As Cat's Eye left the zenith and began its descent over the far horizon of the valley, Sigrid passed the guard on the Citadel's gate. He glimpsed her face and did not presume to challenge her. She was allowed at least to step beyond the walls of the Citadel. For the present.
The Citadel was in turmoil with the death of Battlemaster Glorund. There was no question as to who would be Battlemaster after him: Carcharoth had made that clear the moment the news came in. So far no one had seen fit to challenge him. Sigrid doubted that anyone would. The Cyborgs were in shock. One of their own, and a Battlemaster besides, killed by cattle.
Breedmaster Titus would support whoever held the position; he was content with his own office, which he—and Sigrid—believed to be more powerful by far. The Battlemaster dealt with the defense of the Citadel. The Breedmaster ruled its heart. It was the Breedmaster who culled the newborn, made the Cyborgs, decided whose bloodline would live and whose would die.
As she walked out of the Citadel, making no secret of her going and so concealing it more effectively than if she had tried to make a hidden escape, she heard the bell that called the First Council to discuss the debacle. Their function was purely ceremonial. The real decisions would be made in the Battlemaster's office, in the Breedmaster's laboratory, in the Cyborgs' quarters.
Had she been a male, she would have been needed in the councils, at least among the Cyborgs; they were too few to ignore any of their number, however junior his status. As a female she was an anomaly, her status neither junior nor senior, simply other. She could have attended the conference, even been listened to, but in her current state of high fertility, she would have been a potentially disastrous distraction.
Her womb, they needed. The rest of her, no. Rather the contrary, at the moment.
She was as free as she would ever be. Free to go where she would, to make what decisions she pleased. It was a peculiar sensation for a Soldier, not unusual for a Cyborg. In her current state of restless irritability, it was a blessing of sorts. She could not process data rationally while she remained in the Citadel. Nûrnen might distract her, might even yield data that would prove useful to the Race.
That her departure at this juncture could be construed as desertion and dereliction of duty, she well knew. She was prepared to justify it. If those justifications amounted to rationalization, then so be it. She could always point out that her playing truant in Nûrnen was preferable to hurling Cyborg Ranks through dojo walls.
The center of Nûrnen was twelve kilometers from the Citadel, down the pass and out the throat into the red Eyelight of the valley. Sigrid took the road at Cyborg pace, as fast as a horse could gallop, pushing herself a little to work off her temper. Even so, she was barely breathing hard as she came from farmlands to suburbs to the crowded buildings of the city proper; to Saurontown, that was built on the slope that looked toward the Citadel. In certain lights, to certain minds, the shadow of the stronghold seemed to lay long and black across the dwellings of those Soldiers and Soldier stock who would not or could not live within the guarded walls.
Sigrid did not pause in Saurontown. The computer in her brain recorded the crowding of faces, the positions of bodies in her path, the ruler-straight avenues and the right-angled turns defined by buildings as square-cut and unadorned as the uniform she wore. She was not hailed or stopped. A Soldier in Citadel gray, moving as fast as a Cyborg could move, was no obstacle to trifle with.
Beyond Saurontown, in what some of the younger Soldiers were pleased to call Cattletown—which Sigrid, severely, called Nûrnen proper—the city changed. The streets began to meander. Houses and public buildings lost their uniformity, sometimes wildly: on one corner a pediment of severe and classical simplicity, on the next extravagant, painted and gilded rococo, on the one after that a simple whitewashed cube with a high arched gate and a scent within of exotic perfumes, and beside it a structure like a nomad's yurt writ huge in stone.
The streets were thronged with people. Lean, rangy, plain-coated Nûrnenites, at times indistinguishable from the dwellers in Saurontown. Plump valley merchants puffing in what to them was thin air; stolid toil-worn valley farmers. Lean, cord-muscled, turbaned Ashkabad camel drivers. Big fair-haired furhatted Kossacki looking incomplete without their horses. Little bandy-legged Mongols looking furious without theirs. Even a black-haired, braided, stobor-hide-clad savage who could only be a Dinneh, half a world away from his homeland, and in his impassive face eyes as wide and wondering as a child's. Other types and faces and modes of dress that Sigrid had never troubled to study, all thronging together in streets that could barely contain them, spreading out in the plazas and the market squares but clumping thick where the bazaars themselves were; and everywhere a stink and a clamor and a seethe of unregenerate, unengineered humanity.
Cattle.
But cattle who could think.
There was no room for temper here. There was barely room for a lean whip of a Cyborg woman. Some who noticed her field gray and knew it for what it was took care to move out of her way. Many did not. Most of those could not: the press was too great. Even she was slowed to walking pace, and then to a crawl.
She could have pushed through. She chose not to. She chose a current of people and followed it. Her directional sense assured that she would not be lost, even where the streets were most convoluted.
She sidestepped a nomad whose head came precisely to her shoulder. He was wrapped in furs; he reeked of unwashed man and unwashed whore. His breath was a melange of unspeakable odors, the most recent a tavern sampler of cheap fruit wine, bad beer and ill-brewed kvass. He staggered against her. Almost she failed to stop the reflex that would have snapped his neck. It caught him instead with force enough to jar his bones, and set him upright. His head rolled back. His grin revealed appalling teeth.
Suddenly she was supporting his whole weight. She would have dropped him, but there was nowhere to do so without his being trampled. Little care as she had for the life of so inferior a specimen, she cared less to cause an incident. And an incident there would be, if a nomad died in the center of Nûrnen with the Citadel's only Cyborg woman as a witness. Then she would be confined to the Citadel, and even this small freedom denied her. Soldiers were authorized to take terminal action—kill—at the least sign of resistance, or on their own initiative. That did not mean they could slaughter at whim; that was bad tactics, liable to produce resource-wasting resistance.
She shouldered the limp, redolent weight, and looked about.
There was a tavern within a few strides—the one, no doubt, from which he had emerged. She could drop him there and then go her ways. Such as those were.
"Hoi! What you doing?"
Another of them. She had not noticed him except peripherally, as one notices a buzzing insect. Now he forced himself on her attention. He was slightly more sober than the other had been, or slightly less sozzled. He was also, she observed, slightly more presentable. Taller, to begin with: fully as high as her chin. Marginally cleaner. Noticeably younger. His kind grew little beard in any case, but cultivated what moustache they could; his, though not as sparse as some, was soft, a boy's.
"What you doing?" he repeated. "Where you go with Ogadai?"
He was speaking the language of the Citadel, and capably enough at that. She answered in plains Turkic. "Is he yours?"
The nomad blinked and shifted languages; his version of the lingua franca of the steppe was accented with something barking and guttural. "He's my cousin." He scowled. His hand dropped to the hilt of his saber. "Where are you taking him? You take him up there"—his head jerked toward the east and the, from here, invisible Citadel—"I'll kill you."
"Killing there would be, cattle boy," said Sigrid, beginning to be amused. "But I would be the one who did it. Do you want this sack of kvass? Take him. I have no use for him."
The nomad half-drew his saber. His fury was a pheromone reek, so sharp that Sigrid twitched. "What do you call him? What do you call my cousin, the khan's son, the pride of the clan?"
"Drunk," said Sigrid, "and stinking. Are you going to draw your saber? If you do, be reminded. It's a felony to draw on a Soldier in Nûrnen."
For a moment she expected—hoped—that he would draw. But the saber slammed back in its sheath. The nomad spat, just missing her foot. "Give me back my cousin."
Not a coward, she decided. More prudent than most of his kind knew how to be. And young—eighteen T-years, twenty at most. "If you were a woman," she informed him, "you would make a fair mother of Soldiers."
She stepped past him. She was ready if need be to use the drunken nomad for a shield against a dagger in the back. But none came. When she stepped into the near-darkness of the tavern—a blink, a pause, and her eyes had focused, in their element now and seeing everything with sharp-edged clarity—she was aware of him behind her. He was still angry.
She stood in spreading silence. There was, she noticed, a respectable crowd. Nomads, Nûrnenites, a squire from the central Shangri-La, a lone Cossack. No Soldiers.
She walked through the stillness. A corner vacated itself. She dumped her burden in it.
She'd intended to leave as she had arrived. But she had not eaten since her session with Bonn, and the haunch that turned on the spit looked edible, even savory. She left the snoring nomad where he lay and claimed another corner, barely lit but more than bright enough for her comfort. A barmaid crept up, half shaking, half defiant. "Beer," said Sigrid, "and meat. Bread if you have it. Double portions."
"I know," the girl said in Russki-accented Americ. Valley Russki; Sigrid could place the dialect, about a hundred and fifty kilometers west of the Citadel. The girl was greenish at her own temerity; but she left with dignity, not running, even swinging her hips a little.
Sigrid raised a brow at that. No Soldier would have taken her for a man, but Soldiers were capable of observation. She was tall—Cyborgs were. Field-gray covered what scant curves she had. She wore her hair cut short for practicality. Her face was fine-boned for a Cyborg's, strong for a woman's: Soldier norm, near enough. No beauty, Sieglinde would say. Her beauty was in her genes.
Which was nothing that cattle could see, let alone understand. The young nomad stood in front of her table, blocking what light there was. He had seen his cousin carried to another room. That, it seemed, was solicitude enough for the man's person. His honor was a frailer thing.
"You said foul things of my cousin," the boy said.
"They were true," said Sigrid.
"They were not honorable."
"Was he?"
That almost brought the saber out again, but prudence conquered once more. Sigrid found herself almost admiring the child. He was not for her. She was for full Soldiers, and for Cyborgs; women's reproductive potential was more limited than men's, and must be conserved. But he was attractive in his way. Intelligent. Compact, even graceful, in his movements. Well-muscled under the furs. Pity, she thought. She might have enjoyed the diversion.
"Sit down," she said.
He was startled enough to obey. And to take the mug when the barmaid brought it, but not to drink what was in it. Sigrid tasted the beer. Not bad. It was hardly true, what people said of Cyborgs: that they could not taste anything. They would eat anything, yes, to keep their bodies functioning. But they preferred quality if they could get it. She drained the mug and signaled for another.
The nomad gulped down his own.
"Do you have a name?" Sigrid asked him.
"Temujin," he answered. He jerked, once the word was out, and made a sign with his fingers. "Take your spell off me!"
"No spell," she said. Except, possibly, pheromones. She had never sat close to a cattle male before when she was fully fertile. He still seemed unaware that she was female: her voice was deep enough to seem sexless. "A very . . . noble name," she said. One of the ancient role-models the Soldiers had taken, back on Old Sauron, the homeworld. Temujin, later called Genghis Khan, Universal Emperor. This one did not look likely to emulate his predecessor.
He flushed. "What is your name?" he asked roughly. Defiant as the barmaid was, but rather less afraid. He would have deduced that, if the Soldier had his name, the Soldier would not take his life—an invalid extrapolation from nomad custom.
He evidently did not know Soldiers well.
Sigrid pondered his question. Then she answered it. "Sigurd," she said. Slurring it, possibly. Sigurd, Sigrid: let him hear what he wished to hear.
"Sigurd," he said. There was a fresh mug of beer in front of him. He drank it in a long swallow. "You could have killed my cousin."
"I almost did." She pondered her third mug of beer. It would not intoxicate her. Her body was processing its alcohol, its sugar and what little further nutrition it contained.
"Why didn't you?"
He was a little owl-eyed. Cattle could not drink; she wondered why they tried. "It would have been . . . inconvenient. Mildly."
"In—con—venient." He nodded. "Messy. Blood feuds."
"In a manner of speaking," Sigrid said. A male Cyborg might have killed in any event; like all males, they tended to irrationality.
The barmaid brought meat, bread, stewed acorn squash. There was more than a double portion. Triple, in fact.
"You eat like a starving tamerlane," said Temujin. He was putting away a fair amount himself, for an unaltered human. High metabolism, or nomad thrift. One stuffed oneself when one could, for when one had nothing.
As much as he ate, he drank easily twice that. Sigrid was ready to leave him to it once her stomach was full, but something in his now disjointed babblings brought her up short.
"—foaled on the high steppe, and lived to do it again; and the foals lived too, daughters as hardy as their mother."
"What?"
Her voice was sharp enough to give him pause. He blinked at her. "Mare," he said with elaborate patience. "Foaled on the steppe. No valley. Foaled right up there, where the air was thin enough to make a Sherpa dizzy."
"Nonsense," said Sigrid. "Nothing Terran breeds safely on the heights."
"She does," said Temujin. "The mare. I saw her, days from any valley, with a day-old foal. And not her first, either. Her—herdsmen swore to that."
Sigrid heard the catch in his voice, the flicker of a pause.
"Who are these herdsmen?"
His eyes narrowed to vanishing. He was trying, no doubt, to look shrewd. "Herdsmen," he said. "Nomads."
"Mongols? Turks?"
He hesitated again, again for the briefest instant. "No," he said. Truth: his scent lacked the sharpness of a lie. "Not either. Another tribe. 'Way upcountry."
"And they have a mare who foals outside of valleys." Sigrid curled her lip. "Are you sure you saw her? Or was it your cousin? Or your cousin's friend? Or a friend of that friend, who heard the story from a traveller?"
Temujin snapped erect. It was not as dramatic as he might have hoped: he wobbled and nearly fell over. He caught himself and thumped his chest. "I saw it. I, Temujin of the Black Horse clan of the White Horde. With my own eyes I saw it."
"And there was a valley inside of a day's journey, just deep enough to foal in, but they never told you of that," said Sigrid.
His fist crashed down on the table. The tavern was filling up, but even in that uproar the sound was as sharp as a shot. Sigrid took note of who flinched, who stared and who took care not to notice. None of the latter two was close enough to hear with unaugmented ears.
Temujin did not shout at her, which was interesting. He spat the words through clenched teeth. "There is a valley. Oh, yes. But not close enough for that mare to have foaled in it."
"So? Then it is one of the tribes that pays tribute to the Citadel or the outlying Bases? Or are they beholden to Tallinn, or"—her nostrils thinned—"Eden?"
"None of them. Not one!" He grinned a wolf's grin, all armament and no mirth. "They're a free tribe. They pay tribute to no one. They don't need your valleys—they have their own."
He was much too far gone in beer and kvass to know what he was saying. So far gone that he seemed almost sober.
His grin widened, one would have thought, impossibly. "But do you know what they do need?"
She encouraged him with silence.
"Men."
She raised a brow.
"They have none," he said. "They don't keep their sons, or raise them past babyhood. They're all women. Women who"—he paused to savor the Soldier's incredulity—"fight."
Sigrid had no incredulity to give him. "Women can fight. No matter how their men may deny it."
He was much too sozzled to notice her bitterness. He leaned across the table. The end of one of his braids trailed in gravy. He never noticed. "They'd like you," he said. "They like your kind, if they can get it. Which isn't often. They have to kill it after, you see—after they've got what they need. They foster out the sons to tribes who'll take Sauron get. The daughters they keep, and train for war."
"How do you know this? Have you seen it?"
"I saw a baby who looked like you. Ice and ash. And a woman who picked up a man and the pony he was on, and dumped them into the fire." He squinted. "Looked like you, too. She did. But they run odd, that kind. 'S not true what Och—Ozh—Ogadai said. Don't cut off a breast to shoot better. Mine had both. Beautiful handfuls. Beautiful, she was."
"Why did you leave her?"
He sniffed loudly. "She left me. Got what she wanted. Skinny little girl-baby. Popped her out, took a look, said 'Thank you, good-bye, be good boy-toy and go back home where you belong.' "
"We have never," said Sigrid, "heard a word of this."
By now he was listing visibly. He squinted at her. " 'Course not. Secret. Swear oaths. Promise—not—" He hiccupped. And choked.
She heaved him up. No one, she noticed, stared. She hauled him out the back, past people who goggled and scurried and fled. In the black, urine-reeking alley, she dropped him. He caught himself against the wall: fortunate for him. Otherwise he might have drowned in his own vomit.
"Tell me," said Sigrid, "where you found this tribe."
He was on his knees, shaking and gagging. Realizing at last, maybe, what he had said, and to whom.
She set a precise toe in his side, and as he doubled, upended him. He fell sprawling. "Tell me where," she said.
It took time. He was defiant. He was strong: he did not scream. But she was stronger. He told her what she wanted to know. Who, and where, and how to come there. There were ways to disorganize a personality, alternating pain and other, subtler types of stimuli; and he was very vulnerable to her pheromones. Almost comically so, compared to a male of her own race.
When he was done, he was no longer drunk and was in no more pain than he should be. He would walk back to his sot of a cousin. He would ride well enough, come waketime. He would have no women for a while, but that would reverse itself. Sigrid was nothing if not thrifty, and he was good stock, for cattle. A male Soldier, she reflected, might well have damaged him permanently. But that was inefficient, and wasteful of resources.
He, of course, knew none of that. His eyes on her were black and burning. "You will die for this," he said.
She regarded him in honest surprise. "Why?"
"My honor—"
A bark of laughter escaped her. It made him jump, and gasp for what it did to his hurts. "There is no honor. Only strength. And I am stronger."
"Not always."
"Always," said Sigrid. "Send us your daughters when they are grown. They'll win much honor in the Citadel."
He spat. He aimed, no doubt, for her face. It went wide.
"I do regret," she said, "that you are not for me."
He surged up. She was ready for him. But not before he had grasped what even a drunken Mongol could not mistake. She laughed—twice in a day: she was growing frivolous. "Yes, I am a woman."
"There are no Sauron women."
"Oh," she said, "but there are." She had him in her arms, almost like a lover. He was not, unfortunately, up to a sharing of his genes. She patted him as if he had been Harad, then lowered him to as clean a patch of pavement as there was in that vile place. "See, I leave you your pride. When you are ready, you may walk. I've harmed nothing that will not heal."
Nothing but his honor. His eyes were smoldering with it. She nodded, a salute of sorts, and left him.
Bloody light from the Cat's Eye glared over the steppe. The wind lashed the high, coarse grasses into waves like the seas of lost Earth. Aisha had heard stories of them, but the only tides she could sense pulsed in her temples. The only salt she tasted came to her lips after she coughed, and she had been coughing too often as she ran, slowed to a trot, then to a walk, one hand pressed cautiously against her aching side.
She ran her tongue over dry lips. The last thing she had drunk was the thin, sour beer they had served in that Soldier-loving tavern in Nûrnen, that slut of a town. And she, even she, with her Sauron blood, was cold now and sleepy enough to scare her. She and Juchi had come far during this day cycle; now it was getting toward Haven's long night. All her life, she had rested in the dark when she could . . . .
And now her father would rest forever. Tears filmed her eyes briefly, then dried. He had died hard, but at the end, he had had her mother's—and his—name on his lips. And she had avenged him. Aisha's own lips snarled. I could not offer him a proper funeral. The last duty of a child. I cannot die before I kill more Saurons! she screamed to herself. I must avenge him!
She knew—and mourned—what became of her father. But what would become of her? She coughed again and spat, a dark glob. Control, she warned herself. Enough blood in her lungs and even she could drown.
Would the tribe take her back? She feared not. Once, the tribe had been "we." Now, it was "they"; and, touched by her father and mother's curse, she was an outsider. She would be lucky if she was not killed on sight. Haven, she remembered, once had meant harbor. There was no haven, no harbor for her anywhere, unless she made one for herself.
Tallinn . . . she had counted it home long, long ago: a vanished haven of intricate red rugs and supple leather walls and care. She shut her eyes until red lights went off beneath her lids. So much red—blood from her father's ruined eyes, blood gouting from his mouth as he died, then from the Cyborg's eye, the glare of the Cat's Eye, the pain, like a coal held to her lungs, of ribs grinding against each other. Even the sullen luster of what she had worn into exile: the great ruby that the Judge of the Bandari had sent her by her son's hand.
A thousand times in the past twenty years, she had thought of selling it. Juchi needed medicines; she needed a sharp knife; they both needed better boots and winterwear. Once, she had even approached a Bandari trade caravan and held out the ring. The ruby—for what she and her father must have. Even the greedy, sly Bandari recoiled from it, excusing themselves to whispering with heads together, the occasional glance flicked back at her. They had forgotten her hearing, augmented by her mother's crime.
" . . . Give them what they need. It's a mitzvah anyhow."
She had wanted to hurl his charity in his big-beaked face. For her father's sake, she could not. So she accepted the gifts. She'd even managed to thank the man. And she had never told her father that she had traded pride for warmth. His shoulders had shuddered that night when he thought she slept; he had no tears, but she knew he mourned what he feared she'd traded. As she might have done, she realized. She just might.
They had never spoken of it.
Aisha shivered at the memory. Odd: she was no longer cold. Heat spread out from that burning coal at her side. Like the heat of a fire within a yurt after a long day's ride, it was heat that sapped her strength and made her yearn only for sleep.
Her father slept forever. Surely, no one would begrudge her just one little hour of rest in the Cat's light. Even the coarse waving grass of the steppe looked inviting as new-washed fleece. Her knees were loosening, her pace slowing . . . .
If she slept now, she would never rise. She met the Cat's Eye with a feral snarl and forced herself into a jog. The impact of her feet on the hard earth and the stabbing in her chest made her gasp. The cold air, rushing into her open mouth, nearly stopped her breath altogether with its impact.
She coughed, and it felt as if she had swallowed clown-fruit brandy that some fool had set on fire. She spat it out; blood followed—more blood than she had will to stop.
Father, I avenged you! She took that comfort, at least, down with her into red-tinged darkness. It was not enough—Saurons still lived—but it was something.
The steppe glowed. Heat-light tendrils drifted from the ground, up through the long grass into the cooling air. Here and there a small life starred the rustling stems with its body warmth, like a wavering, moving fire sliding through silvery dapples. A huge-winged ice-eagle trailed its presence through the wavering currents of the air; those swirled like liquids mixing in a clear glass. Westward the snowpeaks of the Atlas reared against stars—stars and glaciers bright with visible light, drinking heat-light from the mottled slopes below, with billowing cloud shapes flowing up the pass from Nûrnen and Shangri-La. The air carried the scents of human, horse, muskylope, drillbit, rabbit, sheep; a kilometer or so upwind, the acrid half-reptile smell of a tamerlane pride, a big male and three females, cubs . . . .
Barak bar Heber—some called him bar Chaya, his mother being Judge and his father dead before his birth—shook his head and sighed. There were no words for what he saw with IR-sensitive eyes, not in Bandarit or Turkic or Americ or Russki. His mother knew what he meant, some others—orphans from Angband, children from the culling-grounds. But there were no words . . . .
What would a poet with the right language make of it? he wondered.
Hooves thudded nearer. He looked back. The caravan was making speed: thirty-two Bandari merchant wains, huge wagons with man-high wheels rimmed in tires of woven drillbit gut, their padded pelts stretched tight over the hoops. Thirty pair of draught-muskylopes pulled each, and a sprawling, brawling mass of men, women and animals surged around them. It was less disorderly than it looked—he and the merchant chief Josepha bat Colda had been in command for a T-year now, all the long way from the Pale—but dangerous, this close to the Citadel. And nearly illegal, under the codes of haBandari and Sauron alike. Goods from the Pale and the continent-spanning Bandari trade routes for the wealth of Nûrnen; thousand-knot rugs for ingots of raw copper, iridescent glass for dried Terran fruits that grew nowhere but in the Shangri-La, Dinneh-trapped pelts and spices from Sna Babra on the western ocean for orthosilk and perfume and platinum.
Most of the return load was good minted silver, something that would draw steppe-rovers like flies to a weeping honeytree all the way back to the Pale. There were also twenty-eight children from the culling-fields of the Citadel and Nûrnen's Saurontown, collected by the Pale's agents. Most precious of all were the reports in his own head, from those agents and the network of spies they ran, a spiderweb reaching into the Citadel itself—human-norm workers, mostly, although not every Sauron was as incorruptible as their myths would have it.
The two riders pulling up behind him were quarrelling as they came. Barak grinned; Josepha and the mediko Karl bar Edgar fan Haller had been at that since he was a pup. Oom Karl—any Bandari of the older generation was an uncle, more or less—had been far too quiet since his wife died last year. It was more than normal mourning. Perhaps because she died while he was away, and of a bad birthing, he blamed himself for not being there.
"Guards all deployed, everything recht," Barak said, preempting Josepha's open mouth.
She scowled: a woman of middle years, full-figured—what the People called zuftig—streaks of white in her braids along with the jewelry that showed her status as master merchant. Her long caftan-coat was embroidered and her saddle tooled and studded with silver, but the weapons had seen use. Nobody spent half a lifetime carrying prize loot across Haven without fighting hard and often. He valued her experience, but not quite as much as she thought he should.
"You're young yet," she said. "Not even six." Haven reckoning, but there were times he was convinced she'd transposed that to T-years.
"That's why you got me cheap," he pointed out. Karl fan Haller snickered and took up his own conversation:
"You should have got that cart for the milch-goats. They go dry, you're going to have twenty-eight unhappy babies on your hands."
"I'm not providing a sit-down ride for bliddy nanny goats for six bliddy thousand bliddy kilometers!" she said. "Don't you tell the mother of six about babies, you—"
They went stone-still as Barak flung up his hand. He whistled sharply, swung the arm around his head, held up three fingers and then made a fist and pumped it twice.
Three of the caravan guards rode up at a sharp canter. "Over there," he said, jerking his head west and north. Directly toward the Citadel; the Bandari had camped thirty klicks out, doing their trading second-hand, mostly. Far enough that everyone could pretend they weren't there. "Not sure. One man, I think, from the sound."
Odd breathing, too liquid. He cocked his head . . . no, the wind covered it, and the direction was wrong for scent "Let's go."
A stirring in the long grass, moving against the wind. The reddish brightness of heat, in the shape of a man sprawled flat. Iron-copper scent of blood, too much, sound of phlegm rattling in the lungs. One injured traveller, alone on the steppe. The trail was visible for a little way in crushed grass and residual heat, leading straight back to the Shangri-La. Too hot. Fever. And a mealy undertone to the scent, less salt than a human norm sweated—like his own. Together with the mere fact of being alone on the steppe, that spelled one thing. Sauron. Finishing off a wounded enemy was mercy. Finishing off a Sauron was positively a mitzvah; Barak's teeth skinned back from his lips.
"Cover me," he said. "There, see?"
"Ya." His rasal—sergeant—pulled the rifle from its scabbard and dismounted. His horse lay down, and the man dropped behind it, laying the rifle across the saddle and thumbing back the hammer. "Got it."
The other two nocked arrows to their bows. "Let me go see, Barak," one said; a young woman, tall, with blond braids coiled around her head.
"Sannie," Barak said without looking around. "It's bad enough when Josepha tries to mother me."
He heard her grunt, and ignored it. Sannie was a good sort, dogged and skilled; he liked her—perhaps loved, he wasn't sure—but she kept pushing at him.
No matter. He reached behind him and pulled the three-meter lance from its tubular scabbard, nudged to put the horse to a canter. One hard thrust, and another enemy of the People would be gone. Hadn't they thrown his mother and his uncle Juchi out to die? Dvora had rescued Chaya like Moses from the bulrushes (he thought of those as some sort of steppe grass), but Yeweh knew what evil had come of Juchi's abandonment, and would come—a good man condemned to horror. The hooves drummed. The long whetted steel of the lancehead dipped.
The Sauron's face showed above the grass, stark white. "No!" Barak shouted, hauling the horse aside and throwing himself from the saddle, weapon tossed into the grass. "Cousin Aisha!"
Fevered, delirious. Her flailing blows would have cracked a normal man's bones even now; he held her immobile, ignoring the blood and fluid that sprayed into his face from her wide-stretched mouth. "Hurry," he panted over his shoulder.
Karl fan Haller's hands were steady as he soaked a pad in ether. "Not too much," he muttered. "Hold—"
Give your cousin this, Barak remembered, as the thrashing form sank into quiet. The ruby ring he'd carried to her; Juchi standing with the bandage around his ruined eyes, Aisha beside him . . . It rested between her breasts on a thong, now. And she looked a decade older than he, not the same thirty T-years. She looked as if she was dying, and her body was burning up. Not just the higher temperature normal to the supercharged Sauron body, but a killing fever.
"I'll get a horse-litter," Karl fan Haller said; it was three klicks back to the caravan and the infirmary-wagon.
Barak shook his head, standing, cradling Aisha with infinite gentleness. He turned and began to trot with gliding smoothness, as fast as the riders who followed him.
It was not Juchi who was accursed, Aisha moaned, but herself. She lay on soft blankets, but confined in a tiny yurt that reeked of herbs and sickness. Worse yet, it never ceased to sway and jolt as if some giant's hand shook it. And worst of all, Shaitan had sent a thousand djinnis to torment her. She shivered, then sweated in the next instant; and always a raspy-voiced djinni hovered over her with an arsenal of stinks, steams, needles and foul tastes . . . . "Damn fool runs with a shattered rib . . . a wonder she didn't die of a punctured lung . . . or freeze . . ." The muttering trailed away into long words that Aisha was certain were incantations. All in a language she had not spoken since girlhood, and imperfectly then: Bandarit.
It was a ritual the djinni did, and it would call for blood. She knew it, she just knew that in a moment the djinni would stick her with yet another knife, and she had to get away.
"Barak! Come hold this madwoman!" shouted the djinni, and the armed man who had seen her in shameful illness and watched as she fell thrust into the dark, tiny space and held her down while, sure enough, the djinni stuck her with yet another knife, needle, thorn . . . it didn't matter . . . she was slipping out into a warm tide of sleep.
Hard to believe, as she fought out of the riptide, only to sink again, that a djinni tended her with a father's care.
Something remained to be said, before she could drift happily away. "Not . . . not right . . ." she muttered, " . . . shouldn't be here . . ."
"What's that about?" muttered the man who, shamefully, watched her once again.
"She was born in the tribes," the djinni explained. Odd that his voice no longer rasped so harshly on her ears. The tide was so warm, so pleasant. In a little while, she would forget . . . . "And she's delirious, or close to it. So she's returned to the ways she knew as a child. She's unmarried; by all the customs she ever followed, it's highly improper for either of us to be here."
She muttered and tried to nod. "Easy there . . . easy . . ." muttered the djinni. "I'm Karl. I'm a doctor. Mediko. Hakim." He patted her hand as if she were still an innocent who had not forfeited the protection of her tribe. She wanted to cling to that hand; her weakness shamed her.
"Barak! Company coming!" A low urgent voice called, and a series of whistled notes followed.
"Saurons," muttered the doctor. "Steady there, lady. Easy . . . we won't let them get you."
She was too weak to move. They would find her and they would take her. Take her like that thrice-accursed Glorund, who had thought to have her on the ground beside her father's body, and whose own body now moldered in the pit that was too good for it.
"Shaysse!" Barak whirled toward the opening of the tiny yurt. "Oom Karl, get your supplies together. If they get to you . . ."
"I know the drill," the doctor nodded. "But you won't let them reach me. Give the Saurons hell, will you?"
Barak's teeth flashed in the lamplight. "My pleasure. And, by the way, tell her it's all family, will you?"
Aisha tossed her head, her too-sensitive hearing bringing her the few low-voiced words she needed to know that Barak and his guards were readying what they hoped need only be a show of force. Muffled hammerings and the click of metal told her the caravan would be defended with everything from stakes to grenades. Odd to sense oncoming battle, know herself as one of its causes, yet be protected. It was a luxury she did not think she should indulge in. She tried to lever herself up, but fell back, dizzy.
Another click sounded beside her. Her eyes fluttered open; the healer held a tight-stoppered pot with a long fuse. Near him, but not too near his weapon, was the lamp.
"You . . ." she moaned.
"I won't let them take us. Or my medicines. Now, sha, be still. Or I put you out again."
Now Aisha could hear the regular trot . . . trot . . . trot of Saurons patrolling the steppe.
A whistle came from outside.
"Stop right there." Barak's voice, not the caravan master's. Knowing the Saurons' hearing—how not? it was no keener than his own—he didn't even bother raising his voice.
The Saurons stopped. They were not even breathing hard.
"Who commands here?" a voice said in Americ.
"Josepha bat Golda is master merchant; I'm Barak bar Heber. I run the guard corps," Barak's voice replied in the same language, the Eden Valley dialect of it. "Who're you, chief of the Citadel shithouse detail?"
"If this is the shithouse, I've got the detail," the Sauron said. "Halt for inspection."
Oom Karl shrugged. "They've got guts even for Saurons, taking on a fully equipped caravan." He pressed an eye to one of the lacing holes in the wagon's canvas tilt, and stared out.
Aisha snarled. She would have liked to wind their guts around a Finnegan's fig tree.
"We're looking for a woman," Chief Assault Leader Sharku said. He and the half-dozen Soldiers behind him carried assault rifles, and ignored the glowering hostility of the caravan crew that so grossly outnumbered them.
"When aren't you?" the guard corps chief—Barak, his name was—retorted.
In his mottled leather armor and horsehair-crested helmet he loomed taller than Sharku, bulked larger. That might have intimidated a plainsman. Sharku ignored it, too. He had his assault rifle, he had the Citadel behind him, and he had utter confidence that without either he could have broken the Bandari in half.
The caravan master, standing fully armed beside Barak, chuckled and leaned on the long steel war-hammer she carried. "Sorry. We don't trade our kinswomen."
"This one's no kin of . . ." Sharku broke off. New pieces fit together in his mind. He'd been used to thinking of the tale of Juchi as nine parts nomad manure to one of truth, till it rose up and kicked the Citadel in the balls. "A woman, not too young, though not as old as this hard-mouthed jade." He gestured dismissively at Josepha, savored her glare.
Barak just stared back at him. If the Bandari was used to intimidating plainsmen, Sharku was used to intimidating cattle generally. Neither had any luck now.
"She's probably injured," Sharku amplified, pushing ahead regardless.
"What makes you think a woman, not too young, injured, could survive alone on the steppe?" Barak asked.
Silence stretched between them. Sharku kept his face impassive, though inside he scowled. But there was no help for the admission, not when legend was becoming sober fact. "She's got Soldier blood," he ground out.
The healer drew a careful breath. His eyes glittered warning at Aisha as he turned to lay a finger over his lips.
"What's she to you, Saurons?" Barak's voice was full of lordly disdain. "Aside from the obvious."
Aisha bared her teeth. Not fearing them as he probably should, Oom Karl laid his hand over her mouth. She would have wagered her hope of Paradise that the Saurons wouldn't admit that a woman had killed their precious Cyborg Battlemaster.
She could almost see the Sauron shrugging. "No matter. Just remember, your kind's not welcome in the valley. We've tacked up Juchi and his worthless accomplice to warn cattle what rebellion costs. All they're good for now. Take my warning now instead of theirs—stay clear." His Americ was flat, uncompromising; Aisha hated him at once.
All that poor man's mutters of Bog and his crisscrossing hadn't spared him a death as painful as her father's; and not even her father's honor and her own spared him this last exposure and her family such shame. Tears ran out of the corners of her eyes, then dried. Allah Himself would mourn; she had failed in a child's obligation to provide her father with a worthy burial.
Well, he would have more Saurons for company, she thought, all but growling. Starting with these. Drawing a deep breath, she tried to tap the reserves of wild strength she had always had.
"Lie back! I may be no match for your strength, but if I have to, I'll knock you a good one on the back of the head. Let's see you fight me with a concussion." Delirious Aisha might be; she wasn't stupid. She lay back, waiting and listening for the Sauron's next question. The physician's lips thinned and he checked his weapon.
Sharku sniffed, probing the air with his enhanced sense of smell. He pointed with the muzzle of his assault rifle toward a wagon. "There's a woman in there."
"That's my aunt," Barak told him. Sharku normally had no trouble telling when a man of the cattle was lying; body language and odor gave him away. Now . . . he wasn't sure. The guard captain went on, "She just had a miscarriage. Again. So you wouldn't be interested."
"If she's your aunt, she'd be old for us anyhow," Sharku answered. Now he got a scowl from Barak.
Behind him, one of the Soldiers added, "We get no sport from these Bandari bitches. She'd probably knife us in our beds."
Watching Barak swell with pride, Sharku wanted to kick the stupid clot. Instead of insulting the Bandari, he'd given him face. Too many Soldiers had no notion of how to deal with the lesser folk of Haven.
The same big-mouthed idiot went on to the fellow beside him, "I don't care whether she's fertile or not. I wouldn't mind some fun."
He had, to give him what minimal credit he deserved, spoken quietly. Barak shouldn't have heard him. But the guard captain had; Sharku's eyes narrowed.
"Don't even think about it," the Bandari said, softly enough that an unaugmented man standing beside him wouldn't have caught it, under the sound of wind and the noise of the caravan settling itself for battle.
Touch of Soldier blood there himself maybe, Sharku thought. That was getting disconcertingly common. Why wasn't anything ever simple? Now they wouldn't accomplish thing one without a fight.
He scanned the line of wagons without moving his eyes. Something like twenty men who looked like full-time fighters. Four rifles—the Bandari made excellent flintlock breechloaders. Sixteen or so bows. Another thirty or forty ostlers and traders and whatnot crowding up behind; it was hard to tell with the restless movement of the muskylope teams. They had pikes, hammers, billhooks, axes, crossbows . . . and from the way they sorted themselves out, some experience of drill.
Not good.
Aisha had had no miscarriage, no child. I never will, she thought. It struck her as unutterably sad. But Barak her kinsman was facing Saurons out there. He should not do so alone, she resolved.
Karl's lips moved soundlessly: "Don't even think it."
She chuckled, which plainly puzzled him.
She wondered if her first impression—that he was djinni, not man—had been right after all. In the darkness, his eyes seemed to glow. She imagined her own did too, reflecting in the tiny lamp: lambent and feral, like those of a creature wounded unto death, but with one last battle in her.
"He is of my blood," she whispered back. "But not accursed. I cannot—"
"You cannot interfere. By God, woman, letting the Saurons know we've got you would be the worst thing you could do."
"The Battlemaster will pin our hides to the stake next to the motherfucker's," a Sauron hissed outside, "if we don't bring her or her body back to tack up instead."
Aisha felt a surge of fierce pride. She had killed the Battlemaster; this must be a new one.
"We're going to have to search that wagon," Sharku said. He didn't like it; he knew he might have been wrong, and he hadn't come out here to embarrass himself in front of cattle. Everyone back at the Citadel is running around like a brain-shot land gator, he thought. Having the Battlemaster found with his throat cut was not your everyday occurrence. The First Council was meeting in round-the-clock sessions, for what that was worth.
"You and what h'gana?" Barak asked him. "Smart Soldier like you, you should think of better ideas."
"What do you have in mind?" Sharku asked softly. One on one, he knew he could take the Bandari, even if the fellow did have Soldier blood. But if Barak knew that, too, he gave no sign. Whatever else they were, the Bandari weren't weaklings.
And it wasn't going to be one on one. More caravan guards had appeared and quietly surrounded the squad of Soldiers. Sharku heard rifle hammers snick, bows creak as they were drawn. His men shifted their feet, gritty soil scrutching under their boots. The odds had just swung violently. Any Soldier could calculate the chances with three or four weapons aimed at every man in the patrol.
The Soldiers would win . . . but there might not be more than one or two left standing when it was over.
"What do I have in mind?" Barak retorted. "You shagging ass out of here, if you want to see the women you do have again. As for us, we're headed back to the Pale for Ruth's Day. And expecting to join up with another caravan pretty soon. So you'd better get moving."
Bluff? Sharku weighed it. He thought his men could beat the guards even if they were outnumbered five to one. He wasn't quite sure, though, not against Bandari—and he was sure he'd take casualties trying. And if he did that and the woman wasn't in the wagon after all . . . he'd be lucky if he got himself posted anywhere as close as Quilland Base. The Soldiers hadn't made themselves masters of so much of Haven by wasting scarce manpower in futile last stands. They didn't tolerate failure in commanders, either.
"Anything else you wanted?" Barak prompted.
Arrogant bastard, Sharku thought. "You'd better stay out of Nûrnen, Bandari, or you're liable to end up in pieces on pikes yourself."
"I promise, I won't be back unless I plan on moving in," Barak said.
"That stay could prove unpleasantly permanent."
"Not when I've got you circled."
Almost, Sharku gave the order to attack then, just to prove to the Bandari that he wasn't as smart as he thought he was. But the Chief Assault Leader held back. A Soldier has discipline, he reminded himself. Let the cattle posture if they would. He did say, "I look forward to our next meeting."
"I've had enough of your pretty blue eyes to last me a lifetime," Barak said, "but any time you like. Now we're going to get moving—like I said, we have to make it back to the Pale. Open it up, chaverim, let's go. As for you, Sauron—" He jerked his chin back toward the Citadel.
Sharku ostentatiously turned his back. He hoped the Bandari would try something, so he got the excuse he needed to turn his men loose on them. But they didn't. He walked away.
The thud of retreating footsteps vibrated in the wood of the wagon. Aisha let out a breath she had forgotten she was holding. Fire licked against her ribs, and she flinched.
Oom Karl sighed gustily, too. "Got off easy, for now," he said. "Now, I'm going to make sure you sleep . . . ."
"My father," she muttered. "He was dead, and they defile his body. I must turn back to Nûrnen and avenge him." She began to climb from her blankets.
He had a sharp-pointed glass knife in his hand. Before Aisha could catch his wrist, he scratched her arm.
She raised a hand to punish him for the scratch, but her head swam. The shadows in the tiny wagon closed in and engulfed her.