Poul Anderson: A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows

“She was born on the planet Dennitza, Zoria III in the Taurian Sector. [A string of numbers] Her family is well placed, father being a district administrator. [Why no mention of the fact Mother was a sister of Bodin Miyatovich, Gospodar and sector governor? O Uncle, Uncle … ] As is the rule there, she received military training and served a hitch in the armed forces. She has a degree in xenology. Having done field work on planets near home, several months ago she went to Diomedes [a string of numbers]—quite remote, her research merely a disguise. Most of the report on her has not been made available to us; and as said, she herself is confused and largely amnesiac about this period. Her main purpose was to help instigate a revolt. Before much harm was done, she was detected, arrested, interrogated, and sentenced by court-martial. There being little demand for slaves in that region, and a courier ship returning directly to Terra, she was brought along.

“We rate her unlikely to be dangerous, given the usual precautions, and attractive both physically and personally—”

The camera projected back the holograms it had taken, for its operator’s inspection, and Kossara looked upon her image. She saw a big young woman, 177 centimeters tall, a bit small in the bosom but robust in shoulders, hips, and long free-striding legs, skin ivory-clear save for a few freckles and the remnant of a tan. The face was wide, high in the cheekbones, snub in the nose, full in the mouth, strong in chin and jawline. Large blue-green eyes stood well apart beneath dark brows and reddish-brown bangs; that hair was cropped below the ears in the manner of both sexes on Dennitza. When she spoke, her voice was husky.

“—will be sullen unless drugged, but given the right training and conditions, ought to develop a high sexual capacity. A private owner may find that kindness will in due course make her loyal and responsive—”

Kossara slipped dreamily away from the words, the room, Terra … the whole way home. To Mihail? No, she couldn’t quite raise him from the dust between the stars—even now, she dared not. But, oh, just a few years ago, she and Trohdwyr …

{She had a vacation from her studies at the Shkola plus a furlough from her ground defense unit in the Narodna Voyska. Ordinarily she would have spent as much of this time as he could spare with her betrothed. But a space force had been detected within a few light-years of the Zorian System which might intend action on behalf of some other claimant to the Imperium than Hans Molitor whom the Gospodar supported, or might use such partisanship as an excuse for brigandage. Therefore Bodin Miyatovich led some of the Dennitzan fleet out to warn off the strangers, and if necessary fight them off. Mihail Svetich, engineer on a Meteor-class torpedo craft, had kissed Kossara farewell.

Rather than fret idle in Zorkagrad, she flitted to her parents’ home. Danilo Vymezal, voivode of the Dubina Dolyina, was head of council, chief magistrate, and military commander throughout a majestic country at the northern rim of the Kazan. Soon after she reached the estate, Kossara said she wished for a long hunt. Her father regarded her for a moment before he nodded. “That will do you good,” he said. “Who would you like for a partner? Trohdwyr?”

She had unthinkingly supposed she would go alone. But of course he was right; only fools went by themselves so far into wilderness that no radio relay could pass on a distress call from a pocket transceiver. The old zmay was welcome company, not least because he knew when to be silent.

They took an aircar to a meadow on the unpeopled western slope and set forth afoot. The days and nights, the leagues and heights, wind, rain, sun, struggle, and sleep were elixir. More than once she had a clear shot at a soaring orlik or a bull yelen poised on a crag, and forbore; those wings or those horns were too splendid across the sky. But at last it was sweet fire in the blood to stand before a charging dyavo, feel the rifle surge back against her shoulder, see fangs and claws fall down within a meter of her.

Trohdwyr reproved: “You were reckless, Dama.”

“He came at me from his den,” Kossara retorted.

“After you saw the entrance and took care to make much noise in the bushes. Deny it not. I have known you longer than your own memory runs. You learned to walk by clinging to my tail for safety. If I lose you now, your father will dismiss me from his service, and where then shall a poor lorn dodderer go? Back to his birth village to become a fisher again, after these many years? Have mercy, Dama.”

She chuckled. They set about making camp. This was high in the bowl of the Kazan, where that huge crater bit an arc from the Vysochina. The view could not have been imagined by anyone who had not seen it, save God before He willed it.

Though treeless, the site bore a dense purple sward of mahovina, springy underfoot and spicy to smell, studded by white and gold wildflowers; and a nearby canebrake rustled in the breeze. Eastward the ringwall sloped down to timberline. Beyond, yellow beams of evening fell on a bluish mistiness of forest, as far as sight could reach, cloven by a river which gleamed like a drawn blade. Westward, not far hence, the rim stood shadowy-sharp athwart rough Vysochina hills. Behind them the snowpeaks of the Planina Byelogorski lifted sungold whiteness into an absolute azure. The purity of sky was not marred by a remote northward thread of smoke from Vulkana Zemlya.

The air grew cold soon after the sun went behind the mountains, cold as the brook which bubbled iron-tasting from a cleft in the crater’s lip. Kossara hunched into her jacket, squatted down, held palms forth to the fire. Her breath drifted white through the dusk that rose from the lowlands.

Before he put their meat on a spit above coals and dancing flamelets, Trohdwyr drew a sign and spoke a few words of Eriau. Kossara knew them well: “Aferdhi of the Deeps, Blyn of the Winds, Haawan who lairs on the reefs, by this be held afar and trouble us not in our rest.” Hundreds of kilometers and a long lifetime from the Black Ocean, he remained an old-fashioned pagan ychan. Early in her teens, eager in her faith, Kossara had learned it was no use trying to make an Orthochristian of him.

Surely the Pantocrator didn’t mind much, and would receive his dear battered soul into Heaven at the last.

She had never thought of him as a zmay. Not that the word had any particularly bad overtones. Maybe once it had been a touch contemptuous, four hundred years ago when the first immigrants arrived from Merseia; but later it came to mean simply a Dennitzan of such ancestry. (Did the growth of their original planet into a frightening rival of Terra have anything to do with that?) However, from him and his family she had learned Eriau—rather, the archaic and mutated version they spoke—at the same time as she was learning Serbic from her parents and Anglic from a governess. When finally prevailed upon to stop scrambling these three into a private patois, she kept the habit of referring to Trohdwyr’s people by their own name for themselves, “ychani”: “seekers.”

For he had been close to the center of her child-universe. Father and Mother were at its very heart, naturally, and so for a while were a doll named Lutka, worn into shapelessness, and a cat she called Butterfeet. Uncle Bodin approached them when he and Aunt Draga visited, or the Vymezals went to Zorkagrad and he took her to the zoo and the merrypark. Three younger siblings, two brothers and a sister, orbited like comets, now radiant with love, now off into outer darkness. Trohdwyr never shone quite as brightly as any of these; but the chief gamekeeper to three generations of her house moved in an unchangeable path, always there for her to reach when she needed him.