She fell into step behind him as he walked down the hill and toward the river. The trees on either side of the game trail had already been cut and it was easy to see the best spot for the dam, right where the two banks came closest to one another, just after the river had made a lazy turn to the left. Workers were already creating a roadway that would lead to the site.
“So what do you think, Szakhandu?” asked Hsrandtuss, breaking the silence.
“Think about what, Great King?”
“About the site of our new city.”
“It is not for me to say, Great King.”
“Stop dipping my tail in the lake with this ‘great king’. I know what you think of me. I’m just a half wild brute that took you away from your comfortable home in Tsahloose. I know you say as much when you are among the other females.”
He glanced at her. She opened her mouth, ready to plead her innocence, but then closed it and dropped her chin.
“I am sorry, Great… husband.”
“What are you sorry about exactly, Szakhandu? Are you sorry that you said unkind things about your king and husband, or are you sorry that you are the wife of a wild brute?”
“I am not sorry about that. I said those things, but I didn’t really mean them. When I am angry or frustrated my mouth becomes a feathered runner. I am sorry if I upset you, but I do not wish to return to Tsahloose. I never have. I have more status as your wife, and once this city is built, I will have even more.”
“It is good to hear,” said Hsrandtuss. “And it is good that you were honest with me. If you had lied to me, I would have bitten you on your pretty snout. Now though, I have use for you. You will take Tusskiqu and fifty warriors and you will make contact with all of the local villages. I need to know about all of them, their chiefs, and their allegiances.”
“You would trust me to do this?”
“I will.”
“I will bring them all to heel, Great King.”
“Don’t let this go to your tail. You are a female, not a war chief. All you are to do is make contact and gather information.”
“I will not fail,” she said, rubbing her chin on his shoulder.
“See that you don’t.”
They arrived back at the city hill in time to see a caravan arriving from the west. It consisted of some two hundred males and females on foot and another thirty, pulling a large wooden two-wheeled wagon. The wagon carried a big square load, covered with animal skins, and behind it trailed thirty or so immature lizzies attached to it by leashes around their necks. Kendra joined Hsranduss and Szakhandu as they walked over to examine the youngsters, who ranged in height from three to four feet.
“Some of these don’t even look old enough to tame,” said the king, pointing at one particularly short individual. It snapped at his hand and he slapped it roughly across the snout. “This one doesn’t look to have seen five summers yet.”
“We brought all the offspring from Hiissierra as instructed, Great King,” said one of the newly arrived males, whom Hsrandtuss recognized from his home village.
“Instructed by whom?”
“By me,” said Kendra. “We will need all ages if our city is to flourish.”
The male who had spoken climbed up on the wagon and pulled back the animal skins to reveal a square cage. It was packed full of tiny lizzie offspring, some two or three summers old and others walking on all fours, no more than thirty inches from snout to tail tip, that had obviously hatched only that spring.
“And I suppose you ordered these pests brought too?” hissed Hsrandtuss to Kendra in exasperation.
“Great King, there will be deaths in our city, and houses will want to catch youngsters to fill their empty sleeping mats. They won’t want to wait six or seven summers for the eggs we lay here next spring.”
“She is right, my husband,” said Szakhandu. “Besides, they will help keep down the insect population.”
“Then you will be in charge of this operation, Kendra,” he said, throwing up his hands. “And you had better see that it doesn’t come back to claw you on the cloaca.”
Three days later Hsrandtuss stepped out the door of his house. It was one of several dozen that had been constructed around the base of the hill. It would be an adequate home until the first stage of his palace was constructed. He stretched out his arms wide and took a deep breath, savoring the scent of pine blowing on the warm summer breeze. Then he started as a tiny lizzie yearling ran across his foot.
“Damn vermin!” he shouted. “Kendra!”
His sixth wife poked her head out of the doorway.
“Get out here.”
She stepped quickly to him, taking his arm in her hand.
“One of them nearly tripped me.”
“You are letting yourself get upset over nothing again, Great King.”
“What do you mean nothing,” he growled, and started off toward the site of his future palace.
She hurriedly caught up with him and fell into step at his side. To do so, she needed to walk almost twice as fast as he did, since her legs were much shorter.
“This is a subject I wanted to speak to you about though,” she said.
“What subject?”
“Our children.”
He stopped and turned to look at her.
“What do you mean ‘our children’? Do you think we need to catch a juvenile? I really don’t think it’s worth the trouble until we get more settled.”
“No, Great King. I mean our children—yours and mine.”
“Now I have no idea what you’re talking about. Remember you’re talking to a male and try to make sense.”
“Have you ever seen a human child?”
“Not a hatchling,” he said, thinking back to the last several times he came into contact with the soft-skins. “I saw Yessonar’s priestess when she was about this tall.” He held his hand up to the top of his stomach. “She must have been six or seven summers.”
“She would have been twice that old,” said Kendra. “They grow much more slowly than we do. Their hatchlings are very short but very fat, and they cannot do anything for themselves.”
“Yes, I have heard that they are like worms,” he said. “I have gotten used to them and I even enjoy meeting with their traders, but the thought of their wiggling little offspring makes my morning meal want to climb back out of me. Why are we talking about them?”
“The humans know their mothers.”
“That is a function of biology,” he said. “After all, they pop out of them already hatched.”
“But they know their fathers too.”
“How can that be? All they could really say is that they suspect who their fathers might be.”
Kendra shrugged. “I want to know my own offspring and I want them to know me.”
Hsrandtuss stared at her for a moment. “And how do you propose to accomplish this?”
“You will make a special garden for me at the palace. I will make my own nest there and my eggs will be the only ones there.”
“You’re not making any sense. The eggs will hatch and the little ones will just run away and get lost among the others anyway.”
“We will build a large enclosure in which to keep them, like the aviaries in Tsahloose. Perhaps with them close to us, the offspring will be easier to tame. The human children learn to behave like the adults very quickly. Who is to say that ours couldn’t do the same?”
“But… but letting them run loose and fend for themselves weeds out the weaker ones.”
Kendra leaned close and pressed her chin to his shoulder. “I cannot imagine that any offspring of yours would need to be weeded out.”
Hsrandtuss let out a long hiss. He knew she was manipulating him, but it did make sense that any eggs from his mating would be superior.
“What do you think the other females will say about this?” he asked.
“I think many of them will want to do the same thing. They will want to build their own nests.”
“Ho
w will our egg keeper be able to watch all these different nests?”
“Each female will have to be her own egg keeper.”
“Don’t you think this sounds like a lot of unnecessary work?”
“I think it sounds like a revolution.”
“I need to think about this,” he said. “Don’t tell anyone about this conversation, and I mean anyone, including Tokkenoht. I know you are two tales of the same iguanodon.”
Kendra put her hand over the end of her snout in acknowledgement.
“Great King! Great King!” Hsrandtuss and his wife turned to see a male rushing toward them. “We have found this in the river.”
The male held out his hand, revealing in his palm a pea-sized lump of shining golden metal. Hsrandtuss took it and placed it in his mouth, biting down on it. Spitting it back into his hand, he saw that his tooth had made a dent in it.
“Is there more of this?” he asked.
“We have seen many pieces in the shallow of the river,” replied the other lizzie. “Is it copper or gold?”
“It is gold.”
“Oh. Should we collect it?”
“Pick up those pieces you see, but don’t let it distract you from work on the dam.”
“It shall be as you command, Great King,” said the male, rushing back down the sloping hill.
“He was disappointed,” said Kendra.
“Of course he was. Gold is too soft to make into weapons or tools, so it is only used for jewelry. And of course, kings like Ssithtsutsu and Khassna held a monopoly on gold, so that it was not available to the commoners.”
“But you know that it has greater value than that, my husband.”
“Of course I do. I have seen the shiny coins that the humans make from gold,” he said. “How many copper bits do they trade for one of those gold coins?”
“One thousand.”
“One thousand,” he repeated. “One thousand copper bits.”
“There is more,” said Kendra. “You know that in the faraway land across the sea, where the humans come from, they are as numerous as the stars in the sky.”
“I have heard as much.”
“In this land lives their king—the king over all the humans everywhere.”
He looked at her, waiting for her to continue.
“Do you know how he shows that he is the king of all the soft-skins?”
“No.”
“He has a hat made of gold.”
Hsrandtuss hissed quietly and bobbed his head up and down. “I will have a hat of gold too.”
Chapter Twelve: The Hunt
“Good morning, Iolana,” said Radley Staff as he entered the library.
“Good morning, Father,” replied Iolana, turning to the next page of The Girl from Beneath the Earth.
“Still working your way through Inspector Colbshallow’s books?”
“Yes, Father,” she said, turning the page.
“I wouldn’t think you would find them all that interesting. They’re written for young men.”
“They just speak to me,” she said, turning the page.
“Are you actually reading that?”
“Yes, Father,” she said, turning the page.
“How can you read that fast? Do you skim through the words?”
Iolana stopped and took the sterling silver bookmark embossed with the Dechantagne family crest from the lamp table, placing it between pages 43-44 of the tattered paperback, which she set next to the unlit lamp.
“No, I don’t skim. It’s all about training one’s mind to recognize an entire sentence at a time instead of only a single word. People do it occasionally without even realizing it. It comes naturally. For instance, you may read the letters B A S S, but how do you know if that word rhymes with ace or ass? Your brain tells you because it sees ahead to the rest of the sentence. So you read ‘the bass is the largest instrument in the orchestra,” or “the bass fishing is best in the lakes of Booth.”
“I see.” He sat down in the other chair. “So what is this book about?”
“They’re all essentially the same. A plucky Brech hero must make his way through dangerous terrain, fight hordes of frightening monsters, and defeat evil masterminds in order to rescue an exotic princess. This particular princess comes from a hidden world beneath the surface where humans are enslaved by a race of intelligent but evil burrowing insects.”
Mr. Staff laughed. “And this speaks to you? Do you identify with the princess or the hero?”
Iolana shrugged. “All I can say is that I don’t see myself as a burrowing insect.”
“Glad to hear it. Remember, we are going hunting tomorrow.”
“I don’t think I will go this time. I have too much to do.”
“You have to go. I planned this trip weeks ago, and besides, it was your idea. What exactly is monopolizing your time lately? I feel like I hardly ever see you anymore.”
“I’ve been spending time with my friends.”
“It’s not a boy, is it? Do I have to start sending a chaperone with you everywhere you go?”
“I assure you Father, there is no boy interested in me. I’m either too young, or too smart, or too famous, or too stuck-up, or too ugly to be bothered with.”
“You aren’t ugly, Iolana,” he said. “But the rest of those are all true. So you will be ready to go tomorrow at 7:00 AM.
“As you say, Father,” she said, taking up her book again.
“You must help me see to Terra. I’m still not sure about taking her with us. I had the devil’s own time convincing her mother that she should be let out, so you will need to help me.” He stood up. “Still, she seemed more worried about Augie. I think she’s had a premonition that he will die young.”
“That’s silly.”
“Of course it is.”
“It’s far more likely that Augie will outlive Terra or me.”
“Why do you say that? Women usually live longer.”
“I wasn’t speaking of men and women, but of Dechantagnes,” Iolana explained. “Mother was the middle child and she outlived Uncle Terrence and Uncle Augie. Our grandfather was a middle child, the second of four. His older brother was killed in the Bordonian War, while his younger sister died of a fever and his younger brother was shot in a disagreement over a gambling debt. If one were to extrapolate from history, one would have to assume that Augie was destined to survive both his sister and me.”
“Don’t forget, you’re a Staff,” said her father, before he exited the room.
“At least according to my mother and Zurfina,” said Iolana quietly. “Two women, neither noted for their adherence to the truth.”
Sixteen minutes later, Iolana closed The Girl from Beneath the Earth and returned it to the crate sitting along the south wall. She skimmed through the container for the book she would read tomorrow, finally picking up Slave Girl Captive of the Pirates before tossing it back into the box with the realization that she wouldn’t have time for it the following day. The rest of her morning reading was cut short too.
“Kayden!” she shouted out the library door. “Where in Kafira’s name is my Gazette?”
The lizzie major-domo stepped close to her. “Khikhiino tacktotott.”
“No one is to get that paper before me. Khikhiino Iolana.”
“Tacktotott?”
“Not even my mother.”
“You whant I get?”
“No, there’s no sense you getting fired over my newspaper. If you see her set it aside, grab it and save it for me. I’ll read it tonight.”
“Yess Stahwasuwasu Zrant.”
“My name is Iolana. I know you can say it.”
“Lizzie name is Stahwasuwasu Zrant.”
“While I admit that ‘Child of the Sunrise’ has a certain ring to it, I’m only too aware that the same words also mean ‘Pest of the Sunrise.”
Avoiding both the dining room and the family at breakfast, Iolana cut through the kitchen from the back hallway, grabbing a crumpet on the way though.
Once out the back door, she ordered a pair of lizzies to wheel the steam cabriolet out of the machine shed. Much smaller than the other cars, the cabriolet had come all the way from Mirsanna. With two large wheels just behind the driver, just in front of the engine, it had two very tiny wheels out in front and was steered not with a steering wheel but with a tiller. Though it officially belonged to her mother, Iolana was the only one who used it, and it was the only vehicle she was allowed to drive herself. The lizzies topped off the water, but Iolana started the coal fire.
“Going?”
The girl turned around to see Esther watching her with her yellow eyes.
“What’s the matter? Aren’t you playing with Terra this morning?”
Esther shook her head. It seemed quite unnatural. Lizzies often bobbed their heads up and down, though it didn’t mean agreement as it did with humans.
“You may come with me, if you wish,” said Iolana.
The lizzie climbed up into the passenger side. The cabriolet didn’t have a back seat. Once the fire was going and the whistle of steam had started, Iolana climbed up beside her. Releasing the brake with her right hand, she pressed down on the accelerator. The arrangement of three foot pedals was so much less complicated than on Brech vehicles. Minutes later, they were scooting down the brick road at close to the car’s top speed of 25 miles per hour. Soon they were pulling to a stop in front of the Result Mechanism’s building.
Iolana climbed down and went around to the back of the vehicle to set the relief cock. Then she walked to the building’s door, unlocking the new padlock that she had put there. She opened the door, but then turned around to look back toward the car.
“Aren’t you getting out?” she asked Esther.
The lizzie shook her head.
“I thought you wanted to come.”
“Not here.”
Iolana shrugged, and leaving the reptilian where she sat, stepped into the building. Walking around to the far side, she opened the coal bin and began shoveling the black rock into the giant firebox. The great machine moved slightly. The fire that had been burning constantly for two weeks flamed up larger with the added fuel. Closing the firebox door and returning the shovel to the coal bin, the girl wiped her hands on her hanky as she walked around to the front of the machine.
The Sorceress and her Lovers Page 14