A Rending of Falcons

by Victor Milán

  For a moment they stood and sat, eyes locked, as a sensation flowed between them as of recognition between those long parted.

  She did not allow her surprise to register on her face. ‘‘I thank you, Galaxy Commander Manas Amirault,’’ she said with the same smile she wore before, but a bit breathlessly. ‘‘Welcome to my planet.’’

  He laughed. His teeth were white and even in his long tanned-leather face. Of course the genes for degenerative conditions such as tooth decay had been ruthlessly weeded out of the Clan gene pool centuries before.

  ‘‘You have no guards?’’ he asked. ‘‘Not even spies in the hills?’’

  ‘‘None,’’ Malvina said. ‘‘Friend or foe, few would name Clan Hell’s Horses other than honorable. You bade me come to parlay. I place myself readily in your hands, Galaxy Commander.’’

  He raised a black brow at this. Malvina felt a quickening of her already lively interest. He had at least some grasp of wordplay. It was more than she could say for many of her fellow Falcons.

  ‘‘Fairly said, Galaxy Commander. Most fairly. Will you now ride the conveyance we have brought for you’’—he waved a brown hand at the horse—‘‘or would you prefer I summon a more conventional vehicle?’’

  ‘‘I will ride.’’

  He raised a brow. ‘‘And do you know how to ride, if I may ask?’’

  She strode to the creature, put a hand to the front of its saddle and vaulted aboard. The small, tan animal with the black tail and mane back-stepped a pace and bobbed its head, eyes rolling. ‘‘I do now.’’

  ‘‘What is your intent on coming to Antares, Galaxy Commander Amirault?’’ Malvina asked, as they began to ride a wide circuit of the camp. ‘‘Will you challenge me for Possession of the Mongol doctrine, as your predecessor did?’’

  He laughed. He was a handsome devil to whom laughter seemed to come as naturally as riding one of these confounded uncomfortable quadrupeds. She found wherever she looked across the bleak pink landscape her eyes slid ever back to him. When they did, his eyes were always on her.

  ‘‘I fear Tristan Fletcher had but small comprehension of what you mean by ‘Mongol doctrine,’ ’’ he said. ‘‘He was more passionate than perceptive, in his way. He was a fine warrior and a good companion; I thank you for giving him an honorable death.’’

  ‘‘It seemed the least I could do.’’

  ‘‘We harbor proprietary feelings toward the ancient Mongols, ’’ Manas said. His two companions, both Star colonels, rode a few meters behind him and Malvina chattering to one another amiably as a pair of songbirds. Around them undulated thorn vines, the color of bleached bones, two-meter spikes thrusting from spiraled ground-hugging stems. ‘‘The Founder in his wisdom modeled much of our society after them, borrowing many terms such as khan and touman . But the Mongols were one thing first and foremost: horsemen and women.

  ‘‘Alone among the Clans do we truly emulate those ancient horse-borne steppe nomads. We reflect it in our councils and in our tactics, although of course in battle we ride metallic steeds powered by internal combustion or fusion, not grass and grain. But we still ride horses from earliest crèche days, to keep vital our traditions and sense of history.’’

  ‘‘Most Clansfolk have little regard for history,’’ Malvina said, ‘‘except for their own, and that solely in the form of the Remembrance.’’

  He nodded. ‘‘But you were different, Malvina Hazen. You and your brother Aleksandr Hazen.’’

  She looked at him, genuinely surprised at the usage. It was an archaism, connoting ancient family ties that Clan culture and even reproduction had been designed to supersede. It was the way Aleks and Malvina had referred, illicitly, to themselves.

  ‘‘We studied history outside of Clan Jade Falcon’s in order to better serve the Falcon,’’ she said.

  He nodded. ‘‘We in Clan Hell’s Horses are well aware. Your fame is wide, Malvina Hazen.’’

  Her answer was a smile.

  ‘‘As to what we intend,’’ he said, ‘‘we would join our efforts to yours.’’

  ‘‘Meaning?’’ she asked. The motion of the horse beneath her was alien but not disquieting. She became aware of certain unusual muscular discomforts, however.

  ‘‘In the Draconis Combine, sword-smiths still practice the ancient Japanese art,’’ Manas Amirault said, half-cryptically. ‘‘Although modern alloys have long superseded the necessity, they make sword blades by beating together layers of hard but brittle steel with a softer but very durable steel. In this way they forge blades of a sharpness and toughness it took centuries for science to equal.’’

  ‘‘Indeed.’’ Malvina might have shown impatience with another for speaking so elliptically. But she did not feel it. The Fire Horse Galaxy commander was young, handsome, and while relaxed by Jade Falcon standards, projected masculine confidence and strength. She found him most intriguing—on a number of levels.

  ‘‘Just so might your ways and ours blend together to forge a blade to carry the Clan Crusade to victory throughout settled space,’’ he said, ‘‘and usher in the golden age which Kerensky intended for all humankind.’’

  She looked at him. ‘‘You say—’’

  His teeth were very white in his dark-tanned face. ‘‘I and my Fire Horses will submit ourselves to you as Chingis Khan, to launch a great Crusade.’’

  ‘‘What says your own khan about this?’’

  ‘‘As Galaxy commander I am allowed a great deal of leeway and initiative,’’ her escort said. ‘‘As perhaps you gathered from the actions of my predecessor. I act not as representative of Clan Hell’s Horses but of my Galaxy alone. At the same time, let us say that my Blood-kinsman, our khan, knows what I intend, and does not disapprove.’’

  She cocked a brow at him. ‘‘In other words, he waits to see whether I stand or fall before he links Clan Hell’s Horses’ star to mine?’’

  He laughed. ‘‘Of course,’’ he said. ‘‘Do things go differently in Clan Jade Falcon?’’

  ‘‘The Clans were created to put an end to such political maneuvering,’’ she said with apparent severity. Seeing his expression grow guarded, she laughed. ‘‘But in truth—of course not. Nor is it Jana Pryde’s fault alone, by any means. We Clanners, it would seem, are no more inferior to our Spheroid cousins in the skill of rationalization than in most things.

  ‘‘Now,’’ she said, nodding toward the horse’s head bobbing before her saddlebow, ‘‘how fast will these things truly go?’’

  ‘‘Indeed you Falcons are adaptable,’’ said Star Colonel Amalie with a laugh. ‘‘For ones accustomed to soaring through the air, you take readily to riding an earthbound beast.’’ Her companion, Star Colonel Telford, joined in the laughter.

  Malvina showed her a little tight smile. Internally she cursed Manas Amirault and his whole Clan as the party completed its circuit of the far-flung Hell’s Horses encampment.

  She was no stranger to pain. Every day since the disaster of the first assault on Skye, she had lived with brutal agony. She refused any medications to ease the torment, except what was absolutely necessary to snatch at least a few hours’ uneasy sleep a night. And every day before that she had known pain, too, though not always of the body. . . .

  But now she experienced pangs of a nature she’d never encountered before. Specifically, it seemed as if the saddle between her hindquarters and the horse was lined with razors.

  She had to admit she could detect no mockery in the voices or mannerisms of the Horse warriors. Either they were so used to the saddle they had no clue what she went through, or they intended to haze the Hazen. In which case she apparently passed the test.

  Because it was part of shared Clan lore, Malvina knew how the Hell’s Horses came by their totem beast. The hell’s horse was no natural, if alien, animal. Rather, a uniquely misfired attempt to gene-engineer terrestrial horses to survive upon the Clan’s harsh homeworld had spawned it.

  The magnificence and ferocity of hell’s horses
had obviously impressed their creators enough to take them for their namesakes. Still, the Clan eagerly began raising their beloved true horses as soon as they had conquered other planets where they might thrive without being turned into savage flesh-eating mutants.

  It still amazed Malvina that the Horsemen would take the damned things on military expeditions, though. She didn’t know whether to admire their audacity or laugh aloud at their folly. She did wonder fleetingly what they did with the horses during high-gee maneuvers.

  Manas Amirault rode silently by her side. She was aware from time to time of appraising glances he cast her way— or admiring ones. Mostly he was content to let his subordinates banter, which they did with a careless ease Malvina was altogether unaccustomed to among the testy Jade Falcons.

  ‘‘What do you think of our horses, Khan Malvina?’’ he asked as they came round to complete the circle at the gates through the wire tangles that surrounded the cantonment.

  ‘‘They seem fragile to me,’’ she said. ‘‘Not robust designs at all.’’

  He tipped his head back and laughed. His long black hair streamed like a horse’s tail from his shaven-sided skull down his wedge-shaped back. ‘‘Most perceptive. Most folk unfamiliar with them find their bulk and strength intimidating. Yet they can be surprisingly delicate. They can also be surprisingly durable—in both cases like humans.’’

  As they turned in toward the gates Malvina realized for the first time that what she had earlier taken for some kind of infantry maneuver drill was in fact a game played by two sides kicking a ball toward nets at either end of a cleared field perhaps a hundred meters long. From differences in the participants’ garb she realized with a shock one group consisted of warriors while the others could only be members of the technician caste.

  ‘‘What is this?’’ she asked.

  ‘‘Football,’’ said Telford. He made a face. ‘‘I fear the techs are getting the better of us again.’’

  She raised a brow and looked at Manas. He seemed blithely unaware of the chalcas implicit in allowing mere technicians to compete with warriors. Much less so blithely to admit to being bested by them!

  The gate guards saluted and dragged the obstacles out of the way with snorting diesel donkeys. At the sound the other horses bounced their heads and danced; not for the first time Malvina suspected her own mount was unusually docile, perhaps narcotized.

  Anger flashed through her: How dare they patronize me! And yet she knew it would not enhance her dignity as a Clan Galaxy commander, far less a khan, to have the wretched beast run away with her or pitch her off into a serpent thorn.

  They rode through the gates, past the playing field, where the contestants stopped to watch. As they rode in among the ranks of parked vehicles and BattleMechs Malvina saw something that astonished her far more than the mixed-caste game.

  ‘‘Are those warriors I see helping technicians perform maintenance tasks?’’ she asked.

  Manas looked at her with what seemed honest surprise. ‘‘Of course.’’

  Malvina felt compressed upon herself as she rode. She felt disoriented. She and her brother had both been compelled to fight Trials of Refusal for ordering warriors of their own commands merely to do walk-arounds of their ’Mechs before missions.

  This, though, struck her as the most obscene thing she had ever seen. Deliciously obscene.

  For just that reason she found outrage transmuting to intrigue.

  ‘‘You are surprised,’’ the Star colonel said gravely. ‘‘Ahh. I forget, though I have studied the ways of other Clans. You Falcons practice teamwork, but grudgingly: it goes against your fiercely individualistic grain.

  ‘‘We Hell’s Horses prize teamwork. Not simply among warriors but between castes as well. All serve the Clan in their ways; none can function without the others. Our castes remain distinct, the authority of warriors is respected. Yet we have no fear of cooperation.’’

  As a good Jade Falcon—especially one who had displayed her fanatic traditionalism like bright post-molt plumage throughout her career—Malvina Hazen might have been expected to flash over into yarak, the raptor’s eagerness to hunt, at the imputation her Clan feared to have its warriors work alongside lesser castes. Even though it was quite manifestly true. Truth was a feeble thing in the face of Clan honor and tradition—and no mitigation of chalcas.

  But Malvina seldom did the expected. Her breath caught in her throat. But not in fury.

  ‘‘Among Hell’s Horses,’’ Manas told her loftily, ‘‘the warrior is a servant, not a master of the people.’’

  It was magnificent and absurd, as specious as the concept of noblesse oblige on medieval Terra, which she and her beloved sibkin Aleksandr had read of so avidly in crèche days. Notwithstanding, the awareness of possibilities burst inside her like a bomb.

  I can use such attitudes, she exulted. Without, of course, losing sight of the fact that that in all cases, I am not servant, but master.

  And laughing aloud she rode in among the yurts of Clan Hell’s Horses.

  18

  Near Alba, Antares

  Jade Falcon Occupation Zone

  8 December 3135

  In the darkness, a sea of wavering torchlight, yellow and amber.

  After Alba’s near-destruction by Khan Elias Crichell’s aerospace fighters, the Jade Falcon occupiers had rebuilt the capital, such as it was, in a haphazard, expedient way. In its seeming randomness it resembled a shantytown, perhaps most of all because of the rude spacers’ quarters that grew up like fungal forests around nearly every DropShip port in known space. Except that its structures were much more durable and blast-resistant: even in their temporary nesting sites, the Falcons built to last. And defend.

  The one real exception, the single carefully planned element about which all the scattershot construction grew, was a vast paved plaza a kilometer on each side. Like all totalitarian cultures from the mists of pre-Kearny-Fuchida time, the Clans felt a need for grand spaces in which to exalt power itself in shared rituals of worship.

  Here in scratch-rebuilt Alba the message ran: We care little for comfort and convenience. But we are here to stay, and our true mark is this shrine to the glory of Turkina.

  A statue of the eponymous jade falcon rose from the center of the ferrocrete lake in green translucent stone thirty meters high, wings outspread as if in stoop, clutching a katana in her claws. Now two throngs surrounded it, torches held high, divided in two by canals of darkness.

  Scaffolding stood beside Turkina’s likeness. Huge banners of the Hell’s Horses and Jade Falcons hung side by side, illuminated by floodlights. Giant bonfires blazed to either side, like pyres for an order now ending.

  On a platform in front of the Clan banners stood three figures clad in white. Beckett Malthus wore long robes not unlike his customary garb. Before him stood Malvina Hazen and Manas Amirault side by side, dressed in identical tunics and trousers of white whipcord. The contrast was startling: Malvina tiny against the Horses’ ristar, who stood not much shy of two meters tall. But it would have taken a uniquely suicidal wit to comment on the potential comedy of the picture they made.

  Nothing was further than humor from the minds of the Falcons and Horses assembled beneath a star-shot sky. They stood with faces and bodies molded into forms of solemn, even worshipful attention. Yet electricity seemed to charge the air like the muzzle of a particle cannon the microsecond before discharge.

  All castes stood assembled there in separate ranks: laborers, technicians, scientists, warriors. Though such commingling was common in Clan Hell’s Horses, it was the first time, perhaps, in the history of the Falcon. It would not be the only such first.

  The two young Galaxy commanders stepped forward. ‘‘Hail, Hell’s Horses!’’ cried Malvina. Her voice was amplified by a concealed microphone and discreetly placed but very powerful speakers to fill the whole crystal dome of night. In response, the Horsemen and -women whinnied their nasal battle cries.

  ‘‘Hail, Jade Falco
ns!’’ Manas’ baritone pealed like a great bronze bell. Fierce Falcon cries skirled skyward.

  Malvina said: ‘‘I am Hell’s Horses.’’ Her Clansfolk assembled echoed her words.

  Manas said, ‘‘I am Jade Falcon.’’ The Horses repeated the phrase.

  Then both, in unison: ‘‘We are the Clans.’’

  They paused to allow their followers to repeat their words, as they did after every clause of the great oath they swore.

  ‘‘This fire we kindle

  ‘‘To set the Universe ablaze.

  ‘‘This we pledge:

  ‘‘We join together

  ‘‘In a Golden Ordun

  ‘‘Courage to courage

  ‘‘Destiny to destiny.

  ‘‘Your strength is our strength.

  ‘‘Our blood is yours.

  ‘‘Blood of Kerensky

  ‘‘Holy Blood

  ‘‘Shall flow together

  ‘‘A rising tide

  ‘‘In sacred Crusade

  "To drown our foes in a crimson flood!"

  Both commanders flung their arms high. Their followers joined them in a wordless scream of exaltation and naked lust for blood and victory. Overhead the stars quivered in the shimmer of the world’s thin atmosphere.

  The screams died away as Malvina stepped back. She mounted a low dais set several paces behind. Beckett Malthus stepped to the fore.

  In stifled silence he and Manas turned to face the diminutive woman whose blond hair swirled in the slight breeze like a battle flag about her shoulders. They knelt. Manas Amirault looked serene. Malthus’ spade-bearded face seemed drawn extra-taut across its lantern-jawed skull, as by turnbuckles. His robes hung with unaccustomed looseness from his powerful frame. In the past few months, much of the excess bulk built up through prolonged fondness for decadent Spheroid cuisine had melted from his powerful frame.