Pretender

by C. J. Cherryh

  “One is grateful, young sir.” He righted himself and took a grip on the seat back with his hand. They had swerved onto a stretch of gravel, actually keeping on the road all the way through the woods, the tail of the bus tending to slew somewhat on the turns. Then, with a last such skid, they definitively left the trees, and turned what Bren calculated was due west, and not that far from the rail station.

  People standing in the aisle had crowded forward, blocking his view. There seemed some discussion in progress between Dur and the driver—he had no idea what the subject was, but the bus was already going at a reckless pace, and now the driver added speed.

  Then a set of red gleams lit the crowd in silhouette: taillights from the several vehicles in front. Braking.

  Jago worked her way up against his seat. “We are coming to the station now,” she said. “There will be a delay here, and we will try to find the car. We will force our way in as far as possible, but there is no surety the car will stop. It has a fair-sized tank, and utmost priority at the pump, if it does. We do not wish to discuss matters with the others on the radio. Banichi is going out when we get to the pump.”

  He didn’t like the notion of Banichi leaving them. He didn’t like the odds the car might have kept going, with some destination of its own in mind, and, as Jago said, no recourse to radio possible.

  Damn.

  But Jago had immediately gone forward again, and the bus, moving more sanely behind the other vehicles, hit a much smoother track, still rolling through an enveloping cloud of dust that lights coming up behind them rendered entirely opaque. There was sand under the wheels now—there had been a lot of that around the train station, a typically soft surface for a fairly major road. If the driver could see anything at the moment but the taillights of the vehicle immediately in front, he would be surprised.

  “Great-grandmother has a better driver,” Cajeiri commented glumly, which was not precisely fair to the driver they had, but it added up to the truth.

  Buildings appeared through the haze. More red lights ahead of them. Red light and the hazy headlamps of vehicles behind them lit the interior of the bus as they slowed to an absolute stop near those ghostly buildings, and then their forward door opened. Several people got out of their bus, some likely to go investigate the fuel supply or consult the drivers in front of them, or argue their precedence in getting to what would surely be one fuel pump.

  And Banichi, trying to locate the car among these buses.

  “Are we looking for mani-ma?” Cajeiri asked, as his young bodyguard leaned over the seat to hear.

  “One hopes so, young gentleman. We have reached the train station and no one has shot at us. This is good.”

  “Guild would have been ahead of us, nandi,” Cajeiri said with a wave of his hand, “and taken care of any problems. Cenedi would see to that, too.”

  “He would certainly do that,” Bren agreed. “But we do not take for granted we are safe here, young sir.”

  Damned sure he didn’t. Cenedi might be out there somewhere. Banichi was. But his view of seats in that car indicated Cenedi was the only one of her staff with her. He hoped Nawari at least was somewhere close in the uncertainty of this blinding dust and dark, and that she was not totally reliant on the competency of Tatiseigi’s long-suffering staff.

  And, in the matter of unreliable staff, God knew where Ismini was at the moment. Certainly there was no room in the plane for more than three, if that, with the fuel bombs: Tabini, Rejiri, and someone. If the aiji’s bodyguard was cut loose to operate, they would not be happy about it, they were ignobly set on a bus somewhere in this mess, and whether they were reliable in man’chi or whether they were in fact gone soft—that lot, with or without Ismini, would be up ahead of the column, no question, demanding precedence for themselves, maybe in a position to move near the dowager, who knew? The whole train of thought made him extremely uneasy.

  Their personnel—he thought it might be Banichi with them—reboarded the bus. The door shut, and the bus rolled slowly into a turn that led it on an extreme tilt along the margin of the road, passing other vehicles. Cajeiri gave a bounce in his seat.

  Had it been Banichi? Or was he still out there?

  “So have they found her? Are we going to the head of the line?”

  As the universe ought to be ordered, in Cajeiri’s intentions, indeed. And it had not been Banichi boarding. They were moving up to fuel. They negotiated their way past ten to fifteen vehicles, including three cars, and made it to the single pump, where they stopped. The door opened. Several of their people got off to attend the mechanics of it. But there was no car.

  Cajeiri immediately got up and began to force his way through the aisle. Bren flung himself out of his seat and caught the princely arm, only marginally ahead of Jegari and Antaro.

  “The young gentleman should by no means get off the bus,” Bren said.

  “We were not getting off,” Cajeiri said, indignantly freeing himself, and simultaneously managing a look out the other window. “We are looking for great-grandmother out the front window. It is our right! And Jegari will go.”

  “Jegari will not go,” Bren said, laying a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “By no means. Banichi will be out there talking to Cenedi, if the dowager is here, and that is quite sufficient. A young man could as easily be left behind by accident, and this is no safe place to be walking about, young sir, not for you nor for your staff.”

  The fuel cap was off, a great deal of clatter at the rear. He heard the nozzle go in, he thought, hoped they were fueling apace by now. Adult privilege, he worked his own way forward to see what there was to see up by the door.

  There Tano found him, in the press in the aisle. “The dowager has fueled and gone ahead,” was Tano’s unwelcome news. “It would be foolish not to top off fuel now that we are stopped, nandi. We do not know what the way ahead may present us. But we do have this station secure, and a team has gone up the line by rail to control the switching point up by Coagi. No train coming from Shejidan will get past that barrier.”

  That was good news. The rail would be physically shunted over to divert any train coming toward them out of the south, not only from the direction of Shejidan, but, the way the rail lines branched, out of the extreme south, where Murini’s strongest support lay. And any such hostile train, once stopped, would be boarded and dealt with, no question.

  “More,” Tano said, “we have been given maps of where more widely scattered fuel can be had, and they are passing these to the column. Certain of the rearmost of this column will fan out from here and use farm tanks and rejoin our route later. More are coming in to join us.”

  “Do you know whether the Kadagidi are coming, Tano-ji?” Bren asked. “Will they attack Tirnamardi, or come after us?”

  “They will not attack an empty house,” Tano answered him, confirming his own opinion. “But they have not been as forward to attack us as one might expect, nandi. And we have passed word of our movement to Guild in the capital.”

  How? And meaning what? Bren asked himself, his heart skipping a beat. “To Guild officials?” he asked. “We blew up their leader, did we not? Forgive me, Tano-ji.” The last, because Guild affairs had fairly well spilled out of him, asking what he should by no means ask.

  “We have advised certain Guild members, nandi. Forgive me.” The radio was active again, a faint tinny voice to the rear. Tano ducked away through the press in the aisle, having given his question a broader answer, one was sure, than most lords would get regarding a dispute within the Guild, and it came from a source that recent suspicion informed him might itself be somewhat—almost—nearly—official.

  Cajeiri, appearing at his elbow, where he should not be, had just asked him a question. He was not sure what it had been, something about Murini. “One has no idea, young sir.”

  “But,” Cajeiri said, and pursued the question.

  “One has no idea,” he repeated, tracking the noise of the radio, but unable to hear the transmission. Tano w
as back there, near it.

  Meanwhile he worked his way back to his seat, entraining Cajeiri behind him, and burdened with the thought that if Algini and Tano were more than Guild members, this ungainly bus might itself be a higher-level target than he had imagined, a traveling Guild office—

  They hadn’t contacted Guild offices in Shejidan, Tano had said, but certain Guild members.

  So communications were functioning, maybe including Tatiseigi’s leaky communications system, which Ilisidi was using with abandon, alerting the whole reception area. They were not isolated. They had control of the railroad switching point at Coagi. They had maps, had support in the countryside, and the means to route their hindmost vehicles to alternative fueling sites: farm tanks, village stations, all sorts of hitherto unimagined sources.

  He sat down in his own seat, dazed by the number of vectors this business was taking, trying to think of anything he could personally do. Cajeiri plumped down beside him.

  “We must have a very large fuel tank, nand’ Bren.”

  “That we do, young sir.”

  “How much fuel does this pump have in it?”

  “One has no idea, young sir. The tank itself is underground. A very large tank, one hopes.”

  “Like the one at Uncle Tatiseigi’s house.”

  “Yes.” His mind was skittering off ahead of the moment, toward the rolling countryside around Shejidan, the scores of towns and villages in the most populated area of the country. Roads were not the rule on the mainland. Vehicular traffic did not go town to town; it went, generally, to rail stations, taking merchandise to market, people to passenger stations, and that webwork of small lanes knit the villages together in the process. One wanted to visit a neighboring town? One hitched a ride with a commercial truck or the local village bus on its way to the train station, as they had done. People didn’t ordinarily even think in terms of driving to the capital: Rail carried absolutely everything, goods and people alike.

  But the web of roads grew and linked villages, lumpy, bumpy, and gravel in most instances, tire tracks through meadow in others, even in areas where buses ran once a week.

  The sheer novelty of vehicles massing and converging along that network of roads, natural as it might be to human culture, might well be utterly off the map of Murini’s expectations, and carry them farther than any assault by rail—if they just took to rail from here, Murini might have cut them off by tearing up track. If they had trusted only to rail, Murini might have picked up the telephone to learn just where they were, and where to stop them. But there were hundreds of village overland routes, through meadows, through woods, and along village centers—across small bridges they could only hope held up, once they reached the stream-crossed meadows near the capital. And their mass could spread out and reform, down this web, taking fuel at farms, gathering strength, Tano had said, and regrouping. Meanwhile their forces were penetrating the rail system, taking switch-points, guaranteeing Murini couldn’t use that system.

  Sheer audacity might carry them through the night, might get them a fair distance before Murini figured out what was happening and decided how to stop this assault.

  And more villages might come in along the way. If there was any district in the aishidi’tat that had little reason to support Murini, it was that stretch of Ragi ethnicity that bordered Murini’s Padi Valley, from Taiben to the Shejidan countryside. The feud between Tatiseigi of the Atageini and Taiben was only a fractional part of that old rivalry. The Ragi atevi of Shejidan could not be content with some Kadagidi upstart from the Padi Valley suddenly claiming to rule the aishidi’tat, with his accent, his traditions, his history of skipping from side to side of previous coup attempts, as Murini had notoriously done. There was no reason in the world that Shejidan district should rise up to defend any Padi-born ruler.

  Rush to arms en masse to overthrow authority? That was not the atevi style. But lend a slight helping hand to tip the balance in favor of a Ragi prince while professional Guild sorted out their internal struggle?

  That would start a chain reaction of minor disobedience that might become an avalanche. It had started, when a few brave members of the tashrid had decided to get contagiously ill at Murini’s summons. Had they known where Tabini was when they did it? Had they signaled their support through the Ajuri lord?

  Now, when it looked as if the whole Padi Valley except the Kadagidi was coming in to support the father of a prince of mingled Valley and Ragi heritage, it remained to be seen whether the tashrid would still sit at home with sore throat or answer Tabini’s summons to assemble a quorum. Now that the dowager was back from space, Tabini could provide the aishidi’tat his evidence—never mind the economic mess the paidhi had counseled Tabini-aiji into, the advice that had started this mess. Now it was apparent that an upstart Padi Valley lord, in a bloody overthrow of the existing order, had taken his primary support from the detested south—that would never sit well with the Sheijidan Ragi or the Taibeni, under the most favorable of circumstances, once it became clear to them. Murini’s seizure of power might have gotten their acquiescence early on, when it had seemed part of a general tilt of the whole Association away from Tabini’s policies and toward a restoration of things-as-they-had-been, but once the Padi Valley peeled away from the Kadagidi, led by the Atageini, and once the Taibeni Ragi joined them, and once the mixed-blood prince came home from space, along with Ilisidi, she of the eastern connections, then, God, yes, the whole picture had changed. The north had repudiated Murini. The islands had repudiated him, in the person of Dur. The coast, under Geigi, had never supported Murini at all. The east had never been anyone’s but Ilisidi’s.

  Now the very center of the Association, the Padi Valley and Ragi highlands districts, had turned soft—turned soft, hell, they were in full career toward Sheijidan to make their opinions heard: there would be the dicey part. Loss of the center and the east of the aishidi’tat left Murini clinging only to the south and his own Padi Valley clan, which was now itself isolated in its violation of neighboring Atageini territory—

  Murini was in deep trouble. That exhilarating chain of assessments dimmed all the world around him, leaving vague just what anyone was going to do to reunite the individual pieces of this avalanche into a stable structure. The avalanche was pouring down toward the capital. Murini would have increasing trouble mustering any support whatever, and the self-appointed Guild head who had entered Tatiseigi’s estate to bring their agents in position for a surgical strike had done so perhaps foreseeing that the gathering would move on the capital and that only taking out Tabini could stop it without shattering the aishidi’tat beyond repair.

  Now that man was dead, along with, one hoped, every agent he had brought with him.

  Nasty thought—that there might be other agents scattered through the buses, maybe on this bus, still intent on stopping them.

  Presumably, however, the lord of Dur knew his own and Banichi and Jago could vouch for any others. That might not be the case on more motley vehicles, those that had piled on people from various villages.

  The thought drove him up from his seat again, pressing past a bemused Cajeiri, to find Tano, where he had gone.

  “One had a thought, Tano-ji, that perhaps on some of the trucks, some of the Guild operatives might still pose a threat.”

  “There are cautions out, nandi,” Tano informed him. “One has advised other buses to take careful account of passengers and quietly report any suspicions at the next fueling stop. Rely on us.”

  “You heard the radio operating,” he said. “You know the dowager is using it.”

  “One has heard,” Tano said.

  The bus engine coughed to life. They started to roll. Those of their people who had been outside scrambled aboard as the bus moved, and the doors shut. One hoped Banichi had made it. One saw a tall man talking to the driver, and to Lord Adigan, silhouetted against the light outside.

  He went back to his seat as the bus rocked onto level road, eased past, and dropped into it
.

  “How far can we go on a single tank, nand’ paidhi?” Cajeiri asked him.

  “One assumes a very large tank, could now that it is full, take even this vehicle most of the way to Shejidan.”

  “See?” Cajeiri bounced to his knees, his whole human-adult-sized body impelled to impose itself over the seat back, to win a bet, one supposed, with his bodyguard. “We can get most of the way there on one tank.”

  “The lord did not say ‘all the way,’” Jegari retorted; the debate continued and the paidhi, who had other concerns on his mind, thought about going back and taking Tano’s seat by Algini, where there was quiet.

  “How much of the way?” Cajeiri asked him, quite familiarly and quite rudely abrupt, as happened.

  “What would your great-grandmother say, young sir?”

  “Nandi,” came the amendment.

  “Indeed, young sir. But I have no precise answer for your question. Excuse me.”

  He gathered himself up and slipped back into the aisle, an escape from innocence and good humor. It was Banichi’s and Jago’s company he wanted at the moment, and information, information of any sort, as much as he could get.

  He found them together, up by the large front windows. The view was of dust-veiled taillights, not so many of them as before, and the bus shot along a gravel road, throwing rocks and receiving them in equal number. The windshield had taken several hits, and had lost chips.

  He came armed with the youngsters’ question. “Can we make it to Shejidan, Banichi-ji, on what fuel we have?”

  “Possibly so, Bren-ji. We only topped off, is that not the expression?”

  “How is the dowager faring? Did you hear?”

  “There was no opportunity to overtake her, Bren-ji,” Jago said. “So we hear, Tatiseigi has taken the loan of that automobile from the mayor of Diegi, who has habitually driven to and from the trains in a notoriously reckless rush. Murini, with the fuel shortage, has forbidden the driving of such private cars. The mayor is delighted to lend it in this cause, and accompanies them, personally.”