Onto what thank God was trail and not empty air.
He didn’t yell, and didn’t object, though his legs did, and for a moment the pain was acute, in a dozen jolting strides down a dusty slot of a trail that began above the point where Nokhada had thrown the fit yesterday about the rein.
If they had gone off then, they would not have fallen, damn the creature. Gone an embarrassing long distance down to a second terrace above the lake, indeed they would, but there was such a terrace, whether or not, yesterday, at the start of the ride, he might have had the ability to stay on Nokhada’s back.
And he found it equally interesting that, with the plunge over the cliff available for the novice fool, Ilisidi had taken them straight up the mountain yesterday, however rough the course. A second chance missed, then. So maybe the tea was, after all, an accident.
Although, given there had been an intruder on the grounds yesterday, maybe getting them over the ridge or above line-of-sight from the fortress had been a priority.
And given Banichi’s comment about having had them under direct surveillance …
“Why didn’t you tell me yesterday that there was a possibility of someone out there?” he asked Cenedi, with the rest of the dowager’s guard trailing behind. “You knew we were in danger yesterday. Banichi informed you.”
“The outriders,” Cenedi said, “were well alert. And Banichi was never far.”
“Nadi, a risk to the dowager? In all respect, is that reasonable?”
“With Tabini’s man?” Cenedi’s face had things in common with Banichi’s. Just as expressive. “No. It wasn’t a risk.”
Not a risk? A compliment to Banichi, perhaps, but damned well a risk, under any human interpretation of the word, unless, the thought that had jogged his attention last night, there were more security systems about than either Banichi or Cenedi was going to own to. He rode by Cenedi in thinking silence, with the waves lapping the rocks below. The sky was blue. The waters danced. A dragonette soared past Nokhada’s face and made her jump, a single heart-stopping moment, close to the edge.
“Damn!” he said, and he and Nokhada had a silent war for a moment, at which Cenedi maintained complete lack of expression, and complete control of his mecheita.
Ilisidi rode ahead of them, oblivious, seemingly, to all of it. When he tilted his head back and looked up he couldn’t see the fortress walls at all, just the bowed face of the rocks and, behind them, the very edge of the modern wall that divided off the paved court from the trail. Ahead, the trail wound higher on the mountain, until they came to a promontory with a dizzying view, where Ilisidi stopped and let Babs stand, and where, when he arrived, he sat doing the same with Nokhada, telling himself that if Babs didn’t fling himself over the cliff, Nokhada wouldn’t, and he needn’t worry.
“Glorious day,” Ilisidi said.
“An unforgettable view,” he said, and thought that he never would forget it, the chanciness of their height, the power of the creature under him, the startling panorama of the lake spread out around them as far as the eye could see. Skiing with Toby, he had had such sights, but never one fraught with atevi significances, never one once foreign and now freighted with names, and identity, and history. The Bu-javid—with its pressures, its schedules, its crowds of political favor-seekers—had no such views, no such absolute, breath-taking moments as Malguri offered … between hours, as yesterday, of cloistered, stifling silence, headaches from oil-burning lamps, cold, dark spots in the corners of cavernous halls and knees blistered from proximity to a warming fire.
Not to mention the plumbing.
But it had its charm. It had its moments, it had the incredible texture of life that didn’t measure by straight lines and standardized measures, that didn’t go by streets and straight edges, with people living stacked up on top of each other, and lights blotting out the stars at night. Here, one could hear the wind and the waves, one could find endless variety in weathered stones and pebbles and there was no schedule but the inescapable fact that riding out and riding back were the same distance. …
Ilisidi talked about the trading ships and the fishermen, while the high, thin trail of a jet passed above Malguri on its way east, across the continental divide, across the barrier that had held two atevi civilizations from meeting for thousands of years—a matter of four, five hours, now, that easy. But Ilisidi talked about crossings of Maidingi that took days, and involved separate aijiin’s territory.
“In those days,” Ilisidi said, “one proceeded very carefully into the territory of foreign aijiin.”
Not without a point. Again.
“But we’ve learned so much more, nand’ dowager.”
“More than what?”
“That walling others out equally walls us in, nand’ dowager.”
“Hah,” Ilisidi declared, and with a move he never saw, spun Babs about and lit out along the hill, scattering stones.
Nokhada followed. All of them had to. And it hurt, God, it hurt when they struck the downhill to the lake. Ahead of them, Ilisidi, with her white-shot braid flying—no ribbon of rank, no adornment, just a red and black coat, and Babsidi’s sleek black rump, tail switching for nothing more than excess energy—nothing more in Ilisidi’s mind, perhaps, than the free space in front of her.
Catching up was Nokhada’s idea; but with the rest of the guard behind, and Cenedi beside, there was nothing to do but follow.
At another time they stopped, on the narrow half-moon of a sandy beach, where the lake curved in, and a man thinking of assassins could only say to himself that there were places on the shore where a boat could land and reach Malguri.
But standing while the mecheiti caught their breaths, Ilisidi talked about the lake, its depth, its denizens—its ghosts. “When I was a child,” she said, “a wreck washed up on the south shore, just the bow of it, but they thought it might be from a treasure ship that sank four hundred years ago. And divers went out for it, all up and down this shore. They say they never found it. But a number of antiquities turned up in Malguri, and the servants were cleaning them in barrels in the stable court, about that time. My father sent the best pieces to the museum in Shejidan. And it probably cost him an estate. But most people in Maidingi province would have melted them for the gold.”
“It’s good he saved them.”
“Why?”
“For the past,” he said, wondering if he had misunderstood something else in atevi mindset. “To save it. Isn’t that important?”
“Is it?” Ilisidi answered him with a question and left him none the wiser. She was off again up the hill, and he forgot all his philosophy, in favor of protecting what he feared might have progressed to blisters. Damn the woman, he thought, and thought that if he pulled up and lagged behind as long as he could hold Nokhada’s instincts in check, the dowager might take that for a surrender and slow down, but damned if he would, damned if he would cry help or halt. Ilisidi would dismiss him from her company then, probably lose all interest in him, and he could lie about in a warm bath, reading ghost stories until his would-be assassins flung themselves against the barriers Banichi had doubtless set up, and killed themselves, and he could go home to air-conditioning, the morning news, and tea he could trust. From moment to moment it seemed like the only escape.
But he kept Ilisidi’s pace. Atevi called it na’itada. Barb called it being a damned fool. He had never spent so long an hour as it took to get home again, an hour in which he told himself repeatedly he had rather fall off the mountain and be done.
Finally the gates of the stable court were in front of them, then behind them, with the mecheiti anxious for stables and grain. He managed to get Nokhada to drop a shoulder, and climbed down off Nokhada’s towering height onto legs he wasn’t sure would bear his weight.
“A hot bath,” Ilisidi called out to him. “I’ll send you some herbs, nand’ paidhi. I’ll see you in the morning!”
He managed to bow, and, among Ilisidi’s entourage, to walk up the stairs without conspicuou
sly limping.
“The soreness goes,” Cenedi said to him quietly, “in four or five days.”
A hot bath was all he was thinking of, all the long way up to the front hall. A hot bath, for about an hour. A soft and motionless chair. Soaking and reading seemed an excellent way to spend the remainder of the day, sitting in the sun, minding his own business, evading aijiin and their athletic endeavors. He limped down the long hall and started the stairs up to his floor, at his own pace.
Quick footsteps crossed the stone floor below the stairs. He looked back in some concern for his safety in the halls and saw Jago coming toward the stairs, all energy and anxiousness. “Bren-ji,” she called out to him. “Are you all right?”
The limp showed. His hair was flying loose from its braid and there was dust and fur and spit on his coat. “Fine, nadi-ji. Was it a good flight?”
“Long,” she said, overtaking him in a handful of double steps a human would struggle to make. “Did you fall, Bren-ji? You didn’t fall off …”
“No, just sore. Perfectly ordinary.” He made a determined effort not to limp the rest of the way up the stairs, and went beside her down the hall … which was supposing she wanted the company of sweat and mecheita fur. Jago smelled of flowers, quite nicely so. He’d never noticed it before; and he was marginally embarrassed—not polite to sweat, the word had passed discreetly from paidhi to paidhi. Overheated humans smelled different, and different was not good with atevi, in matters of personal hygiene; the administration had pounded that concept into junior administrative heads. So he tried to keep as discreetly as possible apart from Jago, glad she was back, wishing he might have a chance for a bath before debriefing, and wishing most of all that she’d been here last night. “Where’s Banichi? Do you know? I haven’t seen him since yesterday.”
“He was down at the airport half an hour ago,” Jago said. “He was talking to some television people. I think they’re coming up here.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know, nadi. They came in on the flight. It could have to do with the assassination attempt. They didn’t say.”
Not his business, he concluded. Banichi would handle it with his usual discretion, probably put them on the next flight out.
“Not any other trouble here?”
“Only with Banichi.”
“How?”
“Just not happy with me. I seem to have done something or said something, nadi-ji, —I’m not even sure.”
“It isn’t a comfortable business,” Jago said, “to report an associate to his disgrace. Give him room, nand’ paidhi. Some things aren’t within your office.”
“I understand that,” he said, telling himself he hadn’t understood: he’d been unreasonably focussed on his own discomforts last night, to the exclusion of Banichi’s own reasonable distress. It began to dawn on him that Banichi might have wanted things of him he just hadn’t given, before they’d parted in discomfort with each other. “I think I was very rude last night, nadi. I shouldn’t have been. I wasn’t doing my job. I think he’s right to be upset with me. I hope you can explain to him.”
“You have no ‘job’ toward him, Bren-ji. Ours is toward you. And I much doubt he took offense. If he allowed you to see his distress, count it for a compliment to you.”
Unusual notion. One part of his brain went ransacking memory, turning over old references. Another part went on vacation, wondering if it meant Banichi did after all like him.
And the sensible, workaday part of his brain told the other two parts to pay attention to business and quit expecting human responses out of atevi minds. Jago meant what Jago said, point, endit; Banichi let down his guard with him, Banichi was pissed about a dirty business, and neither Banichi nor Jago was suddenly, by being cooped up with a bored human, about to break out in human sentiment. It wasn’t contagious, it wasn’t transferable, and probably he frustrated hell out of Banichi, too, who’d just as busily sent him clues he hadn’t picked up on. As a dinner date, he’d been a dismal substitute for Jago, who’d been off explaining to the Guild why somebody wanted to kill the paidhi; and probably by the end of the evening, Banichi had ideas of his own why that could be.
They reached the door. He had his key from his pocket, but Jago was first with hers, and let them into the receiving room.
“So glum,” she said, looking back at him. “Why, nand’ paidhi?”
“Last night. We were saying things—I wished I hadn’t. I wish I’d said I was sorry. If you could convey to him that I am …”
“Said and did aren’t even brothers,” Jago said. She pulled the door to, pocketed her key and took the portfolio from under her arm. “This should cheer you. I brought your mail.”
He’d given up. He’d accepted that it wasn’t going to get through security; and Jago threw over all his suppositions about his situation in Malguri.
He took the bundle she handed him and sorted through it, not even troubling to sit down in his search for personal mail.
It was mostly catalogs, not nearly so many as he ordinarily got; three letters, but none from Mospheira—two from committee heads in Agriculture and Finance, and one with Tabini’s official seal.
It wasn’t all his mail, not, at least, his ordinary mail—nothing from Barb or his mother. No communication from his office, messages like, Where are you? Are you alive?
Jago surely knew what was missing. She had to know, she wasn’t that inefficient. And what did he say about it? She stood there, waiting, probably in curiosity about Tabini’s letter.
Or maybe knowing very well what was in it.
He began to be scared of the answers—scared of his own ignorance and his own failure to figure out what the silence around him was saying, or what of Tabini’s signals he was supposed to have picked up.
He ran his thumbnail under the seal on Tabini’s letter, hoping for rescue, hoping it held some sort of explanation that didn’t add up to disaster.
Tabini’s handwriting—was not the clearest hand he had ever dealt with. The usual declaration of titles. I hope for your health, it began, with Tabini’s calligraphic flourish. I hope for your enjoyment of Malguri’s resources of sun and water.
Thanks, Tabini, he thought sourly, thanks a lot. The rainy season, no less. He rested a sore backside against the table to read it, while Jago waited.
Something about television. Television, for God’s sake.
… my intention by this interview to give people around the world an exposure to human thought and appearance far different than the machimi have presented. I feel this is a useful opportunity which should not be wasted, and have great confidence in your diplomacy, Bren. Please be as frank with these professionals as you would be with me, privately.
“Nadi Jago. Do you know what’s in this?”
“No, Bren-ji. Is there a problem?”
“Tabini’s sent the television crew!”
“That would explain the people on the flight. I am surprised we weren’t advised. Though I’m sure they have credentials.”
Under the circumstances which have made advisable your isolation from the City and its contacts, I can think of no more effective counter to your enemy than the cultivation of increased public favor. I have spoken personally to the head of news and public awareness at the national network, and authorized a reputable and highly regarded news crew to meet with you at Malguri, for an interview which may, in my hopes and those of the esteemed lord Minister of Education, lead to monthly news conferences …
“He wants me to do a monthly news program! Do you know about this?”
“I plead not, nadi-ji. I’m sure, however, if Tabini-aiji has cleared these individuals to speak to you, they’re very reputable people.”
“Reputable people.” He scanned the letter for more devastating news, found only I know the weather in this season is not the best, but I hope that you have found pleasure in the library and accommodation with the esteemed aiji-dowager, to whom I hope you will convey my personal good wishes.
> “This is impossible. I have to talk to Tabini. —Jago, I need a phone. Now.”
“I’ve no authorization, Bren-ji. There isn’t a phone here, and I’ve no authorization to remove you from our—”
“The hell, Jago!”
“I’ve no authorization, Bren-ji.”
“Does Banichi?”
“I doubt so, nadi-ji.”
“Well, neither do I. I can’t talk to these people.”
Jago’s frown grew anxious. “The paidhi tells me that Tabini-aiji has authorized these people. If Tabini-aiji has authorized this interview, the paidhi is surely aware that it would be a very great embarrassment to these people and their superior, extending even to the aiji’s court. If the paidhi has any authorization in this letter to refuse this, I must ask to see this letter.”
“It’s not Tabini. I’ve no authorization from Mospheira to do any interview. I absolutely can’t do this without contacting my office. I certainly can’t do it on any half-hour notice. I need to contact my office. Immediately.”
“Is not your man’chi to Tabini? Is this not what you said?”
God, right down the predictable and unarguable slot.
“My man’chi to Tabini doesn’t exclude my arguing with him or my protecting my position of authority among my own people. It’s my obligation to do that, nadi-ji. I have no force to use. It’s all on your side. But my man’chi gives me the moral authority to call on you to do my job.”
The twists and turns of a trial lawyer were a necessary part of the paidhi’s job. But persuading Jago to reinterpret man’chi was like pleading a brief against gravity.
“Banichi would have to authorize it,” Jago said with perfect composure, “if he has the authority, which I don’t think he does, Bren-ji. If you wish me to go down to the airport, I will tell him your objection, though I fear the television crew will come when their clearance says to come, which may be before any other thing can be arranged, and I cannot conceive how Tabini could withdraw a permission he seems to have granted without—”