Shadow’s Son

by Shirley Meier, S. M. Stirling

  She stepped closer, stuck her face toward his. He smells like stale wine; too early. Younger than I thought, not more than twenty-two.

  “You call me kras, Bukangkt,” she said, slow and just loud enough for the others to hear. “I call you whatever I want. Right now I call you stupid. What were you exiled for, raping pigs?”

  She turned her back on him, walked away. How stupid is he? Very stupid; she heard steel rasping free of leather and the jingle of mail-rings as he lunged after her, and Sova’s warning cry, “Khyd-hird!”

  Getting a fix by his shadow ahead of her, the Kommanza wheeled on one foot, fast, kicked as he went by. He was quick, had got closer than she liked—maybe she was starting to lose her speed ... Her boot heel hit right behind his elbow. The sword was a long straight double-edged type with a simple bar guard, grey steel; it flew ahead of him and buried itself in the turf—shunk.

  The Lakan turned, clutching his arm, shouting something in his own language. Brave as a boar, at least. She kept her hands on her hips; showy, but necessary on this sort of occasion. High-kick to the face with her right boot; the Zak-made armor was marvelously flexible and well-jointed. He blocked with crossed forearms, tried to grab her foot. His unarmed work was all learned catch-as-can in brawls, she could see that from the way he moved.

  Her foot snapped down; it had been a feint. The motion of driving her right leg down scythed her left up between his legs; he was standing in the straddled stance of a sword-and-shield man with a chopping style and her greave hit his loinguard—smack. It was leather that buckled under the blow and he backed, wheezing, fighting not to puke, but keeping his eyes on her. Knows how to override pain, at least. Good. His deep brown face had turned grey under the helmet that almost matched his mail.

  “That was stupid, Bukangkt,” she said, advancing on him. Wheel-kick, heel struck him on the shoulder. Solid, even through the chain and the padding underneath, and the arm dropped limp. “I could kill you now, Bukangkt.” She put her hands down, up on one foot; vulture-stork stance. Snap-kick once, twice to the stomach and chest, pulling at that last instant. He oofed back, the thick strong legs shaking. “Couldn’t I, Bukangkt? Speak.”

  “Yes,” he wheezed. The others craned their necks to see, but didn’t break line.

  “Yes what, Bukangkt?”

  “Yes, kras!” he gasped. She straightened up and smiled.

  “That was what I was waiting to hear,” she said.

  Someone laughed. She wheeled, stabbing out a finger. “You with the jackass laugh, do you want to fight him? Now? Tomorrow?” Silence, except for unnerved horses. She turned back to Bukangkt, keeping her eyes on him as she bent to pull his sword from the turf, flipped it and offered it over her forearm.

  “Think you could lead a section, Bukangkt?” she snapped, grinning at him. He was blinking at her. She could see the thought seeping through whatever he put between his ears.

  He took the sword, weighed it in his hand and stepped back; she didn’t tense, but her arm felt the way to her hilt without moving. He brought the sword up in salute. She could see what it cost him to straighten.

  “Yes, kras.”

  She called Hotblood out of the woods, as Sova took hold of her destrier’s reins to keep him from bolting. The other horses in the line started shifting and stamping.

  “Resume your station. Decurion.” She went to stand by Hotblood, rested a hand on the pommel and vaulted up one-handed. The troop were just now noticing; like most people, they tended to see what they expected, and you expected to see a horse under a saddle. It was not an easy vault with half her weight of armor on; her knees felt as if they had sand in them.

  “I am Centurion Shkai’ra Mek Kermak’s-kin,” she told them. “I command this troop. Decurion Bukangkt is provisional second.” And I’m provisional Centurion, but let’s not get fancy. “This is Squire Sova Shkai’ra’s-daughter Far-Traveller, my aide. Further appointments will be made according to merit.” The pony pranced, feeling Sova shift at her new use-name. Well, it fit as well as “Can’t-take-your-eyes-off-her-for-a-moment” or “Disobedient Little Bitch.”

  She scanned the line. “At present, all you have is an appointment with the corpse-robbers!” She let the words sink in. “This is the most undisciplined, shabby, ill-assorted, uncoordinated excuse for a cavalry troop it’s ever been my misfortune to see, let alone try to command! Steel Spirit weep, the thought of leading you up against Arkan regulars, I don’t know whether to laugh, puke, or run!” She hammered a fist on her saddlebow. “You will keep up with line of march, and you will drill at maneuver every minute of it. You will take care of your horses before your gear, and your gear before yourselves; you will make a camp the Demarchic Guard would be proud of, and then you will do weapons-drill until you drop, and then, maybe, you can eat and sleep.”

  She let her scowl relax into a smile. “And when we meet the Arkans, we will kick their well-reamed assholes so hard their teeth march off to Kurkas like little wooden soldiers on parade, and we will skin them of loot right down to their bones.”

  “Mount!” That wiped out the grins. She drew her sword and took the file-leader’s position, forward and to the right. “Form column of squads, from the left. Walk-march, trot.”

  Zaik saw them try. Zaik wept, or maybe laughed. She sighed, and hoped the next battle would be delayed a long, long time.

  I’m never going to be done riding stupid horses, Megan thought sourly. Shkai’ra and Sova were off doing what cavalry did; Megan kept an eye as well as her rear on the revolting creature she was riding, while mentally reviewing the technique for using a wire garrote. She’d learned it quite a while ago and hadn’t had much occasion to use one since. Learn the flip/snap till you can do it falling on someone, Megan, her old master had said, since you’re not likely to be able to reach up to a naZak’s neck anyway. So true, that had turned out to be. She’d brought one in her collar, thinking she might need it. The dust cloud was broadening; trot, walk, trot now rather than just walk.

  She was near the head of the main column; far ahead was the vanguard, then a long stretch of open road curving slightly through rolling hills, then the mounted Elite Demarchic Guard at the head of the main column, under the great standard of Yeola-e, green mountains, blue sky with seven stars. And I, here with the odds and sods, as Shkai’ra would say, Megan thought sourly, all the bits and pieces attached to headquarters. Behind them the A-niah marching on foot, double-bitted axes over their shoulders; behind that, the endless column of troops and baggage.

  The countryside around them was strange, hotly alien to F’talezonian eyes: terraced hills with vineyards, olives, apricot trees, oranges, figs, strips of yellowing barley and wheat. The stone cottages were deserted, no movement off across the hills except an occasional dust-cloud or twinkle of steel from the outriders. A manor house on a hill was burning, sending a dun club of black smoke and sparks up into the air. The road lanced across the hills, massive cuttings and embankments; there were poplars along either side, and the passing strips of shade were more than welcome. Megan took a sip of lukewarm canvas-tasting water from her canteen and spat.

  Lixand. Son of my body. We’re closer. Her pony sneezed at the dust. Lixand. I won’t think of what your life is like. The implications of the words in the agent’s letter, “... he is a favorite of the Lord,” tore at her like Hotblood’s fangs tearing horsemeat.

  Plans. What good suggestions could she come up with for scaring Arkans? Visions of Halya; Hayel, their Halya, didn’t have air. Hmmm. Could I make someone think there was no air?

  One of the squires came whipping back on a pony. “Megan called Whitlock?” She nodded. “You’re commanded forward. To the semanakraseye.” She thanked him and he went off. Looks like I’ll finally get to be useful. If I can get this beast to trot ...

  At the column-head, surrounded by his staff and gallopers, she found Chevenga riding on his Lakan black, carrying the great mountain-and-stars on his shoulder. Symbolic. He believes in that. His armo
r matched, the trim blue and green and, here and there, flashes of gold: it was segmented plate of the highest quality Yeolis made, as good as Zak. His helmet and gauntlets were off, hooked to his saddle; on his head he wore only a green bandanna. As she came up alongside him, he handed the standard off, and wheeled with a smile to her and a beckoning gesture. A little way back was a small covered cart; passing their horses’ leads to a squire, he gave her a hand up, and they climbed in.

  Inside was spare, reminding her of his tent. It was a rolling office: the folding desk was set up, and an old white-haired woman he introduced as Chinisa somebody, his scribe, sat behind it busy with some paperwork, glancing up with a polite smile. The same locking file cabinet was there too, and a small pallet with blankets neatly made up; beside it was a large sand-timer, the type with a switch-valve between the glass chambers so it could be shut off without being turned on its side. Who sleeps here? He and the scribe spoke back and forth in Yeoli; all Megan caught of Chinisa’s words were “semanakraseye,” and that only because he corrected her, clearly saying “No, it’s just Chevenga.”—“Amiyaseye,” the scribe said then, teasingly. He said something with a peeved look, and she was gone, grinning. Does it bother him to be called that? Megan remembered how it had made her squirm, to learn of her own fame. Still, I wasn’t born and trained into a position ...

  Chevenga wrung out his bandanna, tucked it in a dagger-strap, and offered her a cushion, sitting himself on the one opposite, and running a hand through sweat-sodden curls. “Cider, unfermented, or tea?”

  “Cider, please, kras,” she answered. He called out the door; in barely a moment, the jar, sweating in the heat, came.

  “Well,” he said, as he poured, “I’ve been thinking about it some. I hope you’ve been thinking about it more; you understand what you can do better than I. We’re going to have an Arkan camp within reach tonight, though, and probably fight tomorrow.

  “Back inside Yeola-e, we were trying to convince them we had Hayel-demons on our side. The first time, I promised their general, the famous Abatzas Kallen, that is, that Hayel would visit their camp if they didn’t march forthwith; he laughed, of course, and that night Hayel visited their camp. I won’t say how, but we had them convinced enough.” He didn’t need to say more; she’d heard tales of the rout.

  “We kept that sort of thing up, all across Yeola-e; I didn’t know we were going to cross the border then, before my people took their decision. Now ... Arko will be happier feeling we’re winning by the grace of Celestialis, not Hayel.”

  What do you care, how they feel? But Ivahn’s words came back: He wouldn’t leave Arko leaderless afterwards; he’d consider it a breach of responsibility. So he’ll take over as lmperator. She studied his eyes, trying to find ambition underneath that brown ingenuousness, not believing, despite Ivahn, that it couldn’t be in there somewhere. No sign showed. “So I’ve retired the demons.” he went on. “And yet terror at night still has its uses. You get the idea?”

  “Hmm.” Megan took her cider, wrapping her hands around the cup’s coolness, and thought. “You want ... portents of divine favor, for Yeola-e, perhaps.”

  “You’ve got a good feel for this,” he said.

  “And yet fearful ... hmm. They’re afraid of you, aren’t they?” He made the “yes” gesture, wordlessly. An understatement if I ever saw one, she thought. Hey, if you’ve got it, flaunt it. “You sauntering around in their camp would cause something of a stir, wouldn’t it?”

  He chuckled, almost shyly, a boyish sound. “I think so.”

  “I can do that.”

  “All right: do it. We’ll go over passwords and how their camp’s set up and all that now, and again tonight. What else do you need to know?”

  She hesitated, decided to leave it till after everything else. How he could have a map of the Arkan camp with such detail was beyond her, but there it was, apparently accurate; she committed the main features to memory. In half an hour—“Take your time, don’t hurry for my sake, take care,” he kept saying—she knew all she needed to except one thing; the time had come. I have to. She swallowed an internal balking.

  “I need to put my hands on your face and arms, kras.” She forced sheepishness out of her voice. “To get a good idea of you to make the image real.”

  He just said “Right”, and sat still while she did it. Not even any jokes about how he could hardly protest the touch of a beautiful woman; yet he didn’t get tense about it either, just sat, until she started to feel one or the other would make her more comfortable.

  The warm feel of his skin, muscles hard underneath, she took in, the shape and angle of his jaw and ears, trying to engrave it in memory, to concentrate on doing it ... Stop feeling that, Megan, she told herself sternly. This is business, however attractive he is. He’s a man. He’s a king, whatever name Yeolis put on it, who can probably smell on me, under the Clawprince, the river-quarter scum ...

  She finished. “I feel as if I’ve had my portrait done by an artist,” he said. “Well, I guess I have.”

  “Thank you,” she answered, curtly without shortness, and went back to her cushion. He reminds me of an old friend. She hadn’t thought of her first love, Serkai, in years. Always up front about everything; that was a lot of why I loved him. Dah, and those pushups he was always doing, wanting to be the best Palace guard there was. I wonder where he is now?

  “Come to my tent at around midnight,” Chevenga said. “I’ll send for you. We’ll go over the same again. Until then.”

  “Kras.” They exchanged salutes, and she climbed down out of the cart. Trotting back to her place in the column, Megan found herself wishing it had been longer, and that their meeting would come sooner. Fiercely, she shook off the feeling. It’s the famous Chevenga charm working on me. I’ll make friends with him, in time. Or I won’t. If he looks down on me, his friendship isn’t worth a green copper anyway. Either way, Gold-bottom, is fine by me.

  Megan rubbed her hands together, blowing on the fingers. That was one problem with having steel claws; if it got cold the steel drew it into her fingertips, even just the difference between night and day. At home she had to be careful of frost-bite in the winter, something she hadn’t thought of when she’d got them.

  She swung her leg over the branch and climbed down the hemlock. One of the trees I know the name for. I prefer doing this sort of thing in a nice orderly city where the streets don’t rustle, squish maybe, but not rustle, and began crawling through the brush into the Arkan camp. It wasn’t the full trench and palisade of a more permanent camp, but the sort of camp that they threw up every night when they marched, with a dug trench of only four feet and a fence-wall of about the same—Arkan solas were all required to carry three stakes with their kit for that wall.

  She crouched in the shadow of the wall, looking down so her eyes wouldn’t shine, fishing for the pebbles in her pouch, smiling to herself, careful not to let her teeth flash in her blackened face. She’d spent a whole day’s march in a half-trance concentrating on the six small pebbles to sensitize them to her mind, till she knew the feel of each stone inside and out; then an entire evening building up an image, a Chevenga for each of them to carry. She’d found herself dwelling on the feel of his skin, fine hairs and all, had to snap herself back to the image with a jolt. First thing I do is set it up so I have to lay hands on him, she thought. It was so forward—though Shkai’ra would laugh at that idea—he probably thinks I’m after him, like every other woman in this army with heart and loins.

  Six pebbles. The first one rolled along the walkway and clicked against the palisade. A sentry wheeled, leveling his javelin at the dark. “Friend or foe?” No surprise, after everything else in this war, the Arkans were jumpy.

  Megan crept away from the pebble to the limit her mind could reach. Warm yellow line from my mind to the stone, glowing with the residue of my thought. The memory of his face under my hands, planes and angles under my palms. Chevenga. The semanakraseye leaning nonchalantly against the palisade,
smiling, his gold teeth flashing in the light of the sentry’s torch ... Down the line came a hoarse yell and the thud of the javelin driving itself into the wood. The image frowned at the spear vibrating through it, then up at the sentry who stood there for an instant and turned and ran, as Chevenga seemed to step toward him. She let the spell fade, carefully in control, grinning. Even if it broke, she’d set it up so the snapping of the spell wouldn’t lash back straight through her head.

  The pounding of feet as the sentry’s backup came running ... He’ll have to explain what he saw.

  Further along the wall she climbed over and drifted along the outer row of tents. It was just as the map had described. There was a camp dog sniffing around a midden pit that she avoided. Near the command tents she rolled a second pebble into the light; it rolled to a stop, clicking against the armored boot of a deputy-general’s guard. She’d forgotten the name; he was a high mucky-muck, that was all that mattered. The guard looked down, then out, stepped forward, glancing around.

  His partner covered his back. Megan concentrated; there was Chevenga, strolling between them. They froze, shouted and lunged, narrowly missing skewering each other; the image grinned and ambled into the tent. A portly man—the deputy-general, it had to be—plunged out, sword in hand, almost into his guard’s javelins, shouting, “What’s going on?”

  She left the uproar behind her, heading to the darker portions of the camp. Four more pebbles, four more disturbances to arrange. The Arkans weren’t going to be in good spirits for the battle tomorrow ...

  “Slow march,” Shkai’ra commanded.

  The white dust of the road was still soft and heavy under the horses’ hooves, lain by the dew that left a crisp taste in the air. To the east, light lay like a band of salmon-pink along the horizon, fading through purple-blue to a darkness where a few stars glittered around a moon huge and pale and translucent as if painted on backlit glass. The cavalry passed through the last of the village’s whitewashed cottages, out among fields that rolled in long quiet swells like a gentle sea. The wheat was early-summer-high and bronze, rippling in swells starred with red cornflowers; in the woodlots scattered among the grain fields, the deep green crowns of oaks caught dawn light like a flash on metal. Purple gentian and wild white rose starred the long silky grass by the side of the road, their scent overwhelmingly sweet; a flight of quail started up at the muffled pounding of the hooves, skimming like flung stones over water before they went to ground, disappearing beneath the yellow waves.