvren Freeport? And you, Christie, you’re Company. Admit a possibility that things can be different?’
The jath dipped, metal prow cutting the ocean and sending up a rainbow-fan of spray. Other ships glided on courses parallel, cutting the bright sea; and the wind came clean from the west. The hull of the shuttle caught the light of Carrick’s Star. I kept my footing on the swaying deck, and felt for a second the same sense of release that Oreys Kethalu must have felt. It was nothing that dared to be optimism, and yet – things can be different.
‘I admit the possibility,’ I said, and saw her grin, and couldn’t help but return it. ‘This is only one ship, Oreys Kethalu is only one man. It’s a possibility, not a probability. Still, I think … we’ve got too much hard work and too little time: I’ll tell you what I think in a few hours.’
