Foreigner

by C. J. Cherryh

  Like hell, he thought, like hell, Jago. Shooting at shadows. What shadows, Jago, is Tano expecting out there in the rain?

  Shadows that fly in on scheduled airliners … and the tightest security on the planet, except ours, doesn’t know who it is and where they are?

  Like hell again, Jago.

  VI

  “A lively night,” the aiji-dowager said, over tea she swore was safe. “Did you sleep, nand’ paidhi?” “Intermittently.”

  Ilisidi chuckled softly, and pointed out the flight of a dragonette above the misty, chill lake. The balcony railing dripped with recent rain. The sun came up gold above the mountains across the lake, and the mist began to glow with it. The dragonette dived down the face of the cliff, membranous wings spread against the sun, and swept upward again, with something in its claws.

  Predator and prey.

  “They’re pests,” Ilisidi said. “The mecheiti hate them, but I won’t have the nest destroyed. They were here first. What does the paidhi say?”

  “The paidhi agrees with you.”

  “What, that those that were here first—have natural ownership?”

  Two sips of tea, one bite of roll, and Ilisidi was on the attack. Banichi had said be careful. Tabini had said he could handle it.

  He thought a moment, first to agree, then to quibble. Then: “The paidhi agrees that the chain of life shouldn’t be broken. That the loss of that nest would impoverish Malguri.”

  Ilisidi’s pale eyes rested on him, impassive as Banichi’s could ever be—she was annoyed, perhaps, at his changing the subject back again.

  But he hadn’t changed her proposition, not entirely.

  “They’re bandits,” Ilisidi said.

  “Irreplaceable,” he said.

  “Vermin.”

  “The past needs the future. The future needs the past.”

  “Vermin, I say, that I choose to preserve.”

  “The paidhi agrees. What do you call them?”

  “Wi’itkitiin. They make that sound.”

  “Wi’itkitiin.” He watched another scaled and feathered diver, and asked himself if Earth had ever known the like. “Nothing else makes that sound.”

  “No.”

  “Reason enough to save it.”

  Ilisidi’s mouth tightened. The grimace became a hint of a laugh, and she spooned up several bites of cereal, put away several thin slices of breakfast steak.

  Bren kept pace, figuring one didn’t speak to the aiji-dowager when she was thinking, and an excellent breakfast was going to get cold. Cooked over wood fire, Cenedi had said, when he wondered how there was anything hot, or cooked. He supposed they managed that in the kitchen fireplace, if there was a fireplace in the kitchen. The thumping Jago had called the generator had stopped sometime during the night. The machine was out of fuel, perhaps, or malfunctioning itself. Maidingi Power swore on their lives and reputations that Malguri would have power, as soon, they said, as they had restored power to the quarter of Maidingi township that was dark and chill this morning.

  Meanwhile the castle got along, with fireplaces to warm the rooms and cook the food, with candles to light the halls where light from windows didn’t reach—systems which had once been The System in Malguri. The aiji-dowager had ordered breakfast set outside, on the balcony, in a chill mountain summer morning—fortunate, Bren thought, that he’d worn his heavier coat this morning, because of the chill already in the rooms. The cold had steam going up from his tea-cup. It was nippishly pleasant—hard to remember the steamy nights that were the rule in the City in this month, the rainstorms rolling in from the sea.

  And with the candles and the wood fires and the ancient stones, it was a blink of the eye to imagine, this misty morning, that he had come unfixed in time, that oared vessels with heraldic sails might appear out of the mist on the end of the lake.

  Another dragonette had flown, with its eye on some prey. Its cry wailed away down the heights.

  “What are you thinking, paidhi? Some wise and revelatory thought?”

  “Thinking about ships. And wood fires. And how Malguri doesn’t need anything from anywhere to survive.”

  The aiji-dowager pursed her lips, rested her chin on her fist. “Aei, a hundred or so staff to do the laundry and carry the wood and make the candles, and it survives. Another five hundred to plow and tend and hunt, to feed the launderers and the wood-cutters and the candlemakers and themselves, and, oh, yes, we’re self-sufficient. Except the iron-workers and the copy-makers to supply us and the riders and the cannoneers to defend it all from the Unassociated who won’t do their share and had rather prey on those who do. Malguri had electric lights before you came, nadi, I do assure you.” She took a sip of tea, set the cup down and waved her napkin at Cenedi, who hovered in the doorway and mediated the service.

  He thought the breakfast ended, then. He prepared to rise, but Ilisidi waved a hand toward the terrace stairs.

  “Come.”

  He was caught, snared. “I beg the dowager’s pardon. My security absolutely forbids me—”

  “Forbids you! Outrageous. —Or did my grandson set them against me?”

  “No such thing, I assure you, with utmost courtesy. He spoke very positively—”

  “Then let your guards use their famous ingenuity.” She shoved her chair back. Cenedi hastened to assist, and to put her cane under her hand. “Come, come, let me show you the rest of Malguri. Let me show you the Malguri of your imagination.”

  He didn’t know what to do. She wasn’t an enemy—at least he hoped she wasn’t, and he didn’t want to make one. Tabini, damn him, had put him here, when he’d known his grandmother was here. Banichi was all reproach for the invitation he’d accepted without having Banichi’s doubtless wise advice—and there was nothing the paidhi saw now to do, being committed to the dowager’s hospitality, except to fall to the floor moaning and plead indisposition—hardly flattering to an already upset cook; or to get up from the table and follow the old woman and see what she wanted him to see.

  The latter seemed less damaging to the peace. He doubted Banichi would counsel him differently. So he followed Ilisidi to the outer edge of the terrace and down, and down the stone steps, to yet another terrace, from which another stairs, and then a third terrace, and so below to a paved courtyard, all leisurely, Cenedi going before the dowager, four of the dowager’s security bringing up the rear.

  It was farther down than he expected. It involved walking quite far back in the fortress, first through a walled courtyard, then across an earthy-smelling second walled court, at which he truly began to doubt the direction they were going, and the wisdom of following this party of strangers.

  Banichi is going to kill me, Bren thought. Jago is going to file Intent on me. If the dowager’s guard doesn’t have it in mind from the start. Banichi can’t have any idea where I’ve gone, if he isn’t watching already—

  Which, thinking of it, he well might—

  Something banged, hammerlike, at the gate in front of them, and as Cenedi opened it there came fierce squeals the like of which he’d never heard at close range, only in machimi plays.…

  Mecheiti, he thought with trepidation, seeing first Cenedi and then the dowager walk through that gate. Horse was what the Remote Equivalencies said.

  But horse didn’t cover this utter darkness beyond the gates, defying the servants to hold it, shaking its head, threatening with its formidable rooting-tusks—it was horse only because atevi rode it, it was horse on the atevi scale of things, the creature that had helped them cross the continents and pull their wagons and patrol their borders. It threw its head in defiance of its handlers, it gnashed its formidable teeth, its tusks capped with gold. Its head-harness glittered with beads, in the mop of flying mane—it was violent, frightening in its nearness and in the heedless strength with which it pulled the handlers about.

  He stopped at the gate, counting it only prudence—but Ilisidi kept walking, after Cenedi. The other guards—there were three more of them
than they had started with—passed him where he stood, telling him his fear was inappropriate, whatever the evidence of his senses, and he gathered his resolve and walked out behind the last, suffering, in that tall company, a sudden revision of perspectives: the world had suddenly become all atevi size, and the fragile old ateva leaning on her cane next to this terrible creature, and reaching out her hand to it, was of the same giant scale, the same fearsome darkness. It might have been centuries ago in Malguri. It might have been some aiji of the warlike age—

  He watched in trepidation as the mecheita dipped his huge head and took something from Ilisidi’s hand. It gulped that down and began to make little snatches at her fingers with its overshot upper lip as if it expected more—playing games, he realized, delicate in its movements, reacting to her ringers with a duck of its head and a gentleness in its touch he would not have believed from its behavior with the handlers.

  Bluff and bluster, he said to himself. The creature was a pet. It was all a show to impress the paidhi, the stupid human.

  “Come, come,” Ilisidi said, looking back at him. She leaned the hand with the cane against the mecheita’s neck, using the animal for a prop instead, and wanted him to come up to it.

  Well, atevi had tried to bluff him before—including Tabini. Atevi in the court had set up traps to destroy his dignity, and with it his credibility. So he knew the game. He summoned up the mild anger and the amusement it deserved, walked up with his heart in his throat and tentatively offered his hand, expecting the dowager would dissuade him if there was a real threat

  But not putting all his faith in it. He was ready to snatch his hand back as it stretched its neck toward him—and jerked away.

  He did the same, heart thumping.

  “Again,” said Ilisidi. “Again, paidhi. Don’t worry. He hasn’t taken fingers in a year or two.”

  He gathered a breath and held out his hand a second time—this time he and the creature were more cautious of each other, the mecheita’s nostrils opening and shutting rapidly, smelling him, he supposed, recalling from his studies that such animals did rely heavily on smell. Its head was as long as his arm from shoulder to fingertip. Its body shadowed him from the sun. It grew bolder, feeling over his hand with its prehensile upper lip, not seeming to threaten, but dragging his fingers down against the gold-capped rooting tusks.

  It had a little lump of bony plate on its nose, that was bare and gray and smooth. The inquisitive lip was barred with wrinkles, and came to a narrow point between the two gold-capped tusks. It explored his fingers, snuffling and blowing its great breaths on him in evident enthusiasm, flicking its ears as it had with the dowager, seeming not offended that he had no treat for it. It tickled the soft skin between his fingers, and tasted his fingertips with a file-like tongue.

  It didn’t flinch away from him, that curious rough contact, it took to his whole fingers with skin-abrading enthusiasm, and he was delighted and afraid and enchanted, that something in the world met him with such complete, uncomplicated curiosity—accepting what it met. It wasn’t offended at his strange taste, that for the dowager’s hopes of his discomfiture.

  Then it took the ultimate, unanticipated liberty of nosing him in the face. His hands flew up to fend it off, and his next view of it was from the pavings looking up at its looming shadow.

  “Hei,” Ilisidi said, holding the creature’s harness, and standing over him, “don’t push on the nose, nand’ paidhi. Babs is sorry, aren’t you, Babs? Didn’t expect a hand on your nose, did you, poor Babs?”

  He gathered himself up—he had saved his skull from the pavings, but not his backside. He brushed himself off and doggedly offered his hand again to the mecheita—one didn’t admit an embarrassment, among atevi, even while the dowager chuckled at his discomfort and said he should take Nokhada, as a relatively placid mount.

  “Take … where, aiji-mai?”

  “To see Malguri, of course,” Ilisidi declared, as if his agreement had encompassed everything. She gave her cane to Cenedi, hiked up the skirt of her coat and hit Babs on the shoulder, the signal—he knew it from television—for Babs to put out a foreleg. Another man helped Ilisidi with his joined hands, and Ilisidi swung up to a practiced landing on the riding-pad as Babs surged up again, smooth and quick as a courtly bow. They towered above him, Ilisidi and the mecheita, black against the sky, the beast that was wholly shadow, and Ilisidi, whose pale eyes were the only brightness, like a figure out of Malguri’s violent past, that swept past him, and turned about and fidgeted to be moving.

  There was a great deal of activity out of the further building, a stable from which other mecheiti came with their handlers, a crowd of black shapes, as tall, as ominous from where he stood, one for every man in Ilisidi’s party.

  And himself. “Forgive me,” he began, when Cenedi signaled the handlers to bring one of the creatures to him. “This isn’t cleared. I don’t know how to ride. I beg to recall that I was sent here for my safety, at considerable difficulty of my absence from critical matters in court—I’ve not consulted with my own security, whose reputations—”

  Nokhada’s passage cut off his view, a living mountain between him and the stone wall of Malguri. “Let her have your scent,” Cenedi said, having the lead rope, and holding the creature still. “Just don’t press on the nose. The reaction is quite involuntary. The tusks are capped, but all the same—one could deal damage.”

  The mecheita stretched out its neck for a lazy sniff of his hand, and a more curious examination of his clothing, and a lick at his face and a try for his neck. He stepped back, not quite in time, from the swing of its head—a blunt tusk bruised his jaw and brought stars to his eyes, while Cenedi restrained it and the servants, nothing heeding his protests, prepared to help him up the way they had helped Ilisidi.

  “Just put your foot here, nand’ paidhi, it’s quite all right.”

  “I can’t ride, dammit, I don’t know how!”

  “It’s quite all right,” Cenedi said. “Just hold to the padrings. Leave the reins alone. She’ll follow Babs.”

  “Where?” he asked bluntly. “Where are we going?”

  “Just out and back. Come. I’ll assure your safety, nand’ paidhi. It’s quite all right.”

  Call Cenedi a liar, in Cenedi’s domain? He was surrounded by the people he’d left safety to follow, because he wouldn’t be bluffed into retreat. Cenedi vowed he was safe. It was Cenedi’s responsibility, and Banichi would hold him to it—with his life.

  The paidhi could only be a certain degree dead. He was replaceable, in an hour, once Mospheira knew he’d broken his neck.

  “It’s your responsibility,” he said to Cenedi, taking up the reins. “Tabini-aiji has filed Intent, on my behalf. I trust you’re aware what went on last night.”

  With which he prepared to put his foot in the stirrup, and let Cenedi worry. He resolutely struck Nokhada on the shoulder, to make him or her or it extend the foreleg: he knew from television how one got up.

  But as Nokhada inclined in the brief bow, and he couldn’t get the stirrup situated, or his foot situated in it, the handlers gave him a shove up toward the rings. His light weight went up from their hands in a greater hurry than he expected, and he had only just landed on the riding-pad when Nokhada came up on her feet.

  He went off the other side with a wild snatch at the riding-pad, into the hands of security, as Nokhada went in a circle.

  Atevi seldom laughed aloud. Ilisidi did, as Babs threw his head and circled and snorted and handlers tried to collect Nokhada.

  There was no choice, now. Absolutely none. He dusted himself off, asked Cenedi for the rein, and, shaking in the knees, remade his acquaintance with Nokhada, who had been made a fool along with him.

  “Make both of us look good,” he muttered to a mountainous shoulder, and tried a second time to make Nokhada extend the leg. “Hit harder,” Cenedi said, so he hit harder, and Nokhada sighed wearily and put the leg out.

  A second time he put his foot in the stir
rup, and a second time Nokhada came up with him.

  This time he expected it. This time he grabbed the pad-rings and leaned into Nokhada’s motion—landed astride, then tilted as Nokhada continued to turn in circles.

  “Loosen the rein, loosen the rein, nand’ paidhi!”

  He heard the dowager laughing uproariously and clung to the rings as he let the rein slip through his thumb and forefinger. Nokhada shook herself and turned around and around again.

  “Ha!” Ilisidi said, as his circular, humiliating course showed him other riders getting mounted, with far less spectacle. He tried to straighten the reins out. He tried with pats of his hand to make friends with Nokhada, who in her now slower circles, seemed more interested in investigating his right foot, which he moved anxiously out of range.

  Then Ilisidi shouted out, Babs passed him in a sudden rush of shadow, Nokhada took it for permission and made the last revolution a surge forward that jerked the rein through his hand so hard it burned. The stone face of the building passed in a lurching blur, the gate did, and while he was clinging to the pad-rings and trying to find his balance, they were across the courtyard, headed through an arch and down a stone chute beside the stairs that ended in an open gate, and sunlight.

  A cliff was in front of them. He saw Ilisidi and Babs turn to the road, and he jerked on Nokhada’s head to make her turn, too, which Nokhada took for an insult, dancing deliberately out on the brink of disaster, with the misty lake beyond and empty air below.

  “Don’t jerk her head, nand’ paidhi!” someone shouted from close behind him, and Cenedi came riding past, bumping his leg, sending Nokhada on a perverse course along the very edge, the creature shaking her head and kicking at nothing in particular.

  On the upward course ahead, Ilisidi stopped, and turned about and waited until they caught up, among the rest of her guard. Nokhada was sweating and snorting as he jogged them to a stop beside Cenedi, and he was perfectly content, trembling in every joint, that Nokhada should stop and stand as the other riders gathered about them.