Hunting Party

by Elizabeth Moon

  They must not move. In the dark, they would make the kind of noise he was making; he would surely hear them; he would have one of the weapons with night-sensing equipment. Bubbles realized she’d left the night-vision goggles hanging around her neck while carrying the candle lantern, and pushed them into place, but there was no ambient light to amplify. Thick darkness pressed in on her again. I hate caves, she thought.

  “I hate caves!” came a male voice from somewhere in the echoing distance, to the accompaniment of a clatter and splash.

  She was never sure which word, which intonation, made recognition sure.

  “Ronnie!” said Raffa, not quite aloud. “It’s Ronnie!”

  Bubbles concentrated on relighting the candle in its lantern.

  * * *

  He looked like someone who had been at the tail end of a hunt on a muddy day, Bubbles thought. Wet, his clothes streaked heavily with clay, his face haggard with exhaustion, he stared at them, swaying slightly, in the feeble light of the candle lantern.

  “You’re not hunters,” he said hoarsely. Stupidly.

  “Raffa . . . Bubbles,” said Raffa, her voice warming to a gentle hum that left Bubbles in no doubt of her feelings. “Don’t you remember?” She had rushed to him; she hovered now as though he were a fragile ornament she might break with her gaze.

  “Yes . . .” His voice trailed away; he stood there, his hands trembling, and seemed to be near collapse. One of his eyes had a dark stain around it. Bubbles saw raw scratches and scrapes on his hands and face.

  “You need to be dry and you need food,” Bubbles said. “Come on, Raffa—get him to dry ground.” He stood in ankle-deep water, with a dry ledge not a stride away—but of course he’d been in the dark the whole time.

  It was harder than she had imagined to dry a large, very wet and dirty young man in a damp cave. Once out of the water, he dripped water and mud onto the ledge; she had no dry clothes for him, and nothing to dry him with. Food—the food she had brought along from the first cache—he held in his hand as if he couldn’t remember its purpose.

  Finally she and Raffa had to undress him, struggling with the wet fasteners, the uncooperative cloth, and use every scrap of spare clothes to dry him. His skin was cold, as disgusting to touch as meat from a cold locker. He sat huddled, shivering, hardly seeming aware of them. Bubbles heated the food bar over the candle lantern until it sizzled and gave off an oily, heavy smell, then pinched off a bit with her fingers.

  “Here,” she said firmly. “Eat this.” His mouth gaped; she pushed the food in. His jaw moved a little, and he swallowed.

  “I’ll do that,” Raffa said. “You keep watch.” She pulled off her shirt and laid it around Ronnie’s shoulders. He didn’t even glance at her slender nakedness; Bubbles looked away as she stood up.

  Keep watch. Fine idea, but how? They needed the candle lantern; it made them visible. They had to talk; it made them audible. Bubbles moved back to the margin of the main cavern, and peeked around. She could just see, with her goggles on, the smudge of light from the entrance, across the water.

  An impossible situation. And yet, in the near-silence, with the murmur of Raffa’s voice coaxing Ronnie to eat, with the random tinkle and splash of water drops into the lake, in the almost-darkness, she felt secure. Cupped in some great hand, a feeling she remembered from those camping trips, when she had felt the land under her as a benign presence. Silly, her schoolmates would have said. She had said it herself, of younger girls’ illusions.

  Here she felt like herself again. Her real self. Not the mosaic of consensus she was in public, in society. Here she felt connected to the little girl who learned to swim in the waves with the cetes, who learned to scramble up steep rocks, dig holes. The little girl who had been called Bubbles, and had thought of herself as a great hero out of some tale. . . . She felt her face shifting to a grin, felt the pressure of the goggles change with that grin. Such a tomboy, her mother had said . . . her brothers had said. But tomboys grow up.

  Not always, she thought. At least not if it meant changing completely. Ronnie’s aunt hadn’t.

  “Bubbles—he’s better. Come—”

  It had been long enough that she was stiff, but she thought at once that Raffa had forgotten to use her new name, the name she now felt was really hers. This was no time to worry about that—but she wouldn’t forget. She shook herself and retreated to the lantern light, pushing the goggles down. Raffa nestled close to Ronnie; Bubbles thought to herself that he was undoubtedly warm on that side, and suspected that Raffa had done more than lean against him. Ronnie had expression on his face now: misery and worry.

  “They got George,” he said. “He was alive then, but—”

  “How?”

  “They poisoned the water—I don’t suppose you know—”

  “Yes,” Bubbles said. “We did. That’s how we found the cave, going upstream to look for safe water.” Ronnie’s voice was still unsteady; she didn’t know if they should press him to talk. Whatever had happened to George must be over now. But he pushed aside Raffa’s arm, and made himself explain what had happened. . . . She wasn’t at all sure he had it straight. How many times had he lost consciousness or fallen asleep? Where had they been, exactly? He had no idea where he had fallen into the cave, except “upstream” from where he’d left George.

  “Never mind,” Raffa was saying, trying to soothe him. “You couldn’t help it, and it’ll be all right.”

  It wouldn’t, of course. If Raffa thought about it, she’d know. Ronnie surely knew, though he might let himself be comforted by Raffa. Certainly she, Bubbles, knew that everything would not be all right. The hunters might keep George alive, trying to catch the rest, but too many had died already. Too much had happened. However this turned out, things would not be all right, not the way they had been before.

  “We have to help George,” Ronnie said, more loudly. He sounded hoarse, as if he were catching cold. “We have to get out of this cave.” He tried to stand up, and Raffa pulled him back down.

  “Not until the hunters give up,” Bubbles said. She knew they wouldn’t, but she didn’t want Ronnie yelling and charging around making it obvious where they were.

  “They probably took him to Bandon,” Raffa said. “If they didn’t kill him right away.” From her tone, she could no more imagine George dead on the ground than Bubbles could. George would be at Bandon, tied up like someone from an adventure cube, to be rescued later and reunited with his friends. In the cube, she would be the designated girlfriend, the blonde who gave him a passionate kiss as the end music came up.

  The problem was that she didn’t want George to die, but she didn’t want to be the designated blonde, either. She was Brun, not Bubbles, and so far Brun wasn’t a designated anything. She put that thought aside to think about later, and with a glance at Raffa set to work to cheer Ronnie up and keep him from doing something rash.

  * * *

  Muddy footprints led to a sheer cliff with water seeping out from under a thick mat of ferns. The prince felt safe, enclosed by the rocky, fern-covered walls, although he realized it could be a trap, too. Someone overhead who happened to see him could shoot him easily. He peered up into the overlapping layers of green, and shivered. He was tired, hungry, and confused. What could have happened? Where were the promised girls?

  Wet leaves dripped on his head and neck. It made him feel stupid, as well as tired. In the solitude and silence, he had time to track the feeling back and analyze it. Long ago—it seemed long, anyway—he had been at school with boys who had known each other for years while he’d been isolated at court. Someone had thought it would be fun to play a joke on the prince, to make him late for roll-call and incidentally make him look stupid. Ethar Krinesl, that had been. He had been lured from his bed on a dark, rainy night by the promise of a rendezvous with girls from the neighboring school. . . . He had trekked across the campus to crouch in a muddy ditch, while (he learned later) the other boys had sewn his clothes together so that he coul
dn’t possibly dress in the morning. And the shadowy figure that had come in the dark, and with giggles had agreed to kiss him, had been Ethar’s older brother Potim. Ethar had had the cube recorder.

  Painful as the memory was, it made him feel better. Now he understood what was going on. All the other men were older, and they formed a tight clique. This was a joke; they were testing him. After a time, when they thought he had been sufficiently humiliated, they would come out and take him into the group, as Ethar and his crowd had done. It was annoying, but understandable. The prince was proud of having figured it out, and felt a little superior to the childishness of the older men. They should have realized he would not panic; he had already killed someone and proved himself. They would have swept the criminals from in front of him; they weren’t really risking his death. Perhaps the criminals had never been armed with anything lethal. Not very sporting, perhaps, but prudent.

  The girl’s voice completed his understanding. Soft, hardly audible, it could still be nothing but a girl—a girl some distance away chuckling softly at something. That had to mean the original promise held; girls were part of the entertainment here. He looked around carefully. She might be hiding anywhere.

  The voice came again, from the rock wall in front of him. He stared, then saw that two big, cleated bootprints lay half under the ferns. He felt himself tingling with excitement. A cave. It must be a cave, full of the girls he’d been promised, hidden away in safety until the dangerous part of the hunt was over. And he’d found them without being shown—perhaps before the other hunters, even. Carefully, he stooped and lifted the mat of ferns, peering into the darkness beyond. Water lapped at his boots; he could see that he stood on the edge of a large pool. He pulled his night goggles out of his pocket and put them on, squinting until he got his head inside where it was darker. A large domed chamber, with smudged reflections off the surface of water as far as he could see. But clearly someone was inside. He smelled cooking food, and again he heard what had to be human voices, distorted by the shape of the cave and the water.

  Had they marooned the girls in a lake? No, all that rain had probably made the water rise. They were somewhere inside, dry and safe. He imagined nooks and crannies cushioned with colorful pillows and rugs, rock-walled chambers where naked nymphs bathed in clear subterranean pools or streams. In all likelihood there was a way that wasn’t very deep. With his goggles on, he should be able to find his way safely around—ankle-deep water wouldn’t bother him, not in his boots.

  Now that the hunt was over, or mostly over, he saw no reason to crawl under the hanging mat of ferns; he was dirty enough already. He kicked at it until most of it fell, revealing a hole large enough to get through if he stooped. That let more light into the entrance; even without goggles he could now see the shape of the first chamber . . . and hear more clearly the distorted murmur of girls’ voices. The other hunters would be surprised, he thought, to discover he had found the place himself, ahead of whatever time they planned to start the party. He might even be the first; he could see, now, that the bootprints he’d noticed stopped there, and backed out again. Of course anyone coming after him would know someone had gone in, but he wasn’t hiding from anyone—certainly not unarmed criminals.

  The light coming from behind him made it hard to see, even with the goggles. Some things were too bright, and others hazed into murky reflections. He had to feel his way along the edge of the cave, so he chose to move to his left, where his right arm was still free to hold his weapon. Not that he’d need it, he was sure. The girls might be startled, but he had the patch that identified him as a hunter, and afterwards . . . He stumbled over something and bit back a curse. It would be much more fun to sneak up on them. The smell of cooked food grew stronger.

  The first flicker of light blazed into his vision, and he pulled the goggles off, blinking. Now he could see nothing. Standing still, silent, he heard murmuring voices that might have been nothing more than a trickling stream—but not that smell. After a few moments, his eyes adjusted, and he saw a faint sparkle ahead, where some light source reflected from moving water. He crept through the darkness, smugly certain of what he would find. The light strengthened; he felt his way around a corner of the rock, and saw them at last.

  His first thought was disappointment; he wasn’t the first to find the girls after all. The dark-haired girl had her arm around the lucky first-comer; the prince wondered why he’d preferred her to the more curvaceous blonde. His second thought stumbled over the first in a wave of righteous rage. Ronnie!

  “You unspeakable cad!” he said. “What are you . . .” His voice trailed away as he realized that the two black circles were the bores of hunting rifles like his own. Both girls, blonde and dark, held them steadily. “You’re hunters, too?” he asked, with a half-nervous laugh.

  Ronnie’s head came around, and he saw the dark stain of a black eye and bruised face. “My sainted aunt,” Ronnie said, in a voice that didn’t sound much like his own. “It’s the prince.”

  “Gerel?” the blonde girl asked. She peered at him, but the rifle did not waver. Her nod, too, came without a move in the weapon’s aim. “It is. And you know what? He’s not on the list either.”

  The prince took a deep breath. Whatever was going on here, it had to be irregular. “I demand to know what you’re doing here,” he said firmly. “I am here at the invitation of—” But that, he suddenly realized, he couldn’t finish. Ronnie might mention it; it could be embarrassing. He interrupted himself with an alternate line of reasoning. “You might introduce me to your—uh—young women.”

  Ronnie gave a harsh bark that might have been intended for laughter but sounded more like pain, and the dark young woman touched him with her shoulder, not removing her hand from her rifle. The blonde one laughed louder.

  “Introduce me? Heavens, Gerel, you’ve been dancing with me since boarding school.” He couldn’t think of anyone like this at any dance he’d been to. She was blonde, yes, but hardly stylish in rumpled pants and shirt, with her hair yanked back behind her ears. She looked older by five or ten years than he was, someone serious and even dangerous. “Bubbles,” she said finally. “Lord Thornbuckle’s daughter—surely you remember now.”

  Bubbles. Ronnie. None of it made sense. If this was Bubbles—and he supposed it was, though he did not recognize her in these clothes, with her hair pulled back—then she could not be one of the girls Lepescu meant. Those girls would be . . . another kind of girl, from another kind of family. Not Bubbles the wild sister of Buttons, and Ronnie the wild son of a cabinet minister, and . . . “Raffaele?” he asked uncertainly.

  “Of course,” she said. It sounded like her voice. The prince swallowed, and wished very much to sit down.

  “I don’t understand,” he said.

  “You’re wearing an ID tag,” Bubbles said. “What is it?”

  He had forgotten the bright-colored tag on his collar, which transmitted a signal to other hunters. “This? It identifies me to other hunters.”

  “Other . . . hunters.” That was Raffaele again. She sounded grim, nothing like the witty girl with the silvery laugh he remembered from the parties last season. “You’d better put your rifle down,” she said, using neither name nor title. That made him nervous, and he couldn’t think why.

  “But if you’re one of us . . .” That didn’t make sense either. He knew the others; they had all been at the lodge. No women, certainly not these girls, and no Ronnie. He turned to Ronnie. “I thought you’d been shipped off somewhere for punishment.”

  “Put your rifle down,” Bubbles said. When he looked at her, he felt almost assaulted by the anger that radiated from her. “Now,” she said, and he felt his arm moving before he thought about it.

  “But this is ridiculous,” he said, not quite obeying. “I’m the prince. You’re friends. Why should I—”

  “Because I have the drop on you,” Raffaele said. “And so does Bubbles. And you’re standing there with the same ID patch as men who tried to kill
us.”

  “Kill you? Why?”

  “Drop it!” Bubbles yelled suddenly. Her voice rang in the cave, echoing off odd corners and coming back as a confused rumble. Rocks clattered somewhere, as if her voice alone had riven the stone. His hand was empty; he could hear the afterimage of the rifle’s thud on the damp floor of the cave. “You idiot, Gerel,” she said more quietly. “And I’ll bet you’ve led the rest of them straight here, too.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Heris seethed inwardly. Of course she had no right of command, but it should have been obvious that knowing where the young people might be was important enough. She led Cecelia outside the room. There had to be some way—perhaps she could get hold of a flitter—

  “Excuse me, ma’am.” A young, earnest-faced militiaman had followed them out. Heris nodded at him.

  “Yes?” she said through gritted teeth.

  “You said you might know where the young miss is?”

  It took her a moment to untangle that: young miss? Bubbles, of course. “I’m not sure,” she said. “Why?”

  “I’d take you over there to tell the captain,” the man said. “If you wanted. . . .”

  Of course that’s what she wanted, but why was he being so helpful? “What about your boss?” she asked. He reddened and grinned.

  “Well, ma’am . . . that Bortu, he just got promoted, you know. Never been on anything like this before.”

  That could indeed explain it. On the other hand . . . Heris looked at Cecelia. “What about it? This—what’s your name?”

  “Dussahral, ma’am.”

  “This man says he’ll fly us over to meet the captain—want to come along?”

  “Of course,” Cecelia said, looking determined.

  “Thanks,” Heris said, smiling at him. “Go find us a flitter—we’ll need to stop into the . . .” She nodded at a door down the hall.