Sloofy replied between taut white lips, “Death was my destination. Does it matter who sees me off?”
Djamos withheld his blade and patted Sloofy on the cheek. “Enjoy the trip.”
When the pack trader joined them behind the rocks, Méarana noticed that Paulie still stood beside the tent with his sword cocked at his right shoulder. Blood ran down the blade and out the pommel to drip on the sand by his feet.
Teodorq called to him. “You coming, hillbilly?”
“Just a sec. There’s something I always wanted to try.”
One of the boatman had gotten his bow strung and now fitted a quarrel to the string. He stepped cautiously along the riverside, sure of his own range, but uncertain of the starweapons. But there was something about the brawny man dressed in serge de Nîmes standing so calmly. He raised and loosed.
And Paulie whirled and swung…and the arrow spun off in two neatly-cleaved parts.
Paulie leaped for the rocks then and vaulted them ahead of a second arrow that glanced off the cliff face.
Teodorq nodded. “Not bad. Wanna try it again?” He nodded toward the boats, where all three archers were now armed.
Paulie stared at him. “Do I look crazy?”
Donovan said, “They’ll try to work their way up on our right.” The pocket had no natural barrier in that direction. “They’ll stay out of range of the beam weapons. Teodorq, you’ve got the best range here. How many bullets do you have left for your pellet gun?”
“In the magazine, or back in the tent?”
“Maybe they’ll just leave us here,” suggested Sofwari.
“They ain’t fighting for no medals,” agreed Theodorq.
Donovan powered down his dazer to save on the battery. He shook his head. “They want our gold and silver.”
“That’s in the chests on the boat,” said Sofwari.
But Billy chuckled. “Tell him, Donovan.”
“The money chest is in the tent. I switched it with your equipment chest. They’ll figure that out once they look inside.”
Teodorq braced his hand atop one of the rocks and tried a long shot at one of the archers. The bullet struck the man in the ankle and he howled, fell to the ground, rolled away. His mates went to him and carried him to the Gadlin, which was farthest from them. Then they fell to arguing with one another again.
Méarana sang out in the local tongue:
“O brave man, to seek your courage
In throats slit of sleeping men!
Your fame: the laughter of the taverns.
You could not slay the sleeping men!”
Billy snorted. “Sticks and stone can break their bones; but not words.”
“Don’t be too sure,” said Méarana. “They take curses and satires very seriously in the north, and some of the boatmen are northern-bred.”
“Think of it as psychological warfare,” said Donovan. “What else can we throw at them?”
“Sahbs,” said Theodorq. “Upstream.”
From out of the mist slipped the silent shapes of four large war canoes. The heads of beasts adorned their prows. The sound of their paddling was lost in the rumble of the falls. Djamos rose to his feet and cried, “The canyon! The canyon!” And ducked before the arrow he had tempted from the rivermen struck the rocks behind him.
Donovan looked at Billy. “My apologies,” he said. “You were right.”
The Confederate shrugged. “If Djespa could not buy so many river-men, he could surely buy his own cousins.”
Djamos said, “There is no price among brothers.”
The men in the canoes laid their paddles aside and notched longbows while the canoes carried them silently forward. The command to loose must have been audible on the riverbank, for the boatmen spun suddenly about and their chests blossomed with feathered shafts. The two archers returned the favor, picking off two of the attacking party. Another man ran for the bow dropped by the third archer, but the attackers pinned him neatly to the sand. The three men who had stayed out of the fight ran for the cliffs, and two of them made it behind the rocks.
The Madareenaroo scraped off the sand and into the current with the surviving boatmen scrambling aboard. One fell off the gunnel with an arrow in his back. The durm spun slowly as the current carried it downstream. No one exposed himself at the sweep to keep her steady. A canoe caught up with her and pulled alongside. Men leaped from the canoe to pull themselves up the side. But now the adwantage was with the boatmen, for the sides of the durm were high and they could fight back from a tactical height. Finally, the canoe’s captain gave up and backed off. The Rajilooris jeered their attackers as they drifted away, as if they had won some sort of victory.
One of the boatmen who had made it to the rocks looked over to Méarana. “I wanted no part of it,” he said. “You must believe me, Lady Harp.” He made a motion like scratching his chest. She recognized him as the man who had given her the token payment.
“I believe you, Watershank,” she told him. “You have acted with honor throughout.”
Djamos moved swiftly, and his curled blade was out and at Méarana’s throat before anyone knew that he had moved. “And now let us await my kinfolk,” he said. “No. Make no move, or the harper’s voice is stilled forever. And you, harper: If your lips part in a satire, your throat will sing before your lips.”
Billy said quietly, “You are making a grave error.”
The marauders in the canoes had beached themselves and now swarmed over the boats, tearing bundles open. Clothing and equipment were strewn on the sand. “My instruments!” groaned Sofawri. “My data!”
“It’s not your head,” growled Donovan, “at least not yet.” He pressed the stud on his dazer and the green light began to blink. Billy noticed and carefully slipped his own gun into his crotch. Theodorq’s nine had disappeared.
A contingent of warriors approached the tent. “All of you!” said Djamos. “Place your hands on your head! You, Paw-lee, put down the sword!” Then he stood, holding Méarana, and called out, “The canyon! The canyon!”
One of the warriors sent an arrow through Djamos’s neck. The translator had no time even to register surprise, but opened his mouth in a gush of blood. Méarana spun away and Sofwari caught her. The warriors drew bows on the embattled group and one of them barked something incomprehensible, motioning with the arrowhead.
Watershank, the boatman, exclaimed and responded in the same tongue. The war chief rattled a command and Watershank opened his shirt to expose an intricate tattoo of a harp. This seemed to satisfy the chief, who motioned to Watershank to join them.
Watershank did not move. “Chief says, are any else here degenerate dog-farking gorge-dwellers?”
“Well,” murmured Billy, “not if he asks that way.”
“Watershank,” Méarana said. “Tell him who we are.”
“These people do not understand ‘starmen,’ Lady. I do not know if I can explain.” He spoke again, making signs with his hands. The chief grunted and glanced at Méarana. He asked a question. “Chief says, where is your harp?”
“In my tent. Does he want me to fetch it?”
“Chief says, if you are harper, you can play—how do you say ‘on the moment, without previous hearing it’?”
“Extempore.”
“If you are harper, you can extempore a praise of his feat here in besting the mighty downriverfolk.”
Méarana doubted such a lay would include the escape of one of the boats, or even a realistic assessment of the might of a band of wharfside thugs. “Does he expect me to use the tropes of the Harp—you are Harps—or may I use the tropes of my own world?”
Watershank grunted and said, “I will say your own country.”
“Tell him my country lies far up the gozán lonnrooda, high up the side of the Mountain of Night.”
Watershank looked frightened at this. “My Lady!” he wailed. “I did not know!” Then he turned to the chief and the two discoursed quickly and vehemently. Méarana did not know whether
they were arguing or that was the normal timbre of their language. Then Watershank turned to her.
“Chief say, as riverfolk would have it, put the money in your mouth.”
“I will go into the tent and fetch my harp. No one will stop me.”
Donovan whispered in Gaelactic, “Méarana, are you sure you know what you’re doing?”
She answered in the same tongue. “I told you. My mother trained me.” She stepped through the warriors, more of whom had come curiously from looting the boats. Bows followed her, sweating bravos stepped back with uncertain looks. She heard the term crootài several times, and wondered if that were the local term for harper.
Inside the tent, she fell to her knees before her satchel and trembled. A body lay in the entrance to the tent and she remembered that a scant hour before she had killed that man. Mother had been right. When the time came, her training had held and no hesitation had stayed her hand.
Her fingers shook as she took the satchel and she paused a moment to gather herself. She remembered what Donovan had told her once. It is much harder to risk another’s life than to risk your own.
Unsnapping the clasps, she removed the bolt of anycloth and inserted the datathread into her communicator. She searched through the memory until she found the image she wanted.
Then she slung her harp case over her shoulder, stepped across the body in the entrance, and walked uphill toward her companions. Passing Sloofy on the way, she saw that a Harp warrior had smashed his skull in. She wondered if the unfortunate Nuxrjes’ri had welcomed surcease by then and what it must be like to die so far from home amidst angry strangers.
Méarana wasted no tears on him. He had gone out looking for trouble, and ought have had no complaint at finding it. But she saw no good in using him cruelly, and gave thanks to her God that the Harp warrior had ended his pain.
She found a pole that one of the boatmen had been using as a quarterstaff in the attack. (How futile and pathetic their effort seemed now! But a man is as dead brained with a quarterstaff as he is when fried by a dazer.) She attached the anycloth to the staff and stabbed the pole into the ground.
The southern breeze caught the cloth and unfurled it. It was the green banner of Harpaloon: the harp embraced by the crescent moon.
Their captors jabbered excitedly among themselves. Then the chief stepped forward and embraced Méarana, kissing her lightly on each cheek.
“You have come at last,” Watershank translated for him. “You have come at last.”
XIV A CITY ON THE HILL
The canoes moved swiftly upstream. Behind them, one of the durms sent a dark plume of smoke into the sky. The other durm had been set adrift into the current with Watershank’s friend aboard and a message that the Tooth of the Harp had made women of the Gorgeous, and Rajilooris were no longer welcome in the Roaring Gorge. With the sweep alone to keep the durm in the channel, the man had a desperate time ahead of him; but he had his life, and that was no small gift. The Harps had wanted to carve the message into the man’s skin, but Watershank had asked his life as a favor of the chief. “Xudafah was a good friend to me on the boats,” he said. “We exchanged the kiss of friendship. How could I take from him what is mine to freely give.”
Méarana’s party had been split up, and the only sounds she heard were the rush of the Multawee over the rocks and the rhythmic chanting of the warriors at the paddles. The sound of the waterfall grew steadily louder and the canyon closed up into narrow, sheer cliffs. Once, the canyon was broken by the mouth of a tributary stream that came bubbling and churning out of a split in the rocks and Méarana glimpsed up its length a series of tumbling cataracts.
They came around a bend in the Multawee and saw the blackened ruins of a stockade and scores of people penned behind wooden fences under the eyes of more Harp warriors. “Candletown,” Donovan guessed. “Those poor bastards are Djamos’s kinfolk. He was a pigeon merchant? What are the odds that at least one of his pigeons was a homing pigeon, and carried word back here?”
“No odds,” said Méarana, “and it doesn’t really matter anymore.”
“I suppose the Harps found out about it somehow and hijacked the whole thing. That does matter, because they worship the harp. Who knows how it would have turned out if Djamos’s kin attacked the boatmen?”
“Father, be quiet. I have to think.” Donovan retreated into silence and, suddenly contrite, Méarana laid a hand on his knee. “I’m sorry. It’s just that there’s a thin line between honored guest and prisoner. Remember Jimmy Barcelona on Thistlewaite?”
“From what I’ve seen, they will deny you nothing.”
“From what I’ve seen all of our lives belong to the chief, and he can do whatever he pleases. If he chooses to keep a harper in a wooden cage to entertain him on demand, who will deny him? If he chooses to keep the harper and kill all the harper’s companions, can I do anything but threaten a satire?”
“I think that threat would mean something to him.”
“I don’t know how far I can extend the protection of my status.”
“You can’t ask Watershank.”
“God, no. He’s not our enemy; but he isn’t our friend, either. He may feel he owes us something because we gave him shelter behind the rocks. And he may have picked up more sophisticated mores in the old empire.”
Donovan snorted. “I didn’t notice many sophisticated mores in Lafeev or Sloofy or the boatmen.” He studied the burnt stockade as they passed. “Look at that,” he said, pointing. “Bunch-cords running down from the tops of the cliffs. That’s how the Harps attacked the town. They tied the cords to their harnesses and jumped off. Closest thing to an aerial assault this world has ever seen.”
“Billy can be my servant. He knows how to play the role. And Teddy and Paulie are my bodyguards. The Harps will understand a harper traveling with bodyguards and servant. But what am I to call Sofwari?”
“Or me,” Donovan suggested.
“You are my bongko. You play the lap drum to give me the tempo.”
“Méarana, I don’t know an alap from a jhala.”
“You don’t have to. Your drums were destroyed by the boatmen and you must go through a purification ritual before you can make a new set. And you can’t do that until your hand heals.”
“My hand…” Donovan studied that extremity. “Oh. Yes.” He curled his fingers and cocked his wrist. “Hurts like hell, too.” He fell silent for a while. “Sofwari,” he said after a time. “You like him.”
“I didn’t expect to; and he can be…exasperating. But he is both well-built and well-spoken, and that combination is not so common as to be dismissed out of hand.”
“When Bokwahna tackled you, I thought I would die.”
“Bokwahna?”
“The steersman on the Green Swan. A big man. When he overpowered you, I cursed myself for being on the flank instead of at your side.”
“Was that his name? I never got to know him. Well, we’re best friends now. Who can be closer than the killer and the killed?”
“When Sofwari fried Bokwahna’s brains, I loved him like a son.”
She had dealt the death blow. Four times into the abdomen. Sofwari’s shot had probably been redundant, but it was nice to remember that Sofwari had done that for her.
More silence passed and the canoes turned for shore. Donovan said, “He’s not right for you; but we’ll figure something out. He’s one of us now.”
Near the foot of Roaring Falls a path led up into the Foothills. It was a well-worn path and one easily ambushed in its narrower reaches; but those who had guarded it were dead and the Tooth of the Harp now owned it. The falls showered down in continual complaint from the ridgeline three hundred feet above and raised a mist within which shone a pale rainbow. Everything was damp and had a sheen of water over it. When Méarana closed her eyes, the falls sounded like a giant wooden door that was constantly rumbling open.
The Harps unloaded the canoes and strapped the bundles on the backs of himmers. These
were a species of donkey native to the land: semiaquatic in the rainy season, and storing fat on their backs in the dry. Gorgeous boys, torn from their shrieking mothers, were pressed into service to drive the beasts up into the High Country.
“Look on the positive side,” the Fudir said through the scarred man’s lips. “At least they’re taking us in the right direction.” He nodded toward the towering massif of the distant Kobberjobbles, snowcaps shining in the afternoon light.
Days passed in endless walking. Each morning dawned chill and a hasty breakfast saw them on the way up. At the midmorning stop, the drivers adjusted and retightened straps on the himmers and everyone drank a bitter tea of cocoa leaves to ameliorate the altitude sickness that had begun to develop among the lowlanders. In the afternoons, the last waves of the ‘soons spent their scattered remains on the highlands. Around the campfires at night there was singing of a high nasal sort that set Billy’s teeth on edge, and some of the warriors played wild skirling music on whistles. Méarana filed it all away in that part of her mind that never stopped plucking the harp strings.
She would use it someday to play this journey to comfortable audiences on Die Bold and Jehovah, on Abyalon and High Tara, to audiences who thought themselves in their ignorance to be tough. It was a big Spiral Arm, but it was far away from here, and the whim of a border lord with a headdress of feathers meant more than the considered will of the Grand Sèannad in congress assembled.
__________
They came finally onto a high plateau where the thin air blew unobstructed and the trees were strangely twisted. They met again the River Multawee in her upper courses. War canoes met them, drawn up on the riverbank. By then the boys pressed as donkey drivers had stopped crying and they faced the unloading with hot, stolid eyes.
The Harp canoes were more elaborately carved than the Gorgeous ones they had highjacked. Their prows arced into lions and gryphons and more fanciful beasts, each plucking with its claws a harp carved on the leftside bow. The sides were fretworked down their lengths: herringbones, weaves, floral patterns, all painted in bright gaudy colors. Watershank told her that each fret design and prow totem represented a different clan. He had never seen so many clans assembled.
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