Starfire Saga, page 47
Like all inanimate structures or objects that harbored life, it couldn’t tell me anything about the life-forms within. For a fleeting moment I was tempted to try to sting that life-form, but Jemeret had warned me not to, and I couldn’t convince myself that the tiny piece of the starfire currently resident in my crown was actually isolated from the huge volume of fire it produced when it appeared during our ceremonial rites. I wondered if the starfire’s energy could be turned into a beam; I wondered if I could do it. I filed it away, an unanswered question among so many.
We camped for the night about six kilometers from the border, far enough so that the Honish would not know our position. Our sensory scouts had shown they had only two spies on the plateau, and those two were relatively close to the boundary itself. We’d sent Krenigo and his guards back to Columbary, and Zunigar had taken the Resni south across the moors to the Hive. That left a party comprising the Boru, the Genda, the Nedi, and Ashkalin of the Marl—twenty-seven of us all told, against an army of several thousand of the Honish.
It might have daunted a more weak-willed group of people—or a more cautious or more sensible one—but Jemeret obviously had something in mind, and I told myself I would never underestimate the power of that brain. I remember wondering if he overestimated it, if that was why he felt he could take on a technological force I perceived as far beyond his ability. I didn’t pursue it.
The guards built a fire in a hollow and set up the lean-tos, but no one left the encampment to hunt. We would live on the biscuits we’d brought from Salthome until we were back on Samish land again.
Sandalari and I were the only women remaining now, so when we had to go a considerable distance to find a small copse of trees to relieve ourselves, we went together. On our return, she said to me softly, “I never thought I’d be going back.”
“You don’t have to,” I said.
She flashed me that radiant smile. “Oh, yes, I do. There’s a greater purpose here, and the stars intend us to try to pursue it. I even—” She stopped walking and lifted her tunic, so that the lower part of her back was bare. “Raise my cloak and look.”
Even before I gathered the material and held it out of the way, I knew her back would be entirely scarless. I let the cloak drop, and she slid the tunic back down. “I never understood why you didn’t heal that last scar when you healed all the others.”
She turned back to me. “We all of us keep some of our scars, Ronica. Some of us keep them on the inside, like you; some of us on the outside, like me.”
“Jemeret?” It came out as a whisper.
“He has scars, too,” Sandalari said immediately. “He’s just infinitely better at hiding them than anyone else alive.”
“I don’t see him as having scars,” I said. “I see him as the Class A the Com wanted me to be—perfect, powerful, and brilliant.”
She smiled again. “You love him,” she said. “You’re entitled to see him that way. But always remember your idea of perfection and the Com’s may be vastly different now.” She cocked her head to one side and a lustrous golden curl fell out of her hood. “I think it’s going to be very interesting.”
“Risky, too.” I was tentatively broaching a subject I wasn’t sure she’d understand; she had only been eight years old when she left the Com. “He thinks he can do something to them—something impossible.”
She frowned. “Jemeret doesn’t tackle what he sees as impossible, but he’s always done very difficult things. I trust his choices.”
I heard an implied reproach, as if she’d added, So should you. I told myself to listen to her; she had known him longer than I. He had healed her just as he’d healed me, taken her from that battered child I remembered to this luminous beauty.
Suddenly I was frowning, too. “Sandalari, Jemeret says all talent arises here on Caryldon.”
“So?”
“But when they brought you to us on Werd, you’d been badly abused because you had talent. That doesn’t make sense.”
She looked down at the brown, mosslike grass that covered the rolling plateau. “I was the only child we know of in the recent history of Caryldon who was born with power to the Honish, not to the Samothen.”
I stared at her. “How?”
She shrugged, a fluid movement under her cloak. “We don’t know. My parents were obviously people of some means, or I might have been killed outright. If there were others like me, they must have been dispatched as soon as the power was discovered. I suppose my parents thought that if I just didn’t use the power I had, then it would be as if I didn’t have it. But how do you teach a child not to see when her eyes are open?”
We had nearly reached the campsite. “How did you get to the Com?”
“There are factions among the Honish, just as there are among the tribes of the Samothen. Someone got information about me to Lord Sabaran, and he bought me. I’m told it was about the time the Com demanded another child—they’d just lost someone—so the men decided to see if the Com had any chance of healing me.”
I flushed. “And we both know how that worked out.”
She rested her hand lightly on my arm. “You know I don’t hold you at fault. Put it behind you.”
We parted at the edge of the hollow in which the lean-tos had been set. She went to help with the attempt to heat up some shilfnin; I went to take care of the tivongs.
Ashkalin found me there and stood quietly, watching, until I had finished. I stroked Rocky’s nose before I walked over to him. “My Lord Ashkalin, can I help you?”
“I would like you to tell me about my son,” he said.
Something twisted inside me, but I knew what he was saying, and I could agree at once that it was possible I owed it to him. It wouldn’t be easy. “We were three, Kray and Coney and I.I can tell you about him better if Coney helps me. Is that acceptable?”
His deep brown eyes seemed to weigh me for a moment, and then he nodded.
So that evening, Coney and I sat with Ashkalin at some distance from the shrouded fire, cross-legged, hands folded in front of us. For the next several hours, as the stars appeared and slowly circled above us, Coney and I gave Kray’s childhood and adolescence back to the father who had never seen them. We discovered all over again the things that had made Kray one of us, and I found myself remembering what I loved, what made me angry, and what had, at last, terrified me so. Coney’s memories differed from mine, because he had never been in competition with either of us, and because he was a gentler person than I. Between the two of us, sometimes laughing and sometimes crying, we reconstructed our friend. It was almost possible for me to forget that our friend had slipped me an experimental drug in order to rape me, and that I had killed him as he accomplished, but did not complete, the act he intended. Before Jemeret came to call us for a strategy meeting, I think I had forgiven Kray for his inability to refrain from the rape, which had killed him and cost me my sanity and almost three years of my own life.
There were still questions I hadn’t asked. Revelations have their own resonance, and I’d allowed them to surround me, to cushion me from the time I didn’t remember fully, the time I spent without a functioning brain. Now, remembering Kray with Coney, watching Ashkalin, I was ready to look at that empty time, and it had to be through eyes other than my own.
Jemeret had posted all the guards, including our own, on our chosen perimeter around the hollow, leaving Henion, Henion’s co-Councillor and cousin Lenape, Sabaran and Sheridar, Venacrona, and Sandalari still in the hollow. Coney, Ashkalin, and I found them all near the fire as we returned.
“I never really believed it would come to a fight when we wouldn’t have all our guards with us,” Henion was saying as we came up to them.
“There are all kinds of fights,” Jemeret said. “Sabaran, you probably know more about the Honish than any of the rest of us. How unified are they actually likely to be? Who is most likely to be leading them?”
The big Gendal stroked his blond beard thoughtfully. “There are two main factions, one answering to the Lewannees and their allies, the other answering to the Beckanees, who are the most unyieldingly hostile to the Samothen. I’ve heard the Beckanees added a lot of adherents when they learned the Lewannees had Lady Ronica in their hands and let her get away.”
Jemeret grunted with something like satisfaction. “So we’re likely to be facing Beckanees.”
“It’s logical,” Venacrona said. “The Lewannee stonehouses are at the opposite end of the Honish lands, and the Beckanees’ are near here, just north of the peninsula neck.”
“Do you have a plan?” Sheridar asked Jemeret.
“I have five or six plans,” Jemeret replied. I saw that he didn’t use the Com jargon “scenario” in front of anyone who wasn’t aware of the secret. “In at least three of them, we don’t get to the Samish lands alive.”
“Concentrate on the others,” Sabaran said dryly, and Jemeret threw him one sideways glance.
“I’d like to get through quickly and without casualties,” my lord said. “But that would take negotiation, and we don’t have a lot of time. So I can’t give that option much chance of success.”
“I’d hoped you were going to tell us about the promising plans,” Ashkalin said.
“That is one of the promising plans.” Jemeret toyed lightly with the hilt of his shorts word. “It’s just not quite as promising as I’d like.”
I cleared my throat. “I don’t know what the other plans are,” I said almost shyly, “but I’d like to try something.”
“What?” Sheridar asked, his eagerness and youth bursting out.
I didn’t look at him, never took my eyes off Jemeret’s face. I’d become accustomed to using his reactions, his responses, as guidelines for my own behavior. At the outset I’d been angered by the tribal rules that mandated my needing his permission for things I wanted to do; now I needed him to confirm me, and I knew he sensed that need. I know now—much later—that I’d made Jemeret my touchstone, that I’d gone from a disastrous need for control to a potentially disastrous need for his approval, once again swinging from one extreme to the other as if no territory at all lay between them. Old patterns are the easiest to slide into, because they’re the most comfortable, the most familiar. I’d learned to use my shields on a sliding scale instead of reflexively, all up or all down. But I hadn’t learned, and wasn’t then aware, that my entire behavioral architecture operated in extremes, too. Jemeret had shown me how wrong the need for complete control of everything was for me, and I’d accepted that. I’d punished myself for it horribly. Now I had retreated to the opposite extreme and gratefully gave Jemeret the right of approbation. He’d always told me I would have to trust him; I had grown to trust him perhaps more than I trusted myself.
He touched me lightly with his sting to tell me to go ahead. I closed my eyes and made myself aware of my brow-crown, just as months before I’d made myself aware of the bowls of starfire metal sunk into the altar in the temple at Stronghome. And just as I had then called the starfire by remembering my encounter with it on the Plain of Convalee, I called it now by remembering how it had come to us in Salthome the evening before.
The gasps would have made me aware that something was happening even if I hadn’t seen the shapes and shadows of sudden phantasms on my closed eyelids. My eyes snapped open and I was dazzled by the light, which surrounded us like a living, glowing mist. It was not normal starfire; the red and blue colors were entirely absent. The gold and white had diffused from their ordinary state of fire to something more like smoke. And then it all vanished, presumably back into my brow-crown, leaving everyone gaping at me, stunned. My lord glowed with pride and some very real gratitude.
In the silence, I irised my eyes wide open again to compensate for the sudden darkness, broken only by the now-comparatively weak firelight. Sandalari said appreciatively, “A weaponless weapon.”
“I didn’t know it would do that,” I said in a low voice.
“What did you think it would do?” Henion asked, his expression nearly one of awe.
I shrugged. “I just wondered if it could release its energy in a way that might help us to get home. It—” I wasn’t really sure how to say it. “—it made its own choice.”
Jemeret had been smiling at me. “And it’s made a very good choice,” he said. “Now I think I can develop a plan that has a chance of working. As a matter of fact, you could say it’s brilliant.”
Ashkalin stifled a snort.
As we had the night before, Jemeret and I shared our campsite with Coney and Sandalari. I honestly didn’t know if they were intimate yet, but they were plainly in love. We’d gone over Jemeret’s scenario twice. Then, when the late winter night was at its height, we retired to our separate campsites. The four of us sat cross-legged around a tiny spark of campfire. We were aware, without consciously addressing it, that we four were the ones who would be going to the Com. We were starting to spend more time in each other’s company; we were going to become a team.
And I resurrected my decision to pursue the last of my vanished time, a decision that had been sidetracked by the creation of the next morning’s scenario. I’d reached the point where my desire to know surpassed my fear of knowing, where my trust of the three people with me was greater than my dislike of negative self-revelation. So I looked at Jemeret. “Will you tell me what happened to me from the time I lost my mind until I—woke up here on Caryldon?” I asked softly. I glanced at Coney, then back again at my lord, repeated the motion, waited. Reaching out to read them, I felt caution, rather than reluctance, and that encouraged me. I went on, “I’ve remembered what I can remember, but it’s not the whole story, and I know that it’s not. If I can get the fragments tied together, the holes filled in, then I’ll have the materials to go on building with.” I didn’t have to say that they could fill it in for me; that was something we all knew, even Sandalari.
Into the silence, she said, “I’d like to hear it, if I may. It’ll help. I’ve been away from the Com a long while, and I’m a little nervous about going back.”
Coney and Jemeret studied one another for a while longer in the weak, flickering light from the campfire, and then Jemeret spoke. “I didn’t come into it until quite late in the process. You’d better start it.”
My gaze flew back to Coney’s face, and he drew a deep breath. “The morning Kray raped you, the MIs broadcast the sound of your screaming throughout the Residence. If they hadn’t, we mightn’t have gotten to you in time to save you.”
Shock must have shown actively on my face.
Coney’s expression was abruptly sympathetic, and Jemeret reached out and drew me back against his chest, but he didn’t sting me. I think he trusted that I’d reached the point where unpleasant news would not pain me beyond my capacity to bear it.
If the MIs had registered the fact that I was screaming, the MIs had been monitoring my suite. Therefore, the MIs had recorded everything that went on in that suite. They’d recorded Class A Jasin Lebec’s visit, when we probed each other and he wished me good service. They’d recorded Kray’s arrival, and the subsequent rape and killing, and they had either not analyzed the material or their analysis had shown the events to be of little importance—until it became clear to them that they were going to lose me. Only then had they initiated action.
The realization was devastating. And the fact that the MIs had broadcast it meant I had not projected my distress outward to get anyone to come to me. I had not sought help, I’d merely reacted, keeping the situation between Kray and me, and handling it badly.
The MIs could have summoned somebody and prevented the rape. We move in human time, but they can react in microseconds. They had done nothing until I was in danger of losing my life. They had done nothing.
I gathered and controlled hard to keep my breathing regular. “I see,” I said as steadily as I could. “Go on.”
Jemeret’s hands tightened briefly on my shoulders.
Coney told me that everyone had come running, and I was at the emergency med and into the radiant fluid tank less than two minutes after they found me. “Jasin Lebec was beside himself,” Coney said. “He’d seen Kray going toward your suite, cheerfully greeted him, and never bothered to read for his feelings. They shoved Kray’s body into postmortem preservation and just left him there. He was clearly more expendable than you were.”
To the MIs, too, I thought bitterly. “And I was in the tank for—”
“Close to two years before they realized they would have to send for Jemeret.” He glanced at the man behind me. “Jemeret Cavanaugh.”
I accepted he’d have had a finame; everyone in the Com did. Coney was actually—no, not actually, only in the Com—Shems Conewall; Sandalari was a Gregson; I was Ronica McBride. “Did I just float in the tank? Didn’t anyone try to heal me? In two whole years?”
“Jasin Lebec tried about twenty times,” Coney answered. “They eliminated all his other Com assignments and never even bothered to give me any assignments at all. It was like they thought my presence would somehow help you—or something to that effect.” He glanced upward once at the stars, among which, some distance away, the worlds of the Com hung. “I used to come to the room where your tank stood and try to talk to you, but the meds all warned me against it. They wanted you close to stasis. They didn’t know what was going on behind your eyes.”
I looked at his set jaw, then looked down at his hands. “Jasin Lebec should have been able to find out.”
“He tried,” Coney said.
Jemeret stirred slightly behind me. “He was too old,” he said. “He could still do a great deal, but you’re very strong, Ronica, and you were fighting him.”
Coney nodded. “He told them repeatedly that it was futile for him to go on trying, but the Tribunal kept insisting he try again and again. Petra Chantrey had some of the professors do a calculation on your declining strength ratio, and she predicted you’d be weak enough for Jasin Lebec to handle in another year’s time. The MIs didn’t disagree. So they waited. And when we got to the two-year point, he tried again, and you were still as strong as ever. That’s when Mortel John told them to send for Jemeret. They argued with him until the MIs kicked in and said they wanted to salvage you enough to risk asking Jemeret to come into it.”
