He’d recovered from his insanity, at least by the measure he now had some idea where they were going.
But he daren’t push. He’d gotten Ilisidi’s help, but it was a chancy, conditional support for him and for Tabini that he still daren’t be sure of … never trust that the woman Tabini called ‘Sidi-ji wasn’t pursuing some course toward her own advantage, and toward her own power in the Western Association, if not in some other venue.
From one giddy moment to the next, he trusted none of them.
Fourteen words, the language had for betrayal, and one of them doubled for ‘taking the obvious course.’
XIII
If Ilisidi was following any established trail at all, Bren couldn’t see it even when Nokhada was in Babs’ very tracks. He spotted Ilisidi high up among towering boulders, Babs moving like one of Malguri’s flitting ghosts past gaps in the rocks.
He didn’t see the crest of the hill—he only lost track of Ilisidi and Cenedi at the same moment, and, following them, at the head of their column of twenty-odd riders, came out on a windy, boulder-littered hillside above a shallow brook and a set of brush-impeded wheel-ruts.
The road? he asked himself.
Was that track the west road Cenedi had talked about, where they were to meet the rest of their party?
Other riders arrived at the crest of the hill behind him, and Cenedi sent a rider down to, as he heard Cenedi say, see whether they saw any recent tracks.
Machine-tracks, that specific word implied.
A truck could possibly survive that road, given a good suspension and heavy tires.
And if service trucks were all the opposition had at their disposal, and they didn’t take a plane out of Maidingi Airport, God, Ilisidi could lead them back over the ridge mecheita-back and outrun any pursuit afoot.
So their means of transport out of Malguri wasn’t crazy. This wasn’t Mospheira’s well-developed back country. There wasn’t a phone line or a power line or a paved road or a rail track for days.
They sat up on their mountainside and waited, while the man Cenedi had sent rode down, had his look, and rode uphill again, with a hand signal that meant negative.
Bren let go a breath, and his heart sank in suppositions and suspicions too ready to leap up. He was ready to object that, considering the fight back at Malguri, they couldn’t hold Banichi to any tight schedule, and they shouldn’t go on without waiting.
But Cenedi said, before he had a chance to object, that they should get down and wait.
That bettered his opinion of Cenedi. He felt a hundredfold happier with present company and their priorities, in that light, whatever motivated them. He began to get down, the way Cenedi had said, attempted with kicks to get Nokhada to drop a shoulder, but that wasn’t a proposition Nokhada seemed to favor. Nokhada ripped the rein forward with an easy toss of her head, sent pain knifing through his sprained shoulder and circled perversely on the slope until her head was uphill and he couldn’t get down over the increased height, in the condition his legs were in, damn the creature.
He kicked Nokhada. They made one more embarrassing and vainly contested three-sixty on the hillside.
At which point one of the other riders took pity on him and got down to take Nokhada’s rein.
“Nand’ paidhi.” It was the same man, he realized by the voice, who’d beaten hell out of him in the restroom, who faced Nokhada sideways, with the dismount-side to the upslope of the hill, then stood waiting to steady him as he slid down.
He wasn’t damned well ready to forgive anyone who’d helped in that charade last night.
But he wasn’t among enemies, either, that was the whole point of what Cenedi had been trying to determine; and the man hadn’t in point of fact beaten him unnecessarily, only dissuaded him from further contest.
So he gave up his quarrel and surrendered his grudge with a quiet, “Thank you, nadi,” and slid down and dropped.
He’d thought he could at least stand up. The knees went—he’d have been down the slope under Nokhada, except for Cenedi’s man keeping him upright, and sensation arrived in his lower body about the same moment his legs straightened.
He managed to take Nokhada’s rein into his own hand and, with a mumbled thanks for the rescue, to limp aside to a place to be alone and to sit down. It was a very odd pain, he thought—not quite bad, at one moment, blood getting back where it belonged, or flesh figuring out there was supposed to be more of it over certain previously undiscovered bones in the human anatomy.
But he decided he didn’t want to sit down at the moment. His eyes watered in the chill wind, and he wiped them, using the arm he hadn’t just wrenched getting down. For a moment he was temporally lost—flashed on the cellar and on remembered anger and went dizzy and uncertain of time-sense as he looked down the slope. He settled for shifting from one foot to the other as a way to rest, holding Nokhada’s rein while Nokhada lowered her head and rooted with metal-capped tusks after a small woody shrub until it gave up its grip on the hillside. Nokhada manipulated it in her muscular upper lip and happily destroyed it.
Cold helped the pain. He just wanted to stand there mindlessly and watch Nokhada kill shrubs, but conscious thought kept creeping in—about the road down there, and the chance Banichi and Jago might not have made it away from Malguri.
The chance also that Ilisidi’s position wasn’t a simple or even a settled question. She was absolutely a wild card, dangerous to everyone with the Association trying, as it was, to fragment. It was only the fact that they were waiting for Banichi and waiting with a great deal of patience, for atevi, that persuaded him that he was in safe hands at all. Being atevi, Cenedi could return to his project of last night and peel another layer of truth out of him without a qualm if he needed to, at any moment, because, being atevi, Cenedi held his morality was Ilisidi’s welfare—consideration of which could shift any time the wind shifted.
How many people on Mospheira, nand’ paidhi?
He earnestly wished he had the gun from his bedroom—but that hadn’t been in the kit Djinana gave him, he’d felt the weight of it, and he didn’t know where it had ultimately gone.
Back to Banichi, he hoped, before it turned up in evidence in some court case Tabini-aiji couldn’t prevent.
A scatter of pebbles came down the slope—a riderless mecheita was rooting after something up above. Nokhada hardly twitched an ear, busy chewing.
Then every mecheita’s ears came up, and the heads came up, the whole lot of them looking toward the bottom of the hill, where the curve of the slope hid the farther end of the road.
Men all around him ducked into cover behind the rocks. Cenedi arrived in two fast strides, jerked him away from Nokhada and jerked him down with him behind the shelter of a large lump of stone.
He heard an engine then, in all that silence. At the first intimation of danger, the riderless mecheiti had tended together with Babs, and Ilisidi kept hold of Babs—holding the whole pack together on the slope above them.
The engine grew louder, nearer.
Cenedi signaled a query from another man with a hand motion to stay down.
Something rattled and popped and echoed, over the hills.
What was that? Bren wondered for half a heartbeat.
Then he heard the thump of an explosion. Muscles jerked, and his heart began to beat heavily in fright as Cenedi retreated from the post he had and moved rapidly from cover to cover, directing the company back uphill to the mecheiti.
They were leaving—pulling out. That rattle was gunfire; he knew it when that sound repeated itself. An exchange of fire. Cenedi had signaled him first of all. He felt a tremor in his legs he put down to sheer terror. He read Cenedi’s signal in retrospect, but he kept hoping for Banichi and Jago to appear from around the hill.
They couldn’t leave now, so close—if people were shooting, they were shooting at enemies, and that meant Banichi and Jago were there, just beyond the hill, that close to them. …
A veil of black smoke rol
led along the road below, carried on a stiff wind. In it, from the edge of the hill, he saw someone running, a single black-uniformed figure—
Not an attack, only a single atevi headed around the rocks and then uphill toward them at a desperate, stumbling run—a lighter someone than the average atevi man.
Jago, he realized in a heartbeat; and sprang up and ran, loosing small landslides of gravel, slipping and sliding and losing skin on his hands. He met her halfway to the bottom, dusty, gasping for breath as she caught herself against a boulder.
“Ambush,” she breathed, “at the Spires. Get up there! Tell Cenedi go, get clear! Now!”
“Where’s Banichi?”
“Go, dammit! The tank’s blown, it’s afire, he can’t walk, he’ll hold them till you get a start—”
“Hell! What, hold them? Is he coming?”
“He can’t, dammit. Bren-ji,—”
He didn’t listen to atevi logic. He lit out running, down to the brush-choked road, down into the smoke. He heard Jago running behind him, swearing at him and telling him he was a fool, get back, don’t risk himself.
Then he heard riders following. He skidded in the pebbles on the last of the slope and ran, catching at a boulder to make the sudden turn onto the road, into the smoke, afraid of the mecheiti running him down, afraid most of all of Cenedi catching him, forcing a retreat and leaving Banichi behind for no damn reason.
He felt heat in the smoke, saw a hot red center in the black, rolling cloud that turned into the burning skeleton of a truck with the doors open. The rattle of gunfire echoed off the surrounding hills, and amid that, he heard the sharp report of gunfire close at hand, from the area around the truck.
“Banichi!” he yelled, rubbing tears and soot, trying to make out detail through the stinging smoke. He saw something dark against the gray of the rocks, off the road, a black figure aiming a pistol up at the hills. Dirt kicked up around him, an explosion of gravel—a shot hitting the ground—and he ran for that figure, with the smoke for his only cover. Chips exploded off the rocks ahead of him. One stung his leg as he ducked behind the rocks where Banichi sheltered.
“You damned fool!” Banichi yelled at him as he arrived, but he didn’t care. He grabbed Banichi’s sleeve and his arm, trying to pull him up, onto his feet. Banichi was clearly in pain, catching at the rocks and waving him off as pieces exploded off the boulders around them.
They weren’t alone, then—Jago was beside him, grabbing Banichi on the other side, and, overwhelmed with help, Banichi gave up and cooperated with them, the three of them laboring across the ruts, while gunfire broke out loudly on their left, at ground level. Bullets shattered rock and thudded into the burning wreckage of the truck, the heat of the fire blasting breath away and stinging the skin as they crossed the road, using the smoke for cover.
More shots hit the truck. “That’s Cenedi!” Jago gasped. “He’s on the road!”
“Along the stream!” Banichi yelled, limping heavily, taking both of them downslope as, just past the truck, they slid down the bank of the stream, among boulders and knee-deep into cold water, all in a haze of smoke.
Lungs burned. Eyes watered. Bren choked back coughs, hanging onto Banichi, trying to cope with the uneven ground and Banichi’s lurching steps, Jago’s height giving her more leverage on Banichi’s other side.
But they were out of the firing. Coughing and stumbling, they came beyond the area where the bullets were hitting. Banichi slipped to his knees on the stony bank, and, coughing, collapsed on the rocks, trying to get his gun back in its holster.
“Nadi, where are you hit?” Bren asked.
“Not hit,” Banichi said between coughing fits. “They were ready for us. At the Spires. Explosives. —Dammit, is that Cenedi’s lot?”
“Yes,” Jago said shortly, and tried to get Banichi up again. Banichi tried, on one knee. Whatever was wrong, his leg on Jago’s side couldn’t bear his weight, and Bren shoved with all his strength to help Banichi up the bank toward Cenedi’s position in the windborne haze of smoke.
Gunfire kicked up the dirt around them. Bren flung himself down with Banichi and Jago, flattened himself as much as he could among the humped rocks at the edge of the road, expecting a bullet to find his back as round after round kicked up the earth and ricochets went in random directions, chipping rock, disturbing the weeds.
Then a moment’s quiet. He started to get up, and to pull Banichi up with him, but a man came running out of the smoke, and immediately after, two mecheiti, riderless—one caught the man with its head and threw him completely into the air. He landed and the mecheiti were on him, ripping him with their bronze-capped tusks, trampling him under them.
“Move!” Jago yelled, as Banichi flung himself up and forward, and Bren caught him as best he could on the right side. Banichi lost his footing on Jago’s side and cost them more effort to get him up. Mecheiti were coming at them, riderless shapes in the haze. Banichi was yelling something about his gun.
Then another mecheita was into it—Nokhada, ripping with her tusks, spinning and butting and slashing at retreating rumps—it was that fast, and Bren grabbed Banichi by the belt and tried to get him up and out of the road—but another mecheita darted in on Nokhada’s flank, raked Nokhada’s side with a glancing blow; and then, God, Babs was into it, riderless, laying about him at both combatants, forcing them apart, driving Nokhada off the road downslope, Tali off into the smoke, others scattering, as they struggled to get Banichi toward the rocks—the mecheiti had gone amok—and a barrage of fire came from somewhere in the smoke as they reached the boulders at the foot of the hill. Bren heard someone yelling orders to draw back, not to pursue, get the mecheiti.
Another voice shouted, “They’ll be up our backs, nadi!”
“They’ve already radioed!” Banichi yelled as loudly as he could, resting his arms against a boulder. “Dammit! Get out of here!”
“We were clear!” a man protested, Giri turning up at Bren’s elbow, catching at his arm. “Nand’ paidhi, what were you doing?”
“He lost his wits,” Jago said sharply. Giri brushed past Bren, took his place supporting Banichi on that side. Others of their company were arriving out of the smoke, still firing down the road, but nothing seemed to be coming back.
“They’re going to try to get behind us, or they’ve got a van farther back,” he heard Jago say to someone, on a gasped breath. “We’ve got to get out of here—they’ll have called our location in. We’ll have planes in here faster than we can think about it. Those are no amateurs.”
Men were running, sorting out the mecheiti. Bren spotted Nokhada in the milling about and ran and caught Nokhada’s trailing reins—Nokhada had a raking wound down her shoulder, and a bleeding puncture from a blow to the neck, and she resisted any signal to lower a shoulder for him, circling on the pivot of the rein and throwing her head. He tried again, holding on to the mounting-straps with his sore arm, trying not to require anyone’s help.
Someone grabbed him by the right arm, spun him against Nokhada’s shoulder, and hit him in the side of the head—he didn’t even see it coming. He came to bruised and on the stony ground with Jago’s voice in his ear, arguing with someone.
“Tell me what he’s up to!” Cenedi’s voice, then. “Tell me where he thinks he’s going—when the shooting starts, a man takes his real direction—or do they say that in Shejidan?”
His eyes were blurred, his ear was ringing, and he put his hand on a sharp rock, trying to prop himself on the better arm. “He doesn’t know better,” Jago was saying. “I don’t know what he’ll do next, nadi! He’s not atevi! Isn’t that the point of all this?”
“Nadi,” Cenedi said coldly, “inform him what he’ll do next. Next time I’ll shoot him in the knee and not discuss the matter. Take me very seriously.”
A towering shadow came between them and the sun. Babs, and Ilisidi, only watching, while Bren staggered to his feet.
“Aiji-ma,” came Jago’s quiet voice from beside him, and Jago�
��s hard grip on his arm, pulling him aside. He stood there with the side of his face burning, with hearing dimmed in one ear, as Ilisidi drifted past and Cenedi stalked off from him. “Damned fool!” Jago said with a shake at his arm.
“They’d have left him!”
“Did you hear him?” Another shake at his arm. “He’ll cripple you. It’s not an idle threat!”
Two of Cenedi’s men had caught Nokhada, and brought her, shaking her head and fighting the restraint. He groped after the rein a man offered him, and made a shaken effort to get the stirrup turned to mount—one of them got Nokhada to drop the shoulder, and he got his toe in the stirrup, but he slipped as Nokhada came up, a thorough botch. He hung from the mounting-straps with both feet off the ground, until someone shoved him from below and he landed far enough on to drag himself the rest of the way aboard.
He saw Jago getting onto another of the spares, the last two men mounting up, as Ilisidi started into motion and Nokhada started to move with the group. His vision grayed out on him in the sudden motion—had been graying out since Jago had lit into him, for reasons doubtless valid to her. His hands shook, and balance faltered.
“You stay on,” Jago said, drawing near him. “You stay with the mecheita, do you hear me, nadi?”
He didn’t answer. It made him mad. He could understand Cenedi hitting him, he knew damned well what he’d done in going after Banichi. He’d violated Ilisidi’s chain of command—he’d forced them into a fight Cenedi would have avoided, because Cenedi was looking out for the dowager—and possibly, darker suspicion, because Cenedi would all along as soon leave Banichi and Jago in the lurch and have him completely to himself and the dowager’s politics. Cenedi personally would gladly sell him to the highest bidder, that was the gut-level fear that had sent him down that hill, he thought now, that and the equally gut-level human conviction that the treason he was committing was, humanly speaking, minor and excusable.
Foreigner Page 36
