Delia of Vallia (12 page)
So she’d taken one of Farris’s small but encouragingly growing force of airboats and started off. She’d gone by a swing back through Delphond to make sure a little matter at Drakanium was in order, and then set course for Vindelka. With Jiktar Lathdo the Eager, the pilot, Jordio the Hawk, and Mimi the Smile, she’d taken off with the dismal hope that she would get through this quickly and fly back to Vondium to some good — some marvelous — news.
When Mimi put her ringletted head into the tiny cabin Delia was in two minds whether or not to consult her about the rash on her chest. Probably it would go away soon. She would rub some ointment on tonight. That should do it.
Mimi looked upset.
“Very well, Mimi, my dear, I shall speak to the Jiktar.”
“It is so — so — degrading!”
“I agree.”
The word
bratch
, which meant jump to it, although in no way as vicious as the infamous
grak
, addressed to slaves to make them hop about their work or be slashed by whips, was often heard in the ranks of the swods as the soldiers drilled. It was not, at least in Delia’s hearing, addressed to her people. Mimi, young, still under training, had been overjoyed to be plucked out of her humdrum routine in the palace in Vondium to be chosen as personal handmaid to the empress. It was a tremendous boost to her ego, a real start on her career, and, more than all that, of supreme bliss to be able to be with the Empress Delia of Vallia. Mimi believed this without coaching.
“But,” said Mimi, with a little return to the smile that gave her her cognomen, “I do not want to make trouble.”
“I shall, if that big froth-blower Lathdo does not learn to speak to you properly.”
“Thank you—”
“He is new to his position, you see. He has just been promoted ob-Jiktar from zan-Hikdar, and he is — well, he is Eager...”
“Oh, yes, majestrix. Very Eager.”
Delia wished that her two Djangs, Tandu and Dalki, had been in Vondium. She would have welcomed their support and protection. But they had both been sent up to Vindelka with a letter from the Lord Farris, in explanation and also instruction. The Djangs would find a snug berth in Vomanus’s bodyguard rather than riding patrol along the Ochre Limits.
The flier shook as wind gusts rattled past.
Mimi looked uncertain.
This Jordio the Hawk is a good pilot, Mimi.”
“Oh, yes, of course, majestrix.”
“You are not afraid of fliers?”
“Oh, no, majestrix.”
Delia did not smile. “You have heard the old tales of how the airboats we bought from Hamal were always breaking down. Of course you have. But now we are friends with Hamal, we can buy proper vollers, and from Hyrklana, too.”
“My mother told me.” Mimi moved to the topmost chest stacked along the side of the cabin and picked up a hairbrush. Delia saw that the girl wanted something to do. “Also, my mother would be amazed that the empress does not travel with a great retinue—”
“When it is necessary, I do. We shall not be away long.”
Delia submitted her hair to the brush. Mimi had a nice stroke, but Delia missed the delicate touch of Rosala or Floria. But Floria — who was just as brilliant and beautiful as Rosala — was off being married, at last, and Rosala had gone, too. Since Delia’s adventures in Hamal had taken her away from her handmaidens, she had not worried overmuch. And, now, poor Pansi was dead, along with Nath the Jokester, and she was going to have to train up this Mimi.
As she lay back, letting the brush stroke through her hair, she reflected that Mimi was one of the girls greatly affected by the recent Time of Troubles. The bad days had muddled up girls’ education in far worse ways than boys, for a lad need only shoulder a spear and march off with the army to make a name and fortune for himself, if he did not get himself killed. For girls it was different, unless they were Jikai Vuvushis. Mimi came from the province of Forli and had not been educated by any of the sororities, at least, not to Delia’s knowledge. Her mother, a shrewd woman with ambition, had applied for a place for her daughter Mimi. She had backed her application with a letter from the Kov of Forli, Lykon Crimahan. He had once been at loggerheads with the emperor, and had proved himself if not a good friend at least a man prepared to set to and work for the new emperor and let bygones be bygones. That had tilted the scales in Mimi’s favor.
A slender, meek girl, Mimi’s choice of career had been wisely chosen by her mother. At Mimi’s age, Delia had been stomping around in black leathers slashing with her Claw and foining with rapier and main gauche. That would not have been practicable for Mimi. She was set on a career, now, and ought to be successful. In pursuance of that, Delia decided, she’d probably let the Little Sisters of Opaz have Mimi for a spell, sharpen her up, teach her the tricks of the trade. All that would help Mimi’s prospects. So many girls applied and so few could be taken, Delia felt the burden upon herself. This, as with so many other aspects, was one of the abiding oppressions of being empress.
Delia was a very proud woman; but she was not so foolishly proud as to believe that being handmaiden to an empress was the summit and achievement of a girl’s life.
But, by Krun, it was a damned good start.
The flier lurched again and then started a gentle descent. A consummate flier herself, Delia recognized the masterful handling. Jordio must be trying to avoid the worst of the blow by diving and attempting to find a layer of calmer air.
The brush snagged in her hair.
Delia winced.
Mimi gasped.
The brush began to stroke again, tentatively. Delia said nothing. She did not pride herself on her tolerance for not biting the girl’s head off. She was sorrowfully aware that by saying nothing, she punished the poor girl far more than a swift epithet and insult ever could do.
The flier swung bodily sideways, was caught and held, and swept back onto course.
Delia said: “That is enough, Mimi. Perhaps you would like to see about that hole in the hem of the turquoise gown? You discovered the hole, which was clever. And, be careful not to stick the needle in your finger. Jordio has his hands full.”
“Yes, majestrix.”
As she ducked out onto the deck, Delia reflected that it was as well that not yet, not quite yet, the gentle intimacy of handmaid and empress had been established between them. Mimi would learn the empress’s funny ways in time.
The wind blew her thoughts away.
Jordio, a wild shape in a flapping cloak, stood at the control levers like some phantom operator of a ghostly sky-mill. Lathdo clung to the rail at his side. Both men peered ahead, into the wildness. The sky pelted down at them, lowering, dark, massy with wind and clamor.
Delia hauled herself along the rail until she stood with the men. They were startled to see her, as though an apparition from a Herrelldrin Hell had jumped up to drag them away.
“Majestrix!” The rest was lost in the howl of the wind. Something to do with not being on deck and being in the cabin.
She said nothing. She held on. Her lips opened and the wind rushed past. This was glorious!
The flier leaped up and down like a crazed sliptinger, that beautiful salmon of Western Vallia, and Jordio met each leap and lunge and held her. Delia looked ahead and down. Were those lights below?
She banged Lathdo on a bulky armored shoulder and pointed.
He nodded.
Jordio inched his controls carefully, and the flier, responding, lunged down and kept at the angle, sweeping in through the gusts. The lights grew firmer. Wind struck into her face as a force, tearing, liberating. But however much she might exult in fronting the elements, those same elemental forces could take the flier and twist her end over end and shred her and cast her down as a mass of tumbled wreckage onto the ground below.
Her hair blew back in a whiplash of abandon. Poor Mimi! The lights brightened. A village, perhaps a small town, huddled against the fury of the storm. The place was somewhere in Vindelka, on the way to the provincial capital.
“... get ... down!” bellowed Lathdo. He looked furious in that dark light, his jaw muscles bulging. If aught happened to the empress!
Delia could guess his thoughts. She could feel a small sorrow for him; after all, he was new to the job and the big blow-hard was eager to do what he imagined to be the right things around an empress. He, like Mimi, could be trained.
Nothing of any of the seven Moons of Kregen could be glimpsed in that wracked sky. The darkness lashed with the wind, and the wind scourged with the darkness. No one saw it.
One moment Jordio was bringing the flier down in a steep descent, angling her to catch the wind, and the next they’d slammed slap bang into the roof of a building.
The flier simply broke up.
Upside down, whirled on the breath of the wind, Delia caught a fantastic glimpse of Mimi flying out of the aft cabin like a kite.
Something hard struck Delia across the back. It was probably the edge of the guttering. Bits and pieces of destroyed airboat whirled about her. She saw nothing in the clamping dark of either Lathdo or Jordio. She fell off the edge of the roof, her back aching like the devil, her eyes filled with tears of pain, of fury and frustration, and her mouth wide open and yelling blue bloody murder.
She hit the dung heap.
Well, Seg and her husband knew about those kinds of adventure. She sat up, spitting straw, and glared about with such a look of savage hatred as would have fried a leem.
She could barely smell the stink, for the wind lashed it away. Her hair blew all over her face when she turned to look downwind. All she could see was the whole world leaping up and down. Then she realized this uncanny movement was merely a tree, blowing bent, and straightening, and so bowing once again to the power of the storm.
She stood up and went a dozen staggering steps to leeward. She bumped into a wall, grazed her fingers, and held on. She dragged in a few gulps of breath. That she kept on her feet meant that her legs weren’t broken. That she gripped to the wall meant her arms weren’t broken. That she remained upright meant her back wasn’t broken — although it damned-well felt like it. And because her head did not roll off and get blown away by the wind, her neck wasn’t broken.
She gulped more air, shook her face free of hair, and crabbed along the wall. Her groping fingers felt the door long before she saw it. It fitted snugly into the jamb.
The exhilaration she’d felt at the touch of the wind faded. She felt exhausted. She was feeling far more tired lately than she should. When the rain began she knew she’d have to cave in, or, being a Sister of the Rose, think about giving in and then go marching on, stupid though the marching might be.
But the tiredness dragged at her. This was frightening, the way she could feel the fatigue deep within her bones. This was something new to her, and nauseating, unnerving.
Holding onto the edge of the jamb and getting her breath, resisting the tug of the wind, she recalled herself after she had fallen from the zorca and become a cripple. Yes, there had been something of that feeling then. Certainly, she’d never felt like this when she’d been carrying any of her children.
She put her teeth together, bit down, hunched up her shoulders, and swinging her leg vigorously, delivered a thumping great kick at the door.
She had to kick three times before she roused any answer.
The door cracked the space of a narrow nose and one eye. She put her mouth to the slot of light and bellowed.
“Let me in!”
Another thumping great thwack with her toes reinforced the demand. She was prepared to lay about her with her tongue, get ’em jumping, have a fire and a hot toddy, a meal, find a decent bed, and — first and most important — stir ’em all up into going out and scouring everywhere to find Mimi and Lathdo and Jordio.
The door slapped open. She tumbled in. An oniony sack clapped over her head. Whoever they were in here, one of them hit her over the head. The smell of onions faded with everything else, faded and went away, went with the wind.
A Walk in the Radiance of the Suns
She supposed, with deep rancor and considerable soul-searching, that this was what happened to girls who grew to think themselves too important. They had given her a tunic, and a breechclout. Both were of grey.
Slave grey.
Well, she’d been slave before. She had helped to outlaw slavery in Vallia. But, here she was, trudging along with a forlorn group of other slaves, all following a coach down a long and dusty road, going from where to where she had not the slightest idea.
After the onion sack, she’d been kicked awake to find herself stark naked chained in a bed. And that damned spot on her chest had changed into a swelling. The swelling was ugly in her eyes, a bulging lump. A cautious swivel of her eyes revealed other lumps. When she could touch her face she felt more.
So these people, whoever they were, had led her out to the waiting coffle of slaves, and taken their chains off and affixed the slavers’ chains. She trudged along with the others, and no one wanted to talk to her.
She was merchandise.
The day sparkled about her. The streaming mingled radiance of Zim and Genodras, the twin Suns of Kregen, touched everything with fire. She half-shut her eyes. The road was ochreish, dusty and dry. Her feet, naked, did not pain her, for empress or no empress, she was hardened to going barefoot. Perhaps, toward the end of the day if the march was long, her feet would pain; but, then, she was in all truth a little out of practice for this particular brand of adventure.
Her latest escapades had been more in the nature of riding a superb saddle animal at the head of armies.
The road, like most roads of Vallia, was atrocious. Relying mainly for transport on her magnificent system of canals, Vallia neglected roadworks. This specimen stretched out between fields of Strafin and Chawinseed, all glowing purple and orange above the green in the rays of the suns. If these slavers put her to work in the fields, she’d make a break and run for it.
The guards who marched beside the small column, only occasionally flicking their whips, were not apims. They were diffs, Fristles whose cat faces bristled with whiskers, and whose fur showed the patternings of various races. They did not look so much bored with their job as indifferent to what they were doing. They continually scanned the sky.
