Роберт Бюттнер - Orphan's Journey

Bassin blinked, but kept his eyes on me. “The church taught the shunning of seafood. When the plague had run its course, the shunning stopped, except among the most religious. Historians date the split of the Clan stocks from that time. The cultures diverged for five hundred years. The flight of the Tassini and Casuni to the Highlands, the Hejus, came three hundred years later. The Clans have been at war since.”

Bassin’s royal ancestors weren’t Abe Lincoln. They preserved slavery, but failed to preserve the union.

I said, “Your grandmothers tolerated religious bigotry. They allowed your society to fragment into perpetual civil war. They made bad decisions.”

Bassin smiled. “I can not improve my grandmothers’ decisions. I hope to improve their grandson’s.”

A steward appeared, and Bassin circled a finger at our plates, then stood. “It is customary to take mead on deck between courses.”

On deck five minutes later, Bassin, Ord, Howard, and I sipped sweet wine in the twilight, and watched a Master Harpooner teach Jude how to throw a barbed iron, with a bulb that could be loaded with explosives at its tip, into a round, yellow target the size of a kraken eye.

I asked Bassin, “Can a harpooner kill a rhind?”

“Sailors believe they can harpoon everything, after a few cups.” He raised his glass, and smiled. “But they also say ‘I don’t have to outsail the rhind. I just have to outsail the other boat.’”

“Well thrown!” The harpooner clapped Jude on the shoulder, and stared at an iron quivering in the yellow target’s center. The harpooner turned to Bassin. “It’s in this one’s blood, Sir!”

Bassin stared toward the sunset. “Jude’s father died a hero?”

“His father saved our world. Jude drags around big expectations.”

“I understand. Blood chose me, too.”

I stared at the sun as it set in the west, and smelled the continent on the breeze. Somewhere on that landmass were Casus and the Headmen of the Tassini, who had to be persuaded to join forces after centuries of Blood Feud. And that would be the easy part of a job I hadn’t even applied for.

Blood had chosen Bassin. Maybe blood was choosing Jude. Whatever had chosen me for command, I had my work cut out for me.

The steward climbed out of the hatchway and tapped a gong with a feathered mallet, to announce the next course.

Bassin stood aside, bowed a notch from the waist, and extended his palm toward the hatchway. “After you, Commander.”

I nodded, and stepped ahead of the man who would become king.

The next morning we reached Marinus. In the days since we had passed through the city, word of the massacre had spread downriver to the city.

The Royal Barge, which drew crowds even in normal times, could barely pull alongside a stone quay without crushing the skiffs — and the river boats rowed by slaves — that bobbed in the estuary. The bank itself was so choked with pedestrians that the crowd forced a dozen people off the quay and into the water. A few people hurled rocks and garbage at the Barge.

I pulled Bassin back from the Barge rail, and said to him, “I thought everybody here was used to war.”

He shook his head. “The perpetual relation of the Clans, one to another, is war. But, at least during my lifetime, war has been waged in the form of uncivil talk punctuated by cross-border raids, not genocide. Few people in any of the Clans had no relative at the Fair.”

Most of the dockside people didn’t realize we had come from the sea, not upriver, and they screamed for news of the missing. A crying woman held up a framed oil portrait of a man in a magenta striped tunic. I had seen a magenta tunic like it thrown on a burning pyre as we left the Fair. Many waved newspapers that looked to have printed front-page casualty lists.

The first great terrorist attack of the turn of this century, and the first reactive wars that followed it, had shocked America. Seven thousand Americans dead from a population of three hundred million. No one would ever know the toll at the great Fair and in the battle that followed, but the Queen’s Secretary estimated a hundred thousand dead from a population of ten million, just among the Marini. The wonder was that this shock hadn’t collapsed Marinus into its own foundations.

We dropped off Ord and a ’Bot loaded with all the Earth hardware we thought the armorers of Marinus might be able to copy. The Minister of Armaments was supposed to meet us with his carriage, but it took a half hour for Marini infantry to clear a path through the crowds to the quay. It took ten minutes more to convince the Minister’s coachman that the ’Bot wouldn’t run away if he didn’t tether it to the back of the carriage.

A half hour further upriver the Minister of Natures met Howard and Jude at the University’s quay and hauled them off to the Great Library of Marin, where Howard would download anything we could use into his ’Puter, and would arrange for a meeting among the Clans, if we could form an alliance.

At every settlement upriver, the crowds lined the banks, but the closer we got to the headwaters of the Marin, the quieter they became. I suppose it was the black smoke from the pyres that drifted above them on the wind. That and the smell of burned flesh.

The Royal Barge’s Master didn’t care much for taking the Barge up the great Locks, even though his future king had designed them. With the Marini fleet sunk like the Spanish Armada, other large vessels were scarce, and the down lock had to be loaded with rocks for counterbalance. Bassin himself did the math with a little abacus made of shell and bone. But Bassin knew his business, and the trip was uneventful. Even the Howlers seemed subdued.

We anchored at the Pillars after sunset, though the Red Moon already hung overhead and lit the skeletal carcasses of the Marini fleet all around us. Bassin and I stood at the rail, looking out at the ash heap. Jeeb perched alongside me.

Bassin said, “You know, I’m not afraid to accompany you.”

I glanced down at his trouser leg, which covered the prosthetic reminder the slavers had given him. “Bassin afraid” was an oxymoron.

I said, “I know.”

“Our intelligence stopped trying to infiltrate patrols into the Casuni lands decades ago. The Casuni are excellent trackers, and they shoot first. I had to go in alone, myself, and act the part of an addled Tassini.”

“You had to go, yourself?” I rolled my eyes.

“The Stone Trade is literally life to us. Our picture of the Trade was decades out of date. Our agents went in, but none ever came out.”

“Maybe somebody had to go. Did you just want to get out of the Palace, so you could personally whack some slavers?”

He rubbed his eye patch. “That aspect ended badly. Mother complains that I delegate poorly.”

I rubbed the plate in my own thigh. “Ord says I do, too.”

Bassin stared into the water, sighed, then clapped his palms on the rail. “So. That is why I delegated to you the job of Allied Commander.”

We had had this conversation before.

The first thing an Allied Commander needs is allies to command. Half of Bren’s human combat power resided with the Casuni and the Tassini. So the first thing I had asked Bassin to do was have his diplomats propose an alliance, maybe by a note in the diplomatic pouch to the embassy in the Casuni and Tassini capital cities. I knew about such stuff. Back home, Ord and I once diplomatic-pouched a copy of a captured parliamentary resolution back to the U.S. Spooks.

However, the Casuni and the Tassini were nomads. They had no diplomatic pouches. They also had no diplomats, no embassies, no capital cities, and no parliaments.

A delegation would have to track down and persuade Casus, and also the Council of Headmen of the Hundred Encampments of the Tassini.