Bretta glanced up from her own rapidly emptying bowl, her eyes gleaming with appreciation and with happiness for the old couple over their son’s accomplishments—although in a corner of her mind, she remembered that they were not that much older than her own parents, ten or fifteen standard years, at most, which would make them between forty-five and fifty. There was many a citified pursuit—literature, politics—at which they would have been considered young.
In their pride—a pride Bretta had been brought up to understand well and to admire—they had refused repeated entreaties to come and work for the Islay family at the Holdings. The life they lived here aged them so quickly, she observed, not for the first time, although they appeared more than content to work themselves to death in the knowledge that their son’s life would be better.
Bretta knew her father believed such differences—not so much in wealth as in access to the benefits of technology—were a result of civilization’s failure to respect the rights every sapient should be at liberty to exercise and which he himself had fought so fiercely to guarantee. Old Hugh and Selda, like fifteen quintillion others throughout the imperium-conglomerate, remained poor because for centuries the Monopolity had carefully stifled every opportunity with rules and regulations (promulgated for nothing more than its own sake), taken away everything they had in taxes, and then wasted it all—and stolen their children into the bargain—for its innumerable and senseless wars. There was nothing their Drector-Hereditary could do here upon Skye, nor even the Ceo herself upon Hanover, that could make up for that, or even change it soon.
Bretta loved Hugh and Selda Toomey well and often wished that she could do more for them, but one could not do favors for a woodsrunner—not of the kind they could never hope to repay—for they would never permit it. Also, there was the point her father often made, that you cannot help everybody for very long—even those who may deserve it—before you begin to need help of some kind or another, yourself. Moreover, he had instructed her from his own bitter experience that help of any variety is much more likely to weaken those who receive it, than ever to uplift them. The kindest favor one can do for a fellow being was to exchange values with him upon an equal basis, or leave him alone.
In this particular instance, Arran (who did not always listen to his own lectures) had been at pains to convince the Toomeys that they were doing him a favor—helping him to make a good appearance upon Hanover—by allowing their only son to travel to the capital planet to work his mother’s culinary miracles, employing his father’s ingredients, in the Ceo’s shining kitchens. It was that “favor”—a useful and pleasurable fraud jointly perpetrated by a father and daughter—that Bretta was gradually “working off” in the shroom grove. That the Toomeys understood and permitted it only made the joke the better.
Afterward, Arran and Bretta deliberately took a long way home, strolling through the forest, enjoying one another’s company. Arran’s hands were tucked comfortably behind his waist in a manner particular to the deck-pacing officers of Deep-sailing vessels, especially those accustomed to wearing thrustibles upon their forearms. Bretta wore her weapon across her back upon a sling (not the best choice, tactically, had she not been well escorted) in order to carry a crock of shroomstew Selda was sending her mother. Arran often felt a pang of guilt that he loved this eldest daughter of his more than anyone else, with the exception of his wife. He had five other children to please him, but none of them was Bretta.
“I came out to meet you here this afternoon with a purpose in mind,” he confessed.
“I reckoned that you had, Father,” she replied, “despite the autothille from Hanover that you brought to the Toomeys. And good news that was, was it not?”
“Aye, My Little, that it was.” Idly, he stooped to pick up a stick the length of his arm and employed it to swat at the ripened heads of weeds they encountered as they walked along. “But my real purpose, as you have in some part anticipated, was to remind you of something—some pertinent facts with regard to the life we Islays lead here—before I convey to you some news of my own.”
A sense of deep foreboding swept unbidden through her body like a sudden chill. And yet—unlike virtually any other child of her years—she kept silent, merely nodding to her father in acknowledgment of what he had just said.
He cleared his throat. “As you understand well, Bretta, I was compelled by the ugliest of personal and political circumstances to grow up somewhat earlier in life than most children of our culture are generally accustomed to doing.”
Bretta smiled, for this was more familiar ground to her. “Yes, Father, I know the story well of how, as the merest youth, you arose perforce to become known to an entire dumbfounded galaxy as the Deep-roving ship-scourge Henry Martyn.” Although her words may have been mocking ones—perhaps the only ones possible in these circumstances—they both knew that her admiration was genuine.
“I warrant that this is the Deep-roving ship-scourge’s wench—your own dear mother—speaking through you.” Arran shook his head to conceal a grin. That his eldest daughter was actually proud of her father was more, at times, than he could bear. “A Deep-roving ship-scourge, I might add, who now prefers simply to be known as his beautiful and intelligent daughter’s loving father.”
Had these words been delivered in any less straightforward a tone, they would doubtless have elicited from her a response common to those of her age, involving a finger thrust down the throat, accompanied by a gagging noise. As it happened, although it had been spoken as if in jest, Bretta knew that her father’s protest—allowing for an intermittent painful longing (which she shared) to find himself back under starsail upon the boundless Deep—was genuine.
“All of that was in the evil days of the Black Usurpation,” she volunteered instead. “At the merest mention of those terrible times, Hugh and all of his cronies still avert their faces and spit, and nobody needs any explanation of their bitter feelings over that. As impoverished as they were before his vile advent, Morven left them even more so. We still lack an accurate account of the number of them he slaughtered. And yet, Father, I have always thought it a trifle contradictory that Skyans might prefer one set of Hanoverians over another.”
“You have always thought a trifle too much—belay that, My Little, for it was an ill-delivered joke which I do not mean, even in the slightest. Hugh and his folk—which is to say, our folk, through your paternal grandmother—are possessed of a most sensible desire to know where they stand at all times.”
Bretta nodded her approval.
“This sensible desire upon their part is readily satisfied by nothing more difficult than the consistent rule of law upon our part, and the most energetic enforcement of their rights we can manage.” With his stick, he struck a seed-pod from a stalk and watched it hurtle across the clearing they passed through to fetch against a treetrunk. “Failing either of these, they will rebel, and in their place, so would you or I. That is exactly what I did.”
“Against everything and everyone by all accounts.” She approved of this, too.
He chuckled. “That’s about what it amounted to at the time. Looking back, I suppose what made the Usurpation most unbearable to me, in an abstract sense disconnected from the suffering it caused, was the fact that Morven’s brutal and illegal activities upon Skye had the tacit approval of Leupould IX, himself.”
“While you, upon the same account, had no allies upon whom to rely in your struggles.” There had been times, when she was younger, that being told of this injustice to her father had made her clench her tiny fists and weep with rage. “All ’Droomly hands within the Monopolity being turned against you, you were forced to build an army and a navy out of outcasts, criminals, and failures.”
He shrugged. “Exactly like myself.”
“Do not be silly, Father. You were even younger than I am when it all began, and bear responsibility only for having righted the wrongs perpetrated or permitted by others. This is also why you turned for help to aliens like the nacyl
and the seporth. We don’t see enough of them these days, you know.”
He sighed. “I know, My Little. I did learn much from my disheartening ‘educational’ experiences, which I have always hoped to pass on to you less painfully. Which brings us, by the sheerest of coincidences, back around the barn and to the point: as a consequence of all I suffered in my youth, I have endeavored to see that, even at your tender age, you are as self-sufficient a creature as your mother and I can make you. You are aware of this, are you not?”
Bretta rested a well-educated hand upon the familiar pommel of a tool and weapon that she could, at need, have fashioned for herself, in all likelihood, had the knife not been made as a gift from her parents. “Very well, indeed, Father.”
Arran paused to place a hand over his daughter’s. “And in every respect, My Little, every day, your mother and I have discovered a more willing, more eager, brighter, and more talented student than ever we might have wished for.”
“Thank you very much, Father,” she sniffed. “You are about to make me cry.”
“My sincere apologies.” He had been close to it, himself. “Never thank somebody for simply telling you the truth, My Little—now where was I? Oh, yes—and because I had to learn it all the hard way, you have been taught how to work a full-sized interstellar sailing vessel, and can acquit yourself passably in every position of responsibility from common deckhand to overall command. I have even included in your education certain hard-learned ins and outs of starship gunnery that military and merchant captains know very little about.”
“Yes, Father.” Bretta wondered—and worried—what Arran was leading up to. For his part, he was struck by her uncharacteristically submissive tone.
“Now admittedly, My Little,” he went on in an attempt to reassure her, “your practical experience of starsailing and gunnery has been limited. Over the years—and they have seemed passing short to me—I have only been able to take you upon outings in the near-spatial environs of our homeworld. For this reason, I will take you with me upon whatever mission the Ceo Lia has in mind.”
There was a considerable pause while Bretta struggled inwardly to absorb the unbelievably good news she had just been given. Then: “You really mean it? Oh, Father, please tell me you are not joking!” In an attempt to leap, dance, laugh, and seize her father about the neck, all at once, she very nearly lost the crock of shroomstew she carried. “Where will we go? Is Mother going with us? Of course she is! What will we do? Do we sail first for Hanover?”
“More than likely.” Arran laughed, too, loving his daughter all over again for the game creature that she was. “And yes, your mother is going with us. As to the rest of it, we will have to see. The ‘bad’ news is that you must trade that twanger across your back for the thrustible I have been saving for you.”
She laughed again. She knew the particular weapon in question well, and in plain truth had always more than halfway expected that it would be given to her someday. Now she wondered whether she would be required to wear a dress, and whether the thrustible—her thrustible—could be concealed within its sleeve.
Thanks to her conscientious and unconventional father, the girl had long known (and from more frequent exercise than her shiphandling practice) which end of a deadly kinergic thrustible was which. Like the atatl, davesling, gladius, bowie, andfortyfive before it, it was the personal weapon of the times. Still, this was a rare skill for any woman of Bretta’s milieu to possess.
Bretta had a thorough theoretical grounding and considerable experience in many other technical subjects, and—at the insistence of her mother—she was well versed in all of the historical and literary subjects, too. She could also outrun, outclimb, outswim, and outfight any of the local boys she knew. In all of this—although it was at Arran’s insistence she had become acquainted with various kinds of primitive weapons, powered, unpowered, Skyan, and otherwise—Bretta had been following all her life a particular example that her mother, Loreanna, might not even have been consciously aware she was offering.
In a civilization that otherwise consisted largely of deliberately self-enfeebled women, Loreanna Islay was another of those rare females who knew what a weapon was for and feared not to use it at need. She took pride and pleasure in maintaining her proficiency and, upon more than one occasion, everything she lived for had been preserved by what many of her overly tamed contemporaries would have regarded as an unseemly willingness to fight, mostly with the ancient chemenergic handgun Arran had given her. To this day, Bretta knew, she carried the small, black walther pp in a pocket of her dress.
Bretta was perfectly aware that her own existence was a direct result of a fiery romantic meeting between a daring, swashbuckling boy outlaw and the girl who became his equally daring bride-of-war. In its own way, the whole thing was more than a little reminiscent of what had happened between her grandfather Robret and her grandmother Glynnaughfern. Loreanna—packed off for disobeying her uncle—had been an unwilling passenger aboard a starship that Henry Martyn happened to have seized. She first became his prisoner, then secondly his woman, and at last his wedded wife and the mother of his children.
And yet, although the unique, cherished, and affectionate understanding often said to exist between a father and a daughter prevailed indeed between Arran and Bretta, his youthful exploits as Henry Martyn had somehow been set aside in her mind as something mythical. Perhaps it was simply too difficult to see a swashbuckler in the gentle soul who read bedtime stories to his baby daughter.
It had always been just as hard for Bretta to watch her mother knitting, for example, and to appreciate that those same small, capable hands had fought for life and death against many an enemy too despicable to mention in decent company. Upon more than one occasion, Loreanna had firmly refused to tell her bloodthirsty young daughter whether she had ever killed anybody, “in the old days.”
Yet perhaps after all, this may have been a rare mistake in the girl’s upbringing. To Bretta, as to everybody else, the fabulous star-raider Henry Martyn, and Loreanna his fearsome warrior-wench, had become figures out of fantasy. And although she saw and spoke with her illustrious parents every day, at the same time, they belonged somehow to another world and a different time.
CHAPTER XV:
ARRAN ISLAY’S DAUGHTER
In daylight, the moonring was often visible as a ghostly band across the sky.
Together, Arran and Bretta emerged from the growing shadows of the forest to find themselves at the edge of the great green meadow, upon the far side of which lay the Holdings. Sprinkled with the low blossoms of a dozen brilliant colors—which would eventually transform themselves into harvestable and delicious groundberries—the cover was less than ankle-deep this early in the year, and it was not very long before they stood within their own flagged foreyard.
Bretta looked back the way they had just come, the way she had taken—she did some multiplying in her head—many thousands of times since she had first turned seven or eight and had won the freedom to roam as widely as she did now. It was difficult to credit the story that an entire town, comprised of hundreds of flimsy false-fronted shanties, had once arisen in that broad green field, been utterly destroyed upon the historic night of the Battle of Skye, and every last trace carefully removed afterward by her parents and by thousands of eagerly cooperating Skyans. She had never found as much as a nail or button to show what evil the Black Usurper and his minions had wrought there.
Upon reaching home, Arran had excused himself almost at once, speaking vaguely of some chore that must be attended to, giving his daughter a hug, and a kiss upon her forehead, and telling her that he would see her once again at table with the rest of the family. Even at the age of fifteen, Bretta was neither unbright nor particularly naive. Their discussion of his glorious outlaw past had gone exactly as far as it ever had upon a hundred previous such occasions, and had shut off as abruptly as it always did when it had reached a certain point.
Bretta could not help but understand from
this pattern that, for all of her life—or at least as long as she could remember—her father had been concealing some painful secret. She had watched this specter herself, creep up and steal the joy of life right out from under him upon too many otherwise happy occasions. Whatever it was, it had to be the source, she had long ago reasoned, of the troublesome and uncomfortable distance she could often feel between herself and—not so much her father, perhaps, but—his heroic past.
She sighed as she always did whenever she felt defeated in this manner, and, rather than head directly for the great house, directed her steps to one of the outbuildings, where the estate’s spreighformery was maintained. Here, many useful things were fabricated, a single atom at a time, and there was an ample washroom she could enjoy without the enthusiastic assistance of her four sisters.
She had given her father the crock of shroom stew, which he had offered to deliver to the kitchen. Now she laid her crossbow upon a workbench, along with her sheathed hunting knife, hip-quiver, and what few she had left of her quarrels. She had already locked the door behind her, knowing it was unlikely that anyone would wish to use the workshop this close to suppertime and that its several windows were just grimy enough to assure her adequate privacy. Striding into the washroom, she sat down upon a wooden bench to remove her leather slippers. The red floor bricks were cool upon the bare soles of her feet.
Almost half of the spreighformery washroom had been given over to what might have been called a shower enclosure, had it actually been more enclosed. Bretta set both of the showerheads running, directed partly at the floor and more or less at one another, a luxury she sometimes permitted herself, until the air within the washroom hung heavy with warm vapor. Unfastening her vest—its buttons had been fashioned from pierced sections of the antlers of the same forest animal which had provided the hide—she hung it over a wooden peg set beside the plank-built door and stripped away her cutoff working trousers.
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