Starfire Saga, page 49
I couldn’t imagine how that must have made him feel. I didn’t know how I would react when—if—I saw Mortel John again. He’d been the closest thing I’d ever had to a father, and he’d turned out to be an MI. Or, at the very least, the halfmachine instrument of the MIs.
“It’s—amazing,” I said. “I keep expecting that life will become simpler, more balanced, now that I’ve got my memory back, now that I understand what happened, what it caused, but it doesn’t settle.”
“It won’t,” Jemeret said. “Not until—one way or another—we’re finished. And perhaps not even then. As a matter of fact, it just got more complicated.”
I knew what he meant. “We’re going to the Com, taking talent to a place where someone or something is killing talent.” I flushed, bit my lip. “Someone besides me.”
All three of them made some sounds of dismissal, demurral, or reassurance.
“Will we be in danger?”
“I shouldn’t think so,” Jemeret said. “Anyone cowardly enough to attack babies isn’t likely to come after full-grown talents.” He seemed to ask Coney for confirmation.
“Sinet, Lage, Camla, Lendo, Vazhny, and Jasin Lebec were all very well when I left,” Coney said. “And if the Tribunal was concerned about our being attacked, surely they’d call and tell us to stay here until they find out what’s going on.”
Providing they’re even trying to find out, I thought. After all, Mortel John hadn’t sounded overly concerned about losing two-thirds of his class.
Jemeret shrugged. “We need to get some sleep. We’ll need our reserves at full strength in the morning.”
Something began nibbling at me at that moment, something I couldn’t quite get my mind around. “One more question, Jemeret.” I pulled back so that I could see his face again, irising my eyes to make his features clearer in the now fading firelight and the pale starlight from the huge bowl overhead. “The sex—” Abruptly, I didn’t know what to ask.
He understood instantly. He seemed to consider what he wanted to say. Coney and Sandalari had frozen in place, but we’d nearly forgotten them anyway. At last the level gray eyes rose to meet mine directly, and Jemeret said, “You had never learned that sex and power are not the same thing. You used it as power on Coney; Kray used it as power on you. I had to help you see that ideally the two aren’t really related at all.”
That rattled me, and he saw it. “I would have wanted you even if it hadn’t been vital to healing you,” he said. “I’d spent too much time inside your head not to need to be inside your body as well. But you’d blown out on a sexual trigger that tore your control of yourself away. Healing you demanded a sexual solution that ultimately gave you the control back and then taught you how to share it. That’s where health lies.”
He had, I know now, used sex to teach me about sharing. At the time, however, I’d learned the lesson very incompletely. I know it’s a difficult lesson. I always thought I could learn the hard things as quickly as the easy things. It isn’t so.
“The Com couldn’t have healed you,” he said, “because the MIs fail to understand that what they consider the wasteful irrationality of emotion is an integral part of human life. We need our emotions. You were deeply harmed emotionally. But the MIs see emotions as an inconvenience, and the government has unfortunately subscribed to the gospel of the MIs.”
“I never thought about health,” I said with surprise. “I always thought I’d just continue to be any way I wanted, and everyone else would have to accept me, because I was the Class A.”
“You’re still the Class A,” Coney said. “Jemeret’s presence won’t change that.”
“What’s changed,” Sandalari said, “is that you aren’t the Com’s Class A any longer.”
If I’d said aloud at that moment what I distinctly remember thinking—It’s true, I’m not the Com’s Class A, now I’m Jemeret’s Class A—if I’d actually verbalized it, maybe I could have become sooner what I would ultimately have to be—my own Class A. Maybe not. But once again, I didn’t say anything. I think now I was somehow never destined to grow quickly enough into the responsibilities laid upon me.
“Did someone say something about sleep?” Sandalari asked.
Jemeret shifted position, stretching out under the canvas lean-to, drawing me along with him. “It would be best,” he said. “Tomorrow won’t be easy.” His lips brushed my neck and ear, and he tightened his arms around me.
Once you get into the habit of introspection, it can become overwhelming. I reflected on sex and power as objectively as I could long after I thought he’d fallen asleep. If we never made love again, I would still love him with every bit of my strength for healing me. If we never probed each other again, it might hurt me, but it wouldn’t affect what I felt for him. I’d been convinced one of the reasons I loved him so much was the sex—the physical act had been both my perigee and my apogee. It was of vital importance in my life up to now. And yes, it was tied up with power, but also with place. In the Com, it hadn’t worked out. Jemeret thought that was a power issue. I wasn’t confident enough on the topic to doubt him. Here in Caryldon, it had been pretty damned splendid. What would happen when we were back in the Com again?
“Make yourself relax, and go to sleep,” Jemeret said in a low voice.
I burrowed back against his chest and complied.
II. Going Forward
Early the next morning, we parted from Ashkalin, who would seek high ground, watch what happened when we crossed the border, then return to Salthome to report to his people and—via Paja messenger—to the other tribes that we had safely boarded his ship and sailed off in the calm between Severance Storms. He mounted his tivong, and Jemeret and I went to bid him farewell.
The Lord of the Marl leaned down from his mount and offered Jemeret his hand. “May the stars give you solid ground again,” he said gruffly, an old seafarer’s blessing.
Jemeret nodded his thanks and clasped the hand. When he released it, Ashkalin looked at me. I read him quickly and knew his feelings toward me were still mixed: composed of a small portion of sexual desire; a larger portion of unavoidable anger, well contained; some admiration; and a healthy amount of simple hope.
“I’ll try to see that your son didn’t die for no reason at all,” I said.
He blinked once, taken by surprise, then held out his hand to me. “I hope we meet again, Lady Ronica.”
“So do I.”
He held my hand a moment longer than he needed to, then dropped it, straightened, turned his mount, waved his guards to follow, and started his journey home. In ten minutes we had packed up and started ours.
Tynnanna reached the border first, bounding down off the high plateau into the edge of the Honish forest, which gave some camouflage even on this side of the boundary. We followed him.
Our advance guards had already placed the army for us, and Jemeret and I used the Honish’s gross emotions to pinpoint the Beckanees and the Lewannees in the mass of people. We had decided—for reasons that remained unclear but felt right—that I would concentrate on the Lewannee men and Jemeret would take the Beckanees. We would use the starfire smoke like a fog to obscure all the view possible, but especially around us. The location was far enough from the sea marshes so that morning fog was a relative rarity, and until we created it, there had been no hint of any.
The Honish men were confident; they had no reason not to be. They far outnumbered us, and what they called the “Samish arts” had never been known to stop a projectile.
I read our own people as we approached the border, and without exception they were all feeling a calm determination, a trust in my lord and me which I found almost unbearably touching. It was not beyond the realm of possibility that some of us would die here, and yet I sensed no fear in anyone. How much of it was simple disbelief in that possibility, the human failing of thinking ourselves immortal, and how much something entirely different, I didn’t know. I would feel the same sense of ineffable gratitude each time this precise situation arose, when people with faith in us put themselves in peril because of that faith. In many ways, I still find it inexplicable.
I glanced back up toward the plateau, looking for Ashkalin and his men on the Samish side, but not finding them by sight and not willing to cast for them. I wished them well, hoping they were wishing us the same. Everyone was prepared to move as soon as we signaled. We wanted no hesitation, no chance for the Honish—slower than we were simply by virtue of their numbers—to try to move on us while we stood still.
As the sunlight gilded the crowns of the trees, we reached the frontier itself, and Jemeret and I looked at each other from the backs of our tivongs, touched each other with our stings, and acted.
I pathfound my brow-crown, asking it to release its energy, and the fog spread out, glowingly bright. At precisely that moment, Sandalari began to sing.
Like most agricultural societies, the Honish were very superstitious about the weather. Their rituals to propitiate the natural forces of sun, rain, hail, and wind, to magnify times of plenty and lessen times of want, had evolved into elaborate, often beautiful, prayers which they sang in worship services in their fields and pastures. Sandalari’s voice was priestess-trained, and it was as strong and as lyrically exquisite as Lyrafi’s. I sensed that the fog would also lift it and carry it along, magnifying its sound in the same way the cave on Zuglith played with sound.
When Jemeret first suggested stinging the families of the Honish leaders, I had wanted to imbue them with the sort of panic that would make them need to break and run away. Jemeret smiled and said, “You still have a tendency to think in terms of all or nothing. When superstition is at work, a little distress should be more than enough. We don’t have to do it all. We can let them work for us.”
So as the smoke spread out, a glowing fog in the otherwise clear morning, and Sandalari sang the Honish Song of Punishing Weather, Jemeret and I projected the kind of anxiety that arises in a religious person at odds with his deity. They would feel uneasiness, guilt, a sense of failure, of wrongness.
And as they tried to deal with that, bathed in the almost subliminal pathos of a prayer that they feared the need for and tried to avoid, we moved forward slowly, shielded by the fog.
We made it the entire way through the army of Honish guards and a good distance through the forest before we urged our mounts into a gallop. We knew, from maintaining contact with them, that the Lewannee men were actually less fearful than those of the Beckanees, but the latter were so determined to assert their own superiority that they forced the issue. The argument, blessedly, took a long, long time. Superstition, internal rivalry, and bewilderment are a powerful combination.
Venacrona crossed into Samish lands far ahead of the rest of us, and, traveling alone, managed to sneak past the scattered Honish patrols on this side of their lands. When he signaled back to us that he was safe, Jemeret pulled me in and used my reserves, along with his own, to bubble us. Sandalari’s singing was halted by the bubble, but that was probably a good thing, because she’d been singing steadily for almost eight hours, and the sun had already gone down.
Once Jemeret took my reserves, I had to let the starfire’s smoke return to the crown, and for the first time we could clearly see where we were. We had, of course, left the bulk of the army hours behind us. Unfortunately, the Honish guard patrols at the border saw us coming and knew who we were. The bubble meant they couldn’t hear us, but they showed up just as the fog dissolved.
I discovered firsthand that a bubble had no effect on an agerin pellet. One of the men, weapon already nocked and ready, fired before Jemeret or I, near exhaustion from the long drain on us throughout the day, could sting any of them.
Time slowed down and I was able to gauge the trajectory of the pellet as it headed for my chest. Then Tynnanna roared and, almost too fast to see, sprang at Rocky, who reared, startled. The pellet dug into my thigh. I damped down my pain receptors, though not soon enough to stop the stab.
Jemeret’s rage swept out past me, and a full quarter of the patrol dropped. Gundever, Henion, Sabaran, and Sheridar, along with most of the guards, were firing back almost at once. For a few moments the air seemed thick with arrows and pellets. The bubble had dissolved, Jemeret knowing it was useless once the firing started, and needing to conserve his rapidly waning energy.
Then the opposition was still, and we were pounding furiously across the scant remaining distance to our own lands. Three of us had been injured, Sheridar the most severely. As we all pulled to a halt, on our own territory at last, flinging ourselves from our lathered tivongs, Sabaran supported his son’s weight down off his mount.
Jemeret touched me long enough to ascertain that I was all right, then stumbled down off Vrand and went to Sheridar. Coney had helped Sandalari, who was as good as exhausted herself, then came to me. “Jemeret needs you more,” was all I said to him.
Venacrona and Gundever came to help me. I’d shut off the pain immediately, and I forced myself to concentrate on my own leg. The pellet had lodged against my thigh bone, but had fortuitously not shattered it. I diagnosed a hairline fracture and took the time to knit the bone cells back together again before I looked up at Venacrona’s anxious face. “Get the guards set up in case they come after us,” I said to him, and he gestured to Henion to see to it. I took a moment to glance quickly around, and only one of the Nedi guards had been hit, but the wound was clearly mortal. In the Com, he might have been saved. Here, there was neither technology, time, nor energy to accomplish that.
“Gundever, can you use your shortsword to dig the pellet out?” I asked him. “It won’t hurt me.”
The young guardsman drew his smaller sword and knelt next to my leg, sliding his gloved hand most of the way down the blade and pausing briefly. “Should I burn the blade first?” he asked. “I may have to go pretty deep.”
“My body will automatically act as an infecticide,” I said. “Just dig.”
Venacrona clasped my hand in his. “You’re trembling. You draw strength from Gund. I’ll get the pellet out.”
Gundever gratefully surrendered the blade, sat down beside me and took my hand out of Venacrona’s. “He’ll do a better job anyway,” he said to me. “Take as much of my energy as you need to hang on.”
Until his words actually registered, I didn’t realize how apt a description “hang on” really was. My reserves were nearly all depleted without my realizing it—the result of pathfinding the crown, stinging the Lewannees, yielding my strength to Jemeret, and then taking the pellet. I grasped at Gundever’s currently greater strength and drew in enough to stabilize myself before I could do the reserves any further injury. I’d been talentless once for a tenday; I didn’t want to have to confront that situation again. Gundever rocked a little, and I hastily scaled back my demands, embarrassed.
“Almost there,” Venacrona said distractedly, and a moment later, “The pellet’s out.” I began to rebuild the shattered cells, vessel and muscle both. Only when I thought I had done enough to avert serious injury did I draw myself back and, exhausted, lie panting.
Sheridar was fully conscious now, working on himself, and he nodded to the men around him. Sabaran briefly embraced Jemeret, and he and Henion bent to pull my lord to his feet. Jemeret looked over at me, his own weariness evident. “Hard as it may be to go on,” he said, “I think we have to put distance between us and the border.” For a moment he was almost angry again. “I didn’t want anyone to die, so I’m sorry, Henion, about Medio. And I think I may have blasted one of the Honish guards too strongly. I lost my temper when they almost succeeded in killing Ronica.”
I wanted to say I hadn’t been in any real danger, but memory conjured the picture of the pellet headed for my chest, and Tynnanna making Rocky leap to move me out of death’s path.
We buried the Nedi guard, but there was no time for ceremony over him. Then we stripped the gear from the tivongs wounded in the attack, for they had suffered more than we, being larger and easier to hit. When we remounted, Sabaran and his son rode double, as did Coney and Sandalari. Henion mustered the remaining guards and brought up the rear, protecting us as we went northeast, deep into the night.
By the time we stopped at last, near dawn, we were almost at the end of our strength, and it was threatening an icy winter rain, not, thank the stars, a storm. No one bothered with food. We just found a relatively sheltered clearing in the forest north of the Plain of Convalee, set up all the canvas shelters, fed the tivongs, rolled ourselves into our blankets, and slept or deeped, depending on our individual power levels. Sabaran gave the guards only one-hour watches, to ensure their continual freshness, but we were undisturbed for the long hours we needed to rest.
Avoiding war is sometimes more costly in talent than allowing war to be fought. We had been taught that in the Com, where we were carefully instructed in the process of balancing the costs of scenarios. There on Caryldon, we could not have fought the Honish army simply due to the strength of their numbers, but we could have eliminated the patrol with relative ease. Jemeret had chosen to try to avoid the killing, and had failed at the border. We paid a price for that in our own bodies and in the life of one of us. I don’t think I realized it then, but I was coming to believe it was the only price we had the right to pay.
When I swam upward from deeping into sleep, then snapped alert, my back was nestled against Jemeret’s chest and my nose was buried in the fur of Tynnanna’s shoulder. I snorted, and the cat rolled away from me, stretched elaborately, and got to his feet. Jemeret stirred, wakeful, too.
“Are you all right?” he asked, touching me with his sting.
I moved around to face him, still lying in his arms, touching him back. “Reserves full again,” I said. “You?”
He nodded. “I keep wondering how long I’ll be this resilient,” he said in a low voice. “Someday I’ll reach the point where one day’s deep won’t fill me. I wonder how old I’ll be when it happens.”
