Foreigner: (10th Anniversary Edition) (27 page)

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.

He’d survived. He was on a solid part of the mountain. Nokhada couldn’t fling them both into the lake. That was a hard-won triumph.

“Caught your breath?” Ilisidi asked him. “How are you doing, nand’ paidhi?”

“All right,” he lied, out of breath.

“The lake trail’s a little steep for a novice,” Ilisidi said, and he thought she had to be joking. There
was
no trail over that edge back there. Surely there wasn’t. “Are we ready?—Thumb and finger, nand’ paidhi. Gently, gently. She’ll follow. Just hold on.”

Babs moved, Nokhada moved, as if she was on an invisible string. Babs made a running rush at the slope, and Nokhada waited and did the same, right behind, with Cenedi behind him. But two of the men were ahead of Ilisidi, and over the ridge and out of sight—security, he supposed, though he supposed that any sniper would just wait for a more profitable target.

“Someone did try to kill me,” he said breathlessly to Cenedi, in case no one had ever quite made all the details clear, in case Cenedi had thought he was other than serious. “In Shejidan. Under the aiji’s own roof. Without filing.
I supposed Banichi must have mentioned that. It’s not just a supposed threat.”

“We’re well aware,” Cenedi said. “The tea was our best chance.”

Cenedi was joking, he hoped. Deadpan retaliation for his remark when they mounted up.

But Cenedi claimed he’d known all along that there was a hazard, and Cenedi, or Ilisidi, had insisted all the same on bringing him outside the walls, and risking his neck with Nokhada. On one level, it was Tabini’s kind of gesture, absolute defiance of his restrictions and the better thoughts of his security—but he remained uneasy in spite of Cenedi’s assurances. The thought flitted through his head that if there were enemies or kidnappers in Malguri … he could be riding with them.

But Banichi hadn’t warned him anything of the sort. Banichi had brought Cenedi into his bedroom. Cenedi said he knew why they were at Malguri, and thought he could guarantee his safety.

Nokhada dipped her head of a sudden to investigate the ground—not the most opportune moment for Nokhada to do that, and he made a grab at the rings and jerked Nokhada’s head to bring it up—which brought Nokhada to an inglorious, sulking halt for two heartbeats before Nokhada moved on her own, still ducking her head, nose to the ground while she was climbing.

“She has a scent,” Cenedi said. Cenedi’s own mecheita was doing much the same, and so was Babs, up the hill. “I’d hang on, nand’ paidhi. Babs is lead.”

“Lead what?” he asked.

“Mecheit’-aiji,” Cenedi said, and he had a sudden recollection of televised hunts, of the legendary ability of mecheiti to track atevi fugitives or four-footed game. He remembered Babs going over his hand, and Nokhada smelling him over. He had the sudden apprehension that it wasn’t just television, wasn’t anything made-up, or exaggerated.

And he couldn’t control the damned mecheita he was
on to prevent it taking him wherever Ilisidi took a whim to go.

Babs gave a sudden whip of his tail and with a scatter of gravel took out diagonally across the slope. Nokhada and Cenedi’s mount and the rest pivoted and launched themselves as if they’d been shot at—Nokhada recklessly, roughly surging uphill in Babs’ tracks, outpacing Cenedi and the rest. He didn’t
want
the lead—and all he could do was hang on to the rings and not drop the rein.

A gully loomed ahead, a wash of soft earth down the hill, and Ilisidi showed no disposition to slow Babs down.

Babs took it.

Oh, God, he thought, envisioning himself bleeding on the ground, run over by the mecheiti behind. He tucked down, he gripped the rings with all his might—he didn’t mass much, he didn’t mass much, he kept telling himself as Nokhada thundered across the slope—Nokhada was going to go and Nokhada didn’t intend to fall—Nokhada took a four-beat turn into the jump, hind legs shoved, shoulders rose—

Then came a floating feeling, a headlong plunge against which his body instinctively reacted backward—and a teeth-cracking jolt as somehow he went forward again and his mouth hit the back of Nokhada’s neck.

Nokhada’s legs were under them again, all four of them, in a pounding rhythm—Babs’ dark rump showed in front of them as Babs suddenly darted left and right on the close track of something brown and white running ahead of them. Nokhada ran a straighter course, other mecheiti running like earthquake behind her.

A shot rang out ahead, from Ilisidi. Whatever it was—went down in a cloud of dust and flattening grass as it skidded downslope.

The guards all cheered the shot, as Babs stopped and the mecheiti came to a blowing, stamping halt around Babs, laying back ears and snorting and sidling about.

Bren’s mouth was cut. He blotted it, watching one of the guards ride down the slope to where the game had
fallen. Everyone thought it a wonderful shot on Ilisidi’s part. He supposed it was. He was shaking. His lip was swelling already, and he must have bruised Nokhada’s ribs with the clenching of his legs—his inner thigh muscles were sore and shuddery, and he was sweating, after doing nothing whatsoever in the chase but hold on.

While the aiji-dowager had just shot supper for herself and her staff, and the mecheiti were all wild-eyed and excited, at, one supposed, the smell of blood and gunpowder in the air.

“How do we fare, nand’ paidhi?”

“I’m still here, nai-ji.” That sounded too much like a challenge. “Credit to the mecheita, not myself.”

“Are you hurt, nand’ paidhi?”

Dependable.
Exactly
like Tabini.
Now
the concern.

“Her neck and my face,” he said ruefully.

“Too far forward,” Ilisidi said, and started off again at a brisk clip, uphill, while—a glance over his shoulder—the one guard was hauling the carcass up onto the riding-pad.

The beasts’ abilities weren’t just television. Machimi plays that showed a fugitive ripped apart by those tusks
wasn’t
exaggeration, he was convinced of it. He didn’t want to be on the ground in front of those feet, or in the way of those teeth, which, in war, they’d not blunt-capped.

Cenedi’s assurances of safety with them began to seem more and less substantial. But—he began to recall with a shudder Babs smelling him over, a smell Babs could never have met before. The mecheiti-aiji, Cenedi had called him, Babs having fixed that smell in his beast-brain and the associative group hierarchy the experts swore extended right into the animal kingdom—

Politics. Four-footed politics. Colony behavior, they called it on Mospheira, where they studied small indigenous animals, but nothing—nothing like the mecheita, nothing like these hunters, that
ate
—he remembered his
history—anything they could root up or catch. Omnivores. Pack hunters.

His legs were limp. His hand was shaking, holding the rein, from the excess of adrenalin, he said to himself.

Like the gunshot. He wasn’t used to such things. They engaged his senses wholly, insanely, on a level a professional risk-taker like Cenedi surely didn’t deal with anymore: he didn’t know what was important, so he took in everything that hit his senses, like a madman, and tried to do something when, to a well-ordered mind like Cenedi’s, there wasn’t anything to do.

The single guardsman they had left overtook them at a diagonal on the hill, with a small, graceful creature tied to the back of his riding-pad. Its head lolled. Its eyes were like the beast’s on the bedroom wall, not angry, though: soft, and astonished. A small trickle of blood ran from black, fine nostrils, a pretty nose, a pretty face. Bren
didn’t
want dinner with the dowager tonight.

Sausages didn’t have such mortality about them. He preferred distance from his meals. Tabini called it a moral flaw. He called it civilization and Tabini called it delusion: You eat meat out of season, Tabini would say. Out of time with the earth, you sell flesh for profit. You eat what never runs free: you call that
civilized?

He hadn’t an argument against that reasoning. He rode at Babs’ swishing tail, as the company remarked to each other again how fine a shot the dowager had made, and Ilisidi said that now that they had stocked the larder, they could enjoy the rest of the ride.

At a slower pace, Bren hoped: the insides of his legs, even relaxing, now, were finding the riding-pad an unnatural stretch, and when he tried to find a comfortable posture, he kicked Nokhada by accident and went humiliatingly off the trail, right down the mountainside, before he could get the mecheita stopped and redirected.

“Nand’ paidhi?” Cenedi asked from above.

“We’re coming,” he said. He supposed Nokhada made a ‘we.’ Nokhada certainly expressed an opinion, in flattened
ears and plodding gait, once they reached the trail again, overtaking the rear of the column, where Cenedi waited.

“What happened?” Cenedi asked.

“We’re figuring it out,” he muttered. But Cenedi gave him a fast rundown of the signals: touch of the feet for direction, light tugs of the rein for attention signals, or to restrain outright rebellion. Don’t touch the nose, don’t pull down on the head. Left foot, go right, right foot, go left; tug lightly, go faster, tug hard, go slow, don’t kick a man in the groin or a mecheita behind the ribs.

Which seemed a civilized arrangement.

“If he intends to jump,” Cenedi told him, “do as you did. Your weight won’t bother him. —Are the stirrups short enough?”

“I fear, nadi, I wouldn’t possibly know.”

“If your legs cramp, say so.”

“They don’t.” He didn’t complain of the rubbery condition. He put that down to sheer fright and a workout of muscles he wasn’t used to using.

“Good,” Cenedi said, and rode off at a steep diagonal up the ridge, Cenedi’s mechieta ducking its head and sniffing the ground intermittently, while its long legs never broke stride.

Curious ability. It was smelling for something along the ground, and lifted its head to smell the wind as they reached the crest of the ridge.

And Cenedi kept the creature under control so damned effortlessly. Cenedi stopped, signalled them with a wave of his hand, and Ilisidi put Babs up the ridge at a fair clip.

Nokhada took the diagonal course uphill, then, hellbent on regaining second place to Babs. Dammit! Bren thought, cutting the guards off in their climb; but he was afraid to pull on the rein, among the rocks and sliding gravel.

“Excuse me!” he called back over his shoulder. “Nadiin, it’s her idea!” That drew laughter from the guards, as Nokhada fell in at Babs’ tail.

Better than resentment, at least. There
was
a hierarchy among mecheiti, and Ilisidi and everyone in the party had known Nokhada was going to follow Babs, come hell or high water. They’d had their joke. He’d gained a cut lip and sore muscles, but he hadn’t fallen off and he’d been a fair sport about the joke—it was the way he’d learned to deal with Tabini’s court, at least, and the way he’d learned to deal with Tabini, early on.

One just didn’t back away from a challenge—and atevi
would
try a newcomer, if for nothing more than to determine his place in the order of things: they did it to anyone and they did it as a matter of course, on an instant’s judgment to find out a fool or a leader … neither of which he planned to be with them, not to threaten Ilisidi or Cenedi or any of them.

And after he had realized Ilisidi’s joke at his expense and let them know he saw it, then things were easier, then he could ride at Babs’ lazily switching tail and be easy about the position in which Ilisidi had set him, giving him a mecheita proper to a high-ranking visitor from Tabini’s own staff; he could quite well appreciate the humor in that, too—a mecheita that was going to give the unskilled visitor hell, especially if he thought he was going to adjust his position in line, or argue with Ilisidi.

Humiliate him? Ilisidi could do that with a flick of her riding crop. Follow a competition jumper in terrain like this? The paidhi-aiji would be extremely lucky if only his dignity fractured.

But he must have passed Ilisidi’s trial of him, since Cenedi had given him at least a fair sketch of left, right, go, and stop—enough knowledge to put a fool in trouble or keep a wiser man from outright folly—like that business on the exit from the gate, and the cliff, which now he was convinced must not have been so sheer as his immediate impression of it, or Nokhada more in command of her footing than she seemed. Dump the paidhi downslope? Yes. Lose a high-bred mecheita? The woman
who’d attacked a course official with her riding crop, over scratches?

He wasn’t wholly certain. The tea service had certainly been calculated to send some message; and he wasn’t wholly certain Ilisidi was innocent in the matter of the tea—although he would bet the severity of his reaction had left the dowager and Cenedi some little chagrined: a general atevi recklessness toward questions of life and death and
bihawa
, that aggressive impulse to test strangers, had betrayed them and left them somewhat at disadvantage: to that degree he suspected it was in fact an accident—a blemish on mutual dignity they had to repair.

Had to. And he couldn’t have accepted the breakfast invitation and then declined to come with Ilisidi on this ride. He’d read it right, let Banichi say what he would, he’d read it correctly.

And, having achieved something of a Place in the dowager’s party, he hoped hereafter simply to enjoy the sun and the mountain—the very height of the mountain, the world spread out below in a spectacular view.