Cliff Lion Springs. It was Orodruin on some maps in the Citadel, early ones made in the flush of mythmaking that followed the descent of the Dol Guldur. Most placenames had since gone back to native usage, unless there were Soldiers close by to keep up the custom.
Sigrid was inclined to call it Cesspool Springs, herself. She could smell it for a good hour before she got to it. The horses did not appear to mind the reek of sulfur and man-shit. It was water and warmth and a place to rest. The yearling had a stone bruise on her hoof that needed a good soaking and a few cycles' layup.
The Bandari were bickering, as usual. In the last couple of cycles it had been essentially one-sided: Shulamit pricking and nagging, Karl answering in monosyllables or not at all. He was nicely sunk in a pheromone fog. Sigrid would have done something about it at the last rest stop, but Shulamit had got to him while Sigrid saw to the yearling's hoof. Just as well, Sigrid thought. In the crowd at the oasis there would be greater opportunity, and paradoxically more privacy.
Now they were squabbling over whether to creep in like bandits or ride in like decent Bandari, and never mind the parental army that might be waiting. Karl had waked up a bit and sprung for the open route. Shulamit was for circumspection. "You never know," she said darkly, "what our parents could have got up to. If they caught Erika . . ."
"They'd never catch Erika," Karl said. "She's too clever. She wouldn't have told on us, either."
"Wouldn't she?" said Shulamit. "Tattletale is her middle name. Bet you she went straight back to papa and told him everything she knew."
"Bet you she didn't."
Sigrid intervened before Karl lost something he valued. It was likely to be his hide, the way Shulamit was glowering at him. "We go in quietly, like honest traders," Sigrid said. "If we're seen, we're seen. If we're not, well enough."
Karl gave in promptly, or his gonads did, which was essentially the same thing. Shulamit would have argued, but she knew by now that Sigrid did not play that game. Bandari, by reputation and in Sigrid's recent experience, had to debate everything up, down, inside out and backwards, and then fight over it for a cycle or so before they settled on the conclusion they had started with. Sigrid had also seen how efficient they could be at their hours of weapons practice, otherwise she would have been convinced that the whole martial reputation of the breed was based on their own bombast.
As it turned out, both Karl and Shulamit were proved right. They rode in as if they had every right to, mixing in with a largish merchant caravan, and no one stopped them. As they came to the outer ring of yurts, they were briefly swept round by a troop of wild black-haired horsemen on black horses. Sigrid eyed those with some interest. Breeding for color, or for any one trait, was a mistake, but there were a few halfway decent beasts in that lot. Somebody would be outcrossing, then, or doing enough culling to keep the stock hardy.
While the upper layer of her mind pondered bloodlines and desirable recessives, the rest cataloged the camp. The whole oasis was overrun, and it was a big oasis. At current rate of influx it had, she calculated, about half a cycle before its population hit critical mass. Then the carefully dug latrine system—nice bit of work, that; Battlemaster Carcharoth would have approved—would overload. Meanwhile she noted that the nomads were being kept in something like order, that no feuds were being pursued right at the moment, and that the rough series of concentric circles looked in on a much smaller agglomeration. The Seven?
One long scan had it all in memory for access later. The raw numbers were impressive. It was like an exercise for Soldier-trainees, a purely hypothetical worst-case scenario. Suppose the whole steppe rose, got rid of its inextricable snarl of feud and counterfeud, found a leader charismatic enough to hold the whole improbable alliance together, and massed against the Citadel. There was still no basis for supposing the army had high-tech weapons, except gut feeling that in a Cyborg meant near certainty. Bows and swords and antique muskets did not mass against assault rifles. They had something else here, or access to something else.
Karl and Shulamit were looking cocky now that they were in the camp, or on the edge of it at least, and so far undetected. "We'll camp over there," said Karl, "inside the perimeter but far enough out that there's grass for the horses. I suppose there's a rota or something for water. Should we go straight to Judge Chaya now and confess our sins, or do we wait till we've scouted things out a bit?"
That was the signal for another round of squabbling. Sigrid cut it off before it could start. "We camp. Then we reconnoiter."
A shrill wailing stopped her cold. It also stopped the camp. In less time than it took to break down and reassemble a Kalashnikov, every nomad in sight was down on his prayer rug and bowing toward invisible Sol.
They could not move the horses sidewise or back without trampling the faithful. The merchants closed them in behind. There were people up front, heading the newcomers away from the center of the camp. None of those was praying, which marked them Bandari or Edenite even without the differences in clothing and coloring. The Edenites ran to lanky fairness—some common ancestry with Soldiers there, old Noreuropa and Norameric stock.
One big, fair man was visible on what must have been a scout post, standing next to a shorter, darker man and scanning the arrivals with a Soldier's eye. He stood like a soldier too, if not a Soldier, with a cant to the body that meant a bad leg. Edenite, that cast to the features and that set to the mouth. Bandari overlay—training, but not from youth as the two with her had it. His youth, in fact, was a good while gone. He was as gray as an old wolf out of a Terran vidtape, and he carried himself as men did who had held command for so long it had become a habit.
The prayer ended. The camp went back to its milling and shouting. The Edenite's eye passed lazily over the caravan, paused at Sigrid's horses—appreciative glint there, before it went on—and froze.
Karl was fussing with the girth on his pony's saddle. Shulamit had her hands full with her remounts. The chestnut had decided that it had had enough of the camel pressing up behind it and was expressing its displeasure with squealing, kicking emphasis. Neither youth noticed the man who bore down on them. Sigrid reckoned that it would be less trouble to let him take them by surprise. There was nowhere to run, in any case, and they would only fall into one of their endless squabbles.
No point in inviting scrutiny. She moved unobtrusively between the mare and her oldest daughter. The dogs, even the independent-minded bitch, pressed against her shins.
The Edenite was in a fine fury, and unleashing it well before the objects of it could have heard him. Spoiled brats was the least of it. Runaways went without saying. She rather liked brass-brained, brass-balled son of a rabid tamerlane bitch. He did not see Shulamit yet, then. She was not that easy to see. Unlike Karl, who looked like nothing else on this part of Haven.
He got his reaming-out, and Shulamit too, since she could never be left out of anything. Sigrid could easily have slipped away in the midst of it. She chose not to.
She was glad of her Soldier training. It kept her face straight through all of it, even the part about the first Bandari on Haven captured by Saurons. An unaugmented human would have laughed aloud.
The Edenite was a soldier, no doubt about it, but he had never learned much about control. He finished with a blast that made even Shulamit flinch, and wheeled about on his game leg.
Sigrid had seen the flash of his glance. She was ready for the arm that swung as if to flatten her for the crime of simply being there. Clever, she thought: play at blind temper, get a good look at the stranger's face. He got his look, but not as long or as clear as maybe he hoped. So did the man with him, who looked both amused and fascinated. The one was wearing a mediko's insignia—and that did not mean a shaman or an herb-healer, not in a Bandari army. He would be as good as they got outside the Citadel. She gave him enough expression to lull suspicion. Complete control was dangerous here. She had to remember that.
Neither reared up and howled, Sauron! The Edenite dragged Karl with him toward the center of the camp. Shulamit pushed sullenly in their wake. Sigrid took the animals in hand—her horses and the Bandari ponies both—and made herself scarce.
It wasn't the pain of getting his just deserts, and being busted clear down to a pup in the process, that made Karl want to kick something. It was that he'd got it in front of her.
She hadn't laughed, but he knew she'd wanted to. He was getting good at reading her. She wore that cold arrogant face to protect herself. No wonder, too. A woman alone on the steppe needed every defense she could muster. She had a tragedy in her past, he was sure. Something grim and heroic, that made her what she was.
He booted himself back into the present, unpleasant as that was. She'd disappeared, horses and dogs and all. His heart stabbed. What if he couldn't find her again?
Well, then he'd comb the camp till he did. Meanwhile he had some music to face. Hammer-of-God stopped dragging him once it was clear that he wasn't going to bolt—probably none too soon for the old bastard, too, with that leg.
Another man moved up beside Karl. Karl braced himself for another blast. He got a smile and an arm around the shoulders—stretching a bit, that, and the smile broadened to a grin. "I swear," said Karl bar Edgar, "you've grown another foot across since I saw you last."
"Not that much," said Karl, but his lips were twitching. It was impossible to keep a good sulk going around Oom Karl.
The mediko snorted. "You're as big as Yigal already, don't say you aren't."
They veered round a knot of yelling Mongols. One of them made a grab for Shulamit. He got a fist in the gut. "Damn," she said. "Hit too high."
Karl spared her a grin, but his mind was still on Oom Karl's words. "Yigal's all right?"
"He'll be righter when he's tanned your hide," said the mediko," but yes, he'll do."
That was comforting, coming from Oom Karl. Karl didn't think, most times, about how old Yigal had been getting lately. It came too close to thinking about how old he would get, thanks to his Frystaat genes.
Live while you can, he thought. It came wrapped around another thought, with an ash-fair face in it, and a long elegant body in leathers and furs.
Judge Chaya was looking old. That came as a part of what else Karl had been thinking, but it was true. She had the kind of face that stopped showing age as soon as it hit maturity, long and lean, with strong prominent bones, but now the bones were sharp, the flesh fallen away. Her eyes focused as keenly as ever, looked right through him, but they didn't, somehow, look as far. Or else they looked farther than ever, and blurred with the distance.
Her speech was a variation on Hammer's, with more resort to Duty and less to Family. He'd have thought it would be the other way around, considering Bandari and Edenite priorities. It wound down a lot sooner than he'd expected. Hammer sounded worried when he asked was she all right. She said she was. Karl knew she was lying, but he was too relieved to have got off so lightly to want to call her on it.
Chaya kept Shulamit with her, not surprising since they were family. Karl minded less than he might have. Shulamit was getting a little hard to take, he admitted to himself. Yatter, yatter, yatter, and she was rude to Sigrid. She was rude to everybody, come to think of it, except Chaya, and that was good solid fear.
He got out as soon he could, under cover of a flap between Karl bar Edgar and General Hammer and one of the General's Edenite cousins. Aisha was in it. Poor Aisha. She looked like Chaya, of course—Chaya was her three-quarter sister, and her aunt too—but much younger. She carried herself like a tribeswoman, but when she forgot she moved like, well, Sigrid. She didn't act like a woman about to get married, except when Karl bar Edgar's eye fell on her; then she lit up like a lamp.
It was colder outside the yurt than in, with Byers' Sun getting low enough to cast long shadows across the camp, but the breathing was easier. Hammer had told him to go in with the Scouts. That was worth the rest of it, because it meant he was trusted—he wasn't going back to his father like a brat too young to fight. He'd do it, and do it as well as he could, for pride. But he had something else to do first.
"Karl! Karl bar Yigal!"
Karl stiffened and spun. Barak bar Heber looked him up and down. He was thriving on all this, grinning like a stobor alpha male in a flock of fat sheep. "Well, you rascal. You took your time getting here."
"We took the long way around," Karl said. "I've had two sets of talking-to. Do I get another lecture, or can I just assume it's included in the others?"
Barak cuffed him. He ducked, but he still got enough of a buffet to make his ears ring. "That's for running off like a pup. The rest goes without saying."
"Hammer said it," said Karl. "And Judge Chaya."
"I'll bet they did," Barak said. "Where's Shulamit?"
"Helping the Judge," said Karl. "I'm to be in the Sayerets, the Scouts." He said that with pride.
"Splitting you up, then. Sensible of them. The two of you were always six times as much trouble together as you were separately." Barak paused. "I hear you had company coming in."
Rumor travelled fast. Karl kept his tone casual. "Oh. Yes, we did. Has there been any trouble?"
"None at all," said Barak. "Horsebreaker, is he?"
"She." Careful, Karl told himself. Not too quick. But Barak caught it anyway. His eyes started to sharpen.
"She's bringing horses to sell for remounts?" the Judge's son asked.
"I don't think they're for sale."
"No?" Barak looked ready to say something else, but somebody yelled his name. Something was up. There was a lot of flurry and shouting, and what looked—and sounded—like a dogfight. "I'll talk to you later," Barak said. Then he was off.
Karl took a deep breath. Saved again. At this rate he might even get away with it. All of the Seven who could care about him were accounted for, and Hammer was tied up in the tent, literally since he'd thrown out his cousin. Karl was as free as a man could be. He set off with a spring in his step.
By starset he was walking more like a man with a mission, and not finding what he was looking for, either. No one had seen the tall blonde woman or the black-and-white dogs or, more to the point in this camp, the horses. Since the last he had seen of his and Shulamit's ponies and baggage had been in Sigrid's charge, he had more to think about than simply losing her, but she was what he was thinking of. Mounts and weapons were easy enough to come by. There was only one of her.
Amazing how many nooks and crannies the oasis held. It was mostly flat, with dips and rises, but the springs bubbled out wherever they had a mind. Streams wandered every which way, some so hot they boiled, others so cold mist hung above them, and smokes and steams, geysers and fumaroles, made the going interesting to say the least. The tribes kept a wary distance from the most active places, and with good reason. The earth quaked and trembled even more there than it did elsewhere, and sometimes belched out boiling water or steam. A body could cook in here.
Karl was never warm enough. It was his greatest grievance with the world he had been born to: that he was designed for a hotter climate. From what the old stories said, warmth was the only virtue Frystaat had—it sounded like a version of the Muslim hell, and had been given to Piet van Reenan's ancestors in the fond hope the planet would kill them all. It almost had, come to that—like Haven, but backwards. Karl, born to Haven, bred to Frystaat, was always cold. But here, for once, he felt almost comfortable. He picked his way carefully, avoiding the pits and the crusted pools, keeping to where there was grass or what looked like a track. Horses had been up this way. The ground was too stony to tell if they were horses he knew, but they'd come by recently, and he was in a mood to gamble.
He moved quietly by force of habit. It was good practice for scouting, and he liked to surprise people who expected him to be clumsy, with his heavy-world bones and his big feet. Not a stone shifted where he walked. He made less sound than the wind in the grass. He ghosted round an outcropping of stone crusted over with pallid crystals, and stopped cold.
The ground dropped away at his feet into what must have begun as a sinkhole. It was a shallow valley now, with a chain of pools running down it from the rise on the other side. The highest one bubbled like a cauldron on the boil. Successively lower ones looked cooler, till the one at the bottom, the one that seeped away into the ground again, barely steamed. There were horses in that one, standing hipshot or lying down. He recognized Shulamit's chestnut war horse and Sigrid's narrow-headed bays. The dogs were on the bank, one lying with head on paws and eyes on the horses, the other sitting up with one ear pricked and one flopped over, staring straight at Karl.
He saw them in a glance and promptly forgot them. She was standing in one of the higher pools, one that looked just short of boiling. Her clothes were spread on a rock, dark with washing, and she was as naked as she was born. Her skin was so white it shone.
She wasn't the way he'd thought she'd be, not in the least. Tall thin women ran to ropy muscle and a lot of sharp angles, and breasts like an afterthought or barely there at all. She had muscle, true enough, but it was long and smooth and molded to the elegant bones. She looked as hard as a boy, but there was nothing boylike about her. Her breasts looked as if they belonged exactly where they were, hard as a boy, but there was nothing boylike about her. Her breasts looked as if they belonged exactly where they were, curving just enough above the high arc of the ribs. The nipples were an impossibly tender shade of pink, like the flush in her cheeks as she met his eyes through the curling steam.
He was one big burning blush from toes to braid-end. Then she smiled.
It wasn't much of a smile, but for her it was as broad as a grin. It stopped him on the verge of turning and bolting. It looped a noose around his neck and pulled him down off the track, past the drowsy horses and the dogs—one sparing him a glance, the other a grin and a tail wag as he went by—and up again along the chain of pools. She never moved, not one muscle, except her eyes that held his. They were the color of silver, or of rain.
He halted on the pool's rim, just before he fell in. "Hello," he said. It sounded unbearably inane.
"You need a bath," she said.
Her voice was the same as always, cool and husky, but it was different too. Friendlier? He was aware suddenly of himself, how leather could smell if you lived in it too long, and how long it had been since he washed properly, all over. As a matter of fact, he stank.
But—here? With her?
She was on him before he knew it, moving with that blinding speed of hers—like—like—
Never mind. She stripped him as neatly as a farmer could shear a sheep, and with about as much resistance: his muscles did the fighting for him, he had nothing to do with it. It had no effect, either. Through the thunder of blood in his ears, he was amazed. Skill, that was it. Speed. She couldn't be stronger than he was. Nobody was. Except Yigal, and he was growing old. And young Barak. And . . .
Cold cut him to the bone. She wasn't even shivering. She half-led, half-dragged him into water so hot he yelped and lurched back toward the shore again, but she held him till the heat melted and flowed through the whole of him. Hands like steel. Not a shift, not a sway as he struggled, as if she were made of immovable metal, or stone. But so narrow, so elegantly slender. Hips that just barely curved. Skin as fine as silk, or the buttery leather the Dinneh had, cured, they said, in the brains of the beasts it came from. She smelled of salt and sulfur and subtle musk, so subtle it barely touched his senses, but he knew it was there.
She was taller than he was. He wasn't used to that. Shulamit—guilt stabbed at the thought of her, but it faded fast—Shulamit came just to his chin. He came just to Sigrid's. He didn't feel small, not at all. He was as wide as three of her, as heavy as—two? One and a half? She packed an amazing amount of mass in those narrow bones.
She had soapweed mixed with something sharp and pleasantly scented. She washed him with it, not too slow, not too light, the way he liked it. Just the way he liked it. How did she know? She took her time. Something kept him from lunging at her, maybe the way she held him with her eyes, or maybe just the steel-strength in her hands. She explored every inch of him.
He still hadn't touched her, not with his hands. After she ducked him under to rinse him, while the water was still streaming from him, he reached for her. He half-expected her not to be there, but she was. She let him pull her to him, neither helping nor resisting. Her skin was fever hot and even softer than it looked, like silk stretched over steel. Her face was rapt and a little mad. She looked like Chaya. But stronger. And beautiful as Chaya never had been, a terrible, death's head beauty, white as a bone and cold enough to burn.
No one, not Shulamit, not any of the women in the Pale, had ever been as strong as he was. He always held back, no matter how hot he was, till it was a habit, and he stopped having to think about it. It shocked him to the bone to find himself out of control, taking Sigrid in one great lunging rush that carried them clean out of the water and onto a fortunate patch of grass. He pulled back, appalled—or tried. Her arms and legs were locked around him. So was another part of her. Sanity ran gibbering for cover. No one—no one—
She did something indescribable with muscles he'd never known a woman had. His own muscles responded out of sheer self-preservation. The thrust should have split her from crotch to sternum.
"Is that all you've got?" she asked.
She wasn't even breathing hard. He snarled something, no matter what, and let red rage carry the rest of it.
"Yeweh," he sighed, some considerable time later. He was wrung to a rag. She looked a bit ruffled, and she was smiling. He supposed that was a good thing, except for where her hand was going. He caught it and held it against his hip. "What in the name of the Three are you?"
"Djinni," she said, or he thought she said. She was nibbling his ear, which was one sure way to drive him wild. "You're almost strong enough for me."
He'd spent his rage a long time ago. Three times? Six? He'd lost count. His hair was out of its plait and falling all over them both. She left off torturing his ear and played with a hank of it. He mustered the energy to pull her in closer. She let him do it. Everything was letting and not-letting, with her.
She looked as relaxed as he'd ever seen her. Her white hand on his brown flank seemed to fascinate her. So did the yellow bush in his groin. That was not growing anything worth looking at, not immediately and maybe not for the rest of his life. She closed that long hand around it.
"Is it dead, do you think?" she asked.
That was a joke; he could tell by the way she slanted her eyes at him. "Deader than Diettinger," he said.
She stiffened, just for an instant, just enough to detect. Then she laughed. He'd never heard her laugh like that before, low and almost warm. "Ah, but will he rise again?"
"I hope not," he said. Then when she laughed harder: "You know what I mean!"
"Do I want to?" She raised herself on her hands. Her breasts swayed, distracting him.
But not completely. "What do you mean, I'm almost strong enough for you?"
"So," she said. "You do listen."
Shulamit—guilt again, but as weak as the rest of him—would have added something about the penetration of sound through six meters of skull. Sigrid lowered herself onto his body, trapping him from head to foot, but not with all her weight—just enough to keep him still. "I always mean what I say," she said.
"I'm as strong as you'll ever find." He sounded lame to himself, as if he had anything left to prove.
"You are proud of that," she said. She'd gone remote again, and cold. Weird, with her body so warm on top of him.
"I should think I have a right to be," he said stiffly.
"So you do." She smiled her faint cool smile. "You're young, after all. You've a lot of growing in you yet."
"And you're as old as Judge Chaya, I suppose?"
"Not quite." She was laughing, damn her, inside that narrow skull of hers. "Nor quite as dead as One-Eyed Diettinger. Nor, I wager, are you."
No. Temper had done it again, brought back the dead. He rolled her over onto her back and gave her what she wanted.
Sannie and Barak between them got Chaya to rest a little after starset. It took doing. Shulamit helped as much as she could, but she got in the way more often than not. Finally Sannie snapped at her, "Go to bed yourself. You're dead on your feet."
They'd given her a place to sleep in one of the smaller yurts, but she tossed and turned. Finally she got up, pulled on the clothes she'd taken off, and picked her way over other, less restless bodies. The trouble, she told herself, was that she'd got out of the habit of sleeping alone. And piled in a palm-sized yurt with a dozen other women was alone. Company meant one big yellow-headed lug with more balls than brains.
General Hammer had him off with the Sayeret. She'd envy him more if she didn't suspect she'd see more action where she was.
He wasn't where the Scouts slept. He wasn't out on duty, that anyone knew. He hadn't reported at all.
She dragged up her heart from where it had dived to her boots. No way he'd gone running again, not when they'd finally got where they wanted to go. So where else would he be?
Most people were asleep in the bloody light of the Cat's Eye, getting settled in for the dark of truenight. But luck hadn't left Shulamit. She found a Mongol woman nursing a baby by a yurt, who remembered very well a brass braid and green eyes and muscle from ear to ear. Not that she put it that way. She had the muscle a few feet lower and rising fast.
He'd been alone, the woman said. A Mongol would not have missed a tall blonde woman with two dogs and a herd of horses. Shulamit was less relieved to hear that than she might have been, especially when the path she was set on left yurts and people behind and went deeper into the springs. Karl wasn't the type to brood in solitude. Public sulks were more his style.
She was puffing when she came to the bend. What made her want to run those last furlongs, she couldn't have said. Maybe just needing to move, because if she didn't, she'd kill something. It wasn't so easy to say that any more, since she'd seen that Sauron rifle roaring in the cleft, and the havoc of blood and brains it left behind.
Saurons, now. Saurons she'd kill, and count every Yeweh ferdamt one of them toward her father's blood price. It was other people she'd be sparing of. Thinking like that made her feel virtuous.
She needed to feel virtuous about now. Guarding Chaya was noble duty and honorable and would pay off in time, the sooner the better—but she was the baby of the group, and they made sure she knew it. Barak, blast him; he'd called her kitten and laughed when she scowled. And she got all the scutwork, to the great relief and obvious pleasure of the woman who'd been doing it before she got there.
Her breath was back, or most of it. She walked the rest of the way around the rock.
And there he was. His mahogany butt pumping away, and long white legs wrapped around it, and his braid-crinkled yellow hair hanging down, hiding both their faces.
Karl had a kink about his hair. He wore it long because he was vain of it, but then he never took it out of its braid except to wash it and comb it and braid it up again. He never let Shulamit touch it, and squawked when she wanted to play with it. He was less tender about his cock, and less shy of it, too.
Now it was all loose in the bloody light. So was he. If that was rape, Shulamit was a Sauron.
The tears in her eyes burned like acid. Her mouth was full of bile. Her knife was in her hand. Stab him, stab him and stab him and stab him and—
He never knew that she stood there. The other one, the white-faced bitch—she did. He rocked to a climax and dropped on his face, heaving for breath. Sigrid lay where he had left her. She looked cool, relaxed, sated. Her head turned slowly. She smiled. Right into Shulamit's eyes.
"Bitch," Shulamit said without sound.
Sigrid laughed, also silently. She didn't even care enough to be smug. She saluted Shulamit with the lift of a brow and the flip of a hand, then pulled Karl back onto her. She did it as easily as if he'd been a bundle of rags. And Shulamit knew what he weighed. He'd come near to crushing her more than once, when he got excited and forgot to be careful. Sigrid was a Sauron—and nobody would believe her. Sauron women were hens' teeth, not even a myth.
She turned and ran. She imagined that Sigrid's laughter followed her all the way down the long twisting path into the truenight.
The boy slept long and hard, the way boys did. Or so Sigrid assumed. She spent some hours in prowling the camp, which was tucked up tight in the darkness, and came back to find him still asleep. She considered waking him up and tossing him out, but he was no trouble as he was.
She sat on her haunches in the age-old posture of the nomad and watched him sleep, while her mind processed the data it had acquired. She was able, as she did that, to reserve a portion for herself. Her body was well and profitably exercised, and the deep need, the prime imperative, was satisfied. Even while she sat there compiling and collating databases, the cells went about their essential business, dividing and multiplying.
The he-dog thrust a cold nose into her hand. She rubbed his ears absently. Inefficient, like talking to him, but pleasurable in its way. Like watching Karl fan Reenan sleep.
What she felt, she realized not entirely with displeasure, was similar to what she felt when she looked at Harad, her sister's eldest son, or Signy, her own daughter. She had not seen either of them in more than a T-year. Harad would have begun his Soldier training. Signy had been in training since birth. She, like her mother, was Cyborg.
The boy shivered in his sleep. Sigrid threw another blanket over him. He had given her what she wanted. He would be appalled if he knew what he had given it to. She doubted that he would kill himself over it, or castrate himself, though his blocky little bint might be pleased to do the honors. Bandari were cattle, with cattle absurdities about breeding. It had not kept this one from doing his best to cooperate. With help, she admitted, and a solid dose of pheromones. But he was a willing victim.
She happened to be smiling, practicing a new kind of facial control, when he woke. He could not see as well in the dark as she, but he saw well enough. He smiled back completely by instinct. She watched him remember, and blaze up like a beacon in her night sight: a glorious blush, and on top of it a wide white grin. He said something in Bandarit, then in Americ: "Good morning, madam."
"Not for a good while yet," Sigrid said. His face fell a bit, but not enough to matter. "It's an old line. A custom of sorts. The lady usually says, 'You're welcome, sir.' "
"Interesting," said Sigrid.
"Well? Am I?"
Presumptuous. She picked him up bodily and kissed him till he wheezed, and went to cook breakfast
He sat where she had dropped him, looking poleaxed. She tossed a waterskin at him. "Fill it," she said.
He obeyed less promptly than a Soldier should. For a Bandari in his condition it was quick.
He ate almost as much as she did. That muscle mass took a great deal of fuel. She was taking nourishment now for two. She stoked herself rapidly and thoroughly. Later she would see what she could obtain in the camp. There was a huge concentration of disposable income here, as such things were measured on the steppe. Several markets had established themselves around the army's fringes, to take advantage of it. None of them had been open when she reconnoitered, but by now people should be awake to man the stalls.
As fast as she ate, she was done before he was. Well enough. He did not need to be reminded that, by cattle standards, she ate enough for a platoon. She could of course go without for considerably longer than an unaugmented human, and operate at reasonable efficiency until she dropped, by deliberately reducing her metabolism to a lower level—even hibernating.
As he finished eating, he began to sigh and fidget and patently work himself up to something. She spared him the effort. "You have duty."
He blushed again. "Actually, I never reported."
Her facial control was slipping admirably. He flinched at her expression. "You—never—reported?"
"I wanted to see you first."
Clearly he thought that excused him. If he had been a Soldier she would have knocked him flat for his stupidity, and whipped him for his lack of discipline. She fixed him with her coldest eye. "You had better go."
He wilted dramatically. She was to soften, no doubt, and forgive him his sins. She turned her back on him, busying herself with the cookfire.
He wavered for a long while, sighing and shuffling his feet. She did not turn. "I'll come back," he said.
She did not respond to that, either.
"Maybe I won't!" he cried behind her. "Maybe I'll go out on scout for days on end. Maybe when I come back I'll be too proud to come crawling into your blankets. Maybe I don't care if you ever look at me again!"
Good, she thought. She straightened, still without turning. There was the filly's hoof to see to. And then, again, the larger camp.
When she looked again, Karl was gone. Her ears, tuned to his footfalls, heard him far away, running with that long light stride, not a Soldier's lope but akin to it in speed and ground-covering efficiency.
She allowed herself a slow drawing of breath. Better he leave angry. She was done with him. There was no graceful way to explain that, and none that would not betray the truth. This way he would go back to his Shulamit. She would make him pay, Sigrid knew, but she would also make sure he stayed.
There was, of course, no surety in the human equation. But Sigrid chose to give the variable a definite value, for the moment. She filed it all under data, incalculable, and left it there until she needed it, where in a male Cyborg it would have been erased. She kept one memory for herself, to examine when she had leisure: a moment just after nightfall, a turn of brass-blond head, a sudden flash of smile.
The camp was awake as she had expected, torchlit and humming. She haggled for a basket of flat steppe bread and a wheel of cheese, and exchanged a bone-handled knife from Katlinsvale for a clubfooted kid. She had the Mongol dispatch, gut and skin the kid on the spot, and got a sack of Bandari sweets for the hide. Prices were high, she supposed. So was the energy in the baklava. She shouldered her pack full of bread and cheese and meat, and worked her way through the honey-nut-dripping pastries as she walked.
The effect was of course calculated. People were less wary of a lone rangy woman with sticky fingers and a mouthful of sweetness than of a lone rangy woman with her hand on her swordhilt. She did not carry her rifle here. It was buried in a cache near the chain of springs, where the she-dog stood guard over the horses.
The he-dog trotted at her heel. He seemed to have decided she was his charge, not the mares. Since she had not ordered him to stay behind, she could hardly shoot him for disobedience. He conducted himself sensibly, ignored the dogs that challenged him, and growled at men who approached too close. Some of them had larceny in mind. The dog's warning saved them some considerable inconvenience, such as the loss of a hand.
She squatted by a yurt to consume the last of her baklava. It stood on a rise not far from the center of the camp, part of it and yet subtly separate. The design branded on it was a repeated pattern of leaping antelope and crossed thunderbolts. From beside it she could see a fair spread of camp and oasis, including the largest market and the densest concentration of farmers' huts.
The dog kept her company by gnawing on a bone, raising his head occasionally to warn off intruders. He was just far enough out of the way to keep from being kicked or stepped on.
"Nice dog."
Sigrid licked her fingers as carefully as her sister Sieglinde's cat, and with much the same air of self-absorption. It gave her time to study the man without giving away too much of her intention. She needed the time, and the feint.
This was a Sauron. Not a Soldier, no. He did not have the training. He stood too loose, his face too easy, too transparently readable. But that face was more nearly pure Sauron than most in the Citadel, short of the Cyborg bloodlines. Most Soldiers these days were only half of the Race. The other half was native, constantly reinforced with full- and three-quarter-bred Soldiers, constantly diluted with fresh tribute maidens.
There was native blood in him, a little. Russia and Mongol, she judged. Given time enough, she could name the tribes. The rest . . .
Three-quarters at least. Judging from his clothing and the badge on his hat, he called himself Bandari of the Springbok clan. Fan Reenan, like Karl. If he was fan Reenan, then his mother had not been telling the truth about his father. And if his mother was Bandari by blood, then Sigrid had lost any claim to Breedmaster's training.
He was down on one knee, introducing himself to the dog. The dog was amenable. It smelled the Soldier in him as keenly as Sigrid did. "Does he have a name?" the man asked.
"No," said Sigrid.
He shrugged and smiled easily as all these people did. It was disconcerting to see those muscles in such free use, and to know from precisely which bloodlines they came. The conclusion was inescapable.
"Barak," said Sigrid, "bar Heber fan Reenan." And every part of it a lie but the first.
"At your service," he said.
He expected a return of the courtesy. "Sigrid," she said, and added on impulse that she would analyze later, "Erda's daughter."
"Sigrid bat Erda, we would say." Barak dipped his head in greeting and salute. "You came in with our runaways, I hear."
So he would have, with the ears he had. Sigrid nodded, taking care not to do it too tightly. Loose, loose; easy; slack. Like cattle. These of all eyes would see how she differed, this of all minds, however untrained, would record the data and come eventually to the right conclusion. He was already aware of her as a Soldier would be: twitch of the nostrils, shift of the body toward her and then away. Scenting that she was female, and ripe. Perceiving that someone else had been there before him.
She damped her signals, but gradually, or he would sense that too, and be suspicious.
A pity, rather, that she was carrying the Frystaater's son. She would have been glad to preserve something of this line. It was dangerous, but primarily because it was wild Sauron, untrained and uncontrolled. Brought into the Citadel and bred back to the parent stock, it would be a useful contribution to the Race.
Who knew? She might have the chance. He massed this army, he and his mother and their band of lunatics and visionaries, to storm the Citadel. When the Citadel failed to fall, he would have to be disposed of. She would be pleased to attend to that.
As far as he could know, she simply nodded and half-smiled. "They're well, those two?" she asked. "Hides still intact?"
"Mostly." Barak scratched the dog's ribs. The dog rolled over and wriggled, grinning like the idiot Sigrid had never taken him for. "You have horses to trade, I'm told."
"No."
She had surprised him. No Soldier would betray it so openly, with widened eyes and stiffened back. "You do have horses," he said, half a question, half not.
"Not to sell."
"We need remounts. The more the better."
"Not mine." She paused. "Unless you think you might try a little appropriating of stock for the army's use? If so," she said, "mine aren't suitable."
"Mares," he said, "I'm told. All in foal?"
"The elder two."
"You'd be wanting to get to a valley, then."
She smiled internally at that. Her mares needed no valley to foal safely. "I was going," she said, "toward Shangri-La. Until I met your runaways."
"And they convinced you to join the war?"
"They made me curious to see what this war was."
"If you aren't going to join us, you'd better hurry with your horses. It won't be easy to get into the valley once we surround the Citadel."
"You're going to prevent the women from going through? Keep the mares from foaling?"
"Of course not," he said, as if she had proposed something abominable.
"That's foolish," she said. "An army could get in disguised as pregnant women, and neatly outflank you."
He shouted with laughter, so sudden that she nearly lost control and went for her weapons. "Yeweh! What a sight that would be! Wouldn't work, though," he said. "We'd start to suspect something after we saw a couple of hundred big bony ladies with rock-solid bellies. Unless they sent out their women," he mused, "but those are tribeswomen. Tribute stock. Captives."
"Few of them are adequately trained to fight," Sigrid said.
"You seem to know about it," he said. "From up around Lermontovgrad, are you?"
"It's obvious to you?"
He shrugged. "You've got a bit of the accent. Not much, true. What's a valley woman doing bringing in steppe ponies? Toughening up the local breed?"
She would not be trapped into making more of the accent he fancied she had. She had, it was true, undertaken to smooth out her flat Soldier vowels. That the result struck him as Valley Russki was interesting, and could be useful. "I have an interest in horsebreeding," she said, "and a . . . connection with a tribe who breed unusually fine stock."
He could not fail to catch the hesitation. "I hear you had a little trouble getting here."
"My mares are a tempting prize."
"So is a lone rider on the steppe."
"Your runaways were helpful," said Sigrid.
"You wouldn't sell your mares for anything, then."
Tenacious. That was Bandari. Soldier, too, but Soldiers were not merchants. "My mares are meant for a gift," she said.
"To your man?"
She felt her lips stretch in what was not a smile. "To my father."
"You're a runaway, too."
He seemed much amused. She was glad he could be, and that he wasted so much of his augmented senses on easy assumptions. "No, he didn't want me to go. He ordered me to stay. I disobeyed."
In the Citadel it would have been a bitter confession, and prelude to discipline. Here it gained her a grin and a salute. "Something you had to do, yes? Well then, we won't try to buy your gift horses. I can't speak for the nomads, mind. Some of them might decide to try a little appropriation of good breeding stock, to keep their hand in."
"They may try," said Sigrid.
"No bloodshed here," he said, suddenly stern.
"May I knock heads together? If necessary?"
The corner of his mouth twitched. "Only if absolutely necessary."
"I'll bear that in mind," said Sigrid.
They were making myths here. The spectacle was impressive, the effect calculated to a minute degree, with the geyser timed to erupt at the crucial moment. Sigrid suspected that it had been like this on Fomoria—with all due apology to the noble dead, that she compared them with cattle—when Galen Diettinger renamed the ship Dol Guldur and took the device of the Lidless Eye, and wielded Old Terran archetypes against the populations of Haven. Humans, and that included humans who carried the modified genes of Old Sauron, needed their myths.
Sigrid was not immune to it. The blood-red light. The stink and the smoke, like an image of the Christers' Hell. The massed tribes. The Seven on a rise above them, and their chief in front of them all in pure and shining white. Sigrid tuned out the words the woman cried in her strong age-thinned voice. She watched the face instead. Barak stood beside and behind his mother, but even without his presence Sigrid would have known who the old woman was. Chaya daughter of Badri and the Soldier Dagor, sister of Juchi the Accursed, sister and aunt both of the woman who stood among the Seven, that one Soldier bred as Barak was: Aisha, daughter and sister of Juchi.
Such complications. So typical of Soldier bloodlines, so absurdly abhorred by the cattle. If cattle had had any sense at all when it came to breeding solid stock, Juchi's curse would have been no curse, and this army would not have gathered.
No, Sigrid thought. The fault ultimately lay with the Breedmaster who exposed Juchi and his sister. Juchi was dead, and well disposed of. Chaya lived to carry on the feud. There was a paradox to confuse one's database. Soldier blood raised by the Soldiers' implacable enemies, the untamable and intractable Bandari.
Sigrid, chance and good genes willing, would balance that with a paradox of her own. She found Karl fan Reenan in the crowd, unmistakable even to cattle senses with his bright hair and dark face, and noted that Shulamit was there, but not beside him. He was not aware of her, not consciously. He was fixed on the Judge's spectacle, concentrating on her speech. She ended it with a grand flourish and a flash of blade in flesh, and the sudden scarlet stream of blood.
Sigrid's whole self focused on that single point. Chaya was using control, however weak, however incomplete. The blood did not clot as soon as it flowed. It kept on, dripping in long slow gleaming drops to the earth beneath her feet.
Just so it had been in a vale leagues away, across a wall of dead: just so, when Katlin's folk took Sigrid into their tribe and sisterhood. Just so; and just so Sigrid had responded to it—but then she had been a part of it. Now she was alien, and outsider, and enemy. She looked at this shedding of blood in a cause that these people reckoned great, and saw only waste.
Priceless, priceless waste. In that blood was encoded more genetic data than any Breedmaster on Haven had ever had access to. Sigrid was trembling, she discovered, as she never did, even with lust. This went beyond mere physical passion. It was data. Knowledge. Intelligence.
She moved through the press of bodies toward the front and the intoxication of blood. The rest of the Seven took oath one by one. She took little specific notice. She knew which of them was Soldier bred, and which not. It was written in their faces.
The khans and the minor leaders began to swear. There was surprisingly little jockeying for position. She recorded every face, with the name its owner attached to it and the languages in which he swore. Leaders took oath for their people, she noted. Hammer-of-God, the big Edenite, was explicit about it, and no more reverent than he had to be.
Then one of the Mongol khans, the one with the most evident power and position, Gasim, demanded that the "strangers" swear. It was Karl fan Reenan he meant, or the boy chose to think he did, coming forward with the air of a man who does another man a favor. It played well. He could have declared loudly that he was not a stranger, he was Bandari of the Pale. Sigrid doubted he refrained out of prudence. He was glad to take the oath, proud to spill his blood on earth that by now was muddy and iron-reeking. He was not shy, either, to show off his command of languages, of which he had a fair sampling.
Boy-strut, every bit of it. Sigrid would have smacked him if he had been a Soldier under her command.
Shulamit came up after him, sulking enough for a dozen, and all but spat her oath. "I'll keep faith with you. I'll kill Saurons in the name of that faith, and go on killing them till every last one of them is dead. Or," she said, "I'll die trying."
The Mongol khan could not be seen to approve. She was a woman, after all. But his narrow eyes gleamed before they left her to rove the crowd. Sigrid knew before they fastened on her, what he would say. "That one!"
Stupid, she upbraided herself. Standing in front where she could not possibly be missed. Towering over surrounding people, most of whom were squat, black-haired, sallow-faced Mongols. All but begging the khan to single her out.
Bloodlust was a weakness in any soldier. Lust for the data encoded in blood was damned near fatal.
Instinct would have damped every reaction, smoothed every emotion from her face. But not here. She took her cues from the eyes that stared at her. Arrogant—not too much. Not enough to telegraph Soldier. Contemptuous? Yes. She could afford that. But again, not too much. Keen as a Soldier in battle, for this was battle, of the most subtle and deadly kind, she strode to face the rebels' leader.
Barak, allegedly bar Heber, was more truly Sauron by blood. This woman was more truly a Soldier. Age, discipline, the experience of a Judge in the Pale—they honed a mind and a body.
They also honed it, ultimately, to nothing. Sigrid spoke words that seemed suitable, in the softened Americ she had been using and then in the Russki of Lermontovgrad, for Barak whose eyes were alert and whose ears were listening for just that. She offered no other languages. It was otiose to speak various dialects of steppe Turkic, and the related Mongol tongue, or to betray that she was picking up Bandarit and their holy Ivrit. She certainly was not going to offer them her command of Old Terran Anglish, Old Latin, or any of several computer languages.
And as she spoke, she studied the woman in front of her. Chaya's bleeding was long since stopped, the blood clotted as Soldier blood should. Sigrid did not need the fresh blood to gauge the woman, inside or out. One close, concentrated look was enough.
The Judge was dying. It would not be a quick death, but as deaths went it was reasonably easy. Chaya was—what? Sixty T-years? Seventy? That was old for a Soldier, between accumulating poisons and late-emerging recessives. A Soldier who lived that long was prey to certain particular forms of decay, most of them mental and none curable.
The dementia was well begun, from the look of it. And once it had begun, its progress could be rapid. The army could lose its primary leader before it even reached the Citadel, or find itself under the command of a madwoman. This oath might even be part of it, exquisite calculation or no. Delusions were a common effect of the syndrome: delusions, visionary episodes, hallucinations.
All of it clouded her eyes as she looked into Sigrid's. Her senses were blunted, her analytic faculties dulled or nonexistent, or she would have known at once, without hesitation, what faced her on that bloody height.
She only knew that Sigrid had taken oath, and that there had been no kneeling or bowing or homage in it. In the manner of despots or of dignitaries with delusions, she wanted something of that, and waited for it. Sigrid gave it to her. A nod was small enough price to pay. She shed blood with her own knife, bound the wound up rapidly to conceal the speed with which, even under control, it clotted. Then at last she was free to withdraw, taking her analysis and her conclusions with her.
Shulamit hadn't intended to get stuck beside Karl after her oathtaking, but when she worked her way back into the crowd, there he was, broad as a brick wall and twice as ugly. At least he didn't try to say anything. He was too busy goggling at the next victim.
Her.
Shulamit stiffened in every muscle. She felt the hackles go up, knew the tickle of the growl in her throat. "Bitch. Fucking bitch."
"Shhhh!" someone hushed her.
She hunched her shoulders and balled her fists. She was not, in spite of appearances, blind mad. She never quite got that far. Her eyes were perfectly clear, and her mind was clicking rapidly along, taking note of every twitch of Karl bloody ballbrain fan Reenan's face, and every move it reflected, as the white-eyed bitch separated herself from the crowd and stood in front of Chaya.
They were almost exactly the same size. And, as gray as the old woman was and as blonde as the young one happened to be, they had damned near the same coloring, too. And the same kind of face, long and narrow, with a nose like an axeblade. And the same kind of figure, no curves to speak of, and the same way of carrying it, and the same bloody bedroom voice. They could have been kin. They could have been sisters.
Truth had a taste, Shulamit discovered: the slow-breaking kind, like valley brandy. First the shock, sharp and fiery. Then the spreading, paradoxical sweetness. Then the heat flowing from the stomach outward, and the fumes rising to the brain, making it reel with certainty.
The bitch was a Sauron.
Once Shulamit said it, even to herself, it felt real. It felt right. It was all there. The way she looked. The way she moved. The way she walked instead of rode, and covered ground without ever seeming to tire. The way she talked—she was talking nice Valley Americ now, with a slight Russki accent, but that wasn't the accent Shulamit had heard the first time she spoke. That accent had been much flatter and harder, especially in the vowels. Sauron accent. And if that wasn't enough, Shulamit went back to the one that clinched the rest, that and the resemblance to Juchi's sister. The way she had picked up Karl as if he weighed no more than a baby, and wrapped him around her finger, and around most of the rest of her as well. That was Sauron strength. It could be nothing else.
No wonder she had a Sauron rifle. She was a Sauron.
Shulamit watched her take the oath in the blood-red light. Something, the angle of the light, the way she bent her head, turned her face for a moment into a skull, a death's head over the blood of the swearing. Shulamit shuddered so hard she almost fell. Why not? Why shouldn't it be a Cyborg, too?
Absurd, of course. There were no death's head females. But if the Universe was going to hit them with a traitor in their midst, it would be just like the luck to give them the worst kind of all, the ultimate traitor, a super-Sauron.
Shulamit wasn't thinking straight, or she would have watched her mouth. She said what she thought when the bitch wrapped up her cut—not to keep it from bleeding, of course, but to keep people from seeing how fast it stopped bleeding. And of course Shulamit had to blurt it out so Karl could hear. He wouldn't see what the bitch was if she told him herself, with diagrams. Which he promptly demonstrated. It damned near caused a scene. Got them dragged apart, and got Shulamit thumped for using her fists where she damned well ought to.
Just as well. Karl wasn't the one who had to know. Everybody else was busy. Including the Sauron, who wouldn't be leaving in any hurry, Shulamit didn't think. If Shulamit were a spy, she wouldn't go till she had all the information she could get hold of, from anyone likely to have any. That would take a while, even for a Sauron.
Shulamit watched her as she faded back into the crowd. Even when the geyser went up with a roar and a hiss like a million angry snakes—that would be a prime chance to slip away, but the Sauron stayed. She was watching Chaya. She stood absolutely still through the Judge's collapse, screams and uproar and all. Her face was wiped of expression, all its lines gone clean as a skull's. Her eyes were pale and deadly cold.
"I'll get you," Shulamit vowed, pressing her lips to the still-seeping cut in her arm. The blood was hot and iron-sweet. "I'll get you if it's the last thing I do."