Indomitus Oriens (The Fovean Chronicles)

by Robert Brady

  “Hey!” Bill protested. “I’m a Republican.”

  “What?”

  “You knew I listened to Rush.”

  “I thought you liked old music,” Melissa said. She shook her head and looked down. “I can’t believe I put out for a Republican.”

  “You what?”

  A wide smile crossed her face, she couldn’t help it any more.

  Bill shook his head. “You just…suck, you know that?”

  “What a terrible thing for you to say,” she goaded him.

  “What you talking about,” Shela asked in English.

  “Shakun dhar,” Melissa said. “And I was just giving Bill a hard time.”

  Shela winced. “I tell you, you not call him dat,” she said. “Very dangerous, you use real name.”

  “Our names are our names,” Melissa said. “I have no idea what else to—”

  Shela held up her hand. They were coming to the city’s gates. They were huge; timbers held together with huge bands of iron, attached to a tower on each side on some sort of hinge that lay hidden in the towers’ stone walls.

  They saw crows circling the gates. Occasionally one would swoop down and peck at the droppings from a horse, or at the wares of a merchant whose attention seemed diverted.

  “What you call dat bird, in anglesh?” Shela asked Melissa.

  “A crow, I think,” she said. “Or a black bird, maybe. They are too small to be a raven.”

  “Raven,” Shela repeated, nodding. “Dassa good name for you. We call you Raven from now on.”

  “And you,” she said, looking at Bill. “You we call dey first word I learn in anglesh, ‘Mountain.’”

  “Mountain?” he said.

  “You big, big like dey White Wolf. I almost call you dey old wolf, but day name gif you lotta trouble.”

  Melissa laughed. “It probably would.”

  “I guess I can be the Mountain,” he said. They had just walked under the gates, and on the other side they saw a whole new crop of courtiers waiting for the Emperor, and even more Wolf Soldier guards to protect him from them.

  “He is in his element, isn’t he?” Bill said.

  “In Uman,” Shela reprimanded him. “Or in the language of Men. You will only learn them if you speak them.”

  Bill screwed his face up as he searched for the words.

  “That is what he likes,” he said, indicating the Emperor. He had no word for ‘element.’

  Shela smiled. “That is better,” she said. “And yes, he likes it very much, but he complains about it all the time, too.”

  “Just like a man,” Melissa said.

  Shela laughed. Something caught her eye, and her face just opened up. Melissa followed her line of sight to two children running up the cobblestone street, followed by an older girl carrying a toddler.

  Melissa didn’t miss the Wolf Soldier guards double-timing around them, firmly moving pedestrians out of their way.

  “There are my babies,” she exclaimed, and squatted down with her arms open to receive them.

  The oldest was a copy of her, somewhere in her early teens, her thick brown hair hanging down to her hips. The next one, a boy, stood almost as tall, his black hair cropped close to his head. The girl who followed them dressed in—of all things—a black leather bra and leather riding breaches, with knives on her upper arms and thighs and a bow over her shoulder. Her face looked almost as if she were surprised—the eyebrows perpetually arched – and framed in purple hair longer than Shela’s, her skin ghostly pale. As she drew closer, Melissa could see her gray eyes, and the surprised look seemd to be her natural expression.

  The purple-haired girl wore no furs despite the cold weather. Her flat stomach was exposed. The baby she held in the crook of her arm had her lower lip stuck out and knuckled her eyes, getting ready to scream her lungs out, Melissa felt sure.

  The girl moved like a dancer, Melissa noted. She ran with a baby in her arms, no easy feat, but she kept the baby steady without slipping or stumbling. She kept her distance from the older children, not crowding them and not more than a leap away.

  The older children hit Shela dead-on. They should have bowled her over but she held her ground. She plied their faces with kisses and they responded with giggles and one hundred questions.

  “Are you well, mama?”

  “Are you staying?”

  “Who is that big man?”

  “Is that girl your sister?”

  “Cook caught Vulpe sneaking plums!”

  Bill barked a laugh that even got the Emperor’s attention.

  “Just like my kids,” he said. “Ten seconds before one is telling on the others.”

  “You have children?” Shela said, and looked at Melissa.

  “I was married before,” Bill said, struggling with the Uman language. “That was long ago.”

  “Your wife died, or you left her?” Shela asked, her arms still entangled in her children.

  “She left me, actually,” Bill admitted.

  Shela nodded and returned her attention to her children.

  * * *

  Bill looked onto the scene longingly.

  He had such great kids. Three of them, all girls; he had kidded his friends that he knew the gas station bathroom better than his own.

  It just struck him then that he would never see his grandkids grow up. He wouldn’t see his girls on Christmas; he wouldn’t get to torment his sons-in-law during Thanksgiving football. He didn’t see them much, but that didn’t exactly mean never, either. If he ever managed to retire, he had hoped to go see all of them.

  He felt a touch on his elbow, and he looked down to see the older children staring up at him with inquisitive brown eyes. Their mother now focused on the baby.

  “Are you our grandfather?” the girl asked.

  Bill couldn’t keep the smile from his face. He squatted down to their level. “No,” he said. “Don’t you know your grandfather?”

  They shook their heads. He could tell they were brother and sister. They had Lupus’ Roman nose, the same eye set. They had Shela’s features, her long fingers and her delicate jaw and cheekbones. They were both going to be tall—you could see it in them already, their long forearms and their gigantic feet.

  “We never met them,” Lee said. “Mama’s mother died, papa’s father lives a way away.”

  “A way away,” the boy agreed. Melissa had told him their names. This was…Vulpe; Latin for fox.

  “Well, I am not your grandfather,” Bill said. “But I can do grandfather things for you.”

  “You can?” Their faces brightened.

  He did the trick his own kids loved best. He put his hands together, then bent his left fore and middle finger over his left thumb and, pretending it was very painful, performed the illusion of pulling off his right thumb with his left hand.

  They were appropriately amazed. Immediately they attacked his hand, trying to pull his thumb off themselves and, when that failed, insisting he do the trick again.

  “Oh, it hurts so bad,” Bill protested. “It was cut off in the war, you know.”

  “It was?” Vulpe immediately warmed to the violence. “Was it the Battle of the Deceptions?”

  “Was it the Battle of Thera?” Lee asked.

  “Was it the Battle of the Two Horses?” Vulpe asked.

  Bill laughed. As much as he’d been suddenly melancholy, he warmed to these two immediately.

  “Looks like you made new friends,” Melissa said to him.

  She stood next to Shela, watching him. The Empress held her youngest, and the girl with purple hair stood back from all of them, watching the crowd that moved past, looking through the Wolf Soldiers and into peoples’ faces. She took in the rooftops, the city walls—she clearly protected the children as well as being their nanny.

  “They are such well-behaved children,” he said to Shela.

  She inclined her head. “Their father has a way with them, this is true. And there is Nina—she never leaves them.”

/>   Nina, the girl with purple hair, looked Bill over once, then looked away again.

  “I don’t think anyone would cross that girl,” Bill said, smiling.

  “Not two times, no,” Shela agreed. She looked at Nina. “Have you been bringing her outside? She is hardly crying.”

  “Every day,” Nina said. Her voice sounded musical, not like the Uman-Chi, but as if she really sang her words. “She can tolerate it for an hour now. I ordered the closed carriage for the trip to the palace.”

  Bill marveled that he had gotten every word.

  Six black horses pulled the closed carriage, and it approached even as she mentioned it. It looked large, but he didn’t think it would be big enough for all of them. He opened his mouth to say something when Lupus turned around and saw him.

  “Do you ride?” he asked, in Uman.

  “Horses?” Bill said, then caught himself. Lupus probably didn’t mean he had a Harley.

  “Yes, your Imperial Majesty, I love to ride.”

  Lupus smiled. “Good,” he said. “Because we are going to go exercise my stallion while the girls go back to the palace with Karel and Xinto.”

  Bill looked past the approaching wagon for another horse and didn’t see one. He looked back at Lupus.

  “Your stallion?”

  Lupus smiled. “The grooms can’t handle him,” he said. “Watch this.”

  He put two fingers in his mouth, and he gave a very un-Emperor-like whistle. Both the kids covered their ears and the baby screamed in anger at the sudden noise.

  What could only have been a stallion’s challenge answered him, and he heard a horrible crash from behind the wagon the team of six pulled. Then another, and another, and Bill took two steps to the side to see a smaller wagon behind the larger one, making great leaps as whatever it contained inside it tried to get out.

  One more scream, one more crash, and two Uman groomsmen ran for their lives as the back door to the smaller wagon flew from its hinges. A massive white stallion immediately backed out and reared.

  It stood bigger than a Clydesdale, built like an Arabian, with a huge barrel and powerful, blue-veined legs. Its iron-shod hooves actually made sparks on the cobblestones as it moved. Its scream might not be deafening but it sufficed to let you know an angry stallion made it. It dropped to all fours and raised and lowered its head several times, then drew a bead on Lupus and charged.

  The Emperor stood his ground while the others around him scattered. The giant ran right up to him and immediately began to butt him with his head. The horse stood easily eighteen hands.

  “Easy, oh,” Lupus said to him in a low voice, rubbing the monster’s neck and ears. The big stallion actually rubbed Lupus’ face with his nose.

  “What is that?” Bill asked.

  “That’s Blizzard,” Vulpe informed him. “That is papa’s horse.”

  “You can’t touch him,” Lee warned. “He will bite your arm off and eat it!”

  “He will?” Bill couldn’t be sure they were kidding.

  “He does bite,” Shela warned him. She took a step next to him, bouncing her whimpering baby, as the crowd of onlookers grew and the Emperor comforted his giant stallion.

  “I have never seen a horse like that,” Bill said.

  “They do not have them where you are from?” Glynn asked him. She had been quiet since her confrontation with Lupus, and Bill had almost forgotten her.

  “It looks like a warm blood mix,” Bill said, in Uman. “It has the look of an Arabian to its head, but the thick legs and wide barrel of a draft—but, no, look at that tight middle!

  “And you never see a warm blood all cuddly like that—but you say to anyone else, he’s mean?”

  “Blizzard loves him like I have never seen a horse love a man,” Shela said. “No horse in Andoran would do what that horse does to be with him. And, yes, he hates everyone else. I can’t even brush him if Yonega Waya isn’t there.”

  “So they cart him out here for the Emperor to ride?” Bill asked.

  “They have to,” Shela said. “Yonega Waya, he built a thing called a winch, it pulls Blizzard on a chain into the cart. Then another horse pulls the cart. I think you will be riding that horse.”

  Bill saw that the groomsmen had returned and were removing the horse from the traces of the ruined cart. To its credit it had stood stock-still while Blizzard had snorted and reared.

  “A—um, you want me to ride the draft?” Bill said.

  Shela laughed. She rubbed her youngest daughter’s nose with her own and was rewarded with a giggle. “That horse is ‘Little Storm,’” she said. “Blizzard is his sire. He is like that. What you want him to do, he does, but nothing bothers him. He is not as big or as fast as Blizzard, but he is close.”

  “I want to go on Little Storm,” Vulpe immediately demanded.

  “I want to go on him, too,” Lee said, not to be outdone by her brother.

  Shela shook her head. “You will come with the women in the cart,” she said. “Blizzard is going to want to run, and Little Storm is going to want to run with him.”

  “I’ll sit with grandfather,” Vulpe offered. He looked imploringly up at Bill. “I’ll be good.”

  “I will be good, too!” Lee promised.

  Shela looked into Bill’s face. She raised an eyebrow in an expression of amusement and shrewd skepticism.

  Bill knew full well the best way to make sure he didn’t get executed would be to get the kids to love him. She must have known that, too.

  “They asked if I was Lupus’ father,” Bill admitted. “I told them I was a grandfather, but not theirs.”

  “Papa can order him to be our grandfather,” Lee said. “He can—” and then another word that Bill didn’t know.

  Bill found it frustrating.

  “Your papa will not make a law that another man has to be your grandfather,” Shela said, lowering her voice. “Now, if you won’t do as you’re told—”

  “Get in the wagon right now!”

  Lupus’ voice thundered out as only a father’s can. Bill had done it himself. Once you became a dad, you got the voice, that certain octave and decibel, that just scares the hell out of children.

  They crashed into each other as they climbed into the covered wagon. Nina took up a position at the door, even the Wolf Soldiers deferring to her.

  “I will see you at the palace,” Melissa said to him, and reached up to kiss his cheek.

  “Shela tells me there is no way you can outride Lupus,” she whispered into his ear. “I think if you could, then he would have a lot of respect for you.”

  He gave her a hug, and surprised her with a pat on the behind. She giggled and jumped away, then followed the children up into the wagon, throwing a last, speculative look at him over her shoulder just before she disappeared inside.

  “If you can outride him,” Shela said, passing him, “then yes, he would respect you a lot. I think you might just want to do your best. Blizzard is very fast and Little Storm is very hard to ride.”

  Bill smiled and watched her go. Glynn followed both of them into the wagon without a word to him.

  She had turned out to be quite a little pain in the ass, after all, Bill thought.

  “Ready?” Lupus asked him.

  Bill counted six horses there. Blizzard had already been saddled; Little Storm had just been cinched. Bill saw four mares between them; three had Wolf Soldier guards and one a plain looking Uman in a breast plate and a cloak. He had close-cropped hair and three scars in a line on his left cheek.

  “This is J’her,” Lupus introduced him. “J’her, this is—”

  He knew better than to say Bill’s name, but he didn’t know what else to call him.

  Bill stuck out his hand to the mounted man. “The Mountain,” he said. Lupus laughed. “I am told it is a good name for me.”

  “I was told J’her was a good name for me,” J’her said. “Then I found out it was a type of rock that you make fences with.”

  “Which makes it a
good name for you,” Lupus commented. “You are the most solid man I know.”

  “You are too kind, Lupus,” J’her said.

  “J’her is the Supreme Commander of the Wolf Soldier Guard,” Lupus said. “Wolf Soldiers all call me by name, so don’t be surprised when you hear it. That saved my life once.”

  J’her cleared his throat. “Your horse is stomping,” he noted.

  “He is,” Lupus said, and reined him to the left. “Mount up, Mountain, or you will be late.”

  * * *

  J’her watched the new man, this older version of Lupus himself, approach Little Storm, a horse very few people could ride.

  He thought this a cruel trick, but then, the Emperor’s judgment proved right more often than wrong. If he thought this an appropriate test of the newcomer, then J’her would support him in it. He would ‘have his back,’ as Lupus liked to say.

  The Mountain stepped up to the horse and looked it in the eye. He rubbed its neck and ears and let it smell him. ‘That is good; let the horse know him,’ J’her thought. He had ridden, anyway. He had a chance to survive.

  The wagon pulled away with the women inside, all of them but Nina, who leapt up to its roof, barely touching the side. The tiny thief, Karel of Stone, had already climbed up there. J’her had seen the little man bundle the other Scitai up to the top as well. If he recognized the legendary Xinto of the Woods, then it would be better not to have him occupy the same air space as the Empress.

  J’her had been briefed before the flagship touched the outer docks. Imperial Wizards had spoken with the Empress while she sailed. They brought two more like Lupus, Men from the north. They would be treated like guests and guarded like hostages, to be considered important.

  And this morning, the next message, “Have Blizzard and Little Storm ready for a turn around the city walls. Minimal guards.”

  J’her had become used to such sparse directives. Lupus played the world in close, giving his subordinates minimal information and expecting unquestioning loyalty. J’her smiled to himself. Absolute, unquestioned, unconsidered loyalty.

  The new Man mounted Little Storm and the horse stood stock-still like it always did. Black like a shadow, still as a stone, Little Storm seemed an enigma until he decided to get going. Then you saw its sire in it. It had killed men who had fallen from it.