Escape from the Drowned Planet

by Helena Puumala

  “The tea is ready,” she announced. “I made enough for all seven of us, but I’ll have to ask you Guards to bring your own mugs. I’m afraid we carry only a mug per person with us.”

  “That’s not a problem,” Aki replied. “I’ll get three from the Headquarters. Glad that you have a pot big enough to accommodate three more tea-drinkers.”

  Mikal, Yarm and the other two Guards were just arriving at the picnic table.

  “While you’re at it Aki, bring our lunch here, too. We might as well eat with the travellers,” Wey told Aki as the younger man left to go to the building.

  Aki nodded and hurried off, while the rest of them seated themselves around the mud-brick table.

  Mikal did not beat around the bush.

  “According to these Guards, Wey and Ery, you are going to be a problem in the Tribal Lands,” he said, directing his words to Kati.

  She made a face.

  “Yeah, Aki mentioned it to Jocan and me. Among the Tribes, women are property, right? And any female person who does not clearly belong to any man, can be taken by anyone who wants her.” She tried not to grind her teeth.

  “That’s the situation, briefly and precisely stated,” said Wey, smiling, perhaps to take some of the sting out of the situation.

  “Damn!” She did grind her teeth. “And here I had been mentally congratulating this world for having sane male-female relationships! On the ship, The Seabird, the crew was pretty much evenly divided between men and women, and all the jobs we’re open to everyone. On Sickle Island, it seemed to me that everybody did pretty well whatever work they wanted to, or were suited for. Even among you Narra-herders the women get on pretty well, considering that most of the young, married ones are bearing and suckling children, which is, let’s face it, a biologically necessary, but physically limiting endeavour. But until now, I hadn’t seen or heard of any of the really absurd crazinesses that I knew to exist on my home world, like women having to cover their whole bodies, including faces, in black cloth, whenever they’re out in public, or them not being allowed to work at the good jobs because that might ‘masculinise’ them, while any sort of low-status work is just fine.”

  She stopped to draw in a breath.

  “You have that sort of a thing happening where you come from?” Mikal asked, looking appalled.

  “Not exactly where I come from, but the same world, yes.” Kati stared at the four mugs that she had set on the table, to wait for Aki to return with three more. “I was lucky enough to live in a reasonably civilized part of my world,” she added more softly. “I was free, basically, to do as I pleased, to even make some really bad mistakes.”

  She looked up at the men around her, grinning wryly.

  “Which is what, I would think,” Yarm said quietly, “allows you to be as sympathetic as you are with the likes of Sany and Chrys, who are still busy trying to pick out their paths along the thorny road of life. It’s a useful trait.”

  “Thank you, Yarm. I appreciate that.”

  “Considering then that you’re not a silly young girl, but a woman with some real understanding of life,” Mikal appealed to her, “you can perhaps find it in yourself to do the sensible thing, and agree to pretend to be my property for the duration of our trip through the Tribal Lands.”

  “I knew you were going to say that!” Suddenly Kati burst out laughing. “Do you get to chastise me? Whack me around when I sass you?”

  “Good Heavens!” Mikal stared at her, shocked. “I hadn’t thought of that! Surely not!”

  Wey threw his head back and howled with laughter.

  “You better be prepared to at least put on an act,” he warned them. “This Kati of yours—“ he threw a teasing look at the woman in question, “—is a rather spirited specimen. Unless she can behave in a meek and modest manner, Mikal, you may have to give her the back of your hand now and then!”

  Mikal turned to stare at him.

  “Surely you’re joking?” he said.

  Wey immediately grew serious.

  “I’m sorry to say that I’m not,” he answered, sounding very sure of his facts. “We’ve been here, herding our animals beside them for a long time. We’ve been keeping them from raiding our animals all that time, having to go into their villages every now and then to do a little threatening, when they’ve gotten into our faces a little too much. We have had to take in and send down south their daughters who, not too infrequently, decide that their lot stinks, and just about any other place on this world must be better. So we have a pretty good idea how the men of the Wild Tribes look upon women, and believe me, those women get no respect.

  “Kati, here, is an attractive young woman; there will be men around the chieftains who will be thinking that they are entitled to a reward from their Chief for some deed or another, and some of them will consider a pretty fourth or fifth wife just the reward they were looking for. A man with that in mind will pressure his Chief to approach you to see if you’ll be willing to sell Kati, or trade for her, and if you prove to be unwilling, for whatever reason, he’ll be watching her, to see if there is any way he can claim that she doesn’t truly belong to you, but, instead could be considered an unattached object and therefore open to being claimed. If he can get the Chief to agree that she is to be considered unattached, then he takes her, and if you object the Chief can have you killed.”

  “Lovely.” Mikal looked grim. “And you know all this to be so?”

  “Travelling parties have come through, or back, missing members of both sexes. The remaining ones in such cases have had very disturbing stories to tell.”

  Aki arrived with three mugs and a large, covered bowl which must have contained the Border Guards’ lunch. Kati got up and began to pour tea into mugs with shaky hands. Jocan noticed the shaking, and came to take the pot away from her, nudging her to pass out the filled mugs instead of handling the hot pot.

  “Mikal, if you want,” Yarm said, “I can play the role of Kati’s husband. I know it’s imperative that you get to where you are going; there is a lot less riding on my shoulders than on yours. You can’t afford to have some idiot chieftain murder you before you get off the planet.”

  “Wouldn’t that be an irony if that happened?”

  Mikal had a fierce grin on his face. Kati could not recall having seen him looking quite like that in the whole time that they had been travelling together. Then he composed his features and shook his head at Yarm.

  “Thanks, Yarm, but no thanks,” he said, looking half-embarrassed. “I think I’ll be more convincing in the role.”

  “You’ve got that right,” Yarm said with a broad grin.

  “Only, Kati, try not to sass me. I don’t think I’m going to be much good at this chastising business. It doesn’t come naturally.”

  Kati sat down on the corner of the mud-brick bench, and took a deep swallow from her tea mug. The herbal brew was very hot in her mouth. The shakiness of the moments ago had passed; abruptly she felt full of energy and her mind was racing. The men around the table seemed to notice her change of mood and watched her curiously. Jocan, after a quick glance at her began to pass their food around even as Aki started to do the same with the bowl he had brought. Jocan had grown used to her ways, and now waited to see what she would come up with. He glanced at Mikal’s face as he passed him a bread pocket stuffed with meat and salad greens, and saw that he, too, was eyeing Kati expectantly.

  “So you’re not much good at slapping a bitch around, are you, Mikal?” she said at last with a wicked grin. “And I don’t think I can do meek and mild to save my life!”

  “Meek and mild might save your life,” Wey threw in, looking serious.

  “If I could do it, perhaps it would.”

  Kati picked up her bread pocket and bit into it, more to gain time than because she was hungry. She had an idea of how Mikal and she might play this game and get through the Tribal Lands with their lives intact. She was thinking it out right then and there, and wanted to have at least a few coheren
t words ready when she opened her mouth.

  The others busied themselves with eating as well. For a few minutes the table was a quiet place, the only sounds to be heard were related to eating and drinking. Mikal watched Kati as he ate, seeing not only the inward concentration on her face, but the way a slight breeze was playing with strands of hair that had escaped from the braid into which she had lately begun to gather her lengthening hair. She had a lovely face, he thought, with dark, arched brows, large, animated eyes, high cheekbones and a straight, if somewhat sharp nose above a wide, warm mouth. She was not beautiful in the way some of the women he had seen at the functions he sometimes had to attend at the Star Federation Space Station, were, but he cared little for perfect beauty in any case. Some of the beauties at the parties he had attended would have been delighted to have had their names linked with the talented half-Borhquan who was reputed to be a rising star in the Peace Officer Corps, but he had not been interested. First there had been his obsession with Lashia, and now that he seemed to have recovered from that loss, he had come across something even better. He had lost his heart to this lively woman from some strange world that was completely unknown to him. She was a Wilder, and on this planet that they were on, he thought wryly, the equivalent of the Wilder Worlds were the Wild Tribes, the very ones whose territories they had to cross to get to the beacon that they needed to reach. And she was plotting a way to try to make that crossing safely.

  “What I’m thinking,” Kati said at last, brushing crumbs off the table in front of her, her lunch eaten, “is that we role play a sort of a mismatched couple in which the bonds between us are strong but the forces pulling us apart are strong, too. I have maybe been married off to you by my parents without having much say in it, but I also know that you’re a decent sort and will look after me. I’m quite fond of you, but have no intention of serving you, or fulfilling your every need.”

  “Sounds fair enough, so far,” Mikal assented.

  “And you are a man who is a bit surprised to find himself married at all. Maybe it seemed like a high time to finally start a family and there I was, my parents pushing me on you, possibly because they wanted to get rid of a daughter who had remained unmarried too long. So you decided that I would do, and then, to your surprise, you discovered that you liked having a woman around, even this less-than-perfect one. So you put up with what you think of as my nonsense, but behave in a fiercely possessive manner at the same time, keeping me in sight at all times, glowering at Jocan and Yarm if they seem to flirt with me. Of course, if the Tribal men dare to even look at me, you snarl, and if they complain that you’re letting your woman walk all over you, you snarl at that, too. As far as you’re concerned, they don’t have a clue, the uncivilized clots. Your woman may not be meek and mild, but she’s yours, and everybody better believe it!

  “Do you think you can play the role of a possessive, somewhat jealous man, Mikal?”

  “It ought to be easier than a lout who clouts his wife, that’s for sure,” Mikal said with a grin. “Sounds to me like this husband that you are visualising is a bit of a naïf when it comes to women, has led a monastic life devoted to a career, something like that?”

  Kati wrinkled her nose.

  “Not necessarily. He could have been a rake in his single life; you know, knew his way to every widow’s bed in town. He might have had the notion in his head that marriage would tie him down and make his life dull, but discovered, on marrying me, that it ‘ain’t necessarily so’.” She directed a wicked grin at him.

  “Are you two plotting to get through the Tribal Lands or are you creating an entertainment for the Midsummer Festival?” Wey asked. He looked from Mikal to Kati and back again in bemusement.

  “Both,” Kati answered, looking straight at him. “What do you think? Do you think the men of the Tribes will believe that Mikal is my sole owner even if I do behave like a feisty, independent-minded lass, as long as he gives off the aura of being in control, and of putting up with my behaviour for his own reasons?”

  Wey seemed to turn this over in his mind.

  “As long as there’s an outburst of jealousy on his part every now and then,” he said finally. “You’ll puzzle the Tribal men. They won’t know where to slot you in their scheme of things. But as long as it’s clear that Mikal considers you to belong to him, that should be enough to keep their hands off you, Kati.”

  Aki and Ery were chuckling.

  “It’ll work,” Ery said. “I think that you’ll scare them.”

  “Yeah,” Aki agreed. “Strong women scare those brutes. And a man who, as far as they can tell, has one on a leash, now that they’d find really scary.”

  Mikal glanced at the two of them.

  “I’m not sure that we want to really scare them,” he said slowly. “Frightened men can be dangerous.”

  “The only way you can make this crossing not be dangerous,” opined Wey, “is if you leave Kati on this side of the gate. And you have already told me that that is not an option.”

  “No, it’s not,” Kati stated flatly. “Besides, Mikal, Jocan and I have faced a number of dangerous situations together, already. Nobody’s going to pack me off into some safe house to wait...for what?”

  “You know we could do that,” Mikal said, looking directly at her. “I’m sure one of these Guards would be willing to escort you back to the nearest settlement. Once I’ve rendezvoused with our ride off-planet, I can ask them to pick you up from outside the settlement. It wouldn’t be much of a detour for them with a scout ship, which is mostly likely what would pick me up, and if I told them that I want to fetch the woman who got me out of Gorsh’s slave ship where I had been kept drugged, I really don’t think there would be a problem.”

  “And while you three are travelling across the mountains, I’m supposed to do what? Knit socks?” Kati was nearly spitting.

  Aki chuckled.

  “The women would probably put you to work carding Narra-fibre,” he said.

  Kati glared at him. Mikal, too, gave him a dirty look.

  “You’re not helping any, Aki,” Wey said, but there was a touch of amusement in his voice.

  “You know, Mikal, I do think that you have every right to be concerned,” Yarm broke into the conversation in a calm voice, “but on the other hand, Kati has proven herself to be resourceful and courageous, time and time again. If you are willing to do a little bit of play-acting, I think we should go with Kati’s idea. The Tribal Lands are only—what?—about three days’ ride, but it’ll be another two or three weeks after that before we get to where you two are headed. I enjoy having Kati with us and I’m sure Jocan feels the same way. I’d hate to have to do without her company for three weeks just because the first three days are dangerous.”

  “Remember, Mikal, you were against her switching places with Chrys when the desert louts were giving trouble to the Caravan,” Jocan piped up. “And that scheme of hers worked like a charm.”

  Mikal looked from Jocan to Yarm, his eyebrows raised.

  “All right,” he then sighed. “I know when I’ve been outvoted. We’ll play our parts and hope that Lady Luck rides with us.”

  “Did she really get you out of a slave ship, Mikal?” Aki asked, his eyes shifting from Kati to Mikal and back again curiously.

  Mikal sighed again and then smiled gently.

  “She did, indeed,” he said softly.

  “I had help,” Kati protested, embarrassed. “A lot of help. Lots and lots of help.”

  Suddenly Mikal burst out laughing.

  “You know, Kati, Lady Luck does ride with you,” he said, grinning broadly. “Why, you had no idea who I was when you dragged me along on your escape; and me, I was barely able to function what with all that drug Gorsh’s doctor had been pumping into me for who knows how long!”

  “Well, a friend did tell me that you were a Federation Peace Officer and therefore ought to be a very useful person to have along.” Kati was not in the least perturbed.

  “Except that ha
ving me along has made this a more dangerous journey than it would have been without me,” Mikal pointed out. “And, you do realize that you would have found your way off-planet without me?”

  “I guess.” This had occurred to her some time ago. “I would have eventually heard about the Free Traders and maybe vamped one to take me with him to Federation Territory. And then I would have had to get someone to believe my story.”

  “Old granda would have helped with the story. But...vamped a Free Trader? I don’t quite see you doing that.”

  “Nah, me neither. Maybe I would have had to card Narra-fibre for my passage.”

  “All right, players,” Wey interrupted with a directorial clap of his hands. “Lets show a bit less joking and witticisms, and a lot more sass, vitriol, and possessiveness. Otherwise this Midsummer’s Entertainment isn’t going to make it to the stage on time.”

  Ery shook his head.

  “Wey always directs our Midsummer Entertainments,” he said. “He’s a slave driver at that.”

  *****

  The travellers ended up staying the rest of the day and the night on the Grassland side of the border. Kati and Mikal spent most of the afternoon practising their act, while the Border Guards and Jocan and Yarm made up an audience who were supposed to catch any behaviour in the actors which seemed unnatural to them. Unfortunately the performances drew gales of laughter as well as delighted catcalls from the watchers; a circumstance that did not in any way help the principals to hone their act.

  Near suppertime more Border Guards rode to the Headquarters from both directions along the fence; they, Aki explained to Jocan, were the Day Riders, who patrolled the line between the Grassland and the Tribal Lands in both directions from the Gate as far as it was possible to ride in a half a day. They slept at the Headquarters and would leave on their patrols again in the morning. There were other Day Riders stationed at other posts along the Border, Aki explained, and further in the hinterlands there were Long Riders, who would start a patrol at the last post on each side and ride all the way to the sea, camping through the nights as they travelled. Apparently they rarely saw trouble because the Tribal Lands were lower and marshier towards the ocean and barely inhabited. However, the Long Riders’ task kept them away from the company of other human beings for weeks at a time, and therefore was not a job very many men aspired to.