Star Bridge (Chaterre Trilogy Book 1)

by Jeanne Foguth

  “Lies. Rumors spread by the heathen Lost. How dare you repeat them?”

  “I could see their land from Sacred Mountain.” Nimri rose, placed her hands flat on either side of her unwanted tea and leaned across the table toward her uninvited guest. “If they truly are a threat, I will do everything in my power to save our people from them, but I need to know they are a genuine menace.” Screaming in his face would never solve anything or quench her doubts. She took a deep breath. “Zurgon, I wish to cross the river to see their way of life for myself.” He didn’t believe the truth of what she had seen with her own eyes. “Since you are so determined to believe the worst, I think you should come with me.”

  “Never!” He surged to his feet and matched her stance. Their faces were a hand’s breadth apart; Nimri could smell garlic on his breath as he enunciated each syllable. “And neither will you. Those savages will kill you.”

  “Will they?” Nimri wished she wasn’t half convinced he was right. Wished she could ignore the nagging doubt. “How can you expect me to have the power to protect the entire Tribe if you don’t even believe I can look after myself?” Despite his words of confidence to the Tribe, as they had come to the pyre, he didn’t seem to value her any more than Rolf had. “Answer me. Don’t you think I can protect myself?” Zurgon blinked in surprise. “I survived the pilgrimage to the Star Bridge. Surely, I can survive crossing the river.” Nimri felt a fleeting moment of victory as emotions of shock and wonder scrolled across his face.

  He asked, “Would you have me break the law?” She shook her head. “Would you break it, yourself?” She didn’t know how to respond, so simply stared at him. Again, his fist hit the table. Tea sloshed on the hickory slab. “You may not cross the river except by swimming or a boat. If you leave and the Lost don’t kill you when you get to their shore, you will be considered one of them and will only be allowed to return to our sacred soil on Market Days.”

  “I know the law.”

  “Is that what you want?” Zurgon straightened and his expression became confused. “To become one with the enemy?”

  “No, but I’m not ready to pick up Rolf’s staff, either.” Nimri wet her lips and tried honesty. “I don’t have the power to weld it.”

  She didn’t know what she’d expected his reaction to her admission to be. Zurgon stared past her, as if she’d become invisible.

  A shadow moved across the floor.

  Nimri turned and saw Larwin standing in the doorway. She smiled encouragingly and gestured for him to join them. Larwin’s attention never left Zurgon, as he came and stood next to her.

  Zurgon’s vigilance never faltered either.

  “Who is this man?” Zurgon asked.

  He has not the look of the Lost, nor is he of the Chosen. I know each member of our Tribe.”

  “He is from the balata,” Nimri said.

  As her meaning sank in, Zurgon’s throat-ball bobbed, the whites of his eyes expanded and his feet shifted until the backs of his knees pushed the chair rearward. Wood on tile whined. “The balata is home to our sacred guardians,” he whispered. It looked as if Zurgon might drop to the floor and prostrate himself before Larwin, as if he was the most junior member of the tribe.

  She’d never expected to see any Elder unnerved, much less the Chief Elder.

  Nimri was tempted to look to her left and see what Larwin thought of Zurgon, but suddenly the Elder’s attention switched from Larwin to her. He now looked at her as if she was as magical as Larwin. Surely the Elder didn’t think she had raised the Guardian!

  “From the balata...” Zurgon’s voice cracked like an adolescent’s, as he repeated the thought. His tongue darted out to moisten his lips.

  Nimri turned to Larwin. He watched Zurgon as if he’d either never seen another man or was ready to commit murder. She gulped, desperate to quell the hostilities. “Larwin, this is Zurgon, our Chief Elder.” Larwin’s chestnut brown gaze never faltered, but his posture did seem to relax at her calm tone and the primary etiquette of greeting.

  “Why do you call him Larwin?” Zurgon faltered.

  “Because it’s what he insists on being called, though he initially introduced himself as Colonel.”

  Zurgon cleared his throat. “Why does he not speak for himself?”

  “He simply doesn’t.” Nimri shrugged as if the question wasn’t one that plagued her. “Maybe he chooses not to or maybe not speaking is a test or maybe our language and customs are new to him or maybe -”

  “Chatterre has but one language.”

  “Yes, Chatterre only has one, but what of Solterre?”

  “Surely you don’t believe he’s from the first world.” A shudder rippled Zurgon’s tan and brown tunic and revealed how emaciated his legs were underneath the layers of cloth.

  “I don’t know what I believe.” Too weak to stand, Nimri sat down and held her mug as if the residual warmth would save her. “Rolf said that on the first world many countries were populated and each country had its own language and traditions.” Larwin moved to stand behind her chair.

  “Fairytales,” Zurgon said.

  “Touch a balata leaf and fairytales seem possible.” Nimri hoped Zurgon had chamomile tea. Judging by the way his slacks were vibrating, he could use something to calm his nerves. Nimri had previously thought knocking knees were a euphemism.

  Zurgon clenched his hands and straightened his back. “Some are, Child of Tramontain.” His tone turned sarcastic. “Why have you raised the Lou Wren from the old tales to help us?”

  Hadn’t he heard a word she’d said? She paused, stared at Zurgon and ran his pronunciation over in her mind. “Until you said something, I’d forgotten the tale about the Lou Wren of the Ancients; Lou Wren, the Son of Light.” Heat crept up the back of her neck.

  “Why have you raised him for us?”

  She had not raised Larwin; he’d raised himself. “Perhaps he or Anthropoid know the answer to that, but they aren’t saying.”

  “Anthropoid?” Zurgon sat down hard enough to rattle his bones. He mouthed Anthropoid’s name several times, reminding Nimri of a beached fish. “Throp Anthrus…” He swallowed. “Not Throp Anthrus the prophetess?” His voice cracked. “Have you raised her, too?”

  The man must be losing his mind. It happened to some of the older ones and Zurgon was well into his eighties, so dementia could be a possibility.

  “Is that why you avoid me?” Zurgon hissed. “Because the danger is so great?”

  Nimri held her mug between both hands and wondered what she should say. What if he was correct? What if she was the obtuse one? Why had the Guardians materialized to help her?

  If the danger were so great, it might explain why The Guardians chose not to speak to her. They may well believe revealing the truth would frighten her too much or that she was too ignorant to handle it.

  ~0~

  After the strange visit from Zurgon, the rattle-bones, Larwin returned to his bedchamber. GEA-4 was scanning the ancient manuscripts, which were stacked in the corner. Ignoring her, he went to the window and watched the elderly man march away. What an odd encounter that had been. Were all the men on this world in their fifties? Was the skinny old guy the only male?

  Larwin scratched his head and wondered if Nimri and Bryta had swooned over him because they’d never seen a man in his prime before. He didn’t like the idea of the old woman having such thoughts, but he had to admit that he wouldn’t mind Nimri having them—assuming her physical makeup proved nontoxic to his, of course.

  Larwin pushed his non-productive thoughts aside and turned to GEA-4. The book she held had an illustration of a combustion engine. What a surprise! The most complex thing he’d seen since arriving were a pair of crude scissors so despite the fantastic images of a paradise, he had begun wondering if the inhabitants knew anything about mechanics. Yet, combustion engines were light years away from the technology he’d seen, so far. He looked up at the pristine blue sky and frowned. Their technology must have advanced on an entirely dif
ferent level for them to create this geode-world.

  “GEA-4, have you gathered any useful data on this place?”

  “Yes, Colonel Atano, I have.” She flipped the page.

  “What are your conclusions?”

  “Your inquiry is not specific.” Another page turned.

  Larwin waited, getting hotter and angrier by the moment, he silently willed the infernal android to behave properly.

  GEA-4 continued scanning pages at a rate of one per second.

  “Have you figured out a pattern to their speech or any specific words?” Larwin said through clenched jaws.

  “No, I have not.”

  He sighed. “Nimri took her cast off. Did you notice?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you had a chance to scan her arm?” Breaks like that usually took months to recover from, when treated in the field.

  “No sign of the injuries remain.”

  His jaw dropped. He’d give anything to have some alien DNA like that. But he couldn’t dwell on such an innocuous issue. “Have you been able to determine where the power station is?”

  “There is none except the sun.”

  Nothing except the what? He closed his eyes and saw red. He counted to twenty-five, then continued on to fifty. “You and your faulty scanners!” Larwin barely managed to control his irritation and knew he should have continued to a hundred. “We’re in the bowels of a planetoid. There is no sun.” Perhaps he should have counted to a thousand. “They merely have the technology to make it appear so … what other information or misinformation do you have?”

  “Probabilities indicate this planet’s diameter is eight-thousand-four-hundred-twenty-six point-three miles. Its distance from the sun is ninety-three-point-two-nine-nine million miles. It rotates on a magnetic axis, thus its core is molten metal with a high probability of iron mixed with gold. Each day is twenty-six-point-seven-three-nine-two Guerreterre hours. Each day the planet tips one-point-two-six miles to my left.” Right on schedule, she flipped a page.

  Larwin’s hand clenched at the thought of strangling the sinewy metal neck. Not that GEA-4 would notice…

  She began to turn a page, but paused. “Probabilities indicate the tunnel is an undiscovered wormhole.”

  A current of electricity surged from his mind to his toes. Could she possibly be right?

  No!

  Larwin put his fists on his hips and glared at GEA-4’s perfectly shaped ear. “All known wormholes exist near black holes.”

  GEA-4 closed the book and picked up one with the picture of an ocean liner on its cover. Did this planetoid have a hidden sea, too? It made sense, since the river he’d seen from the mountain had to deposit its water somewhere.

  Instead of opening the cover, she pivoted to face him. “Yes, Colonel Atano, all known inter-space conduits are located within black holes.” Larwin realized she was agreeing with his point and found that even more confusing than her continual misstatements. “However, that does not mean wormholes cannot be found elsewhere.”

  “Assuming that’s true, where are we?”

  “Your inquiry is not specific.”

  “Can you scan the stars and plot our astrological position?” He was using the same tone he’d heard Nimri and Zurgon use, but at that time, he’d focused on grasping her words. Now, hearing in his own voice and understanding the language, he comprehended that the aliens had been quarreling.

  Had he been the source of their discussion? If so, was their discord over his discovery of their hidden world or the fact he was living with two females? Larwin didn’t know their cultural standards; so found the question impossible to answer. For certain the old man didn’t trust him and refused to stay in the same house with him.

  So, where did Zurgon live? Larwin looked around the chamber. Everything in it indicated the owner of the room was male, probably a mature one, judging by the clothing in the chests. Larwin narrowed his eyes and studied the thick, twisted black staff in the corner. It was the sort of thing someone who was either in poor heath or somehow disabled would use, if they lived in a primitive culture such as this. Could Nimri have put him in the old man’s room? Was this a matriarchal society, which gave her the power to throw the old man out of his home? Was that the crux of the discord he had just witnessed?

  “My programming only covered known star systems,” GEA-4 said.

  He blinked in confusion at the abrupt change of topic. Then her meaning sank in: they had gone through a wormhole and were lost in an unknown quadrant of space. Cold, chilblain-raising air moved over Larwin. If correct, that meant he might be stranded here for eternity. Ripples of alternating hot and cold rushed over him. He sat on the edge of the bed wondering if GEA-4 had purposely used such a calm tone while giving him the devastating news.

  “Everything I worked for—lost. My family—lost.” He’d never see Tem-aki again. Larwin put his face in his hands and focused on breathing. Living. While there was life, there was hope. By the time he looked up, GEA-4 was halfway through the ocean liner book. “Did you realize you were ruining my future when you destroyed my ship?”

  A page flipped. “Your inquiry lacks adequate information.”

  “It wasn’t a question. I was making a statement.” Larwin’s throat ached with the strain of swallowing unshed tears. “You ruined my life. I’m stuck on this forsaken planet; destined to spend the rest of my life surrounded by treasure I can’t profit by and I’m forced to live with a beautiful alien, whose flesh burns me when I touch it.”

  The sheer power of his loss made him feel as if he had been disintegrated by a photon torpedo. “Here, I’m no one and probably as poisonous to them as they must be to me.” He stood up and paced the room. “On Guerreterre, I had rank. If I brought back this bounty, I would have become a Lord.”

  “My scanners don’t show a heat differential for Nimri or alien DNA,” GEA-4 said matter-of-factly, as she turned a page.

  “Of course they don’t.” Faulty scanners had to be the cause of all his problems. “Why do I keep asking you? I’ll use my analyzer.” Once it proved the android wrong, he could theorize her celestial calculations were correct.

  Chapter Eight

  After Zurgon left, Nimri returned to her garden and resumed picking chocolate menthe. Being in the garden had always calmed and helped her think. The minty smell helped, too. Thanks to Zurgon, she had a lot to ponder.

  Bryta appeared around the corner of the house; part of her smock hung in an uneven wad; she gripped the other part as if it was a lifeline. Bryta’s irrational worry had begun when Rolf became ill, then day by day her absurd behavior and nervousness had increased. One evening, she’d confided that she feared Rolf would never recover. Day by day her panic had grown. Nimri’s qualms had intensified, too. On the final day of his illness, Bryta had wailed over her uncertain future. Nimri assured her that she had a home and position for as long as she wanted it, but her offer had not calmed Bryta. Nimri had hoped Bryta would improve after her great-grandfather’s ashes were laid in the balata.

  Now, Nimri wondered if her surrogate mother intuitively sensed impending doom, if Bryta sincerely missed Rolf or if she had more complaints about their guests. Judging from the white-knuckled grip Bryta had on her rumpled saffron apron, her sallow complexion coupled with the thin lips, and the tentative gait, Nimri knew she should prepare for an earful about something.

  Before Bryta had a chance to say whatever was on her mind, Nimri gave her a sunny smile and said, “Zurgon told me Pearl’s muscles were sore. I need menthe to make an ointment.” Nimri sighed. “Pearl always seems to be the first to fall ill, then within a week, everyone is sick.”

  Bryta’s lips thinned and her eyes shifted as she fought a mental war over desire to say whatever she had come outside to say and the need to discredit Pearl, who had been her bitter rival since they were children. She opened then closed her mouth several times, the way fish did and almost looked comical. Then, Bryta’s eyes sparked with a familiar fire; she let go of her apr
on, straightened and thrust out her bosom. Nimri bit the inside of her lips to hold back the bubbling relief of laughter and prepared to hear Bryta condemn Pearl for having attracted the man she’d once favored, but now feared.

  “That’s because she is the worst gossip in the tribe,” Bryta said. “And she always refuses to stay away from others when she’s ill.” Bryta had never had a nice thing to say about Pearl in the twenty years that Nimri had known her. “She’d sooner spread her gossip and infect everyone. She thinks rules don’t matter because of Zurgon’s status.”

  “Who? Pearl?” Nimri hoped her expression appeared genuinely perplexed. She and Flame often joked about Bryta’s jealousy over Pearl, who had become Head Woman when she bonded with Zurgon. Worse, Pearl always knew the latest news first, whereas they heard it last because their home was halfway up the mountainside and it was rare for them to have visitors, so they usually found out the news on market day. Ever since Nimri had known her, Bryta had alternated between being Pearl’s sworn rival and her best friend. But whether friend or foe, she’d always viewed Pearl as her only true competition.

  Bryta’s face flushed. “Of course, Pearl. Who else is such an infernal gossip and always such a know it all? What’s worse, she gets away with spreading lies along with her germs.”

  Bryta had just described herself, as well as Pearl. Nimri barely managed to contain the threatening chuckle. Certain that her smile would give her away, she kept her head down and acted as if choosing menthe leaves absorbed all her attention. “Pearl does, doesn’t she?” She muttered after the inclination to laugh abated.

  Bryta snorted and mumbled something under her breath.

  “You’re right,” Nimri still didn’t trust herself enough to stop picking or look up. “I’ll probably need enough ointment for everyone.” Nimri sat back on her heels and took a deep breath. She darted a look up at Bryta’s fiery red cheeks. “You can help harvest.” She resumed her chore.