Upslope I heard rocks slide, then “Holy moly!” echoed off the cliff, over and over. Behind us, Howard’s duckbill trotted toward us, with his rider crooked in the saddle.
Ahead of us, our captors raced down toward the river, shaking the ground and spraying turf clods.
Our minder waited below, two pistols drawn and trained on us, until the rumble died. Then all four of us reattached our mounts to his lead rope, and he led us forward at a walk.
Twenty minutes later, we reached the Fair’s edge farthest from the river, where the Casuni and the other Plains Clans pitched their yurts.
The breeze carried the alcoholic tang of whatever passed for booze here, and of urine and vomit. We rode paths where the meadow grass had been beaten to mud and was strewn with horn flagons that would be missed when their owners sobered up. The paths wound between round hide tents from which buzzed snores, moans, and human flatulence.
Jude said, “Must’ve been a rager last night.”
For ten minutes, we snaked among yurts. Here and there Casunis peeked out from behind tent flaps at us, bloodshot eyes screwed narrow against the sunshine.
We crossed to the yurt city’s opposite edge, then continued a half mile across open meadow. There, our captors’ hobbled duckbills grazed a meadow already chewed to stubble by earlier arrivals. The saddles, bridles and other tack, our gear, and the hide bags the cavalry had kept close at nights, lay in piles at the meadow’s edge, guarded by a half dozen of Blackbeard’s finest. Sergeant Yulen had been left in charge.
Yulen motioned us four off our mounts with a drawn pistol. The other guards cut our wrist bonds but replaced them with sprint-proof rope hobbles around our ankles.
The guards unsaddled our duckbills, then set them to graze with the others.
Yulen lined us four up, then paced in front of us, hands behind his back, armor clanking. “First you clean that tack until it shines. Then you clean it again, till it shines to my standards. Then you’ll clean Stones.” He looked us up and down, shook his head, then sighed. “Why does God test me with the pathetic likes of you?”
I whispered to Ord, “Do all Sergeants go to the same acting school?”
Four hours of tack cleaning, and re-cleaning, piled upon four days’ riding, left us dragging ass enough that Yulen cut us a break. Four women, the first we had seen, walked out from the encampment and brought us flatbread, skins of water, and pale blue fruit that tasted like limburger peaches.
Well, I’m pretty sure they were women. Each stood a head shorter than the scrawniest Casuni cavalryman, smelled better, and whispered constantly to the others. But indigo robes draped them head-to-ankle, and the eyes that peeked above their face scarves were kept downcast.
I sat on a rock, chewed a blue peach, and asked Howard, “What do you make of this?”
He peered into the half-moon he had bitten out of his peach. “Dicotyledonous Angiosperm.”
“I mean this Fair.”
He cocked his head. “There must be a quarter million people jammed in here. The ships and peaked tents don’t belong to the Plains nomads who brought us here. I’d guess once a year the Plains Clans and the ‘Fisheaters’ call a truce, and trade. Obviously, it’s become a festival.”
I nodded. “Brendin talked to Blackbeard about trading us for fancy armor. But what do the Fisheaters get in return?”
Howard pointed at the mounded bags in front of us. “I expect we’re about to find out.”
Yulen had been sitting on a rock, edging his sword with a sharpening stone. He looked up and snorted. “Now my aching Fisheaters wag their tongues like women. Then you’re rested enough to do women’s work.”
Yulen pointed his sword at the hide bags, which made a mountain taller than he was. Alongside them sat wooden tubs of river water, coarse-bristled brushes, and empty, iron-banded chests. “Clean Stones go in the chests.”
He drew his sword back behind his shoulder, one handed, then spun a blue peach in the air with the other, like a juggler.
Yulen’s sword flashed, and the peach fell in two dicotyledonous halves. “Steal one Stone, that’s your hand. Steal two Stones, that’s your head.”
Yulen must have known that his demonstration kept Stone washers honest, because he backed off thirty yards, sat with his back against a tree, and propped his helmet over his eyes.
I yanked a pillow-case-sized hide bag from the pile, staggering backwards as it popped loose. “It’s like feathers!”
I tipped the bag, and a hundred dried mud balls the size of eggs and walnuts bounced to the ground.
Howard dipped one in a bucket, then sluiced mud off the Stone with a brush.
The rough rock in Howard’s hand glittered. I don’t just mean like jewelry. It glowed, blood-red, even in the afternoon sunlight, like a plugged-in light bulb. I had to squint to look at it.
Howard lifted his Eternad helmet off the equipment pile behind us, unsnapped the optics headring, and peered through the lenses at the Stone, like a jeweler louping the Hope Diamond. “Holy moly!”
“What is it?”
Howard peeled off his headring and handed the ’ring and Stone to me. I hefted the Stone. “It’s like a ping pong ball!”
Howard said, “It just feels that way.”
“Huh?” I manual-focused Howard’s optics on the Stone’s surface. The Stone itself didn’t glow. It was a water-rounded cobble of sedimentary rock. Just a naturally cemented sand and silt grain lump, as common as any kid ever picked out of any creek on Earth. The glow shone from transparent spherules, as tiny as pinheads, scattered among the mundane grains.
Jude said, “What are they, Howard?”
Howard paused. Then he said. “Well. . . . A black hole core weighs gigatons. It sucks in light. The material encased in those spherules lightens the rock around it, and it reflects light so perfectly the whole Stone seems to glow. I can only think of one explanation.”
“Cavorite? In these little red blobs?”
He nodded. “So this is the natural state of interuniversal Cavorite.”
“You said Cavorite came from the edge of the universe. This place is the armpit of the universe, definitely not the edge.”
Howard shook his head. “The universes commingle at their interface. The spherules are bits of Cavorite that crossed over, and picked up a coating of material from our side. Somewhere out beyond the edge, there are probably similar bits of our universe in adjacent ones. The Firewitch powerplant just mimicked one of these spherules, with shutters added to release and direct the Cavorite effect.”
Jude said, “But we’re not at the boundary.”
“Meteorites normally originate within their own star system. But intergalactic bolides are certainly possible.” Howard held up another washed Stone, between his thumb and forefinger. “I’ll bet a carton of cigarettes that these spherules fell on Bren eons ago, got buried, lithified, then eroded out over geologic time.”
Howard laid the Stone he had cleaned in an empty chest. “Spring thaw would erode new Stones from the mountain outcrops.” He gazed into the distance. “The Stones are so light that the spring rains wash them downstream. The Tassini prospectors must mine the placers all summer. That’s why the Trade Fair is in the fall.”
Ord had already filled one chest with washed Stones. He gazed at the peaked tents, banners now flapping in the afternoon breeze, and at the ship sails swaying beyond them. “Do these river people use these Stones to fly in space?”
Yulen sat up beneath his tree, and cupped his hands. “If you’ve time to talk, I’ll fetch Stones enough to keep you busy all night! Or I could cut out your tongues.”
The bag pile’s shadow had already lengthened. We all shut up and scrubbed.
We finished scrubbing at dusk, then Yulen staked us down for the night. He found us an abandoned yurt in the encampment’s Casuni quarter.
Our minders stationed themselves in a ring around the tent’s perimeter.
Jude ran his hands over the yurt’s hide wall, tested the r
opes that hobbled his legs, then turned to me. “Isn’t it time to escape now? If everybody gets as drunk as they got last night, we could sneak past the guards.”
“And then what?” I shook my head. “Tomorrow, Blackbeard’s going to trade us to the Fisheaters.”
Howard said, “The Marini seem more genteel than the Casuni. We’d probably be better off with them. I vote we stay put tonight.”
I raised my eyebrows at Ord.
“We’re not immediately threatened, Sir. Our resources are limited. Our intelligence is nonexistent. And we lack an objective.”
I tugged off my boots. “Okay. Let’s make tonight’s objective sleep.”
Outside, singing began—throaty, off-key, and destined to worsen as kegs emptied. But after what we’d been through, I drifted off to sleep in minutes.
Yulen and Blackbeard woke us at dawn, made us wash, and dressed us in plain cloth tunics over our underlayer, then remounted us on our duckbills. They and a half dozen others led us back through the yurt encampment, until we emerged onto a grass midway. Awninged tents and stalls cut it up into a rabbit-warren of a bazaar, teeming with people, some mounted like us, most dismounted.
I rode alongside Yulen, eavesdropping while he pointed out passers-by to the blond youngster Yulen had taken under his wing.
I had already learned volumes listening around the campfires on the journey here.
Across the midway, two men wore sun-cheating robes over bodies as thin and brown as rusted wire. Indigo dye stained their foreheads. Yulen grinned as he pointed. “Tassini. The more purple on their heads, the higher their station.”
The pitiful Tassini roamed the Plains’ arid south. Noble and dashing Casuni raiders routinely burned Tassini encampments. The cowardly Tassini did exactly the same to Casuni encampments whenever they got the chance.
This cycle pretty much described Plains-Politics- according-to-Yulen, for three centuries. The closest thing to a Plains-Clan Constitution was a proverb, “Blood Feud is bread.”
The Plains Clans may have been peevish with each other, but they agreed on one thing. They hated the Marini worse.
Yulen pointed at a half-dozen Earthling-sized men and women. The men wore wide-sleeved shirts under brocaded vests and eschewed facial hair. The women walked alongside them unveiled. Men and women seemed to have a skin fold above the eye that made them look sleepy. Yulen said to the boy, “God made Marini look tired because they sleep beside the devil.”
Clan Marini, a.k.a. the Fisheaters, were Bren’s worldly traders and navigators, and controlled the lush, temperate Coastal Plain. A transfer to the Marini looked like our most promising way forward.
Our bound wrists drew a few looks as we rode, but most of the crowd was buzzed on mead, hungover from same, or bargain hunting.
Rosy, my mare, ignored the first Fisheaters we passed.
But we came up behind one Marini who wore a black-lacquered breastplate and cheek-plated helmet, and boasted rippled forearms. Rosy reared and squealed as we passed him. The Fisheater had a hint of scent about him. But to me, it was nothing to thrash one’s tail about.
Blackbeard turned our little caravan down a zigzag alley so narrow that we had to ride single file.
After five minutes, Blackbeard halted us in front of a yellow-and-red awning that fronted an enormous tent, from which music bubbled. Beneath the awning sat a droop-eyed, turbaned Marini. Cross-legged on multicolored carpets stacked two feet high, he clenched the carved mouthpiece of a woven fabric hose between his teeth.
The hose snaked down into the belly of a bubbling, glass-globed water pipe. Beside the man’s pipe, a spectacular, dark-eyed woman lay curled like a cat. Unlike our lunch porters of the day before, her costume left no doubt about her gender.
Howard leaned toward me, and pointed at the pipe. “Do you suppose that’s tobacco?”
Droop-lids raised his palm to Blackbeard. “Peace of the Fair, Captain.”
Blackbeard raised his own palm. “And of the One True God, may He smite those who lie with the devil.”
Droop-lids snorted smoke out of the corner of his mouth. Evidently the Fisheaters didn’t like being accused of sleeping with devils.
Then the Marini smiled and bobbed his head, counting back up the alley along our line of mounted guards and prisoners. “A dozen for your men, then? And two for so considerate a commander as yourself, at no charge.” He reached down and stroked the woman’s hair. “On my honor, my girls have copulated only with royalty.”
Jude whispered, “Whoa!”
The woman blew Jude a kiss. On her, the droopy Marini eyelids looked great.
I groaned. When I swore to Munchkin that I would protect her sixteen-year-old son, I didn’t expect it to be from extraterrestrial hookers.
Blackbeard waved a gauntleted hand at the pimp. “I’m selling. Not buying. You know the flesh trade. Where can I ransom these four back to their kin?”
“Ransom is good business.” Droop-lids nodded. Then he snorted. “But Marini don’t ransom half-breeds.”
“What?” Blackbeard bristled. “These four are as Fisheater as you, old man.”
“Not with those eyes. We all look alike to you Plains hicks, hey?” The pimp made a shooing motion with the hand that held the pipe tube, and smoke curled from its mouthpiece. “Get this filth away. They block paying customers.” Then Droop-lids’ eyes brightened. “Of course, my girls would service them, and your men, with extra enthusiasm, if you change your mind, Captain.”
We couldn’t turn around in the narrow alley, so Blackbeard led us on down to its opposite end, cursing as he rode. He told Yulen, “It’s just a matter of finding the right match. We’ll go visiting tonight.”
Jude kept turning in his saddle, gawking back at the woman reclining beneath Droop-lid’s awning, and muttering, “Whoa!”
Blackbeard reconfined us to our tent, left our hobbles on, and made our guards stay inside the tent with us. Yulen slipped us more flatbread on the sly, and we slept through another party night at The Great Fair.
In the morning, Blackbeard sent Yulen to spruce us up, like the day before. But this morning, more guards crowded into our tent behind Yulen, pistols drawn. Yulen replaced our rope hobbles with leg irons, and, as he locked them around our ankles, he knit his brows. Unpromising.
As we dressed, I asked him, “Hard night, Sarge?”
He shook his head. “I didn’t drain one horn. When my Captain’s unhappy, I’m unhappy.”
“Why’s your Captain unhappy?”
“We passed the night going tent-to-tent among the Fisheaters. None will ransom you.”
Uh-oh.
I looked at Yulen sideways. “So you’re gonna let us go, right?”
Yulen turned up his mouth corner in a failed smile. “In a fashion. To the highest bidder.”
Twenty-Seven
A half hour later, Yulen halted the duckbill caravan of us four, the guards, and our gear at the edge of a vast meadow that sloped from The Fair’s tent city to the River Marin.
He sat back in his saddle and sighed to the young soldier alongside him. “In a month, we’ll strike our yurts, the Marini will sail into the downriver fog like ghosts, and the Tassini will slink back to the desert.”
Yulen pointed at two structures one hundred yards from us, close enough to one another that I could have thrown a baseball between them. “But The Pillars and The Block will remain here, like they have for three hundred years.”
The young cavalryman squinted at a row of stones set with iron rings. The stones lined the riverbank, each one as big as a sleeping duckbill. Chains as thick as men’s thighs branched from the stones, and anchored ships out in the river. The young man pointed at the anchor stones. “My mother said, ‘Good boys sail from The Pillars one day.’”
Yulen snorted. “Mine said, ‘Rotten boys go on The Block.’”
Given my record, I focused on The Block.
The Block was a three-foot-high cut-stone stage twenty feet long and ten feet deep. Sit
uated halfway between The Great Fair’s tents and the river, it squatted in an open meadow that had been trampled to lifeless dirt by crowds. The Block’s more complete name, which I had heard around the campfire, was The Slave Auction Block.
That morning a crowd of a thousand spectators and a hundred bidders surrounded The Block. Awnings on poles, placed to protect the crowd, not the merchandise, hung limp, and the sun shone in a clear sky.
When Yulen cantered our caravan up behind The Block, Blackbeard met us. He flicked his eyes to the sky, and said to Yulen, “Sun makes a man open his pockets, hey, Sergeant?”
Yulen shrugged. “For half-breeds? At least they have property.”
From my campfire eavesdropping, I knew that the Clans of Bren didn’t mind bigotry, chopping one another into lunch, religious intolerance, gender inequality, public drunkenness, or slavery. But the Clans agreed on three inviolable rules. First, no chopping one another at The Fair. Second, once the auction hammer falls, a deal’s a deal. And, third, private property is private property.
When a seller offered a person for sale, he had to include as a package deal all property he captured along with his prisoner, down to the captive’s last peppercorn. The buyer had to bid for the whole package, too. No cherry picking. In the meantime, the prisoner owned his own stuff (or her own stuff; they were even-handed that way).
It was a fig leaf of decency, because incoming slaves seldom owned more than what they wore. But our four tons of gear, consisting of sealed Plasteel Tamperproofs, four suits of Eternad armor, and our four inanimate Cargo’Bots, were just as much ours by law as some peasant’s peppercorn. For another hour or so.
An Apprentice Auctioneer, a Tassini wearing indigo eye shadow, made us unload all four tons of our own stuff from Blackbeard’s duckbills. Then the Apprentice looped a long chain through our leg irons, paid it out, and locked it to a ring set in The Block. Then he made us sit in the dirt alongside all our gear. Not quite all. Jeeb hovered high above the spectator’s awning, still unknown to the Bren.
Orphan's Journey Page 11