The Far Side (57 page)

“That’s good advice, even for a sergeant turned captain,” Melek said.

The storm was as bad as the one they’d experienced in the rookery, but the citadel was a solid building and never once so much as trembled.

When dawn came, the clouds were breaking up, and the winds had died away.  Collum, Melek, and the city council had men off at once seeing what had happened to the city.

Kris and Andie went to reassure people waiting on the steps after a long and hard night.

Then Collum appeared.  “There is some wind damage in the city.  Already Melek has men working to fix that. There was a lot of rain, but the people of Arvala can teach dralka about how to engineer not to flood!”

There were cheers, and after that, people were released in small groups.

About ten in the morning, Kris saw something on Andie’s shirt and looked again, not sure what she was seeing.   “Andie, the message light on the radio is blinking.”

Andie looked down and saw that it was.  “Probably the static last night,” she said with a laugh.  She picked it up and put it to her ear.  “Andie,” she said, not expecting anything.

“Tell me sunshine,” Ezra told her.  “What part of ‘I’ll check in at dawn’ did you forget today?’”

“We had a bit of a storm,” Andie said.  “But, regardless, I’m sorry.”

“We did too.  Andie, say hello to my cousin, Jacob.”

“Hello Andie,” a strange voice said.

Andie lifted an eyebrow.  “I have a message to you from your old man, Andie.  He says would you please get the lead out -- he’s trying as hard as he can, he’s not going to live forever.”

Andie whooped.  “You’re from home?”

“Well, you wouldn’t recognize it as home, but, yeah, pretty much.  Tell Kris her father and mother send their regards.”

“Fuck them!  Tell me Art Foster and Kit Richards are dead!”

“Will you settle for one out of two?  Look, Andie and Kris, Jake and I have talked to home; I’m pretty sure from your signal that you can’t talk direct.  Jake has a radio that can talk direct.”

“Cool!”

“So, we are now hotfooting it towards you.  We think we were just a bit south of the eye of the storm.  We haven’t heard from the rookery yet, but Andie, Linda is waiting to say hello to you.”

“Well, you tell her hello from me too and that I just doubled her salary.”

“Later.  We need to make some tracks -- Jake had a run in with the Tengri last night and one of them might be hanging around.  We don’t want to give one of them a cheap shot.  I’ll be back on the radio in four hours when we stop for lunch!”

“See you then!” Andie said, then dropped the radio on a table grabbed Kris and the two danced with mad abandon for a few minutes.

“Your people have come?” Melek said evenly.

“Yes,” Kris said.  “Melek, if you think we will walk away now and leave you to luck -- it’s not going to happen!”

“Not even!” Andie said.  “Christ!  We’ll whistle up a division of Marines, and the Tengri won’t exist after that!”

Chapter 22
:: Happy Face Again

“Jesus!” Kris said, having heard the recitation of events since they’d left home.

“Fuck!  Shit!” Andie echoed her.

Andie looked around.  “You guys talk, I have a class to teach!  I’ll be back in a bit.”

Melek was waiting patiently a few feet away and Kris felt sorry for him.  There was no way she could explain this.  None.  “Our families,” she told him, “are overjoyed that we are safe.  Even Andie’s father who wasn’t expected to live, has tarried in this life to be able to say goodbye to her.”

“You will go to them?” Melek asked without inflection.

Andie laughed.  “Say goodbye to my old man?  Do you know how many times that bastard left the house without so much as a word?  Still...”  She shook her head and headed off to her class.

Still, he was supposed to be dead.  That he was alive and wanted to hug Andie one last time had to be a powerful motivation.  Kris looked at Melek who looked back at her without expression on his face.

She remembered what Ezra had said once about not wanting to teach the Arvalans poker -- that they’d learn poker faces and then they’d have no idea what they were thinking.  She didn’t know what they were thinking now.

“Melek,” Kris said softly, “where were you born?”

“Tirala -- my father is a merchant there.  My mother had too many children.”

Dead, in other words.

“And you live here, now, right?  Not there?”

“Here, aye.  This is where my duty is.”

“And you think so little of me that I would walk away from my duty to you, to Arvala, to the Chain Breakers...” her breath caught, “to those like Chaba, who need to have their chains broken... do you think I am Dralka, to just put that aside?”

“You haven’t sworn oaths.”

“No, but tell me what was in your heart before you swore your oaths?  Did you want to do you duty?  Did you want to bring honor to your family and the Chain Breakers?”

“Of course... Kris... it is your home.  You can’t give up your home for strangers.”

“And yet, you swore you’d die trying to rescue descendants of your ancestors -- ancestors you’ve never met and whose descendents, with the exception of one, you also have not met.  And you do this duty far from the home you grew up in.”

“It is different.”

“Not if you hold honor to be worth dying for, Melek.”  Kris faced him.  “Look, I know you think I am from a place of wonders and marvels, where we can do anything we wish.  Some of that is true, but there are those of us just as misguided as Mardan and the Dralka.  And, unlike here, at home, those people have been in the ascendancy.  My parents, Melek!  They tortured my parents!  They broke my father’s hand!  They broke Andie’s friend’s legs!  A woman!  They killed one of our employees, a man that Andie had hired to help her!  Another has died trying to rescue us!  We do not come from a place any different than Arvala, Melek!”

“And of those who went south with Menim and myself, nine in all, five of us live, Kris.  With the exception of Menim, the others died doing their duty.  Death comes to us all.”

Collum walked into the room and bowed to Kris. “Lady Kris.”

“I was told that I could never think of myself like that.”

“Well, if I am to be King, that will be one my first official acts: making you and Andie ladies of the realm.”

“I would hate to think that the more nobles I kill, the higher the rank I would obtain.”

Melek laughed politely.  “Lady Kris, you are a noblewoman or you are not.  There are no degrees of nobility here.”

“Well, that’s a good thing.  And Andie?”

He bowed his head.  “If I told Andie I’d made her a noble, I do believe she’d shoot me.  I was going to leave telling her that to you.”

Kris had to laugh.  “Probably she would
still shoot you.”

“I got the idea from Andie, actually.  She was talking about people from your home who teach at the finest schools -- those with the finest minds.  She told me that these are called ‘professors.’  I will name her the First Professor of Arvala.”

“That will tickle her funny bone,” Kris admitted.  “I was trying to tell her that one day she’d be a professor.  This will make that come true.”

The three of them talked about various things that had to be done yet before the army could march south and were still at it when Andie returned.

Andie smiled smugly, satisfied.  “I do believe I’m getting the idea of steam power across to them.  I have unexpected support from the millers -- right now they are screwed because the wind from the storm trashed every single wind-powered mill and the rains washed away most of the water mills.  The thought of a mill not dependent on wind or water is attractive to them.”

“That is so, Andie,” Melek said, a pleased look on his face.  “You say the black stuff -- coal -- works well?”

“Aye, charcoal as well.”

“There are mountains of coal not far from the city, and there are seams down each of the Fingers,” Collum contributed.

“You know that Ezra wanted to know a lot about what’s on your maps,” Andie told them.  “We need to talk a bit about rocks and the history of your planet.”

“I do not understand, Andie,” Collum told her.

“We’re talking about mountains of coal.  I already know that a hundred miles to the northeast there is a large complex of what I’m pretty sure are some volcanoes.  About three quarters of the way to them is a huge red mountain, as I’ve heard it described, that’s where you get your iron ore.

“Further, off to the west i
s a very large range of mountains made of granite, with additional seams of copper.  There are tin deposits on the Fingers.  You have no idea how lucky you are -- where we are from, it is uncommon to find so many minerals in one place.

“I’ve been thinking about those deposits and I’ve been thinking about the rocks we walked past on our way here.

“The East Finger is a section of what was once sea floor that was lifted many thousands of feet, and part of it broke, here on the western edge of the peninsula.

“The eastern eighty miles is mostly flat terrain, sloping very gradually to the place where the rock broke and then the next twenty miles the land slopes steeply to the sea, but unlike the eastern part, the rocks are at about a twenty degree angle.

“Geology isn’t something I was really interested in, but the whole concept of drifting continents was interesting to me.”

“Drifting continents?” Melek asked.

“Aye, at home the surface of our world is a number of large chunks of crust that float on the top of the mantle, and move around as the mantle shifts beneath it.  Think of an old lake bed with a muddy bottom, and the way the mud cracks when it dries.  Then imagine the whole thing resting on molten rock that is slowly moving.”

“Wouldn’t this crust melt?” Collum asked, sounding reasonable.

“At home we were talking a crust of between twelve and fifty miles thick.  But, here we’ve walked over a section of rock that is more than twenty miles thick and got a good look at the various layers.

“It’s a mixture, which isn’t a surprise.  On Earth it’s a mixture as well.  The thickness though -- that is interesting.  Further, there are a number of things that are anomalous, at least as far as we are concerned.  Our planet’s axis isn’t straight up and down and as a result the length of our days and nights are not only unequal, but vary, depending on the time of the year.

“Your days are twenty and a half hours long.  Moreover, it’s light for exactly half of that -- at least it would be if the Big Moon wasn’t in the sky half of the time.  Scientists from home are going to be fascinated, and while I’m not as smart as they are when it comes to this sort of thing, I’m betting they’re going to find that your planet is nearly tidally locked to the Big Moon -- that at some point in time it’s going to look like it stops in your sky, and will hang forever at that point after that.

“Because your rotational axis is vertical, you have no seasons like we do at home.  Seasons being times of the year where the climate warms up or cools down and about which you have no idea what we’re talking about.”  She laughed.  “I understand that some of your farmers get four crops a year.”

Collum shook his head.  “You can do that for a year and a half and after that the harvest declines steeply.  We let the land sit idle, usually a quarter of the year.  And we change what we plant during the year.”

“Yeah, I wondered about that at first,” Andie told him.  “There seemed to be a lot of people in the artisan and merchant classes -- many more than there were at similar stages in our history.  You had to do a lot of things a more settled culture wouldn’t have had to do -- it’s why the Tengri are further along that you are.

“At home at a similar stage of development, eight or nine out of ten of our people farmed, to feed the rest.  Here it’s half.”

“And how many have you freed up now?” Collum asked.  “As many as we have?”

Andie smiled slightly.  “No.  Only about two percent of my people farm.  There are peoples who lag behind, but they are getting more uncommon.”

She waved around.  “We crossed thick strata of limestone, sandstone, there were some granite sections as well.  Many kinds of limestone, several grades of sandstone.  I know I’m undoubtedly making an elementary mistake, but I get the distinct impression that this planet is older than ours.”

Andie paused.  “One thing I am also surprised about is that the Big Moon doesn’t seem to be causing some of the tidal effects we see from our, much smaller, moon back home.”

“We do have tides,” Melek pointed out.  “The water level varies by many feet over a month.”

“Yes, but there are a couple of moons in our solar system that are close to a much larger planet and they experience considerable heating.”

Kris perked up.  “Would they still experience heating if the orbit is mostly circular?”

“I don’t know.  We’ll have to ask when we get back.”

Andie looked at the two older men.  “You do know that we will be coming back, right?”

“No, Andie,” Collum told her.  “We don’t know that.  I have only a slight understanding of how you came here, but I understand that something almost happened so that you could never leave.  If that is possible, so is it possible that you couldn’t return.”

“Collum, you and Ezra went south to meet the Tengri.  You found they had superior weapons.  Please tell me that you understand that something could have happened and you could have died there.”

Collum bowed his head.  “It is as you say, Andie.  We were clever and they were not.”

“And, I’m pretty clever as well.  But we both know that at times cleverness isn’t enough and you take what you get.  Sometimes what you get isn’t what you wanted at all.  Collum, you could get killed fighting the Tengri.  A great many women and children could get killed -- you could save them by surrendering.”

“I’d rather see them dead!” Collum told her.

“And if it was me, I’d agree,” Andie told him.  “You have a war to fight, and if I was a betting person, this is going to be a war that lasts a very long time.

“You must understand, that now no matter what, they know where you are here, and I think we all know that they want to finish the job their ancestors started, just as you want to stop them, and, in time, roll them back.  I tell you true, Collum, your grandchildren might see that victory but you won’t.  You could, though, if you mess up, see the defeat and destruction of your people.”

“I know.  But we have to fight.  We must fight!”

“I agree.  Kris agrees, Ezra agrees.  And trust me, I have friends back home, and no matter how things are back there, I’m going to get my way.  The authorities aren’t half smart enough to stop me.  They never have been and they never will be.

“I will see you safe, Collum.  I swear it.  I can’t do it for you, but I can sure show you things that you’ll need to know to win in the end.

“You have seen our firearms and you’ve seen theirs.  Do you understand how little gunpowder is used by each weapon?”

“I’ve listened to you, Andie.  It isn’t much -- but like arrows, you shoot a great many times.”

“Exactly.  One thing I will do will be to show you how to put more gunpowder in one place and explode it.  We call those bombs.  Trust me, a ton of gunpowder exploding leaves a great huge hole.”

Collum sucked air.  “It would!  I never thought of that!  We can make devices that could do that!”

“Indeed you can.  We did.  We’ve used them by the thousands and millions in our wars.  They are more deadly than you can believe, but on the other hand, they aren’t the end of the world.  I will speak of this just once, now and never again.  Kris -- please, don’t speak of this either.

“Collum
, we have weapons like those of gunpowder, using powerful explosives -- they leave large holes.  But Collum we also have weapons where it would take just one to leave Arvala nothing but a smoking hole in the ground, poison to anyone who tried to live here for years afterwards.”