by R. M. Meluch
A figure of awe and wisdom, the Fendi was not one to whom brash declarations should be made. Ben backed down to a humble silence.
The Fendi scratched the brindle ruff behind his berinx’s ears. “Let my warrior stay because he is an Itiri, not because he knoweth humankind not.”
Ben dropped to one knee and touched his forehead to the floor in final acceptance and farewell. “Yes, Fendi.”
• • •
Two years abroad revealed nothing to sway Ben’s already fixed mind, and nothing to endear humanity to his estranged soul. He found the human war still raging, just as he’d left it, fought in the name of supremacy of a savage, vulgar race. If any change had occurred, it was a widening of the already enormous gulf between expressed human ideals and actual human deeds. There were good people incapable of reaching lofty goals naively set, and there were evil people who perverted the expressed ideals to their own ends. Bungling and avarice took their toll on everyone humans touched. Good intentions did not an empire make.
Human greed was especially stunning to Ben, coming as he did from a place where the concept of ownership was loose. Physical things were used on Iry. To own a thing was an oddity and a privilege.
And among humankind, Ben lost one of his only possessions. His sword.
Contempt had made him careless. The idea that someone would actually take Da′iku from him was inconceivable. He could not believe it was gone.
The blade was shipped to another planet, sold at a bazaar, and was in the hands of a new owner by the time Ben caught up with it, led by his shrieking kestrel.
The sword’s buyer watched in mute astonishment as first a hawk appeared from out of the empty air and scared his prized white Arabian mare, then a young man with almond eyes and scarred feet walked into his garden and seized the reins of the gold-caparisoned horse, and made her stand still. The mare came to a stamping halt, panting under her heavy ornaments in the damp oasis.
The elderly man’s bushy eyebrows rose and disappeared under his kaffiyeh as Ben unstrapped the newly purchased sword from the mare’s saddle, drew the blade, and cast the gaily tasseled velvet sheath to the ground. The warrior turned the double-curved blade in the light before his exotic eyes, then whistled it through a helix in the air. Then he walked away with it.
The old man did not interfere. His leathery skin pinched in frowning crevices around a beaked nose and deep owl eyes. He picked up the discarded red velvet sheath, watched the warrior retreat barefoot through the white pillars of his paradise, and he breathed a baffled oath: “Allah?”
• • •
That night, while he slept under the desert stars, a pinprick invaded Ben-Tairre’s dreams. His mind sludged upward to thick consciousness, never clearing to alertness. His limbs moved as through water, and he knew he had been drugged.
He fought it—in the wild thrashing way of panic, not the calm methodical way of the Itiri. He hadn’t the patience to learn that kind of control, so his fight was the charging of a wounded animal, without the concentrated power of thought to break down the evil inside him. He could only rage against it. He thought his simple will could force anything.
For a second time, it was not so.
He tried to turn back and learn—learn now—a systematic defense against the foreign substance in his veins. Too late.
Feebly he pushed at the ropes on his arm, at the heavy feet that stood on his other wrist and on his ankles, until he was pinned down on the sand and couldn’t resist anymore. The drug sapped even his desire to fight. It was so easy just to rest and watch them, as if it were all happening to someone else’s body and he was only an observer.
His right arm was held out straight and strapped down to a wooden board rough with splinters so that he couldn’t move but to curl his fingers and make a fist around the biting woven hemp bond pulled tight across his palm.
A meat cleaver appeared before his stupidly curious and uncomprehending eyes—a heavy square blade with a keen edge and a black handle. The steel flashed in the lantern light, a harsh cutting glare—unlike the lustrous reflection of tungsten-plastic.
A great bear of a man with a woolly beard wet his fingers on his thick red lips, wiped them on his long striped coat of green, black, and gold, and gripped the cleaver’s stout handle in both his hands. He stepped up to stand over Ben, frowned down at him, and muttered a word. “Thief.”
Ben followed the focus of the man’s bloodshot brown eyes to his own wrist, and meaning penetrated his drugged thoughts. Fear returned. He yanked at his bonds with a sudden twist of his whole body. Wood and rope groaned. He shifted his pinned weight to try again, but a blue-smocked man sat on his chest.
The man with the woolly beard put one foot forward, swung the blade back and up, and with a grunt and a heave brought it chopping down through Ben’s wrist and buried the blade in the wood.
Then men cut his bonds, took his sword, and left him there spurting blood into the sand.
• • •
The kestrel brought a physician, who followed the bird as if it were a messenger from God to where Ben lay in shock, holding his veins and arteries shut, and waiting out the drug’s effects. He couldn’t do more.
The physician sealed the wound, said his bone was not shattered and that he was lucky. The physician had no blood to give the warrior, but said Ben was strong and thought he would recover—inshallah—God willing.
Having made it this far, Ben knew he wouldn’t die. When he regained strength, he walked back to the oasis and retrieved his sword once again. He cut off no hands, though he was bitterly tempted. He returned to his ship, Singalai, and went home.
The ranga fashioned a new appendage for him of jointed metal, padded and gloved to look like a hand.
The kestrel hated it and would not alight on it.
“Where wert thou when they were firing drug darts at me?” Ben said to its angry cries.
The new hand lacked dexterity and feeling. It was good for clutching and holding fast and for striking with great force. Ben adapted. The hand was useful.
But in the darkness, its faintly audible clicks and whirrs, ignored in the daylight, became magnified, a loud and desolate song of loss, like the shifting sands of the desert in the quiet of deep night.
• • •
The year of the Opal Sword began a new hexadecade. It was the year the child Amerika came to stay on the Aerie.
It was also the winter the Fendi died.
Ben withdrew to a lonely ledge in the gray twilight to be by himself. There was no order in the world. Ranga were wailing in their caves.
It was a cold day when Ben-Tairre wore boots, a day when breath froze in the lungs and eyes would coat over with ice. All was bleak.
He could not find the sun.
He tried to bring to mind hard green eyes like glass, and the voice of a gentle monarch who had allowed a Wolf to become a warrior-priest.
The Fendi’s dying words had been: “Not to make Ben Fendi.”
Jinin-Ben-Tairre thought it an incredibly odd thing to say.
There were two Bens on the Aerie. The Fendi must have been referring to the other Ben. Jinin-Ben-Tairre didn’t think anyone would even consider making him leader. The Fendi didn’t need to make a dying injunction against it. It was like telling berinxes not to fly. So why say it?
“Knowest thou not?” his fire kin asked him. “Because thou hast defeated defeat. Something none of us has ever done. And because thou art not a follower. And because no one is sure what to do with thee.”
He hadn’t known there were so many on the Aerie who would call his name. The Fendi had known. Jinin-Ben-Tairre agreed it would not be a wise choice.
As it happened, Roniva was chosen.
A small breeze cut like bitter knives. Ben covered his face with the edge of his brown mantle. The soft fabric felt rough and hard in the dry cold.
A hooded figure wended the rocky approach to his isolated ledge with careful deliberate steps on brown-slippered feet. A thin figure set in regal resolve, her back erect but fluid, she was known to Ben even without a glimpse of her jet-black skin.
Ben saluted as she arrived on the ledge, his sword fist over his gloved false hand. “Fendi.”
Roniva lifted her hood from her face and her glossy black hair. “Not yet,” she said. Breath froze to her lips. A white haze of drying skin chalked her high cheeks. “This is the last time I may speak to thee.”
Wind picked up the edges of their mourning cloaks, billowed and snapped them like wind flags.
“What sayest thou, hanina?” Ben asked, his brown-black eyes barely open within epicanthic folds.
“Thou murdered my Xanthan,” Roniva said.
“I know.”
“Thou art here and my son is not. A poor substitute.”
Her son. She had never said as much.
“Thy son was distort,” Ben said softly.
“So art thou. Shandee drives thee. Thou art nothing without thine anger. This is my Aerie.”
Wintry gusts pierced through fabric like sharpened blades. “Is this setkaza?” Ben asked. He hadn’t expected to die today.
“No,” Roniva said. “I shall not begin my reign with a bloodletting. I shall try, Wolf. If I cannot live with thee, I will have no choice. And have thee no doubt who will win.”
“No, hanina,” Ben said.
• • •
They held the peace for less than a year, until the coming of an Earthman in the year of the Opal Ship, the man who came to them under the name Alihahd.
Suddenly setkaza was here, the intent to kill, and Ben lived in perpetual readiness for his fatal combat. It could come at any time. Or he could make it happen, choose the time and place to his own advantage and readiness.
But it was said that he who moved first was lost. Setkaza was a waiting ordeal, a trial of nerves. The one who endured the pressure of death threat day after night after day, had always been victorious. Setkaza could go on for years. It could snap tomorrow.
Ben-Tairre knelt on the floor of the training hall. He touched his forefinger to the groove in the wood where Roniva’s sword had stabbed, locking their fate.
Turns of life were an unaccountable whirl. Caprice and sudden death and tragedy, fortune, chance, and destiny made vanity of expectation. There was but one certainty now. The death of a warrior.
PART THREE:
Ashar Ari
10. The Gathering Storm
IT WAS STILL THE FIRST WATCH, the hour of the bells. The air was sharp. The sky was clear and the stars shone in full array. Amerika stopped on the Ledge Path and gazed to the east. She sighed, “The Wellspring is rising already. Oh, Harry, I am not ready for winter.”
The Wellspring was a cold-weather sign. The constellation was at its zenith at midnight in the dead of winter. Amerika didn’t like to see it threaten on the horizon.
Amerika had picked a bunch of the season’s last gay cerulean flowers and tucked them into the bandelette tied beneath her small breasts. She took Harrison Hall’s arm and pointed up to show him a blue-white open cluster of stars which the Itiri had named for the flowers.
Iry had no moons, so no months. Instead, the year was divided into sixteen signs, each named for a constellation in Iry’s zodiac. The sentinels would announce the beginning of a new sign at whatever hour of day it occurred—the time varied, for the number of days in the year didn’t divide evenly by sixteen. There were 171.8 long days in the Iry year. Vaslav, who had a wrist chronometer that kept Earth standard time, said there were 30.97 Earth standard hours in an Iry day. It still made a short year, too short for summer to become actually warm, and, with any luck, too short for winter to grow killingly cold.
Just now it was autumn. The day was the eighth of the Beacon, the sign of an eclipsing binary. Only the constellations on the ecliptic were named. They were the only stars of any use to the Itiri, other than the pole star, but from the Aerie the pole star was always hidden behind the towering mountain Guardian.
The names of the constellations weren’t as imaginative as Earth’s constellations. Iry’s were mostly literal, and, once upon a time, the stellar configurations looked like their names—Hexagon, Crown, Cross—but that had been ages ago. Since their ancient naming, the signs had slipped along the ecliptic and the stars drifted in different directions, so that no sign looked like what it was supposed to be. The Red Birds used to form a spearhead and didn’t now. But then no real bird on the planet Iry actually flew in a V anyway, so it mattered little that the red stars formed a disorderly flock.
Harrison Hall sat on the balustrade of the arcade, his back against a stone column. He gnawed on the mouthpiece of his empty pipe. Firelights were fluttering to life inside the ranga caves, warming the doorways. Voices carried more clearly in the night air. Music of two woodwinds in rippling cadences chased each other from two caves on Aerieside. Hall tried to hum along but couldn’t predict the alien patterns.
He caught Amerika gazing at the valley. Alihahd had been down there all summer.
Rumors and reports made their way up the mountain upon occasion with messengers and deliveries of food from the valley. The rumors were not of Alihahd, but of Alan James. No one in Kaletani Mai had ever met an Alihahd. They only knew a tall, white, blond man with blue eyes and a big voice. His name was Alan James.
So the captain had assumed another alias, thought Hall. Well, Alihahd wasn’t really Alihahd either.
By midsummer, the stories that wended up to the mountaintop were of “the Earth Fendi.” Hall roared with laughter. Earth Fendi, indeed. If Alihahd stayed down there much longer, the villagers would have him deified.
Very good, Captain. Very good.
Amerika hung on every word spoken about the man, Alan James. She would grab every courier, every eagle, every traveler who came from Kaletani Mai, and squeeze every tale out of him. Her face was wistful now as she leaned over, her forearms resting flat along the balustrade, and she gazed at the lights of the valley where he was. The little girl was missing him.
Then her black eyes shifted to a closer focus, and she pointed down. “Harry, look.”
Harrison Hall took his pipe from his mouth and squinted into the dark.
Starlight caught on a movement in the blackness, a figure coming up the steep snake path from the valley to the Aerie. Hall could see no details, just a long-limbed form climbing up with a dogged way of moving.
Only warrior-priests climbed the sheer torturous snake path. But this was no warrior. Hall knew who this was.
Yet it was with a sense of disbelief that he beheld the lank, heavy-boned man appear over the top of the precipice to stand on the Aerieside Ledge Path. Harrison Hall thought of something he’d been told about legends—they always return.
Alihahd strode the path with a relaxed gait, tired but without exhaustion. He reached the narrow footbridge and began his crossing to Haven.
He was halfway when Jinin-Ben-Tairre appeared from shadows and stepped onto the bridge from Havenside to cross in the opposite direction. Their gazes met, and they both stopped.
The bridge swayed.
Ben gripped the knotted ropes. Muscles moved in his powerful shoulders.
His small mouth drew down in a sharp tight frown that wrinkled his chin. His eyes slanted even more steeply with the threatening cant of his brows. He took another step on the bridge, his intent clear without words. This Earthling would have to make way for him.
But a deep voice came from the bridge, very tired, short of temper, and unimpressed. “Move back. I shan’t jump.” And Alihahd looked away to the side as if annoyed and impatient. He knew what was rightfully his and was not about to be intimidated out of it.
Ben-Tairre blinked, slow to believe Alihahd could actually mean it. But Alihahd
was not going anywhere—least of all backward—and slowly Ben-Tairre stepped down.
Alihahd completed his crossing. He walked past Ben without looking at him. It wasn’t a gesture of avoidance. It was non-acknowledgment. Ben might as well have been a bush for all Alihahd cared.
Amerika gave a joyful little shriek and ran along Havenside’s Ledge Path to meet him. Harrison Hall followed her at a casual walk. Hall stopped a few paces away, his weight on one foot, one hand in his redingote pocket, the other holding his pipe. “Captain.”
“Mr. Hall,” Alihahd said in his elegant voice. He hadn’t changed. Not in that respect.
Hall had to smile. “How did you get up here?”
Alihahd’s glance shifted sideways toward Ben-Tairre, and he answered loudly, “I walked.”
Amerika clapped her brown, baby-fat hands with a gleeful giggle.
Hall gave a small nod. “Bravo,” he said softly.
Jinin-Ben-Tairre turned away from the bridge as if he had never wanted to cross it in the first place, and he mounted the stepped path to the higher terraces instead.
When Ben was gone, Alihahd let some starch from his proud stance, turned his head to Hall, and said, “Have you any conception of how far three miles straight up is?”
Hall chuckled. “Do you know what you just did to him?” He cocked his head in the direction in which Ben had retreated.
Alihahd did. Ben’s first climb of the snake path was a village legend. “Purely intentional,” Alihahd said.
“Are you going into warrior training next?” Hall asked lightly.
“Are you mad?” Alihahd returned. He pictured himself, a forty-eight-year-old cheela. No, he hadn’t climbed the snake path in answer to any calling. He’d climbed it to slap Ben’s alien-posing face.