Shadow of the Warmaster

by Jo Clayton

  “Why?”

  “Always asking questions, aren’t you. Just for once do what I say, eh?”

  More apprehensive than ever, Aslan swallowed the last of the cold tea and passed over the bowl.

  Xalloor poured in enough brandy to cover the bottom. “Drink that. Now.”

  “Yes, Mama Loor.”

  Xalloor gave herself a scant teaspoon of the brandy, pushed the cork back in and settled on her pallet. “Where was I?”

  “Evvily was saying do you trust her.”

  “Right.” Xalloor sipped at the brandy, eyes closed. “Elmas laughed. I don’t need to trust her, she said, I have two good locks on her. The outsiders want trade with us. They cheat us now and that shuts down on them fast, she said. Rosepearls, she said. They want them like most people want air to breathe, she said. And they’ve come to take back the slaves Bolodo sold Pitapat, she said. The woman more than the others. Her daughter is a slave, she said. She’s here to get her back.”

  Aslan felt sick. She bent over until her forehead was resting on the box.

  “Cha! I knew this was going to happen.” Xalloor came round the box on hands and knees, lifted Aslan against her, held her with her face tucked into the curve between neck and shoulder. She held Aslan until her shuddering stopped, stroking her back, smoothing a gentle hand over and over her short dark hair.

  Finally Aslan sighed and pushed away. She filled her bowl again and drank the brandied tea for its double warmth. “Go on,” she said.

  “Not much on to go. Soon as she said that, I thought of you and what you told me about your mum. Then I thought, hunh, don’t jump so fast, Loor, lots of daughters hauled off here, I’m one myself though my mum wouldna crossed a street to fetch me home. Evvily was still being hard to convince. She might have lied, she said, she might have been playing games with you. No, Elmas said. The daughter is here now. At the Mines. Aslan, she said. We’ll hold her, that way we can be sure the mother does what she’s promised. Just then that idiot Mustakin came slamming back in, forgot his overcloak. They stopped talking. I suppose Elmas thought she’d said all she needed to, anyway they went out after Musti. By that time I’d forgotten the shakes and I took off as soon as I was sure no one would land on me. So there it is, your mum is here, looking for you.”

  “They’re not going to tell me about her, are they.”

  “Nuh. Or her about you. What you going to do?”

  “Snoop. There’s a meeting…” Aslan grinned, suddenly riding high. “Be a hoot if I turned up there and said hi mom. Pass that bottle and let’s celebrate.”

  3

  The Ridaar unit had three voice-activated pinears, ilddas in University jargon, inconspicuous-long-distance-data-collectors. Aslan slipped one into the mine chamber the Council used for their private meetings, she got one into Elmas Ofka’s quarters. The third she hesitated over for some time, but she finally decided to keep it reserved for anything that turned up in the feed from the other two.

  On the night of the day she planted the ilddas, the night after Gun Peygam, she came back alone after supper and played over what they’d picked up and transmitted to the Ridaar. There wasn’t much from the ear in Elmas Ofka’s quarters, but in the material from the other she found the Dalliss report to the special Council meeting and the discussion afterward. She learned the date and place of the next meeting with the outsiders, she learned about the plan to attack the Warmaster and the role she was meant to play in that. Hostage. The breathing equivalent to a handful of rosepearls. Sold again, she told herself when she heard that. A slave is a slave is a slave.

  Time crawled. She felt the feet of every minute walking across her skin, inescapable tickling torment. She taught her history seminar and kept her body easy and her face blank with an effort of will that left her drained. There was an itchiness in her students that she found hard to ignore, they stank of conspiracy. their questions were perfunctory or prods to get her talking on subjects all round the secret that excited them; she could not notice that excitement because she was not supposed to know about the plan to seize the Warmaster.

  “How many rebellions have you studied, doctori-yabass?”

  “Too many to narrate. I’ve told you about three, if you’ll remember, examples of what can happen. The genocide on Alapacsin III, the Great-Father uprising on Tuufyak, the Placids on Ceeantap. If I have time the next few weeks, I’ll fill some cassettes with what I remember of other violent changes in leadership, show you variations on those three types of outcome.”

  “Which do you think we’ll have here, doctori-yabass?”

  “Depends on you and how you look at things. Please remember, people are capable of almost anything in the name of good.”

  “What’s wrong with that, doctori-yabass?”

  “So it’s a game, eh? Whack your teacher, eh? Look to your prophet and learn. Seems to me he said a thing or two about ends and means. At the start, all rebellions are rather much the same. I know, I’ve told you to avoid generalization, it’s lazy thinking, but even that’s not always true. They begin with passion and ideals, fire in the belly, ambition in the brain. You, young Hordar, that’s you I’m talking about. And they begin because there is a need that grows until it explodes one day. There you have the inklins. You here at the Mines, you’re playing touch and run games, you tease the Huvved because you can’t afford to slaughter them. The inklins on their yizzies are playing a deadlier game, they’ve nothing to lose. These feral children are a lit fuse; unless you can damp it, they’ll force the Huvved to destroy everything you’re trying to save.”

  “Huvved are crazy, doctori-yabass, are they that crazy? If they destroy us, they destroy themselves.”

  “Alapacsin three, read your notes. I have a cassette I want you to see. Some of you may remember the speaker, you can explain to the others later. Make notes if you wish, the segment is quite short.”

  I am KalaKallampak, a Mon of the Bahar. I have been here on Tairanna, a slave, for more than twelve years.

  The Morz was sitting on his cot, his back against the wall, his heels dug into the thin mattress. As he talked, he was knitting, producing something shapeless, using the rhythmic swings of his hands to subdue the fury that knotted his jaw and set the veins throbbing at his temples. Yet when he spoke, his gravelly voice was mild, almost serene.

  In the beginning my servitude weighed lightly on me. I was permitted to spend much time in the open ocean, when I studied the sea life and collected samples part of the day and part of the day I played, enjoying myself in water as fine as any I can remember.

  He lowered his hands, bowed head and torso toward the lens.

  For which I honor the Hordar who demand such purity. I was content, though not happy; who can be happy forcibly separated from those he loves? But it was endurable. Then the Fehdaz who bought me died and his successor was a fussy nervous little cretin who was distressed at the thought of property so valuable roaming about loose. I was forbidden the open sea and I started to suffer. Day by slow day I grew heavier with anger and physical pain. Until my days were dreary and my nights were worse and sleep was fickle and had to be courted. During those years when salt smell on the wind was all I had of the sea and a brine tub all that kept my body whole, I searched for a way to keep my mind more supple than my misfortunate body. The habit of decades gave me the answer, I am as much a scholar by temperament as I am a technician by training. I began watching gul Brindar; day and night I found ways to see what was happening to the city. I set the things I saw and heard into the many-leveled intricately nuanced watersong of my people, polishing the periods of my mindbook into a poetry of sound and sense, writing into my memory the recent history of Ayla gul Brindar.

  Eyes closed, he scratched absently at his wrists, then fumbled at the wool; the veins at his temples pulsed visibly. After a moment he lifted the needles and began knitting again.

  For three years I did this, then one day there was a moment when I was loose upon the cliffs of Brindar with no one near e
nough to stop me. I did not care if I lived or if I died. I jumped and fell a hundred yards into a clash of rocks and weed and incoming tide, survived and swam the three thousand miles to surface here. You ask me to tell you my mindbook. I will do that, though turning the tale into the airgroan of Hordaradda erases all its grace.

  The Troubles have their seed in things done long before Bolodo brought me here. I cannot speak of them. This is what I saw myself. Five years ago the treatment of yoss fibers was introduced, a slave like me was given a task and did it and in the doing crumbled what was already cracking. Because yunk wool rotted in the depots waiting for a buyer, many and many a landbound Hordar was pushed off the Raz where his family had been generation on generation, back to the Landing Time. Where could they go? The Marginal Lands would not support them, there were many already claiming those. Young single men took their hunger to Littoral cities that glimmered with promise. Though that promise proved as illusory and fragile as soap bubbles, hungry families followed them. The cities began to bulge with dispossessed grasslanders. They took any work they could get so they could feed themselves and their children, took work from Little Families; living was already precarious for the city poor; those not affiliated with Great Families were as hungry as the grasslanders who were not welcome or well treated.

  He was rocking gently back and forth, like the sea rocking back and forth, his eyes were still closed, the needles clicked and clashed, the wood twitched and ran through his fingers.

  The Duzzulkerin, what coin they had they were not about to waste on rent; in cities there are always and ever empty buildings. They lived in these until they were driven out, one family, two, ten, wherever there was an empty corner. Their unwilling landlords would call the city wards and evict them, but in a day or so, or a week, more families would come to take their places. And when these moved on, more again would come, until finally the landlords gave up trying to reclaim their property and began charging rent which sometimes they managed to collect.

  Incivility increased. City fought Grassland with fists and worse. Hordar are not violent, they are much like my folk in that, but there is a limit beyond which you cannot push them, especially youngers unseasoned by age and learning, the unsteady youngers who, looking forward, see only a bleakness growing worse.

  Incivility was bred in the bare and boring shelters that would never be homes, where Duzzulka youngers were left alone to pass the days however they could. It would not happen to the least and poorest of the Morze Bahar, I take pride in that; plenty and poverty are shared alike, Morz to Morz, and children are hard won, a joyful blessing. When KariniKarm bore my son and daughter, I swam with her and stayed with her to care for them until they could leave the water and walk upon the land, breathing the thick wet air into new soft lungs. A full year I stayed with her and them, leaving work, weaving joy into the wide communal song.

  Schooling on this world is Family business; where the families cannot do it, the children are unschooled; when their parents work all day and half the night for a meager sum that barely keeps them fed and clothed, how are they to teach their children to read and write and figure? If they never learned themselves, how are they to teach? Grasslander youngers and city youngers alike, they are ignorant and unlettered, they are wasted. Is there no one who understands this? Is there no one out there who will find a cure for this obscenity?

  He put the knitting down and rested fists on it, gazed grimly into the lens, his stare an accusation. When he spoke, the gravelly voice was hard with scorn.

  Is it so strange, so unexpected that these so abandoned children melded in gangs and learned city ways in city streets? Is it so strange that they met there gangs of city poor, youngers who heard their elders cursing the grasslanders who stole their jobs, is it so strange they fought, these children of the streets? Is it so strange they learned to rage at landlords and city wards and most of all at the Huvved Fehz? Is it so strange for youngers looking at the struggles of their kin and the slow slipping of their elders’ lives, is it so strange that they are filled with rage at everyone and everything, that they covet and seize what they cannot hope to earn, that they destroy what they cannot hope to seize? Is it so strange that these youngers call themselves inklins which means the unremembered, that they come to despise themselves as failures and worthless and turn that despite against the world?

  He stopped talking, pressed his fingertips against his eyes. For over a minute he sat very still, his dark leathery skin twitching in several places. When he spoke he had put aside his agitation, his voice was mild again.

  They are not stupid, these inklins, only unlearned; some are very clever indeed. It was an inklin who made the first yizzy. A boy in gul Mei, or sometimes the story says gul Brindar, or sometimes gul Samlikkan, a boy dreamed of flying, but lacked the guildfee for his training. So he stole yoss pods and bundled them in a bag net which also he stole and tied the net to a broomstick and strapped a minimotor (which, of course, he stole) to that stick. And he flew.

  He leaned toward the lens, his face intent, his eyes glowing, as if he wanted to force his listeners to understand what he was saying.

  The idea also flew. West to east, east to west, within the year inklins in all parts of the Littoral were building yizzies for themselves. Within two years inklin gangs were having skyfights; at first they used sticks to bang away at each other, then they made spears, then another clever inklin, some say it was a girl tired of getting banged about, discovered how to spray fire from a hose. The gas inside yoss pods is hydrogen, remember. There were mornings when the city was full of charred flesh and the screams of the not quite dead.

  Even before I left, it was not only inklin flesh that burned. Sometimes the yizzy inklins drop fire on Houses and factories and when they feel like it, on the Fekkris; a Huvved in the street after dark is a target whenever inklins fly. The Fehdaz sends slaves to clean up when the mess is really bad and he does not want the extent of it to make the whisper circuit.

  Incivility increases. The cities are burning bit by bit.

  What the inklins do not destroy the Huvved will; already they see poor folk as sharks circling them ready to attack, the time will come when they see every Hordar poor or not as enemy, when the only easing of their terror will come when there’s no one left for them to fear. I see the time coming when the Warmaster will glide from city to city melting cities into bedrock slag.

  I am uncomfortable here away from the ocean. I go to the Sea Farms; if they are fortunate, they will survive the Burning. Should the Huvved go entirely mad, they can scatter their barges and wait out the storm. May the data flow freely for you, Aslan A-tow-a-she, may your days be filled with meaning.

  “Does this answer that question of yours, Hayal Halak?”

  “I knew all that, doctori-yabass.”

  “If you knew, why did you ask?”

  “You sound very serious today, doctori-yabass.”

  “Boring, you mean.”

  “Oh no, we’d never say that. Go on, tell us more. That was, not boring, no, depressing. Tell us something positive. Tell us about the rebels that win, doctori-yabass.”

  “I’m going to be boring again, and depressing, but listen to me anyway. The rebels that pull it off, they’ve done the easiest part. War simplifies things, choices are stark. After the war’s over, well, life gets at them, chews them down. People don’t change, not really. There are no instant angels. Ideology is for arguing about in bars, it’s hopeless as a guide for government. Right thinking just does not do it, backsliding seems to be a necessary condition for intelligence. If the rebels who survive and are running things haven’t allowed for that, there’s fury and frustration and repression and things end up the way they were before, or worse.”

  “And if they allow for frailty, doctori-yabass?”

  “With a little luck and a lot of good will, they go on, sometimes things get better, sometimes worse.”

  “Worse for whom, doctori-yabass?”

  “That’s the questi
on, isn’t it?”

  “A question you have not answered, doctori-yabass.”

  “A question I don’t have to answer. A question I can’t answer. It’s all yours, young Hordar.”

  As she went through her ordinary round, she chewed over what the ears told her and tried to decide what she wanted to do. She had a choice. She could stay here and be quite comfortable; she could pretend she didn’t know what was happening, she could teach her seminars, act as consultant to the Council, flake everything that happened as a record of a rebellion in progress, an opportunity few of her colleagues had had. It was the sensible thing to do, wasn’t it? It was adolescent claptrap, this sense that she would be somehow debased if she let the Hordar and Elmas Ofka hold her hostage, trick her mother. Four days. It wasn’t much time. Four days to get ready to be at that meeting. Or not. That night, she talked with Churri and Xalloor, her mind still unsettled, her inclination to go not much stronger than her inclination to stay.