Starfire Saga, page 4
The mud in the kitchenyard slowed me down a little, and I let it, because I knew it would hamper my pursuers, too. I anticipated that the gate would be bolted and perhaps locked, so I didn’t waste any time trying to open it. I climbed the pile of wood for the kitchen fire, leaped from it to the roof of a shed against the outer wall, and from there to the top of the wall. I had just reached it when people burst from the kitchen door after me.
From the wall to the ground was a five-meter drop, but the grass was soft, and I cushioned the landing as best I could. For a moment I was stunned by the jolt; then the gathering took over, and I ran for the forest, about three hundred meters away across open land. The boots were soft, and I could run very well in them, so while I had no idea where I was going, I gauged that I could run a long way. The talma lent itself to running, and the undergarment, being flimsy, tore easily when the length of my strides exceeded its ability to stretch.
I could hear that they had gotten through the gate before I quite reached the forest, but soon I was in the trees and their view of me was cut off. I could have tried covering my trail, but I opted instead to put distance between me and them. Once I had outdistanced them by several kilometers, I would take the time to cover the signs of my passage.
It was dimmer under the trees than in the open, but soon the gathering began drawing on my reserves, which increased my sensitivity to light to the point where I could see as clearly as if it were an open field at sunhigh. Branches slashed at my arms and legs, but I didn’t care about the pain enough to steal strength from my running and seal off the pain receptors.
Once, I passed a startled group of some kind of grazing animals, which I later learned were the dralgs I had heard about, but I was barely conscious of them, for it was clear they constituted no danger. Several times I frightened coveys of some kind of bird, huddled in the bushes, and the sounds of their wings and startled cries unnerved me.
I don’t know how long I ran. Although it grew darker, my sensitivity to light kept increasing and counterbalanced the darkness. Finally, the sounds of pursuit had been gone for so long that I felt I would be safe in slowing. Gradually I reduced my speed to a normal run, then to a walk. The ground had grown rocky, with some large outcroppings nearby. I walked to the base of one and stood against it, listening very hard, gasping in great lungfuls of the cold, sweet air. There were no human sounds behind me.
There was, however, a double heartbeat, about ten meters away to my left. I spun in that direction and saw, crouching, eyes burning with inner fires, what was clearly a predator. I later learned that this was a klawit, one of the hunting cats I had heard about in the stonehouse, but at that moment I registered it only as big, furred, sharp-toothed, and looking at me as if I were its next meal.
Had I had the sting, I wouldn’t have been afraid of it, but as it was, there was a real fearsomeness about it that completely unnerved me. Yet the gathering reflex was still strong enough so that when it sprang, I leaped backward. The newly returned dimness of the late evening or night fled as my light sensitivity came back in a rush.
At closer range the animal was feline, an overmuscled, long-fanged, horned cat. It seemed surprised that I wasn’t beneath it, and tensed to spring again. I kicked up my acceleration to the highest level I could muster, turned, and bolted again, racing at the limit of my ability to get away from the beast. It was very fast, but after a few minutes it seemed to realize that I was faster and it dropped off and abandoned the chase.
I went a bit farther, and exhaustion claimed me. I dropped to normal speed, and into darkness at once. It had become night. The only sound I recognized was alien to me for the first few seconds, and then I realized it was running water. Covered with sweat and gasping for breath, suddenly chilled from the wind, I stumbled to the stream and knelt next to it, scooping up handfuls of the icy water.
There was no sound other than the water moving over the rocks and against the banks, and the sighing of wind through the trees around me. There was no warning at all just before something struck me at the base of the skull with sufficient force to knock me forward into the water, unconscious.
On Werd—and probably earlier, though I never thought about it before—no one at all wanted me to have nightmares. It stands to reason, I suppose, that a Class A with a bad dream can disrupt the lives of the people in adjoining rooms or even adjoining buildings. The part of the sting that projects the nightmares is a relatively weak one, however, so that people are made uneasy and apprehensive rather than fearful or demented. When nightmares came to me at the School for Talent, Mortel John would hurry into my room, wake me gently, and cuddle and soothe me until I was comforted and at ease again. Then he let me drift back to sleep. When I was deeping, I never dreamed at all, and I certainly never had nightmares.
I knew as I regained consciousness now that I was very near real exhaustion, that much of my reserves were gone and only the artificially induced unconsciousness that had allowed me to deep for a time had kept me from draining myself to a really dangerous level. But when I damped down the dull pain in my head and opened my eyes to find myself on a rug in the Meltress Lewannee’s Lady tower, I decided it had to be a nightmare, cried out a little, and waited for Mortel John to come and wake me up. Only he didn’t, and it wasn’t.
The occupants of the chamber hadn’t changed. If it had not been full night outside the windows, and if I had not been muddy and exhausted, I might have thought my whole escape attempt was a hallucination.
“Stand up, Ronca,” the Meltress said. I was still too tired to damp down very many pain receptors, so the branch welts on my arms and legs throbbed as I climbed to my feet, forcing me to stand unsteadily.
The stonehouse guard and the guard named Gundever both stood between me and the door, also muddy and disheveled. The brute guard was still somewhat out of breath.
“Oh, no,” I said to them. “You couldn’t have caught me and brought me back here! You were making enough noise to drown out a sonic boom! I’d have heard you.”
The stonehouse guard took a step toward me and began to raise his arm in anger, but the small man called Ser Venacrona said very quickly, “In the name of my Lord Jemeret, I accept this woman in exchange for the debt. I will not have her touched.” Gundever moved instantly between the stonehouse guard and me, his back to me. Almost offhandedly, I calculated his speed, and there was nothing unusual about it in a man trained to fight.
The stonehouse guard stepped back at once.
The Lady Meltress Lewannee smiled. “You will please then give me the debt paper,” she said.
The small man pulled a parchment from his sleeve and handed it to Dogul without even glancing in her direction. She took it and carried it to the Meltress. I turned to watch her and realized that my hair had come loose from at least two of the braids and that the others hung askew. I tried to pull all the hair backward away from my face, but my hands caught in its tangles.
Between the weariness and the aches, all caution fled from me and I yelled, “Just who the hell do all you people think you are?”
Either the old man signaled him or there was something in my voice that made Gundever whirl around and grab my wrists in his hands, holding them out from my body in a grip that I knew I hadn’t the strength left to break.
The Meltress Lewannee crumpled the paper in her hands and tossed it into the flames of the fireplace with a sigh of what could only be relief.
Ser Venacrona took from a pouch at his belt something that looked like a small hoop of beaten metal and stepped toward me with it. I had no idea what he intended, but I wrenched against Gundever’s grip on my wrists.
Gundever looked down at me, jerked my arms once gently, then said under his breath in a mixture of exasperation and amusement, “Will you relax already?” The utter practicality of his tone and the incongruousness of the words so astonished me that I stopped struggling and stared at him, open-mouthed. He seemed so sensible that I might have laughed, had I not been so tired. He nodded encouragingly at me when I held still, and I really looked at his face for the first time. He was about twenty-five, deeply tanned, and his dark eyes twinkled under light brown brows that probably matched the hair hidden beneath a dark brown helmet. Somehow he made me feel more at ease, and I thought it was because he seemed to have sense, to be somehow more familiar. It seems to me when I think about it that I must have been feeling—and unaware of it that being more “familiar” made something or someone more “controllable,” since I was used to controlling what was familiar to me. But control is an issue I don’t want to write about yet—mine, the Com’s, Jemeret’s. Not yet.
Ser Venacrona took advantage of my stillness to reach up and fasten the ring around my neck, like a collar. It caught in my hair, which he pulled free. I heard it click almost before I felt it, and, like Gundever’s attitude, the click was tremendously reassuring. Anything that locked could be unlocked. Anything with a mechanism had an easy path.
The little old man made a sweet farewell to the Meltress Lewannee, and when he finished, he said to Gundever, “Bring her along. We’ve got a long way to go before we reach the encampment.” Gundever bent and scooped me up.
“I can walk,” I said.
“Yes,” Ser Venacrona said dryly. “You can also run. For that reason, I think we’ll keep hold of you for the time being. My name is Venacrona.”
I realized that “Ser” was a title as, across the shoulder of the man who carried me, I saw Dogul looking pleased at the way things had gone. The stonehouse guard made no move to open the door, and Gundever had his arms full of me. Venacrona was obviously not willing to do it himself, so for a moment no one moved at all. At last, probably on a signal from the lady behind us, Dogul went to it and opened it. As we went through, I heard her hiss “Farewell” to me, but I didn’t have the energy or the grace to reply.
The three of us marched through a crowd of guards in the front hall and out the wicket in the front gate. In the courtyard was a wagon, curtained in gaily colored embroidered hangings and drawn by two pair of large quadrupeds. I learned later that these were tivongs, the best herd animal on this world, strong, fast, and saddle-broken, as well as wagon-trained.
“Get into the wagon with her,” Venacrona said to Gundever. “I don’t want her jumping out somewhere along the track.”
Gundever set me on my feet in the wagon. The inside was piled with rugs and cushions, which made my footing uncertain, and he had leaped in beside me before I had a chance to scramble across the shifting surface.
“Can you drive them all right?” he called out.
Venacrona had climbed up onto the driver’s box and gathered in the reins. “I was driving before your na-sires were sucking tit,” he said. “Keep the curtains closed.”
The wagon began to move, picking up speed as it got out into the open on the other side of the stonehouse walls. I sat down quickly and looked at Gundever, who pulled off his helmet and dropped it on a rug.
“How did you catch me?” I asked him.
He grinned, suddenly looking very boyish and harmless. “My name is Gundever,” he said. “You’re an awful mess.”
“Are you just a guard, like the ones from the stonehouse?”
His grin turned a little sheepish. “Jemeret wouldn’t have trusted Venacrona to a plain guard,” he said. “Or you, I guess.” He studied me frankly, making me abruptly aware that I was nearly naked, then leaned over by the curtains to the driver’s box. “We out of their view yet?” he asked.
“Still in open ground,” Venacrona said, “but our tail’s to them, so you can come out and take over.”
I contemplated jumping out the back while they fastened back the curtain and changed places, but until I found out how they’d caught me, there didn’t seem to be much sense in running. Besides, my strength was still too low, my reserves too close to the danger level.
Venacrona plumped himself down on some of the cushions with a sigh of relief as Gundever urged the team to go faster. “You’re a great deal of trouble,” he said to me, “but I fancy Lord Jemeret will think you’re worth it.”
“Who is he? Why will he think I’m worth it? What did you mean, I was foretold?” I asked him.
His lined eyes narrowed, and he chose to answer the middle question, though it took me a moment to realize that was what he was doing. “You look very much like a woman we—all the tribes of the Samoth, as a matter of fact—value highly, someone who is dead now, or maybe someone who never lived at all.” He dug his hand into the pile of pillows and brought up a flask, which he handed to me. “Here, drink some of this. It’s clogny. You’re tired, and it will help a little.”
I took the flask, but didn’t open it. “Look,” I said, “you probably won’t believe me or understand me, but I’m from the Com, which is outside this world. All I want is to get back.”
“People the stars send us often say strange things at first,” Venacrona said, unperturbed, “but after a while they get used to it here. If you don’t want to drink any of that, hand it back.”
I pulled the stopper and sniffed at the mouth of the flask. It smelled like a grain beverage, so I took a swallow and analyzed it quickly as it burnt its way down—fermented, some sort of grain, aged very little, containing no drugs, potent. I handed it back to him.
“Who is he?” I asked again.
“Lord Jemeret is Chief of the Boru, one of the tribes of the Samoth,” he said. “And he is my friend. He sits on the ruling Council, and many believe that he will be Chief of all the Samothen before he dies.” He took a huge swallow from the flask and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “You want some of this?” he asked Gundever.
“Is a Boru a man?” Gundever asked, reaching behind him for the flask.
“What does he want me for?” I asked, more quietly than I had asked anything else. The relationship I had with these people was very different from the one I had had with Dogul and the Lady Meltress, and I knew it.
Venacrona retrieved the flask from Gundever and restoppered it. “He needs a lady and an heir,” he said, “and he must have a lady who will help him become Chief of the Samothen. He has chosen you because you are a stargift. You will bear his child.”
My breath went out of me as if I’d been punched, and it sounded ragged in my own ears as I filled my lungs again. Without even thinking, I flung myself at the back of the wagon, but I didn’t get there before Venacrona had his hands on the collar around my neck and was snapping something onto it.
“Damn, she’s fast,” Gundever said, with something like admiration in his voice.
It took me a moment to realize I was now chained to the side of the wagon. The second I did realize it, I spun around, stumbling on the cushions, and made a grab for Gundever’s shortsword. The move seemed to take both men by surprise, but my stumble gave Gundever time to intercept me and stop my hand on the way to the sword. He let the reins drop to hold me until Venacrona, surprisingly strong, jerked at one of my ankles and pulled me off balance. “By the stars, woman,” he said, “you can’t mean to tell me you’re virgin.”
“Would it make a difference?” I asked, shaking off Gundever’s hands.
“It would explain this unreasoning terror,” the old man said slowly.
As it happened, I was not virgin, but the unreasoning terror was very real, and he had identified it correctly. I probed my own feelings, and said, my voice catching and breaking as I did, “My name is Ronica McBride. I am a talent. People don’t—treat me this way!” To my surprise, there were tears in my eyes.
Gundever snorted. “They must’ve been telling her horror stories in the stonehouse. Us barbarian tribes raping our way across the face of the land.”
I fought back the tears for a few moments, but then I turned my face and hair into the cushions, too threatened, too fearful, too helpless to reason. I closed my eyes and sank into my weariness, trying to feel nothing but the jolting of the wagon that sped me toward a man I knew I could never accept.
Kray’s full name was Amahd Kriegar, and he had been born on Abranel and brought to Werd from there. He styled himself a prince of some kind in a joking way as we played games as children. He would say he was too handsome and refined to be an ordinary, everyday citizen, and Coney and I would chorus, “But you’ve got talent!”
It was from Kray that I first heard the word “rape.” We were all somewhere in those early throes of puberty, trying to continue the training of physical systems already rebellious and now adolescent as well. We had half an hour for midday meal between classes, and we had sat by the fountain in the schoolyard to eat. Kray had been doing some reading, and he said he had “discovered that there was this thing called rape. You two ever heard of it?”
We both said, no, we hadn’t. Kray leaned in close and lowered his voice. “A man can make a woman lay with him,” he said. “You know, force her to have sex against her will.”
“You’re lying,” I said angrily, but even as I said it, I knew Kray wouldn’t lie about a thing like that.
“Why would a man want to?” Coney asked, putting his meal aside.
“To show he’s stronger, I think,” Kray said. “I heard that soldiers used to do it to the women of an enemy they conquered.”
“Men used to own women, too,” I said, “but that doesn’t mean they do it anymore, and they don’t do that rape thing, either.”
“I’ll bet they do,” Kray said.
As always, when an argument seemed insoluble based on what we knew, we took it to Mortel John. I asked him belligerently if there were still such a thing as rape. Mortel John deliberated for a time, and then said, “Yes, I’m afraid there is.”
