Indomitus Oriens (The Fovean Chronicles) (20 page)

             
“So, the dress—”

             
Shela shook her head, stroked Melissa’s cheek, looked at her. “Oh, it’s not the dress,” she said. “He messed that up. He spent all this money, all this time, gets the dress, forgets the shoes. Thinks I am going to wear boots with a dress like that.”

             
Melissa still felt pretty shocked at all of this, but she couldn’t help but giggle. So typical of a man to forget the shoes.

             
“He put me right in my place that night,” Shela said. “I never forgot that, not ever. When you are a slave, your Master can sell you, he can beat you, he can kill you if he wants to. You are nothing.

             
“Your man,” she said, and her voice was breathless, “he goes out of his way to plan something like that, takes the time to learn your ways, put you in your place. You know you
have
a place, with him, in his heart. He thought I died once, you know what he did?”

             
Melissa shook her head.

             
“He charged his stallion alone into a Conflu army,” she said. She said some word, then “warriors.”

             
“How many?”

             
She sighed and she held up her fingers, and said some word that she didn’t know.

             
Melissa shook her head. “In English?” she said.

             
Shela thought for a moment, then said, “You know, ten?”

             
“Yes.”

             
“And ten ten is hundred?”

             
“Yes.”

             
“Ten, ten, ten, ten men.”

             
“Ten thousand?” Melissa gasped in English. “He charged ten
thousand
men?”

             
“He charged them,” she continued in English, “he go through them, he come out dey udder side, and find me, and he cry.”

             
“No!”

             
“Two weeks, he not leave me,” she said, still in English. “I sleeping, he not care. Anudder army coming, he not care. I wake up, he dey first thing I see, and den he cry for me again.”

             
“Wow.”

             
“Battle of Tamaran Glen,” she said. “No one not know dat story.”

             
“Really?”

             
“Uh, huh,” she said. “Very important battle. I pregnant with Lee.”

             
“You were pregnant?”

             
Shela nodded. “When he get his hands on me, when I all better, whoo! He took a belt to me!”

             
“While pregnant?”

             
“Not hit dey stomach, hit dey butt, dey legs. Hurt so bad, I back in bed two days.”

             
Feminist bile rose in Melissa’s throat. What kind of man was this? He’d throw himself into an impossible battle to die at her side and then, surviving it, he beats her.

             
“So, he hits you, and that’s love for you,” she said, slowly, looking for the Empress’ reaction.

             
“Oh, don’t be stupid,” Shela said, with a wave of her hand. “You sound like Uman-Chi now.”

             
“No, I just don’t get it,” Melissa said. “And I want to, Shela. I want to understand.”

             
She turned and faced Melissa directly, looked right into her eyes. “He loves me,” she said, still in English. “He know he does, I know he does. You know, that not good enough. Keep a flower in a chest, flower dies, yes?”

             
“Yes,” Melissa said. That she got.

             
“We in the stable, he try to show me that he know me, he know my ways, he know what I like, to give gift to me, express it,” Shela said.

             
“Yes,” Melissa said. “I see that.”

             
“I smart mouth, he hit me, he tell me I have to be good slave. He show I can’t push him, can’t disobey him,” she said. “He show, he strong. Strong for
me
. He not strong because he hit, he hit because he strong, good man. He know I Andaran woman. Andaran men, love dey horse, beat dey wife, yes?”

             
“What?”

             
She sighed, Melissa sighed. They didn’t share enough common language to get this.

             
“You man, he tell you what to do?”

             
“Yes,” she said. She took her lead from Bill. It didn’t make her a slave, if that was what she was getting at.

             
“You talk back, smart mouth?” Shela asked her.

             
“No,” she said. “He loves me, respects me, Bill is—”

             
Bam! She got it.

             
She looked into Shela’s eyes.

             
“It is the thought that counts,” she said. “It isn’t the beating, it is that you can make him so mad, he hits you, not because he hates you, but because he couldn’t stand it if you did the things that would ruin what you have.”

             
“Yes!” Shela said, smiling and exciting.

             
“Because if he didn’t love you, he wouldn’t care what you did,” Melissa said.

             
Melissa chewed on that, then looked at Shela.

             
“We chase that around,” she said. “And how many of us even know it?”

             
“It funny what people don’t know,” Shela said.

             
“Well, what people don’t think,” Melissa said. “You can lead them to it, but they have to get over the threshold on their own.”

             
“What you mean?” Shela asked her.

             
“You know,” Melissa said. She shivered. The furs didn’t keep her warm any more. “You hear the words, you see it, but you can still not get it. You have to work it out for yourself. You have to think it.

             
“The most powerful thing that there is, is a thought.”

             
Shela’s eyes widened, and she took Melissa by the shoulders. She looked her in the eyes, then she gave her a hug.

             
“I knew it!” Shela told her.

Chapter Eleven:

              Glorious Rome

On the 6
th
day of the month of Weather,
The Bitch of Eldador
pulled quietly and safely back into Galnesh Eldador.

Glynn stood at the bow, wrapped in animal furs. The cold stung the end of her nose and the salty spray tugged at her green hair, pulling it back from her shoulders.
The pain of exposure to the cold air made her eyes tear, but her training made her no stranger to pain.

They’d made her the baroness of a strip of rock, over hopeless peasants, in a land of inferiors that her nation hated.
A far fall for the most promising enchantress in the history of the Uman-Chi, and a high price to sing one song.

The indignity almost exceeded suffering.
Did it not play so readily into her hands, she might find it impossible to abide.

She sighed, her breath a cloud that blew past her.
She had endured the pathetic ramblings of the Conqueror with all of the dignity and self-discipline that befit her people. She had listened to him pontificate on irrelevant stories of his conquests and the glory of Eldador. Behind it all, the thin veil of a threat: the knowledge that he would dispatch her if time proved her song could not be undone. She would be kept within reach until he decided whether or not she must die.

She would not be done in so easily!
She was Uman-Chi. She was superior.

The smell of the docks came familiar to her.
Slops and rot and things discarded into the waves, the pollution she associated with the race of Men. At least it seemed not so overpowering here as in a Volkhydran city. The Emperor saw the importance of discouraging the rats that made a filthy wharf their home. Still, by her own standards, the long wharves of Eldador ranked barely above a pigsty.

Her former charges, Melsa and Bill, approached her from behind.
She ignored them, watching as barefooted sailors scurried across the decks, hurling lines to their counterparts on the docks, reefing sails and polling the gigantic
Bitch
into her mooring, outmost from the rest of the fleet, readiest to make way.

The tremendous leap in logic that had taken the Emperor from lateen rigged ships of half the size to these hulking, menacing battleships, sporting square sails and copper sides, spouting flame and carrying three times the cargo at half again the speed of Trenboni Tech Ships, stunned her.
Twelve years had passed since the day when the Eldadorian fleet had engaged the Trenboni at the Battle of the Deceptions, a fight for control of the Straights that separated Tren Bay from the ocean beyond. Even had Eldadorian Fire not devoured a third of the Trenboni ships present in the first minutes of the battle, Angron’s best admirals admitted they would have lost. Eldadorian ships ran faster, meaner, better armed and stayed more resilient. They reduced the Trenboni to tinder in the waves.

This very ship had been there.
The
Bitch
could be considered a blooded veteran.

“We go to Eldador now?” Melsa asked her in broken Uman.

She regarded the female down the length of her nose. What a painfully limited capacity to reason.

“Yes,” she said, and smiled to reassure her.
“Lupus will take care of you, I’m sure. He won’t hurt you if you do what he says.”

“You believe that?” Melsa asked her, looking into her eyes.

Of course I don’t believe it, any more than you do
, Glynn felt like saying. She just smiled and turned away, watching the sailors.

She had her own uses for these Men, after all.

* * *

Melissa turned back from Glynn to Bill and shrugged.

“She says we’ll be fine,” she said.

Bill grinned a wry grin.
“Kind of hard to believe,” he said.

Melissa nodded, and turned back to the port herself, pressing her body next to his, feeling his arm come around her shoulder.

She saw a tremendous city. Long, wooden docks pushed out into the Bay. They led into a market place of some kind, Men and Uman and even some Scitai like Xinto and Karel running between the ships to stalls, and from the stalls to the city gates, more than one hundred feet tall and imposing, framed by two towers in the city wall, half again as high.

Eldador sat on a plain framed by rolling hills.
On one of these, facing out to the sea, she made out a monument of some kind, too far away to see clearly. The palace seemed to be central to the city. Its walls rose higher, probably because it had been built on one of those hills, although she couldn’t tell for sure. Pennons snapped from her towers in the cold air. Shela had explained to her earlier that they were mostly decorative—not like in Trenbon where they marked the noble houses that were responsible for those parts of the city.

The smell coming off the place was bad, but she had been to Philadelphia and it smelled worse.
She didn’t know a lot about sailing but she had lived in Portland and been down to the Long Wharf. You couldn’t escape some odors.

When the sailors made the ship fast to its mooring, Lupus and his wife climbed up on deck and watched their Wolf Soldier guard assemble smartly to escort them from here.
A crowd of about twenty already waited for them on the wooden dock.

“You will come with us,” Lupus informed the three of them in Uman,
“and live in the palace with me. There is a lot to discuss.”

He sounded stilted
—trying to use words he knew they knew. Already she found herself thinking in Uman. Bill had picked up the language as well. They practiced with Xinto and Shela and occasionally with Wolf Soldiers when they could find one who felt like talking.

That rarely happened.
They acted dour and mean. Their eyes stayed flat when they spoke and they looked at nothing, as if they considered some great injustice as they spoke. She’d been surprised to find out that they included men and women—with no differentiation between the sexes. She thought of Lupus as a sexist, and his being so cosmopolitan with his army surprised her.

She roused herself from day dreaming when Bill nudged her toward the ramp extending from the ship to the dock.
Lupus and Shela and Glynn had already crossed it. She followed them, Bill behind her with a hand on her waist, being careful not to slip on its slick surface into the unforgiving water.

Below her, in the cold water, something swam quickly past.
It moved like a snake, like a giant ‘s’ in the waves, but beneath them rather than on the surface. It looked up at her once with serpentine eyes, then it disappeared. There and not there in a moment.

“How do you like my
Bitch
,” Shela asked her in Uman, sidling up against her and smiling just as soon as she had achieved the relative safety of the dock.

“Your…?”

She laughed. “Yonega Waya named her after me, the flagship of the fleet.”

She raised her eyebrows in surprise, part of her mind still focused on the thing she’d seen in the water.
She couldn’t help but look for him; courtiers talking rapidly in Uman and the language of Men surrounded Lupus. Bill stood uncomfortably on the outside of the group, Glynn next to him, ignoring them all.

“He calls you that?”

Shela shook her head. “No, when I saved him from the Bounty Hunter in Eldador, they called me ‘The Bitch of Eldador,’ they were so mad at me. Very soon that was my nickname. Lupus threw that back at them, showed them what it means to disrespect me.”

Melissa nodded.
The way Shela thought made sense to her now. People insulted her and, rather than take it to heart, she would have them face that insult in the form of the flagship of the fleet. She and Lupus told the world, “Call us what you will—we revel in it.”

That seemed like both of them.

She followed the group down the wet wooden dock to the marketplace. First a squad of Wolf Soldiers, then Lupus and his courtiers, one of them a Wolf Soldier himself, then Bill, Glynn, herself and Shela, then Karel of Stone and Xinto with his hands tied behind his back, surrounded by Wolf Soldiers, then the rest of the Wolf Soldier guard, in order by their squads again, as she had seen them in the palace in Outpost IX.

“Where we go?” she asked Shela.

Shela’s eyes almost glowed. She took in everything, the people, the smells, the sounds, the approaching city. She looked truly happy to be home, probably because she missed her babies, maybe for other reasons as well.

“My home, the palace,” she said.
“You will like it. I’m going to get you a good horse and take you for a ride, and show you the most powerful city in Fovea.”

She nodded.
She wondered if Shela also rode a side-saddle. It seemed to her an Empress would have to look a certain way, but Shela didn’t seem the side-saddle kind.

“We walk now?” she asked.

Shela nodded. “Market is too close for the horses. It’s easier to walk. And he likes to walk. ‘Walk and talk,’ he says, all the time.”

Melissa just smiled.

The smell increased as she approached the city. Now she saw what looked like crude dumpsters overflowing with garbage, and all manner of things ending up in the waves. She looked to Shela, who suddenly started frowning.

“Meker,” she said, and Melissa could hear the anger in her voice.

“M’lady,” one of the Wolf Soldiers ran up from the ranks. He was an Uman, solid built, hair cut close to the scalp. He didn’t bow, but he put his fist over his heart as she addressed him.

“The harbor master is letting the garbage overflow again,” she said.

“I noticed that myself, m’lady,” the Uman said. He was almost conversational with her. Melissa wondered if she knew him personally. After all, she knew his name.

“Take your squad to the harbor master’s office, and let him know it is his last day,” she said.
“I think he has an assistant who has a year or two experience. Tell him this is his chance to impress me.”

He lowered his head deferentially, then turned on his heel and called up his squad.
They stepped to the side of the Imperial procession and marched double-time down the docks.

Lupus saw them and turned around.

“Something?” he asked in Uman.

“Firing the harbor master,” she answered.

Lupus looked around him, then took a whiff, and smiled. “Just firing him, right?”

She grinned back.
“He let the garbage overflow, he didn’t kill anyone,” she said.

“Yeah, I smell it,” he said.

“I did as well,” Glynn added, also in Uman. “I was hoping it wasn’t the norm.”

“Perhaps you want to be the new harbor mistress,” Lupus asked her.
He stopped, the rest of the entourage stumbling to a halt.

Glynn regarded him.
Her eyes may have moved, but you couldn’t tell looking at her. Her mouth was set in a thin line and she kept her back straight and proud.

“No, your Imperial Majesty,” she said, “I do not wish it at all.”

“Then you can keep your Uman-Chi attitude in check,” Lupus said. You could tell exactly where his eyes focused, and their intensity made Melissa glad they didn’t fall on her.

“I meant no offense,” she said, and lowered her head.

“You meant not to be called on it, you mean,” Lupus challenged her. He didn’t move off of this point, as Melissa would have expected. He surprised her by becoming so angry so fast.

“I have no tolerance for it, Glynn Escaroth,” he said.
“Ancenon and D’gattis and even Aniquen came here, and they showed their manners. I will have you in a peasant dress scrubbing those dumpsters you smell, if I need to in order to keep yours.”

“I humbly beg your forgiveness, your Imperial Majesty,” she said, her head still down.
Melissa heard no trace of fear in her voice, but she didn’t speak Uman well and the inflection might have been lost on her.

Without another word, Lupus turned on his heel and returned to talking to his courtiers, as if none of this had happened.
The entourage scuttled up to keep pace.

“He do that all dey time,” Shela said to Melissa in English.

“What?”

“He go from dey pissed off to dey happy,” she said.
“I know him, and I never unnerstan’ that. He be so mad, and den it like he blow out dey candle.”

“Quick to anger, quick to mend,” Melissa said.

“What dat mean?”

“Something my grandmother used to say,” Melissa said.
“Men who are quick to be so angry are as quick to get over it.”

“So dis like dey men from Conn eckky cut,” she said.

Melissa smiled. “Well,” she said, “it is like a few of them.”

Shela nodded.

The market place at the landward end of the wharf consisted of a huge maze of stalls and tables, with hawkers selling wares of all sorts. She saw different foods, different types of cloth and skins. They saw weapons and wines, animals and ales, whatever came into her head, she didn’t have to look too long before she saw it.