Shadow’s Son

by Shirley Meier, S. M. Stirling

  No. That was all she could manage; she didn’t know if he could catch it.

  Down, he thought. Meclimb? The idea of the horselike creature trying to climb almost pulled a hysterical laugh out of her. Leaking ... ? Oh, bleeding. The patter on the leaves ...

  Down, he thought more insistently. Noskinaliveme. She had to force her hands loose, fearing she’d pass out just from moving. Pain and tingling counterpointed the sharp agony in her leg. The night was growing fuzzy gray and black blotches.

  DOWNNOW. She put down one hand to try and support the wound, realized she couldn’t, slid down to the branches below her, bark scraping her face and hands. Her heel glanced, then slipped off a branch, which caught her in the crotch. Hardly hurts, next to the arrow. She was sliding sideways, almost strengthless, caught the branch with her knees and her hands, half hanging.

  DOWN!

  Shutup, weasel-ass. Falling would be faster ... and probably kill her. She held on, trying to tighten the one leg, flexed the muscles in the other, couldn’t move.

  Something long and dark rose up beneath her, claws scraping the bark. Hotblood, rearing up, no mistaking the gape and stink of his breath. He grabbed her by the back of the belt in his teeth, backed down to all fours, holding her like a rat he was about to shake, lowered her to the trampled grass.

  Ground, Koru ... Honey Giving One give me strength. She blinked away muzziness, took delicate hold of the slippery arrowshaft. No. Leave it for the healer. Hotblood lay down beside her. ON. She dragged herself onto his back, clinging to his mane. He stank even worse than usual, and his fur was wet everywhere. Riversneaksneak. The only way for him to get in unseen. Stayon. Smallsharpsnippydisagreeable—

  Vision faded in and out. There were flashes; the flexing and rippling of Hotblood’s body under hers, torchlight on his mane, an Arkan’s face working as he stumbled back screaming, “Dimas, dimas!”, fierceterribiefleescreamfalldowntrembleatME, hehehe!

  Like a mantra: Hang on. Hang on. Hang on.

  Did I hear Yeoli words? Why isn’t Hotblood moving? Hang on. A babble of voices—Shkai’ra, Yeoli, Haian—Alliance camp. Safe. She fainted.

  Noise, loud noise. Megan tried to roll over in bed, pull the covers over ... oww. The twist of pain in her leg woke her more thoroughly. A sharp stink of medications threaded its way into her nose. She tried to open her eyes, found that they were gummy and didn’t want to obey her. The weight of blankets; someone hadn’t cleared this tent ground as well as they could have, there was a small pebble under the mat, under her shoulder. Someone’s hand, in hers. Early morning chorus of birds. She forced her eyes open and tried to blink them clear.

  The further reaches of the big tent were a vague blur. Someone moaned a few beds down.

  “Do not worry, you weel hev some trouble seeing et first. Eet will go ayway een a while.” She blinked, managed to make the swimming brown blur resolve itself, at least for a moment, into a Haian face.

  “I did make it back.” Her voice was a croak. A momentary fear ... No Haian would work for Arko—unless under duress. She groped; no, the hand holding hers had no shackle on its wrist.

  “Yiss. We hed to vein-leenk your weeth a donor, you lost so much blood, but you weel be all right.” The Haian shifted to offer her a drink from the invalid’s drip-bottle, that she suddenly realized she wanted desperately. “You’ve been aslip three aer,”—hours, that meant—“end the arrow was removed just fine. You weel be up een three, four days.”

  “Th-thank you.”

  “Ees my work. I call your wife; she hes been risting.”

  Shkai’ra was wearing a sleeveless tunic and a gauze bandage across the inside of her right elbow. “Hello, love. Hotblood’s pissed because we had to cut his mane to get you loose,” she said, taking the Haian’s stool and clasping Megan’s hand. “They used me to top you up, after that poor squire gave out. How can somebody so small have room for so much blood?”

  “I have this bad habit of spilling it.” Shkai’ra snorted. “I wish I didn’t feel this shitty.”

  Outside it was false dawn. Megan closed her eyes against even that, thankful for the pain-killers that soothed not only the wound, but her head. Shkai’ra leaned close and whispered in her ear, switching to Fehinnan. “Fishhook brought you a present that’ll make you feel better.”

  “Oh, a dead mouse,” Megan said sarcastically, in the same language. “It’s as if Ten-knife were back. Just what I need now to keep my strength up.”

  Grinning, the Kommanza held out a tiny rectangle of heavy-bond Arkan paper, written over in a minuscule hand. “Not a mouse ... a pigeon.” Megan blinked, puzzled. “A messenger pigeon.”

  “Oh, great,” she groaned. “I bet this time Gold-Bottom finally decides the stupid beast should be strangled. We’ll catch it fish-gutted good from whoever owned it ...”

  Fishhook’s passion for pigeon-meat was an ongoing problem, in an army whose command used messenger-pigeons all the time. Several times they’d had to sheepishly return a bloodied feathery corpse, minus head or part of breast but with leg-band and sealed paper left carefully intact, to the Yeoli command council scribe, at the cost of a chewing-out and a stiff fine.

  “Hah!” Shkai’ra laughed. “Not unless he wants to blow his cover. Whatever piss that Haian put in your veins has got your wits, hasn’t it?”

  The Zak struggled up to her elbows, ignoring the pain and fuzziness. “You mean ... not from our rokatzk! What does it say? What does it say?”

  “My heart, I can barely read Zak!”

  “Shit. Sorry. You bring my magnifying glass?”

  Shkai’ra pulled it out of her pants pocket, out from among the half-eaten figs, bits of jerky, dirty sweat-rags. “You wouldn’t have brought the cloth, too?” Shkai ra handed it over with a smirk and Megan awkwardly polished the lens. She propped herself on one elbow, nausea rising.

  “Here, don’t be an idiot, lie down.” The Haian’s apprentice’s protest echoed Shkai’ra’s. She pushed a pillow behind Megan’s back. “Sssa, love.”

  The Zak fought down irritation: it was the Kommanza’s horse-soothing voice. My son. This might be the key to freeing Lixand and I can’t focus my Koru-forsaken eyes on it! She shook her head and peered through the glass at the scrap of paper, refusing to let the remnants of the headache distract her.

  “It’s in Arkan, sure enough,” she whispered, and translated into Fehinnan. “‘Box 596... Commercial enterprise ... proceeding as planned. Do not liquidate investments ...” Fish-guts, Shkai’ra, this is it, the stop action message! Oh Koru ... Lixand-mi ...”

  “Easy, love. He can’t be relying on just one pigeon to carry that message; he’ll have it double or triple-covered, in case the pigeon happens into storms or predators. Like wing-cats.”

  “Of course, of course he would, all right.” She read on. “‘Food greasy, wish you were here.’” She put the glass down and laid her head back. “Dah, by Koru, I know that style, that’s him. Dark Lord, I feel awful.” She closed her eyes and rubbed them with her hands and thought. “But so what? This could only do us good if we had someone in Arko who could do something about it and the only one of us who could masquerade as an Arkan would be you.”

  “Shit,” Shkai’ra said, wrinkling her nose. “Just when this war was getting interesting. And I was in line for a cavalry brigade,” she added to herself. My last chance at command. Oh, well.

  “Love—you aren’t taking me seriously, are you?”

  Shkai’ra held out one, red-blond braid. “Ia, I am. Unless you think we could pull off a rescue through letters in wartime?”

  “Shkai’ra ... you don’t know the language well enough. You don’t move like an Arkan woman and never will. Arrgh—oww. I know you think Arkans are blind, but ...”

  “No, Megan,” said the Kommanza, smiling. “Remember that time we were in one of those Thanish trade-towns ... Vyksa, wasn’t it? And it took that idiot Thanish chandler ten minutes to realize we were female. Zoweitzum, I had my shirt unlaced almost to the bo
ttom of my breastbone and he didn’t notice! People see what they expect; Arkans are even more trained to see ‘men’ in pants and ‘women’ in skirts than Thanes, and city ones don’t meet outsiders, like those Thanes would.”

  “As a man! You’re tall enough ... But you’d have to go as a solas if you wanted to be armed, and they’re fish-gutted literate, let alone fluent in their mother-tongue, in a certain accent, and knowing who to talk up and down to—not to mention the low voice! There’d’ be no reason for you to be in the City Itself unless you were wounded ...” Her voice trailed off, thoughtfully. “Wounded on the head. The right sort, and you wouldn’t be able to write much, or talk straight ...”

  She shook herself mentally. “No. Koru, what am I thinking? This isn’t enough information for you to go haring off ahead of the army to chase Lixand—one scrap of paper with a box number on it. Besides, you can hardly walk up to You Know Who and say ‘I need to leave your army for a few weeks to get my wife’s son, or she’ll have to kill you.’” She put a hand on Shkai’ra’s knee. “Thank you anyway, love, for the thought.”

  “No,” Shkai’ra said. “We were planning to think of a way to get you out of the choice, Lixand or Gold-bottom; this is it. Think about it when you’re a little less wretched, after you’ve slept some. There’s no tearing hurry, because you have a good excuse for delay to give the rokatzk now—you’re wounded! And think about that message; Lixand’s obviously not being held by Irefas proper, nia? If he were, that would be going to the Marble Palace, not a drop-off box.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not.”

  “Your rokatzk never said ‘we have him in the Marble Palace dungeon’—just ‘I have him.’ He’s freelancing, with a few other people, probably not more than half a dozen—easy work for me. Worth the attempt, at any rate.” Her eyes closed for a second. “Rest now. We’re going to win.”

  Megan chewed on her Arkan pen, looking at the neat columns of positives and negatives on the paper before her. She was propped up on pillows, the lap-desk on her lap; her bad leg hurt like a rotten tooth but bigger, the pain made worse by the lurching of the un-sprung wounded-cart, even on roads this smooth. It was stuffy in there, and people kept groaning. Never thought I’d wish I were riding. But the Haians weren’t going to let her up yet; when she did try standing, just to see what would happen, she instantly felt why they didn’t—her head going light, and her whole body insisting on lying down again.

  The only bright moment today had been when Chevenga had come into the cart, to squeeze hands, stroke brows and present everyone with the decoration all wounded got, the Saint Mother’s Bloodstone, slipping it under their pillows if they were sleeping. Good thing he can’t read Zak, she’d thought as they exchanged pleasantries.

  It was an old habit, laying out her thoughts on paper to see in black and white whether an idea was viable. Most times she had to burn the paper once the decision was made, this time no exception.

  Shkai’ra would have to count on the fact that no one would challenge the wound—on both head and throat—and her limited Arkan vocabulary could be garbled enough that no one would notice the accent. Scribbled in one corner of the list was the notation “Emmas Penaras, solas”; Shkai’ra could learn to write that. For the rest, a few cards that Megan could easily forge, along with travel papers ... If she could stall the rokatzk for an iron-cycle, and Shkai’ra were both lucky and careful, it was possible.

  “I’ll wrap my head in bandages stained with chicken blood.” Shkai’ra, lying back by the fire with one ankle over her knee and fingers laced behind her head, grinned raffishly. In two days, Megan had healed enough to be let out of the wounded-cart at night. “Poor valiant ... umm ... Emmas Penaras, solas, head-wounded fighting the benighted barbarian invaders. Can’t speak very well, forgetful, lost his letters mostly, hands shaky anyway ... it’s perfect! We can get Imperial harness easily enough.”

  Megan appraised her. “You’ll have to trim your hair some, dear. It’s too long for a solas.”

  Shkai’ra winced. “My hair! I guess I couldn’t pass for an Aitzas ... Damn, I haven’t done more than trim the ends since I got warrior-braids.” She brought the plaits, shining in the lamplight, around in her hands. “Well, that should wait until I go missing, of course. So, love, think you could make a convincing widow?”

  Megan scanned the dark tents around them, idly wondering if the blackmailer was near, or whether people were starting to wonder why she and her wife had started speaking Fehinnan so much. “Or at least the worried wife of someone gone missing in action,” she answered. “I’ll stall things for an iron-cycle, the length of time I told him first. I think I can do that.”

  “That should be enough time,” Shkai’ra said.

  “Then you bring Lixand back to the army ... or if the army takes the City first, we’ll meet on the steps of the Marble Palace. Or, barring that, the Temonen manor. At noon. And if the other’s not there in, say, an eight-day after the army arrives, we’ll know for sure.” The Kommanza nodded wordlessly. “Hotblood would have to stay here.”

  “He will, if I tell him to, even though he doesn’t like it,” Shkai’ra said. “You can trust me, my heart. I’ll win for both of us.”

  “Three of us,” Megan corrected. “Lixand, too.”

  I trust you, love, she thought later, when sleep would not come. Shkai’ra snored peacefully. Chevenga will have to as well, though he doesn’t know it. She tried to feel as determined as she could make her voice sound. You always come through in the crunch. You’re your best when things are worst.

  The next morning, well enough to walk a little, she was summoned to the office-cart. Koru ... It couldn’t be to plan; she was wounded. Lady grant he doesn’t suspect something. He can’t, how can he know anything? She swallowed back nervousness as the semanakraseye spotted her, and handed off the blue and green standard, smiling.

  In the cart, a few words of small talk, then he came to the point. “However much one might deserve the army’s accolades,” he said, “there’s an award one is always presented in privacy.” His stern scarred face cracked into a grin like a boy’s, waiting to see the look on the receiver’s face when he gave a present. In his hand lay an award-pendant, a white one: Megan recognized the Nephrite Serpent. Not quite the Incarnadine, which required very spectacular results, but still, the second highest award there was, for actions of stealth.

  She felt her face go burning hot. Don’t think it. Don’t remember, I’ve forsworn my strength-oath. Don’t think it, now. “I was just doing what you were already paying me for,” she sputtered. I’m blushing; Koru, don’t let him see it’s more than I would for just modesty. “You didn’t decorate me the other times.”

  “Look,” he said, his dark eyes fixing hers, in emphasis. “If you had fallen out of that tree when the arrow hit, if you had given up, they’d have truth-drugged you, and taken all you have done away from us. Then they’d have killed you, and taken all you will do. That’s what you’re getting it for. Now stop wasting my time arguing.”

  “You’ll win, Shkai’ra,” she whispered to herself, as she limped back to the wounded-cart, fingering the prize in her belt-pouch. “Not for three of us—for four.”

  Shkai’ra backed carefully, taking the blows of the practice sword alternately on shield and the wood of her own blade. The brown-gold dust of the impromptu field scuffed up around their feet, mixed with bits of dry grass. Or a crop, before? Possibly; it was unrecognizable now. The harsh sound of their breathing sounded under the clack-feang of the field, shouts, clatter from half a hundred sparring pairs, lost in a universe of concentration that narrowed down to the bright slit bisected by the nasal of her helmet.

  Now, she thought, and began to back more quickly. The man followed, hard and fast, cut-thrust-backhand cut-thrust-thrust-thrust, shield up and point keeping line with his rear foot, stamping into each blow. Shkai’ra let him fall into the rhythm of parry and stop-thrust, then squatted under the next, releasing the outer grip of her shield with her le
ft hand, letting her knees relax and gravity carry her down. Instinctively he slashed, dropping is shield to cover the exposed thigh; her legs shot out, one hooking behind his knee and the other around his ankle. Curling erect, braced on the man’s leg, she chopped two-handed at his exposed shoulder. The heavy curved oak of the boka thudded flat and heavy on the steel and leather of his armor, and the shield-arm went limp.

  Eeeeeeeeeeeeeee! she shrieked, a sound like a file on stone, and attacked with a berserker flurry that banged off shield, blade, helmet, shoulder, midriff, finishing him with a footsweep and a precisely controlled overhead cut that would have sliced halfway down from his shoulder.

  “You Enchians get too fucking academic,” she rasped, to him and the other defeated sparring partners who sat nursing their bruises along the edge of the trampled ground. “A battle’s more like a bar brawl than fencing in the salle d’armes, remember it. Dismissed from foot drill: report to your centurion for formation riding.” She turned her head. “Sova! Water!”

  The girl brought the wooden bucket to the edge of the commander’s tent. The sides were rolled up along the guy ropes, leaving an awning from the bright morning sun. Shkai’ra unlaced her armor and the sweat-soaked gambeson, pulled her shirt off while the girl put the equipment on its stand, drank thirstily and wiped herself down with a wet towel. She glanced around; nobody near, and nothing she need do urgently for the next little while.

  “Thanks,” she said, pouring a final dipper over her own head. “Come on in, I want to talk to you for a minute.” The Thane-girl followed. The inside of the tent was bare of anything but a scroll-rack and some cushions; Shkai’ra sank to one, kneeling back and resting her chin on her sword-hilt.

  “Sova,” she said abruptly, after the girl had sat down. “Talking isn’t my skill. Megan’s better at it.” Another silence. “But sometimes things must be said.” Her copper brows knitted in a frown of concentration. “I never expected to ... have a child in my care before I came to Brahvniki last year.” A faint smile. “I got out of the habit of thinking far ahead, after I left my homeland. Now that I’ve got family responsibilities, I’ve got to get it back. Zoweitzum, I might get killed tomorrow, and there’d be all sorts of things I couldn’t say, dead.”