by Robert Brady
“I don’t pretend to know the King’s mind,” Glynn said. “However I see no reason to bring you here, give you these advantages, and then betray you.”
“Unless he wanted to know if it worked,” Lupus countered.
“How else would I know of her song?” Xinto pressed him.
“What?” Glynn demanded.
Lupus and Glynn looked at each other, then at Xinto.
“Did you hear her sing tonight?” Lupus demanded.
“What of it?”
“Did you?”
He opened his mouth to sing a few words of it, but couldn’t. It felt as if his throat closed.
“He heard it,” Glynn said to Lupus, in Uman-Chi.
“He can’t sing it—only you can, but he’s trying,” Lupus said.
The giant asked Lupus a question in their language, and the Emperor answered it. His female stood and approached them, bent over and looked in his face, her pendulous breasts hanging sweetly under the neckline of her blue dress.
She looked back to Lupus and Glynn, and said in Uman, “I do not know him.”
“It seems you do not need to,” Lupus said.
Glynn looked skeptical. “Which would he be?”
“We should kill him,” Shela insisted, in Andaran.
“No,” Lupus said. “We’ll keep him. Let’s see if more are drawn to us. It would be nice if they all just turned up together.”
He looked at Xinto. Lupus didn’t have his sword, he wasn’t wearing his armor, but he looked no less threatening for it.
“Consider yourself a prisoner of the Eldadorian Empire,” Lupus said to him, and he didn’t make any effort to hide how glad he was to say it.
“I don’t mind waiting to dispatch this one.”
* * *
The Eldadorian Empire took Xinto of the Woods into custody, meaning they took him in chains to the hold of The Bitch of Eldador and locked him in a cage barely large enough for him to turn around. Bill and Melissa returned to their rooms and Glynn to hers. It was impossible to miss the contempt the Uman-Chi caster regarded her charges with, and in fact Shela tended to notice things like that.
She could like that girl, she thought. If this dark-haired, younger woman kept her focus on this older man, then she could be a good friend.
Friends were rare for the Empress of Eldador. She herself had been the confidant of the previous Queen of Eldador—Alekanna. That sweet woman had cherished their time because Shela sought nothing from her.
She’d died horribly and it had destroyed Glennen, the former King. Her Yonega Waya had sacked Outpost IX in retaliation.
Shela missed that friendship. Now it was she whose favor others curried, to whom they listened with glazed-over eyes, waiting for the proper moment to ask for something, to suggest something, to do whatever it was they wanted to do to further their position.
The next morning, sitting in the captain’s cabin of The Bitch of Eldador on a swaying deck while the three Sea Wolves pushed south, Shela listened to her husband and these outsiders, and thought these thoughts and wondered at the prophecy she’d heard.
They will fall, who walk with her
They will fall, who oppose her
They will fall, for the power
Of the goddess, who chose her.”
One thing was certain in Shela Mordetur’s mind: whether they walked with this champion or opposed her, no matter what it took, they would not fall.
* * *
“Have you ever heard of Greek or Byzantine Fire?” Lupus asked them.
They sat in the captain’s cabin of the Bitch of Eldador, the flagship of the Eldadorian fleet. The deck swayed beneath them. It bothered Bill, but Melissa loved it.
“No,” Bill said, and suppressed a burp.
“Yes,” Melissa said. “It was a chemical that burned in air, lighter than water, and was used by the Byzantines to keep their remnants of the Roman Empire alive. Even now, no one knows how they made it. Some say only Constantine and his descendants knew.”
Lupus grinned. He was still in his leather pants and white shirt, but now he dressed in leather boots as well, with a chain over the instep like a biker, and kept a sword over his left shoulder.
Melissa and Bill sat with Glynn. She’d traded in her white robes for a grey travel dress and bound her green hair back. Xinto in a brown travel cloak and Karel, in his bearskins were seated on short stools opposite the room’s one door, under a sealed, circular window less than a foot across. The ship was a three-master with square sales, and it plowed the waves southeast, from Trenbon to what they called ‘Galnesh’ Eldador, meaning ‘the Port of Eldador.’ The sailors seemed to be all grim-faced Wolf Soldiers. A huge funnel ran from the ship’s stern to its bow, where it described an arc ten feet ahead of the ship.
“It wasn’t hard to figure out,” Lupus said. “Once you think about it.”
“It has baffled every scientist for centuries,” Melissa argued.
“Did it?” Lupus asked. “Or did they realize how simple it was, and keep their mouths shut? It burns hot enough to warp steel, you know. In the modern Navy, you still wouldn’t want to be hit by Eldadorian fire.”
“Eldadorian fire?” Bill asked.
“The same thing,” Lupus said. “Spray it on the water and you better not run your ship through it. Spray it on your ship, and all you can do is jump off. It spreads faster if you throw water on it.”
“Because it is lighter than water,” Melissa said.
“Exactly,” Lupus said.
“And this technology?” Bill said. “If your enemies have it?”
Lupus grinned. “Right you are,” he said. “But it isn’t good enough to have Eldadorian Fire. If you open the vats to study it, they have this irritating tendency to start burning.”
“Ah,” Melissa said. “White phosphorous is one of the ingredients.”
“You’re a chemist?” Lupus asked her, leaning forward.
“Two years—University of Maine,” she said. “Got A’s, though.”
Lupus frowned appreciatively and nodded. “You know I interrogated someone with Nitrous Oxide once?”
“You made Nitrous?” she admitted being intrigued.
He grinned a very satisfied grin and informed her of his brilliance.
He’s vain, Melissa knew of him. He felt very pleased with himself that he could get away with the things he did. His constant warnings and sudden, serious inquiries into their knowledge told her he was also terrified of someone coming to take it away from him. He hadn’t impressed the locals with his skills and rose to lead them, he’d taken out anyone in his way. After talking to him for two days and listening to his stories, she knew that he didn’t care what he had to do or whom he had to hurt to get what he wanted. In every one of his stories he boasted about how he screwed someone whom he felt deserved it.
He used the tactics of military geniuses and passed them off as his own. He used Economics 101 to run his whole nation and then entrepreneurs made him fantastically wealthy, because he let them.
The trip to Galnesh Eldador took only three days, and by that third day, she hated him.
On that third day Glynn came to their door and summoned them from the relative warmth of the cabin to the weather deck. Melissa and Lupus wrapped themselves in furs left by the cabin’s tiny stove while Bill sat on a stool too small for him and held his stomach.
The decks had become icy and slippery in an early spring freeze. Men and Uman scrambled across it in bare feet, just the sight of them made Melissa’s own soles ache. She clutched her furs closer and stepped out upon the swaying deck behind Lupus.
“We are here already?” Glynn seemed amazed. They found her on the forecastle, the sea spray on their faces. The wind blew cold above decks from a frigid north wind. Ice clung to the bowlines, and fell like little missiles from the snapping sails. Every swell showed her how close the cold sea came to them as the ship tilted.
“Sea Wolves are much faster than your Tech Ships,” he informed he
r. “Sleeker hulls, more canvas to the wind.”
She nodded and looked out past the rigging to the land.
“That is the Eldadorian Peninsula,” she said.
He smiled and looked at her.
“My lands?” she asked him.
He nodded.
She wrinkled her nose. “Barren rock, the land fouled by the sea,” she said. “No farming, perhaps a tower for my studies.”
“What ever you desire, and can get your subjects to build for you,” Lupus told her.
They spoke in Uman, Melissa getting most of the words now. The syntax proved difficult—you had to totally change a word sometimes when you spoke of the future or of the past, but it didn’t seem that bad. Xinto had started her on Scitai as well. She could say simple greetings, thank-you’s and ask “Where is the handsome man with the beard?” which he assured her would get her to him, wherever she might go.
“I already have a handsome man with a beard,” she had informed him.
When Bill could stop barfing he buddied up to this Emperor. Probably a good idea, because the looks she got from Glynn said she worried about her own affairs now and not theirs. As prisoners of the new guy, they ate and slept as well as they had with the old guy, but one day there would come a time when he said, “Thanks for all your help,” and it would be a lot better to have a barony somewhere than to be out on the street or worse.
Melissa herself had cozied up to Shela. They seemed close in age, in look, and they both found themselves the women of Earth men, so they shared some common ground.
She stood on the forecastle as well, wrapped in shaggy furs of her own. Melissa’s lower lip trembled and, when Shela saw it, she let hers tremble too, and they laughed at each other.
“Oh, I hate the sea,” Shela confessed to her in Uman. They always tried to improve her understanding of it.
“I like sea,” Melissa said. “Hate spray. Hard to get out hair.”
Shela looked to her hair and nodded. Then she looked at her husband. “He likes the cold, likes to be in the cold.”
“He is from the cold place,” Melissa said.
“Yes?”
Lupus hadn’t shared his past with Shela, so she decided to use this to increase her own value. “His home is called ‘Connecticut.’”
“Conn ecky cut,” Shela said.
“Very good,” Melissa smiled. “In the winter, very cold. Kill you outside at night.”
“So he lived in a house?” she asked. Melissa nodded.
“Andoran is warm. We sleep outside most nights,” Shela told her. “Our first time—he took me on the plains, on the ground, under a sky full of stars.”
“Ooooo,” Melissa said, appreciatively.
“I wanted so much to give him a son from that,” she said. “I was his slave, but his sons would have been born free. You should see how he loves his children.”
“How many?”
She smiled—a mother’s smile. Melissa knew it, having seen it herself. “Three. Lee, the oldest. A Sorceress, like me. Then a son—we call him Vulpe. His sister will help him choose a man’s name when it’s time. And then my youngest—my heart yearns for her now. She has an Andaran name—Chawnaluh Nanahee Nudageehay. In the language of Men, that means, “Angry at the Sun.”
“Angry at the Sun?”
“She sees it, and she screams,” Shela shook her head. “We worried that she was sick somehow—so many babies die. But she is well, and simply doesn’t like the light.”
“I have sister, no brothers,” Melissa said.
Shela looked at her. “Your mother died?”
Melissa was stunned. “How you know?”
“What man stops before he has a son?”
Melissa shook her head. She wanted to argue, but it didn’t seem worth it. She hadn’t come here to bring feminism to the masses, much less the nobility.
“Your man, he hasn’t—” and then some word she didn’t know.
She squinted at Shela. Shela made a gesture with her hands.
Sex.
“Too many people to hear,” she said.
“Not what Glynn says,” Shela said.
“What?”
“She said you were even caught by your guards.”
Melissa blushed crimson as she recalled that night.
“She told you that?”
“You embarrassed her very much,” Shela said. “I think Uman-Chi put pants on the stallions. But she was supposed to—” some word “—and then you did that.”
“Supposed to what?”
She thought for a moment. “Like a mother with her babies.”
“Ah.”
“My babies never did that!” Shela had a good laugh.
Melissa felt mortified. Glynn walked by her, then the Emperor. Lupus gave her a perfunctory smile, Glynn walked past as if she didn’t see her standing there.
Melissa called her a bitch under her breath, and moved to follow, but Shela made it clear she wanted to stay. Melissa pulled her furs closer around her, and kept looking off the side of the ship.
“I want you to tell me something, and be honest,” Shela said. “If you lie, I will know.”
Melissa nodded.
Shela didn’t look at her, but said, “Are you happy with your man, or are you going to leave him for another?”
She felt stunned. Leave Bill? What the hell?
“I think I love him, Shela,” she said. “I think I really do.”
“That’s good,” Shela looked at her, and caught the tears on her face. She stroked one away and looked into her eyes.
“I see he doesn’t—” and a word she didn’t know.
“What?”
She sighed. “Hold you, kiss you, stroke your hair.”
“I usually begin it,” she said. “Everything.”
She nodded. “I think that is these men from Conn ecky cut. Lupus is no different.”
“No?”
She sighed. “He traded for me,” she said. “He has a stallion that is very rare. So, my tribe, my father, bred it to a mare, for me.”
Melissa’s eyes widened. “So you were traded for, um—” she didn’t know the word, so she made the motion.
“Yes,” Shela wouldn’t look at her now. “And we had to trick him to do that. He didn’t want me.”
“You so pretty though,” Melissa said. “You love so much.”
Shela turned her face out to the bay. “You know, that doesn’t matter to a man,” she said. “You think it does, but then you think of all the girls, very pretty, very—” some word, but she was sure it meant loving.
“And they all tell a story of a broken heart,” she finished.
Melissa thought about that. “Mine was Mike.”
“He broke your heart?”
“Oh, so much, Shela,” she said. “And left me with nothing. I met his mom, I gave him my—um—first time.”
“No!”
Melissa nodded. “He promised stay with me.”
She didn’t say marriage, because she didn’t know the word, but she got through it with some help from Shela.
“Someone did that to me, my father would tie him to five horses,” Shela said.
“Five?”
Shela looked at her, and she got it.
“First Lupus didn’t want me,” she said. “Then he get the sex, and I know, I am just the sex for him.”
“Oh,” Melissa said.
Shela shrugged. “I was a slave,” she said. “A slave is for sex. Have to be stupid, not to know that.”
“Okay.”
“But then, one day, a very cold day, we came to Eldador the Port, and went to the stables, very late at night.”
She was looking off into space now, her face so serene. Melissa had no doubt this was some pivotal point in her life.
“We are “—some word—“the horses, and I remember I was brushing my horse’s back, and Yonega Waya said to me, ‘Look, I am so dirty!’
“Yonega Waya?” she asked.
Shela smiled
. “His Andaran name—it means ‘White Wolf.’
“And I say, ‘Look—that is a horse, and you are—” the word again.
Melissa repeated the word. It turned out to be putting the horse up, brushing it down, making sure it was dry.
“Anyway,” Shela said, and she threw an angry glance at Melissa for interrupting, “I say this, and he tells me I am dirty and must have a bath, and I say, ‘No,’ and that is disrespectful even for a wife, so for a slave—whew!—that was bad, and I was thinking, ‘What is he going to do?’”
“What did he do?”
“Smack,” she said, and clapped her hands together. “Right in the mouth, told me not to disrespect him.”
“Wow,” Melissa said.
“Turned me around,” she said. “And then you know, he threatened to do it again, and then he washed me, right there, like you wash a dog with fleas.”
“In the stable in the cold?”
Shela nodded, and her eyes glowed from the memory of it.
“Were there people there?”
“One boy, who set it up with him,” she said.
“Set it up?”
Shela nodded. “This was all a plan to give me my first dress ever,” she said, and she sighed. “So beautiful, that red dress. I have it—it is old, I don’t care. I put that dress on; I am just his slave girl again.”
“So, the dress—”
Shela shook her head, stroked Melissa’s cheek, looked at her. “Oh, it’s not the dress,” she said. “He messed that up. He spent all this money, all this time, gets the dress, forgets the shoes. Thinks I am going to wear boots with a dress like that.”
Melissa still felt pretty shocked at all of this, but she couldn’t help but giggle. So typical of a man to forget the shoes.
“He put me right in my place that night,” Shela said. “I never forgot that, not ever. When you are a slave, your Master can sell you, he can beat you, he can kill you if he wants to. You are nothing.
“Your man,” she said, and her voice was breathless, “he goes out of his way to plan something like that, takes the time to learn your ways, put you in your place. You know you have a place, with him, in his heart. He thought I died once, you know what he did?”