Indomitus Oriens (The Fovean Chronicles) (35 page)

             
Raven digested that. She hadn’t been a church-going Christian since her childhood, but that didn’t make her ready to change her religion, either. She had a lot of questions she didn’t have the language skills to ask, and she didn’t know if she trusted Glynn to give her the right answers, either.

             
“The gods are important here?” she asked, finally. “They get right down into your lives?”

             
Glynn sat her mount silently for a minute or more. Both sat sidesaddles, their dresses’ skirts draped over their mounts’ butts. The plains stood open and the day quiet, the cool breeze in their faces.

“It is forbidden,” Glynn said, finally, “for a god to touch the life of a mortal on this world.
With what we know now, there are some Uman-Chi who believe this is why the god War sought the Conqueror. War can direct this ‘Lupus,’ this wolf, directly, and break the rules.”

             
“So the Mountain and I?” Melissa couldn’t finish the question, for all it implied.

             
Glynn nodded. “You have not, then, been contacted, heard any voice in your head, directing you?”

             
Melissa shook her head. “How would I tell?” she asked. “I mean, what would it sound like?”

             
“Honestly, I have no idea,” Glynn said. “The Emperor would know, if I am correct, but then how would one ask him?”

             
“Yeah,” Melissa said. “Kind of late for that now.”

             
They continued in silence. A cool breeze blew from the west and tugged at both women’s hair. She’d been forced to take a side-saddle because all of the ones for men were in use when she was leaving. She shifted on it, giving Xinto the opportunity to move his hands on her waist.

             
“The Mountain hasn’t told me anything about any voices,” she said, finally.

             
Glynn nodded, and said nothing.

             
“Maybe we have to—you know—pledge ourselves to a god first?” Melissa asked.

             
“Would you do that?” Xinto said. “Forsake your deity, who created you, who cared for you, for another, whose intentions you do not know?”

             
Melissa thought of the ones who had created her—a mother who had made her life hell, and a father who had let her down, chosen her loser sister over her, trashed her chances at college.

             
She considered the god who had let them.

             
And in the end she said nothing.

* * *

              Little Storm’s hooves drummed the plain, faster than any horse should move.

             
The Mountain—he had to force himself to think of himself as that now—had spent his time on horseback before. Growing up on a farm, he’d enjoyed the Appaloosa ponies his father raised as a side business, and had broken many of them to saddle himself.

             
Appy’s were a great breed, but they didn’t run this fast. Thoroughbreds ran fast, but the fastest of them wouldn’t have kept pace with Little Storm, and none of the fast ones had his stamina.

             
The Mountain turned his head and looked back down the road, no longer able to see the markers for Galnesh Eldador, much less the city spires. That shouldn’t have happened so soon, he thought.

             
It was another two hours before he came to a decent-sized town, if you could call it that, the Mountain thought to himself. Approaching from the North, he saw a few sod houses dug up out of the dirt and, past them, a central building made of dirt and sticks. They kept a few horses and a few cows that he could see, the cows looking bushier than the cows of Earth. Domestic bovines had been bred thousands of years ago from aurochs, and he wondered if he saw that now. He didn’t see a bull.

             
He slowed the horse as he found what was likely a market. It consisted mostly of Uman and a few swarthy Men, their wares on blankets before them, and children of both races running between. To their west, a solid wooden building had to be an outhouse from the reek coming off of it.

             
The swarthy Men turned out to be Volkhydran immigrants. Bill walked himself right up to them, staying on his horse, and introduced himself.

             
“Mountain—there is a funny name,” one said. “There is no Volkhydran called that.”

             
“What’s a common Volkhydran name?” the Mountain asked.

             
“Krell—that’s common,” one woman said, a toothless grandmother with children at her feet. Lupus had explained the Eldadorian custom meant keeping your fields away from your home. Farmers staked a claim and declared it to the Empire, and farmed it, but walked to the farm and lived on land that wasn’t as fit for farming.

             
“Nantar, too,” another woman, just as old, said. They dressed in loose fitting cotton dresses, died in purples and blues. They kept their hair loose behind them. “Because of Nantar of the Daff Kanaar. Agtar, Kafar—those are good Volkhydran names.”

             
“Jack,” the first woman said. “I know a Jack from Kendo.”

             
“Jack?” the Mountain asked. He could live with Jack. He had an uncle named Jack.

             
She nodded. “You see these furs?” she pointed toward the piles on the blanket before her. Flies buzzed around them. “These are Hydran furs, but Volkans wear them. You put these on, you look like a Volkhydran.”

             
The Mountain put his hands to his wide belt, about to explain that he didn’t have any money, when he found a bag attached to it that he didn’t remember putting there.

             
He pulled it from his belt and it jingled. He opened it and found a collection of gold, silver and copper coins, which the locals called ‘Tabaars.”

             
“Got anything an Andaran girl would wear?” the Mountain asked.

             
“Do they wear anything?” the first old woman joked. The second sniggered. “I thought they didn’t waste time with clothes. Took too much time to take off.”

             
“Isn’t the Empress an Andaran?” the Mountain asked.

             
“What of it?” the second asked. “All that means is Lupus is insatiable.”

             
“He
is
insatiable,” the first old woman said. “He has an appetite for everything.”

             
“He does?” the Mountain asked.

             
“Well, he doesn’t tax as bad as our old lord,” the first said. “But you have to pay it all—I don’t know that we are better off. I lived in Alun, and our lord demanded half of our planting. I don’t think we ever gave him more than a tenth part, though. We knew how to hide it. Here, they take fifteen of a hundred, which is hard to figure out. We grow a lot of corn—you have to actually take a hundred ears to get fifteen. Same with spuds, same with squashes. The magistrate comes ‘round with the local bull—he takes one calf in seven.”

             
“It’s a game—the game here is the same game as the game there,” the second said, and took a fur back from Bill. “I didn’t mean to have that one in the pile.”

             
“But it was in the pile,” he said, his salesman sense sparking.

             
“But I didn’t mean to have it there,” she said. “That’s a nice fur.”

             
“I want a nice fur.”

             
“Well, it’s more.”

             
She and Bill began to haggle. Bill didn’t know the local currency, but a good rule of thumb was to ask for twice what you expected to get for your wares. The first old lady turned behind her and pulled out a tangle of leather.

             
“I can let you have this for a silver,” she said. “It is off of an Andaran woman, I know it. Put a skirt on your girl and a horsehide robe, and she’ll look like any Andaran.”

             
“Do you have the skirt and the robe?”

             
“I know someone who does—can you wait?”

             
“I can wait.”

             
“Will you be wanting a girl?” she asked him.

             
Bill straightened. “What?”

             
“Oh, don’t be embarrassed,” the old woman made a ‘shooing’ motion with her hand. “Man comes off the trail, come to a town, he’ll eventually look for a girl.”

             
Bill sighed. “Well, I
am
looking for a girl, actually a couple girls, who may have come through here.”

             
The one old woman poked the other. “He’s chasing a girl,” he said.

             
“
That
is more like a Volkhydran man,” the other answered.

             
“Was a young girl came through here with an Uman-Chi and a Scitai feller,” the first told him, squinting into his eyes. “But unless you want another daughter, she’s too young for you.”

             
“Where were they bound?” Bill asked.

             
The two women exchanged a glance.

             
Bill leaned forward. “She
is
my daughter,” he said. “And the Uman-Chi thinks she looks like the Empress. I don’t think they have any good plans for her.”

             
“Knew that Uman-Chi was a liar,” the second woman said.

             
“Was with a Scitai,” the first agreed. “You know they do nuthin’ but steal.”

             
“Your daughter went south to find Brinn’s Hostel,” The second informed him, laying the Andaran clothes out for him. “They’ll be there the end of the day if they go a normal pace. I don’t know as you can push that draft to catch ‘em.”

             
“Overland he could,” a man said from behind them.

             
Bill turned to see another Volkhydran, probably his own age but looking
much
the worse for wear, with grey-shot hair and puckered skin. He dressed in worn leathers and sandals.

             
“The road takes a gentle curve,” he informed Bill. “You take the straight, keep a point on the south, you’ll save yourself three
daheeri
, like as cut them off.”              

             
The Uman-Chi had educated Bill and Melissa on standards of measure.
Daheeri
were each a tenth of the distance from one horizon to the next on a flat plain, or about 1.2 miles, if this planet was about the same size as Earth. The gravity didn’t make him think otherwise.

             
“Is there a point you know of?” Bill asked him. It wasn’t easy to keep your bearings when you travelled, less so when you went fast. Any animal tends to want to circle to one side or the other.

             
“I can sell you a comm—pass,” he said.

             
That word was just too similar.

             
Sure enough, the Emperor had introduced the compass to these people, along with the secret of making them. Bill spent six silvers on clothes for himself and for Melissa, for the compass and a meal while he was here. They threw hay to his horse for free. A couple Uman whores presented themselves to him but he declined their services. They were more persistent than Bill would have liked.

* * *

              Glynn and Raven arrived at the Eldadorian hostel as the sun set. They unsaddled their own horses in a public stable, with plenty of hay and grain, outside of a big, stone holding, three stories tall, with a gigantic tub in front and a fire next to that.

             
Dark skinned Men, no less than six of them, filled the tub, laughing and splashing each other. One stood beside the tub, stoking up the fire under an animal like a deer turning on a spit cranked by two children.

             
Raven laughed to herself. Glynn turned her nose up in disgust.

             
“I know, I know,” Raven said. “Men acting as the animals they are. Keep reminding yourself, Glynn.”

             
“I am reminded sufficiently, thank you,” Glynn said. “I think that we must needs wait here for my friend to find us.”

             
“Why?”

             
“Because we have no males,” Glynn said. “And I don’t fancy my breasts to be pawed by a flock of rude Men.”

             
Raven covered her breasts reflexively. “They would do that?”