by Doris Egan
One hurdle surmounted and several dozen more to go. I sat out on the broken wall that evening by myself, and thought gloomy thoughts. He'd probably walk out of the fort tonight if I agreed to go along with it—a suicide walk, as far I was concerned, and I'd always considered him a model of enlightened self-interest. Ran and I had never had such major differences over strategy as we'd had this summer in the Northwest Sector. And a close analysis could not help but reveal that the difference in strategy were based on deeper differences as to what was important and what was not.
I had to accept the fact that being kidnapped by outlaws was not having a good effect on our engagement. * * *
Ten days later was graduation day for my practice group. Just to up the ante, Carabinstereth was allowing the men in to watch, and any of the new women who were interested. If we made it to the end of class, we wouldn't be novices anymore. Standing between each of us and the end of class were Lex, Komo, and Grateth, who would be attacking us with hands, feet, knives, clubs, and pistols. And anything else that entered their perverted heads in the course of the event. Needless to say, every student was a wreck for at least a full day ahead of time.
I'd told Ran not to come. I was afraid of messing up and looking like a fool in front of him. For some reason he had a high opinion of my abilities, and I didn't want to destroy it. He told me he was on water-duty anyway, and would be busy hauling jars all morning.
I waited on the line that day, watching the blunted knives being laid out on the floor, feeling sorry for myself. / didn't ask to be here. The knives, by the way, though blunted, could still do serious harm if we weren't careful. The clubs were regular clubs. And the pistols were supposed to be discharged, but one never knew when an extra store was being held. If Ran really cared, he'd have shown up anyway. Oh, terrific. Now you'd like him to read your mind. No, but I'd like him here… in case I don't screw up. But if I do screw up, I want him far away.
The lead woman on line was called out on the mat, and the fun began. It went with sickening quickness. Our attackers were quick, clean, and dedicated to their work, but our class was trained to meet them anywhere they were taken. Then, about halfway through, all the rules went out the window. They started pulling people out of line at random, changing single attacks to multiples, throwing in moves we'd never seen. Mora was beside me in line; she turned and whispered, eyes wide. "It isn't safe here anymore." We looked at each other, both well aware that that was the conditioning message for tonight.
Well, if they wanted us to be able to operate in a state of fear they were doing a good job of provoking it.
And then Carabinstereth was gesturing to me. "Your turn, Tymon."
And I was out in the middle, alone. Then something was around my throat, and I stomped on someone's feet and
turned and saw a knife in Lex's hand, and grabbed his wrist—and more things happened, and suddenly I was getting up and Lex was down on the mat. Something was dangling from my neck and I pulled it down dumbly and looked at it: A rope. Lex had tried for a garrotte first.
It was the only time anyone had tried that move, but that hardly accounted for the applause. I walked slowly toward Carabinstereth and the end of the line.
"Nice work on that other knife," she said.
I said, "What other knife?" and she pointed and grinned.
As it turned out, Lex had had a second knife. I hadn't realized it at the time, I'd just hit his other wrist as I came around and didn't even see it go skidding off across the floor. My friends on the sidelines had been horrified when they saw it first come out, but since I'd never seen it myself I felt as if I were accepting their acclaim under false pretenses. I probably would have been much more scared watching the scene than living it.
"I ought to kill you, Carabin," I said, knowing full well I should be very angry with her. Lex and Komo were as careful as they could be, but I might have gotten seriously hurt.
The grin was unimpaired, however, because Carabinstereth knew perfectly that I couldn't be angry at this point. I was just getting hit by the euphoria that washes over you after a win.
She bowed and waved me back in line, where two women hugged me. Lennisa was on my left in a brown leather vest; she was from the latest band we'd taken on. "Your fighting was so exciting," said Lennisa. "Even the fellow carrying the waterjars put them down and started yelling 'Go, Tymon, go!' "
Startled, my gaze snapped to the balcony. But it was empty.
Chapter Fourteen
While I was being conditioned in the many ways and means of killing and disabling, Stereth was busy. Not a tah shipment on the plateau escaped the watchful eyes of our band or the network of allies surveying every eastern and southern road. The system of messenger birds was expanded and Des was sent from one market town to another, from one outlaw rendezvous to the next, spreading charm and good fellowship and arranging for supplies.
Sembet Triol handled the messages, and acted as courier when needed. One afternoon I saw him striding hurriedly across the grounds from the coop to the main hall, with an air of urgency impossible to mistake. I followed him.
He went straight to Stereth, pulling off the blue cap he wore on the roof where the coops were set up, and began talking before he was halfway down the hall. "You know that shipment you told me to keep an eye on? The Ordra-lake being brought west for air freight?"
Stereth put down the paper he was holding and stood up. "Yes."
"They got it through the Waste and hauled it down to the low country all right. Then they were going to load it onto an airtruck at Jessul and fly the long way around the plateau to get it to the capital."
"Well?"
"The airtruck blew up as soon as it took off."
Stereth was silent. Then he said, "Was the tah on board at the time?"
Sembet Triol nodded. "Eighty thousand tabals worth. They were trying to make up for the regular shipments that didn't get through. It was a superfreighter."
Stereth looked up suddenly and met my eyes. "What are you doing here?"
I said, "I didn't know you had friends as far away as Jessul."
He bit his lip. "No."
"How many people were on board?" I asked.
He shrugged. Sembet answered, "Three."
"Don't pin this one on me," said Stereth. He picked up the paper he'd been reading. "Thanks, Sembet."
"What does that mean?" I asked.
Stereth ignored me. I turned on my heel and left the hall. "Don't take it personally," said Sembet, out in the filtered light of a cloudy afternoon.
It had been six weeks since the last tah had gone south. By now every canister and jar in every village and town would be turned upside down and packets that were years old would be ripped open and rationed out. I knew what the results of this would be from having gone through withdrawal myself. Soon the citizens of Shaskala and points south would get headachy, and some would have stomach cramps. Then they'd become short-tempered. The day would seem longer and harder to get through, they would feel less alert. The headaches would get worse… and then they'd get better. Going off tah was easier than going off a lot of drugs. Nobody ever died from it, but it was annoying as hell. And then there was the habit of ritual that surrounded tah… for Shaskala, what would happen at the midmorning hour, when the merchants would all slow down and look involuntarily for the tah bowl to be brought forth? As for those farther south, breakfast for most of the population meant tah and not much else.
I really started to wonder when the next truckload of tah they tried to ship by air to the capital had a mechanical problem and dumped six hundred tons of cargo into Lake Kasheral.
"I suppose they could boil the lake," Sembet said to me, a few days later. We were talking in the coop loft when one of Stereth's feathered messengers flew in. Clintris deftly detached the paper and handed it to Sembet, who read it and laughed. You can fit a lot of message onto a little paper on Ivory, where one character equals a word, sometimes even a phrase.
"What is it?"
I started to laugh. "Tell him never to change."
Sembet, who was already scrawling a reply to go out with the rider, wrote at the bottom, "Tymon says don't ever change."
A voice spoke from the entrance to the coop. "And that should be no problem. Stereth says that Des takes direction well." Ran stood framed in the neverending cloudy twilight. "Can I talk to you for a minute, Tymon?"
That was not his happy tone of voice. As I followed him outside, past the main building to the stone wall, I noticed for the first time that he'd lost some weight since Shaskala. The grounds were more crowded these days, and I didn't even know half the people around us. We had to speak in low voices.
"Theodora, how can you be doing this?"
"Doing what? What have I done?"
He hitched himself up to the top of the wall and sat there. "The way you joke with Sembet. The way you talk to the women in your class, even to Stereth—you fit in here like a glass of water poured into the Silver River. What do you think's going to happen to these people when the government catches them?"
"Well, I know the odds aren't good, but with a little luck Stereth will get us—"
" 'Them.' 'Them,' not us. You've got a problem, Theodora— maybe you're a little too close to see it. You're just too adaptable."
"Look, I may not be a real cantry tar'meth, but I like the company. And they've been good to us, they treat us the same way they treat themselves."
"May I remind you that these people kidnapped us? We are not in their debt. How they can casually assume we owe them any loyalty—"
I glanced at him in disbelief. "Are you serious? You shanghaied me when I first came to this world, and then expected me to be a loyal Cormallon member."
"One situation has nothing to do with the other! I hired you honorably—"
"Without exactly spelling out the job requirements."
He put up his arms. "Let's not dredge up minor details from the past."
Suddenly all our circling struck me as funny, and I started to chuckle. He was taken aback. I suppressed the laughter, took his hand, and said, "I hope you don't ever change, either." On impulse, I kissed him on the cheek. "Your ego is a great comfort to me."
There were a few whistles and catcalls from witnesses to the kiss. Actual physical affection was usually reserved for the shadows here in outlaw country. The more people showed up in the bands, the more the couples would disappear into the back rooms and stablelofts. "Yeah, yeah," I called back. "Don't you have some work to do?"
"Tymon!" came Sembet's voice. "Can you give me a hand with this?"
I ignored the call. Ran said, "Why do you do these things?" But he said it, shaking his head, the way a farmer will talk about the weather: Familiar, and not likely to be changed by any human agency.
I said, "You know, before this summer, I used to only yell at you when you kept things to yourself. You've been good about that, anyway."
"Thank you. I suppose in a little place like this it's harder to collect secrets anyway."
"Or keep them once you have them."
"That, too."
Sembet's voice sounded again. "Tymon! Where are you, anyway?"
"I'd better go," I told Ran.
He sighed. "Go."
"You're not still upset?"
"As is my habit, I have resigned myself to the fact your attitude will never improve."
"Good enough," I said, and left.
I should have seen then that things were coming to a head. Ran was betraying more edginess than he generally allowed anyone to see, the fort was reaching bursting point in terms of population, militia sweeps had increased on the roads. And on the sixteenth of Kace, Fire Moon came, and Tarniss Cord issued an invitation to a joint council feast to Dramonta Sol and Stereth Tar'krim.
Stereth left the monastery fort under the command of Komo and Mora Sobien Ti, and brought most of the original band with him to Deathwell. Eight of the most promising candidates from the new bands formed a guard of honor.
We rode up the hill to Deathwell two days before the feast. Stereth halted his mount by the poem on the wall near the gate. He sat there for a long time. I was near Cantry, and I heard him turn and say to her, "Do you ever think that your best friend died before you were born?"
There was something hollow in his voice that went beyond his usual flat tones, and Cantry's reply in turn held a trace of nerves. "You're under a lot of stress, Stereth. You're feeling pressure, that's all."
He hesitated beside the poem. Cantry said, "Come in with us, love, everybody's waiting."
His mount moved on, and we all passed under the gates: I hoped that Tarniss Cord meant us well.
As a courtesy to Tarniss Cord, Carabinstereth agreed to teach one or two practice sessions for the women of Death-well while we were there. The rest of us were assigned duties preparing for the feast—not only food, but decorations to impress Dramonta Sol and his band. Cord was the nominal hostr but he was more of an arbiter, bringing two potential allies together. Our band, as the supplicants, had to put up the wine and meat for Dramonta. "We have to make everything nice before he gets here," said Des to me, as he hammered garlands into the wood molding around the arches in the great dining hall. "We have a word for this where I come from, Tymon. We call it brownnosing."
I handed him some nails. "We have a similar term on Athena."
He grunted and motioned to a pile of garlands on the floor. "Why don't you help out a companion of the road," —Des' way of getting what he wanted— "and put some of those up along the arches by the other rooms?"
So I found myself stringing garlands around the entrance to Carabinstereth's practice session. The women were already lined up for their first routine. I saw the white, strained faces verging on nausea, and thought, heavens, it's
just another drill. Don't take it so hard. But I remembered how nervous I'd been in their place.
Clintris came over to where I stood on a table. "But you can't work out here," she said. "It'll distract the students."
I said, "Are you joking? They wouldn't notice a marching band at this particular moment. Have you forgotten what it's like on that line?"
A faint smile appeared on her face. "You have a point." She picked up a garland. "Do you need any help?"
Oceans would part, and fish would dance on dry land. "Uh, well, thank you. I just need to finish this section here—"
"No trouble," she said, and she climbed up beside me. As she stretched for the nail at the far end, and I held the garland and looked uncomfortably toward my feet, she said, "I've been wanting to apologize for giving you such a hard time when you first appeared. I don't know what I expected from a barbarian, but you've been very… normal, Tymon."
"Oh. Well, thank you."
"Not at all," she said, and deftly hooked the rest of the string. "There. Any other places we need to cover?"
"The front entrance."
"Fine." She stopped and came up with an armful of white and yellow flowers. Her face was buried to the chin. "Coming, Tymon?"
That night, Stereth took me aside. He motioned for me to follow him out past the officers' cells to an aisle bordering a parapet on Deathwell's northern side. Slit windows let in blackness and stars. I saw a lookout pass along the outside of one of those windows. We waited till he'd gone, and Stereth said, "This time you won't be an observer."
My stomach turned over. I waited.
He said, "You're going to be seated next to Tarniss Cord at the feast. One of his lieutenants will be on the other side. Des will be on your right."
I was still silent. He said, "Nothing to say yet?"
"Fine, I can draw a map of the table. Thanks for bringing me up to speed—"
"Jumpy little tymon, aren't you? Here, this is for you."
He put a knife into my palm. It felt slippery. "Stereth, I think you have me confused with somebody else."
"Calm down, little one. You don't even know what I'm asking yet. All I want you to do is keep an eye on our host and make sure he behaves normally. Which I'm sure he will do. I've spoken with Cord at length and I'm impressed with his reliability."
"If you're so impressed, why do I have to keep an eye on him?"
"No harm in being careful, Tymon."
"And why at the feast? Do you have other people watching him the rest of the time?" When he didn't answer, I said, "And why don't you have Lex or Grateth do this?"
I was still holding the knife. Stereth lifted it from my palm and slipped it, sheathed, into the pocket of my outer-robe. "First," he said, "because I told you Cord has a soft spot for barbarian women. He'll like being seated next to you, and won't think anything of it. Everybody knows barbarians are as innocent as newborn puppies. Second, Lex and Grateth have the army in their bones, everyone who looks at them knows it. If I asked Cord to sit between them, it would make him nervous." I just stood there, and finally he said, with a trace of impatience, "Come on, Fymon, surely Carabinstereth has shown you how to kill with a knife."
"She has." And anyway, I've done it.
"The chances of your being called on to do anything are exceedingly remote. Otherwise I wouldn't ask it of you. This is soft work, for a soft outlander. That's all it is."
I was silent. Stereth said, gently, "If you can't behave ike an Ivoran, maybe you should have stayed home."
I turned and went back along the passage and down the iteps to the hall below, feeling the shape of the knife igainst my thigh through the cotton of the inside pocket.
Ran, of course, felt that Stereth's request was perfectly inderstandable. He had no great liking for Stereth, but irming me, he said, was "simple self-defense."
"Anyway," ;aid Ran, "if he thinks nothing will happen, then most ikely nothing will happen. He seems pretty good at this iort of thing."
Cheery. All very cheery.
* * *
By the evening of the banquet I was in a bad state of nerves. Dramonta and his entourage had ridden in that afternoon. Dramonta accepted the overly courteous solicitude of Cord and Stereth as his due, and dispatched Marainis Cho to assist with the preparations—or more likely, to keep an eye out for poison and relevant gossip. It was to be a traditional feast, totally communal, so gossip was all she was likely to get.
