Pretender

by C. J. Cherryh

  One seat given up to another non-Guild. So only Cenedi was with them, give or take the man riding with the driver.

  And a fuel shortage at the pumps, which meant chancier supply for their convoy. Nothing had been working right, in this anti-technology reversal of policies…in the flight, as they had begun to hear, of certain notoriously human-influenced, technologically-skilled occupation classes into obscurity and inaction.

  So town lords, on their way to the capital to answer calls to the legislature, had evidently been compelled to take the usual truck or bus to the stations. And Lord Tatiseigi’s coming to meet them in his elegant automobile that night had itself been a political gesture, it now seemed, a gallant statement, if they had been aware how to read it. The old lord had had a touch of the rebel about him from the start, downright daring in his reception of the dowager and the heir, and in the style of it. One might somewhat have misjudged him…failed to realize how deeply Murini had offended the old man.

  Or how strongly the old man was inclined to commit to the dowager. There was a thought.

  Subcurrents. Implication and insinuation and hint. He was back on the continent, for sure. He clung to the upright bar against the chance of a hole in the road and asked himself how far he had gotten out of touch with the pulse of the mainland—of the whole planet—during his absence. So much hardship, so many lives impacted—

  A rock hit the windshield. His imagination made it a bullet for a split second, and he flung himself back, bumped into Banichi, who steadied him on his feet.

  “We are not yet under attack,” Banichi assured him, releasing him. “But we shall be. Best rest while you can.”

  “Next to the young gentleman?” Bren asked, resolved on remaining where he was, and drew a quiet laugh from his bodyguard.

  “Indeed,” Jago agreed, and for several moments the cloud of dust sparked with taillights was all their reality, the bus going blindly behind the others.

  “Someone has gone off in the ditch,” he realized, as they passed a bus pitched over beside the road, nose canted down in the drainage ditch. Their bus whipped past and kept going.

  “The hindmost will help pull them out,” Jago surmised, which was the only reasonable help: They could not stop the whole column behind them to render aid, and it had not been the dowager’s car in the ditch, which alone would have gotten their attention. Their bus bucketed along, itself swerving violently as the road turned for no apparent reason—one such turn had betrayed the vehicle now well behind them.

  The progress became a hypnotic blur of headlamp-lit dust and sways and bumps, the driver working the wheel furiously at times to keep them on track, the engine groaning intermittently to get them up over a hill. Then they would careen downward, keeping their spacing from other lights, the whole rushing along at all the speed they dared.

  No telling what Tatiseigi’s driver had achieved, or how far in the lead they were. They passed a small truck that had pulled over. The passengers were gathered out in front of it with the hood thrown up, attempting to find some problem in the steaming engine. And it was gone in the night. Machines that had never driven farther than the local market were pressed to do the extraordinary, and they passed a large market truck, this one with a flat tire. The passengers held out hands, appealing for a ride, but their bus was already more crowded than afforded good standing room.

  “We cannot take them on,” the lord of Dur said, in Bren’s hearing. “We are charged to overtake the dowager. We have the heir and the paidhi aboard. Someone will take them.”

  The scene whipped past them, and was gone.

  7

  Another low range of hills, another diversion to the east, as the driver spun the wheel wildly. One of Dur’s men held a flashlight to a map and shouted instructions into the man’s ear the while. Intersections with other country lanes went past, and Bren found a small place to sit on the interior steps by the door, down next to Banichi’s feet, seeking to relieve his knees.

  “No, the paidhi is quite well, young sir,” he heard Jago say. “He is trying to sleep at the moment.”

  Not precisely true. He heard his young companions had come looking for him, or Cajeiri had, personally, and he did not lift his head from his knees, while the rumble of bus tires over gravel made a steady, numbing din at this range. The door had three slit windows, and he could make out brush.

  Perhaps he did sleep, in that position. He waked with a squeal of brakes and a rattle of gunfire, that sound he had heard all too often.

  “Banichi-ji,” he exclaimed, and started to get up, but Banichi’s large hand on his head shoved him right back down. A little rattle became a barrage, and he sat, crushed by his bodyguard. Banichi and Jago were keeping low, everyone ducked down. Something cracked through the windshield, but the bus kept going, and then someone toward the righthand rear of their bus must have had a window slid back, because someone inside their bus let off a full clip. The bus never slowed. He heard Dur exhorting his bodyguard to shield their driver.

  Damn, he said to himself, crouching there, thinking of that vulnerable, open car ahead of them.

  “Cajeiri!” he heard Banichi say, then; and Jago’s weight left him. With the worst of thoughts, Bren heaved himself up and scrambled through a press of atevi who tried to give him space.

  Cajeiri was on his knees in the seat, he and his young guards, struggling to lift the window they themselves had dropped. Banichi leaned across and did it one-handed.

  “What are you doing?” Banichi challenged them.

  “There was a flash in the woods, nadi!” This from Antaro, defending her young lord. “We were shooting at that!”

  “We?” They were all exposed to the night, but the spot which had roused their alarm was long past in the dark: The bus had sped off at the column’s speed. “Your task,” Banichi said in that dreadful voice he could use, “your task, young woman, is to protect your lord, which may require your flinging him to the floor, not abetting his youthful misjudgement.”

  “Yes,” Jegari said.

  There was a draft still coming in, a hole in that window, difficult to see in the dark. A bullet had gone through, and missed. Bren spotted it. He was sure Banichi already had.

  And Ilisidi and Tatiseigi in that open car, Bren thought with a chill.

  Whoever had shot at the column had fired blindly—which argued non-Guild forces, maybe Kadagidi coming cross-country, having learned they were no longer at Tirnamardi. In the latter case, the attackers surely had no way of knowing they had had the heir in their sights—

  Or they were Guild, Bren said to himself, and had tried an impossible shot.

  Which the fool youngsters had tried to return, and never mind Antaro had used the indefinite, child’s we, the child’s language which she had doubtless left behind entirely seven years ago, Banichi and Jago and everyone else in hearing had to be sure who had drawn a gun and not ducked his vulnerable head—damn, one could be sure of it.

  “Keep your heads down, and rest,” Bren suggested, employing the fortunate three-mode. “We shall all have to sleep an hour or so, no matter they shoot at us. I shall sit with you.”

  Which probably did not please his staff, but his backside was numb from the chill of the deck, and he slid past Cajeiri and took his former place, by the window. He took out his handkerchief—a gentleman had a handkerchief—and stuffed that white object in the bullet hole, high up. Well enough, he thought. A sniper might take that pallor for a target…above their heads.

  “Nandi,” Jago said, she and Banichi taking their leave, moving back to their former position, they and Tano and Algini, who had held the curious back. The aisle in their vicinity cleared, people getting back to their seats.

  It was the moment in which an adult might have a word with a foolish young lad, and his desperately inexperienced staff. One prudently declined, letting them think about it, think about the dangers out there.

  Young nerves had clearly had enough for the moment. Cajeiri had turned about in his
seat, trying to find a comfortable place. He tried turning his head away, pretending to go back to sleep, but in lengthy silence, the bus bumping and thumping at its high speed, he ended up turning over, and finally sliding against Bren’s shoulder, exhausted.

  Fair enough. Bren provided a shoulder; the weight was warm and provided a brace against which Bren himself could lean, the bus wall being cold and all too vulnerable. Bren found himself able to shut his eyes, even to drift a bit, in an interval of relatively smooth road and dark.

  The bus jolted. Brakes wheezed. Refueling stop, Bren decided, at once aware that there was light outside the window. He began to think about getting up and finding out where they were.

  Suddenly the bus roared off in a scattering of gravel, making no stop at all.

  Cajeiri lifted his weight from Bren’s shoulder, braced himself with a hand on the seat in front. “What was that, nandi?” he asked. “What are we doing?”

  “One has no idea,” Bren said, and hauled himself to his feet and past the boy, in search of information, in what was near dawn. Details hung in a dim gray light, where before had been dark and silhouettes, and faces were weary and watchful, facing the windows.

  Tano was the one of his staff closest by, he and Algini having traded off their seats to Banichi and Jago. He took a grip on Tano’s seat rail.

  “What happened, nadiin-ji?” Bren asked.

  “An isolated station, nandi. The pumps are booby-trapped. A team is working to clear it, for the hindmost. Our driver believes we can make it—if not, still to another pump, with a small detour.”

  Communications must still be working. They had hardly slowed down to find this out. “Is there word of the dowager?” he asked them, “Or the aiji?”

  “There is not, Bren-ji. But we have not passed the car, either, baji-naji.”

  “What shall we do, then? Drive straight into the city?”

  “Perhaps,” Tano said. “Perhaps, Bren-ji.”

  Perhaps, if the fuel held out in sufficiency to keep the column together. If, baji-naji, the buses held together mechanically and they didn’t run head-on into ambush. Worse, they were going into a narrowing cone on the map, making it clearer and clearer to anyone that the city was their destination, and offering ample time for their enemy to put up a meaningful roadblock and a determined resistence.

  He worked forward in the crowded aisle to have a look ahead for himself, and had an uncommonly clear view of the column in front, no longer a dust-obscured scatter of taillights, but a gray string of five small trucks and one bus stretching ahead of them down a hill, on a well-traveled market road. No car. No hint of a car ahead…whatever that meant. One hoped it meant that the dowager had gone off the route and tried some clever maneuver. It was no good asking. Whatever they got by radio—and it was even possible that his staff could reach Cenedi at short range—there was no news for him, or his staff would have waked him to inform him. Banichi and Jago were in a seat forward, themselves catching a few moments of sleep. He decided against interrupting that rest.

  He went back to his seat, answered Cajeiri’s sleepy questions—the boy had finally, absolutely run out of energy—and when Cajeiri dropped off again, he watched out the window, watched grain fields pass, finally making a pillow of his hand against the outer wall and catching a few hazy moments of sleep.

  Then the tires hit pavement. He jerked his head up, saw buildings, realized they were passing right through a town—a town he knew, by that remarkable red building on the hill, the old fortress. It was Adigian, firmly in Ragi territory.

  And it was sunrise, and people were out on the roadside waving at them, cheering them on, some of them with weapons evident.

  Cajeiri’s head popped up. “There are people, nandi!”

  “Adigian. A Ragi town. Wave at them, young gentleman.”

  Cajeiri did that, but soon they ran out of people, and only saw three trucks waiting in a side street, trucks crammed with passengers, a sight that whisked by them.

  More would join them, had his bodyguard not said so?

  His nerves were rattled. As the last of the little town whisked past the windows he found another priority. The bus had what genteel folk called an accommodation in the rear, which he visited, and returned to his seat. The bus meanwhile kept up its steady pace, never slowing once, not as they left the brief patch of pavement and struck out on the usual dirt surface.

  If there was fuel in Adigian, they had declined it, because the driver judged they had enough. Most everyone had waked, but now heads went down again. And amazing himself, he dropped his head over against the seat edge on folded hands and caught a little more half-sleep, his mind painting pictures of the space station over their heads, the white corridors of the remote station where they had fought to rescue the colonists…so, so much detail the world didn’t know. He remembered a boy playing at race cars in the ship corridors, Banichi on his knees helping repair a wreck…all these things. A curious dinner, with floating globes of drink, and fear of poison…

  Odd-smelling, dark halls, then, the interior of a kyo ship. The wide, strange countenance of their own kyo guest, his broad hand descending on a pile of teacakes…

  His head spun. There were so many changes, so much water under the bridge.

  Adigian. Home territory, if he had a home anywhere besides that mountain over on Mospheira. The Ragi heart of the aishidi’tat.

  For the first time since returning from space, even in his sojourn in Tirnamardi, he began to have a real sense of location, as if a missing true north had settled back into his bones and reached conscious level. He knew where he was with his eyes shut. Shejidan was there, just there, ahead of them, a little off dead-ahead, as the road wound. Remarkable, that he hadn’t had that awareness until now, that it had taken ancient Adigian and that old fortress to stir it.

  Early evening on a rail trip, the train passing through the same town, himself on the way to Taiben, a guest of Tabini-aiji, all those years ago…

  Making notes for the University back on Mospheira, attempting a sketch of the fortress, since a camera would never be accepted in those long ago, nervous days of human-atevi relations…back before the station had found new occupants, back before there was a space program, back before the paidhi had lived in the Bu-javid’s noble apartments.

  In those days the aiji inviting a human guest to Taiben was itself unprecedented. Revolutionary.

  Teaching him the use of a firearm, and giving him a small, concealable pistol, had been a thunderbolt. Defend yourself, had been Tabini’s implication, though at the time he had had no idea how imminent that necessity would be. It had not been a large gun: It was a small enough weapon to fit his hand, to fit very easily into his coat pocket—one of the concealed sorts that atevi maidservants might have tucked away when they only looked unarmed. Banichi had replaced it with another, slightly heavier, the night that he had arrived in Bren’s service, never to leave him.

  Tabini had seen conflict coming, hadn’t he? The aiji had made his own decision to draw the paidhi into the thick of court activity, and gotten—oh, far more than Tabini had ever bargained for, that was probably the truth; but likewise Tabini had already known what he was going to ask for his people, hadn’t he? More technology, more change—he had never offered more than Tabini was willing to take, and use, and go with, clear to the stars, and to societal change, and technological revolution that did, in the end, exactly what paidhiin had been appointed to prevent…

  Paidhiin had operated on the theory that technological revolution would be devastating to atevi culture, atevi society. That it would mean another war, with the destruction of Mospheira or of atevi, or both. Paidhiin had resided quietly, down among the secretaries of the Bu-javid, and made their dictionary, and consulted on every word, every concept, building notebooks ever so tightly restricted to certain aspects of the University and the State Department, which supervised them.

  He had broken those ties years ago. He had become part of the court. He had all but
renounced connections with Mospheira in the end.

  And that town had turned out to cheer them—to cheer Tabini-aiji, not the Kadagidi—hadn’t they? They were Ragi. It was natural they’d be on Tabini’s side. But not, necessarily, on his. He had to remember that, and not expose himself to danger, not until he’d delivered the final load of information—things the Ragi atevi might not like to hear, but had to.

  Turn in the road. He lifted his head, quite sure in his bones where they were, and dropped it back against his hands, then against the bus wall, Cajeiri sleeping soundly against his shoulder. He saw a map in his mind, a map that showed him the countryside between Adigian and Shejidan, a region crisscrossed with small roads between villages, population quite concentrated in this region, and with many towns of size.

  It was a place where, above all else, they had no wish to engage their enemy. Nor would their enemy wish to engage them, here, in the heartland of Tabini’s staunchest allies.

  Had they seen the dowager? Was she all right? The boy was asleep again, against his shoulder. He had no wish to badger his staff with the unanswerable, when they were using their spare moments to think of details that might keep them alive.

  Eyes shut. There was a period of dark, vaguely punctuated by potholes, turns, and once, the awareness of another episode of crowd noise, while the bus tires hummed over another stretch of concrete pavement.

  Like going to the mountains over on Mospheira, that pavement sound.

  Like holidays with his family, with Toby and his mother, he and his brother headed up the mountain to ski, their mother to soak up the fireside and a few drinks at the lodge…Squeal of brakes. Loss of momentum.

  He waked.

  They had come to a fueling station: He saw the pump, and the dusty gray back side of a rural co-op building, with a red tractor with a harrow sitting idle, a wagon nearby piled high with sacks probably of grain, a railway car on a siding, typical of such places.