Starfire Saga, page 28
“This isn’t the end of the path,” he said. “It is only the beginning, and we have a long way to go. I want you to think that there is a world of feeling still awaiting you.”
“I don’t think I have much more capacity for feeling,” I said shakily.
Jemeret threw his head back and laughed, looking suddenly very young. “We will build your capacity,” he said. “I know the potential is there, and I look forward to it.”
I hid my face in his shoulder, all at once absurdly shy, and he laughed again. He pulled the rugs up over our sweat-glazed bodies. “Get some sleep,” he said. “I have an idea for the morning, but it will take all of my strength and most of yours.”
I settled against his body, tucked under his arm. Then something prompted me to say, “Jemeret, I’ve begun to remember things.”
The slightest ripple of tension ran through him, but he mastered it instantly. “Don’t think about it now,” he said lightly. “Just get some sleep.”
VIII. Stronghome
“We do know more today than we did last night, and it is remarkable knowledge,” Sandalari said. Hundreds of pairs of eyes turned toward Jemeret and me. “We will hear Lord Jemeret’s plans.”
The wagons were packed and divided into tribal groups for the breaking of Convalee, but it was already near midday and no one had moved. Jemeret stepped up onto the box of the wagon on which I sat, and which Gundever was driving; Variel rode behind me. Tynnanna waited beside the right front wheel.
“I think we can avoid war,” Jemeret began. “It won’t be easy.”
“Does this plan involve getting us home?” Krenigo of the Vylk called out in a drawl.
Jemeret masked a smile. “Of course, Lord Krenigo. I am anxious to return to my home, and I’m sure the Vylk want to be in Columbary before the storms begin.” He reached down and laid his hand on my shoulder.
“I propose to use my power and the power of this woman, whom the stars have honored, to draw strength from all of the tribes in equal measure and to put the Honish guards to sleep. I propose to hold them in that state for the hours it will take the Resni, the Marl, and the Vylk to cross the Honish land. A Paja will go with each of them and return here when they are safe. Then we will release the Honish guards and continue on our own way home.”
There were murmurings, and I felt a stirring from my other life. “The job of a Class A is often mundane, often unnoticed,” said Mortel John to me in a class only composed of the two of us. “But the job of a Class A—overall—is to create scenarios that preserve or restore peace. Sometimes the scenarios for ending war are a bit more dramatic than those for preventing it. For example, there was the Gandavian System dispute that threatened to split the Com with a violence even the Drenalion would have been unable to halt. Class A Bernetta Hansen, nearly four hundred years ago, went to the system and stung 108 of the key individuals fomenting the conflict. It nearly cost her her life, but the war was halted. This is the true fulfillment of the Class A promise.”
And here was Jemeret, a truer, stronger Class A than any I had ever heard of, on a wilderworld, fulfilling the promise of the Class A. I wanted to cheer or to weep. I did neither.
Venacrona spoke for the plan, as did a number of other tribal leaders. Ustivet spoke against it, saying that he feared it would show the Samoth to the Honish as cowards and meggos. He glanced swiftly sideways at Jemeret as he said that, but it was possible not to take it as a personal insult, and Jemeret did not.
Sabaran laughed shortly. “Ustivet, they’ll be asleep. They won’t even know we’ve passed if we’re careful. They’ll just one day discover some of the tribes went home and they missed it.”
“You’re not going to have to cross their lands,” Ashkalin said in reply. “You have nothing to worry about.”
“Why, then, I’ll come with you,” Sabaran said easily. “That way the Paj only have to send out two messengers.”
“As a matter of interest, that’s not a bad idea,” Jemeret said. “Since we don’t want to slow down the trip across the Honish lands, I won’t be able to draw power from the three tribes we’ll be protecting. But I can link to you, Sabaran, and if you see anything untoward or alarming, you can signal immediately.”
Sabaran nodded. “I have no objection to being a link.” Ashkalin accepted, and so did Zunigar, who had welcomed the plan from the beginning. Krenigo had little choice but to conform.
Venacrona announced the order in which the tribes would move toward the Honish border. The Paj would lead, because they knew the land best; then the Boru, the three tribes that would have to breach the Honish blockade, and the others thereafter.
The wagon roads through the forest were not plentiful, but they were wide and well-maintained. The stonehouses needed trade with the Samothen. We swung southward, then westward, and by dark had reached a place near the border. Jemeret, Venacrona, Sabaran, the two Paja messengers, the three leaders of the involved tribes, and I went forward to scout out the situation.
There was a partially sheltered thicket that gave a good view of the border, and we could see the line of Honish guards. They did not appear to be overly watchful, but they were wellarmed.
Jemeret took my hand and concentrated for a moment, then turned to Venacrona. “About six hundred troops here and several thousand men at a garrison about two leagues north.” He concentrated a moment longer, and this time I thought I felt a slight tug. “The far border is much less manned. They know we’ll be coming from this side.”
“How will you handle it?” Venacrona asked.
“I’m going to try to ignore the garrison as long as I can,” Jemeret replied thoughtfully. “If we’re lucky, we can avoid expending that energy altogether. Veen, I need everybody in a line, holding hands, the Boru first, then all the other tribes that aren’t crossing. Intertribal linkages only between priests and priestesses. Hurry.”
Venacrona hurried away, and in less than three handspans we’d made a human chain, with Variel linked to me and to Gundever and the rest—fifteen hundred strong—in a line that snaked among the wagons. Jemeret took a deep breath and let it out, gathering to touch his reserves against those of all of the rest of us. Then he looked at me. “Ready?”
“Anytime,” I said.
He squeezed my hand, and I felt the beginnings of the surge that traveled all the way down through the gathered tribes of the Samoth, so that the amount drawn from any one person would be minuscule. Then he began to draw and to project at the Honish guards an overwhelming desire for sleep. Despite everything that I knew about power and control, I was amazed at how quickly the guards dropped.
“Start them across,” Jemeret said tightly to Venacrona, who waved to Ashkalin. The Marl moved out beyond us, tivongs and wagons rattling toward the rise on which the guards had been keeping watch. As Sabaran went past, he glanced at Jemeret and nodded once.
Farther to the south, the Resni line began, and beyond it, the Vylk. Moving in parallel, they went slowly until they topped the rise, then sped up when the ground flattened out. Venacrona, the one remaining person who was not part of the line, went up to the hilltop, standing between the prone bodies of the guards, and kept watch.
Once, about four hours into the night, Venacrona made a series of gestures to Jemeret, which I took to mean activity at the garrison. Jemeret drew more power and expanded the scope of the projection to take in the garrison as well.
The day was entering its fifth hour—almost sun-high—when Venacrona signaled to us that the three riders were on their way back, and very soon Sabaran and the two Paj crested the rise and kept coming. Venacrona had tied Rocky and Jemeret’s big tivong, Vrand, to a nearby tree. Now the priest went to Variel and said, “Be ready when my Lord Jemeret gives the order to break off. Let go of Ronica’s hand, and you and Gundever run for the wagon. We’ll take the Boru onto the North Road.”
Variel nodded that she understood. I heard and saw it vaguely, but was concentrating on my role as a conduit.
Jemeret looked at me, his eyes focusing on my face from far away. “We have to hold it alone now,” he said. “Can you do it?”
I said what I absolutely meant. “I think I can do anything.” I felt he wanted to smile, but the enormity of the effort he was making precluded it.
He spoke past me, to Variel. “Break off now.”
She let go of my hand.
I became aware in an instant that Jemeret had used the resources of the tribes and carefully husbanded mine and his own. Now there were only the two of us left, and we held the cap of sleep over the guards at this side of the Honish lands and over the garrison for almost another hour while the rest of the Samothen headed away for their various homes. Then it became too dangerous to continue, and he dropped the cap.
“Let’s go,” he said.
He was stronger than I was, not because he’d used more of my reserves, but because his were so much greater. Still holding my hand, he helped me to Rocky. Tynnanna, who’d been sleeping at Rocky’s feet, rose and stretched as I swung up on the tivong’s back. Jemeret untied the two tivongs and vaulted up on Vrand. A moment later we were pelting toward the North Road, Tynnanna racing lightly behind us.
We were both tired, but the exhilaration of the ride was still attractive. I was in awe of Jemeret’s ability to accomplish so much without any waste of resources. I was certain that if I had been in charge, I would have thrown everything into the problem. His approach was infinitely wiser than mine would have been.
Of course, that has been proven to me many times over.
We caught up with the wagons half an hour later and discovered that the Genda were still with the Boru. Sabaran leaned across to Jemeret and embraced him. “No one else could have done it,” I heard him say. “In the spring we will all start thinking about the unifying of the Samothen—especially if the winter goes as we hope it will.”
“The Samothen were just unified for almost sixteen hours,” Jemeret said with some satisfaction. “It’s a start.”
They embraced again. “Have a good winter,” Sabaran said.
“And you,” said Jemeret. “Weather the storms.”
They clapped each other on the arms, and Sabaran reined his tivong around and rode back toward his tribe. I watched him go. Doing so, I became aware that Sandalari was sitting on the box of the second Gendal wagon. She waved at me, and I raised my hand in farewell, wondering if I would see her again in the spring, wondering what the Severance Storms were.
“Go get in the wagon,” Jemeret said to me. “You need some sleep.”
“So do you,” I responded.
“I’ll be there soon.”
I turned Rocky toward the head of the Boru train. About twenty-five wagons forward, I passed the one Shenefta was riding on, and smiled at her as I went past. Then I realized that driving that wagon was Sejineth, and I nodded to him, too. He nodded back, and for the first time I sensed neither hostility nor reserve.
When I reached the wagon that Gundever was driving, I tied Rocky to the back, patted Tynnanna, and collapsed onto the pile of rugs by the tailgate. I wanted to think about what had happened, but I fell asleep almost instantly in the gentle swaying of the wagon.
I had been on the wilderworld for one month.
The trip toward Stronghome had been under way for a tenday when it really began to feel cold. The next day, the mountains came into view.
Jemeret had showed me a map of the route to Stronghome, which lay in a sheltered valley below the heights of the highest peaks on this world. Six major peaks more or less surrounded the valley—giant Marlith, the highest and steepest; massive Zuglith, which spread its immensity over the entire northern side of the valley; Harrilith, big anywhere except next to Zuglith, and whose southern face provided the only easy route up to the pass that gave access to Stronghome; and the three sisters, Kulith, Kunlith, and Kerlith.
Despite that, I was entirely unprepared for the aggressive reality of the range of mountains seen from a gentle slope as the foothills began. I had never seen mountains, except in vid studies, which, despite their simulations of reality, could not approach the originals. There was a grandeur, a magnificence, that nothing but the genuine article could convey.
“They’re stupendous,” I said breathlessly to Variel, who was riding beside me wrapped in her traveling cloak as I drove the team.
She looked at me curiously. “Yes, of course,” she said. “Haven’t you ever seen mountains before?”
I shook my head. “I’ve been on a number of other worlds, but there was never anything—anything like that.”
“See the peak that looks split in the center?” Variel pointed. “It doesn’t really look like a split, it looks like a shadow.”
“Yes, I see it.”
“Well, to the right of that peak is a low shoulder—you can’t see it from here—and that’s the pass we cross to get into Stronghome.”
Her voice had a quality of longing. “You really want to get back, don’t you?” I said.
She looked at me as if that were a remarkably silly question. “It’s home,” she said. “My family is there. Of course I want to be home again.”
I realized as she spoke that I had never felt the call to a homeplace, because I had never really had a home. And if I had fulfilled my promise and gone to work for the Com, I would never have had one at all. It was a stunning realization. Almost as if she suspected what I was thinking, Variel spoke. “Tell me about the worlds you’ve seen. It’s so strange to me to think there is anyplace else, anything up there”—she nodded skyward—”except the stars and the mysteries.”
“Oh, there are hundreds of worlds,” I said. “About 250 belong to the Com. Billions of people. And yet—” It was a strange thought. “There’s a sameness among them. Werd and Koldor were in very different parts of the core, but the architecture was the same, the feeling was the same, and the overall civilization seemed the same. There was very little open space left, and what there was, was carefully designed to look like wilderness. We thought it was really wilderness—at least I did before I came here. The buildings were generally plasteel or alloy, and varied between six and about forty floors.”
“Stop,” Variel said with a helpless laugh. “I can’t even begin to picture it. A stonehouse is big enough for me to think about.”
She began singing lightly in a clear soprano, and as soon as I had heard enough of it to feel comfortable with the tune, I sang along.
Every evening when dinner was over, Jemeret and I left the wagon to Variel and Gundever, took our rugs and furs, found a place for a bed under the trees, and made love. He knew I was a beginner—except for Coney, there had never been a lover until him—and he reveled in teaching me about the physical joys of sex.
On the trip to Stronghome I was always passive, the student and the responder. The control was always his; the choice of acts was his; my response was invariably at his prompting, rather than my own, his power allowing him to govern every physiological aspect of the process—mine, as well as his. The depth of my passion, and the power of the orgasms, always astonished me, even if I was expecting them, for they were more than I remembered each and every time. In part it was because, as he learned my body the way he knew my mind, he could manipulate it more easily, and in part it was because of the sting.
I remember once reading that there really was no difference in the sex act from the dawn of history onward, but the person who wrote that didn’t know about Class A talent. The sting directly affects the mind, the emotions, and the nerves, and the amount of effect is governed by the amount of power applied. Every night, Jemeret used a little more power. So that no matter where his hands or his mouth were, no matter how quick or how slow his penetration, his mind was the master of everything that went on, holding my own mind captive, giving me perfect pleasure.
By the twelfth night of the trip, when I felt as if I had dissolved into pure sensation, I heard him say, “Ronica, this is still only the beginning.” I fell asleep bathed in the sweat of our coupling, but trembling in anticipation of a future whose limits I could not see, the thought of which both enchanted and frightened me.
On the twenty-first day after the end of Convalee, we reached the mountains.
There was a large open area where the track through the foothills became a true mountain road and began to climb steeply into the rocks. The wagons changed order then, the rear wagons going first and our wagon bringing up the rear. The warriors whose responsibility had been the guarding of the track while we were at Convalee fell into step along the wagons as we passed them. Some were the woman warriors, and everyone greeted each other with real happiness.
With us at the end of the train—the direction from which any attack might have come—we had the advantage of being able to preserve an unbroken view of the path behind us. As we climbed, except when it was obscured by the occasional boulder or stand of trees, the views of the plains and forest were more and more spectacular. Jemeret told me how hard the climb had been for him one spring when he and two of his companions were ambushed by Ilto raiders before the Peace of Jaglith was signed. There had been eight ambushers, and his friends were killed before they had come anywhere near evening the odds. Jemeret drained himself in dispatching the four who remained, leaving his reserves almost as empty as mine had been after the Drenalion. He said it took him three days to walk back to Stronghome, and if there had been one more Ilto, he would have died out there.
I could not picture him that weak. He seemed to me to be a focal point for incredible strength, incredible wisdom.
And, as we climbed, I began to see that, barring the development of manned flight on this world, Stronghome was probably impregnable.
“I don’t understand why you won’t teach us any military tactics,” Kray said angrily to Mortel John. “It’s something everybody needs to know.”
