Orphan's Journey

by Robert Buettner

  Bassin’s royal ancestors weren’t Abe Lincoln. They preserved slavery, but failed to preserve the union.

  I said, “Your grandmothers tolerated religious bigotry. They allowed your society to fragment into perpetual civil war. They made bad decisions.”

  Bassin smiled. “I can not improve my grandmothers’ decisions. I hope to improve their grandson’s.”

  A steward appeared, and Bassin circled a finger at our plates, then stood. “It is customary to take mead on deck between courses.”

  On deck five minutes later, Bassin, Ord, Howard, and I sipped sweet wine in the twilight, and watched a Master Harpooner teach Jude how to throw a barbed iron, with a bulb that could be loaded with explosives at its tip, into a round, yellow target the size of a kraken eye.

  I asked Bassin, “Can a harpooner kill a rhind?”

  “Sailors believe they can harpoon everything, after a few cups.” He raised his glass, and smiled. “But they also say ‘I don’t have to outsail the rhind. I just have to outsail the other boat.’”

  “Well thrown!” The harpooner clapped Jude on the shoulder, and stared at an iron quivering in the yellow target’s center. The harpooner turned to Bassin. “It’s in this one’s blood, Sir!”

  Bassin stared toward the sunset. “Jude’s father died a hero?”

  “His father saved our world. Jude drags around big expectations.”

  “I understand. Blood chose me, too.”

  I stared at the sun as it set in the west, and smelled the continent on the breeze. Somewhere on that landmass were Casus and the Headmen of the Tassini, who had to be persuaded to join forces after centuries of Blood Feud. And that would be the easy part of a job I hadn’t even applied for.

  Blood had chosen Bassin. Maybe blood was choosing Jude. Whatever had chosen me for command, I had my work cut out for me.

  The steward climbed out of the hatchway and tapped a gong with a feathered mallet, to announce the next course.

  Bassin stood aside, bowed a notch from the waist, and extended his palm toward the hatchway. “After you, Commander.”

  I nodded, and stepped ahead of the man who would become king.

  The next morning we reached Marinus. In the days since we had passed through the city, word of the massacre had spread downriver to the city.

  The Royal Barge, which drew crowds even in normal times, could barely pull alongside a stone quay without crushing the skiffs—and the river boats rowed by slaves—that bobbed in the estuary. The bank itself was so choked with pedestrians that the crowd forced a dozen people off the quay and into the water. A few people hurled rocks and garbage at the Barge.

  I pulled Bassin back from the Barge rail, and said to him, “I thought everybody here was used to war.”

  He shook his head. “The perpetual relation of the Clans, one to another, is war. But, at least during my lifetime, war has been waged in the form of uncivil talk punctuated by cross-border raids, not genocide. Few people in any of the Clans had no relative at the Fair.”

  Most of the dockside people didn’t realize we had come from the sea, not upriver, and they screamed for news of the missing. A crying woman held up a framed oil portrait of a man in a magenta striped tunic. I had seen a magenta tunic like it thrown on a burning pyre as we left the Fair. Many waved newspapers that looked to have printed front-page casualty lists.

  The first great terrorist attack of the turn of this century, and the first reactive wars that followed it, had shocked America. Seven thousand Americans dead from a population of three hundred million. No one would ever know the toll at the great Fair and in the battle that followed, but the Queen’s Secretary estimated a hundred thousand dead from a population of ten million, just among the Marini. The wonder was that this shock hadn’t collapsed Marinus into its own foundations.

  We dropped off Ord and a ’Bot loaded with all the Earth hardware we thought the armorers of Marinus might be able to copy. The Minister of Armaments was supposed to meet us with his carriage, but it took a half hour for Marini infantry to clear a path through the crowds to the quay. It took ten minutes more to convince the Minister’s coachman that the ’Bot wouldn’t run away if he didn’t tether it to the back of the carriage.

  A half hour further upriver the Minister of Natures met Howard and Jude at the University’s quay and hauled them off to the Great Library of Marin, where Howard would download anything we could use into his ’Puter, and would arrange for a meeting among the Clans, if we could form an alliance.

  At every settlement upriver, the crowds lined the banks, but the closer we got to the headwaters of the Marin, the quieter they became. I suppose it was the black smoke from the pyres that drifted above them on the wind. That and the smell of burned flesh.

  The Royal Barge’s Master didn’t care much for taking the Barge up the great Locks, even though his future king had designed them. With the Marini fleet sunk like the Spanish Armada, other large vessels were scarce, and the down lock had to be loaded with rocks for counterbalance. Bassin himself did the math with a little abacus made of shell and bone. But Bassin knew his business, and the trip was uneventful. Even the Howlers seemed subdued.

  We anchored at the Pillars after sunset, though the Red Moon already hung overhead and lit the skeletal carcasses of the Marini fleet all around us. Bassin and I stood at the rail, looking out at the ash heap. Jeeb perched alongside me.

  Bassin said, “You know, I’m not afraid to accompany you.”

  I glanced down at his trouser leg, which covered the prosthetic reminder the slavers had given him. “Bassin afraid” was an oxymoron.

  I said, “I know.”

  “Our intelligence stopped trying to infiltrate patrols into the Casuni lands decades ago. The Casuni are excellent trackers, and they shoot first. I had to go in alone, myself, and act the part of an addled Tassini.”

  “You had to go, yourself?” I rolled my eyes.

  “The Stone Trade is literally life to us. Our picture of the Trade was decades out of date. Our agents went in, but none ever came out.”

  “Maybe somebody had to go. Did you just want to get out of the Palace, so you could personally whack some slavers?”

  He rubbed his eye patch. “That aspect ended badly. Mother complains that I delegate poorly.”

  I rubbed the plate in my own thigh. “Ord says I do, too.”

  Bassin stared into the water, sighed, then clapped his palms on the rail. “So. That is why I delegated to you the job of Allied Commander.”

  We had had this conversation before.

  The first thing an Allied Commander needs is allies to command. Half of Bren’s human combat power resided with the Casuni and the Tassini. So the first thing I had asked Bassin to do was have his diplomats propose an alliance, maybe by a note in the diplomatic pouch to the embassy in the Casuni and Tassini capital cities. I knew about such stuff. Back home, Ord and I once diplomatic-pouched a copy of a captured parliamentary resolution back to the U.S. Spooks.

  However, the Casuni and the Tassini were nomads. They had no diplomatic pouches. They also had no diplomats, no embassies, no capital cities, and no parliaments.

  A delegation would have to track down and persuade Casus, and also the Council of Headmen of the Hundred Encampments of the Tassini.

  However, if a Casuni, a Tassini, and a Marini were placed in the same tent, the only thing that would prevent them from stabbing each other would be their desire to choke the crap out of one another first. Therefore, no delegation member could be Marini, Tassini, or Casuni.

  That drained my delegate pool down to one.

  I said to Bassin, “I don’t like the way I’m being inserted.”

  “The herds are migrating this time of year, so Casus moves his encampment daily. We will allow Casus to find you. What you must do is walk to the escarpment. I counsel that you skirt the ruins to the north. Better cover, there. Cross the escarpment, let a Casuni patrol pick you up. They will take you to Casus.”

  “Eventually.�
��

  Bassin nodded. “Eventually.”

  “We don’t have till eventually. And a prospective commander shouldn’t arrive in custody.”

  I whispered to Jeeb, and he telescoped his wings, and whirred off into the dark.

  Bassin frowned. “Where is the little one going? Jason?”

  I checked moons-set time on my ’Puter, then went below to gather my gear.

  “Jason, how do you expect me to help you if you won’t tell me what’s going on, and you won’t allow me to do my job?”

  Bassin was a good guy. Better than good. But he had been the Crown Prince all his life. Even if he didn’t realize it, he was still micromanaging my show, sharing what he knew with me only when he felt like I needed to know. The time to fix the relationship was now, not when the crunch came.

  This little charade would put Bassin on the receiving end of micromanagement and of being denied information, but it wouldn’t kick up much dust between us. Bassin was smart. He would figure it out, give me breathing space from here on out, and we would still be able to work together.

  A few years ago, I would have handled the situation by sulking until I blew up. I was maturing into a commander. Or I was turning into a devious total dick.

  Forty-Three

  The barge’s long boat put me ashore at the Pillars under the 2 A.M. light from the slivers of two moons. I carried full pack, my M-40 cross-slung, and two snacks in silk sacks that Bassin had the Chef prepare, after I explained my plan.

  I stood knee-deep in the lapping water as Bassin reached over the gunwale and shook my hand. “Remember—”

  I nodded. “Don’t sleep on sand in the desert. The screw worms will crawl up my ass. You remember, if I’m not back in eight days, head back downriver. There’s no prep time to waste, and Howard and Ord can teach you more than I ever could.” I tapped the time display on my wrist ’Puter. “Do I have to make it an order?”

  He grinned. “No. But it’s going to be interesting to take them from someone besides Mother.”

  Bassin’s swabbies turned the long boat without a whisper and rowed him back to the Royal Barge, and I slogged ashore.

  For a graveyard, the Fair was noisy.

  The debris was animated by scavenging shadows slinking from corpse to corpse. The night echoed with challenges snarled across rotted prizes, and with cracking as teeth crushed bone. Ash twisted up from the wreckage like whirling ghosts.

  In the distance, milling duckbills and other livestock, abandoned in the chaos, bleated.

  It was improbable that the Slugs or Casuni had posted pickets to secure this mess, so I maxed my vent filters against the stench and clambered through the ruins.

  I saved my stealth for evading Casuni patrols once I crossed the escarpment. I had no time to waste negotiating with patrols, and less inclination to begin a peace mission with a firefight.

  A half hour later, I had left the Fair’s ruins behind and headed up the grassy slope that led to the escarpment, alongside the tree line where the Marini chariots and the wronks had lain in ambush. My pack weighed me down enough that I had to chin my suit temp down a degree to retard sweating, and my thighs burned.

  A tree limb cracked.

  I stopped, turned, and nodded down my night goggles.

  In the trees, something snorted.

  I realized too late that cross-slung on my back was the last place my M-40 should be at that moment. Howard had said wronks in the wild were scavengers. The Fair’s stench had attracted every carnivorous freeloader within trotting distance. First would have come the bugs, then the birds, then the rat- and hyena-sized scavengers. A monster as big as a wronk could afford to come late to the party, then scare off the small fry, or eat them, too. An eight-ton buzzard fifty feet away in the bush was the last thing I hoped to hear tonight.

  Then a transponder blip flashed on my visor display, above the trees.

  “Found her, huh?” I said.

  “Yip.” Jeeb chirped in my earpiece.

  “And Casus?”

  “Yip.”

  Rosy, all twenty-four feet of her, ambled out of the trees, walked to me on all fours, and slimed my faceplate with her tongue. I had bet that Rosy was too smart to be caught by men, or eaten by wronks, and would stay near the river’s water supply.

  “I missed you, too.” I scratched her neck wattle as I looked around.

  If skittish Rosy wasn’t spooked, the wronks hadn’t arrived yet.

  I untied the silk ribbons on Bassin’s snack bag, and fed Rosy orange turnips, one by one.

  An hour later, after moons-set, and at the 3 A.M. low tide of a sentry’s alertness, Rosy pattered up a draw into Casuni territory, as silently as a two-ton reptile can with a human aboard. Then she stretched out at a gallop that not even a Casuni patrol could match.

  With Rosy’s savvy and sense of smell, and Jeeb’s overhead surveillance, I evaded two predator packs and one Casuni hunting party camp. We followed Jeeb across the high plains until, an hour before sunrise, Rosy stood, huffing and snorting steam, in a boulder clump that anchored a rise overlooking Casus’s camp, a half mile distant by my rangefinder display.

  I dismounted, opened the second silk snack bag, and fed Rosy more turnips, while I ate the breakfast the Chef had packed in the rest of the second bag. Outside my Eternads, the High Plains air was so cold it seemed hard as glass. But stars smothered the black sky, the wind calmed, and Rosy, insulated by bulk, body fat, and millennia of adaptation, purred like an antique bus at idle.

  I tasked Jeeb to Watch and Wake, set Rosy to graze the slope away from Casus’s camp, snuggled down into a crevasse, and darkened my visor to sleep black.

  The last thing I thought, as I drifted off, was that I was getting the hang of this place.

  Blip. Blip. Jeeb woke me.

  The ground trembled beneath my shoulder blades.

  Forty-Four

  I levered myself out of my crevasse, and looked up at the sun without even checking my visor’s clock. I’d slept three hours.

  In small groups, and from all directions, two hundred mounted riders approached Casus’s encampment.

  “Crap!” If Casus was distracted by raiders, not to mention killed by them, he wouldn’t make much of an ally.

  I chinned my optics. Every rider was Casuni, wearing polished armor. A black cape streamed back from every man’s shoulder. But their weapons remained holstered, and each party drew along behind it a duckbill loaded with a cargo of what looked like bundled sticks.

  I swung my head to Casus’s camp. At the center of a hundred yurts rose one twice as tall and wide as the others. Casus’s scarlet pennant snapped in the frigid wind, attached to a swaying pole that stuck up through the yurt’s billowing central smoke hole.

  In the open space in front of his yurt, Casus stood, hands on hips, and watched the incoming riders. He wore a black cape over his shoulders, too.

  The first group of riders reined up in a dust cloud, and its leader dismounted, walked to Casus, and hugged him.

  The next group thundered up. Its riders hugged Casus, then hugged the members of the other group.

  The scene was repeated as group after group rode up, until Casus’s yurt was visible only as a shadow through a yellow dust cloud.

  I whistled up Rosy, swung into the saddle, and patted her neck. “Ever crash a party before, babe?”

  Forty-Five

  Casuni pistols can’t hit a blimp outside sixty yards. So, although I was staring down four hundred drawn pistol barrels as I rode toward Casus’s encampment, Rosy and I got within shouting distance without Casus’s guests wasting a first shot.

  I popped my visor and yelled, “Casus! It’s Jason!”

  He squinted through the dust. “Who else would it be in that armor?” He waved the others to lower their pistols.

  When I dismounted, Casus bearhugged me so hard that my armor’s surface stress display winked amber. Then he held me by my shoulders at arm’s length. Tears ran down his cheeks and into his beard. “
How did you know?”

  “Huh?”

  “Yulen spoke of you.”

  I nodded. “Yulen. Sergeant Yulen? He did?”

  “He said you were the cleverest idiot he ever met.”

  “Oh.”

  “That’s quite a compliment from a Sergeant.”

  “True.”

  “Yulen was never so complimentary of my own sons. He taught them all, you know.”

  “I didn’t know.” Then I remembered the young cavalryman at the Fair, that Yulen had taken under his wing. Black cloaks. Tears. “Sergeant Yulen is dead?”

  Casun stared at the bare ground at his feet. “Soon. He’s receiving the balms.”

  “How?”

  “That battle at the Fair. A bullet from the black worms.”

  It had been ten days, and they didn’t call it first aid for nothing. But maybe. I felt for the Aid Kit in my thigh pocket. Over the last century, U.S. Adviser-team medics had made more friends with Plexytose and Penicillin than the State Department had made with cummerbunds and canapés. “Can I see him?”

  “Of course.” Casus hung an arm around my neck, and walked me toward his yurt.

  A Casuni woman as gnarled as driftwood held open the big yurt’s entry flap, and Casus dragged me inside.

  Through smoky haze drifting off the central fire pit, I recognized Yulen’s tangled gray hair. He lay on his back atop a pile of hides two feet tall. His belly was bare, but robes covered his chest and legs. His eyes were closed, and his breathing shallow.

  An old woman in bulky Casuni robes sat cross-legged beside Yulen, rubbing a clove of something across his forehead and humming.

  A second woman spooned liquid from a pot on the fire, opened his lips with thin fingers, and drizzled the liquid into his mouth.

  A third woman knelt alongside Yulen’s pale, bare belly.

  I stepped close to the old soldier, and asked Casus, “May I?”

  Casus waved the three crones back, and their eyes burned at me.