“And what did you tell them?” she asked Faro, unsure whether she really wanted to hear the answer.
But he smiled, as she looked up again to face his eyes. “I told them that you are a very serious and disciplined leader, and that you will allow nothing to interfere with the discipline of the troupe.”
That was a good answer, for indeed, if she chose to amuse herself with any of the men, regardless whether she actually played favorites after that, it would be assumed that she was doing so. That would be very bad for discipline, and she was glad that Faro had thought of the response, for she truly was not interested in any of the men in that way.
“Thank you,” was all she said.
Faro smiled. “You have been similarly supportive of my situation,” he reminded her.
That was early in the expedition, while they were within a week of the capital. After marching for more than a moon, they came to the border of Mazonia. The terrain turned from lush fields and farms, to huge tracts of grazing-land supporting vast herds of sheep, goats, and cattle, and then to land supporting hardly more than the occasional jackalope. Near her home, the landscape was of rolling, wooded hills and well-watered valleys; it had gradually gotten drier, the landscape flatter, and the population sparser. They had not seen another person for the past two days.
They had been subsisting on their own provisions and whatever they could glean from the countryside for several days, for the landscape was barren of farms or settlements here, bare even of the great cattle and sheep ranches that took up as much land as a dozen of the farms Xylina was used to.
The land was flat for the most part, but rutted with shallow canyons and dotted with occasional tall, barren ridges, orange-red hills whose sides had been eroded even as the sides of those canyons had been, etched with deep grooves by wind or water. A scrubby grass and a tough, aromatic shrub were all that grew here, except where there was water. There, trees and other vegetation flourished, proving that the land was not barren if it had water. But there was very little water here, and Xylina decreed that they must fill their waterskins and barrels at every occasion, saving that real water for drinking, and using conjured water for bathing and washing. She considered herself fortunate that the summer had been cool so far; this land would have been unbearable in the scorching heat of a high summer. As it was, she conjured additional water at every halt, letting the men use it to wash the dust from their faces, and to cool their overheated bodies. The dry air evaporated it so quickly that within moments of sluicing it over their heads, their hair and tunics were already dry. They also used it to rinse away the taste of the flat, stale, real water they drank from their waterskins, pouring it into their mouths after they had drunk their fill. She could have conjured other things-wine, for instance-but she thought it might be prudent not to give them anything intoxicating. In heat like this, they were very likely to get drunk or sick much more quickly. In any event, they seemed grateful enough for just the sweet water.
She called a halt at just about midday, and let the men rest while she peered at the map and tried to reckon their location. Ware walked his horse up alongside her mule as she was staring at the horizon, and pointed a helpful finger.
“There,” he said. “You see that flat-topped hill? On the map, it is called The Anvil,’ and it sits exactly astride the border here.”
“I don’t see anything that looks like a boundary,” she said doubtfully, straining her eyes toward the horizon. She had expected fences, or a wall, and border guards. There was nothing but cloudless blue sky and red earth.
Ware shrugged gracefully. “Nor will you,” he replied. “There is only a low fence of sticks and rocks to mark it. As you can see, there is nothing hereabouts to guard-so the border is only a convenience, recognized by both sides as the place that marks the region where men are subservient, and where they are not. And, not coincidentally, the place where Mazonite conjuration ceases to be the only magic humans possess. Across that border, other rules prevail. Your magic will still be as strong, but there will be other kinds that are just as strong.”
She rolled the map, and put it carefully away in the case. “Then what stops men from escaping over it?” she asked.
Ware gave her a sardonic stare. “Really,” he said, finally, as his horse stirred restively beneath him. “Xylina, can you in your wildest imaginings picture very many men who had the strength, resources and fortitude to cross the territorywe have over the past two days? Alone? With no provisions? And with more of the same awaiting him on the other side? And why would such a man want to endure such privations?”
“But I had thought that there were men waiting beyond the borders for the runaways-” she began.
Ware laughed, softly. “Oh, there are those waiting for runaways here. Tiny tribes of nomadic horse-warriors, who are only too pleased to capture these strays and add them to their own slave-strings. No, Xylina, men who escape this way soon find themselves wishing that they had stayed at home, for if they experienced hardship at the hands of their mistresses, what they find at the hands of these Pacha horse-warriors is near to torture.”
Nomadic horse-warriors. No one had warned her about those. She looked back at her little train, and wondered how formidable it would look to barbarian raiders. Were twenty-four men enough? Did they look like hardened fighters? And they were afoot; they could not escape mounted men by running. For a moment, she wavered, and fear crept into her heart.
Ware was continuing to eye her, with a wry smile on his lips. “They will findyou just as tempting a prize, my dear,” he said softly. “Any of the Pacha chieftains would be pleased to have you in his tent-properly leg-shackled, of course. Your beauty is rare among the Mazonites; among the Pacha you would shine like a moon-flower among chickweed. A chieftain would claim you as his pleasure-slave immediately.”
Her head jerked up, and she looked down her nose at him indignantly. “Andyou would do well to remember who is the mistress here,demon ,” she snapped. “No unwashed barbarian is going to touch me and live to tell his nomadic kin!”
With that, she gave the signal to Faro to move out, and urged her mule to the head of the column, ignoring Ware’s rich chuckle as he guided his horse in behind hers.
She was in the process of conjuring the camp defenses when the first of the Pacha appeared over the horizon.
She had taken into consideration the fact that they were horse-fighters when she built the defenses. The first defense was a tangle of razor-sharp wire all around the camp, waist-high, and too wide (she hoped) for a horse to jump. Immediately behind it was a stretch of pointed metal stakes, slanted outward, no more than a hands-breadth apart. No horse was going to care to approach that! And if for some reason their attackers passed both those barriers successfully, there was an inner defense, a shallow ditch filled with oil, that could be lit to create a final barricade of smoke and flame. Ware assured her gravely that no horse could be persuaded to jump into fire.
For the camp itself, she had conjured silk and very long, flexible poles, which could be bent over to form a dome-shape, the silk stretched over all and pegged to the ground with stakes. The men had already obtained water from a nearby creek, and she had conjured water for washing, fuel for the fire, and oil for lamps and torches. As the sun neared the horizon, the men had been divided into work-parties; some to set up the tents, some to help the cook with the dinner and fire, some to light lanterns and torches, the rest with other camp-chores.
She looked up from her conjurations, alerted, perhaps, by a hint of movement where none had been the moment before, and saw the Pacha watching her. They were lined up on a low ridge, sitting easily on their horses, as if they were on couches.
She had never seen anything like them before; even the attempts by entertainers to ape “barbarians” paled before these men in their wild magnificence. She wondered what kind of magicthey had, or if they had any at all.
They rode small, rangy horses, hardly bigger than ponies, but whose manes and tails stre
amed nearly to the ground. The horses’ manes and tails were braided with beads, strips of wildly-colored cloth and ribbons, and feathers. The beasts themselves were painted with markings in red, yellow, black, and white-spots, circles about the eyes, arrows, and lightning zig-zags. They had nothing on their backs in the way of saddles, only bright red and blue blankets, and a simple loop of rawhide rope around the nose seemed to serve their riders for reins and bridle both.
Their riders were naked to the waist, wearing only the simplest of breechcloths of red and blue cloth, their bodies and faces painted with the same symbols as their horses. Around their necks they wore a tangle of myriad necklaces made of bright beads, bones, teeth, and claws. Their hair was as long and wild as their horses’, worked into hundreds of tiny braids, each one ending in a bead or a bone. Xylina wondered how they had come up upon her so silently, for they should have rattled like an entertainer’s sistrum. They boasted long, braided moustaches as well. Hair and skin was the same brick-red as the raw red earth of this place. Without the breechcloths, or with one of plainer stuff, one of these warriors would blend into the landscape so well that he could creep right up to the boundary of the camp without being seen.
In their hands they bore long lances, topped with wicked points of black, shiny serrated flint that gleamed with reflected sunlight. She could well imagine the kind of damage those lances could do, for the many “teeth” on each lance-head were made to break off in a wound. These lances were cruel weapons, designed to mutilate if they did not kill. There were quivers of smaller, obsidian-tipped throwing-spears at each rider’s knee, and on their backs they bore bows and quivers bristling with white-fletched arrows.
Determined not to show that she had been unnerved by their sudden appearance, Xylina completed her conjurations, and then stood with arms crossed, waiting for them to make a move.
At length, after a long period of exchanged impassive stares, during which the entire camp became aware of the Pacha’s presence, some imperceptible signal passed among them, and they nudged their horses with their bare heels and moved toward the barricade as one.
The men of the camp dropped whatever they had been doing, and moved to stand behind Xylina at the ready. Ware came up beside her on her right and Faro on her left, and they watched with her, as the entire cavalcade made its leisurely way toward her first barrier. They did not move their ponies out of an ambling walk.
Then again, why should they? The Mazonite party obviously wasn’t going anywhere.
“I don’t suppose they speak Mazonite,” she said, doubtfully. “Do they?”
“Hardly,” Ware replied dryly. “These are warriors. It is beneath them to speak your language, for their own is so clearly superior. However, I speak theirs.”
“As do I,” Faro interjected, with a glance that was not quite a glare at the demon. “It was part of my training as a scribe to learn the languages of the nations around Mazonia. I have not had the benefit of speaking with a native, but I would imagine I can at least understand them, and make myself understood.”
Ware said nothing, although this was clearly a warning from Faro that if the demon intended any trickery, he had best give the notion up for the present. Xylina almost smiled, for if the situation had not been so tense, it would have been funny. Faro was determined to protect her from Ware’s treachery.
As the riders neared, she saw something that astonished her. Some of the riders had small, but well-roundedbreasts , the nipples painted with concentric rings! There was no doubt of it, and this was not the kind of deformity that came when a man was neutered. Unless the men were terribly deformed at birth, or were some kind of hermaphrodite, there were women riding as warriors among them!
“Are those women?” she whispered to Ware. “These warriors-do they have women among them?”
He glanced at her for a fleeting second, before returning his attention to the oncoming riders. The setting sun at their backs gilded die entire landscape in rose-gold, lighting red riders and red horses on a red ground against a deep purple sky. The glints of sun on the obsidian points looked like flashes of scarlet fire.
“Of course they are women,” he replied. “The Pachas encourage their maidens to ride as warriors, to prove their worth as bearers of future warriors. The strongest and most valiant maidens have the widest choice of suitors. Of course, once a woman bears a child, she must care for her children first, and her days of riding out with the warriors and hunters are over. Still, the women with children provide the main guards for the Pacha encampments, and it would be a foolhardy brigand who would think to make of a camp an easy target, for they continue to practice assiduously all of their lives.”
“These are not brigands?” she asked, doubtfully.
“You are in their realm, Xylina,” he reminded her. “They are no bandits; they are warriors guarding their land.”
Once again, Xylina was forced to revise her preconceptions. She knew he was correct.
“But do not think that because they have women as equals among the warriors, that if they captured you, they would ever use you as other than a pleasure-slave. Foreign women are chattel,” Ware continued, “captured Mazonites in particular. Just as foreign men are chattel. All foreigners are dogs; the only difference between a foreign man and a foreign woman is that the woman is likely to be prettier than a man, and a woman can breed children for more slaves. Keep that in mind. The Pacha respect strength, and nothing else; there is a treaty between Mazonia and the Pacha tribes, and you must prove yourself strong enough that they cannot violate that treaty.”
So she must demonstrate to them that she was strong, clever, and too difficult a proposition to warrant attacking. Xylina crossed her arms over her chest, and took an aggressive stance. The Pacha halted their ponies just outside the perimeter of the camp. She was quite certain that they had gauged the strength of her defenses, the wire, the stakes, die oil, and the armed men beyond, but they paid no obvious attention to them, staring across the three barriers at her and her entourage.
Finally one spoke, a tangle of liquid syllables.
“He is the leader, or so he says,” Ware translated. “There is no telling if that is true; the Pacha sometimes lie about which of them is in charge, to deflect the enemy’s attention from the true leader. He wishes to know who the leader of this camp is.”
“He knows, of course,” Faro added, with a flash of annoyance at Ware. “He knows we’ve come out of Mazonia, so the only possible leader would be you. But he wants to see if we are going to lie to him. My studies tell me that lying to them is not a good idea, unless it is a lie they can’t verify.”
Since the idea had occurred to her that she could say that Ware or Faro was the leader, it was a good thing that Faro had added that. She stepped forward one pace, and nodded at the leader of the Pacha, but said nothing. He must know she could not speak his tongue-perhaps it would increase her status to have these translators.
The warrior spoke again.
“He wants to know why we’re here and what we want,” Faro said quickly, before Ware could translate. “He says the Mazonites have a treaty with his people, as Ware told you, and he wants to know if we’re breaking it by raiding on Pacha land.”
“What does he mean by raiding?” she asked, thinking that she had better get a more exact translation before committing herself.
Faro asked the question, and was rewarded with another spill of words. “Raiding means hunting for slaves or horses,” he replied. “Raiding means stealing from the Pacha the things that belong to the Pacha and to their land.”
Again, she pondered the question. “Ask him if the treaty permits hunting only for food as we travel across Pacha land, taking no more than we can eat, and using all that we take.”
This time Ware did the translating, as Faro tried to remember the words for Xylina’s question. The Pacha responded immediately.
“Hunting for food is permitted by the treaty,” Ware said. “But he warns you that if his scouts find the bloa
ted carcasses of animals killed only for horns, teeth, or hide, he will bring down the wrath of his gods upon us for wanton spoilage of his brothers. And it is considered good manners if you leave the hides, bones, horns, and teeth behind where we have camped, for the warriors to retrieve and take back to their people. In that way you prove that you are not a trophy-hunter.”
Xylina thought long and carefully before dictating her reply. “Tell him that we are only crossing his land, as permitted by the treaty, that we are not raiding or hunting for trophies, and that I will kill with my own hand any man who destroys one of his brothers for the sake of horn or hide. And to prove that, I will leave the hides and so forth behind at each of our camps.”
When Ware translated that, there were slow smiles from the Pacha, smiles quickly covered. She could not tell if those were smiles of pleasure, disbelief, or cynicism. Suppose that they considered her to be a fool for agreeing so readily, instead of rejecting their strictures with contempt?
She also could not tell if there really was a treaty that was so detailed, or if this was something the Pacha had made up to lull her into a false sense of security-that the moment she or one of her men killed a jackalope, they would descend on her. Nor, despite Ware’s assurance that the Pacha did not speak her tongue, was she sure that one among them was not fluent in Mazonite. She could afford to take nothing for granted-so she could not say things to Ware or Faro where the Pacha might overhear.
But the Pacha chieftain was speaking again. This time Faro translated. “He wishes to join us for a reaffirmation of the treaty,” Faro said. “And he adds that he is very fond of Mazonite wine. I gather this is the Pacha idea of a subtle hint.”
The tiny germ of an idea crystallized, and she smiled broadly. “Tell them that the Pacha, our fellow warriors, are welcome within our encampment,” she said, spreading her arms wide. “Tell him that we will drink to brotherhood in something better than Mazonite wine. Tell him there will be a feast in their honor, andmagic wine, which will leave no sour stomachs and aching heads in the morning.”
If I Pay Thee Not in Gold Page 21