Warriors [Anthology]

by George R. R.

  Two weeks after the battle, John Grey returned to Gareon, and found that smallpox had swept through the village like an autumn wind. The mother of Malcolm Stubbs’s son was dead; her mother offered to sell him the child. He asked her politely to wait.

  Charlie Carruthers had perished, too, the smallpox not waiting for the weakness of his body to overcome him. Grey had the body burned, not wishing Carruthers’s hand to be stolen, for both the Indians and the local habitants regarded such things superstitiously. He took a canoe by himself, and on a deserted island in the St. Lawrence, scattered his friend’s ashes to the wind.

  He returned from this expedition to discover a letter, forwarded by Hal, from Mr. John Hunter, surgeon. He checked the level of brandy in the decanter, and opened it with a sigh.

  My dear Lord John,

  I have heard some recent conversation regarding the unfortunate death of Mr. Nicholls last spring, including comments indicating a public perception that you were responsible for his death. In case you shared this perception, I thought it might ease your mind to know that in fact you were not.

  Grey sank slowly onto a stool, eyes glued to the sheet.

  It is true that your ball did strike Mr. Nicholls, but this accident contributed little or nothing to his demise. I saw you fire upward into the air—I said as much, to those present at the time, though most of them did not appear to take much notice. The ball apparently went up at a slight angle, and then fell upon Mr. Nicholls from above. At this point, its power was quite spent, and the missile itself being negligible in size and weight, it barely penetrated the skin above his collarbone, where it lodged against the bone, doing no further damage.

  The true cause of his collapse and death was an aortic aneurysm, a weakness in the wall of one of the great vessels emergent from the heart; such weaknesses are often congenital. The stress of the electric shock and the emotion of the duello that followed apparently caused this aneurysm to rupture. Such an occurrence is untreatable, and invariably fatal, I am afraid. There is nothing that could have saved him.

  Your Servant,

  John Hunter, Surgeon

  Grey was conscious of a most extraordinary array of sensations. Relief, yes, there was a sense of profound relief, as of one waking from a nightmare. There was also a sense of injustice, colored by the beginnings of indignation; by God, he had nearly been married! He might, of course, also have been maimed or killed as a result of the imbroglio, but that seemed relatively inconsequent; he was a soldier, after all—such things happened.

  His hand trembled slightly as he set the note down. Beneath relief, gratitude and indignation was a growing sense of horror.

  I thought it might ease your mind....He could see Hunter’s face, saying this; sympathetic, intelligent, and cheerful. It was a straightforward remark, but one fully cognizant of its own irony.

  Yes, he was pleased to know he had not caused Edwin Nicholls’s death. But the means of that knowledge...gooseflesh rose on his arms and he shuddered involuntarily, imagining . . .

  “Oh, God,” he said. He’d been once to Hunter’s house—to a poetry reading, held under the auspices of Mrs. Hunter, whose salons were famous. Dr. Hunter did not attend these, but sometimes would come down from his part of the house to greet guests. On this occasion, he had done so, and falling into conversation with Grey and a couple of other scientifically minded gentlemen, had invited them up to see some of the more interesting items of his famous collection: the rooster with a transplanted human tooth growing in its comb, the child with two heads, the fetus with a foot protruding from its stomach.

  Hunter had made no mention of the walls of jars, these filled with eyeballs, fingers, sections of livers ... or of the two or three complete human skeletons that hung from the ceiling, fully articulated and fixed by a bolt through the tops of their skulls. It had not occurred to Grey at the time to wonder where—or how—Hunter had acquired these.

  Nicholls had had an eyetooth missing, the front tooth beside the empty space badly chipped. If he ever visited Hunter’s house again, might he come face-to-face with a skull with a missing tooth?

  He seized the brandy decanter, uncorked it, and drank directly from it, swallowing slowly and repeatedly, until the vision disappeared.

  His small table was littered with papers. Among them, under his sapphire paperweight, was the tidy packet that the widow Lambert had handed him, her face blotched with weeping. He put a hand on it, feeling Charlie’s doubled touch, gentle on his face, soft around his heart.

  You won’t fail me.

  “No,” he said softly. “No, Charlie, I won’t.”

  * * * *

  With Manoke’s help as translator, he bought the child, after prolonged negotiation, for two golden guineas, a brightly colored blanket, a pound of sugar, and a small keg of rum. The grandmother’s face was sunken, not with grief, he thought, but with dissatisfaction and weariness. With her daughter dead of the smallpox, her life would be harder. The English, she conveyed to Grey through Manoke, were cheap bastards; the French were much more generous. He resisted the impulse to give her another guinea.

  It was full autumn now, and the leaves had all fallen. The bare branches of the trees spread black ironwork flat against a pale blue sky as he made his way upward through the town to the small French mission. There were several small buildings surrounding the tiny church, with children playing outside; some of them paused to look at him, but most of them ignored him—British soldiers were nothing new

  Father LeCarré took the bundle gently from him, turning back the blanket to look at the child’s face. The boy was awake; he pawed at the air, and the priest put out a finger for him to grasp.

  “Ah,” he said, seeing the clear signs of mixed blood, and Grey knew the priest thought the child was his. He started to explain, but after all, what did it matter?

  “We will baptize him as a Catholic, of course,” Father LeCarré said, looking up at him. The priest was a young man, rather plump, dark and cleanshaven, but with a gentle face. “You do not mind that?”

  “No.” Grey drew out a purse. “Here—for his maintenance. I will send an additional five pounds each year, if you will advise me once a year of his continued welfare. Here—the address to which to write.” A sudden inspiration struck him—not that he did not trust the good father, he assured himself—only...“Send me a lock of his hair,” he said. “Every year.”

  He was turning to go when the priest called him back, smiling.

  “Has the infant a name, sir?”

  “A—” He stopped dead. His mother had surely called him something, but Malcolm Stubbs hadn’t thought to tell him what it was before being shipped back to England. What should he call the child? Malcolm, for the father who had abandoned him? Hardly.

  Charles, maybe, in memory of Carruthers . . .

  ...one of these days, it isn’t going to.

  “His name is John,” he said abruptly, and cleared his throat. “John Cinnamon.”

  “Mais oui,” the priest said, nodding. “Bon voyage, monsieur—et voyez avec le Bon Dieu.”

  “Thank you,” he said politely, and went away, not looking back, down to the riverbank where Manoke waited to bid him farewell.

  <>

  * * * *

  Naomi Novik

  Born in New York City, where she still lives with her mystery-editor husband and six computers, Naomi Novik is a first-generation American who was raised on Polish fairy tales, Baba Yaga, and Tolkien. After doing graduate work in computer science at Columbia University, she participated in the development of the computer game Neverwinter Nights: Shadows of Undrentide, and then decided to try her hand at novels. A good decision! The resultant Temeraire series—consisting of His Majesty’s Dragon, Black Powder War, Throne of Jade, and Empire of Ivory—describing an alternative version of the Napoleonic Wars where dragons are used as living weapons, has been phenomenally popular and successful. Her most recent book is a new Temeraire novel, Victory of Eagles.

 
; Here she takes us on an evocative visit to a distant planet of intricate and interlocking biological mysteries for a harrowing demonstration that it’s unwise to strike at an enemy before you’re sure they can’t strike back....

  * * * *

  Seven Years from Home

  Preface

  Seven days passed for me on my little raft of a ship as I fled Melida; seven years for the rest of the unaccelerated universe. I hoped to be forgotten, a dusty footnote left at the bottom of a page. Instead I came off to trumpets and medals and legal charges, equal doses of acclaim and venom, and I stumbled bewildered through the brassy noise, led first by one and then by another, while my last opportunity to enter any protest against myself escaped.

  Now I desire only to correct the worst of the factual inaccuracies bandied about, so far as my imperfect memory will allow, and to make an offering of my own understanding to that smaller and more sophisticated audience who prefer to shape the world’s opinion rather than be shaped by it.

  I engage not to tire you with a recitation of dates and events and quotations. I do not recall them with any precision myself. But I must warn you that neither have I succumbed to that pathetic and otiose impulse to sanitize the events of the war, or to excuse sins either my own or belonging to others. To do so would be a lie, and on Melida, to tell a lie was an insult more profound than murder.

  I will not see my sisters again, whom I loved. Here we say that one who takes the long midnight voyage has leaped ahead in time, but to me it seems it is they who have traveled on ahead. I can no longer hear their voices when I am awake. I hope this will silence them in the night.

  Ruth Patrona

  Reivaldt, Janvier 32, 4765

  * * * *

  The First Adjustment

  I disembarked at the port of Landfall in the fifth month of 4753. There is such a port on every world where the Confederacy has set its foot but not yet its flag: crowded and dirty and charmless. It was on the Esperigan continent, as the Melidans would not tolerate the construction of a spaceport in their own territory.

  Ambassador Kostas, my superior, was a man of great authority and presence, two meters tall and solidly built, with a jovial handshake, high intelligence, and very little patience for fools; that I was likely to be relegated to this category was evident on our first meeting. He disliked my assignment to begin with. He thought well of the Esperigans; he moved in their society as easily as he did in our own, and would have called one or two of their senior ministers his personal friends, if only such a gesture were not highly unprofessional. He recognized his duty, and on an abstract intellectual level the potential value of the Melidans, but they revolted him, and he would have been glad to find me of like mind, ready to draw a line through their name and give them up as a bad cause.

  A few moments’ conversation was sufficient to disabuse him of this hope. I wish to attest that he did not allow the disappointment to in any way alter the performance of his duty, and he could not have objected with more vigor to my project of proceeding at once to the Melidan continent, to his mind a suicidal act.

  In the end he chose not to stop me. I am sorry if he later regretted that, as seems likely. I took full advantage of the weight of my arrival. Five years had gone by on my homeworld of Terce since I had embarked, and there is a certain moral force to having sacrificed a former life for the one unknown. I had observed it often with new arrivals on Terce: their first requests were rarely refused even when foolish, as they often were. I was of course quite sure my own were eminently sensible.

  “We will find you a guide,” he said finally, yielding, and all the machinery of the Confederacy began to turn to my desire, a heady sensation.

  Badea arrived at the embassy not two hours later. She wore a plain gray wrap around her shoulders, draped to the ground, and another wrap around her head. The alterations visible were only small ones: a smattering of green freckles across the bridge of her nose and cheeks, a greenish tinge to her lips and nails. Her wings were folded and hidden under the wrap, adding the bulk roughly of an overnight hiker’s backpack. She smelled a little like the sourdough used on Terce to make roundbread, noticeable but not unpleasant. She might have walked through a spaceport without exciting comment.

  She was brought to me in the shambles of my new office, where I had barely begun to lay out my things. I was wearing a conservative black suit, my best, tailored because you could not buy trousers for women ready-made on Terce, and, thankfully, comfortable shoes, because elegant ones on Terce were not meant to be walked in. I remember my clothing particularly because I was in it for the next week without opportunity to change.

  “Are you ready to go?” she asked me as soon as we were introduced and the receptionist had left.

  I was quite visibly not ready to go, but this was not a misunderstanding: she did not want to take me. She thought the request stupid, and feared my safety would be a burden on her. If Ambassador Kostas would not mind my failure to return, she could not know that, and to be just, he would certainly have reacted unpleasantly in any case, figuring it as his duty.

  But when asked for a favor she does not want to grant, a Melidan will sometimes offer it anyway, only in an unacceptable or awkward way. Another Melidan will recognize this as a refusal, and withdraw the request. Badea did not expect this courtesy from me; she only expected that I would say I could not leave at once. This she could count to her satisfaction as a refusal, and she would not come back to offer again.

  I was, however, informed enough to be dangerous, and I did recognize the custom. I said, “It is inconvenient, but I am prepared to leave immediately.” She turned at once and walked out of my office, and I followed her. It is understood that a favor accepted despite the difficulty and constraints laid down by the giver must be necessary to the recipient, as indeed this was to me; but in such a case, the conditions must then be endured, even if artificial.

  I did not risk a pause at all even to tell anyone I was going; we walked out past the embassy secretary and the guards, who did not do more than give us a cursory glance—we were going the wrong way, and my citizen’s button would likely have saved us interruption in any case. Kostas would not know I had gone until my absence was noticed and the security logs examined.

  * * * *

  The Second Adjustment

  I was not unhappy as I followed Badea through the city. A little discomfort was nothing to me next to the intense satisfaction of, as I felt, having passed a first test: I had gotten past all resistance offered me, both by Kostas and Badea, and soon I would be in the heart of a people I already felt I knew. Though I would be an outsider among them, I had lived all my life to the present day in the self-same state, and I did not fear it, or for the moment anything else.

  Badea walked quickly and with a freer stride than I was used to, loose-limbed. I was taller, but had to stretch to match her. Esperigans looked at her as she went by, and then looked at me, and the pressure of their gaze was suddenly hostile. “We might take a taxi,” I offered. Many were passing by empty. “I can pay.”

  “No,” she said, with a look of distaste at one of those conveyances, so we continued on foot.

  After Melida, during my black-sea journey, my doctoral dissertation on the Canaan movement was published under the escrow clause, against my will. I have never used the funds, which continue to accumulate steadily. I do not like to inflict them on any cause I admire sufficiently to support, so they will go to my family when I have gone; my nephews will be glad of it, and of the passing of an embarrassment, and that is as much good as it can be expected to provide.

  There is a great deal within that book that is wrong, and more that is wrongheaded, in particular any expression of opinion or analysis I interjected atop the scant collection of accurate facts I was able to accumulate in six years of overenthusiastic graduate work. This little is true: The Canaan movement was an offshoot of conservation philosophy. Where the traditionalists of that movement sought to restrict humanity to dead worlds and
closed enclaves on others, the Canaan splinter group wished instead to alter themselves while they altered their new worlds, meeting them halfway.

  The philosophy had the benefit of a certain practicality, as genetic engineering and body modification were and remain considerably cheaper than terraforming, but we are a squeamish and a violent species, and nothing invites pogrom more surely than the neighbor who is different from us, yet still too close. In consequence, the Melidans were by our present day the last surviving Canaan society.

  They had come to Melida and settled the larger of the two continents some eight hundred years before. The Esperigans came two hundred years later, refugees from the plagues on New Victoire, and took the smaller continent. The two had little contact for the first half millennium; we of the Confederacy are given to think in worlds and solar systems, and to imagine that only a space voyage is long, but a hostile continent is vast enough to occupy a small and struggling band. But both prospered, each according to their lights, and by the time I landed, half the planet glittered in the night from space, and half was yet pristine.