by Patty Jansen
The next, smaller, room was empty. This room had no windows, and the light from lamps on the walls reflected in the mirror-like water in the rectangular pool. Wisp of steam rose from the surface. A cabinet against the back wall was well-stocked with towels and soap. She carried the soap basket and two towels to the pool, undressed and slipped into the water. It was beautifully warm. She lay back with her head on the edge.
The two men in the next room got out of the water and left. When their voices had faded in the echoing halls, there was blissful silence. For the first time in her life, she was alone and could do whatever she wanted.
She'd go to Barresh and find Iztho. She might even stay there until she had to leave for Kedras. Barresh was a primitive place, so living there would be cheap. Since it was no longer a protectorate of Miran, there was no way her father could easily find out where she'd gone.
But she needed to look less like a noble Mirani lady. It was time to get rid of that annoying hair.
After coming out of the bath, she dried and stood in front of the mirror. She held a strand of her wet hair up and cut through it with the nail cutter about two fingerwidths from her head. Then the next strand and the next one. As the wet strands of hair fell down at her feet, her satisfaction grew. The growing cover of short spikes on her head made her look like an adolescent boy. No more careful brushing, no more knots, no more tangled hair in clasps and buttons.
Then she put on her apprentice uniform and studied herself in the mirrored wall. No Endri from the city ever cut their hair, but plenty of people from other places did. If she wore her hunting gear, maybe she would look like one of the mountain nomads who came into the tiyuk market with their animals. Maybe she could pass for a merchant's daughter from any of those towns and then she wouldn't stand out so much.
Chapter 13
Mikandra left the Trader Guild building at dawn and walked through the streets pristine with untouched snow.
The building that was the terminal of the Miran airport lay outside the city wall. It was a low complex that spanned the side of the air field closest to the city. By the time Mikandra got there, a lot of people were already going into the building, dragging heavy bags over the icy ground. Overnight more snow had fallen on top of the half-melted and frozen snow from yesterday. It made for slippery ground, but fortunately, the snowfall had stopped.
Mikandra opened the door and let herself into the low-ceilinged hall and the crowds within. Inside it smelled humid, but cold, of damp stone and damp fur, like it did in the hospital. The floor was wet from people bringing in snow on their boots. Slippery too, in places. A poor cleaning woman walked around with a mop, but it was so busy that her work was almost impossible.
Flickering screens around the walls indicated which shuttles were coming in and leaving. Right now, for as far as she could see, the snow-covered airport was empty.
A lot of people were waiting for the passenger shuttle, and a huge check-in queue snaked through the hall. Most of the people were in family groups, many with children and lots of bags. Mothers snapped at children for playing in the puddles. Children cried, couples argued.
There were also a lot of young men, all of them Nikala workers. Their cloaks were of poor quality and their clothing was rough and patched. Their shoes were old, scuffed and re-soled many times. They moved in groups, talking and laughing loudly in terrible slang without much regard for people around them.
The queue moved slowly.
Although the walk to the airport had been cold, Mikandra was glad that she had left her cloak in her room at the Guild. She had no use for it in Barresh, and it was a big and bulky thing. Other people were wrestling with theirs, trying to stuff it in bags—that was very bad for the fur—or trying to keep it off the ground, which was hard because the fur was slippery.
The city guards at the desk were making a show of checking everyone's ID card. Signs with the destinations of various flights hung from the ceiling.
The Kedras queue next to her was the longest. She didn't spot any noisy young men travelling to the world whose most important function was the Trader Guild headquarters. Most of those passengers were merchants.
It surprised her how many people wanted to go to Barresh. In front of her in the queue stood a group of young men, friends talking and laughing. Two of the men walked on crutches and one man who had only one arm. Another's face was horribly scarred to the point that it made her shiver. She had seen men like these in the hospital. They looked like soldiers because they were ex-soldiers, retired for medical reasons, like so many of the young men in the hall.
Sometimes one of the men would cast her a strange look. The family behind her kept glancing at her, too.
Mikandra tried to ignore them. She shuffled along in the queue, feeling as visible as a massive hairy tiyuk bull in the snow. Even with her short hair, she didn't look like any of the other people. Her hair was straight, not curly. She was much taller than other women as well as many of the men, and her hunting clothes might be old and showing a bit of wear, they were nothing like the poorly-made and old-fashioned garments the people wore.
On the other side of the counter was a fogged-up window through which she could barely see the expanse of the airport, featureless white. A smaller craft had arrived, and a gaggle of guards in white and red went to meet whoever came down the steps. Mikandra recognised the thick mottled cloak and long gossamer-like hair of an Endri noble, before he vanished amongst the guards. Who was it? Someone from the council having visited Bendara?
The line moved very slowly.
The guards took aside a mother who appeared to be travelling alone with two young children. She carried a couple of bags bulging with clothes, and a guard gestured for her to put her bags on a table. He proceeded to unpack everything, spilling an array of clothing, including women's underwear, on the table.
He took aside a pile of new-looking clothes and spoke to a colleague.
The woman protested. One of her children started crying.
"Please, these are clothes that my husband needs over there." She picked up the crying toddler, but the boy squirmed in her grip and broke into an ear-splitting scream.
She put the toddler down where he tried to throw himself on the ground, but his mother held him up by the arm. "Shut your mouth!"
Over the top of the boy's screaming, the guard continued, "Since these items are not for yourself, you will need to fill in these forms—"
The mother belted the child on the ear. "Shut up!"
"—which are required for export. You need to take them over to the counter at the back of the room."
"But we'll miss our flight." The woman looked on the verge of tears. Her face was red. The toddler screamed his lungs out. She probably couldn't write.
Mikandra shivered. If they were going to check her, sure they would find something to object to, even if only because of who and what she was. Endri men travelled because they flew themselves or had the money for private craft, Nikala travelled because they had the numbers to fill up the larger craft and tickets were cheap, and the only ones staying at home were the Endri women.
Mikandra came up to the counter, the guard took her ID, looked at the screen displaying her details.
"Bisumar, huh?" He was a burly sort and his voice loud.
Several people turned and stared.
Mikandra's heart beat like crazy. The rumour that a Bisumar had flown out of Miran on a shuttle would soon be everywhere.
Mikandra bent closer to the guard. "I'm doing some work for my aunt." She kept her voice low. "I'm meant to travel on regular transport and not stand out. You're not helping."
His eyes widened. "Oh, lady. My apologies."
He let her through into the waiting area, where she put as much distance between herself and the people who had heard him yell her name as possible.
Fortunately, it was even more busy here. She stepped over bags to get to the window, but came into view of another guard who also glanced at her. What else had
the first guard seen on the screen about her? Had her status as Trader Guild, Andrahar Traders filtered through the system yet?
Her talk with Aunt Amandra yesterday had made her more nervous than she wanted to admit. The rivalry between the Endri families was something she understood. She had grown up with it, and the rules of engagement had been written in thousands of years of history. The Foundation agreement described how to handle disagreements between families. Nemedor Satarin, being a Nikala, stood outside that framework. His brash talk frightened a lot of people. He divided Miran in a way it had never been divided before.
Never in her life had she thought she would be glad to leave Miran, and now that was exactly the way she felt. She wanted escape from prying eyes and suspicious looks.
The windows rattled and from outside came a roar of engines.
A number of children ran to the window.
Mikandra felt, rather than heard, the shock wave of a large craft flying over. It vibrated deep inside her chest. She loved the roar of large engines, especially when they employed the downward jets for landing.
The shuttle came into view, slowly descending with landing gear outstretched. The downward jets blew up a huge cloud of snow which obscured the view of the craft. That engine sounded like . . .
The quiet field outside changed into a hub of activity. Airport staff wheeled two hot air cannons out of a shed. While a cart pushed the cannons across the field, staff worked to get them fired up. The craft touched down, shut the downward jets and the snow cloud dissipated, but the main engines were still going, blowing snow behind the craft.
Yes, she had been right about the model. The purple sheen of the exterior made this a Hedron-built shuttle. A Rhion model, the heavy-duty workhorse of the passenger movers. It had a Hedron-developed fusion chamber with three independently-controllable outlets on each side. The crew was two pilots and an engineer. The Rhions rarely came to Miran, because they did not handle cold very well. This craft was working at the very edge of its effective operability. Why was it here? Because it could take more people that the regular shuttles?
Even while the cannons were directed at the engine chamber, the sound of metal ticking and cooling was audible inside the hall.
One of the guards went to unbolt the large double doors of the waiting area and threw them open. A blast of icy wind came in.
The first passengers already streamed onto the field.
The guard at the door yelled at people to hurry up.
A woman in front of Mikandra complained in a voice thick with Nikala speech.
"We's been sitting there since crack of dawn, what's th' hurry all of a sudden?" She lugged a number of heavy bags and limped heavily with one leg.
"Let me carry some of your bags."
The woman frowned while Mikandra took one of her over-stuffed bags. It smelled musty.
"'s nice, dear, but really I'm fine. 's with th' slave driver trying t' hurry us up."
Her accent was so thick that Mikandra had trouble understanding.
"Aren't youz cold, dear?" And without waiting for the reply, "Why to those cannons have t' be so noisy?"
The hot air cannons went through a whole cylinder of fuel in the short time the craft stopped to offload and take on passengers. There were two cannons, and they each fed off two cylinders that were taller and broader than a person. There was a merchant downstream from Miran whose sole business it was to convert meltwater into fuel with a huge solar collector, and keep these cylinders full, just so that the shuttles could land here.
Mirani craft used the same fuel but in different tanks. Other gamra people always derided the Mirani craft as old-fashioned. They called them rockets or missiles, but they were robust and did what they needed to do: function well in cold weather and thin air.
The line of people progressed over the airfield, into the biting wind.
In the roar of the heaters and the engines, all other sounds vanished.
Up the stairs into the craft, past the roaring heat canons. By the time she entered the doorway, Mikandra's ears were ringing.
The craft was full of families, mostly with a lot of bags which people attempted to stuff in the baggage carriers.
The woman with the limp found a seat, and Mikandra returned her bag to a puzzled thanks, dear. Nobody else had helped any of the people with crutches or mothers with more children than hands.
It was so busy in the craft that it looked like all seats were taken.
She thought that Barresh was a backwater. That's what everyone always said. No Traders, no real autonomy, crime, street fights. Why were all these people going there?
Her seat was next to one of those young Nikala men who seemed to be travelling by himself rather than as part of a large group. He looked slightly older than her, had longish curly hair and wore well-worn clothes. He looked up when she sat down. His eyes were startlingly dark blue. His face was quite round—not narrow as many Endri faces—and his golden curls danced around his head when he moved. His hands and arms were clearly a worker's: strong and sinewy, with the back of his arms covered in a thin fuzz of golden hair. His skin had a bronze tinge.
The man next to the window was a merchant, middle aged, dressed in a traditional long robe. He leant his head against the back of the seat and pretended to be asleep.
Mikandra sat down, feeling self-conscious and holding her own—completely hairless—arms close to her side. The ex-soldier nodded at her, raising eyebrows at her short hair and hunting clothes. She didn't fit. Her clothes were too nice, her hands too cultured. She was a dead give-away for an Endri girl.
The craft's crew—now trying to get all passengers to sit down—were all non-Mirani, mostly Coldi. They wore neat grey Pilot's Guild uniforms. Like the Trader couriers, they were employees, rather than members. She spotted one or two with goggles which frequent travellers used for going through the Exchange.
On this trip of course, going as close as the western coast of the continent, they wouldn't be using the Exchange.
The doors were shut and crew came around to check people's safety harnesses.
Some people seemed anxious and one or two were crying. Maybe they were leaving behind family members, or maybe they felt like they had no option but to leave because of the boycotts, or something else. It was disturbing. Mikandra felt very small and ignorant. There was so much to learn about the world and how people's lives were affected by laws and government.
Finally, the crew members were happy and took their seats. The lights in the cabin went off and a mechanical-sounding voice in Mirani went through emergency procedures. It repeated the announcement in Coldi and then in a language Mikandra had never heard. She presumed it was keihu, the main language spoken in Barresh.
That made her uncertain again.
What if no one in Barresh spoke Mirani? That was a disturbing thought.
The engines roared. The air vibrated with power. Mikandra was pressed into her seat and let that majestic feeling of leaving the ground come over her. After a short while came a sense of forward movement.
Mikandra leaned over to see out the window. They were already quite high, and she had missed looking out over the noble quarter of the city one more time. Already, the outskirts of the city fell away to make place for the cloud-covered highlands. Alpine meadows and the occasional agricultural field. Meandering creeks in the valleys. Patchy and thin snow.
"First time away, huh?" the young man next to her asked.
She turned to him. Was it that obvious?
"Where's youz going?" He smiled, showing browned and uneven teeth.
She cringed at the accent. Yes, people spoke like that, but they swept streets. Not even the cleaners in the hospital were allowed to use slang.
"Me?"
"Yes, do youz see anyone else? Not him, eh?" He gestured at the merchant on his other side, who was leaning back in his seat, his eyes closed.
"Uhm . . ." It had not occurred to her that someone would ask her these types of questions, an
d she was sure that I'm from the Andrahar Traders and I'm looking for Iztho Andrahar was going to be an answer that was neither wise nor good for her.
"Visiting a cousin." She did her best not to sound too cultured, and probably failed miserably.
"In Barresh? Not many Mirani left there. Most of th' army got kicked out."
"Yeah, he's . . . a merchant." She was grasping at straws. She needed some story to tell him, and quick.
"Who with? I used t' work for the Menudin family, y'know. I know a lot of them."
Drat, next he was going through all the Mirani merchants and who worked for whom and it would come out that she knew nothing. "I'm not from Miran. I live in Bendara."
"Oh."
Fortunately, he seemed happy with her reply. She just hoped that he wasn't going to quiz her about Bendara, because it was a long time since she'd been there. She deflected the conversation away from her. "What are you going to do in Barresh?"
He laughed. "Jus' having some fun. Meeting some mates. I'm Jocassa by the way. "
She so badly wanted to ignore him and turn away, but that would probably draw more attention.
"I'm Eydrina."
"Like th' hospital matron, eh?"
Her breath caught. "Do you know her?"
"Everyone knows her. That's where they send youz 'n' fix you up if there's any fixing t' be done."
She frowned.
"I'm ex-army," he said.
"City guard?" Please, no.
He shook his head. "Used t' be on th' Kesilu coast." On the eastern side of the continent. "I signed up and was almos' sent out t' fight in Barresh, but that din' happen because th' Barresh Council threw Nemedor Satarin out. Turns out I's discharged from th' army after that. Din' need us anymore, they said. Turns out it's better this way—not fighting—'cause we get t' do whatever we like, 'n there's no commander telling us what t' do." He laughed.
His words shocked her. These were the soldiers who defended the glorious nation?
"What about yourself? Youz don' look the type' s normally on this flight."
"It's a surprise visit to my cousin."