Indomitus Oriens (The Fovean Chronicles) (21 page)

“Busy,” she said to Shela in Uman.

“No, not at all,” Shela said. She looked around the bustle. “It is early in the season. In Life, it will be ten times as busy. Look—you can walk between the stalls, there are so few.”

“I am impressed,” Bill said, dropping back to join their conversation.

Shela’s nose wrinkled—a sign Melissa knew meant she felt annoyed. Melissa surmised Shela must not get much time with other women, especially one who could tell her about her man.

“The merchants come here, because they pay so little
shakun dhar
,” she said.

“So little what?” Bill asked her.

“Shakun dhar,” she repeated. “I don’t know the anglesh word. You sell something, you pay some of what you make to the Duke or Baron, he pays that to the King.”

“Tribute?” Melissa asked.
Bill touched her shoulder.

“Taxes,” he said in English, looking into her eyes.
“Angron asked me about that—about economics. Lupus brought more business here by lowering taxes.”

“Oh, for the love of God, he’s a Republican,” Melissa said.
“No wonder he’s so hot to go to war.”

“Hey!” Bill protested.
“I’m a Republican.”

“What?”

“You knew I listened to Rush.”

“I thought you liked old music,” Melissa said.
She shook her head and looked down. “I can’t believe I put out for a Republican.”

“You
what
?”

A wide smile crossed her face, she couldn’t help it any more.

Bill shook his head. “You just…suck, you know that?”

“What a terrible thing for you to say,” she goaded him.

“What you talking about,” Shela asked in English.

“Shakun dhar,” Melissa said.
“And I was just giving Bill a hard time.”

Shela winced.
“I tell you, you not call him dat,” she said. “Very dangerous, you use real name.”

“Our names are our names,” Melissa said.
“I have no idea what else to—”

Shela held up her hand.
They were coming to the city’s gates. They were huge; timbers held together with huge bands of iron, attached to a tower on each side on some sort of hinge that lay hidden in the towers’ stone walls.

They saw crows circling the gates.
Occasionally one would swoop down and peck at the droppings from a horse, or at the wares of a merchant whose attention seemed diverted.

“What you call dat bird, in anglesh?” Shela asked Melissa.

“A crow, I think,” she said. “Or a black bird, maybe. They are too small to be a raven.”

“Raven,” Shela repeated, nodding.
“Dassa good name for you. We call you Raven from now on.”

“And you,” she said, looking at Bill.
“You we call dey first word I learn in anglesh, ‘Mountain.’”

“Mountain?” he said.

“You big, big like dey White Wolf. I almost call you dey old wolf, but day name gif you lotta trouble.”

Melissa laughed.
“It probably would.”

“I guess I can be the Mountain,” he said.
They had just walked under the gates, and on the other side they saw a whole new crop of courtiers waiting for the Emperor, and even more Wolf Soldier guards to protect him from them.

“He is in his element, isn’t he?” Bill said.

“In Uman,” Shela reprimanded him. “Or in the language of Men. You will only learn them if you speak them.”

Bill screwed his face up as he searched for the words.

“That is what he likes,” he said, indicating the Emperor. He had no word for ‘element.’

Shela smiled.
“That is better,” she said. “And yes, he likes it very much, but he complains about it all the time, too.”

“Just like a man,” Melissa said.

Shela laughed.
Something caught her eye, and her face just opened up. Melissa followed her line of sight to two children running up the cobblestone street, followed by an older girl carrying a toddler.

Melissa didn’t miss the Wolf Soldier guards double-timing around them, firmly moving pedestrians out of their way.

“There are my babies,” she exclaimed, and squatted down with her arms open to receive them.

The oldest was a copy of her, somewhere in her early teens, her thick brown hair hanging down to her hips. The next one, a boy, stood almost as tall, his black hair cropped close to his head. The girl who followed them dressed in—of all things—a black leather bra and leather riding breaches, with knives on her upper arms and thighs and a bow over her shoulder. Her face looked almost as if she were surprised—the eyebrows perpetually arched – and framed in purple hair longer than Shela’s, her skin ghostly pale. As she drew closer, Melissa could see her gray eyes, and the surprised look seemd to be her natural expression.

The purple-haired girl
wore no furs despite the cold weather. Her flat stomach was exposed. The baby she held in the crook of her arm had her lower lip stuck out and knuckled her eyes, getting ready to scream her lungs out, Melissa felt sure.

The girl moved like a dancer, Melissa noted.
She ran with a baby in her arms, no easy feat, but she kept the baby steady without slipping or stumbling. She kept her distance from the older children, not crowding them and not more than a leap away.

The older children hit Shela dead-on.
They should have bowled her over but she held her ground. She plied their faces with kisses and they responded with giggles and one hundred questions.

“Are you well, mama?”

“Are you staying?”

“Who is that big man?”

“Is that girl your sister?”

“Cook caught Vulpe sneaking plums!”

Bill barked a laugh that even got the Emperor’s attention.

“Just like my kids,” he said.
“Ten seconds before one is telling on the others.”

“You have children?” Shela said, and looked at Melissa.

“I was married before,” Bill said, struggling with the Uman language. “That was long ago.”

“Your wife died, or you left her?” Shela asked, her arms still entangled in her children.

“She left me, actually,” Bill admitted.

Shela nodded and returned her attention to her children.

* * *

Bill looked onto the scene longingly.

He had such great kids. Three of them, all girls; he had kidded his friends that he knew the gas station bathroom better than his own.

It just struck him then that he would never see his grandkids grow up.
He wouldn’t see his girls on Christmas; he wouldn’t get to torment his sons-in-law during Thanksgiving football. He didn’t see them much, but that didn’t exactly mean never, either. If he ever managed to retire, he had hoped to go see all of them.

He felt a t
ouch on his elbow, and he looked down to see the older children staring up at him with inquisitive brown eyes. Their mother now focused on the baby.

“Are you our grandfather?” the girl asked.

Bill couldn’t keep the smile from his face. He squatted down to their level. “No,” he said. “Don’t you know your grandfather?”

They shook their heads.
He could tell they were brother and sister. They had Lupus’ Roman nose, the same eye set. They had Shela’s features, her long fingers and her delicate jaw and cheekbones. They were both going to be tall—you could see it in them already, their long forearms and their gigantic feet.

“We never met them
,” Lee said. “Mama’s mother died, papa’s father lives a way away.”

“A way away,” the boy agreed.
Melissa had told him their names. This was…Vulpe; Latin for fox.

“Well, I am not your grandfather,” Bill said.
“But I can do grandfather things for you.”

“You can?” Their faces brightened.

He did the trick his own kids loved best. He put his hands together, then bent his left fore and middle finger over his left thumb and, pretending it was very painful, performed the illusion of pulling off his right thumb with his left hand.

They were appropriately amazed.
Immediately they attacked his hand, trying to pull his thumb off themselves and, when that failed, insisting he do the trick again.

“Oh, it hurts so
bad
,” Bill protested. “It was cut off in the war, you know.”

“It
was
?” Vulpe immediately warmed to the violence. “Was it the Battle of the Deceptions?”

“Was it the Battle of Thera?” Lee asked.

“Was it the Battle of the Two Horses?” Vulpe asked.

Bill laughed.
As much as he’d been suddenly melancholy, he warmed to these two immediately.

“Looks like you made new friends,” Melissa said to him.

She stood next to Shela, watching him. The Empress held her youngest, and the girl with purple hair stood back from all of them, watching the crowd that moved past, looking through the Wolf Soldiers and into peoples’ faces. She took in the rooftops, the city walls—she clearly protected the children as well as being their nanny.

“They are such well-behaved children,” he said to Shela.

She inclined her head. “Their father has a way with them, this is true. And there is Nina—she never leaves them.”

Nina, the girl with purple hair, looked Bill over once, then looked away again.

“I don’t think anyone would cross that girl,” Bill said, smiling.

“Not two times, no,” Shela agreed.
She looked at Nina. “Have you been bringing her outside? She is hardly crying.”

“Every day,” Nina said.
Her voice sounded musical, not like the Uman-Chi, but as if she really sang her words. “She can tolerate it for an hour now. I ordered the closed carriage for the trip to the palace.”

Bill marveled that he had gotten every word.

Six black horses pulled the closed carriage, and it approached even as she mentioned it.
It looked large, but he didn’t think it would be big enough for all of them. He opened his mouth to say something when Lupus turned around and saw him.

“Do you ride?” he asked, in Uman.

“Horses?” Bill said, then caught himself. Lupus probably didn’t mean he had a Harley.

“Yes, your Imperial Majesty, I love to ride.”

Lupus smiled. “Good,” he said. “Because we are going to go exercise my stallion while the girls go back to the palace with Karel and Xinto.”

Bill looked past the approaching wagon for another horse and didn’t see one.
He looked back at Lupus.

“Your stallion?”

Lupus smiled. “The grooms can’t handle him,” he said. “Watch this.”

He put two fingers in his mouth, and he gave a very un-Emperor-like whistle.
Both the kids covered their ears and the baby screamed in anger at the sudden noise.

What could only have been a stallion’s challenge answered him, and he heard a horrible crash from behind the wagon the team of six pulled.
Then another, and another, and Bill took two steps to the side to see a smaller wagon behind the larger one, making great leaps as whatever it contained inside it tried to get out.

One more scream, one more crash, and two Uman groomsmen ran for their lives as the back door to the smaller wagon flew from its hinges.
A massive white stallion immediately backed out and reared.

It stood bigger than a Clydesdale, built like an Arabian, with a huge barrel and powerful, blue-veined legs.
Its iron-shod hooves actually made sparks on the cobblestones as it moved. Its scream might not be deafening but it sufficed to let you know an angry stallion made it. It dropped to all fours and raised and lowered its head several times, then drew a bead on Lupus and charged.

The Emperor stood his ground while the others around him scattered.
The giant ran right up to him and immediately began to butt him with his head. The horse stood easily eighteen hands.

“Easy, oh,” Lupus said to him in a low voice, rubbing the monster’s neck and ears.
The big stallion actually rubbed Lupus’ face with his nose.

“What is
that
?” Bill asked.

“That’s Blizzard,” Vulpe informed him.
“That is papa’s horse.”

“You can’t touch him,” Lee warned.
“He will bite your arm off and
eat
it!”

“He will?” Bill couldn’t be sure they were kidding.

“He does bite,” Shela warned him. She took a step next to him, bouncing her whimpering baby, as the crowd of onlookers grew and the Emperor comforted his giant stallion.

“I have never seen a horse like that,” Bill said.

“They do not have them where you are from?” Glynn asked him. She had been quiet since her confrontation with Lupus, and Bill had almost forgotten her.