IronStar (10 page)

Not as bad as it might have been
, she
reflected ruefully a few minutes later. After an initial gymnastics disaster (
how
was she supposed to know a saddle could slide sideways around a horse’s belly?
),
a few moments’ negotiations among the men, and a few mostly-carefully-hidden
sniggers, a resolution was reached for their, ok for
her
transportation
problem. Two of the lighter-looking men were now riding double, and Kirrah was
installed atop
(‘way, ‘way on top!)
one of their mounts, a mottled gray
and black beast, currently trotting obediently on its tether behind Prax’soua’s
mount.
Not as hard as I feared
, she thought, already adapting to the
chop and roll of the animal’s gait.
As long as I don’t have to
steer…
I am seriously not helm-qualified for this conveyance… how
do
they
manage it, no one seems to do anything, the horse just kind of …turns when they
want it to.
The three missing bowmen had rejoined them as they’d left the
village, materializing out of several of the small copses of trees dotting the
savanna around the village. They were now moving south and a little west,
making a comfortable twelve to fifteen kph according to her wristcomp.

Now that she had the leisure to make
detailed observations, the similarities and differences among her escort became
more apparent. All wore loose long-sleeved garments, apparently woven from the
same coarse but supple fiber as her borrowed cloak. Their mix of light tan and
green coloring had blended in very well when they stepped among the clumps of
trees, and camouflage seemed pointless for anything higher than twenty
centimeters on the open plains of
not-grass
. Unless you were a
forty-meter
tso’ckhai
, that is. All but two men had knee-length cloaks,
colored a dull tan outside and a green on the inside that was a passable match
to
not-grass
. Underneath the outer garments, Kirrah could see
laced-together leather panels that would probably protect their wearer from
those small vicious arrows. Metal-reinforced leather helmets and ankle-high
boots completed the basic …
uniform, I suppose
, thought Kirrah.

Five of the men were obviously
archers, their curved, meter-and-a-half bows slung over their shoulders and a
quiver of 65-centimeter long arrows slung across their lower backs. The other
four seemed to be swordsmen like Irshe, three of then carrying
ninety-centimeter blades on backslings, while the used-looking hilt of Irshe’s
weapon was visible at the top of a saddle sling. All wore armbands that looked
to be narrow green and orange ribbons twisted together. Prax’soua’s armband
trailed another ten centimeters of the orange ribbon, and Irshe’s bands had an
identical green trailer. Kirrah found herself storing these markings as rank
insignia.

At the same time these thoughts
were going through Kirrah’s mind, one Irshe shu’Kassua sho’Teescha, veteran of
three campaigns and third most senior
ro’tachk
in the Royal Border
Patrol, was pondering the strange woman following so cooperatively on trooper
Tar’akai’s mount. She was obviously a foreigner; those dark green eyes looked
quick and intelligent, yet she seemed unfamiliar with some basic aspects of
life in the Realm. Irshe had never seen armor like hers, either. It seemed
thickest around her throat, across her shoulders, and down her back, leaving
limbs, chest and belly dangerously exposed, in his professional opinion. Plus
that odd thick section around her left forearm… perhaps to block an overhand
swordstroke? The rest of her body was covered by gray cloth the same color as
the armor, and sprinkled with odd ropes and pouches that seemed woven in all
one piece. Ah well, it looked finely and purposefully made, and it was foolish
to judge without experience. Although the lack of a helmet, coupled with the
heavy bruise on her forehead - about two days old, Irshe’s practiced eye
estimated - suggested that it was not a perfect design. Perhaps she had lost
the helmet. He wondered also at the strange insignia on her shoulders, a pair
of stars connected by a jagged line, arching over some fierce winged beast,
with some unreadable script underneath. He was well traveled by most men’s
standards, but he recognized neither the symbols nor the script.

And that …thing, on her right hip –
how he itched to have a closer look, although it would be gross disrespect to
ask a warrior for her weapon. The young boy’s account of her killing a
tso’ckhai
with a single blow from it, seemed almost as incredible as the
tale of her surviving the embrace of an
irwua
nest. Yet she had wrestled
to raise it exactly as though it were a deadly sword, at that tense moment when
she first awoke. Her eyes had surprised him then… hunter’s eyes; even when
surrounded by his bowmen, no fear at all, just a predator’s alert, calculating
wariness. Something else for his lord to puzzle over.

His primary mission, however, was
no puzzle at all. The recovered crossbow bolts and bit of clothing left no
doubt, this was the second Wrth raid in three tendays. Their raiders were
getting bolder every midmoon. If the Realm did not respond firmly, the city of
Talameths’cha would be under siege by the beginning of summer.

The poor lad - his name was now
shu’Malafoth’
shuah
sho’Malamethsha’
shuah
– indicating his father
and village both dead. He was a brave one, though: he had already sung
Deathnaming for kin and neighbors. Irshe had felt moved to formally share the
boy’s
shuahsha
, his gift-of-ashes
,
with the ritual touch to both
their lips. Some things should not have to be borne alone, at that age. At any
age. He wondered what settlement Lord Tsano would assign for the lad. The
orphan of a village mayor would be a worthy addition to someone’s hearth.

Shortly after noon the party
stopped for a rest and to feed and water the horses at another of those
inviting, deadly ponds that dotted the savanna. Kirrah dismounted carefully
with some discreet help from Prax’soua, which earned him her appreciative smile
and eternal gratitude. She now had a whole new set of aches to go with
yesterday’s. Thighs, hands, calves and fanny, who would have suspected so many
muscle groups were involved in just
sitting
… She watched with interest
as two of the men unlimbered camp shovels and dug a shallow half-meter basin
near the pond’s edge. Water quickly percolated through the soil and filled the
depression, allowing the horses a safe drink. A second dug bowl slaked the
men’s thirst.
So that’s how it’s done
, she thought.
Silly me, to
forget my shovel.

After a cold lunch of cheese and
another of those excellent sweet crumbly cakes, the party prepared to mount up.
Kirrah was very glad she had reconnected her suit’s personal plumbing after her
foray into the forest that first morning. The men were discreet about stepping
into the bushes to relieve themselves, but with her ignorance she would probably
discover a new type of predator, simply by moving far enough from the party for
privacy. Besides, she rather enjoyed the odd looks she got by her bland
indifference to their chivalrous offers to look the other way.
It’s all part
of the Survey Service mystique,
she grinned inwardly:
we breathe
underwater, we shoot lightning, and we never, ever need to squat in the bushes.
Who needs to be able to ride double on a horse, anyway?
However, at some
point she would need to get out of the suit and wash, and let the suit cleanse
itself. It was already somewhat ripe, and it would eventually become unhealthy.
Not today though, and not tomorrow.
Aye, Sir, Sergeant Irshe, mounting up…
the rank seemed a good fit for their competent, pale leader with the cold,
steady gray eyes that missed nothing. She had known mid-ranked Survey officers
with poorer leadership skills, and warship’s crew with less fire discipline
than these men.

Kirrah wondered why the horses
traveled single file, changing leaders every few klicks, then she noticed each
horse tended to step into the footprints pressed down in the not-grass by the
leader. Good solution to walking in this stuff, she thought: travel in a line.
Even so, most of the men’s kits included wooden slats that reminded her of
narrow snowshoes - probably just the thing for conserving energy if you have to
walk on top of the wretched stuff.

By late afternoon she was clinging
grimly to the saddle and swaying dangerously, fatigue and accumulated stress
beginning to take their toll. Travelling south-southwest, they had crossed a
river at mid-morning. Apparently
irwua
did not infest moving water. The
party had splashed boldly across the dozen meters of shallow riverbed. Now the
same river had swung south, converging on their path again from their right,
and on their left the increasingly frequent clumps of trees had merged into
another forest. When she almost tumbled from the saddle for a third time, Irshe
called a halt. With the sun still well above the horizon, they made camp by the
side of the river.

Kirrah made it through dinner
without actually nodding off into her hot stew, but clearly was headed for
unconsciousness by sunset. She felt useless, irritable, and desperate for a hot
bath. With her last reserves of wit, she considered the risks of sleeping among
this band. After all, they’d had plenty of opportunity to shoot at her if they
intended her harm: as far as they knew, she was unarmored and vulnerable to
their weapons. The men had been nothing but courteous following the initial
standoff. More significantly, Akaray seemed to trust them implicitly. He was
currently brushing down one of the horses under the casually watchful eye of
Irshe, whom the boy seemed ready to worship.

In the end she worked out a
compromise. While the idea of closing her helmet and setting her suit to
hullmetal rigidity had a certain paranoid appeal, it also said as loudly as
possible to her hosts, ‘I don’t trust you’. As well, it would reveal resources
she would rather hold in reserve. Instead she configured the wristcomp’s audio
and infrared sensors to alert her silently if anything approached closer than
three meters. A few steps from the circle of men around the campfire, Kirrah
settled down on a patch of the resilient not-grass - it made a much better
mattress than walking surface, she decided. She rolled her cloak into a pillow
and was asleep in seconds. Her alarm woke her once, well after nightfall, as
Akaray crept up. He nestled into her arms and curled up with his back pressed
against her belly, his head under her chin. She laid one arm protectively over
him, and they both slept.

Irshe gazed thoughtfully at the
strange pair.
What sort of gift was he bringing to his lord, to the people
of his city, into the heart of the Realm? Look at her sleeping there, as unguarded
as though she were safe in a bedchamber within the city’s walls
. She seemed
at times almost childlike, more lost than Akaray. Yet recalling the look of her
eyes that morning, he could almost imagine her the heroine of the boy’s wild
tales. Like smoke around her, everything about her was the scent of
foreign
,
no, not quite foreign… of
unknown
, of strengths under the surface.
Like
the tiny ripples on an irwua pond
, the thought crossed his mind.
The lad
trusts her
, he answered. Time to check the sentries.

“Any sufficiently advanced
technology is indistinguishable from magic” – A.C.Clarke, 20
^th
century A.D. author and visionary; Terra

Kirrah awoke with the camp, about
dawn.
At least no big hairy legs in view today
, she thought with relief,
unless you counted Corporal Prax’soua on his way to fetch water from the
stream…
After a few experiments, she concluded her wristcomp’s data base
was not really up to a conversation yet. But, she decided, it would be worth
testing the men’s reaction to a talking machine, before they got to wherever
they were going. At some point she was going to have to be introduced to
whoever ran this region.
You don’t know it yet, but you are one lucky ruler,
she thought. Wherever her Regnum’s government established its native
contact embassy, the local government seemed to find its economy greatly
stimulated relative to its neighbors, with consequential benefits to its tax
base and, by almost universal extension, to its ruler’s fortunes.

The Regnum’s two hundred years of
explorations in this general direction of space had found about a hundred
‘hablets’ - habitable worlds - so far, including eight of the so-called
‘manhome’ worlds with a pre-existing human presence (
nine, make that
nine
now!
). The discovery of a new human presence was always a great delight to
the anthropologists, paleontologists and other scholars who loved arguing over
how the so-called “lost colonies” had come to be, and debating why no trace of
human habitation older than about eleven thousand years had ever been found on
any of them.

Such discoveries, on the other
hand, tended to annoy the Mercantiles - the large mining, terraforming, and
colonizing interests that competed to develop valuable new and
unoccupied
hablets.
The original policy of strict non-interference with these human cultures, never
very popular, had crumbled with the public posting of 3V clips smuggled from
the world later called Gomorrah, showing humans raising other humans as meat
animals. Official posture was now to welcome these colonies as long-lost
younger siblings, and to provide carefully monitored support and assistance to
bring them into mainstream Regnum civilization at their own pace. Such a world
belonged to its human inhabitants, but the preservation of ‘unique cultures and
traditional practices’ was now considered less virtuous than bringing the
benefits of modern education, medicine and, ahem, ‘culinary discrimination’.
With human civilizations ranging from late-Paleolithic to early steam age
available for study, Regnum anthropologists had seen hundreds of different
nations, city-states, tribes, and styles of government from barbarian to feudal
to communal, but one thing they all had in common was taxes.
Two things
,
she revised, thinking of Akaray’s village.