“And the whole rebellion could be over,” Ilisidi said, “but I wouldn’t bet our lives on it, nadiin. The Association is hanging together by a thread of public confidence in Tabini’s priorities. To answer a rising against him with brutal force instead of negotiation, while the axe hangs over atevi heads, visibly? No. Tabini’s made his move, in sending Bren-paidhi to me. If that plane goes out of Wigairiin, if I personally, with my known opposition to the Treaty, deliver the paidhi back to him—the wind is out of their sails, then and there. This is a political war, nadiin.”
“Explosives falling on our heads, nand’ dowager, were not a sudden inspiration. They were made in advance. The preparation to drop them from aircraft was made in advance. Surely they informed you the extent of their preparations.”
“Surely my grandson informed you,” Ilisidi said, “nadi, the extent of his own.”
What are we suddenly talking about? Bren asked himself. What are they asking each other?
About betrayal?
“As happens,” Banichi said, “he informed us very little. In case you should ask.”
My God.
“We go to Wigairiin,” Cenedi said. “I refuse, with ‘Sidi’s life, to bet on Maidingi, or what Tabini may or may not have done.”
“I have to leave it to you,” Banichi said with a grimace and a shift on the elbow. “You know this area. You know your people.”
“No question, then,” Ilisidi said, and punctuated it with a stab of her walking-stick at the sodden ground. “Tonight. If this rain keeps up—it’s not an easy airfield in turbulence, Cenedi assures me. Not at all easy when they’re shooting at you from the ground. If we get there we can hold the airstrip with two rifles, take the rest of the night off, and radio my lazy grandson to come get us.”
“I’ve flown in there,” Cenedi said. “Myself. It’s a narrow field, short, single runway, takeoffs and landings right out over a cliff, past a steep rock where snipers can sit. The house is a seventeenth-century villa, with a gravel road down to Fagioni. The previous aiji was too aristocratic to fly over to Maidingi to catch the scheduled flights. She had the airstrip built, knocked down a fourteenth century defense wall to do it.”
“Hell of a howl from the Preservation Commission,” Ilisidi said. “Her son maintains the jet and uses it. It seats ten. It can easily handle our twelve, Cenedi’s rated for it, and it’s going to be fueled.”
“If,” Cenedi said, “if the rebels haven’t gotten somebody in there. Or sent them down, as you say, into Fagioni, to come up overland. If we have to scramble to take that field, nadiin, will you be with us? That’s the walk that could be necessary.”
“No question,” Banichi said glumly. “I’m with you.”
“None,” said Jago.
“The paidhi will take orders,” Cenedi said.
“I,” Bren started to answer, but Jago hit his knee with the back of her hand. “The paidhi,” she said coldly, “will do what he’s told. Absolutely what he’s told.”
“I—” He began to object on his own behalf, that he understood that, but Jago said, “Shut the hell up, nadi.”
He shut up. Jago embarrassed him. The anger and tension between Banichi and Cenedi was palpable. He looked at the rain-soaked ground and watched the raindrops settle on last year’s fallen leaves and the scattered stones, while they discussed the geography of Wigairiin, and the airstrip, and the aiji of Wigairiin’s ties to Ilisidi. Meanwhile the putative medic had brought his splints, three straight sticks, and elastic bandage, and proceeded to wrap Banichi’s ankle—”Tightly, nadi,” Banichi interrupted the strategy session to say, and the medic said shortly he should deal with what he knew about.
Banichi frowned and leaned back, then, because it seemed to hurt, and was out of the discussion, while Jago asked pointed questions about the lay of the land.
There was an ancient wall on the south that cut off the approach to Wigairiin, with a historic and functional iron gate; but they didn’t expect it to be shut against them. Just before that approach, they were going to send the mecheiti with one man, around the wall, north and east, to get them home to Malguri.
Why not stable them at Wigairiin? Bren asked himself. Why not at least have them for a resource for escape if things went wrong there, and they had to get away?
For a woman who seemed to know a lot about assaulting fortresses, and a lot about airstrips and strategy—removing that resource as a fall-back seemed a stupid idea. Cenedi letting her order it seemed more stupid than that, and Banichi and Jago not objecting to it—he didn’t understand. He almost said something himself, but Jago had said shut up, and he didn’t understand what was going on in the company.
Best ask later, he thought.
The dowager valued Babs probably more than she did any of them. That part was even understandable to him. She was old. If anything happened to Babs, he thought Ilisidi might lose something totally irreplaceable in her life.
Which was a human thing to think. In point of any fact when he was dealing with atevi feelings, he didn’t know what Ilisidi felt about a mecheiti she’d attacked a man for damaging. Forgetting that for two seconds was a trap, a disturbing, human miscalculation, right at the center of a transaction that was ringing alarm bells up and down his spine, and he couldn’t make up his mind what was going on with the signals he was getting from Banichi and Jago. God, what was going on?
But he couldn’t put it together without understanding what Ilisidi’s motive was, what she valued most, what she was logical about and what she wouldn’t be.
On such exaggerated threads his mind was running, chasing down invalid chains of logic, stretching connections between points that weren’t connected, trying to remember what specific and mutable points had persuaded him to believe what he believed was true—the hints of motivation and policy in people who’d been lying to him when they told him the most basic facts he’d believed.
Go on instinct? Worst, worst thing the paidhi could ever do for a situation. Instinct was human. Feelings were human. Reasonable expectations were definitely human. …
Ilisidi said they should get underway, then. It was a good fifty miles, atevi reckoning, and she thought they could get there by midnight.
“Speed’s what we can do,” she said, “that these city-folk won’t expect. They don’t think in terms of mecheiti crossing hills like this that fast. Damn lot they’ve forgotten. Damn lot about this land they never learned.”
She leaned on her cane, getting up. He wanted to believe in Ilisidi. He wanted to trust the things she said. Emotionally … based in human psyche … he wanted to think she loved the land and wanted to save it.
Intellectually, he wanted answers about sending the mecheiti back to Malguri—where there were, supposedly, rebels having breakfast off the historic china.
He didn’t get up with the rest. He waited until the medic packed up and moved off.
“Banichi-ji,” he said on his knees and as quietly as he could. “She’s sending the mecheiti away. We might still need them. Is this reasonable, nadi-ji?”
Banichi’s yellow eyes remained frustratingly expressionless. He blinked once. The mouth—offered not a thing.
“Banichi. Why?”
“Why—what?”
“Why did Tabini do what he did? Why didn’t he just damn ask me where I stood?”
“Go get on, nadi.”
“Why did you get mad when I came to help you? Cenedi would have left you, with no help, no—”
“I said, Get on. We’re leaving.”
“Am I that totally wrong, Banichi? Just answer me. Why is she sending the mecheiti back, before we know we’re safe?”
“Get me up,” Banichi said, and reached for Jago’s hand. Bren caught the other arm, and Banichi made it up, wobbly, testing the splinted ankle. It didn’t work. Banichi gasped, and used their combined help to hobble over to his mecheita and grab the mounting-straps.
“Banichi-ji.” It was the last privacy he and Banichi and Jago might have for
hours, and he was desperate. “Banichi, these people are lying to us. Why?”
Banichi looked at him, and for one dreadful moment, he had the feeling what it must be to face Banichi … professionally.
But Banichi turned then, grasped the highest of the straps on the riding-pad, and with a jump that belied his size and weight, managed to get most of the way up without even needing the mecheita to drop the shoulder. Jago gave him the extra shove that put him across the pad and Banichi caught up the rein, letting the splinted leg dangle.
Banichi didn’t need his help. Atevi didn’t have friends, atevi left each other to die. The paidhi was supposed to reason through that fact of life and death and find a rationale other humans could accept to explain it all.
But at the moment, with bruises wherever atevi had laid hands on him, the paidhi didn’t understand, couldn’t understand, refused to understand why Banichi should have died back there, for no damned reason, or why Banichi was lying to him, too.
Men were getting up, ready to move out. If he wasn’t on Nokhada, Nokhada would leave him, he had no doubt of it, they’d have to come back to get the reason—he still supposed—of this whole exercise, and nobody was going to be damned happy with him. He quickened his pace, limped across the slant of the hill and caught Nokhada.
Then he heard the tread of someone leading a mecheita in his tracks across the sodden leaves. He faced around.
It was Jago. A very angry Jago. “Nadi,” she said. “You don’t have the only valid ideas in the world. Tabini-ji told you where to be, what to do. You do those things.”
He shoved up the rain-cloak plastic and the sleeve of his coat, showing the livid marks still on his wrist. “That, for their hospitality last night, that, for the dowager’s questions—which I’ve answered, Jago-ji, answered well enough that they believe me. It’s not my damn fault, whatever’s going on. I don’t know what I’ve done since the dowager’s apartment, that you look at me like that.”
Jago slapped him across the face, so hard he rocked back against Nokhada’s ribs.
“Do as you’re told!” Jago said. “Do I hear more questions, nadi?”
“No,” he said, tasting blood. His eyes were watering. Jago walked off from him in his blurred vision and got on her mecheita, her back to him the while.
He hit Nokhada harder than his wont. Nokhada dropped her shoulder and stayed down until he had his foot in the stirrup and landed astride. He kicked blindly, angrily, after the stirrup, fought the rain-cloak out of his way as he felt Nokhada jolt into motion. A low vine raked his head and defensive arm.
Jago hadn’t hit with all her force—left the burn of her hand on his face, but that was nothing. It was the anger—hers and his, that found a vital, painful spot and dug in deep.
He didn’t know what he’d said—or done. He didn’t know how he’d come to deserve her temper or her calculated spite, except Jago didn’t like the questions he’d asked Banichi. He’d trod on something, a saner voice tried to say to him. He might have vital keys if he shut down any personal feeling, remembered exactly what he’d asked, or exactly what anyone had said. It was his job to do that. Even if atevi didn’t want him doing it. Even if he wasn’t going to get where they promised him he was going.
He lost the hillside a moment. He was on Ilisidi’s balcony, in the biting wind, in the dark, where Ilisidi challenged him with facts, and the truth that he couldn’t trust now to be the truth, the way he couldn’t pull the pieces of recent argument out of his memory.
He was on the mountain, alone, seeing only the snow—
On the rain-drenched hillside, with Jago deserting Banichi, cursing him for going after her own partner—and in the smoke, with the ricocheting bullets left and right of him.
The cellar swallowed him, a moment of dark, of helpless terror—he didn’t know why the images tumbled one over the other, flashed up, replacing the rainy thicket and the sight of Ilisidi and Cenedi ahead of him.
The shock of last night had set in—a natural reaction, he told himself, like the details of an accident coming back, replaying themselves over what was going on around him—only he wasn’t doing it in safety. There wasn’t any safety anywhere around him. There might never be again, only the bombs had stopped falling, and he had to focus and deal with what was ringing alarm bells through the here and now.
Banichi had challenged Ilisidi on the preparation of those bombs for a reason.
Banichi wasn’t a reckless man. He’d been probing for something, and he’d gotten it: Ilisidi had come back on him with a What do you know? and Banichi had claimed to know nothing of Tabini’s plans, implicitly challenging Ilisidi again to take him to that cellar and see what they could get.
Where was Banichi’s motive in the confrontation? Where was Ilisidi’s in the question, with so much tottering uncertain?
Putting Tabini’s intentions in question. …
God, the mind was going. He was losing the threads. They were multiplying on him, his thoughts darting this way and that way … not making sense and then making him terribly, irrationally afraid he still hadn’t figured the people he was with.
Jago hadn’t backed Banichi, anywhere in the argument. Jago had attacked him, told him to shut up, followed him across the hill to say exactly what she’d already told him and then hit him in the face. Hard.
Nobody had objected to Jago hitting him. Ilisidi hadn’t. Banichi hadn’t. They’d surely seen it. And nobody stopped her. Nobody objected. Nobody cared, because the human in the party didn’t read the signals and maybe everybody else knew why Jago had done it.
The threads kept running, proliferating, tangling. The dark was all around him for a moment, and he lost his balance—caught himself, heart thumping, with a hand on Nokhada’s rain-wet shoulder.
It was the cellar again. He heard footsteps, but they were an illusion, he knew they were. He’d taken a knock on the head and it hurt like hell, shooting pains through his brain. The footsteps went away when he insisted to see the storm-gray of the hills, to feel the cold drops off the branches above him trickling down his neck. Nokhada’s jarring gait scarcely hurt him now.
But Banichi was alive. He’d made that choice, whatever atevi understood. He couldn’t have gone off and left him and Jago, to go off with Ilisidi—he didn’t know what part of a human brain had made that decision, the way atevi didn’t consciously know why they, like mecheiti, darted after the leader, come hell come havoc—he hadn’t thought, hadn’t damned well thought about the transaction, that the paidhi’s life was what aijiin were shooting each other for. It hadn’t mattered to him, in that moment, running down that slope, and he still didn’t know that it mattered—not to Tabini, who could get a replacement for him in an hour, who wasn’t going to listen to him in anyone else’s hands, and who wasn’t going to pay a damn thing to get him back, so the joke was on the people who thought he would. He didn’t know anything. It was all too technical—so that joke was on them, too.
The only thing he had of value was in the computer—which he ought to drop into the nearest deep ravine, or slam onto a rock, except it wouldn’t take out the storage—and if they collected it, it wasn’t saying atevi experts couldn’t get those pieces to work. And experts weren’t the people he wanted to have their hands on it.
He should have done a security erase. If he’d had the power to turn it on.
God, do what to save that situation, tip them off it was valuable? Make an issue, then botch getting rid of it?
Just leave it in the bag, let Nokhada carry it back to Malguri?
The rebels were sitting in Malguri.
Dark. The steps coming and going.
The beast on the wall. Lonely after all these centuries.
He couldn’t talk to Banichi. Banichi couldn’t walk, couldn’t fight them—he couldn’t believe Banichi lying back like that, resigning the argument and all their lives to Cenedi.
But Cenedi was a professional. Like Banichi. Maybe together they understood things he couldn’t.
Jago crossed the width of the hill to blame him and hit him in the face.
Cold and dark. Footsteps in the hall. Voices discussing having a drink, fading away up the steps.
A gun was against his skull and he thought of snow, snow all around him. And not a living soul. Like Banichi. Just shut it out.
Give it up.
He didn’t understand. Giri was dead. Bombs just dropped and spattered pieces all over the hill, and he didn’t know why, it didn’t make any sense why a bomb fell on one man and not another. Bombs didn’t care. Killing him must be as good as having him, in the minds of their enemies.
Which wasn’t what Cenedi had said.
There began to be a sea-echo in his skull, the ache where Cenedi had hit him and the one where Jago had, both gone to one pain, that kept him aware where he was.
In his own apartment, before Cenedi’s message had come, before she’d left, Jago had said … I’ll never betray you, nadi Bren.
I’ll never betray you …
XIV
Not doing well, he wasn’t—with one pain shooting through his eyes and another running through his elbow to the pit of his stomach, while two or three other point-sources contested for his attention. The rain had whipped up to momentary thunder and a fit of deluge, then subsided to wind-borne drizzles, a cold mist so thick one breathed it. The sky was a boiling gray, while the mecheiti struck a steady, long-striding pace one behind the other, Babs leading the way up and down the rain-shadowed narrows, along brushy stretches of streamside, where frondy ironheart trailed into their path and dripped water on their heads and down their necks.
But there wasn’t the same jostling for the lead, now, among the foremost mecheiti. It seemed it wasn’t just Nokhada, after all. None of them were fighting, whether Ilisidi had somehow communicated that through Babs, or whether somehow, after the bombs, and in the misery of the cold rain, even the mecheiti understood a common urgency. The established order of going had Nokhada fourth in line behind another of Ilisidi’s guards.
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