Barrayar b-2

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  “Not so far as I know.”

  “You were very wise.”

  “Oh …” His face grew distant. “I don’t know. Since my old woman died, ’s been pretty quiet. Some men I know, their children have been a great trouble to them. Ezar. Piotr. Don’t know who will burn the offerings on my grave. M’ niece, maybe.”

  Cordelia glanced at Gregor, riding along atop the saddlebags and listening. Gregor had lit the taper to Ezar’s great funeral offering-pyre, his hand guided by Aral’s.

  They rode on up the road, climbing. Four times Kly ducked up side-trails, while Cordelia, Bothari, and Gregor waited out of sight. On the third of these delivery-runs Kly returned with a bundle including an old skirt, a pair of worn trousers, and some grain for the tired horses. Cordelia, still chilled, put the skirt on over her old Survey trousers. Bothari exchanged his conspicuous brown uniform pants “with the silver stripe down the side for the hillman’s cast-offs. The pants were too short, riding ankle—high, giving him the look of a sinister scarecrow. Bothari’s uniform and Cordelia’s black fatigue shirt were bundled out of sight in an empty mailbag. Kly solved the problem of Gregor’s missing shoe by simply stripping off the remaining one and letting the boy go barefoot, and concealing his too-nice blue suit beneath a man’s oversize shirt with the sleeves rolled up. Man, woman, child, they looked a haggard, ragged little hill family.

  They made the top of Amie Pass and started back down. Occasionally folk waited by the roadside for Kly; he passed on verbal messages, rattling them off in what sounded to Cordelia to be verbatim style. He distributed letters on paper and cheap vocodisks, their self-playbacks tinny and thin. Twice he paused to read letters to apparently illiterate recipients, and once to a blind man guided by a small girl. Cordelia grew twitchier with each mild encounter, drained by nervous exhaustion. Will that fellow betray us? What do we look like to that woman? At least the blind man can’t describe us. …

  Toward dusk, Kly returned from one of his side-loops to gaze up and down the silent shadowed wilderness trail and declare, “This place is just too crowded.” It was a measure of Cordelia’s overstrain that she found herself mentally agreeing with him.

  He looked her over, worry in his eyes. “Think you can go on for another four hours, Milady?”

  What’s the alternative? Sit by this mud puddle and weep till we’re captured? She struggled to her feet, pushing up from the log she’d been perched on waiting their guide’s return. “That depends on what’s at the end of four more hours of this.”

  “My place. I usually spend this night at my niece’s, near here. My route ends about another ten hours farther on, when I’m making my deliveries, but if we go straight up we can do it in four. I can double back to this point by tomorrow morning and keep my schedule as usual. Real quiet-like. Nothing to remark on.”

  What does “straight up” mean? But Kly was clearly right; their whole safety lay in their anonymity, their invisibility. The sooner they were out of sight, the better. “Lead on, Major.”

  It took six hours. Bothari’s horse went lame, short of their goal. He dismounted and towed it. It limped and tossed its head. Cordelia walked, too, to ease her raw legs and to keep herself warm and awake in the chilling darkness. Gregor fell asleep and fell off, cried for his mother, then fell asleep again when Kly moved him around to his front to keep a better grip. The last climb stole Cordelias breath and made her heart race, even though she hung on to Rose’s stirrup for help. Both horses moved like old women with arthritis, stumping along jerkily; only the animals’ innate gregariousness kept them following Kly’s hardy pinto.

  The climb became a drop, suddenly, over a ridge and into a great vale. The woods grew thin and ragged, interspersed with mountain meadows. Cordelia could feel the spaces stretching out around her, true mountain scale at last, vast gulfs of shadow, huge bulks of stone, silent as eternity. Three snowflakes melted on her staring, upturned face. At the edge of a vague patch of trees, Kly halted. “End of the line, folks.”

  Cordelia sleepwalked Gregor into the tiny shack, felt her way to a cot, and rolled him onto it. He whimpered in his sleep as she dragged the blankets over him. She stood swaying, numb-brained, then in a last burst of lucidity kicked off her slippers and climbed in with him. His feet were cold as a cryo-corpse’s. As she warmed them against her body his shivering gradually relaxed into deeper sleep. Dimly, she was aware that Kly—Bothari—somebody, had started a fire in the fireplace. Poor Bothari, he’d been awake every bit as long as she had. In a quite military sense, he was her man; she should see that he ate, cared for his feet, slept … she should, she should… .

  Cordelia snapped awake, to discover that the movement that had roused her was Gregor, sitting up beside her and rubbing his eyes in bleary disorientation. Light streamed in through two dirty windows on either side of the wooden front door. The shack, or cabin—two of the walls were made of whole logs stacked up—was only a single room. In the grey stone fireplace at one end a kettle and a covered pot sat on a grating over a bed of glowing coals. Cordelia reminded herself again that wood represented poverty, not wealth, here. They must have passed ten million trees yesterday.

  She sat up, and gasped from the pain in her muscles. She straightened her legs. The bed was a rope net strung on a frame and supporting first a straw-stuffed mattress, then a feather-stuffed one. She and Gregor were warm, at least, in their nest. The air of the room was dusty-smelling, tinged with a pleasant edge of wood smoke.

  Booted footsteps sounded on the boards of the porch outside, and Cordelia grasped Gregor’s arm in sudden panic. She couldn’t run—that black iron fireplace poker would make a pretty poor weapon against a stunner or nerve disruptor—but the steps were Bothari’s. He slipped through the door along with a puff of outside air. His crudely sewn tan cloth jacket must be a borrowing from Kly, judging from the way his bony wrists stuck out beyond the turned-down sleeve cuffs. He’d pass for a hillman easily, as long as he kept his urban-accented mouth shut.

  He nodded at them. “Milady. Sire.” He knelt by the fireplace, glanced under the pot lid, and tested the kettle’s temperature by cupping a big hand a few centimeters above it. “There’s groats, and syrup,” he said. “Hot water. Herb tea. Dried fruit. No butter.”

  “What’s happening?” Cordelia rubbed her face awake, and swung her legs overboard, planning a stumble toward that herb tea.

  “Not much. The Major rested his horse a while, and left before light, to keep his schedule. It’s been real quiet, since.”

  “Did you get any sleep yet?”

  “Couple of hours, I think.”

  The tea had to wait while Cordelia escorted the Emperor downslope to Kly’s outhouse. Gregor wrinkled his nose, and eyed the adult-sized seat nervously. Back on the cabin porch Cordelia supervised hand and face washing over a dented metal basin.

  The view from the porch, once she’d toweled her face dry and vision clear, was stunning. Half of Vorkosigan’s District seemed spread out below, the brown foothills, the green-and-yellow-specked peopled plains beyond. “Is that our lake?” Cordelia nodded to a glint of silver in the hills, near the limits of her vision.

  “I think so,” said Bothari, squinting.

  So far, to have come this fast on foot. So fearfully near, in a lightflyer … Well, at least you could see whatever was coming.

  The hot groats and syrup, served on a cracked white plate, tasted wonderful. Cordelia guzzled herb tea, and realized she’d become dangerously dehydrated. She tried to encourage Gregor to drink, but he didn’t like the astringent taste of the tea. Bothari looked almost suffused with shame, that he couldn’t produce milk out of the air at his Emperor’s direct request. Cordelia solved the dilemma by sweetening the tea with syrup, rendering it acceptable.

  By the time they finished breakfast, washed up the few utensils and dishes, and flung the bit of wash water over the porch rail, the porch had warmed enough in the morning sun to make sitting tolerable.

  “Why don’t you take over
the bed, Sergeant. I’ll keep watch. Ah … did Kly have any suggestions what we should do, if somebody hostile drops down on us here before he gets back? It kind of looks like we’ve run out of places to run to.”

  “Not quite, Milady. There’s a set of caves, up in that patch of woods in back. An old guerilla cache. Kly took me back last night to see the entrance.”

  Cordelia sighed. “Right. Get some sleep, Sergeant, we’ll surely need you later.”

  She sat in the sun. in one of the wooden chairs, resting her body if not her mind. Her eyes and ears strained for the whine of a distant lightflyer or heavy aircar. She tied Gregor’s feet up with makeshift rag shoes, and he wandered about examining things. She accompanied him on a visit to the shed to see the horses. The Sergeant’s beast was still very lame, and Rose was moving as little as possible, but they had fodder in a rick and water from a little stream that ran across the end of their enclosure. Kly’s other horse, a lean and fit-looking sorrel, seemed to tolerate the equine invasion, only nipping when Rose edged too close to its side of the hayrick.

  Cordelia and Gregor sat on the porch steps as the sun passed zenith, comfortably warm now. The only sound in the vast vale besides a breeze in the branches was Bothari’s snores, resonating through the cabin walls. Deciding this was as relaxed as they were likely to get, Cordelia at last dared quiz Gregor on his view—her only eyewitness report—of the coup in the capital. It wasn’t much help; Gregor’s five-year-old eyes saw the what well enough, it was the whys that escaped him. On a higher level, she had the same problem, Cordelia admitted ruefully to herself.

  “The soldiers came. The colonel told Mama and me to come with him. One of our liveried men came in. The colonel shot him.”

  “Stunner, or nerve disruptor?”

  “Nerve disruptor. Blue fire. He fell down. They took us to the Marble Courtyard. They had aircars. Then Captain Negri ran in, with some men. A soldier grabbed me, and Mama grabbed me back, and that’s what happened to my shoe. It came off in her hand. I should have … fastened it tighter, in the morning. Then Captain Negri shot the soldier who was carrying me, and some soldiers shot Captain Negri—”

  “Plasma arc? Is that when he got that horrible burn?” Cordelia asked. She tried to keep her tone very calm.

  Gregor nodded mutely. “Some soldiers took Mama, those other ones, not Negri’s ones. Captain Negri picked me up and ran. We went through the tunnels, under the Residence, and came out in a garage. We went in the lightflyer. They shot at us. Captain Negri kept telling me to shut up, to be quiet. We flew and flew, and he kept yelling at me to be quiet, but I was. And then we landed by the lake.” Gregor was trembling again.

  “Mm.” Kareen spun in vivid detail in Cordelia’s head, despite the simplicity of Gregor’s account. That serene face, wrenched into screaming rage and terror as they tore the son she’d borne the Barrayaran hard way from her grip, leaving … nothing but a shoe, of all their precarious life and illusory possessions. So Vordarian’s troops had Kareen. As hostage? Victim? Alive or dead?

  “Do you think Mama’s all right?”

  “Sure.” Cordelia shifted uncomfortably. “She’s a very valuable lady. They won’t hurt her.” Till it becomes expedient for them to do so.

  “She was crying.”

  “Yes.” She could feel that same knot in her own belly. The mental flash she’d shied from all day yesterday burst in her brain. Boots, kicking open a secured laboratory door. Kicking over desks, tables. No faces, just boots. Gun butts sweeping delicate glassware and computerized monitors from benches into a tangled smash on the floor. A uterine replicator rudely jerked open, its sterile seals slashed, its contents dumped pell-mell wetly on the tiles … no need even for the traditional murderous swing by the heels of infant head against the nearest concrete wall, Miles was so little the boots could just step on him and smash him to jam… . She drew in her breath.

  Miles is all right. Anonymous, just like us. We are very small, and very quiet, and safe. Shut up, keep quiet, kid. She hugged Gregor tightly. “My little boy is in the capital, too, same as your Mama. And you’re with me. We’ll look out for each other. You bet.”

  After supper, and still no sign of Kly, Cordelia said, “Show me that cave, Sergeant.”

  Kly kept a box of cold lights atop his mantel. Bothari cracked one, and led Cordelia and Gregor up into the woods on a faint stony path. He made a menacing will-o’-the-wisp, with the bright green-tinged light shining from the tube between his fingers.

  The area near the cave mouth showed signs of having once been cleared, though recent overgrowth was closing back in. The entrance was by no means hidden, a yawning black hole twice the height of Bothari and wide enough to edge a lightflyer through. Immediately within, the roof rose and walls flared to create a dusty cavern. Whole patrols could camp therein, and had, in the distant past, judging from the antique litter. Bunk niches were carved in the rock, and names and initials and dates and crude comments covered the walls.

  A cold fire-pit in the center was matched by a blackened vent-hole above, which had once provided exit for the smoke. A ghostly crowd of hillmen, guerilla soldiers, seemed to hover in Cordelia’s mind’s eye, eating, joking, spitting gum-leaf, cleaning their weapons and planning their next foray. Ranger spies came and went, ghosts among the ghosts, to place their precious blood-won information before their young general, who spread his maps out on that flat rock over there… . She shook the vision from her head, and took the light and explored the niches. At least five traversable exits led off from the cavern, three of which showed signs of having been heavily traveled.

  “Did Kly say where these went, or where they came out, Sergeant?”

  “Not exactly, Milady. He did say the passages went back for kilometers, into the hills. He was late, and in a hurry to get on.”

  “Is it a vertical or horizontal system, did he say?”

  “Beg pardon, Milady?”

  “All on one strata, or with unexpected big drops? Are there lots of blind alleys? Which path were we supposed to take? Are there underground streams?”

  “I think he expected to be leading us, if we went in. He started to explain, then said it was too complicated.”

  She frowned, contemplating the possibilities. She’d done a bit of cave work in her Survey training, enough to grasp what the term respect for the hazards meant. Vents, drops, cracks, labyrinthine cross—passages … plus, here, the unexpected rise and fall of water, not a matter of much concern on Beta Colony. It had rained last night. Sensors were not much help in finding a lost cave explorer. And whose sensors? If the system was as extensive as Kly suggested, it could absorb hundreds of searchers … Her frown changed to a slow smile. “Sergeant, let’s camp here tonight.”

  Gregor liked the cave, especially when Cordelia described the history of the place. He rattled around the cavern whispering military dialogue to himself like “Zap, zap, zap!”, climbed in and out of all the niches, and tried to sound out the rude words carved in the walls. Bothari lit a small fire in the pit and spread a bedroll for Gregor and Cordelia, taking the night watch for himself. Cordelia set a second bedroll, wrapped around trail snacks and supplies, in a grabbable bundle near the entrance. She arranged the black fatigue jacket with the name VORKOSIGAN, A., artistically in a niche, as if used to sit upon and keep someone’s haunches from the cold stone and then temporarily forgotten when the sitter rose. Last of all Bothari brought up their lame and useless horses, re-saddled and bridled, and tethered them just outside.

  Cordelia emerged from the widest passage, where she’d dropped an almost-spent cold light a quarter kilometer along, over a rope-strung ten-meter cliff. The rope was natural fiber, and very old and brittle. She’d elected not to test it.

  “I don’t quite get it, Milady,” said Bothari. “With the horses abandoned out there, if anyone comes looking they’ll find us at once, and know exactly where we’ve gone.”

  “Find this, yes,” said Cordelia. “Know where we’ve gone, no. Because wi
thout Kly, there is no way I’m taking Gregor down into this labyrinth. But the best way to look like we were here is to actually be here for a bit.”

  Bothari’s flat eyes lit in understanding at last, as he gazed around at the five black entrances at their various levels. “Ah!”

  “That means we also need to find a real bolt-hole.

  Somewhere up in the woods, where we can cut across to the trail Kly brought us up yesterday. Wish we’d done this in daylight.”

  “I see what you mean, Milady. I’ll scout.”

  “Please do, Sergeant.”

  Taking their trail bundle, he disappeared into the dim woods. Cordelia tucked Gregor into the bedroll, then perched outside among the rocks above the cave mouth and kept watch. She could see the vale, stretched out greyly below the tops of the trees, and make out Kly’s cabin roof. No smoke rose now from its chimney. Beneath the stone, no remote thermal sensor would find their new fire, though the smell of it hung in the chill air, detectable to nearby noses. She watched for moving lights in the sky till the stars were a watery blur in her eyes.

  Bothari returned after a very long time. “I have a spot. Shall we move now?”

  “Not yet. Kly might still show up.” First.

  “Your turn to sleep, then, Milady.”

  “Oh, yes.” The evening’s exertions had only partly warmed the acid fatigue from her muscles. Leaving Bothari on the limestone outcrop in the starlight like a guardian gargoyle, she crawled in with Gregor. Eventually, she slept.

  She woke with the grey light of dawn making the cavern entrance a luminous misty oval. Bothari made hot tea, and they shared cold lumps of pan bread left from last night, and nibbled dried fruit.

  “I’ll watch some more,” Bothari volunteered. “I can’t sleep so good without my medication anyway.”

  “Medication?” said Cordelia.

  “Yeah, I left my pills at Vorkosigan Surleau. I can feel it clearing out of my system. Things seem sharper.”