Warring States Read online

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  Chapter Twelve

  Home is the hunter

  In the depot master’s office, Andrej had heard the Emandisan officer speak with increasing distress; and now as he stood on the landing field at Jeltaria his feelings of foreboding deepened into an anguished conviction that everything was to go wrong. Horribly wrong. Irreversibly wrong. Stoshi could have warned him; Stoshi had said nothing. Two could have tipped him off; had she actually tried to do so? Hadn’t she told him that transport was arranged, and that he would be met?

  Fool that he was, he had taken her to mean that there would be someone to make local arrangements. A guide. Someone who had contacted the family on his behalf and negotiated a meeting, someone who could tell him about Joslire’s family and how things were and what he could expect. He’d been mistaken.

  There was a welcoming party waiting for them, maidens with flowers, a cavalcade of ground-transport cars; and people. Well, people in the welcoming committee, yes, obviously enough; but people waiting for him as well, six people of them, waiting on a large golden carpet of beaten reed-fiber — local handicrafts. Pots of flowering plants.

  Chairs, and attendants, and Andrej hadn’t known what he was going to say to Joslire’s people in the first place and could not call to mind even a single one of the ideas he might have had, under the stress of being so suddenly confronted by aged women of Joslire’s family. They had to be. They could not be anybody else.

  In the overcast hush of the waiting launch-field Andrej stepped down the loading ramp to take his place in the Security formation. Something caught his eye as he came forward; a twitch of a finger. Lek Kerenko. Finger-code, the milk-maid’s daughter. Lek had been with him on Azanry, at the Matredonat, when he had outraged propriety and astonished his Marana by marrying her. It was a good point. A man capable of so brazen an act as he had committed at that time, and in that place, had no right to feel nervous just because a private pilgrimage had turned into a media event.

  Stildyne marched them all across the thermal sheathing that blanketed the launch-field’s surface; it wasn’t a standard formation by any means — that would be six, and they were eight — but his gentlemen rose to the unusual occasion like the superlative soldiers that they were. There was a young officer waiting for them just short of the room-sized reed-mat; Andrej couldn’t decipher her rank, but she made her function explicit at once.

  “Your Excellency.” Something seemed odd about her accent; Andrej realized that it was the fact that she didn’t seem to have one, not that his ear could detect. Her Standard was flawless. “A very great honor, sir. If I might translate for his Excellency. My name is Piross, and I’m to make introductions, at his Excellency’s will and good pleasure.”

  Security spread out with solemnly measured tread and posted themselves along the near edge of the reed mat and its sides, facing out. Facing away. Making the room defined by the reed-mat a private space. There was no breath of wind; the air was as still as though there was no such thing as a wind in Jeltaria, and the clouds were gray and thick and heavy with rain. They would not let the women of Joslire’s family sit in the open in the rain, surely?

  “My Intelligence officer said that I would meet with his surviving relatives,” Andrej said to Piross. “If one of them is Joslire’s mother I have not been warned, and fear an embarrassment. It is a terrible thing in my home-world to come face to face with a man’s mother, and not demonstrate appropriate respect.”

  Piross nodded sharply, as if acknowledging an instruction. Covering for his confusion, Andrej thought, gratefully. “His mother’s sister, your Excellency, and his father’s mother. His eldest sister. The son of another of his mother’s sisters, the son of one of his father’s brothers, and the wife of his surviving brother, with her firstborn child.”

  The Emandisan officer at the depot had said Joslire’s brother was not there. It was so strange to look at these people and see Joslire in their faces.

  “What am I to do?” They were looking at him, those old women, hawk-eyed and merciless. Where did you come from. Why are you here. What business can you have, you too-pale man, why are we troubled with your presence?

  “You give her the knife and show her your hand. She may prick your hand. She will give you back the knife. Then we’ll all go to the orchard, and they’ll open the gate for you.”

  Knife, what knife? Which knife? Of course he had brought them. They were Joslire’s. “But which is the right one?” he asked in a low voice, trying to control his panic. That knife, perhaps. Of course it would be that knife. It could be no other, the one that he wore between his shoulderblades when he wore it at all, the one that he tended to wear even when he did not feel the need to go fully armed to a staff meeting. He didn’t wait for her reply. He had enough to go on, and he was the son of the Koscuisko prince after all. He had generations of ritual bred into him.

  “Mister Stildyne,” Andrej said, unfastening the secures of his duty blouse. Black, because he was one of the Ragnarok’s Primes; it was a particular black whose use in uniform was restricted to officers of senior rank. Of course his under-blouse was clean, and in good repair. If it were otherwise he would have no choice but to be humiliated in public, and the Saints only knew in what broadcast and record and rebroadcast record, by appearing in disrespectfully slovenly dress.

  Stildyne would never have let such a thing happen. Stildyne stood at Andrej’s back to take Andrej’s blouse; in his shirtsleeves Andrej stepped onto the reed-mat and crossed its padded surface to where the old women sat. They looked much older than he had at first taken them to be, once he was close enough to see; it was not the creasing of facial skin that spoke of the years, but the shining of the bones of the hand beneath the skin, the fingers thin as a bird’s wing.

  These women represented the blood that had been Joslire’s life, and their dead — the missing generation, Joslire’s brothers and sisters if he’d had any — had fallen victim to the same cruel treachery that had enslaved Joslire. Andrej knelt, because they were women and they were old and they were not to be asked to rise by a man who had any respect for his mother.

  Down on both knees, he bowed his head, raising his hand to draw the knife. Flattening his palm Andrej considered it — this was the weapon that had taken Joslire’s life — and presented it to the oldest of the women, who sat like an abbess with her hands to her thighs watching him closely with her dark eyes.

  “Tell her that I have brought these back,” Andrej said, not looking at Piross. “They have saved my life on at least one occasion, and freed Joslire from his. He should have them back. They belong to his family.”

  The translator spoke. The oldest woman leaned forward and drew Andrej’s hand toward her with the knife still across its palm; seemed to squint at the scar on Andrej’s palm — where Joslire had pushed that knife through, back to palm, and pinned his hand and Andrej’s hand together — then picked it up.

  Holding it to the cloud-diffused light of the sun at midheaven she turned it slowly from side to side, as if she were evaluating its condition; and then she spoke. Her voice was quavery with age, but firm and self-possessed for all that.

  “Tell him he is mistaken,” Piross said, from behind Andrej. “The knife does not follow the family, grandson, the family follows the knife.”

  The old woman leaned forward again as the translator was speaking, reaching out for Andrej. To touch his head, and give him benediction? Andrej bowed his head, but she was going for the back of his neck instead. The sheath. She sheathed the knife between his shoulder-blades, and it felt warm to the touch all along its length as if it had absorbed a day-long dose of full sunlight during its few moments naked beneath the cloudy Emandisan sky.

  Then she stood up, and beckoned to Andrej to do the same. “Now we will go and meet the family,” she said, through the translator. “But put on your costume, and bring your people. We want to be sure that your ancestors understand who you are, so that they’ll know you when they see you, the nex
t time.”

  What was he to do?

  Grandson, she’d called him — or whatever she had called him, Piross had translated it that way, and Piross’ command of Standard was excellent. Unchallengeable. What was expected of him, what —

  Look to the second son. His mother’s housemaster had told him that, early and often. In someone else’s house look to the second son and guide on him. The first son is the inheriting son, and if you do as he does you may commit a mis-step. The worst thing that can happen to you if you look to the second son is that you gain a reputation for being over-careful to avoid giving offense, and there is hardly a thing as an excess of politeness where the inheriting son of a great house is concerned. Look to the second son and you will do honor to your father’s name and your mother’s nurture.

  There was no second son here; there were only Joslire’s cousins. Andrej turned his head to find one of them, to discover what he should be doing — lead? Follow? What?

  One of Joslire’s cousins caught Andrej’s eye just as Piross started talking. “His Excellency is expected to walk behind the women of the family but ahead of its other men,” she said. “You will not travel in the same cars.”

  Joslire’s cousin seemed to acquire the scent of Andrej’s confusion, all at once; he grinned, so broad and open and unguarded a smile — there in an instant and gone almost as quickly — that it struck Andrej to the heart. He’d seen that smile before. Not very often, but he’d seen it, and the pain that the reminder in the flesh brought home to him staggered him where he stood.

  Stildyne was behind him, with his blouse; holding it to help Andrej dress himself, steadying Andrej at his back as he had been doing for all of these years. Andrej stood for a moment longer than was perhaps strictly necessary; Stildyne stood with him with Stildyne’s hands to Andrej’s shoulders as if in the act of smoothing the fabric to lie perfectly flat.

  Hadn’t the Emandisan officer suggested that Andrej’s brother was hoping to meet him? Why hadn’t he noticed? Because the reminders of this place, of how much he had learned from Joslire and how much lost when Joslire had claimed the Day, deprived him of his capacity for rational thought. He had to rethink his arrangements. How was he to make this work?

  The cars would be waiting, and there were elderly women. Even if they had not been the knives’ family, they would still be old women who had suffered much and who should not be kept waiting while one man brooded over his difficulties as if he were the only person here who’d had any in his life.

  Straightening his spine Andrej nodded to Stildyne over his shoulder, and turned crisply on his heel to follow the women to the transport that was waiting — with a full police escort, name of all Saints — and the translator with them.

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  On Azanry, Koscuisko’s planet of origin, burial places were great gleaming stoneworks let into the ground; Stildyne had seen pictures. Not everybody was buried in such splendor, of course not, but in the burial places of the old aristocratic families you could sometimes walk down row upon row of stone boxes underground before you reached that which had once held the founder of the line.

  Dasidar himself was buried in the dead-house of the Autocrat’s court, Dyraine of the Weavers beside him. There were tours available on remote. They had to recycle the space, in the older families; there wasn’t room for everybody, any more. The first, the last, and four parents, and everybody else moved off into much smaller boxes that contained just bones in disarray. Dolgorukij funeral customs fascinated Stildyne. Many of the things about the Dolgorukij interested him; Koscuisko was as good as a hobby, that way.

  This was no huge stone house of the dead, no anonymous envelope of residue from an industrial funeral. The transport cars drew up beside a long white wall, and through the gates Stildyne could see that the wall ran up the slope of a modest little hill on either side. There was a plantation of some sort. The translator had said orchard, hadn’t she?

  Stildyne got out of the car on one side while Koscuisko and the translator exited through the other. There were Security everywhere, Emandisan security. The port authority apparently took Koscuisko much more seriously than Koscuisko had expected, or Stildyne either. Stildyne didn’t know yet whether or not there was going to be a fight about Koscuisko’s knives, though the old woman’s actions coupled with the translator’s explanation did seem to imply that the knives were to be left with the officer.

  Jeltaria was arid and dry, for all that it was on the banks of an inland sea. The apron in front of the gate was covered in crushed white rock that caught the light and sparkled in the clear air. The clouds had lifted a little, it was even warmer than before — Stildyne could feel himself sweat.

  Curran’s family were holding the gates. Koscuisko was to go through. The oldest woman said something; Stildyne looked to Koscuisko’s translator. “Come into the orchard and meet your ancestors,” the translator said.

  There was all this police presence; would Koscuisko want his people to go in with him?

  Koscuisko gave Stildyne the nod and Stildyne started the Security detachment through the gate, past Joslire’s family. Nobody stopped Security, so it was clearly all right. Once they were through the two cousins closed the wooden gate, behind them; the oldest woman headed off down the main axis of the orchard, talking as she went. Koscuisko hurried to catch up, which meant Security hurried and Stildyne hurried and the translator hurried as well.

  “There have been more than thirty-five generations of the knife in our family.” The old woman, but the translator’s voice was that of a young woman. It was a little confusing. “Not all of equal duration, of course. I will show you the first to take your knives into his hand. And then you may go and speak to your brother.”

  The orchard-garden was a regular matrix of white stone-graveled pathways and earth-boxes on the ground, four or five feet high, two or three times as long, half that length deep or wide. Each of the raised beds contained a tree with ripening fruit: yes, an orchard. The old woman was headed up the hillside at a determined pace with Koscuisko following after.

  “What are these trees?” Koscuisko asked the translator; who translated the question for the old woman’s benefit — just so she would know, Stildyne supposed — but answered it herself, not waiting for the old woman to do so.

  “They’re a slow-growing hardwood, your Excellency, a nut-bearing tree. The peculiarities of the Madic tree include the required proximity of juvenile as well as past-bearing trees for successful fructification to occur, and they are hungry for flesh, in the first years of their growing.”

  They weren’t beautiful trees. They were looking more sinister to Stildyne by the moment, as a matter of fact; but vegetables had that effect on him in general. He’d never seen a tree but in pictures until he’d been a grown man of twenty, and even then it had been a tame tree in a zoological gardens. He could remember the first time he’d seen wild ones. The experience had been very unnerving.

  “You feed them on the bodies of your dead,” Koscuisko said. There was something in his voice that made Stildyne almost want to shudder, and it took a great deal to have an effect like that on a man who had to face Brachi Stildyne in the mirror every morning. “What is it of the tree that earns it so much honor?”

  The old woman had led them to a place halfway up the slope of the little hill. The walls of the raised beds there were old and primitive, piled stones that had been gradually collapsing over who knew how many years; the tree that still stood there was long dead, bleached and scoured and polished by wind and dust and sun and time.

  “This is the first man who ever kissed the knife that you now wear.” The old woman was looking at Koscuisko, though it was the translator of course who put the words into plain Standard. “Touch his hand, grandson. Know your ancestor.”

  Taking Koscuisko’s hand she climbed up the little rubble of the rock into the raised bed where the dead tree stood, and put Koscuisko’s hand — Koscuisko’s scarred hand — to the trunk of the tree. Koscuisko sna
tched his hand away as if out of the thermal exhaust of a conversion furnace.

  “Holy Mother,” Koscuisko said, but it was sometimes hard for Stildyne to decide whether he were swearing or praying. This was one of those times. “It sings.” And carefully Koscuisko put his hand back to the dead trunk of the tree. “It is humming. Alive. Breathing.”

  The translator said nothing, but the old woman who had named herself Koscuisko’s grandmother smiled as if she knew exactly what he had said. Maybe she did. There was no particular reason to assume that she couldn’t understand the spoken word perfectly well, or well enough, even if she didn’t actually speak it.

  “We had no body to feed a tree when Joslire came back to the orchard,” the old woman said. “There was only ash, and bits of bone. We worked it into the earth around the ancestor, so that Joslire would have the strength to find his way. Here he rests, Koscuisko of the others.”

  No tablet. No marker, no stone. Stildyne knew that Koscuisko had expected some object to look upon and call a grave, and there was none; only the dirt and debris around the base of an old tree, and little bits of something cinder-looking. Not what Koscuisko had expected, not at all. Stildyne wondered why. Koscuisko was a thorough man, he should have been better prepared; or was this a closely held secret, permitted to Emandisan families, not widely published in tourism documentation?

  Koscuisko put his forehead to the trunk of the old — dead — tree, and was silent. The old woman nodded, as though she was satisfied about something.

  “You do not need the translator to talk to your own brother,” the old woman said — and the officer who Koscuisko did not need in order to communicate with Joslire Ise-I’let translated with evident care. “I leave you with your people. We do not allow others into our orchards, grandson. Use your time wisely.”