Conspirator

by C. J. Cherryh

  They might be, even now, hiking to some phone where they could call.

  Please God they were safe ashore, just stranded by a contrary wind.

  “Nadiin-ji,” he said to the three with him, “can one of you call the house and tell them to ask the village constable to go along the shore on the far side?” They were skittish and wary youngsters, not prone to trust strangers whose man’chi might be in doubt. They would rather try to walk home, but that was a day’s rough hike, just to get to the curve of the bay, let alone clear to Najida.

  That was the good supposition. If, on the other hand, they had gotten beyond the mouth of the bay, if they had gotten swept well out, the current off the point bent southerly.

  “And phone Kajiminda: tell our neighbor what has happened, and ask Lord Baiji to put out boats to search, in case they have been swept out to sea. Say we have a boat with children swept out into the bay. Tell them we need help.”

  He had to call Shejidan. He had to admit to Tabini that he had allowed a catastrophe. They had a radio on the boat, and Jago had it underway again, using the engine to bring it back to the dock. He had his coat, his aishid was equipped, the boat was outfitted for their fishing trip, and that meant entirely—food, blankets, everything they needed for a search.

  He stood watching as the boat came closer, and listening as Banichi, on com, spoke to Ramaso up at the house, advising him what had happened, passing orders in rapid succession. He said to Banichi: “Tell Ramaso to tell my brother we have an emergency. Tell him get his boat out. Fast. Meanwhile can you find out if there were any life vests in that tender?”

  Banichi nodded, while talking and listening. On the life vests, it was thought, up at the house, that there were two.

  Two. Marvelous.

  Meanwhile Jago was nosing Jeishan in to dock, running out to toss a line to Tano and Algini. Jeishan hit the buffers, slid along them—Jago had judged the speed tolerably, and there was no great shock as it came in. She ran back up to the bridge to finesse the docking and at that point Tano and Algini had pulled it in, with the engine idling.

  Bren jumped for the deck and headed for the bridge, heard thumps behind him as Tano and Algini came aboard, then Banichi. He didn’t even look back, except to take a glance out forward and find his course clear. He didn’t want to take the time for Jago to get the Brighter Days into dock, but none of his aishid were experienced seamen, and it was worth it, if Toby’s expertise gave them an expertly-captained second boat to travel line-of-sight and try to figure the currents and where, at the moment, that little sailboat might have gone.

  “Jago-ji,” he said as he joined her on the bridge, Jago in nothing but her underwear and a sopping wet tee. “Go aboard Toby’s boat and get it to the dock—wait for him. You can communicate with him. Call the house and have them send down spare dry clothes.” Banichi had come in, meanwhile, carrying Jago’s jacket and other clothes, and she declined to put it around her shoulders.

  “Yes,” she said plainly, to his order, and grabbed her clothes and gear up and went outside in the cold wind, wet and half-naked. They were free of the dock, the lines taken in almost as soon as they had pulled into shore, and Bren throttled up, heading for the Brighter Days and maneuvering to avoid her anchor cables. Jago went around to the starboard bow, ready to move across.

  He came in close, very close, backed the engine, and gave Jago as steady a platform as he could—no need. Jago made an easy jump, was on, her clothes and gear tucked under one arm, and on her way to the bridge, where, presumably, Toby had left the ignition key . . .

  But messages would get Toby down there, and if Toby had the key with him, somebody would have to swim it—likely Jago—one more time. He couldn’t wait. He’d given Toby someone who could communicate on radio, somebody with Guild authority. He throttled up and took out toward the southern shore of the bay, confident that Jago would do what was logical and get Toby out on the search.

  “Fishermen will help us, Bren-ji,” Banichi said calmly.

  “Put out a general call. Say: Children from the village. Compensation from the estate.”

  Cover story with the right and useful details: Banichi knew exactly why, and got on the radio and put it out that way—village children swept out in a sailboat from the estate dock, the estate to compensate any fishermen who diverted their boats to the search. There were no better searchers, to know the tide, the currents and the coast, but none of them were going to keep up with the yacht on its way out . . . Jeishan’s was a potent engine, for security reasons, the paidhi’s security, in point of fact.

  But it wasn’t helping them. Tano and Algini were out along the rail, braving a bitter wind to scan the wooded shoreline unobstructed by fogged glass and spatter from the spray. They were moving under power, moving fast, with the last of the tide.

  There was no guarantee if the youngsters had gotten to shore that they would have had the skill or the strength to get the boat in: it might well have gotten away from them, granted only all of them had gotten off if it did float away. It was not guaranteed that there’d been any signal flare aboard or that the youngsters would know what it was for. It was a simple tender-boat, dock to boat and back again, for carrying supplies, and most everyone that handled it was expert, not tending to get into difficulty that needed such things.

  The kids had no idea what they were into. He sincerely hoped they hadn’t tried to swim the current. Cajeiri had never swum in water over his head, though, bet on it, he’d read a book about it; while the other two, Taibeni, inlanders, were probably worse off than Cajeiri. The possibilities were beyond frightening.

  “There are rocks above water,” he said, veering off from the coastline and driving close to where he knew such rocks were, right near the mouth of the bay—a miserable perch for anybody, but a lifesaver of more than one fisherman in the history of the estate, as well as the ruin of a couple of boats who hadn’t known they were there at high tide. Tano and Algini came into the cabin for a moment to warm up—Banichi turned the heater on, to the relief of all of them; and even started up a pot of hot tea.

  They ran by the first rock, with no sign of the youngsters, and on the way to the second, Bren took a cup of tea, as much for the warmth of the cup as the contents. They reached the second half-submerged reef, with still no sign of the kids—the third rock there was no likelihood the kids could reach with the tide running, and he opted to put about back to the shore, to take up that search again, and to run by a fourth rock dangerously close in.

  Banichi meanwhile was on the radio, talking to Jago. “Nandi,” Banichi said, “nand’ Toby is on his way. His lady is coming with him.”

  “Good,” he said. It was good. Barb was many things, but she was an experienced hand with the boat, she had common sense in a crisis she understood, and she knew the sea. “Advise them of our status. Then one regrets to say we must concern the aiji and discreetly advise him of the situation. I would do so personally, and shall, if you will hand me the microphone.”

  “Yes,” Banichi said. It wasn’t a call he wanted to make, and there was a certain hazard in announcing to the world in any recognizable way that the aiji’s son and heir was out in a sailboat on a given stretch of water. Bren listened as Banichi made the short call to Jago, speaking in a personal code that, apart from the code the Guild used, was something she and Tano and Algini understood.

  Then Banichi used ship-to-shore to call the Bujavid operator, and the aiji’s guard—the best route, Bren thought, gazing out over a vast tract of eye-tricking water and rough coastline, and still not a sign of a boat or the youngsters. Banichi used code there, too, and evidently was able to convey what had to be conveyed, because Banichi didn’t hand him the microphone, just talked in short, coded bursts to whoever received the call. At last Banichi closed off the contact, and said:

  “The aiji has been informed, nandi. The aiji-dowager is airborne from Shejidan and intends to come in at Dalaigi. It seemed more discreet for me to make the call.”


  “The dowager was back in Shejidan?”

  “One apprehends that she had stayed there the night, Bren-ji, after the last incident, had resumed her flight to Malguri today and is now turning the plane around a second time, and coming here. They did not give an estimated time, doubtless a security concern.”

  “One is by no means sorry to have her assistance,” Bren said. He could only imagine the dowager’s state of mind after two aborted flights. And he could only imagine Tabini’s state of mind dealing with the dowager and his son’s second disappearance, this time into real danger. But Tabini’s guard were all new men, since the failed coup; the dowager’s were not, and they had worked with Banichi and Jago extensively. Bren was himself very glad to know Ilisidi was bringing in her resources . . . upset as he was to be the cause of the problem. He only hoped they could find the young rascals before she got here and end the day with a phone call to Tabini and the dowager presiding over a family dinner party up at the house.

  The light, meanwhile, hurt the eyes, glancing off the water. The sun was headed down the sky, now, into afternoon, and the far distance was obscured in white haze.

  Banichi surrendered the radio to Tano, and went out with Algini to watch the shoreline . . . but by now certain other boats showed on the northern expanse of water. None of them were the sailboat. They were fishermen from the village and the neighboring district, all spreading themselves out in the bay and sweeping the area they had already crossed, a precaution for which Bren was very grateful.

  Tano listened to something on the radio, then said, “Nand’ Baiji is launching his boats and Lord Geigi’s personal yacht, nandi. They are going out to meet the coastal current. Nand’ Baiji is going out personally.”

  “Good,” Bren said. That was the most important thing, to get boats into position to catch the youngsters if they had been swept out into that southerly flow—a current strong enough in some seasons that even larger boats had to take notice of it. It was very, very easy to assume one was making progress northerly, unless one had a shoreline for reference.

  More than one fishing boat had been lost when that treacherous current met a contrary wind and the waves turned chaotic. And that was not a situation he wanted to contemplate. The peninsula that divided Najidami Bay from Kajidami Bay, where Kajiminda sat in much the same position as Najida, had a hellish set of rocks at low tide.

  “What does the weather report predict?” he asked Tano, and Tano checked and reported.

  “A front will arrive by morning, nandi, with southerly winds and overcast, rain in the afternoon.”

  Not as bad as could be: winds blowing with the current, not cross-grained, but it would speed the little boat along. And rain and rising wind could swamp a little sailboat, not even mentioning hypothermia.

  He wished that the tender had been equipped with a locator. Or a radio. Or—he had to admit it—the detested wireless phone. Any sort of communication. If the youngsters had the presence of mind to use the sun, and a shiny object. Anything.

  But there was so much light out there, and his eyes burned with the effort. No sunglasses, no protection, nothing of the like turned up in the bin by the wheel. Damn it all. He wasn’t sure he wanted to come back if he couldn’t find the kids . . . didn’t want to face Tabini and Damiri, or the Taibeni kids’ parents. Or the dowager. God knew he’d tried to keep up with the kids. He’d gotten distracted. He’d failed for one miserable hour to post a guard on the kids, even his aishid had been distracted for that hour, under his orders, and they’d just—been kids. The eight-year-old steered the group, the other two didn’t have the fortitude to tell Cajeiri no, or didn’t think they had the authority to fling themselves on him bodily and stop him. Adults had fallen into the same trap with the boy. A long string of adults.

  “Nothing,” he said to Tano, beside him. “Has Toby’s boat left yet, nadi-ji?”

  “They are away and coming up the opposite side of the bay, nandi, in case they went straight across.”

  “One fears they have been swept out to sea.” He didn’t trust himself to find the current. They were out far enough now to avoid the rocks. He throttled way back as they nosed into the offshore current and let the current take the boat, just reading that and the shifting wind as best he could. If the wind had kept up as it had been off the point, the youngsters would have been swept northerly. But after a brief lull as they had been outbound, it was shifting to carry them southerly, increasingly so. The change in wind direction meant smoother water for the little craft—but a far, far faster passage, and it was continuing to shift. Tacking against the wind—that wasn’t something they likely knew how to manage; and that rocky coast was not their friend. “Get up atop and look out as best you can, Tano-ji. Trade with Banichi and Algini when the cold gets too much.”

  “Yes,” Tano said, and went out, admitting a gust of cold air. His footfalls resounded on the ladder as he went up with the various antennae and the dish—he wouldn’t improve reception, but it was the best vantage they had, and that, at the moment, was everything.

  The current had them now, and Bren throttled up just a little, hoping desperately that a boat moving under power would not just run past the kids.

  Hoping for a sight of a very, very small object, in all the sheet of white light that was the Mospheiran Strait.

  The sun was warm, at least, though the wind was biting cold, and they had wrung out Jegari’s pants and coat, as hard as they could, even putting the oar handle into the loop of cloth and twisting with all their strength to wring out the last drops of moisture: that was Antaro’s idea, which Cajeiri thought was outstandingly clever. They had found two floatation vests, and putting one of those on Jegari offered him some protection from the wind. Cajeiri thought Antaro should wear the other, since she could not swim at all, but both of them insisted he put it on, so he did that, and made them happier, uncomfortable though it was: he and Jegari agreed they would keep Antaro afloat should they have an accident.

  The situation they were in, however, was worse and worse, and the water that splashed aboard was cold as ice. They tried again to row in toward shore, and worked at it, but got nowhere: they let the sail down and just tried not to go too far. Then Cajeiri remembered he had read about swimming that if you were caught in a current you should swim hard with it and get speed enough to swim across it.

  So they put the sail up again and tried to do that. They rowed with their single oar in the bow—Antaro doing much of the rowing, since she was the only one not encumbered by a vest; but that was no good, and then Cajeiri tried to turn the boat in toward the rocks, but that was a worse mistake: the tiller went over, but when Jegari put in the oar hard, straight down, and tried to pull on it, it twisted in his hands and then broke right in two. The end went floating right away from them.

  Jegari was terribly embarrassed at that, but not half as embarrassed as Cajeiri felt for the whole situation.

  Still, mani had taught him not to make excuses when it was really bad, and it was. It was very, very bad. He was so sorry his gut hurt. But that meant his companions were really, truly owed an apology for his bad leadership. And it hurt his conscience that Jegari was doing all the apologizing.

  “One accepts all blame for this unfortunate situation,” he said to his two companions, “and you should forget the oars.”

  “We are equally to blame, nandi,” Antaro cried.

  “We are older,” Jegari said. “We saw danger in it. We should not have agreed.”

  “You are not to say no to me!” Cajeiri snapped. He was determined on that. “Or we will disagree.” But his associates on the ship, Gene and Artur, had argued with him. They had also agreed with more than these two would ever agree to. “This time perhaps would have been a good time to say no and argue,” he acknowledged unhappily, as the waves tossed their little boat in a little space of calm, and the wide, sunlit ocean sparkled fiercely around them. “We have no water to drink. Sea water would kill us. I know that. And we have no food.”


  “Nand’ Bren will come after us once he misses us,” Antaro said.

  “He will,” Jegari said. “And his big boat can go faster than this, surely.”

  “His boat and nand’ Toby’s certainly can. They can cross the whole ocean in a day, almost. Well, from the Island to the north coast. And you are right. They will be looking for us. We must surely be easy to see. The big boats have a much better view.” He sat and thought, and thought, and the wind puffed at their sail, and the sail filled, and took them further south.

  He thought it was south, at least.

  And he had learned one thing about boats, or, to tell the truth, remembered something that nand’ Toby had once told him, which was that the tiller could not turn the boat if the boat was not going faster than the water was, and they had had ample proof of that fact. So he turned the boat as much toward where he thought land was, as much as he could get without losing the wind, and with his two companions gazing hopefully at him, he tried to remember everything else he had learned from nand’ Bren and from nand’ Toby and from Barb-daja about boats. He thought he at least looked confident, with the boat moving again, and his hand on the tiller.

  He did not feel that confident at all, and he was trying to remember his maps, which he had studied, whether they had already passed Kajidami Bay, too, and whether Kajiminda Peninsula jutted out far enough they could run into it. There was Dalaigi Township, beyond that, but Kajiminda Peninsula was a huge hooked jut of land with yet another deep bay that he thought inset into the continent, so they could completely miss it, and end up in the Southern Ocean where the seas got really rough.

  It was just a mess, was all. A very unfortunate mess.

  Antaro had had the best idea, hoping for Bren to turn up. So did he. Bren would surely be looking for him about the time he failed to appear for lunch. Bren would search the whole house, and know right where to look—and somebody would surely miss the sailboat. The only foreseeable problem was that the sailboat they had taken was the boat that would help nand’ Bren get out to the big boat to come after them . . . but Bren would find a way. He believed that.