Orphan's Journey

by Robert Buettner

  The dunes we had to cross actually comprised only a two-mile wide belt that shifted with the seasonal winds, forming the real physiographic barrier that separated the duckbill-riding Casuni from the Tassini.

  Six hours later, a Tassini Encampment Headman and I sat across from one another, cross-legged.

  He said, as he tamped moist, shredded janga leaves into the gold-filigreed receptacle of a water pipe, “I am told the Ogre Prince and the Bitch have forged a single sword. And have chosen you to wield it.”

  We sat together on striped cushions under an indigo canopy. A rising wind billowed the furled tent sides, as it scudded late-afternoon clouds toward us. They scraped low across the scrubland visible behind the encampment’s other thousand tents.

  The Headman looked to be seventy, but it was hard to tell because his face was dyed indigo from forehead to jaw. His mahogany skin was visible only where a mustache and goatee would have grown, and the whites of his eyes gleamed against his purple skin like moons in a night sky.

  I pounced on his statement. “Momentous events beget momentous responses. Would it please you to know more?”

  The Headman’s response itself was momentous, because by it he signaled that his visitor could finally talk business. Company came rarely to the Tassin nomads, and their customs were arranged to savor it, as well as to measure a stranger’s worth.

  We had passed four hours discussing my journey; my ancestry; his ancestry; my livestock, which consisted of Rosy; his livestock; whether the approaching storm would bring rain or only sand, and the mystery of how devil-worshiping Marini whores and pimps could produce liqueur so sublime that it would be served in paradise.

  Our four-hour chat had been lubricated by smuggled Marini liqueur, poured hot from a tall brass pot into cups the size of a man’s thumb, which my host refilled as fast as I politely drained them.

  The Headman lit the janga leaves he had stuffed into the water pipe, striking a flint he held in fingers as gnarled as a janga hammock pole.

  In harsh country, from Afghanistan to the Bren Highlands, the few things like janga and groundfruit that didn’t kill you found many uses.

  The Headman puffed his cheeks around the ivory mouthpiece of one of the pipe’s hoses, until smoke curled from his lips. “Tell me what you know, then what you want. Each detail. Omit nothing.” Then he lifted the other hose, and held it out to me.

  As I reached for the hose, my seat cushion tipped, and I had to catch myself with my free hand. The Headman’s smuggled Marini moonshine had left me zogged, as the price of politeness.

  I grimaced as I sat back, and my bladder sent its own signal about impending business. Purple Face’s liqueur was as diuretic as it was intoxicating, but after four hours wasted on small talk this was no time for a pee break.

  I had a regrown lung and no-smoking orders from New Bethesda. But I had more immediate concerns, and refusing to smoke the old boy’s janga wouldn’t resolve them.

  I slipped the hose mouthpiece between my lips, sucked, and choked back a cough as my throat constricted. “Very mild!”

  The Headman grinned. “My mother chewed this batch herself.”

  An hour later, I didn’t care what his mother chewed. I was pretty sure I had covered the major points of the proposed alliance, a tentative order of battle, a loose time-table, and an invitation to the first meeting among the heads of state.

  The Headman seemed to have grown two more eyes, my skull pounded, my bladder throbbed, and Niagara thundered in my ears.

  The Headman’s extra eyes were a janga hallucination, but the Niagara was real. Night had fallen, and the Headman’s household slaves had dropped the tent sides against the storm, which had proven to be this desert’s once-per-year scorpion-drowner.

  Rain drummed above my head and trickled through the tent’s seams.

  The Headman chopped the air with his hand, and said to me, as fuzzily as though he spoke through a pillow, “The risks are too great. The Marini have cities and ships to lose. We have nothing. Perhaps the devil will ignore the Tassini. I must say no.”

  I said, “The devil—the Slugs—won’t ignore you!”

  “If God wanted us to fight, He would give me a sign.” He squinted into the smoke cloud between us like it was a holo generator, and said, “I see no sign.” He shook his head, again, in wide arcs.

  Drunk and stoned as I was, I still knew I was losing this war before it even started.

  “You have to see!” I pounded my fist into a pillow, then countered his head shake with my own, even broader, one. That was a mistake. The room spun, I pitched forward into my cushions, and passed out.

  Forty-Nine

  Sometime later that night, cold rain dripped on my face, and woke me in dimness punctuated by distant lightning. The storm still pelted the Headman’s tent so hard that it cascaded a frigid stream onto the upper-bunk rope hammock into which somebody had slung me. Whoever had put me to bed had also stripped off my armor, so I lay shivering in my underlayer.

  I had to pee worse than ever, but I was still so drunk that I didn’t dare try to roll out of the hammock to stagger outside.

  Through my stupor, I realized that I couldn’t have screwed my diplomatic mission worse. The Headman had already turned me down. Now I had passed out in front of him, and had been put to bed drunk, by him or by his slaves. Without the Tassini, the Casuni would bolt. Without the Casuni, the Marini would bolt.

  My head spun worse than ever, and I just peed where I lay as I passed out again.

  I woke near noon the next day, and looked around. One tent side flap was up again, and a clear day shone through it. A woman, veiled, and covered head-to-toe in a coarse robe, stood at the tent’s far edge, hanging a woven rug to dry in the breeze. When she saw me staring at her, she ran away.

  My head hammered as I climbed down from the upper hammock. The lower was empty, as was the rest of the tent, but outside I heard the slapping stride of an approaching Tassini wobblehead.

  I found my armor, and started dressing. Then the Headman stepped in through the open tent flap, brushing dust from his cloak.

  His jaw was set.

  I looked down at the tent floor. “I—”

  He said, “Well, it’s done. It disgusted me, but it’s done now.”

  “I can’t blame you. But I really think—”

  He chopped air with his hand and cut me off. “The entire Council of One Hundred still must meet. But I rode out at first light and met with two other Headmen, so the Council will be only a formality.”

  Wasn’t it enough that he had turned me down? Did he have to advertise? My blood chilled. No, he didn’t. So he had to be talking about something else. I must have broken some taboo I was too blitzed to remember. Had I puked on an altar? Peeked under a woman’s veil in my stupor, and now the Tassini were meeting to decide to chop off my hand?

  He walked to a low, lacquered chest in the tent’s far corner, took out a jeweled sword, and it rang against its scabbard as he drew it.

  My heart skipped, and I stood there unarmored. I swiveled my head back and forth, searching for my M-40.

  The old man held his sword up between us, and the blade flashed as he turned it in his hand. He stared into its light, and his eyes glistened. “I take no joy in sending my son to war. But as I must, my blade will go with him.”

  My jaw dropped. “What did you tell the other Headmen?”

  He raised his indigo eyebrows. “That the Tassini must join you in this war, as the Ogre and the Bitch have done. Your arguments were stated with reason and passion. I was reluctant, but the sign was unmistakable.”

  I stopped with one leg in my armor, then sat on a cushion, shaking my throbbing head. After thirty seconds, I found my voice. “Sign?”

  “After I put you to bed, I sat up for one turn of the glass, and waited. But God gave me no sign. I smoked another pipe, but still no sign. I shivered in the cold rain. Then I took to my bed.” He pointed at the lower hammock. “And I prayed, one last time. And Go
d’s rain came upon my face. And I felt His rain, and it was warm!” He raised his eyes to the tent roof and smiled.

  If I ever write a Brief for the State Department, I bet they won’t let me add a section on winning allies by peeing on them.

  The downside of the rainstorm was that it flooded the wadis that separated me from Casus, Rosy, and, ultimately, the Royal Barge. The Scouts—my scouts, now—and I were forced to camp two nights, until the water sank low and slow enough that our wobbleheads could wade across.

  I spent the first forced layover teaching the Scouts to fire my M-40, plinking targets one shot at a time. Then one of them discovered the full auto position on the selector switch, and sprayed my last magazine across the desert like he was watering a lawn.

  He apologized profusely, and promised to make it up to me by roasting the testicles of the next dozen Casuni he met. I spent the second layover day teaching the Scouts the etiquette of allied operations.

  By the time I rejoined the outriders that Casus had left at the Border, reclaimed Rosy, and bid them farewell, I was almost two days behind schedule for my Royal Barge rendezvous. Casus was already en route to the Alliance’s first meeting of heads of state. If I missed my boat ride, I’d be stranded upriver while the Clans planned their war without me.

  Just in case that happened, I tasked Jeeb to Cruise and Snooze, an overnight surveillance above the Slug Troll. I hoped Jeeb could gather data on incubation progress, so Howard and Ord would have a better idea how much lead time the Alliance had to plan its war.

  I rode Rosy harder than I should have, but she never complained and never slowed.

  By the time Rosy staggered to the escarpment’s lip, we were both panting. And, for all our efforts, sixteen hours late.

  Rosy and I looked out across the valley of the Marin. The sun set at our backs, while the Royal Barge dwindled to a speck, disappearing into the downriver mist.

  I popped my visor, waved, and hollered, though I knew I might as well have been an ant calling the moon. I sighed. I had been promising Rosy turnips for days.

  “Goddam you, Bassin.” There was nothing worse than a Crown Prince who had the humility and discipline to follow orders.

  Snort.

  Almost nothing.

  Fifty

  A wronk stalked toward us out of a tree clump, head low, tail high, snarling and slobbering in the twilight, upwind and eighty yards north of us along the escarpment.

  The monster looked like its citified cousins, the ones the Marini hitched to their chariots, but thinner, dirtier, and, of course, unmuzzled. A wronk can’t run down a healthy duckbill, and is just smart enough not to try. But a wronk sure scares hell out of anything else it meets.

  So Rosy reared and squealed, then leapt over the escarpment. I had made the ten-foot leap easily with her twice before, but this time, exhausted and terrified, she landed badly, cartwheeled, and I somersaulted off down the slope.

  By the time I scrambled to my knees, Rosy was trying to stand, and the wronk was pacing back and forth along the Escarpment lip, rumbling as it smelled fresh, relatively stationary meat that it couldn’t get at. Another thing a wronk was just smart enough to know was that even its massive legs couldn’t absorb eight tons landing after a ten-foot jump.

  But, in about thirty seconds, the pacing wronk was going to stumble onto the path down the Escarpment, and come down below to make us into snacks.

  No problem, as long as we kept moving. I ran to Rosy, grabbed her reins, and said, “Up, girl. We gotta go.”

  Rosy bleated, then hobbled on three legs, holding her right rear leg in the air, while her lower leg below the knee joint dangled. The tibia protruded, white and bloody, exposed in an open fracture.

  I snapped my head around, looked away, and felt sicker than I had when I smelled the rotten hole in Sergeant Yulen’s gut. With a broken leg, Rosy was going to die even if the carnosaur vanished in the next second like an extinguished holo.

  Wronk.

  The beast found the way down the escarpment, and put a first foot on the path.

  Wronk.

  I spun and looked in the direction of the second bellow.

  The only thing worse than being chased by a slobbering, fifty-foot-long carnosaur is being caught between it and a forty-foot-long one.

  While I had been riding the High Plains, every wronk within an area the size of New Denver must have plodded to the ruins of the Great Fair, perhaps attracted by the bird cloud wheeling overhead, certainly attracted by the stench of the biggest putrefacted smorgasbord this world had known in centuries.

  The downslope monster advanced up the hill toward Rosy and me, head down and roaring. When it got within twenty yards, Rosy gave up hobbling, and rolled on her back, hissing, and kicking at the carnosaur with her sound hind leg.

  The wronk hung back, dodging Rosy’s punches, and snapped at me as I stood between it and Rosy. More, I supposed, to scare away an annoying competitor than to catch a snack.

  For weapons, I had an M-40 slung across my back for which I had only empty magazines, a utility knife no longer than one wronk tooth, and, in my thigh pocket, clipped alongside my Aid Pak, the single-shot .22 caliber survival pistol toy.

  I stood my ground between Rosy and the monster, unslung my M-40, reversed it in my hands, and swung it at him stock first, like a Louisville Slugger.

  The wronk lunged, and tried to reward my Quixotic stupidity by biting me in half at the torso.

  Whether I stumbled back over prostrate Rosy, or the wronk’s breath blew me back across her like a putrescent typhoon, I’ll never know.

  I found myself on my ass in the grass, with Rosy between me and the big wronk, staring into her huge brown eyes as she screamed.

  The beast’s snout thudded into her flank, its jaws clamped, and bone cracked. Rosy wailed and thrashed as the carnosaur began to eat her alive.

  I fumbled out the survival pistol, pressed it against Rosy’s eye socket, and whispered, “I’m sorry.” Then I fired the tiny bullet through her eye, into what I hoped was her brain.

  I lay face down and still alongside her, trembling, but her body continued to thrash for what seemed like minutes. Finally, I realized the movement was the carnosaur heaving her lifeless two-ton corpse, as it wrenched her hind leg off like a turkey drumstick.

  With the wronk preoccupied, I low-crawled away from Rosy’s body, dragging my useless M-40 by its sling, freezing in place every few feet, while I waited to feel huge jaws crush my body.

  I was ten yards away from Rosy’s corpse when the sound of wrenched gristle and cracking bone stopped. A low rumble replaced the noise.

  I turned my head. The smaller wronk had lifted its snout out of Rosy’s rib cage, and gobbets of gore plopped from its jaws back into her body cavity.

  Ten yards to my right, the bigger wronk that had challenged us at the top of the Escarpment thrust its head at the smaller monster, and roared a hiss like a jet engine.

  The bigger beast trotted to Rosy, and muscled in alongside the small one.

  While the two tussled, I scrambled to my feet and ran like hell, watching over my shoulder.

  The big wronk hip-checked the smaller one so hard that the smaller one staggered three paces away from the carcass, then caught its balance and snarled. The big wronk snorted, and turned back to feed.

  When the smaller carnosaur raised its head, it saw me, tearing ass downhill, just slower than a wronk could run. It swung its head once more at the big bully, then bellowed and stalked after an easy consolation prize, that being me.

  I cross-slung my rifle to free my hands, then shucked my pack, hoping that the beast would stop and examine it, and also to lighten my load. Meanwhile, I ran like my hair was on fire downhill, toward the charnel ground that had been the Fair.

  The wronk trampled my pack without a sniff, and kept coming, but it was eighty yards behind me and didn’t seem to be gaining.

  Plan B was that when I got to the Fair, some rotten morsel would distract the wronk.
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br />   Four minutes later, I entered the mounds of by-now skeletal remains, and debris swarming with scavengers. The chain reaction provided by abandoned livestock and scavengers that got themselves killed in the fray had kept the flesh party jumping for days.

  Scavengers snapped and snarled at me as I ran by, and I could hear them doing the same to the wronk as it passed them. In the frenzy, fast-moving small fry like me passed through, ignored by those among the scavengers that were strong enough to bite through Eternads.

  Five minutes later, I emerged from the obstacle course with the beast still hot on my trail, and now only fifty yards back.

  The prof on my Cretaceous-life holo concluded that tyrannosaurs were too big, slow, myopic, fragile, clumsy, and stupid to hunt. I wished he were here. Not so he could reconsider. So I wouldn’t have to outrun the wronk, I’d just have to outrun him.

  Three hundred yards downslope my salvation shimmered in the sunset. If a web-footed Tassini wobblehead couldn’t swim a flooded wadi, a wronk surely couldn’t swim the Marin. All I had to do was make it into the river, swim out to deeper water than the wronk could wade, then climb aboard some hunk of shipwreck flotsam, and wait until the dumb brute lost interest in standing on the shore.

  But I was running on repaired legs, breathing with a regrown lung, and hadn’t had a good night’s sleep in weeks. Adrenaline takes you only so far.

  The beast had closed the gap between us to within twenty yards by the time my boots splashed into the Marin. I high stepped out thigh-deep, then belly flopped, and churned my arms and legs like a monster was chasing me.

  Eternads are watertight if the vents are sealed. They aren’t designed for swimming, but they trap enough air, and are light enough, that a GI can actually swim faster in them than without them. They say a Navy SEAL wearing Eternads swam faster than Olympic Record time for the sixteen hundred freestyle while he was bagged, to win a bar bet. Probably Squid blarney, but the part about being bagged lends credibility.