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Coordinated Arm 02: Bretta Martyn

Page 12

by Smith, L. Neil


  At her slender waist, swinging from the wide leather belt which had been her first handcrafted project, hung the very knife—its broad, spatulate, gleaming-edged blade exactly as long as her strainfully outstretched hand from the tip of her thumb across to that of her littlest finger—with which she had, all by herself, flayed, field-dressed, and quartered the antlered forest animal from the russet skin of which she had fashioned her vest and slippers, sewing them with dried gut. The knife, a gift from both of her parents, denoting passage from babyhood, had been forged from the heart of a starfallen meteoroid, its generous handle crafted from a section of the antlers of a beast identical to the one she had killed virtually as her first act of young girlhood.

  At an age when most children were struggling not to soil their underwear, Bretta had learned that, in the forest (as well as everywhere else), a good knife could make the difference between survival—even comfort—and an ugly death. With her father’s encouragement, she had disciplined herself to care for her knife, and to groom it as carefully if it were a well-beloved pet.

  He had taught her all she knew of knives and other primitive weapons. Their use for fighting, in this age of kinergetic thrustibles, was an all but forgotten art which could confer considerable advantage, if only of surprise. That he had bothered to instruct her—in the use of thrustibles, as well—spoke volumes, when “properly brought-up” females were supposed to be too fastidious and fragile to defend their own (Arran always added, “worthless”) lives.

  Ironically, one of these “primitive” weapons promised a material improvement in the hard lives of her woodsrunner neighbors. Among the commodities Skye exported to a galactic marketplace (others consisting principally of herbs of several types) were native fungoids of numerous kinds, some used for medicinal purposes, some for cooking, and some intended for a more exotic application, usually left undiscussed in genteel company consisting of more than a solitary gender.

  The spores, suspended in a thick and sticky nutrient fluid in which she immersed the pointed tips of her quarrels, before launching them at selected trees in the surrounding forest, were those of giant “shelfshrooms,” greatly prized everywhere they could be obtained, for their rich, meaty flavor and texture. The species could be counted upon to grow with astonishing rapidity, in a single season swelling to the width of her outstretched arms from fingertip to fingertip, jutting out from their arboreal host at least half that distance, and a tapering measure thick, without doing the tree visible harm. Harvested, dried, sliced thin, and sautéed, they could be substituted for smoked and salted meat and combined with leafy lettuce and ripe tomatoes, with no one the wiser except whoever had assembled the delicacy in the first place.

  Long before the starship-raider Henry Martyn had made this rustic planet doubly celebrated, Skye had already been well-known in certain discriminating quarters for agricultural products such as these. The family of woodsrunners Bretta found herself assisting today had instructed her in all the secrets of the shroomer’s craft. In return—and small recompense it was, she reckoned—she had invented this unique method of planting their spores for them. As the shrooms were inspected over the next several weeks and attended by the farmers, they would collect her corrosion-proof quarrels and return them to her.

  More than anything, Bretta enjoyed this task because it took her away from the Holdings, away from four younger—and obnoxiously noisy—sisters, and afforded her time to think. It was a growing-up time that anyone her age, in any era, needed. Having once been fifteen himself, and having vowed to remember it well, Arran was correct in believing he understood the way his daughter Bretta thought. Nor, being who and what he was, was he inclined to resent what he had correctly deduced to be her principal line of reasoning these days.

  After all, what could be duller than being the child of one’s own parents?

  It even failed to trouble her understanding father in the slightest that in the fondly imagined privacy of her own thoughts, she styled herself (in her mind, at present, foremost) great-granddaughter to one Ianmichael Briartonson (locally pronounced “Bronson”), legendary Skyan woodsrunner and outlaw chief, and, more importantly (at least to Bretta), granddaughter to the infamous old Ianmichael’s martyred (and quite naturally, therefore—to any bright, fifteen-year-old human female—transcendently glamorous) daughter, Glynnaughfern Briartonson.

  It was this beautiful “native” girl, of course, who by and by had become the wedded wife of Hanoverian war hero Robret “the” Islay, Bretta’s paternal grandfather. By and by, she had also become the mother of Robret fils Islay, Donol Islay, and Arran Islay, in turn. It was a tragedy Bretta often reflected upon, that the pair of sons who might have recalled their mother best had been dead these past fifteen years. The first of them, Bretta knew, the younger Robret, had been but one of many victims of Tarbert Morven, the Black Usurper; the other, Donol of infamous reputation, had been the victim of his own evil treachery. Sadly, Glynnaughfern’s remaining living son was too young to remember her as more than the blurred memory of a face hovering above his cradle.

  Moreover, given a history of dire times and desperate circumstances upon moonringed Skye—not to mention the mundane reality that the Briartonson family, however celebrated, had earned a meager living as humble woodcutters—but few likenesses of Glynnaughfern were to be found. Many, indeed, had known the young woman when yet she lived, and to this day all remembered her well, enthusiastically regaling Bretta with tale after tale of her cleverness and kindness. And yet—perhaps by this very process—the bright and lovely peasant girl had, at the same time, somehow become an immortal, larger than life and legendary in stature, and many more—who had never in truth cast eyes upon her—now claimed nonetheless to have been among her closest friends.

  From time to time, Bretta’s father had directed a considerable number of artists, both of the homegrown amateur variety and professionals expensively imported from offplanet, to attempt drawings of his mother, based upon the remembrances of older Skyans. It had become something of a hobby with him, and the likenesses were now to be discovered in virtually every chamber of the Holdings. They had also been combined, by some variety of ulsic craft, into a formal portrait now hanging over the titanic fireplace in the Great Holdings Hall.

  It had been wise and beautiful Glynnaughfern, witnesses upon all sides afterward asserted (usually in interminable ballads imposed upon customers and stallkeepers in the village marketplace) who had altruistically given her selfless love, and eventually her precious life as well (it was proclaimed in forced rhyme and imperfect meter) to bring the curtain down upon a bloody war and obtain lasting peace between two hostile peoples. The war in question had been the prolonged and sanguine conflict between the Skyan “natives” and two distinct “waves” of Hanoverian conquerors who had arrived about a century apart.

  With chagrin, Bretta suddenly realized that she had somehow fallen into a reverie (”like a girl,” she admonished herself) and was neglecting work which must be finished well before the wan light of the deep forest glade began to fail her. She could do much that many another individual could not, but she could not see in the dark like a slit-eyed Skyan jerrypouncer. Three times in rapid order she cocked her crossbow, dipped a shaft in shroom spores, and sent the combination flying toward a tree she had chosen, creating a reliable bodily rhythm, before again allowing her conscious attention to the task to waver.

  Nevertheless, there was, for a young person in her place, much to think about, and unlike most people’s children, she had been taught to enjoy the act.

  The Skyan “natives,” of course, had not been native to the planet Skye at all, but simply descended from the first human beings to set foot upon the planet—not yet moonringed, if fireside tales were to be credited—in an antiquity so dim that nobody even recalled stories of it. That mountainous and wooded world, as lush as it appeared to be despite its small, cold seas, had given rise to no sapients. Its higher life-forms, no brighter than pets the newcomers had brough
t with them, were all completely alien trilaterally symmetrical.

  Recent archaeological estimations and attenuated folklore—principally arising from offplanet—generally agreed with what little local folklore there happened to be (collected, in the main, by Mistress Lia Woodgate, when she had lived here), placing initial human colonization of Skye at somewhere between nine hundred and one thousand standard years in the past, connecting it directly with an astonishingly widespread pattern of stories and popular beliefs centered upon humanity’s having been outcast from an ancient, mythological mother planet.

  And yet while mythology is one thing, reality is another altogether. In the beginning, as was well-known by those truly closest to her, the “sainted” Glynnaughfern Briartonson had been neither a willing nor an eager sacrifice to the cause of peace, love, and brotherhood upon Skye-under-the-Moonrings. What the young renegade had principally desired in those days was to murder as many Hanoverians as she possibly could, preferably with her own hands. As a fiery and capable combatant in her own right, she had only suffered the humiliation of being taken captive by Robret “the” Islay himself after leading an abortive raid upon some Hanoverian establishment he happened to be inspecting at the time.

  By all accounts, the subsequent romantic collision between the pair was an exceedingly passionate and violent one. Legend held that it had proceeded, inspired by the generally frenzied circumstances of wartime, from something greatly resembling mutual rape, to a deep and lifelong mutual devotion, in the span of only a few hours. And in this case legend was not merely consummately correct, but had been recapitulated so closely in the meeting of Bretta’s own parents that she entertained the idea that there was something genetic to the pattern.

  Glynnaughfern awoke the next morning, it was said afterward, pulsing with her bruises and her satisfaction, but to the impossible discovery that she had fallen in love with none other than the chiefmost of her father’s enemies and her own, as well: a foreign interloper who had been rewarded for his display of valor in some irrelevant war—by a faraway satrap who properly had no such right—with an abandoned Hanoverian title to the world that was their home.

  As the soul-shattering tale of Glynnaughfern’s capture and capitulation began to circulate among her former woodsrunner compatriots, she was neither praised by her fellow Skyan “natives” nor loved for what she had done—even for what, presumably, had been done to her. Upon the contrary, enough of her own people began to regard her as a traitor of the most contemptible variety imaginable—a bedroom collaborator—that her all-too-brief life was subject, from that moment onward, to the gravest dangers at every turn, and she lived what little of it remained to her under the shadow of imminent death.

  It was in the throes of childbirth, however, that beautiful and valorous Glynnaughfern had ultimately perished, the inevitable consequence, according to the dour pronouncements of her long-faced Hanoverian physicians, of almost a thousand years of biological isolation and genetic drift between Skyans and Hanoverians. The young woman had been surpassingly lucky, they had declared with a lugubrious disapproval—as they packed their carpetbags for the long journey overland to Skye’s equatorial starport—simply to have survived two previous successful pregnancies (these having been attended by Skyan midwives, they failed to mention) along with some unguessable number of unsuccessful ones.

  And so it was, as it often happens, that with the passage of time, her passion, for her own people as well as for her Hanoverian husband—and what came afterward to be regarded as her sacrifice for the sake of peace between them—came to be better and better understood and appreciated. No doubt thanks to her, in the end, Robret would prove a light-handed ruler who truly loved the world he had been given and respected its people and their customs. And, as also often happens in such affairs, it would be her children who would turn out to be her greatest gift to seal the bloody breach between two warring populations.

  For in even harsher times yet to come, Skyans and Hanoverians would stand together side by side against another foe and bring him down—together side by side—to the most ignominious defeat ever recorded in the history of the galaxy.

  And yet, myth and reality representing differing contours and textures of the same object, as they will, nobody (least of all, Bretta, herself) doubted that Glynnaughfern would far rather have lived, to enjoy seeing at least one of her sons grow up and sire six children of his own (thus far). Likewise she would have enjoyed spoiling her grandchildren and been proud (and unsurprised) to discover that, in terms of those grandchildren, everything had worked out vastly better than either she or her descendants might have planned, had they not, instead, merely followed the course their lives had plunged them upon, headlong.

  For above all, her eldest granddaughter Bretta (who was not a whit less beautiful than her fabled grandmother, if the girl but knew it) belonged, from the top of her handsome head to the tips of her well-formed toes, and to the equally admirable innermost recesses of her being, to both worlds, Skye and Hanover.

  CHAPTER XIV:

  OF CHILDREN AND PARENTS

  Someone was waiting for Bretta when she came down the hill at midday, bereft of quarrels save a prudent handful, crossbow slung over one sunburnt shoulder.

  “Hullo, My Little.” Her father winked. He, too, carried a sizable knife upon his belt, but in addition, had strapped his second-best thrustible to his right forearm. “I have come to tell you that our old friend and neighbor Hugh Toomey and his goodwife Selda have kindly invited us to luncheon.” Glancing over his own shoulder to assure that he was not being overheard, he added in a somewhat softer voice, “after which your mother requires us to return home and prepare for supper. ’Tis a hard life, I confess, but somebody has to live it!”

  Bretta laughed. The old friend and neighbor to whom Arran had referred was the very shroomer upon whose behalf she had spent this morning improving her already respectable marksmanship. It was his humble stacked-log home the tidy foreyard of which she and her father found themselves approaching as he spoke.

  “Friend Hugh, indeed.” She handed the man her empty spore crock, setting her crossbow down to lean against a knee, and gladly accepted the spraddlehorn dipper of well water he offered her. “I have started one hundred and fifty plants this morning. If the weather holds, I believe there will be time for a second crop before winter.”

  “Aye, yoong Bretta-me-lass.” The peasant bestowed upon her his infamous and nearly toothless grin. Having come into the world without a master, in a long-abandoned Hanoverian Drectorship, like other “natives,” he had violently resisted becoming a serf with the arrival upon Skye of Arran’s father. Since the Battle of Skye, however, there had been no serfs upon this planet; while Toomey was a tenant upon Arran’s land, he was nevertheless a free man. “An’ if ye’er hoppen t’be attacked by hardwood trees, ye’ll be that prepared, I’ll wager!”

  For just a moment, Bretta did not know quite what to make of old Toomey’s jest. It is a rare fifteen-year old, female or male, who can easily endure being made the butt of humor, especially by adults who may or may not be joking. Then she noticed her father watching her closely and recalled, through a hot haze of offended adolescence, just how long and how well this preposterously toothless figure before her had been their faithful and trusted friend. She burst into laughter that was genuine, for all that it had come a heartbeat late.

  “Too right,” Bretta offered. “Any I miss I’ll count upon you to chew to death!”

  This struck Hugh as the funniest thing he had heard in a long while, and as they all stooped low—Arran clapped Bretta upon the shoulder to let her know that he approved of what she had said—to enter the rude dwelling with its foot-hardened dirt floor, the man repeated it to his wife, a plump and prematurely aged woman with approximately the same number of teeth left as her husband.

  Selda Toomey laughed as she spooned a thick and aromatic stew into wooden bowls she had set upon the table. The fact that they had spoons and bowls—and a t
able—was a source of pride to them, and this primitive hovel of theirs, a lifelong dream come true. When they had married, Bretta knew, they had dwelt under a leanto over the hollow formed by the roots of a fallen tree. It was by no means, however, the source of Hugh and Selda’s greatest pride.

  “What news,” Arran asked them both as he sat down upon a bench beside his daughter and took his first bite of Selda’s stew, which was as rich with flavor as the old woodsrunner couple was poor of wealth, “d’you have lately of Young Hugh?”

  In a way, this polite exercise was absurd, for it was he who had brought them the news himself, only a few minutes earlier, in the form of yet another autothille from the capital, carried by the same ship the courier had arrived upon. Still, they could all pretend that he had asked for Bretta’s sake, for she knew their son quite well. Only a year or two older than Bretta, it had been Young Hugh, for the most part, who had taught her everything she knew of shrooms.

  Hugh sat himself down upon a tree stump roughly hacked into the shape of a stool, since the couple (who imagined themselves to be rich enough as it was, compared to the manner in which they had begun life together) possessed no other furniture. Selda assumed her usual proprietary pose beside the clay brick woodstove upon which she worked her daily culinary miracles. Before her husband could so much as open his toothless mouth to answer Arran’s question, she herself spoke up enthusiastically, and as she did so, placed a great round loaf of freshly baked bread upon the cleanly scraped boards of the trestle table.

  “Yoong Hughie’s doin’ right as rain, all thanks t’ye, sair. He tells us in yon thilly-thing they’ve premoted him already from scullery t’salad—an’ Ceo’s asked twicet herself for morsel of selfsame stew ye’re eatin’ now, she has!”

 

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