Indomitus Est (The Fovean Chronicles) (22 page)

    
Its walls almost burned white, I kept thinking.  The towers and the walls and the buildings, even the streets shone clean and white. I could smell the flowers in the air.  Blizzard, less impressed than I, spontaneously relieved himself in the middle of the street, but even as I contemplated dismounting to find a pail, an Uman with a dogcart, followed by a flock of small, black birds, appeared with a small shovel.

    
Blizzard bore his share of stares from passing Uman, the occasional Uman-Chi (who seemed to pointedly ignore everything) and the few Men I saw here.  I saw no Dwarves, but I did notice a new, smaller race of man-like beings.  They ranged around three feet tall, were clean-shaven except for a few and much lighter than Dwarves.  Their demeanor seemed
nothing
like that of the Simple People. 

    
“You great, clumsy clot,” someone swore.  It seemed to come from under my horse, which suddenly went stock-still where I’d ridden on their Main Way, heading toward the central wall for want of a better place to go.

    
“Excuse me?” I asked.

    
I felt a pressure on my left boot and looked down to see one of these little fellows looking up at me, an almost comically angry scowl on his round face.  He had brown eyes and a brown beard, and dressed in a long cloak that bulged with pockets.  On his head he wore a rakish hat with a long, orange feather.  He tapped my instep with a dirk, the edge of which looked quite keen.

    
“
Excuse
you?” he said, his face growing red.  “Excuse you before or after your great, lumbering beast tramples me in the street?”

    
“I hate to say it, but I didn’t see you,” I said.  He probably got that all the time and I doubted that he liked it.  I was right.

    
“We Scitai are citizens of the Silent Isle too, you know,” he growled up at me.  “Gods, but what would a Man know of that.  You know what I say of men?”

    
“That we are so tall that only the thinnest air feeds our brains?” I asked, quoting from Kvitch.

    
That gave him pause.  “You have heard that, have you?”

    
“From the Simple People,” I answered.

    
That
brought his head up.  “And there are not many Men who would call them that,” he noted.  He looked me over, dressed in Dwarven Armor, sitting my Dwarven-made saddle on my horse from the Wild Horse Plains.

    
Remembering my first encounter with Kvitch, I dismounted to speak with him.  He stood a little under three feet – I towered over him.  Still, I resisted the urge to squat down and talk to him as if he were a child, and instead stooped enough to extend my hand.

    
“I am Mordetur, a friend and emissary of the Simple People to the Fovean High Council.”

    
He took my forearm in his in a surprisingly strong grip.  “I am Xinto of the Woods, a Scitai of the Silent Isle, and a warrior.”

    
I nodded appreciatively.  “I will likely seek training while I am here.”  This was the truth. I had learned a lot in Volkhydro and I wanted to learn more while I could still afford it.  I had learned long ago that wealth is a fleeting thing.

    
“Well, train with the Uman-Chi, not me.  They are long of Life and have more experience than all of the other races.”

    
“I will.”

    
He sighed wearily.  “I suppose if you can give an honest man a ride on that great beast of yours, then I can get you to where you are needing to go to bear your message.  Obviously, you have no idea.”

    
“And what would make you say that?”  I asked.

    
“You are a light-headed Man, that’s what”

    
I laughed.  He came across as a likeable, if not particularly agreeable, fellow.  I lifted him up onto Blizzard’s back and mounted behind him immediately to ensure that he was not thrown.  Blizzard eyed him warily but seemed willing to tolerate him so long as I was there.  The stallion had proven time and again that he had no other loyalties.

    
We picked our way through the street.  Xinto commented that he had seen no bigger horses than mine.  I kidded him back that they likely all looked the same to him.  I dodged the obvious “where did you get him” question by asking him about the Scitai and politics on the Silent Isle.

    
“Trenbon is ruled by the Uman-Chi majority,” he said. “In as much as we do not live in their cities and pay them no tax, we Scitai call ourselves
of
the Silent Isle.  There is some farmland by Outpost VII that we claim, and that some Uman-Chi Baron or another is always trying to get back from us, which keeps that argument alive.  If the Silent Isle were to be invaded, then you can believe it would be Scitai archers on their walls and our children in their cities, though their generals would be giving orders and their king doling out food.”

    
“Are you invaded often?” I asked.

    
He looked at me strangely, as if I had asked him the color of the sky.  “Never happened, not even once.”

    
“So it is kind of a moot point,” I concluded.

    
He smiled.  “There you go, then.”

    
“Are the Scitai good archers?” I asked.  My archery remained terrible.

    
He looked at me even more strangely. “Good?” he asked.  “How about `the best?’  Or are you some sort of champion with that Uman stick you carry?”

    
“No,” I said, shaking my head.  “Exactly the opposite – and if you wanted to teach me …”

    
That got a smile from him.  Luck or War had shined on me again, it seemed.  I had met another willing accomplice.

    
A modest, open-air coliseum had been built between the outer and the inner walls.  It had room for eighty seats on its floor and another few hundred in five stadium-like tiers.  I saw neither a refreshment stand nor an awning for protection from the elements, so I guessed that things got cancelled often.  Here, the Fovean High Council sat for a few hours every day.

    
So I rode my horse with Xinto to the Proxy to the High Council, a round Uman with long, white hair, dressed in a white robe and, from what I could tell, almost nothing underneath.  He needed a bath and I could tell that his breath stank before I got off of my horse.

    
“That is who you need to talk to,” Xinto said.

    
“What do I do?”

    
He looked over his shoulder, up at me.  “What do
you
think you do?” he asked me.

    
Sarcastic little bastard.  I already liked him.

    
“Introduce myself, tell the Man sitting there that I am from the Great Dwarven Nation, see when I can get in to talk to them?”

    
Xinto shook his head.  “The thinnest air,” he repeated.  “Let me down, I don’t want you on my conscience.”

    
I lowered him to the ground and dismounted behind him.  There were armed Uman warriors that I hadn’t noticed, just inside the entryway to the coliseum.  One took Blizzard’s reins, gave the stallion a nervous look, and nodded to me.  “He bites,” I warned him, to which he didn’t reply.

    
Xinto marched directly to the fat man and announced me as Lord Mordetur of the North.  I had business and no time to wait – it was imperative that I speak within the hour.

    
“Your nation?” he asked me, looking right over Xinto’s head.

    
“The Great Dwarven Nation,” I answered.  I still wore my Dwarven armor.  I had polished my horns, as well.  Blizzard snorted and stomped a steel shod hoof, making a spark on the cobblestones.  Xinto put his hands in the pockets of his voluminous cloak.

    
“Kind of tall for that, no?” he smiled up at me from his desk.  The stench wafting from his mouth as he spoke made me want to gag.

    
“Will we get in today?” Xinto demanded.  The fat man grimaced down at him.

    
“Don’t see why not,” he said.  “Nothing going on, they were about to break.”

    
“We need to hurry,” Xinto told me. 

    
The man stood and waddled off, I looked down at Xinto.

    
“We didn’t have that big of an emergency,” I told him.

    
“I know,” he said.

    
“So why the rush?”

    
He shook his head.  “Because they speak two languages here, Mordetur.  Emergency and not.  The wait for the latter is much longer, and usually last until it becomes the former.”

    
I nodded.  We had a few moments at least, so I decided to make the most of it.  “How should I behave with these people?” I asked.

    
This time Xinto didn’t look up at me, but waited until after the man had left.  “They aren’t people,” he told me, “they’re diplomats.  Their responsibility is to decide matters of international law.  Every Fovean nation is entitled to ten delegates to the Council, and any of them can ask you anything he wants, for as long as he wants, as many times as he wants.  You will know them because, while they are in Trenbon, they all wear white robes in order to distinguish themselves.”

    
“And to make sure someone else pays their bills?” I asked him.

    
He smiled.  “Now you’re showing me something.”

    
The man hadn’t returned yet, so Xinto continued, “Don’t believe that the Council represents peace. It furthers Law and it assuages War.  It stands as a dam against the flow of violence and ambition. In extreme situations, it can summon the combined Fovean armies. 

    
“Conflu knows this well.  Years ago, they annexed the nation of Andoran, lock, stock and barrel; claiming frequent pillaging of their boarders by Andaran raiders.  Their cities were taken and held by large Confluni garrisons, but that only lasted until the combined Fovean armies marched in.  The Volkhydrans hammered especially deep into Confluni land, paying back for years of raiding.  After another threat from the Council they pulled back their invasion.

    
“Since then, Confluni kill anyone who sets foot in Conflu.”

    
“Will there be… civilians here, as well as politicians?” I asked.

    
Xinto nodded.  “It’s anyone’s right to observe the proceedings, though few do until something spectacular is going on.  Mostly the High Council maintains records of international goings-on, solves trade disputes and relative values of coin and listens to and weighs the merits of each Fovean nation’s complaints about the others.  These complaints are aired between the members of the Council, of which the Simple People are, technically, a part.”

    
I wanted to ask, “Why technically,” but then without preamble we were summoned by our fat friend and put on a dais, near one end of the coliseum.  Men in white robes looked up at us in various degrees of limited interest.  On the tiers there were maybe twenty people, mostly Uman-Chi, although some looked to be black Men.

    
Xinto nudged me.  “Just read your writ, answer questions, and go.  Expect the Dorkan delegates to fight you and to deny everything.  Don’t try to leave until they dismiss you.  For the love of Eveave, don’t lie!”