Kingdom River Page 4

The girl was smiling at him as if they were old friends — apparently knew him from description. "I thought I had another day or two to walk to Better-Weather, but then I saw your camp, and said to myself, 'Ah — there's been fighting! So surely there the Captain-General will be.' " She made a little curtsy as a lady might have done south, in the Emperor's court, then took a fold of heavy white parchment from her coat, and handed it to him.

  "I'm instructed to serve the Lord Small-Sam Monroe as the voice of New England, at his pleasure of course. Ambassadress." The girl dwelt on the final s's and made a sudden face of glee.

  "From McAllen?"

  "No, lord. Second-cousin Louis is superseded. I come down from Harvard Yard directly to you… Poor old Cousin Louis; he'll be furious." She spoke a very elegant book-English.

  "I see."

  There was a spatter of dried blood down her long blue coat.

  She saw him notice it. "Travel stains of the travel weary — I walked all the way down."

  Walked, Sam thought, and walked in the air.... Still, from Boston-in-the-Ice to North Map-Mexico — alone and in however many weeks — was remarkable. And New England's first mistake, to let him know she was remarkable. They should have sent her by ship.

  He read — in black squid ink on fine-scraped hide — the submission of Patience Nearly-Lodge Riley's service as go-between (and Voice of the Cambridge Faculty and Town Meeting) to 'the person Small-Sam Monroe, presently Captain-General of North Map-Mexico'…. The 'presently' being a good touch.

  "Am I accepted?" She had a girl's fluting voice, as free of vibration as a child's.

  "For the present." 'The present' being a good touch.

  "Then, my baggage?" the ambassadress pointed up into the air. "So, soon I will be out of my stained coat."

  "Call the thing down," Sam said, and raised his voice to the troops. "Stand still, and keep silent!" The shouting hurt his head.

  The girl looked up, put two fingers into her mouth, and whistled as loud as he'd ever heard it done. That hurt his head, too.

  From high… high above, came a distant hooting, a mournful, uneasy sound. The troops shifted in the sunshine, and sergeants called them to order. They were looking up at what slowly circled down, sweep by sweep on great wings, making its low worried noises.

  Sam didn't look up. Margaret Mosten watched the Boston girl.

  Slow sweeps, slow descending, so the girl put her head back and whistled again. Sam's head throbbed. Fucking vodka — and the wrong day to have drunk it.

  Then the thing came swooping in, wings sighing… the sighs turning to thumps of air as it beat the hilltop's wind to slow… hang almost stationary over their heads in heavy flappings, and finally — as the girl stamped her booted foot and pointed at the ground — come down in a collapse and folding of great bat's wings. It folded them once, then again, so it fell forward on what should have been elbows, and crouched huge, hunched, and puffing from exertion or uneasiness. Its body was pale and freckled — smooth skin, no fur — its neck long, wattled, and odd. But it was the head made the troops murmur, no matter what the sergeants ordered.

  Sam stayed standing close by an effort, and looked at a toothed thin-lipped jaw almost long as a man's arm, a round bare bulge of skull with human ears, and eyes a suffering woman's tragic and beautiful blue. A pair of little shrunken breasts dangled from the creature's chest.

  The Boston girl went to the thing, made soothing puh-puh noises to it, and began to unbuckle its heavy harness. The wide leather straps were difficult to deal with, stiff with wetting and drying.

  Sam stepped beside her — heard Margaret grunt behind him — and leaned against the thing's flank, warm and massive as a charger's, to work a big buckle free. The creature smelled of human sweat, its skin smooth from crease to crease, and damp with the effort of flying.

  "What have you done?" he said, not a question he would have asked without the vodka.

  But the girl understood him.

  "Oh" — she patted its hide — "we make these... Persons from beginning babies, inside tribeswomen, or New England ladies who won't be responsible, fall into bad habits, and don't pay their debts." She tugged a second strap loose, then stepped aside so Sam could lift two heavy duffels and a shrouded wicker basket down from the thing's hunched back.

  Something rustled in the basket.

  "Weather be kind..." Michael Sergeant-Major came and shouldered Sam aside, bent to pick up the baggage. "Sir, where do you want these?" There was sweat on the sergeant-major's forehead.

  "Set a tent for the lady. East camp, beside Neckless Peter's, I think. Tent and marquee, camp furniture."

  "Canvased tub-bath," Margaret said. "Canvased toilet pit."

  Sam turned away, and the Boston girl came with him in quick little steps alongside, the long blue coat whispering. She smelled of nothing but the stone and ice of the high mountain air she'd walked through.

  "How are we to keep that sad thing, lady?"

  "Call me Patience, please, Lord Monroe; since we'll be camp-mates. I don't keep her; I send her home."

  "Home… And it goes all that distance back?"

  "Oh, yes. Its mother is there. It will wander a few weeks… but get to home hutch at last."

  "Its mother?"

  "Occas always rest in their mothers' care."

  "Nailed Jesus…"

  "May I change the subject — and ask, are you always so sad at your soldiers' dying?"

  Sam stopped. "What did you say?"

  The girl smiled up at him, her right hand resting at her side, casually on the grip of her scimitar. "I thought you must be sad for the soldiers I saw being buried below me, to be drunk so early in the day. It proves a tender heart."

  Margaret had come up behind them. "You mind your fucking manners," she said to the Boston girl, "or we'll kick your ass right out of here. Who are you to dare — "

  "Let it go, Margaret," Sam said. Then, to the girl:

  "Still, not a bad idea to mind your manners, Patience... or I will kick your ass right out of here."

  "Oh, dear. I apologize." The girl curtsied first to him, then to Margaret. "It will take us a while to learn to know each other better." She snapped her fingers at Michael Sergeant-Major, and he led her away, bent beneath the weight of her baggage and basket.

  When she was a distance gone, Sam began to laugh. It hurt his head, but was worth it for the pleasure of first laughter since coming down to This'll Do.

  "Nothing funny there," Margaret Mosten said.

  "Wouldn't want her for a daughter, Margaret?"

  "Sir, I would take a quirt to her if she were."

  "Mmm… It's interesting that the New England people sent us such a distraction. I wonder, to distract us from what?"

  "If necessary," Margaret said, " 'distractions' can have regrettable accidents. And that blood on the coat — 'travel stains.' "

  "Yes… See that people are careful with her. She carries to fight left-handed or with both hands. And there're parry-marks on the hilt of that scimitar — but no scars on her face, no scars on her sword arm when she reached up to undo the thing's harness." Salutes from the two cavalrymen guarding his tent. One of them had eased the chain catches on his breastplate slightly.

  "Johnson Fass."

  "Sir!" A more rigid attention by Corporal Fass.

  "Getting too fat for that cuirass?"

  "No, sir." Hurried fumbling to tighten the catches.

  "If we had a sudden alarm, Corporal, and you mounted to fight with that steel hanging loose on your chest, then one good cut across it with a saber or battle-ax would break your ribs like pick-up sticks."

  "Won't happen again, sir."

  Sam walked on. The young commander had spoken — unheard, of course, by the hundreds of dead buried beneath the hill. He wondered how many such disasters it would take, before the corporals stopped saluting....

  "About our guest, Margaret; I want people mindful that if she kills someone, I can only send her away. And if someone kills her, it mea
ns difficulty with Boston. So, no attempted love-making, no insults exchanged, no discourtesies, no duels on duty or on leave. Let the officers know that's an order."

  "Too bad," Margaret said, "because it's going to be a temptation. What the fuck do those New Englanders have in mind, sending us a girl like that?"

  Sam stopped by his tent's entrance. "What they first had in mind, was to make us wonder what they had in mind."

  "Right."

  "And Margaret, I thank you for not mentioning it was a bad beginning, for her to find me drunk.... Now, I need some sleep. And Lady Weather keep the Second Regiment's dead from visiting my dreams."

  He put back the tent's entrance flap, and ducked in.

  Margaret started to say, "They would never — they loved you," but Sam was gone inside. And just as well, she thought. My foolish mouth would have hurt him more.

  * * *

  No lost cavalry troopers came to his dreaming.

  Sam dreamed of being a boy again in their mountain hut... and his Second-mother, Catania, was reading to him from an old copybook traded out of the south for twenty sheep hides. She read to him often, fearing he might take to the mountains' signs and tribe-talk instead of book-English.

  "'... There were a few foreign families come to the prairie, Germans, Baits, Hungarians. But they were not felt as foreign as they might have been in cities or small farming towns, since all of us had come to the prairie as foreigners to it, so in Western-accented English or Eastern English or Southern English — or in English hardly English at all — we made do together, and were Americans.

  In time, we were to master the rough grasses, the black earth beneath, though it cost us all our lives to do it. The sky we never mastered. We were too small, too low. We were beneath its notice.

  ... One Sunday, we took the wagon the long, rutted road to church, and in church, in the last row of benches, I saw for the first time a sturdy, small, blond little girl, her hair in braids. She was wearing a flour-sack dress with little blue blossoms on it — not as nice a dress as my sister's — and she was to become my friend.'"

  His Second-mother stopped reading then, and put the top-sewn copybook away. Her eyes, in the dream, were the gray he remembered; the scar down her cheek as savage; her hair was white as winter.

  "What happens?" Sam asked her.

  "Sweetheart, always the same things happen," his Second-mother said. "Happiness is found… then it is lost… then perhaps found again. And the finding, the losing, and the perhaps, is the story."

  ...Sam woke, saying, "Wait!" aloud — though for what, he wasn't certain.

  A voice from outside and a courteous distance said, "Sir…?"

  Sounded like Corporal Fass.

  Sam called, "Just a dream, Corporal," and got up off his cot.

  There was no more time for mourning, for considering his stupidity in sending a man like Ned Flores to lose a fight. No time for more vodka. The young Captain-General, that almost-never-defeated commander, must get back to work.

  Ned wouldn't much mind the missing hand. He'd have a bright steel hook made, to wear and flourish with a piratical air, like the corsairs in that most wonderful of children's Warm-time copybooks.

  Sam stepped outside the tent. Afternoon, and the morning wasted. "Fass!" What in hell was the other man's name?

  "Sir?"

  "Colonel Voss to report to me."

  "Sir."

  "The Rascobs as well."

  "Sir — the brigadiers rode out of camp a while ago. Rode north."

  And no good-byes. The old men were still angry. And were about to be made much angrier.

  CHAPTER 4

  "Chancellor Razumov, have you read this?" The Lord of Grass, at ease on a window couch in the Saffron Room of Lesser Audience, shook sheets of poor paper gently, the slight breeze disturbing the prairie hawk that perched on his other forearm.

  "Yes, my lord." The chancellor, very fat, still made an easy half-bow of continued attention. Tiny bells tinkled down the closure of his yellow robe.

  "And your opinion of our fugitive librarian's report?"

  "Accurate, from what we know otherwise. It describes minor — though formidable — rule, ruler, and ruled. Certainly to be taken into account as they lie along the Khanate's southern flank, and might disturb your movement against Middle Kingdom. Still… perhaps not so formidable, lord, since the librarian writes they've lost a skirmish to the Empire, apparently just before his message left their camp. A Light-Cavalry matter, but still a loss."

  "Yes... Perhaps a loss, perhaps not." The Lord of Grass exchanged glances with his hawk. The open window's autumn sunlight, dappled through figured fine-cotton curtains, seemed to stir across them in a chill breeze.

  "Certainly a defeat, my lord, according to accounts, according to the Boston people as well."

  "A defeat, but perhaps not a loss. Tell me, Razumov, how best does one prepare winners to continue winning?"

  "By the victories themselves, lord."

  "Oh, no. Victory's lessons are few — but defeat's are many. Something we might well keep in mind.... I believe our commonsensical Captain-General of North Map-Mexico has deliberately made a false demonstration to us of his apparent limitations in command... and at the same time has taught a hard lesson to his army, particularly his Light Cavalry — our principal arm, by no coincidence. He has taught them a painful first lesson in the uncertainties of war."

  "An expensive lesson, surely. We understand there were heavy losses."

  "And so, all the more effective." The hawk shifted on the Grass Lord's arm. "Though, since the loss was so heavy, I suspect it will be quickly followed by a triumph in revenge."

  "But lord, is the young man that clever?"

  "Perhaps not, Razumov. Perhaps only that sensible.... This damned bird has shit on my sleeve."

  * * *

  An Entry…. As I have been appointed the role of historian, librarian, and informational to the young Captain-General, I feel it behooves me — what a Warm-time word! 'Behoove.' Its dictionary definition, of course — but also perhaps as in shoeing a horse, preparing for an action, a journey? So much we will never know....

  Still, as occasional historian of Lord Monroe's rule, it behooves me to make my entries on our army's inferior paper, then bind the note-books myself. Clumsy. Clumsy work.

  There came a scratching at my tent-flap fairly soon after the New Englander's descent — a sight (seen over the ranks of uneasy soldiers) to remember. It was all childhood's horror stories come to life, though concluding as only a small girl swaggering with a sword. Her huge Made-beast left there, crouched and moaning, apparently resting from its long flight.

  A scratching at my tent-flap, as if a kept cat wished in — then the Boston girl's quite pretty face peeping past the canvas cloth. She had set her large blue hat aside.

  "Are you doing something private?" she said. "Something you wouldn't want anyone to see?"

  "Not that private," I told her. "Come in."

  She ducked inside, very small in a voluminous coat — a coat freshly unpacked, by the even creases in it, and made of dark-blue woolen cloth, finely woven and heavy, though not the equal of what Gardens used to weave. I've seen no cloth of that quality anywhere else.

  The young woman sat on the edge of my cot — perched there, her booted, blue-trousered legs crossed like a boy's — and settled her scimitar across her lap as if it were a pet.

  "Neckless Peter. Is that correct?"

  "Peter Wilson — but yes, my friends call me Neckless Peter. 'Neckless' since my neck is short — though originally 'Neck-lace' because I wore the gold necklace of Librarian in Gardens. The nick-name was given me by a friend; I keep it in her memory."

  "I know 'nick-names'; we called a friend Piss-poor Penelope, just for the three p's in a row. And you're the intelligent person here, aren't you? Little and old, but intelligent?"

  "I suppose that's true."

  "Isn't it wonderful?" She made a child's face of wonder. "I'm little and inte
lligent, too! Though I'm not old. So we can be friends, and find out things from each other. Try to hide things... then find them out."

  "I don't doubt it, though I'm not told North Map-Mexico's secrets."

  "Oh, you and I will discover them." She gave me that steady fresh regard — knowledgeable and innocent at once — that children bestow on their elders. And I saw that she was dangerous, certainly — would not have been sent, otherwise — but also, that she might be mad.

  "You're thinking something about me."

  "Yes."

  "You think I'm very strange. Perhaps with a bird in my head?"

  "Yes."

  "And has it occurred to you, small, old, and intelligent one, that I might not be strange? That's it's you people of the warmer places, you who haven't learned to live in ice without being swaddled and farting in furs, who haven't learned to do even simple things with your thoughts, that you are the sad and strange ones?"

  "Yes, it has occurred to me."

  "Then let me confirm it — it's the fact."

  "Perhaps."

  "'Perhaps.' 'Perhaps' is the curse of intelligence."

  "…Perhaps."

  She'd spoken like a clever child, but now laughed like a woman, richly, and in deeper voice. She laughed, then recovered in near hiccups. "Now" — she settled herself comfortably — "is the young Monroe, our Captain-General, a war-lord perfect, despite his losses here?"

  "No."

  "The Kipchak Khan, Toghrul, whom you betrayed — is that a painful word?"

  "Only a little."

  "He is believed in Boston to be a war-lord perfect, and almost certain to win, moving against Middle Kingdom."

  "Mmmm."

  "You don't believe that?"

  "I believe that war is too imperfect for a perfect master."

  Again that steady regard. She ran a small white finger slowly back and forth along her saber's sheath, thinking. Then she nodded. "You are intelligent — but are you cruel? You wouldn't hurt me, would you? Use intelligence against me, who am only a girl, and pretty?"

  "I think... you would be difficult to injure."

  She grinned, was up off my cot, bent and kissed my forehead, then sat back down again. She'd smelled of cool air, and nothing else.