Indomitus Oriens (The Fovean Chronicles) (19 page)

             
He used the tactics of military geniuses and passed them off as his own. He used Economics 101 to run his whole nation and then entrepreneurs made him fantastically wealthy, because he let them.

             
The trip to Galnesh Eldador took only three days, and by that third day, she hated him.

             
On that third day Glynn came to their door and summoned them from the relative warmth of the cabin to the weather deck. Melissa and Lupus wrapped themselves in furs left by the cabin’s tiny stove while Bill sat on a stool too small for him and held his stomach.

             
The decks had become icy and slippery in an early spring freeze. Men and Uman scrambled across it in bare feet, just the sight of them made Melissa’s own soles ache. She clutched her furs closer and stepped out upon the swaying deck behind Lupus.

             
“We are here already?” Glynn seemed amazed. They found her on the forecastle, the sea spray on their faces. The wind blew cold above decks from a frigid north wind. Ice clung to the bowlines, and fell like little missiles from the snapping sails. Every swell showed her how close the cold sea came to them as the ship tilted.

             
“Sea Wolves are much faster than your Tech Ships,” he informed her. “Sleeker hulls, more canvas to the wind.”

             
She nodded and looked out past the rigging to the land.

             
“That is the Eldadorian Peninsula,” she said.

             
He smiled and looked at her.

             
“My lands?” she asked him.

             
He nodded.

             
She wrinkled her nose. “Barren rock, the land fouled by the sea,” she said. “No farming, perhaps a tower for my studies.”

             
“What ever you desire, and can get your subjects to build for you,” Lupus told her.

             
They spoke in Uman, Melissa getting most of the words now. The syntax proved difficult—you had to totally change a word sometimes when you spoke of the future or of the past, but it didn’t seem that bad. Xinto had started her on Scitai as well. She could say simple greetings, thank-you’s and ask “Where is the handsome man with the beard?” which he assured her would get her to him, wherever she might go.

             
“I already have a handsome man with a beard,” she had informed him.

             
When Bill could stop barfing he buddied up to this Emperor. Probably a good idea, because the looks she got from Glynn said she worried about her own affairs now and not theirs. As prisoners of the new guy, they ate and slept as well as they had with the old guy, but one day there would come a time when he said, “Thanks for all your help,” and it would be a lot better to have a barony somewhere than to be out on the street or worse.

             
Melissa herself had cozied up to Shela. They seemed close in age, in look, and they both found themselves the women of Earth men, so they shared some common ground.

             
She stood on the forecastle as well, wrapped in shaggy furs of her own. Melissa’s lower lip trembled and, when Shela saw it, she let hers tremble too, and they laughed at each other.

             
“Oh, I hate the sea,” Shela confessed to her in Uman. They always tried to improve her understanding of it.

             
“I like sea,” Melissa said. “Hate spray. Hard to get out hair.”

             
Shela looked to her hair and nodded. Then she looked at her husband. “He likes the cold, likes to be in the cold.”

             
“He is from the cold place,” Melissa said.

             
“Yes?”

             
Lupus hadn’t shared his past with Shela, so she decided to use this to increase her own value. “His home is called ‘Connecticut.’”

             
“Conn ecky cut,” Shela said.

             
“Very good,” Melissa smiled. “In the winter, very cold. Kill you outside at night.”

             
“So he lived in a house?” she asked. Melissa nodded.

             
“Andoran is warm. We sleep outside most nights,” Shela told her. “Our first time—he took me on the plains, on the ground, under a sky full of stars.”

             
“Ooooo,” Melissa said, appreciatively.

             
“I wanted so much to give him a son from that,” she said. “I was his slave, but his sons would have been born free. You should see how he loves his children.”

             
“How many?”

             
She smiled—a mother’s smile. Melissa knew it, having seen it herself. “Three. Lee, the oldest. A Sorceress, like me. Then a son—we call him Vulpe. His sister will help him choose a man’s name when it’s time. And then my youngest—my heart yearns for her now. She has an Andaran name—Chawnaluh Nanahee Nudageehay. In the language of Men, that means, “Angry at the Sun.”

             
“Angry at the Sun?”

             
“She sees it, and she screams,” Shela shook her head. “We worried that she was sick somehow—so many babies die. But she is well, and simply doesn’t like the light.”

             
“I have sister, no brothers,” Melissa said.

             
Shela looked at her. “Your mother died?”

             
Melissa was stunned. “How you know?”

             
“What man stops before he has a son?”

             
Melissa shook her head. She wanted to argue, but it didn’t seem worth it. She hadn’t come here to bring feminism to the masses, much less the nobility.

             
“Your man, he hasn’t—” and then some word she didn’t know.

             
She squinted at Shela. Shela made a gesture with her hands.

             
Sex.

             
“Too many people to hear,” she said.

             
“Not what Glynn says,” Shela said.

             
“What?”

             
“She said you were even caught by your guards.”

             
Melissa blushed crimson as she recalled that night.

             
“She told you that?”

             
“You embarrassed her very much,” Shela said. “I think Uman-Chi put pants on the stallions. But she was supposed to—” some word “—and then you did that.”

             
“Supposed to what?”

             
She thought for a moment. “Like a mother with her babies.”

             
“Ah.”

             
“My babies never did that!” Shela had a good laugh.

             
Melissa felt mortified. Glynn walked by her, then the Emperor. Lupus gave her a perfunctory smile, Glynn walked past as if she didn’t see her standing there.

             
Melissa called her a bitch under her breath, and moved to follow, but Shela made it clear she wanted to stay. Melissa pulled her furs closer around her, and kept looking off the side of the ship.

             
“I want you to tell me something, and be honest,” Shela said. “If you lie, I will know.”

             
Melissa nodded.

             
Shela didn’t look at her, but said, “Are you happy with your man, or are you going to leave him for another?”

             
She felt stunned. Leave Bill? What the hell?

             
“I think I love him, Shela,” she said. “I think I really do.”

             
“That’s good,” Shela looked at her, and caught the tears on her face. She stroked one away and looked into her eyes.

             
“I see he doesn’t—” and a word she didn’t know.

             
“What?”

             
She sighed. “Hold you, kiss you, stroke your hair.”

             
“I usually begin it,” she said. “Everything.”

             
She nodded. “I think that is these men from Conn ecky cut. Lupus is no different.”

             
“No?”

             
She sighed. “He traded for me,” she said. “He has a stallion that is very rare. So, my tribe, my father, bred it to a mare, for me.”

             
Melissa’s eyes widened. “So you were traded for, um—” she didn’t know the word, so she made the motion.

             
“Yes,” Shela wouldn’t look at her now. “And we had to trick him to do that. He didn’t want me.”

             
“You so pretty though,” Melissa said. “You love so much.”

             
Shela turned her face out to the bay. “You know, that doesn’t matter to a man,” she said. “You think it does, but then you think of all the girls, very pretty, very—” some word, but she was sure it meant loving.

             
“And they all tell a story of a broken heart,” she finished.

             
Melissa thought about that. “Mine was Mike.”

             
“He broke your heart?”

             
“Oh, so much, Shela,” she said. “And left me with nothing. I met his mom, I gave him my—um—first time.”

             
“No!”

             
Melissa nodded. “He promised stay with me.”

             
She didn’t say marriage, because she didn’t know the word, but she got through it with some help from Shela.

             
“Someone did that to me, my father would tie him to five horses,” Shela said.

             
“Five?”

             
Shela looked at her, and she got it.

             
“First Lupus didn’t want me,” she said. “Then he get the sex, and I know, I am just the sex for him.”

             
“Oh,” Melissa said.

             
Shela shrugged. “I was a slave,” she said. “A slave is for sex. Have to be stupid, not to know that.”

             
“Okay.”

             
“But then, one day, a very cold day, we came to Eldador the Port, and went to the stables, very late at night.”

             
She was looking off into space now, her face so serene. Melissa had no doubt this was some pivotal point in her life.

             
“We are “—some word—“the horses, and I remember I was brushing my horse’s back, and Yonega Waya said to me, ‘Look, I am so dirty!’

             
“Yonega Waya?” she asked.

             
Shela smiled. “His Andaran name—it means ‘White Wolf.’

             
“And I say, ‘Look—that is a horse, and you are—” the word again.

             
Melissa repeated the word. It turned out to be putting the horse up, brushing it down, making sure it was dry.

             
“Anyway,” Shela said, and she threw an angry glance at Melissa for interrupting, “I say this, and he tells me I am dirty and must have a bath, and I say, ‘No,’ and that is disrespectful even for a wife, so for a slave—whew!—that was bad, and I was thinking, ‘What is he going to do?’”

             
“What did he do?”

             
“Smack,” she said, and clapped her hands together. “Right in the mouth, told me not to disrespect him.”

             
“Wow,” Melissa said.

             
“Turned me around,” she said. “And then you know, he threatened to do it again, and then he washed me, right there, like you wash a dog with fleas.”

             
“In the stable in the cold?”

             
Shela nodded, and her eyes glowed from the memory of it.

             
“Were there people there?”

             
“One boy, who set it up with him,” she said.

             
“Set it up?”

             
Shela nodded. “This was all a plan to give me my first dress ever,” she said, and she sighed. “So beautiful, that red dress. I have it—it is old, I don’t care. I put that dress on; I am just his slave girl again.”