Swords Above the Stars

by Roman Zlotnikov

  The Baron stared at him irritably for a few seconds, then her face softened.

  “It looks like you are afraid, my boy!” she sneered. “Perhaps you’re not totally useless, just stupid like all men.” She gently moved her closed gloved fist against his jaw and graciously added. “My castle lies fifteen miles to the north. When your hostess lets you out, you can call in on me. I’ll see what you can do, and if I like it, you will receive a gift.” Then turning on her heels, she left the balcony.

  Yv leaned against the wall. Unbelievable, or what? Firstly, she makes him out to be an idiot, then tries to seduce him with a pair of perfumed gloves. He broke down and burst out laughing. The day had started nicely.

  Don Krushinka was in his quarters. When Yv staggered inside, he raised his head irritably, looking up from the display, but on seeing who his guest was he sighed, turned off the computer, and rubbed his face with his hand. The room was in a mess. Noticing Yv’s puzzled look, Don Krushinka grinned.

  “Today I will be flying on to Lusus. I put all the dons’ requirements into one request and gave it to the local suppliers, so now I can get back to the squadron.” He caught himself and nodded toward a chair. “Sit yourself down. Any problems?”

  Yv shrugged.

  “ I just had a conversation with some lady or other called Baron Medjid.”

  Don Krushinka froze, then stopped him with a gesture.

  “Wait. Tell the rest to my...”

  He got up and went into the next room. A few minutes later Admiral Sandra appeared, dressed in a bathrobe with slippers on her bare feet, and rubbing the sleep from her eyes.

  “For Adam’s sake, my Mustachioed One, this is the first time in thirty hours that I’ve managed to lie down. What has happened that you...”

  Don Krushinka didn’t let her finish. Nodding toward Yv, he said, “Baron Medjid has just tried it on with our young friend here.”

  “What are you talking about?” Sandra was instantly awake. “What’s he told you?”

  “Nothing yet. I thought that we should listen to it together.”

  Sandra nodded.

  “Not just us together, but the three of us.” She slid over to a console in the corner of the room and pressed the call button. “Sorry to interrupt you my dear, but could you urgently come over to my place? I know ... I know ... And yet ... No, I mean immediately. There is no time to lose.” She turned to the men. “Tera is on her way now.”

  A few minutes later the front door opened, and Tera marched briskly into the apartment. Yv’s heart skipped a beat. He did not lie to the baron when he said that he had only seen Tera once briefly. He hadn’t had a chance to see her in two weeks.

  That evening, when he arrived for dinner, she was waiting for him alone. Captain Umarka gave him a silent glare, opened the door, and shoved him inside. It was likely that from such a push, other visitors would fly into the room, but Yv just shrugged and stepped forward. In the middle of the apartment stood a table laid for two persons, and Tera was sitting at her desk in the far corner, looking over some printouts. Seeing him, she smiled, although looking a little tired, put down the sheets of paper and rose. It took Yv’s breath away. For a few seconds, he stood there, staring at her with round eyes, then came to his senses and turned away, blushing. He had noticed that among the aristocracy of the kingdom, for whatever reason, it was not customary to use makeup often, but sometimes when they used it ... Tera smiled at him, and it seemed to him that she was a little flattered, then she squinted slyly.

  “You have such a dazed look on your face.”

  “I ... it’s ... I mean ... Yes.” He shrugged irately without raising his eyes. “I’m sorry, Your Majesty, I ...”

  “Tera.”

  “What?” Yv didn’t understand.

  “We agreed that when we are alone, it’s just Tera.”

  Yv just nodded, unable to speak. They both sat down at the table in silence. During dinner, Yv dispelled the legend of the don’s for having bottomless stomachs, and he barely touched the delicacies standing on the table. Finally, Tera, feeling awkward, decided to slightly lighten the atmosphere. “Tell me about the war,” she asked him.

  Yv froze and looked at her carefully. Sympathy shone in her huge green eyes. He suddenly felt the tension that he had from the moment he crossed the threshold of the room, leave him. For some time Yv sat silently, remembering the boring, half-starved months waiting in anticipation of new contracts, the grinning ugly faces of trolls, the scary appearance of the Scarlet Prince on the monitor, everything that had been part of his life for the last seventy-five years then he began to speak.

  Glancing around the room with an angry look, Tera turned to Sandra.

  “Well, what is this all about?”

  Sandra nodded toward Yv.

  “Our young ... or rather, young-looking friend just had a conversation with Baron Medjid.”

  Tera’s eyes opened wide. She turned abruptly and looked sharply at Yv.

  “What did she want to know?”

  Yv shook his head.

  “I will not repeat that before Tera.”

  “What?”

  Yv grinned. “Throughout our conversation, I was tormented by the question, do I really look like such a fool? Now I understand why she talked to me that way.”

  Sandra smiled. “What way was that?”

  Yv stubbornly shook his head.

  “Pardon me, Your Majesty, but I will not talk about it in front of you.”

  For a few moments Tera looked at him in surprise then said icily, “If it was about something tarnishing my honor, you can safely repeat it. Baron Medjid is one of my most bitter enemies, so nothing that comes from her would surprise me.”

  Yv was silent. Sandra sighed and turned to Tera.

  “Listen, my girl, we can’t waste time trying to convince this stubborn young man.”

  Tera thought for a moment. “Is the story long?”

  Yv shrugged. “The conversation lasted about five minutes.”

  “OK, I’ll wait in the next room.” She gave Yv a poisonous glance. “I hope he will not mind if you tell me everything that you hear here?”

  Sandra looked at Yv. He just shrugged his shoulders.

  “You know her Majesty better, so you can decide what is necessary to tell her, and what is not.”

  Tera left, and Sandra and Don Krushinka turned to Yv.

  “In general, the whole conversation was reduced to the following. firstly, her ladyship brazenly asked me if I was sleeping with Tera. Next, she recommended me to be more persistent. When I showed my extreme reverence for Tera, she touched me protectively on the cheek and said that if I was to be of her taste, and if in the near future I visited some castle fifteen miles to the north and tried hard, I might receive a gift.”

  Sandra and Don Krushinka looked at each other dumbfounded and laughed in unison. When they calmed down a bit, Sandra shook her head.

  “Perhaps you’re right. The girl should not have to know about it. She would eat Medjid alive, and that would seriously aggravate the situation in the Council of Peers...”

  After a moment’s thought, she looked at Don Krushinka. He nodded back. “You see, the arrival of the dons has not aided Tera’s popularity among the higher aristocracy, and some naval officers have basically taken it as a slap in the face.”

  “We didn’t come here because we wanted to,” muttered Yv resentfully. “We were asked to come.”

  Sandra smiled sadly.

  “Sometimes, I think this was all a mistake. For the first time, the opposition has a slim chance, but I still do not see any alternative. The girl was very determined, and an attack by the forces of our fleet alone would mean certain death. Now she realizes this, but this time she felt that we should do exactly as I advise. I don’t know, maybe I should try to dissuade her...” She sighed and turned to the door to the next room. “OK, Tera has been waiting for long enough. Tera!”

  Tera came from the next room. She looked angry.

  �
��Well, was it so awful that my gentle girlish ears could not hear it?”

  Sandra smiled and nodded. “Something like that.”

  “So, what was it?”

  Sandra shrugged. “They made a clumsy attempt to make you lose your temper, and in addition,” she smiled again, “he was very clearly propositioned. There are some interesting options here.”

  Tera looked at Sandra puzzled for a few seconds, then her face flushed crimson. “No way!”

  “Why not?” Sandra asked in surprise. “In my opinion, it’s a great chance to find out what they are up to. Also, we need to do something about this storm they have raised in the Council of Peers.”

  “No,” Tera repeated, stubbornly shaking her head.

  Yv grinned. “Would anyone like to ask my opinion?”

  The women stared at him, then looked at each other with some embarrassment. In this world, they were not used to listening to men’s opinions, but then again, he wasn’t from this world.

  Sandra shrugged. “Well, what do you have to say then?”

  “Nothing special, I just got used to deciding who I sleep with, whose face I beat up.” He stood up. “So please forgive me, but I intend to continue to do the same.”

  Did it seem to him that really saw Tera’s eyes flash with satisfaction? Yv did not stare any closer, and he left the apartment, angrily slamming the door behind him. Back in the room assigned to him, he looked in the mirror and saw his face was red as a beetroot. Yv tore off his jacket, put his head under a stream of cold water, then climbed into the shower. His nerves calmed down a little, but to totally bounce back to normal, he needed to do something radical.

  He dressed and went out to the disc flyer in the parking lot.

  He found the trattoria quite quickly. It was the first such institution outside the gates of the commercial port in which Stubborn Bull had been given a landing space. Yv left the disc flyer in the port parking lot and walked to the door. The room was crowded. The tables had been moved to the middle of the room and placed in the center was a water filter with a stainless-steel housing, from which the heavy smell of raw spirit filled the room. Before he could look around the clientele, Beer Keg’s joyful shout came from the far corner.

  “I swear by Saint Gregory and Saint Yerema, it’s Lucky! So, you managed to escape!”

  Yv moved unhesitatingly over to his friends. When he approached the table, Beer Keg grumbled in fun. “You have been gone for so long, young man. I swear by Saint Christina, I really thought you had decided to settle down!”

  He guffawed loudly at such a ridiculous assumption, but Grey Moustache didn’t laugh. He only looked at Yv and silently poured him out half a glass of brandy. Yv grabbed the glass and drank it one go. Beer Keg paused and shook his head.

  “Yes, my brother, I swear by Saint Jorgen, it seems to me, that you have had enough of palace life!” He sighed. “I’ve always said that a Noble Don needs to stay away from three things. the palace parquet floor, the female heart, and the claws of a Scarlet Prince. All of them bring certain death, but at least with the Scarlet Prince you won’t suffer for long.”

  Yv nodded and held out his glass for a refill. In the end, hadn’t he come here to get drunk?

  Yv fell out of the trattoria and nearly collapsed on the pavement. Thank God, his arm got some support, which for some reason screamed and began to push him away, but he clung to it like a drowning man at a straw, and she stopped him from collapsing.

  Somehow restoring his balance, Yv grabbed onto his support, which was struggling to get away from him, and he pulled it closer to his dazzled eyes. The cute attractive face seemed vaguely familiar to him. Yv grinned stupidly, mumbled something like an apology, and let the lady go, wondering whether or not to give a courteous bow.

  Such an action was fraught with the chance of a complete loss of balance, so he kept his balance to avoid falling over from any sudden movement, and merely lifted his hand and tried to wave, but could not even bring the face into focus.

  Something swished before his face, and Yv, automatically waving it away with his hand, felt a faint stab of pain in his palm. His eyes finally focused. His savior stood across from him in a very aggressive posture, holding out a drawn sword, but her expression was clearly startled. Yv felt some itching in the palm of his hand, and gently, taking care not to upset his center of gravity, put his hand before his eyes and stared blankly at the glove which had been cut almost in half.

  The palm of his hand, however, remained smooth and clean, without a scratch. He looked blankly at his hand for a few seconds, then muttered, “Did that just really happen,” and belching loudly, returned to the door of the trattoria.

  Tera dropped her sword arm and leaned against the wall. “How rude ...” She snorted indignantly. “By Holy Eva, what possessed me to look for him? I managed to escape from the supervision of my security guards and came to these stinking outskirts in the hope of talking to him alone, and it turns out, he had got drunk as a pig, and he couldn’t even recognize me.”

  Then she remembered that she had struck him with her sword in anger and shuddered involuntarily. Thank Eva the blow struck with the flat of the blade, or it could have been ... She angrily shrugged her shoulders. Or tomorrow, in every corner of the land, there would be whispering about how she had run to a dirty, smelly drinking hole chasing a rootless don from the borderlands.

  Tera pushed herself off the wall with her shoulder, scowled at the trattoria’s door, and resolutely turned, heading back to the quiet field where she had left her disk flyer.

  6

  Yv awoke and sat down on the bed. Outside the window, the sun glimmered, but he had no idea whether it was dawn or sunset. His head was spinning. In his mouth, there was a taste like dung from flocks of sheep. He remembered the hangover cure from New Town and groaned in his head.

  “Listen, big boy, I admit you were not that bad, but shut up and let me sleep!”

  Apparently, he had moaned aloud. Next to him, lying face down on the bed was a short-haired brunette of about thirty years of age, with a painfully contorted face. She was totally naked. For a few seconds, Yv looked at her with a bewildered expression then asked. “Who are you?”

  The girl sighed loudly and with a supple movement she sat up on the bed, showing off her gorgeous breasts.

  “Oh, damned Adam, you men are so stupid! Adam damn your home-brewed alcohol!” She moaned, and slid off the bed, slapping the floor with her bare feet, and walked to the glass cubicle in the corner.

  After a while, there was a noise of the shower. Yv sat for a few moments, staring blankly at the door, then looked around. No doubt he was in the hotel. It was a standard room with a few trinkets, whether owned by the landlord or simply set out by clients to enliven the interior.

  The things in the background looked somewhat alien but clearly indicated that this world was dominated by women. The room was obviously cheap—this was indicated by the barely noticeable repairs to the sheets and tablecloths—but it shone with a cleanliness which was pleasing to the eye: napkins, chair covers, and the like.

  Also, there was a shower - an unthinkable luxury! Yv tried to remember yesterday’s events, but only some fragments appeared before his eyes, the clearest of which was raising his glass. Yv shook his head, swung his legs to the floor, rose carefully and went to the window. The city outside was an unusual sight.

  The cities that Yv had visited before were linked by the roar of soaring space shuttles. Judging by what was visible from the window, it was unlikely that in this city there were more than a dozen similar looking houses, but all of them, from the towers of the City and ending with the sprawling suburbs, were stylized in the period of the Middle Ages.

  It was stylized but not an ugly copy, as happens in some worlds, where the owners of taverns saved every cent or penny from the pauper’s fee guests like him could afford. They were just happy to have a roof over their head, a wooden trestle bed with a straw mattress, and a piece of meat toasted on a skewer over t
he hearth.

  The noise of water from the shower went quiet. Yv turned and stared at the girl who appeared out of the shower, still naked, but with a turban on her head made from a towel. Without looking at him, she went to the mirror, checking herself over with a critical eye, took a jar of cream from the dressing table and began to rub it into her skin.

  “Did you order breakfast yet?”

  “What?” Yv didn’t understand.

  The girl sighed. “Clearly not!”

  Having finished with the cream, she went to a small bedside console and pressed a button. “Steward!”

  “I hear you room twelve,” came a voice from the console.

  “Breakfast for two. With wine. Nothing extravagant, just enough to be paid for with a few queens.” She let go of the button and turning to Yv she grinned. “I hope you will not be charging me for last night.”

  Yv pondered on her words for a few moments, then it came to him, and he almost choked with indignation. Of course, in this world, the brothels were staffed by men. The girl laughed.

  “All right, little man, let’s get dressed. Breakfast will be here soon.”

  Yv spotted his belongings scattered in every corner of the room, but everything was there, including his sword which was hanging from the bed’s headboard, as was his habit. One of his gloves looked like it had been slashed across the palm. He looked at it in puzzlement for a few seconds but then just tucked it into his belt. He was not so rich as to throw away things that could still be repaired. Pulling on his jerkin, he turned to the girl. She was still naked, sitting on the bed and critically considering the mutilated rags which Yv guessed were her bra and panties. The girl turned and stared at him mischievously.

  “Why such impatience? Listen, young man, you owe me some new underwear.” She tossed the rags in the corner, shaking her head in frustration and started to pull clothes over her naked body, murmuring.

  “Adam be damned, that was my best underwear, and hardly ever worn!”