Indomitus Oriens (The Fovean Chronicles) (14 page)

Angron shook his head.
“This makes no sense,” he said. “A farmer has a field. He sews his crops, the land produces a bounty and he reaps it. No matter how much you take, the land is the same, the crop the same. Leave him all of his crop and he’ll eat what he needs, sell what he doesn’t and then spend the rest.”

“Take the excess for the state,” Aniquen continued, leaning forward, “and put it to the common good, and then all peasants live better, live safer, with better roads, more soldiers to protect them, and all of the things that the state can provide.”

Bill had heard this all before. The debate was probably thousands of years old. He argued that when the peasants could keep more of their money, they would find new ways to be productive and increase their wealth. The increase in wealth led to more taxes for the state.

The Uman-Chi argued it was no different if the state took the money
—the gold was all the same. If the farmer couldn’t get to market then he couldn’t sell his wares.

They reached an impasse.
The Uman-Chi just didn’t believe him and they claimed their own experiments proved they were right. However, they kept mentioning some Emperor who was making it work, and were demanding that Bill justify how.

Finally they thanked him and sent him on his way.
He returned to his rooms with Melissa, and found her sleeping alone. He passed up on dinner and slid into bed next to her, and wondered at a place so alien, and what he’d found and what he’d left behind.

Chapter Seven:

              Being Good Pets

   
They were another month in Outpost IX. In that time they spent their days learning Uman and the language of Men (of Volkhydrans, they were told, although they’d never met one or really heard of them), learning to ride, and answering the questions put to them by Angron and Aniquen, who spoke to them together or, more rarely, individually, about what they called ‘chem-stree’ and ‘ech-nomics.’

In the evenings they were encouraged to occupy their own time.
Bill tried to learn to fight with a sword but he wasn’t very good at it. Melissa fought more with a paint brush, first on her own and then with a tutor once Glynn had seen her work. She would sit on a stool before an easel, her dark hair framing her frowning face as she chewed the end of a brush and gazed out their one window. Although she saw the hills and homes and blue water of Tren Bay before her, she painted these intense abstracts, auroras of color and altered perception the likes of which the young Uman-Chi Caster had never seen before.

“And you think this means she has the skill?” Chaheff asked her at their morning devotions.

Glynn lowered her head before the image of the goddess Eveave, standing in a long dress as a piece of white marble on a wooden shrine before her.
Her knees felt every grain of dust the servants had missed on the floor, her back ached for the posture she kept. Her power might be growing but her body wearied of the intensive training.

“It is not uncommon for Men to exhibit artistic skills as an indicator of the gift,” she informed Chaheff, as if he didn’t know this.
“We know the Emperor is strange in his thinking—we have no reason not to believe his kinsmen would be as well.”

“The Emperor does not have the gift,” Chaheff stated, flatly.
He knelt beside her, before a marble cast of Adriam, the All-Father. His breathing was labored—mostly due to his weight, Glynn imagined.

She’d worn a new white robe cut a little too large for her, and she’d caught him admiring her breasts.
Chaheff already shared his life with an Uman-Chi woman whose family protected the stables in the palace, so Glynn couldn’t imagine that he’d want a new wife. However that woman, of a median house, had given him no children.

These thoughts made Glynn testy.
In fact she was of an age where her brother should be seeking out a mate for her, and she knew Ancenon had not interested himself. In fact, he had not returned to the Silent Isle even once since their last conversation.

Now she was occupied with training and with managing these new-comers, mostly it seemed because she was blamed for bringing them here.
She didn’t find that fair and she admitted to herself she’d like nothing better than to find someone else to provide a reason to monitor them.

“In fact,” she said, “we know only that we have no record of the Emperor
using
the gift. He is the only person of the race of Men who speaks both Uman-Chi and Cheyak, and the latter better than most of us. It has been conjectured that he may be
barely gifted.
”

Chaheff smiled.
“He might need to go to his own schools,” he said.

Glynn allowed herself a reciprocating smile.
Years ago, the Emperor of Eldador had begun schools for those persons of all races who had minor magical abilities, but not the skill to master them. Such people were previously prevented from studying the craft and, in fact, were stripped of their power if it was possible. These unfortunate souls usually ended up trying to teach themselves and inevitably suffered for it.

Now they filled a thousand roles throughout Fovea, either as truth sayers, or as messengers or helping repairmen, working as healers or studying crops and livestock.
They were taught to be happy to use just the tiny sparkle of the power Adriam had granted them, and to make their way in the world accordingly.

It had caused even more people to flock to Eldador, not that most Foveans needed a reason.
Now every nation—even Volkhydro, which had very few gifted persons—had these same schools, and made use of the barely-gifted.

“If he does, I’m sure he’ll either dominate it or kill everyone in it
—that is the way of the Eldadorian Emperor,” Glynn assured him.

She had her own reasons to hate this Man.

“If your Melissa has the gifts, then she has them,” Chaheff informed her. “Let us close our prayers and move on to other things.”

They incanted the closing together, with the proper form and intonations, learned b
y each of them over decades and, in Chaheff’s case, centuries.

Rising after, Uman servants approached them with libations
—fruit juice for Glynn and milk for Chaheff. The two Uman-Chi accepted the drinks without comment and the Uman withdrew.

“As for another matter, it has finally been agreed that you are the noble, young and old, from your poem,” Chaheff commented.

He stepped back as he said this, dropping one arm in the posture of the friendly messenger. Glynn straightened and raised her left hand elegantly as the interested host.

“I thought as much,” she informed him.

“As such, you must reassert yourself to the ultimate meaning of this champion,” Chaheff said. “While some great minds work together to decipher the song, none have your intimate knowledge of the woman, Melissa. As well, you
are
our only female Caster and, as such, may have insights we lack.”

Why did males always assume that women shared some common bond?
Glynn asked herself. However she smiled politely and took on a receptive stance.

“If I can decipher them, then I will,” she promised.
“However these two come with strange minds and wild ideas. I cannot promise more than to try.”

“Trying is all we ask of you,”

* * *

One thing that had come to bother Melissa in the later years of her life was
any inability to do anything. It just
bugged
her. Perhaps because she’d lost so much, or perhaps because she wanted so much, if there was a task at hand, and she couldn’t overcome it, then it would drive her crazy, and she’d throw herself at it over and over again until finally she overcame the thing she couldn’t do.

Because of that, she’d spent a month of evenings in the stables where the horses were kept, riding the horses there until she was confident she wouldn’t fall again.

At first she’d been met with resistance by sleepy-eyed Uman servants whom, once the horses were fed and stalled for the night were welcome then to enjoy their lives as their assets let them. One had even complained to Glynn, not that it did him any good. To Glynn, the stablemen were servants like any other, they lived to serve and if service was required of them then, come day or night, that was what they needed to do.

Melissa, however, treated the ones who stayed to help her with such appreciation and respect that the Uman servants could
n’t help but find an affection for her, even the old stablemaster, Geflain, who had complained about her. It was he who, more than any other, stayed in the early evening to teach her and to coach her in her learning to ride.

“The side saddle is
a test of your balance,” he’d informed her. “It’s like a lesson in life to a young lady. Keep your balance, keep your poise, and no harm will come to you.”

“A lot you know about it,” Melissa had groused at him.
“You get to hold on with both legs, not perch your butt on half a seat.”

With that he’d
helped her down from the palfrey she’d been practicing on, leapt up into the side saddle and commenced to ride the horse no less daintily than Melissa had seen of Glynn.

“This sort of riding,” he informed Melissa as he trotted the horse around the enclosed arena, “is for a proper lady.
Perhaps you’ll find that in you and be able to imitate it, if not embrace it?”

That had been all it took for Melissa.
A month later she could canter even one of the more aggressive Andaran horses in the side saddle. She found it invigorating and enlightening. Two weeks later Bill was commenting on the difference in how she moved, how she presented herself. At the end of that month she was noticing the same thing herself. Riding came not as a challenge or an imperative but as a natural motion. As she’d seen with Bill, the horse became an extension of herself. She felt its strength flow up into her, and she began to accept its grace.

Geflain, she’d realized, had been right.
The side-saddle wasn’t some kind of oppression by males. It taught her a discipline in poise and balance. It began to change her outlook on life.

Bill went looking for Melissa that night and found her where he expected to find her, riding another horse in the royal stables. He didn’t understand her passion even though he shared it. Ben Franklin had said once, “What’s outside of a horse is good for what’s inside of a man,” or something similar and he’d seen the change riding had wrought in Melissa.

Watching her riding a muscled gelding in the arena, turning left and right between poles that had been set up for her, he thought both, ‘Wow, she’s getting really good,’ and ‘Wow, I
want a cigarette so bad, I’d cut off a lock of Melissa’s hair and smoke it, if she would let me.’

The thought made him smile, and that’s when she saw him.
She smiled back and rode the gelding up to where he watched her, leaning against the rails of the arena wall.

“Where do you even come
up
with an idea like that?” she asked him, when he shared that second thought with her.

“Something from my sordid past,” he confessed. “Girls smoking their braids.
I don’t know if it works.”

She kicked her feet free of the stirrups and leapt off the horse.
Smelling of the animal’s natural musk, she threw her arms around Bill’s neck and shoved her tongue into his mouth.

Her hand was on him.
They’d been going hot and heavy since they’d been brought here, with the exception of the three days of her last cycle, last week.

H
e reached for her. She giggled and ran her fingers up his sides.

“You’re doing really well with that gelding,” he commented to her after she broke the kiss.

She smiled and cocked her head to one side. “Maybe I’m ready for a stallion,” she informed him.

He chuckled.
“A stallion is a precarious beast,” he informed her.

She smiled and kissed him again.
“Don’t I know it?” she informed him.

She’d been doing this, Bill thought to himself.
He had a hard time keeping up with this girl. He thought it was a big deal when he lasted a whole minute against one of their warriors with a sword in his hand. She went out and conquered her fear of riding. He learned a little of the language of Men, she mastered Uman
and
learned to paint.

In his whole life, he’d never had regular sex more than twice a week.
She left him feeling like she needed more than what he was giving her.

He could be falling in love, and in the back of his mind he couldn’t stop thinking he was too old for falling in love.

“You’re amazing, you know that?” he asked her.

She reached up and bit the end of his chin, through his beard.
He tried to pull back but she held him for a moment.

He relaxed and
she let him go. He turned his face down and looked into her eyes again.

“Want to go back to bed?” she asked him.
“I think I’m ready to ride that stallion.”

Bill took her in his arms and kissed her.
She did this, too. She called the shots as to when and how. Usually it was her on top, because she didn’t like his weight on her. She’d maneuver herself around his belly.

One thing Bill had never been was a kept man, and he’d been feeling more and more like one since he came here.
They let him have what he wanted, but they made him ask for it. They fed him. They had him in a nice room, but he didn’t own any of the things in it.

Sometimes, a man needs to demonstrate a little rebellion, if only to remind himself that he could rebel.

He reached his fingers up the sides of her body and past her shoulders, up her neck and into her long, black hair. She broke the kiss and looked up into his eyes, smiling and dreamy-eyed. He could feel her breath on his face, smell the horse’s funk on her, filling his senses.

Melissa was an amazing beauty and, at least for now, all his.
She was one part of his life that no one else dictated for him—except, of course, that these Uman-Chi had assumed they were a couple and paired them together.

What if they were trying to breed them?
The thought rattled around in the back of Bill’s mind.

His fingers reached into her hair.

“Wuh—Bill?” she gasped, breaking the kiss.