Indomitus Oriens (The Fovean Chronicles)

by Robert Brady

  “Yes, grandfather,” Vulpe informed him.

  Bill nodded. He took a step back from the stallion, put his hand on the boy’s shoulder, and then handed him the lunging whip.

  “Okay, now,” he said. “You do it.”

  * * *

  Melissa watched Bill train the stallion from the fence, Shela on one side of her, Nina on the other, Lee standing just inside the fence where Vulpe had been, the hem of her palace dress already smudged either from climbing the rails or from leaping into the arena sand.

  Melissa bounced Chawny in her left arm. The baby was highly interested in the consistency of Melissa’s hair, and how many strands she could rearrange.

  Shela at first criticized Bill—the Mountain—then became more curious. When the stallion trotted away from him, she said, “See—this doesn’t work.”

  Then the horse wheeled and stampeded toward the one man. Several of the stablemen leapt over the fence, but Shela ordered them to stand fast. Melissa called out, “Bill!” without thinking.

  “Stop using his name,” Nina admonished her. She didn’t like Bill, Melissa knew. She wouldn’t care if he died.

  But he didn’t die. The horse slammed to a halt right in front of him. It was a bluff charge—a tactic by the horse to see if he could take over dominance. Bill had taught him otherwise. Now he was teasing the stallion with a carrot.

  “Is—what?” Melissa didn’t understand. “Is that a game?”

  “No,” Shela said, and sighed, turning to face Melissa. “He won’t let the stallion have the carrot until the stallion stops trying to take it. In that way, Little Storm sees the Mountain controls the food. In the herd, the one who controls the food is the leader.”

  “Lead the herd, lord the horse,” Lee said from within the arena. Shela smiled and turned to her daughter.

  “You’re an Andaran daughter, aren’t you?” she asked. “A true Waya Agiladia.”

  “I am,” Lee said, and turned her attention back to the arena, where Bill was handing the lunging whip to her brother.

  “Hey!” she protested. “I want to do that, too!” and she was hiking up the front of her skirts and charging across the arena sand.

  Shela laughed and shook her head.

  “Should she—I mean, is it safe?” Melissa protested.

  “Hell, no it isn’t safe,” Lupus informed them, emerging from a row of stalls to the east of the arena. “When are my kids ever doing something safe?”

  Stablemen and women bowed to the Emperor as he approached with a squad of Wolf Soldiers. Shela smiled and reached for him.

  “My husband,” she said as he took her hand.

  “My wife,” he responded, and kissed the back of her hand. He turned to Melissa. “My child?”

  She laughed and handed Chawny to Lupus. The baby gurgled and beat his face and chest with her tiny fists.

  “Ah, this one is her mother’s daughter,” Lupus said, between pummeling.

  Melissa turned her attention to the arena and saw Nina was already shadowing the two older children as Vulpe fended off the stallion and Lee held Bill’s forearm and tried to tell her brother what he was doing wrong.

  “Let him do it himself, girl,” Bill told her. “You don’t want him telling you.”

  “If that works I’ll make him an Earl,” Lupus chuckled.

  “You almost had to dig him a hole,” Shela informed him.

  Lupus laughed again. “Why do you think I’m here?” he asked. “The stableman sent three apprentices to fetch me.”

  Shela turned her attention back to the arena. “I wouldn’t have hurt him,” she said.

  “You wouldn’t have hurt him badly,” Lupus corrected her.

  “Well, I can’t hurt him at all, now,” she said. “He was right. I like this way, with carrots. I’ll send this method to my father.”

  Lee opened her mouth to say something, looked up at Bill, closed her mouth and clung to his arm. The stallion reared up on Vulpe and the young man held his ground.

  “Now that is something you can tell your father,” Lupus said.

  “Vulpe’s courage?” Melissa asked him.

  “Mountain shut Lee down,” Lupus said.

  “I’m seeing it, but I can’t believe it,” Shela agreed. “She’s actually obedient to that old—she’s, um—”

  Shela shot a guilty look at Melissa.

  A smile curled one side of Melissa’s mouth. “Every kid is better for someone else,” she said, finally. “It’ll wear off when she gets used to him.”

  Shela laughed, kissed her husband’s cheek, then reached out and squeezed Melissa’s hand.

  “I think I will enjoy this while it lasts,” she said. Then, with a sideways glance at her husband, she added, “And I think you should pick out a portion on a map of Eldador before my husband forgets his promise.”

  They all laughed as Vulpe fed a carrot to a much more compliant Little Storm.

  * * *

  Later that night, they all sat at dinner in the Imperial dining room, Melissa now seated next to Shela, and the children on either side of their adopted grandfather.

  “And he bolted at me, and I watched him, and he kept coming, and I was so scared, but I didn’t show it, and he stopped a second before he was gonna hit me, and I fed him a carrot,” Vulpe was informing all of them.

  “He was quite brave,” one of the palace barons chimed in. He was a Man whom Shela recognized but didn’t really know. “A warrior so fearless should lead a life full of adventure.”

  Vulpe beamed. His sister, of course, couldn’t have it.

  “I did it, too,” she complained.

  “Of course you did,” another of the palace barons, this one a hanger-on she remembered as Dellick Jarves, a youngish Man whom Shela had always thought should be doing something more useful with his life, said. “My Lady, your bravery is already legendary. Did you not ride your first horse at two?”

  “Yeah, I remember when I caught her grandfather helping her out with that,” Yonega Waya drawled.

  Shela rolled her eyes.

  “Is it always like this?” Raven asked her.

  “Too often,” Shela informed her. She plucked a pile of vegetables from one of the platters and dumped them on her children’s plates.

  “Mamaaaaaaa,” her daughter complained.

  “Eat,” the Mountain ordered her. “You can’t work horses if you don’t have the right…um, what’s the word for ‘Nutrition,’ he asked, looking to her.

  “Neetashya,” her husband informed him.

  Shela hadn’t known that. However her daughter made a face and immediately started in on her vegetables.

  Vulpe actually did the same without being told.

  “Never has a man more rightly been named an Earl,” Lupus noted.

  Shela couldn’t say she liked it. She took a sideways glance at Nina, and her protégé also seemed wary.

  “How does he do that?” she demanded of Raven.

  The other woman shrugged and took a sip from her own glass of wine. “It’s a grandfather thing,” she informed Shela. “They’re trying to impress him. It won’t last.”

  “To his Excellence,” Dellick Jarves said, raising a bowl of mead. “Long may he…do whatever it is Earls do!”

  “What do Earls do?” the Mountain asked her husband.

  The Emperor was drinking, the rest of the room with him. When they lowered their glasses and bowls, Raven leaned against her, “Does this make me anything?” she asked.

  “Are you married to him?” Shela asked her.

  Raven sighed. “I don’t think officially, no,” she answered.

  “Then it makes you lucky,” she said, glaring at her children.

  Raven chuckled, Shela with her.

  Dinner dragged on. All Lee wanted to talk about was horses, so all her brother wanted to talk about was horses. Chawny had been in the sun all day and fell asleep into her mashed vegetables, so Nina took her to bed and remained there to guard her.

  As the meal broke
up, the children insisted that their ‘grandfather’ take them to bed. When it was revealed that he couldn’t read them a story, it was decided they would read him one.

  Shela watched them leave. “Are you right to bed?” she asked Raven.

  She shook her head. “I think they’ll keep him away from me as long as they can,” she said.

  “As long as Nina will let them,” Shela said. “Come with me.”

  Raven followed her obediently out of the dining room, where her husband was engaged with his Oligarchs and Duke Hectar, out to the stables.

  “I’d like to finally ride that horse,” she said.

  Raven nodded.

  They found their way to the stables. There was a light mist of a rain—not enough to inhibit riding, but enough to keep the moon hidden and the torches out. Magical light was preferred in the stables, open flame being a danger to the hay.

  Shela focused her power, and these lights glowed brilliant around the arena fence. She walked past them toward Little Storm and Blizzard’s paddocks.

  “Did you do that?” Raven asked her.

  “Yes,” she answered. The horse had bedded itself down for the night in a pile of hay. Its sire, Blizzard, stood at its paddock’s steel gate. He nickered a warning to the other horses as she approached.

  “What’s it like?” Raven asked her.

  Shela turned on her. “What’s what like?” she asked.

  “Your spells, your—um—casting? Is that the word?”

  Shela nodded. “It’s an expenditure of energy,” she said. “It’s sometimes like being angry at a man, then realizing that you still love him.”

  “Do you get a lot of practice at that?” Raven asked her, smirking.

  Shela turned on her. She reached behind her and pulled the laces from her palace gown. The string came loose and the top dropped to her waist.

  “No,” she said. “In fact, I don’t. I’m blessed with a husband who loves me, and I love him.”

  Raven blushed and looked away. “My—my apologies, your Imperial Majesty,” she stammered. “I meant no—um—insult to you.”

  Shela sighed. She pushed the dress down past her hips and handed it to Raven, standing in nothing but her leather harness, that with the breast straps around her hips. She reached down and took the strings to the straps in her fingers and reached them up behind her neck.

  “No,” she said to Raven, “you’ve done nothing. I’m not a happy woman tonight, Raven. My husband has informed me he’s out to campaign.”

  “I’m sorry, your—Shela. What means…campaign?”

  “You understand army? Wolf Soldiers? Elddorian Regulars?” Shela asked. Raven nodded.

  “He’s leaving with them all,” she said. “And he’s raised his Daff Kanaar allies, and they’re all meeting in Uman City, which is another city like Galnesh Eldador.”

  “Why?”

  “Because of this prophetic song,” Shela said. “You understand ‘prophetic?’”

  “Yes.”

  “He believes it’s finally time to push our fortunes, and to conquer the rest of Fovea.”

  She led Raven to her personal stalls, where she kept her riding equipment. As a younger woman she’d needed nothing more than this and a skirt. As a mother of three, pants made riding much more comfortable.

  She stepped into a pair of leather pants the same color as the ones her husband liked to wear and a white cotton blouse with a tight middle that pushed up her breasts. It made riding a lot easier if they, as Yonega Waya put it, couldn’t “Do their own thing.”

  Raven’s face was knit in concern. She probably feared her Mountain would be leaving with them, and she was right to fear.

  “The rest of Fovea?” Raven asked. “Can—can you do that?”

  Shela shrugged and plucked her boots from where they hung on a hook. “I have to assume they can,” she said. “My husband is undefeated in battle, and he’s been in many.”

  She placed a hand on Raven’s shoulder and stepped into her boots. Raven placed a delicate hand on her hip to help her balance.

  “How long will this take?” she asked. Yes, she was worrying for her man. She remembered her first time at home while her husband campaigned. She’d wept and wept, worrying for him constantly.

  “Years,” she said. “If you want his children, now that he’s an Earl, I’d advise you to apply yourself. You do know how to get yourself pregnant?”

  She looked into Raven’s eyes.

  “Yeah,” Raven said. “Been thinking a lot about that.”

  “I’m thinking I might want another,” Shela admitted. She started down an aisle in the stables. The light mist seemed like it might be tapering off.

  “Wouldn’t it be grand to be pregnant together?”

  Chapter Sixteen:

  Time for a Change

  For five days, the Mountain exercised his stallion with the Emperor’s eldest children, their nanny and his wife in attendance. Glynn would watch them from a proper balcony, in a room assigned her by the Eldadorian Emperor, befitting a landed baron of that nation.

  A simple suite of rooms with a bedchamber and a parlor. Not nearly as grand as those she’d become used to in Outpost IX, but enough room for her meditations and her slumber. She admitted she enjoyed the balcony which overlooked the stables. She’d feared the room would fill with the stink of manure but in fact the Emperor kept a remarkably clean stable and instead, even in spring, the only smell that filled the place was that of fresh cut hay.

  Compared to the smell of Men, she found that odor delightful.

  She still reflected on her single day of scrubbing dumpsters in the city proper. The Eldadorians maintained these huge, metal monstrosities for the collection of common refuse, and then would cart them away one day per week to other carts, which would carry this refuse to an open pit past the hills to the west of the city. Here the refuse could be tilled back into the earth, planted over, and new pits dug.

  In Trenbon they would cart waste into Tren Bay, and often times it would wash back up onto the shore. Then it was a villain’s job to pick it up and remove it.

  At least there were no slops. In the rest of Fovea, common persons relieved themselves into pots kept in their bed chambers, and then cast these onto their personal property if they had it, more often into common streets, to mix with the excrement of horses, dogs and other persons. In Eldador it wasn’t uncommon at all for a home to have fresh running water flowing into it, and for persons to relieve themselves into water bowl receptacles which carried their refuse away.

  Glynn Escaroth didn’t understand the purpose of the system, but she didn’t have to see it, neither did she have to clean up after it, and for that she was grateful.

  Below her the Man called ‘Mountain’ was running his stallion through a series of poles. The purpose was the horse should switch leads as the pole ran to his left or right, and then stay on balance. This Mountain would do this, and then his woman, now called Raven, would do the same thing, either in a man’s or in a proper side saddle, and then the children would follow suit. To one side Nina of the Aschire, called among other things The Emperor’s Watch Bitch for her unnerving dedication to the children’s safety, oversaw everything, usually with little Chawny in her arms.

  “You know we’ve got to get them away from the Emperor,” Xinto of the Woods informed her.

  Poor Glynn nearly leapt over the balcony rail! She turned to see the little Scitai in his rumpled over cloak, with his rakish hat with the long, orange feather, standing in the doorway behind her, grinning up a storm. He bowed to her and added, “My Lady, Baroness.”

  “My Lady Duchess, if you please,” she corrected him, drolly. “I see you’ve finally relieved yourself of the Emperor’s hospitality.”

  Xinto clucked his tongue and stepped back into the room. Glynn followed him. “The Emperor’s dungeons were designed by the Bounty Hunter’s Guild,” Xinto said, “although he doesn’t know it. I could have left sooner, except Karel of Stone kept watch over me, a
nd still is by proxy.”

  “Ah,” Glynn said, smiling. “The flaw in his plan. You bribed or slew the ones sent to watch you.”

  “Nothing so common,” Xinto informed her. “The Guild does not kill without cause. No, I slipped out when a bored watcher fell asleep, found my cloak and some extract I keep, and now the two of them will sleep, each with a dart in his neck, until relief comes. I suspect I have another half an hour to leave the city.”

  “So little time,” Glynn noted.

  “True,” he said, “and having had time to consider this song of yours, I have to believe it would be best for all of us to leave Galnesh Eldador, your foreign charges with you.”

  “Easier said than done,” Glynn complained. She crossed the room and sat on the corner of her bed. Xinto leapt up next to her. “The Emperor loves his countrymen, his children no less. This woman who calls herself Raven now actually saved the life of young Vulpe. The other, calling himself the Mountain, tamed one of Blizzard’s get and has been named an Earl of estates outside of Angador.”

  “An Earl?” Xinto parroted her. “And yourself, a Baroness?”

  Glynn waved her hand. “Don’t remind me, not that I care,” she said, although in fact the treatment stung. “I’m not surprised the Emperor would use title to ingratiate his countryman.”

  “So they are from the same lands?” Xinto said. “I’d thought I saw a similarity between them, and they’re both giants.”

  Xinto’s nature was to collect intelligence. Time, however, was fleeting. “Regardless of this,” Glynn informed him, “we must needs away from here, I agree, and our charges with us. There is another I would meet upon the road, another mentioned in my song, no less, and after tomorrow I think he will move on from whence he’s waiting.”

  Xinto nodded. “I could go find this person for you,” he offered. “Inform him that you need more time.”

  Glynn shook her head, her green hair waving underneath her chin. Outside she could hear the Mountain telling Vulpe to keep his heels down.

  “He’s a Volkhydran, and a Wolf Soldier deserter, I fear,” she said. “He has no trust in him. I think he will not speak with you.”