The Patrimony (27 page)

“Quick, Bili,” she said calmly, her temper dissipated in the urgency of the moment, “get a spear. I’ll hold him here. He looks to be gone mad.”

But he moved not a muscle, he only chuckled and, in less than the blinking of an eye… the hound was gone!

Aldora spun about, shouting, “Damn you, Bili Morguhn! Ahrmehnee magic! How
dare
you do that to
me!
Do you forget who I am?” She lunged upward at his body with the long dagger.

Still chuckling, he lightly skipped from the path of the thrust and struck the hand wielding it hard enough that the weapon went clattering into a corner. Then the delicate-looking little woman went for his face with her nails, but he clasped his arms around her, easily immobilizing both arms, while his questing lips found hers, locked upon them and remained for a long, long time, before wandering downward to pay brief court to a flat, tiny ear, and then burying themselves in the hollow of her throat.

Much, much later, as both lay, tired and disheveled, upon a badly rumpled bed, Aldora’s fingers traced the scars on his smooth, fair-skinned body, recalling that she had done so thirty-odd years before when this same, marvelous man had been a boy… no, never a boy, not him, not Bili!…

She sighed and lay back down beside him, snuggling to the hard warmth of his body. “How old are you now, Bili?”

He turned his head to smile down into her upturned, heart-shaped face. “Nearly fifty summers, my love. Why? Does this old man displease you?”

She shivered with thought of the recent pleasure he had given her and briefly raised her mindshield that he might know and be forever answered. “Oh, Bili, Bili, my own Bili,” she murmured with intense feeling. “Why could it have not been you, rather than this half brother of yours?

“I had almost forgotten, you know? Had almost ceased to remember just how wonderful, how complete and perfect it has always been with you… and only with you.”

In another part of the archducal hall, Milo of Morai— once Undying God of the Horseclans, now Undying High Lord of the Confederation, by his own reckoning, at least eight hundred years old—sipped wine and chatted with the three newest-found of his rare, mutant strain.

The tests devised by him and by Aldora and administered under their constant supervision had shown positive results in all three cases. The ancient High Lord was inordinately pleased and showed it plainly.

“Giliahna, Neeka, you’ll both love the new capital, Theesispolis, and especially the palace there. My wife, Mara, designed it and oversaw every step of its construction. And, speaking of Mara, she’ll be more than overjoyed to see you. She and Aldora, they… well, Aldora is seldom happy or contented for long and she envies Mara so much that about twenty years ago she tried to drown her—that being one of the few ways our kind can be slain. Since then, the two have consistently and most wisely avoided being in the same city at the same time.

“I am, perforce, often in the western mountains on campaign and poor Mara grows lonely with only old Drehkos for company.” He took a long draft of the brandy-laced wine and clapped Tim Sanderz on the shoulder.

“As for you, Tim, you’re the incarnate answer to centuries of prayers. You enjoy campaigning and warfare. You’re good at it. You’re a natural leader and, moreover, you’re an experienced commander of organized troops, so presumably a good tactician. If you prove out as a strategist, as well, I may finally be able to get a few years of rest.

“With Drehkos to govern the settled lands—something he’s quite skilled at—and you to command the armies and the frontier, Mara and I might go away for a while. We might sail out to the Islands or even clear across the Eastern Sea to the lands beyond—Ehspahneeah, Gahleeah or even Pahl’yos Ehlahs—it’s been centuries since either of us has seen those lands, or even been much beyond the borders of our own.”

Tim’s blue eyes were wide with amazement. “But… you mean you’d trust
me
with your entire military establishment, my lord Milo?”

“Tim, you’d better start remembering to call me Milo and comport yourself as the equal, the peer, that you all truly are.

With luck, we’ll have many centuries together, and even a single hundred years is a hellishly long time for one man to defer to another.

“Yes, I’ll trust you with the armies… when you’ve proved you can handle them properly, win victories without too high a butcher’s bill, think for yourself, yet have the good sense to know when to accept and defer to the advice of your staff. But that will be five or ten years from now, Tim.

“Immediately we all go back to the old capital, Kehnooryos Atheenahs, for the winter, you three will enter the Confederation Mindspeak Academy and well then learn just what active and latent talents you each possess. But you’ll not only be studied, you’ll be taught, as well.

“You’ll learn the many different levels of mental communication, and how to speak on two or three at the same time. You’ll be taught how to get around or through closed mind-shields and, if you own the innate ability, how to do it without the shielded mind even knowing it. You’ll be taught to farspeak, and your range—with and without the added power of other minds—will be meticulously measured and recorded.

“You may—one or two of you, anyway—learn to far-gather, though I confess we’ve had precious little success in teaching that highly esoteric skill. Those who have been able to learn already possessed the rudiments. The Academy simply honed an existing edge, as it were.”

Neeka shook her head slowly, then asked, “Lord, what is this fargather? I’ve never heard the term.”

After long years with the arrogant, outspoken, bull-headed and often violent Aldora; with his loving but self-assured and frequently argumentative wife, the Undying High Lady Mara, Milo had felt instantly attracted to this quiet, humble and unassuming, basically gentle, raven-haired beauty. Though they two had been sharing a suite and a bed for some weeks, her public manner toward him remained one of humility and deep respect. He was becoming more and more fond of her and was seriously considering marriage to her after a few years, if Mara approved.

“Fargathering, Neeka, is the rare ability to mentally detect danger at distances and through many barriers. It is most applicable to soldiering and warfare and most useful therein. In the century or so of the Academy, the number of actual occurrences, either natural or induced, of real strength in its use has been pitifully small. All of those, saving only one, have been men.

“That single exception was our present host’s first wife, Rahksahna Morguhn—Ahrmehnee-born, now deceased. Bili, himself, owns the strongest fargathering talent ever recorded, yet none of his brothers so far tested has the power to any degree, and his three children by Rahksahna lack it entirely. I am now hoping against all the odds that Tim and Gil, as they both had the same mother as Bili, will prove latent far-gatherers.”

Milo drained off the other half of his goblet, then refilled it, continuing to talk while reaming his pipe and packing it with tobacco.

“You’ll learn to mindspeak with animals, not just horses and cats, but all manner of beasts. You’ll learn to see with others’ eyes, hear with their ears, smell with their noses, taste with their tongues and feel with their skins.”

His eyes caught Neeka’s and she lowered her gaze, flushing darkly, a small smile tugging at her lips. In their nights together, he had already commenced her education in those particular and erotically pleasurable directions.

“Finally, when you’ve absorbed all the Academy has to offer you, you’ll start learning languages and dialects. All of you know Mehrikan—Neeka knows one dialect, Gil two, and Tim five, but there are more than a dozen all told in the Confederation alone. You all can read and write and speak Southern Ehleeneekos, and Neeka knows the Northern dialect, but you’ll all have to learn the Island dialect, which differs markedly from mainland Ehleeneekos.

“Tim and Gil speak a passable Ahrmehnee, already, and Neeka can quickly master it, no doubt, but you’ll all have to learn to read and write it, and that will take time, since they use an alphabet entirely different from Mehrikan and only distantly related to Ehleeneekos.

“Neeka reads and writes Zahrtohgahn, but she can’t speak it. Tim speaks Kweebehkeekos and Nyahgrahee, which are almost the same language, and a bastard pidgin-Zahrtohgahn. The only language that at least one of you doesn’t have is English.”

All three looked puzzled at the unfamiliar word. Before any could frame the question, Milo explained.

“English was the language that was spoken and written by the people who dwelt on this continent almost a thousand years ago. The gullible and the superstitious of our time call those long-dead people gods, but they were not, any more than am I or are you. The Witch Kingdom, so called, deep in the southern swamps, is the only place that English still exists as a spoken language, though all the many Mehrikan dialects are its direct descendants.

“If, after you’ve mastered all the more needful languages, you want to learn to speak English properly, fine, I’ll be happy to teach you… and I’m the only man outside the Witch Kingdom who can. But you must all learn to at least read English. Now and then, one or two or more of the ancient books turn up somewhere or other, my agents obtain them by hook or by crook and they are rushed to Theesispolis to be carefully preserved in the great library there, along with the volumes of my personal journal, which is also in English.

“These books contain, oftimes, knowledge which has, does and will prove invaluable to us and our people over the centuries. So we must all have the ability to partake of it.”

All three nodded assent. Then Neeka’s brow wrinkled and she shyly asked, “But why learn all these other languages, my lord, when we can all mindspeak?”

Milo had arisen and was standing with his pipestem in his mouth, its filled bowl inverted over a candle flame, while he sucked mightily and little spurts of wispy smoke jetted from his mouth.

Tim answered the question. “Because, Neeka, outside the Confederation, mindspeak ability is far less common than it is in our lands.”

Milo resumed his seat, he and his now well-lit pipe emitting clouds of fragrant, blue-gray smoke. He nodded. “Tim is right. But even in the Confederation, only a little more than half the people have real, everyday-usable mindspeak even though the percentage has been climbing every year for the last two hundred or more.

“When I led the first ten thousand or so of the Kindred from the Sea of Grass and into Kehnooryos Ehlahs a bit more than two centuries ago, mindspeak—since it had long been a survival trait in the hard and too often short life of the clanspeople on the prairies and high plains, as it was the means of communicating with their horses and the allied prairiecats—was present to some degree in between seventy and eighty percent of them.

“But in the Southern Ehleenee, whom we conquered piecemeal, only one or two percent were accomplished mindspeak-ers, and even those with latent powers only brought the figure to something less than ten out of every hundred. There were two reasons for this: Since their culture differed so drastically from that of the Horseclans, they had no real, pressing need for the ability and so had never nurtured and developed it; and since their antique religion considered any unusual mental abilities to be an indication of witchcraft—for which ‘sin’ the penalties were harsh, hideous, agonizing and fatal—those who did possess mindspeak seldom used it.

“As the Kindred and Ehleenee intermarried and interbred, the talent began to crop up with more frequency, especially among the nobility. Then, after I broke the power of the Ehleen Church a century and a half back; after I stripped their clergy of many of their ancient rights and privileges, revoked their tax-exempt status retroactively and seized much of their property for back taxes along with tons of gold and silver; after I disbanded and either killed or imprisoned their secret packs of night-riding terrorists; after I released the common Ehleenee from the Church’s emotional stranglehold and turned them against the clergy by exposing those clergymen for what they truly were—smugglers, brothel owners, receivers of stolen goods, extortionists, rapists and murderers, and most telling, slavers of the worst sort, who maintained a fleet of merchant ships to transport the children the priests demanded of their parishioners for ‘holy orders’ across the sea to be sold at auction; after all this had been done and most of the Ehleenee were truly free in both mind and body, the percentage of mindspeakers really began to climb.

“But what I consider—as will you—progress is seldom comprehensible to those whose lives span only fifty or sixty years and often less. Nonetheless, the population of the Confederation now includes almost sixty percent mindspeakers, and that is a hopeful sign that, someday, all our people will share the same gift.”

In the late evening of yet another day, Milo sat with his pipe and a small goblet of fiery cordial, his nude, freshly bathed body wrapped against the chill of the night in a chamber cloak of silk and fur. His long, almost hairless, bare legs were extended before a fragrant fire of oak and applewood.

Across the width of their chamber, warmed by a nearby brazier, sat Neeka. The woman occupied a low, padded stool, faced a mirror lit by flanking lamps, and was raptly concentrating on the meticulous brushing of her buttock-length black hair. Her own goblet of cordial sat on her dressing table, barely sipped, and the small, richly jeweled pipe she was trying to learn to smoke had been set aside to smolder out.

Between them, a big bed, its cherrywood headboard carved with the arms of Clan Morguhn, awaited them. Milo was eagerly anticipating the warmth of feather mattress and quilted coverings, but Neeka, it soon became apparent, was thinking of other things.

“Milo,” she asked, still brushing, “people have to have something to believe in. It was wrong for you to destroy the Church, and that destruction can only breed more and more rebellions over the years. Someday, the Ehleenee may even unite and—”

Milo chuckled and interrupted her. “Ehleenee unite? Never! Neeka, they couldn’t even unite to face the threat of my armies conquering them, so factionalized and backstab-bing were they… and they’ve not changed one whit over the years.