Glory (34 page)

“Let me explain matters to you, Mynheer Marq,” Ian Voerster said. “You and your shipmates have arrived at a difficult time. There are changes taking place on Planet Voerster, and we are--quite frankly--not a people who take easily to changes. I will not bore you with the whole spectrum of Voersterian customs and political realities. Suffice it to say that I have found it necessary to make certain arrangements and alliances I regard as necessary for the survival of our social order. My wife has chosen to defy me. She has apparently enlisted the aid of a pair of your syndics, who have joined her at Einsamberg Kraal-- in the mountains some twenty-two hundred kilometers from here.”

“Your provincial politics mean nothing to Wired Ones,” Jean Marq said.

“That’s as may be, Mynheer Marq. But the fact is that your people have become involved. So it has become necessary for me to involve you.”

“There were messages to our ship asking for medical aid,” Jean said. “Our Master and Commander is a humanitarian.”

The small, bright eyes fixed on Jean Marq. “You are not a humanitarian, I take it.”

“I am a Starman, not a downworlder.”

“That’s plain enough. We won’t be troubled with sentiment, then,” Voerster said. “I approve of the demand for medical aid. I would have asked for it myself, if I had not been preempted. It is of absolute importance to the government of Voerster--”

“Meaning yourself,
Monsieur le President
” Jean Marq said with heavy irony.

“I do not deny it. I and my family represent the only law this world has ever known. We owe very little to the homeworld, Mynheer Starman. Our people were regarded as enemies and pariahs ever since the more militarily favored nations forced sanctions on us to change our chosen social order. The move from Sol to Luyten was the
second
Great Trek for the White Tribe. We do not change our ways easily.”

Jean Marq, Sorbonne intellectual and Gallic snob, regarded the Voertrekker-Praesident with distaste. Dietr Krieg was right in generally choosing not to come ashore on these bumpkin worlds.

“I was about to say that the medical assistance required is needed so that a political alliance can be fulfilled. I won’t trouble you further with details, except to say that your well-being depends on the delivery of the aid requested--and the return to my jurisdiction of certain citizens of Voerster who have broken a number of our laws. I shall make that clear to your syndics at Einsamberg.”

“I have heard that there is a beached Starman on Voerster,” Jean Marq said.

Ian Voerster’s smile showed tiny, even, white teeth. They looked like baleen in that large, florid face, Jean Marq thought.

“There is such a Starman. Black Clavius by name. He has been on Planet Voerster for many years. Our years, which are, I believe, somewhat longer than the Earth Standard years used aboard Goldenwings.”

Jean Marq was surprised. One didn’t expect colonials to be informed about the internals of life aboard lightsailers. He wondered if perhaps he had been guilty of making hasty judgments.

“Until a short time ago, Clavius was my personal guest here at Voertrekkerhoem,” Ian Voerster said. “Persons who spoke to the syndics of the Goldenwing
Nepenthe
all those years ago say there are stories on many worlds about Black Clavius.”

“There are some, I am sure,” Jean Marq said.

Ian Voerster smiled thinly. “He talks to God, you know.”

“Qu’est-ce que c’est que cela?”

“Quite literally, I assure you,” Ian Voerster said with a thread of scorn in his tone. Ian needed to turn on Marq the same spite the outworlder used on those he obviously thought of as inferior. This was a game Voertrekkers played in their cribs, and they played it well. “Of course, even Clavius is reluctant to claim that God replies to him directly. Or at all, for that matter. You are an odd lot, your Starmen. Do you suffer delusions or great loss of intellectual capacity when you are separated from your--” He made a disdainful gesture about his head. “Drogue, you call it?”

Jean Marq looked at the Voertrekker-Praesident with grudging respect. The man was even more cruel and more capable than Marq had first supposed. Duncan was going to have his hands full with this one.

“My mental capacity is adequate to my tasks, I assure you,
Monsieur le President
,” Marq said.

“Excellent,” Voerster said, getting to his feet in dismissal. “You will dine with me tonight. Mynheer Starman. I look forward to it. I am sure that two men of the world can find much on which to agree.”

A column of greasy smoke rose from the foot of the valley toward the overcast. Gusts of wind swirled down the palisade of the Shieldwall north of the manor house, scattered the smoke and then, dying, allowed it to re-form its oily path between soil and sky.

Duncan, heavily dressed against the intermittent rain, leaned on the parapet and studied the lower valley of Einsamtal thoughtfully.

“Is there much to the rites?” he asked.

Eliana, dressed much more lightly and quite at ease in the chilly air that was customary so near Voerster’s arctic circle, said, “Yes. A great deal. We are a people who value ritual. I am told that on the homeworld there are still ruined monuments on the land whence we came, monuments where my people used to gather to swear loyalty to one another and celebrate the pride of the White Tribe. It is no different here.”

“But funerals?”

“Death is our great reality.”

Duncan looked steadily at Eliana’s fine-featured face, the dark brows and eyes, the ebony hair blowing in the wind. He could feel her within him. He was a trained and experienced empath and yet he had never felt another’s gift so deeply. What, he wondered, could this remarkable woman have accomplished had she been found on Search and Wired at an early age?

“Death, your reality, Eliana? I don’t sense that, somehow.”

She essayed a slow smile, an expression of deep wistful-ness. “Perhaps I overstated it, Duncan. We are a melancholy people. There is a darkness in us. In twenty years or two hundred it will all come to nothing here. We abandoned justice a thousand years ago. That is why nothing changes on Voerster and why we make so grand a business of dying.”

She indicated the pyre beyond the rocky ridge at the foot of the valley. “The Planetians are a race of brutes, but they would never deny Eigen Fontein his funeral fire.”

“Interesting,” murmured Duncan, returning to his view of the rising smoke column. It occurred to him that men had begun to rise above the animals when first they invented ceremonies with which to face death.

“And they honor a white flag,” he said.

“More or less,” Eliana said. “I would not put too fine a point on that. The Highlanders have their own ways.”

“They sent you the Luftkapitan.”

“They had two reasons for that. They wanted me to see how they had mistreated him. And they had a message meant for me, personally.”

“The Law of Tribe,” Duncan murmured.

“You have been studying, Starman.”

“You have an impressive library here. And this--” He touched the socket in his skull, “--this helps one with languages.”

“So Black Clavius told me,” Eliana Voerster said. “How eager he must be to connect again. He once said it was like setting the mind free to roam the stars.”

“Colorful. And almost true,” Duncan said.
And how you would love it, Eliana--

Her eyes met his directly, answering him.

“My concern is my daughter,” she said. “If you know the Law of Tribe, you know what was promised the Highlanders. Both of the Fontein’s solutions are unsatisfactory. But I will submit if that is the only way to spare Broni.”

Duncan felt a shudder of revulsion at the thought of Eliana Ehrengraf in the hands of one of the strange men at the foot of the valley.

“Don’t judge my people too harshly,” she said. “Our laws are what our world has made them. Our ways seem harsh to you, but they were written to help us survive.”

“I don’t judge, Eliana,” Duncan said. “Does your husband know what the man down there intends?”

“If he does not, I will tell him. As soon as Buele and your woman repair the radio. It might divert him from Broni. It may even give him reason to reconsider what he has done.”

Amaya would hit flash point if she heard herself referred to as “your woman,” Duncan thought. No New Earth feminist ever thought of herself as any man’s woman. He wondered what Eliana’s reaction might be to the uninhibited way the syndics lived in deep space.

He said, “In the cargo bay of my shuttle lies the body of an old friend to whom I promised a burial. Would the Fonteins permit it--under a flag of truce?”

Eliana considered the outrage Georg Fontein was feeling. The brother lost was hardly beloved. That was not the highland way. Fontein blood had been spilled, and that was a serious matter. “I don’t know, Duncan. They might, but I am not sure.”

Duncan unconsciously shifted his position to ease the strain on his wounded leg. He felt feverish and the thigh muscle was swollen and throbbing. Whatever was to be done had to be done soon.

Eliana said instantly, “You are in pain.”

It would have been useless to deny it to an empath. “Yes.”

Her dark eyes were wide and steady. “So is my Broni.”

“I know.”

“Can you bury your dead and still take Broni with you to your vessel?”

Duncan drew a deep breath and decided. “Broni and all of us, Eliana, if there are more of those--” He indicated the foot of the valley once more--”on the way from the highlands.”

Eliana had shared part of Ian’s threat with the Starman. That Ian himself would also be on the way as soon as the weather cleared, she did not mention to Duncan Kr. It was the nearest one empath could come to lying to another.

Duncan said, “Clavius tells me that he thinks Dietr Krieg can help Broni.”

“I told you that when I first saw you,” Eliana said.

“That was faith speaking. But Clavius knows what a syndic physician can do.” His cool gray eyes fixed on Eliana’s dark ones. “We are not miracle workers, mynheera. You must understand this.”

“I know what you are, Duncan Kr,” Eliana Ehrengraf said.

Duncan made no immediate reply. Of course she knew what he was and who. Her raw talent informed her. She knew, but did not know why she knew. Perhaps this made for more trust than he, Duncan, deserved. He was only a ship’s captain, after all. Not a saint. “And if Dietr can help Broni, what then?”

“One trial at a time, Duncan. Save her life first.”

Duncan looked again down the sloping valley of Einsamtal. The wind carried the sounds of the Highlanders’ funeral chants. And mingled with the mournful piping came the sound of a balichord. Black Clavius stood on one of the corner towers playing for the enemy dead.

“If we leave here, what will become of your kaffirs?”

“They will melt into the mountains. They are all hill people.”

“How do you bury your dead, Eliana?”

“We weave a sarcophagus of grass. On Earth we used coffins of wood, but here there is almost none. So we use what we have in abundance. Grass.”

“Ask your people to make such a sarcophagus.”

“Very well.”

“And I will carry a message to the Planetians.”

“You? But you are hurt, Duncan--”

“They are less likely to do something treacherous if I ask for a truce to bury my syndic. I come from the sky, remember.”

“It may seem that you are dealing with primitives, Duncan. But you are not. Perhaps you need to remember that. The Planetians are sophisticated enough to be treacherous.”

Duncan took her hand. The flesh was warm, her grip strong. “Do you know what a Cargo Cult is, Eliana?”

“Is that what you think Voerster has become?”

“Hasn’t it? Don’t you wait for years--tens or hundreds of years--for the Goldenwings to bring what you want from out there?”

She closed her eyes and said with deep wistfulness, “My poor Voerster.”

She was a Voertrekker aristocrat, and for all her unhappiness with life as she was forced by duty to live it, she loved her homeworld deeply. Duncan still felt echoes of a similar feeling from long ago. He remembered the gray sea and the dark sky of Thalassa. Human beings, he thought, were capable of strange and powerful attachments.

“What does Captain Klemmer intend?” he asked.

“All Klemmer really wants is to fly his airship back to Voertrekkerhoem. I have imposed upon him most grievously,”

“Will the Fonteins allow him to go?”

“I think not,” Eliana said. “They would try to prevent him. It is their way. By now, Georg Fontein probably believes that
Volkenreiter
belongs to him. Planetians are like that.”

“Will they attack us today?”

“Not until Eigen’s funeral fire burns down. Georg must take ashes back to Winter Kraal and bury them there.”

“’For the ashes of his fathers and the temples of his gods,’“ Duncan quoted softly.

“Thalassan?” Eliana said.

“From Earth,” Duncan said. “A man named Macauley wrote it long ago about a Roman soldier and what he reckoned worth fighting and dying for. We humans don’t change much, do we?” He braced himself for the walk inside. “We had better call a council of war,” he said.

They gathered in the room adjacent to Broni’s bedchamber. Duncan had asked for a representative from the kaffirs in the manor house, and two were present, standing silently against the wail with Eliana’s kaffir handmaiden.

For the last ten minutes there had been an exchange of ideas concerning the possibility of the Fonteins permitting anyone to approach the shuttle grounded in the meadow near the dirigible
Volkenreiter
. Luftkapitan Klemmer, his tattered uniform having been replaced with borrowed clothing from Healer Tiegen Roark, sat stiffly on the edge of his chair. He spoke slowly and with difficulty over his swollen lower lip. “I will not board the starcraft. I wish to return with my ship to Voertrekkerhoem. I can manage
Volkenreiter
alone if I can get aboard her.”

“Oh, I don’t think so, Brother Klemmer,” Buele said without being asked. “There must be someone on the elevator helm. I remember that very well.”