The Stone Dogs

by S. M. Stirling

  "Myfwany Venders, Arethustra Plantation, Sicily," she said. Myfwany clasped forearms with both the elder Ingolfssons. "Mandy Slauter, from Naples; Veronica Adams, Two Oaks Plantation, Lusitanica; Muriel Quintellan, Haraldsdal Plantation, Campania."

  Her parents went through the ritual gravely. Then her mother turned to her and smiled, spreading her arms. " But't' yo' are still my baby 'Landa, hey?"

  Yolande flung herself forward, and felt the familiar slender strength of her mother's arms around her, pressed her face into the hard curve of neck and shoulder. It smelled of soap and a faint rose perfume and the clean summery odor of Johanna's body, the scent of comfort and belonging. "Hello mama," she whispered. "Thanks awfully." Her mother held her out at arm's length.

  "Yo' are fillin' out," she said. Yolande grinned with pride, then gave a whoop of surprise as hands gripped her under the arms and swung her in a circle.

  "Y'are indeed, but still bird-light," her father said, laughing up into her indignant face.

  "Daddy! Put me down!" He laughed again, giving her a toss; she felt the strength in his hands as he lowered her, gently controlled and as irresistible as a machine.

  "Greetin's, child," he said. To the others: "Y'all will fo'give me, ladies; I've got an overseer gone and broke her leg, and fo' hundred hectares of vines to finish prunin', while my wife lazes about." He nodded and strode down the plaza, where a groom led a horse forward.

  "If he thinks wrestlin' with that accountin' computer and those League bureaucrats—" Johanna shook her head. "Well. Friends of my daughter, y'all are to consider Claestum yo' own, and make yo'selves to home. Veronica an' Muriel, I'm puttin' yo' together?" The friends were standing hand-in-hand; they exchanged a glance and nodded, smiling. "East tower, then; yo' servants an' baggage arrived safe last sundown. Or pick another if it doesn't suit; one thing this stone barn's not anyhow short of, it's space. 'Landa, I'm puttin' y'other two friends directly either side of yo' old rooms over't'' the west tower. Rahksan heah will settle yo' in, and see y'all at lunch."

  "Oh, it is good to be home," Yolande said, throwing her gunbelt on a table and sinking into a wicker chair. "Shut up, eat; iff'n I'd taken yo' by air, yo'd have puked."

  Machiavelli looked up from the cushions of the chair opposite, giving her a cool green-eyed stare of resentment before ostentatiously grooming. He had been sent ahead by train with her luggage and maids, and would be a while forgiving her. The Oraka girl shed her boots with a push of instep against heel, and let them drop; she peeled off her socks with her toes and rubbed the sole of each foot down the drill fabric of the opposite pants-leg.

  Rahksan laughed, scooping up the holstered pistol and nicking it neatly on the stand beside the door before picking up the boots. "Good to have yaz back, Mistis 'Landa," she replied, examining the scuffed heels." T cat Ah could do without."

  Yolande sighed, linked her fingers behind her head and stretched, wiggling bare toes against the edge of the reading table as she watched the serf drop the footwear outside the entranceway to the corridor and begin unpacking the hand case she had brought with her in the aircar. She could feel her mind settling into the familiar spaces, at rest with every cranny of the rooms that had been hers since she moved down from the nursery. There was the old tower above, with its spiral staircase; the rooftop aerie, a private study below, then her bedroom. This lounging room on the ground floor, lined with bookcases and the tapestries Uncle Eric had looted from Florence during the War and given for her namingfeast. Her desk, over there in the corner; a video screen, her own retrieval terminal to the House computer, the new digital sound system she had gotten for her thirteenth birthday. Chinese rugs on the gray-marble tiles of the floor, glowing in the bright morning light that streamed through the glass doors of the terrace.

  Rakhsan came back from taking her toiletries through into the bathing rooms. Yolande looked at her more closely. The Afghan had been a fixture of her life as long as she could remember. Ma had been given her as a present by an uncle when they were both five, to raise as she might a puppy or a kitten, a ragged girl-child pulled out of the rubble of a gassed village during the conquest of her wild and mountainous homeland. She was a short woman, round-faced and curve-nosed and slightly plump, big-breasted and hipped, with curling dark hair still glossy despite the silver streaks.

  "Yo' lookin' good," the young Draka said affectionately. Rahksan had done much of the day-to-day rearing of the Ingolfsson children, and supervised the serf nursemaids. "Younger, or at least thinner."

  "Tanks kindly, Mistis," Rahksan said, running a complacent hand down from silk blouse to pleated cream-colored skirt. With a slight grimace: "Had to live on rabbit-food, an' swim ever' day 'til I thought mebbeso I'd grow fins, but I shed five kilos." A sly wink. "Certain person said it'd be all lonely nights iff'n I didn't."

  Yolande smiled and closed her eyes, surprised at her own brief embarrassment. She had always known that her mother slept with Rahksan occasionally, at least since she was old enough to be conscious of such things at all. It was nothing unusual. For that matter her father had probably sired Rakhsan's own son; he had the look. But it's sort of uncomfortable to imagine Ma and her actually… doing it, she thought. And it still sounded a bit strange to hear "Mistis" instead of the child's title of "Missy."

  "How's Ali?" she asked, changing the subject. "Drink, please. Yo'self, too."

  Rakhsan slapped her forehead. "Ali! That boy!"

  There was a sideboard near the stairs with a recessed chilling unit, the usual. The serf poured two glasses of lemonade, handed one to Yolande, and sank gracefully to her knees, sitting back on her heels; it would not have been fitting for her to use the chair, of course.

  "Ah swear he do things jus''t' grieve his ma —" She shrugged. "Do mah best fo' him, and whut do Ah git? Trouble an' gray hairs. He workin' in the House stables now." A sniff, and grudging admission. "Doin right well, Mastah say he natural with horses, mebbeso Head Groom somedays. Still, he doin' field-hand work when he coulda lived clean an' been clerk o' somethin', here in't' House."

  She drank, and rolled the cup between her palms. "I tell him yo' 'quires, Mistis, tank y' kindly."

  Yolande cleared her throat. "Did Myf… did my friends like they rooms?" she asked.

  "Why, sho'ly," Rahksan said blandly, finishing her juice and rising to replace the etched-glass tumbler on the counter; her back was to Yolande for a moment. "They all settled in good." A pause. "That Mistis Myfwany, she a fine young lady," she continued. "Mos' particulah interested in yo', Mistis, ask questions an' all." Another pause. "Powerful pretty, too."

  "We're good friends!" Yolande snapped. "All of us," she added.

  "Did Ah says different? A body'd thinks mebbeso yo' was sweet on somebody…" She turned, a wide grin flashing white against her olive face.

  "Oooo—!," Yolande half rose, flushed with anger, then sank back, joining helplessly in Rahksan's laughter. "Yo' impossible, Rahksan!" she said, throwing a pillow.

  "No, jus' impudent an' triflin'; comes a' havin' wiped yo' butt an' changed yo' diapers…" The smile softened. "Didn' mean hurt yo' feelings, sweetlin'," she said warmly, laying, a hand on her shoulder.

  "Yo' didn't," the girl said, throwing her arms around the short woman's waist and laying her head on the comforting softness of her bosom. "Oh, Tantie Rahksan, maybe I am sweet on her, a little… I don't know, it's all mixed up, don't know what I want." A sniffle that broke into a sob. "Why can't everything be simple, like it used to?"

  "There, chile, there," Rahksan replied, stroking her hair. "My little 'Landa growin' up, is all." She hummed softly in her throat, rocking the Draka girl for quiet minutes. "Some day yo' looks back on this as y' happy an' simple time. Be happy in it; growin' is painful sometime, but believe me, bettah than agin'." A rueful chuckle. "Tings works that way, sweetlin'. Wait fo', five years an' yo' starts gettin' interested in boys, now that complicated. They a lot mo' different."

  Yolande giggled tearily and made a mock-retching sound. The
serf bent and kissed the top of her head. "Y'change y' mind somedays, girl. They necessary, an' mighty nice in they own way. Anyways, take things as they come. Here."

  The serf produced a handkerchief, and proceeded to wipe Yolande's face. The girl surrendered to the childlike sensation, but reclaimed the linen to blow her own nose. She was grown-up, or almost, after all.

  "Thanks, Rahksan," she muttered. "Sorry I was so silly." Looking up, she saw the blotch her tears had made on the front of the other's blouse, and winced with embarrassment. "Didn't mean to be such a waterin' pot." That prompted remembrance: she felt in her pocket. "Got somethin' fo' yo' in Palermo last month."

  Rahksan unwrapped the tissue and opened the small blue jeweler's box. "Why, Mistis 'Landa!" she exclaimed, lifting out the locket. It was a slim oval of pale gold rimmed in pearls, on a slender platinum chain. She opened it, holding the cameo up to the light; a Classical piece in the modern setting, translucent white against indigo blue glass, a woman's head wreathed in a spray of tiny gold olive-leaves. "That beautiful, sweetlin'; nice to remember y' ol' Tantie Rahksan."

  "I'll nevah fo'get yo', Rahksan," she said quietly.

  "Well." The serf put the chain around her neck, then bent to kiss Yolande on the forehead. "Whenevah y' needs somebodies''t' talk to… o' cry on, Mistis… Ah'm theah." A glance at her watch. "Bettah get goin'. Mastah John's rooms need a check; them useless bedwenches of his neglects things somethin' aweful. That Colette, particular."

  Yolande watched her leave and finished the lemonade, vaguely ashamed of the display of emotion. I'm too old for tears, really… The sadness was gone, though. Now she felt truly relaxed; this was her home ground, after all. She undid her cravat and pulled it loose to finish wiping her face, then tossed it aside, undid the top button of her shirt, and held the Egyptian linen away from her skin. I am filling out, she thought with satisfaction. Not much, but then Ma wasn't much bigger, and she was the most beautiful person in the world. What had she said? "Anything more than a handful is a waste." Curious, she touched the smooth shallow curve with the pads of her fingers. In biology class the teacher said breasts were mostly an ornament, like a peacock's tail. The touch had a sort of shivery feel to it, almost like an itch.

  Her fingertips brushed across the pointed pink cone of the nipple, and she jerked the hand away; it was the sort of sensation that could feel good or bad, depending. Too strong, anyway.

  She rose to her feet and paced, letting her hand trail across the bookshelves. Good friends here; Gulliver's Travels, her Alice Underland and Looking-Glass World, family heirlooms in smooth leather and stamped-gilt titles. Some she could remember her mother reading to her at bedtimes; others she had discovered herself. The old books had a rich scent all their own, leather and the glue of their bindings and a slight hint of dust that reminded her of summer afternoons. She opened one and smiled to herself; there was a vine-leaf still pressed where she remembered, brown and gossamer-fragile. They had seemed so big, then, filling her lap, the smooth paper with the dyed edges transparent gateways to wonder. Veme, Stevenson, Lalique, Halgelstein, Dobson. Illustrated histories, and the Thousand and One Nights; most of all horse books: riding, breeding, showing.

  There were models on the shelves as well, from the time when flying had won co-equal place in her heart with the stables. Early machines: Pa had gotten the model of the Ahrinian for her; it was nearly a hundred years old and had been made when the first war-dirigible was launched. An odd looking machine, cigar-shaped with the spiral wooden framework dimpling the fabric covering, and big room-fan type propellers jutting out from the gondola. Miniatures of her parents' Eagle fighters, from the Eurasian War. Pencil-slim twin-engined planes, perfect down to the blackened exhaust-trails behind the big prop engines and the kill-marks on the wings; they had been going-away gifts from their ground crews. A plastic suborb missile she had put together herself from a kit: a slender sinister black dart. And a scramjet fighter, long slim delta shape banking in frozen motion on its stand. She touched that, symbol of freedom from earth V bounds and gravity's pull.

  There were data-plaques piled beside her terminal. Yolande grimaced at the size of the stack of the palm-sized wafers, in school colors; enough to keep her busy several hours a day. She put her palm against the screen for the identity check and pushed a wafer into the slot beside it. The machine chimed: Introduction to Evolutionary Ecology. Text and pictures flickered by, moving diagrams showing energy-flows, reconstructions. Feathered dinosaurs and ground-apes from Olduvai—and space for the data she would be entering, answers, and essays. That would be interesting, at least, but mind and body rebelled at the thought of more study now.

  She turned through the open glass doors to the ground-level terrace instead, and reached overhead to grip the steel bar just outside. Moodily she began a series of chin-lifts, stopping at fifty to hang with her knees curled close to her chest and controlling her breathing to a deep steady rhythm. Bruiser said it was the best way to clear your mind for thinking: let the muscles soak up and burn the hormonal juices the body tried to cloud your mind with. It's a good remedy for confusion, she thought wryly. If I could be sure what I'm confused about.

  "Hio,'Landa." The terrace outside her rooms ran all along the west front of the building, but her section was separated by a carved-stone screen that ran out to the low balustrade. Myfwany's face leaned around it, smiling. "Want company, or yo' set on devolvin' into a gibbon?"

  "C'mon ovah," Yolande said. She raised herself to chest-height against the bar, counting twenty slow breaths, then dropped to the ground, acutely conscious of her rumpled state. "Everythin' all right?"

  "Better than that," Myfwany said, swinging around the balustrade. "Been lookin' forward to seein' yo' homeplace quite some time, now. Can't know a person till you've seen where they come from, hey?"

  The other girl had shot up these last six months, and flat-footed on the tile pavement Yolande's eyes were level with her nose. She had changed already, into a round-necked cream-silk sleeveless shirt and fawn trousers; there were bracelets in the form of curled snakes pushed up on her upper arms, and a fillet of the same silvery metal holding back the red curls that fell to her neck. They walked to the balustrade together, leaning on the stone and looking down. Yolande cast a covert eye to her side, admiring the way the platinum snakes seemed to ripple as the muscle moved beneath the freckled skin of Myfwany's arms.

  "Utilities an' such?" the redhead asked, nodding downslope.

  The hill fell away gently to the northwest. There was a strip of lawn three meters below them, then terraces behind low brick retaining walls, flowerbanks and cypresses, fountains and stairways. At the base of the slope the buildings began, two rows of them built back into the slope so that the pale yellow tile of their roofs made steps leading down to the pool at the bottom. They were half-hidden from here by the trees planted about them, chestnuts and oaks.

  "House stables, toolsheds, garages, some sleepin' quarters," Yolande answered. Most of the housegirls bunked in the attics, but not the garden staff. The plantation's transformer was down there, too; electricity came in by underground cable, brought down from the hydro plants in the mountains. She laid a hand on Myfwany's. "Thanks… thanks fo' comin' along, Myf. Missin' goin' to yo' home, and all. Would've been lonely, without."

  Myfwany turned her hand palm-up and squeezed for a moment before releasing the other girl's fingers. "No great sacrifice," she said quietly, not looking around; she smoothed the wind-tossed hair back from her face. "Got to get it cut… My stepmother an' me don't get on so well, anyhows."

  Yolande tried to imagine what it would be like, for her mother to die and a stranger take her place, and shivered. "Come on, there's time for a swim befo' lunch."

  There was a shout from the pool. Johanna Ingolfsson looked up from her papers, and saw her daughter balanced on her red-haired friend's shoulders. The other girl reached up; they clasped wrists and Yolande did a slow handstand, grinning downward through dangling strands of wet blon
d hair.

  "Now!" she said.

  Myfwany pushed up and Yolande twisted, doing a complete 360 turn before arrowing into the water headfirst. Johanna nodded approvingly as the sleek body eeled along the bottom of the pool for a dozen meters before breaking surface and crawl-stroking for the far end. Myfwany followed. They paused for a moment, treading water and hyperventilating, then dove for a game of subsurface tag. Johanna quirked a lip. Not the only type of touching friend Myfwany has in mind, if I can still read the signs, she thought.

  "Looks like my youngest might make a pilot; got the reflexes, at least," she said musingly. "About time, the first three bein' in the ever-lovin' infantry of all things."

  Rakhsan chuckled; she was sitting on a cushion at the bottom of the lounger, embroidering a circle of silk held in a wicker frame. "Mebbeso she pick the Navy, eh, Mistis?"

  Johanna snorted and reached for the glass of cooler. The outdoor pool was set along the eastern flank of the Great House, along the outer rim of the terrace built up and out from the hillside. It had been convenient; the space beneath provided room for things best tucked away, the heat-pump system, the fuel-cell for the war-shelter deep in the rock beneath the manor, the armory, a laundry… a pleasant place for an outdoor lunch, as well. One hundred meters by twenty-five, with a basic pavement of black onyx marble they had gotten cheap after the War, stripped from ruined palazzi in Sienna. The rough stone of the wall behind them was overgrown with bougainvillea, bright now with pink-purple garlands; low limestone troughs held banks of clematis, pearl rhododendrons, azaleas; there were stone bowls with topiaries and small trees, or lilac bushes for the scent.