At the bottom of the board, Culmeni asked the priest some questions about Sceni music. Beside him, Frikard and Vraser spoke of casualties. Lieutenant Darkcut drew Buschard into a discussion of wine with Commander E-varit, and within a few minutes no observer would have guessed that any of the people at the table had been engaged in a life-and-death struggle a few hours earlier.
Buschard, having to speak across Kessie Darkcut to reach E-varit, began to discuss a legendary vintage with him. His words reached Vraser. “I drank Ferrea ’49.”
“I doubt that very much,” Vraser interrupted from across the table.
“You may be right,” Buschard conceded quickly, for Vraser’s knowledge of wines was notorious in the fleet. “I was told it was the ’49, and it was quite good, but who knows?”
“You don’t, obviously. The Ferreans have bottled more ’49 than an entire planet can make in a decade. How much did you pay?”
“You old kelt-purse! Let me see. About fifty—maybe more.”
“Humph. You got knicked. Sometimes I wonder if there ever was a ’49, or whether the Ferreans just made it up to rob fools and snobs.”
“Hah! They got you too, didn’t they?” Buschard seemed elated by this discovery.
Vraser reached for a platter of cheese, the dim light reflecting softly off his balding head. “Perhaps,” he said in a condescending tone, “but I never got taken for any fifty chits.”
The portal slid open with a tiny hiss. Everyone except the Havassit priest turned to see who was coming in. The priest had his back to the door but seemed uninterested in who might be coming up behind him. It was one of the five or six unauthorized pards which lived aboard ship. The graceful feline swept in like a grande dame, leapt lightly onto the table and walked its length, fluffy tail erect. It walked up to Gilhame, sat down on his plate, wrapped its tail around itself and yawned into his face. He looked at it, reached out and stroked it under the chin, and was rewarded with an ecstatic buzz.
“Hello, my pretty,” he said. The pard flowed off the table into his lap, turned several times, settled down and went to sleep. Gilhame continued to stroke it as he turned his attention to Group Commander E-varit.
“Commander, I have no pretensions to the role of connoisseur of food and wine. I leave that to Vraser and Buschard. I am accounted something of a small expert on music and the dance. Tell me, have you ever heard Grentarian pipes?”
E-varit gave him a slight glare. “Once or twice.” Then he looked uncomfortable. “Their sound is not quite to my liking.”
“It could not be otherwise, under the circumstances. How maladroit of me. Tell me, what do you think of Lavarin’s conducting?”
Ur Fagon smiled. Grentar, Krispin’s home world, was famous for many things besides its brandy and fine cloth. One of these was the Grentarian pipes, renown through most of space for their uneasy music. But both men knew that ur Fagon had not referred to the music but to the history of the instruments themselves. The story of the Vrandonian peace conference was well known—how the Grentarians had killed the principal envoy during the meal, to the eerie music of the pipes.
“We live in very odd times, don’t we, Admiral?” E-varit answered, ignoring Gilhame’s question.
“Odd times?”
“Our cultures—yours, mine, the Nabateans, the Kalurians, most of us except the Havassit—have evolved an entire literature based on deceit and treachery. Have you ever thought about it? We say a man speaks like a Lurian—and we mean he lies. We refer to Risar promises—my daughter used the phrase when her betrothed wed another—and yet the Risar have broken but one oath. But that is all we remember about them, not that Corluss Hruska, the greatest playwright of the last decade, was a native of Risar. My son and I spoke of it one night some years ago. He was about fifteen and doing his psychohistory specials. He wondered that there was no scholarly journal called ‘The Annals of Deceit.’ ”
“ ‘The Annals of Deceit.’ Interesting. He sounds like a lad with a good head on his shoulders. Does he still pursue his interest?”
“He was one of my fighter pilots,” said E-varit, his triangular eyes narrowing. “I am afraid that the mines you used ended any interests he had in . . . anything.”
Gilhame stared at his adversary, the tiny golden flecks dancing in his green eyes. “Your sorrow is my sorrow,” he said formally. “Let us desire that, upon his return, there will be peace.”
The people of the Ten Nations had as many diverse religious beliefs as the nearly four thousand worlds which comprised them. The Kardusians and the Nabateans held to reincarnation after a period of atonement for wrongdoing, while the Coalchee believed that if one was ritually salted, one escaped rebirth. The absence of salting guaranteed that E-varit’s son would come back as a member of some other race. To a Coalchee, that was the ultimate punishment.
E-varit nodded and sipped his glass. “No doubt they piped him into the Overworld with the music of Grentar,” he said bitterly. “All the allusions we have constructed to prevent us from direct reference. I wonder why?” “Self-disgust, Commander,” said Lieutenant Darkcut. “We are a brutal and uncivilized people, and we know it. The tale of our years is a glorious history of war. Do you wonder we try to pretend that war is forced upon us, not our own deadly choice?”
E-varit turned his head and looked at her a little sternly. “Strong words for one of your profession, Lieutenant.” “Have you ever thought why so few women enter my discipline?”
“No.”
“Women have few illusions. And they have none whatever about the glory of war.”
“Perhaps. Have you ever been to Shipana?”
“In the Nabatean sector? No, I haven’t.”
“You, Admiral?” E-varit turned to include his host in the conversation again.
“I think I have heard of it, but I’ve never been there.” “I visited there—oh, it must have been fifteen years ago.
Strange people. They reverence the Great Mother there, but in a manner so perverse I cannot describe it. The men are very vragado—noisy, swaggering louts. The women .ire the softest, most pliant creatures in the cosmos. They never look you in the face, but simper behind tiny little hands. But they have a play there. Very curious. The play has been performed continuously from time immemorial, if one believes their traditions. They call it The Loyal Retainers, and it has more death, deceit and treachery in it than most planets see in a generation. These Shipanii have eight different words for death, sixteen for murder, nine for suicide and I don’t know how many for treachery. Some words are poetical, some polite and a few are quite precise, almost bald. Now, this play is a literary work, very rich in ritual and allusion, and yet it only uses the least polite words in their language when they speak of the insult which began the matter and the subsequent murders, suicides and betrayals. Words which any of us in this room would choke to speak. It is as if they have decided not to hide behind words.”
“That’s fascinating. Why is the play performed continuously?”
“That is the part I do not quite understand,” said E-varit. “Their tradition is that they will continue to perform the play until the Lion and the Horse return. Then they will not need to anymore, because the Lion will bring them inner enlightenment, and the end of all things will follow.”
“What is the color of the Horse?” asked the woman.
“White.”
“I guessed as much. The Lion and the White Steed are a persistent messianic legend on many worlds. I thought about doing my mono on that subject, but it was too large a matter. If I survive to old age, I may tackle it. The play also sounds like the Antrian Creation. I wonder how many worlds have some endless ritual to prevent the end of all things? There’s another large subject. Is anything wrong, Admiral?” She looked across at ur Fagon.
He damned her for being so sensitive but said, “No, nothing.” The Lion, the Light-Bringer, the Savior. Why did the mention of this legendary creature disquiet him? The Dragon had seen him in uneasy dreams since the
beginning of time, though he had never met him. But the Lion’s ruddy beard and eyes like great black stones, eyes like the depths of space with no white in them, had disturbed his sleep many times.
The pard in his lap sensed his unease and lifted its head. It stared up at him with its large blue eyes and purred to comfort him. Gilhame stroked its head and wondered if the Lion would return in this lifetime and if they would finally meet. “Everyone is waiting for the Messiah or someone like him, aren’t they?”
Kessie Darkcut smiled at him. “Of course they are. We can’t save ourselves, so we want someone else to do it.”
“Culmeni!” Gilhame said abruptly.
“Sir?”
“Some music, please.”
“Certainly, sir.” Culmeni rose from the table. He wondered what the old man was up to, being polite and petting that pard. ‘In fact,’ he thought as he went to get his harp, ‘what the devil was that pard about?’ Usually they bottled their tails and hissed at ur Fagon’s approach. He noticed that Frikard and Buschard seemed puzzled too. The old man was positively affable. Then Culmeni sat down with his harp and began to play.
By prearrangement, the rest of ur Fagon’s people rose from the table and sat on the cushions around Culmeni. A-gurit joined them after a moment, leaving the priest in solitary state at the far end of the table. He seemed to have fallen into a silent meditation. The little witness brought the rod and recorder to the table, sat down in the empty place next to the priest and waited.
Gilhame looked at E-varit and stroked the pard. “Since you seem in favor of plain-speaking, shall we two simple men of war essay some?”
“I am at your service.”
“I only wish you were. I realize what an intolerable position I have placed you in. You won’t be welcome at home.”
“ ‘No one loves the vanquished.’ ”
“I suppose not. We are still exchanging literary pleasant-lies, Commander.”
“Yes, Admiral, we are.” The little Coalchee reached for his glass.
“Could you bring yourself to call me Gilhame? ‘Admiral’ and ‘Commander’ are so formal for men who have broken fast together—even enemies. There are no Risar promises here, no Grentarian pipes.”
“And Esarian harps?” E-varit referred to the famous siren instruments of that world.
“Culmeni? A more honest man I would be hard-pressed to name. Or do you mean me? I am hardly as seductive as Esarian harps.”
“What do you want?”
“A little quiet conversation.”
“In exchange for what?” E-varit was wary.
“I have nothing to offer you except the opportunity to remove yourself with dispatch—after we have talked.” “After you get the information you require.”
“Precisely. Now we are getting down to plain-speaking.” “I know a guest’s right. I did not ask to break bread with you.”
Gilhame laughed, quietly this time. “I use everyone, do I not? That is the secret of control, E-varit. Never waste an opportunity to learn. I could have had Buschard remove you and had you dead-brained. That would have given me the information I wanted, but then we two would never have known each other. That, my friend, is the role of food in history. It is why the guest’s right is rarely betrayed. Eating is our only vestige of civilized behavior. Even the interaction between the sexes is a kind of combat.”
E-varit grinned, displaying even teeth as white as his hair. “True. My wife and I have been fighting to a draw for years. You have never married?”
“No, never. I made my sister-son, Hamecor, before I left Faldar and entered the Academy. Women are delightful creatures, but their logic quite astounds me. They are, you know, the most logical thinkers in the cosmos, illusionless, as Kessie pointed out, but their leaps and bounds, their ruthless reshuffling of the data to suit their own ends, exhausts me. It is like pursuing a running hart over rough terrain on foot. The odds are not to my liking, in any case.”
“There are very few spacemen from Faldar, Admiral.” “At least try ‘ur Fagon.’ The word will not choke you, I promise. The Faldarian dream is not for everyone, E-varit.”
“My wife says, if she ran the cosmos, there would be no war.”
“Perhaps. But what would males do to occupy themselves then? No, if war did not exist, we would have to invent it.”
“There are many things—art, music, poetry.”
“Come now. You must agree that no man has written a book worth reading in over a decade, or painted a picture worthy of the canvas. I don’t know if we could ever learn that.”
“Turn our ships into shovels? I find that a curious but attractive notion. Men have created beauty in the past, but I suspect you are correct. The course we are on is rushing head-over-heels to destruction. Listen. Your harpist is playing such a strange song. I wonder how old it is?” Gilhame listened intently for a moment, drifting back through the flotsam of his many memories, sifting the overlay of millennia from the song until he could hear in his mind the first time he had listened to it. “It was written, according to legend, by al-Richar, the demon warrior, during his captivity in the Endless Tower on the Mother World.” “That old? I would never have suspected you of an interest in ancient music . . . ur Fagon.”
“There is much ancient music on Faldar. My sister Corinda . . . made it part of the dream. Poor Faldar. A world living in a past which will never return.”
“I have heard that.” E-varit drained his glass. “I find that I am weary. What do you wish to know?”
“Anything you are willing to tell me.”
“You are very unlike your public image, ur Fagon. In fact, I would say your current behavior is completely out-of-character. ”
“Then you did have a psycho-tape on me. You had an advantage I lacked.”
“Three, actually.”
“The devil you say!”
“It was one of the assurances which convinced the Protector.”
“Krispin is going to live to be a very sad old man.” Gilhame sighed. “The why of it still puzzles me.”
“I would guess he was afraid of your growing success, ur Fagon.”
“Ambition? Strange, but that is a drive I think myself devoid of. Does that surprise you?”
“No. But I have studied your tapes. A man doesn’t have to be ambitious to be dangerous. Sometimes efficiency is a greater threat than glory. No one would ever deny that you are a fine killing machine, ur Fagon.”
“What a bitter epitaph you have written me, E-varit. No more than I deserve, certainly, but bitter nonetheless. What rewards would the Protectorate reap for being Krispin’s assassins?” He twirled the stem of his wine glass in his left hand. “Besides my death, I mean?”
“The Island Worlds. In fact, a flotilla is probably already there. The Protector was anticipating success.”
“Then, unless there was double-dealing on Governor Mordell’s part—for such a concession must have arisen with him, not Krispin—you have three planets which suit your race nicely. Still, I suspect your colonists found a rather nasty welcome. Mordell would know that the Protector couldn’t holler cop.”
“Cop?”
“An archiac word for peacekeeper.”
“Oh. You are probably right. You can’t trust a traitor, can you?”
“No, you can’t,” ur Fagon said. “And Mordell would be a great hero for warding off a Coalchee invasion. Clever man, Mordell. It’s a wonder he hasn’t cut himself before, he’s so sharp. Tell me, since your welcome at home is likely to be cool, if not fatal, would you consider staying on with me while 1 shove the bastards’ treachery down Krispin’s and Mordell’s throats? I will not restrain you, of course, if you want the short way out now. I gave my word. But I thought you might enjoy the fireworks.”
“You mean my son might still be alive if Krispin had not tried to have you ambushed? I agree that the final responsibility is his. You and I, after all, are only tools. But after that, what?”
“Whatever you will. You are a brave
and loyal warrior. You may live out your allotted span however you wish. I would be honored to accept you into my service. Or, I could arrange for you to settle on one of the Imperial domains and make a new life for yourself there. You may take the short route to the Overworld, of course.”
“I have always had a fondness for fireworks, Black Dragon.”
“Good.” He filled both their glasses. “Let us drink to Old Hag Death cheated of our company for a while, then. It is good to toast a surety.”
“To Death!” They raised their glasses.
Chapter III
The audience hall at the principal city of Vardura V was ancient and immense. It was several millennia older than the Kardus Temporal Empire, by the archeologists’ best guesses, and appeared to have been scaled for a race of giants. That the giants had been manlike was evidenced by splendid murals on the two long walls, but beyond that no clue to their existence or fate had ever been found. No skeletons, no artifacts of that vanished race had ever been reported.
The walls rose eighty meters from the floor. The roof was made almost entirely of glass in a curious, pleasing pattern of abstract shapes and colors. Unlike the walls, which showed the giants at work and play, the ceiling lacked any underlying theme and seemed at variance with the ordered black and white hexagonal slabs of stone, mortared in red, which made up the floor.
Governor Inawe Mordell sat on the dias at one end of the hall, waiting. His elegant hands traced the intricate carving in the arm of the chair as he tried to quell his rising anxiety. Something was certainly up. It was Krispin’s silence which disquieted him the most. The only communication he had received from him was that the battle was over and that the fleet would be at Vardura that day.
Of course, Krispin had planned to bring the fleet home, the remnants of it, after the destruction of Admiral ur
Adrienne Martine-Barnes Page 3