MacAffee fell from his height... fell in a fat flutter of blue and spattering red... and was caught, as if by arrangement, on the tribesmen's spears.
The Made-boy, Errol, hummed a three-note tune.
* * *
The Boston-woman, her weapon wiped and sheathed, sailed down after the fight — only lightly sliced along her forearm — to leaps and roars of congratulation by the file-toothed men. Dwarfed in their crowding as she retrieved her opponent's fallen sword, then its scabbard, she treated them like noisy children — presenting that slender scimitar in pretend thrusts and blows, so the men danced away in mock terror, laughing. In celebration, the tribesmen then stamped and trampled the dead ambassador into a muddy red mess with one half-open eye.
... When the warriors quieted, began to drift away, the Boston-woman pushed through lingerers the little distance to the Made-peoples' clearing — looked Bajazet up and down, then held out her hand. Though she was small and neatly collected as a girl, she seemed at least in her forties. Her face was marked with a faint web of fine wrinkles, and her hair fell prematurely white past her shoulders. But her eyes seemed of no age, and black as a moonless night.... Blood had trickled down her wrist.
"Patience Nearly-Lodge Riley," she said, gripped his hand surprisingly hard, and noticed him noticing her bleeding. "Twenty years ago, he couldn't have touched me.... So, you're Toghrul's boy — and, I'm sure, his image, though somewhat worn after your long run." She let his hand go. "Your First-father and I might have met — did you know that?" An oddly merry smile. "I believe something of that sort was planned by the Faculty. And if we'd met, I suppose he would have fallen in love with me — since I was very beautiful, and clever...."
The Boston-woman then turned away and called, with copybook obscenities, to a lounging, tall, naked Sparrow with a fine-feathered necklace and an ax.... They walked away together, the Boston-woman's wide-brim blue hat hanging down her back on a plaited cord.
Bajazet sat by the fire awkwardly, and with a grunt of discomfort from stone-rasped skin and bruised muscles. "A 'friend'?" he said to the Made-girl. "— That Boston-woman?"
"She is a friend." Nancy slightly lisping her is as she watched the Boston-woman go. "And a Person, made as we were made, only more subtly — you know that Warm-time word, Prince?"
"Yes."
Richard, sitting beside the fire. "I consider myself an extremely subtle creation — of juice mainly of a Boston breeder, but partly of a grizzled bear, placed within a certain woman Shrike."
"Have you Persons on your great river?" The Made-girl cocked her head for Bajazet's answer.
" 'Persons'... such as you?"
"Yes, and others. Moonrisers."
"Moonrisers..."
"As you are a Sunriser." Becoming impatient. "You true-blood humans are called Sunrisers, everywhere." She'd lisped Sunrisers.
"Not on the River," Bajazet said.
She stared at him. Yellow eyes and odd pupils... "In this country, there are many Persons like us. And named Moonrisers," she reached out and tapped his knee with a narrow black-nailed hand, "because Sunrisers are plain as day — and we are not."
"I see..." Bajazet said. "And also saw three of your 'Persons' killing a tribesman. Eating him."
"You did not."
"I said, I did. Three of the big riding things — gone feral, I suppose."
"Mampies," Richard said.
"Oh... Mamps." The girl made a face. "They're not Persons."
"They are," Richard said.
"Well, they're very stupid, and have no souls."
"They're stupid, Nancy," Richard said. "But they have souls."
... Listening to more on the question of Mampies and their possible souls — a subject that appeared not to interest the boy, Errol — Baj was content to sit quiet at the fire. He stretched gingerly, testing his aching ribs.
* * *
Through the day, and into evening — having polished his sword and dagger blades, then rubbed them against rusting with a tallow-piece from his pack — Bajazet drowsed by the Odd-three's fire. The past days' weariness seemed to have settled into his bones... and he was very hungry.
At nightfall, a battle-injured tribesman came limping, and tossed thick chunks of horse meat to them. — Tossed, it seemed to Bajazet, as one might toss meat to hounds, after a hunt. No other tribesman came near.
... While he ate horse steak, cooked surprisingly well-done, considering his company — chewing, swallowing slowly as he could to keep such richness down a starved belly — Bajazet found himself calm as if he had a future certain, as if all uncertainty had been worn out of him while he'd fled with death trotting at his heels.
Now, there was the strangeness of his met companions — a man, with some part bear; a girl, some part coyote or fox; a silent boy, part... something. Their strangeness, and the suddeness of the traitor king's death, amounting to life for him — at least life enough for a meal of horse meat.
Later, the four of them rested, fire-watching without talk, listening — at least Bajazet listening — to the tribesmen singing down the valley. Sparrows, Thrushes... His Second-father had once mentioned that some western, and all the eastern tribes, had years before quit their tribal names for the names of birds, though no one knew why.
"Perhaps," King Sam had said, "— since Middle-Kingdom and Boston have sometimes harried and broken them, East from the river, South from the ice, perhaps the tribes renamed to leave their defeats, their losses behind to start again, feathered for a different future."
The Sparrows, at their many fires along the valley stream, were singing all together a slow, measured anthem, with no harmonies attempted. The music echoed in soft strophes from the hillsides, as if their ancestors sang with them.... Listening, Bajazet thought he recognized an ancient Warm-time hymn. "The Glory In Mine Eyes, is the Coming of the Lord..."
The Boston-woman returned in the dark with a scabbarded sword in her hand, as well as the other at her belt. She put back her coat-tails, and sat cross-legged at their fire without asking. — Making, to Bajazet, a fourth oddity present. It felt... unsettling to be in this company, while the only true-blood humans paraded the night naked, with filed teeth, singing.
"Woods-hatchets are handy," the Boston-woman said, "— and knives necessary, but they never become the friends swords do. Though they say great Warm-time Bowie was loved by such a belt-blade." Smiling, she lifted the slim, sheathed scimitar from her lap, leaned through the fire's smoke, and handed it to the Made-girl, Nancy.
"— Tom MacAffee was a lazy man, and weak-wristed for being so bulky; this weapon is no heavier than mine. I think, with fox's muscle aiding, you'll find it very comfortable to swing."
The Made-girl said, "Thank you, Lady Patience-Lodge. Thank you dearly," drew some inches of fine steel free of tooled red leather, then bent to kiss it.
So, it was some small portion of fox's blood that Nancy had. Now, Bajazet could see it in her clearly.... The yellow slit-pupiled eyes, and russet hair soft as fur. The sharp-featured face and long jaw, its white eyeteeth still making his bitten forearm ache.
"Patience Riley," the Boston-woman said. "— Only nearly Lodge.... Unkind-Harry, the Sparrows' war chief, wanted that sword for his own, but I persuaded him; he's too tall for it, anyway. And you needn't thank me, Nancy. The blade is small payment for your seeing that our Judas goat, here," she smiled at Bajazet, "— was kept safe to draw the treacherous Cooper on and on."
A "Judas goat," the creature that led spotted cattle to the slaughterhouse. Bajazet felt his face heated by more than the fire's warmth.
"I've offended you." The Boston-woman smiled at Bajazet through dying flames. She seemed to smile often, find many matters amusing. "— But only with the truth. Do you think it wise to be offended by the truth?"
"The truth, Lady," Bajazet said, "— is usually offensive, or it would be called something else."
"Ah..." She stared at him, and Bajazet could see in the fire's warm light how beautiful she must
have been before the years and some grave care had touched her face, and whitened the length of her hair.
"No thank-you gift for me?" Richard's voice was low as a warship's drum. "— Or Errol?" He rose to his feet with an odd rocking motion, and stretched, yawning.
"As for you, Richard," the woman said, "— your great double-ax needs no improvement. And Errol has no notion of gifts, and never will have, as his partial-father weasel had no notion of them. They are as lost on him as conversation."
The boy had looked up at his name being mentioned, and Bajazet saw no sign of that animal's blood in his body, which might have been any wiry human boy's.... The sign was in his eyes, empty of all but the fire's reflection.
"So this conversational creature is better?" The big Made-man hulked over to her.
"Moonrisers are the best of beast and man." The Boston-woman rose to stand the size of a child beside him, and reached up to stroke his cheek. "— And what was meant to be, before Sunriser-humans imagined themselves better than they were." She smiled at Bajazet. "... Now, come walk with me, Who-was-a-prince."
Bajazet stayed sitting where he was, not interested in obeying this Boston smiler.
"... And if I asked, please?"
The court's lessons of courtesy were likely the cause of his rising, then, to follow her into the dark. As he went, he heard behind him, at the fire, the soft whisper of steel drawn from scabbard. Then the swift ruffle... ruffle, of a curved blade testing the air.
"Can you use that lean, straight sword of yours?" the Boston-woman's voice before him in the dark.
"Yes," Bajazet said. "And very well."
"Then, Who-was-a-prince, you might teach Nancy what you can." Bajazet could see, by starlight, by the faint glow of tribal fires down the valley stream, the woman's white hair leading through thicket. "— Not that her hatchet has been bad practice for learning the crisscross strokes of a slicing blade. But wards, parries, the use of the point..."
"I don't see what opportunity I'd have to teach her anything."
They'd walked a fair distance along the valley's brushy slope — Bajazet able to follow more by sound than sight — when a small hand came from shadow to rest on his chest. "Here, is private enough. We will be voices in the dark, you and I — as the tribesmen believe all we Persons to be children of the dark, and made under a rising moon."
Then she was silent for a while. Bajazet heard nothing but the wind down the valley's hills, stirring the tangle of scrub around them. The tribesmen were no longer singing.... He hadn't noticed when they'd stopped.
"What do you imagine, boy? Do you imagine returning to Island?"
"No," Bajazet said — and realized he'd decided before knowing he'd decided.
"And why not? The Cooper is dead. His only son is dead."
"Then some other river lord will likely be waiting to cut my throat." Bajazet spoke into the night and night's breezes, where only a small, outline woman stood. "— And now I believe it's my turn for a question."
"Then... ask."
"You're a New Englander, yet I hear you've said to those others that Boston has helped — I think now, more than helped — to murder my brother, and our friends." Bajazet touched his left-hand dagger's hilt, to be sure of drawing. "The Coopers are gone, but Boston remains, and I intend to damage those people and their town, if I can. — Why should I not begin with you?"
"Why not?" She grunted, seemed amused. "First, I wonder if you're good enough with those straight blades to take punishment to me — even once you're rested from the chase.... Second, and only for acting as a mother should, I've been declared Beyond-town-limits.... And third, I've just killed Boston's ambassador to Middle Kingdom, after seeing to the tribes' slaughter of the Township's chosen River King." A distant night bird called in the sedge, two faint sighing notes. "You will find it difficult, boy, to injure Cambridge more severely."
"Still... you are what you are." There was a green scent of bracken on the air, from stems broken, crushed by the savages' battle charge.
"Ah, I hear your cruel First-father speaking there; sad that we never met.... Yes, I am what I am, and Boston made and bred — but the Faculty Selectmen, meeting on Cambridge Common, voted to take my son away. They hold him, though he's a baby, and certainly the One Expected."
"The One Expected..."
"Yes. They bred better than they knew. My Maxwell swims dreaming down lines of blood, through recalled history of its little bits. He follows those into the pasts of people gone, and looks out through their eyes, though understanding little."
"And this is true?"
"True, even though only a baby's dreams — a baby, it seems, who will always be a baby, though wiser and wiser. Wise enough already to frighten those fools who have labored — as other Talents have labored for hundreds of years — to bring him to us."
"And they took him for that?"
"That, and his dreaming into the future, more and more — I suppose by some arithmetic of possibilities the little bits tell him — so he sometimes sees what will be seen, though imperfectly." She stood silent before Bajazet a little while, starlight barely salting her white hair. "They intend to cripple him for their comfort. And I intend to have my Maxwell back... and have their heads, besides."
She'd stood so perfectly still, that Bajazet was startled when she suddenly turned. "Errol! Back to camp!" There was, perhaps, a rustling through the scrub, though nothing to see by starlight.
"A turned back," she said, "— after seeing so much killing here, is a temptation for his knives. Any helpless person. And a girl — or boy, for that matter — also a temptation, of another kind. Though young, he's very true to his part-sire, with rutting and murder being close to the same for him."
"More of New England's doing."
"Live on the ice, Who-was-a-prince. Live in the ice for the near six hundred years since Jupiter betrayed us, and the cold came down... then comment on what talents keep us warm and safely guarded."
Bajazet thought of answers .. . then decided not to speak them. A sharp shoulder of the quarter moon had just edged above a hilltop, and by that light his accustomed eyes saw the Boston-woman — Patience — watching him with eyes darker than the night. She stood close, but there was no odor from her; she might have been the shrub-scented air itself.
"— Now, my questions, boy."
"You've called me 'boy,' enough."
The Boston-woman turned to break off a stem of brush, twirl it idly. The little leaves flashed silver in moonlight. "Then what am I to call you? You're no longer Prince Bajazet — he died when you ran instead of dying. That 'boy' is dead as mutton.... Wonderful Warm-time phrase, by the way."
"I keep my name."
"No, you should not. If the name lies, the man lies. What did your family — when you had one — what did they call you?"
"... Baj."
"Then 'Baj' is who you are — and should call yourself even inside your head, to keep their love with you. It is your best name, as 'Patience' is mine — though not the best description of me."
Bajazet said nothing, though he tried "Baj" to himself... and it did seem to bring some comfort. Also, it would likely spare him more of her Who-was-a-prince's. Words so sadly true, revived pain enough to twist any name to a different one.... With "Prince Bajazet" lost, then better be only "Baj" to himself and everyone, as the broken tribes had named themselves for song-birds.
"So, New-named..." The woman turned and walked away — seen quite clearly now the moon was risen — so he had not much choice but to follow, warding brush aside. "As to your returning to Island... In all your running away, your scrambling through these hills as a Judas goat — very well, my Judas goat — did you ever pause to listen to the drums?"
"I heard cavalry trumpets chasing. Not drums." He shoved thistle and sedge crackling aside.
"Well, the drums were there. Almost always, if you're still, and listen. I've heard them thumping... thumping up the Map-Mississippi all the way from drowned Old Orleans, like very
distant thunder. The Sparrows say so, too."
"They say what?"
She stopped, turned to face him. The moonlight seemed bright as morning before dawn; it shone on the rolling scrub as if on surf suddenly frozen still. "— They say, Baj, that old One-eye Howell Voss has left the governing of North Map-Mexico, and comes up from the Gulf on a galley — he and his dangerous wife — with Middle Kingdom's fleet already at his service, and officers of the Army-United pacing his ship's deck." She tossed the switch of leaves away.
"— The drums echo the fishermen's cheers as that galley passes. Apparently they were happy enough with your brother, young Newton, and mourn his murder.... Now, I suppose, Howell Voss will be their king, and Charmian the queen. Isn't it odd? I would never have thought it when I knew them, those years ago... and I'm very clever."
"I'm glad to hear it. It makes a difference."
"Difference enough? — say he succeeds."
"Say he succeeds... I think there'll be vengeance enough, at least at Island. He and his wife and old Master Lauder will see to it."
"Yes." She nodded. "I well remember unpleasant Master Lauder. And that being done — what of you?"
"Nothing of me." Bajazet — "Baj," he supposed he would become — was tired of talking about it. Talking seemed to bring treachery and its tragedies back like swallowed vomit. "I suppose I'd be welcomed. Welcomed for my Second-father's sake. I would have a home."
"But not your home, anymore?"
"... Perhaps not."
"Perhaps..." Patience shook her head. "I wonder how comfortable a man might be, living his life with 'perhaps' as his home. Living with a family not his family — seeing all futures go to others."
"If they fight Boston, I would do it."
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