Price of Ransom (38 page)

“You were saying?” Yevgeny asked.

“In fact,” Deucalion said, “it was at the original Concordance of New Era fifty eight that the position of advocate was developed as a more positive tool for conflict resolution than what was used before.”

“Which was?”

Both Deucalion and Yevgeny smiled. “Lawyers.”

A
S THE TRAIN CLACKED
and rolled in its rhythmic clatter along the track, Paisley gazed out the plastine window at the lush green countryside. No, Yehoshua corrected himself, it was not plastine, it was the far more fragile substance called glass. He was surprised that it was still used in League space, after the remarkable technology he had seen, but then, he was surprised at the antiquated train in which they were riding. Surely the engineers in League space could design a more streamlined, modern railcar rather than this model that was clearly ancient, or built to look ancient and run with more noise along slatted tracks than he thought necessary, or charming. But after everything he had seen, after Diomede and Concord and Terra orbit and the brisk efficiency of Heathrow Terminal, where they had landed, he had to assume that they wanted these trains to be exactly as they were: quaint and old-fashioned and slow.

He looked back at Paisley. Her expression was one of reverence, as if what she saw brought back some long-forgotten and exalted memory to her. Jenny moved on the seat beside him, and he turned his head to see that she, too, looked at Paisley. She noticed his gaze and winked at him, sharing her amusement at the awe on Paisley’s face. Next to Paisley, Gregori was engrossed in making the tabletop—a clear surface that when manipulated properly was in itself an entire com-screen—display the interlaced threads of Terra’s transportation web.

“Too bad Pinto isn’t here,” said Jenny in a low voice, nodding at the view outside the window. “It would remind him of home.”

“It be so
green
,” breathed Paisley. She did not even look at her seatmates, merely relapsed into her enraptured gaze at the steep-sloped hills and the meager scattering of trees clumped at the edges of rock-walled pasture. A silvered stream paralleled them, and under the lee of a hill a village stood, dark, squat houses that looked millennia old. In a low, singsong voice, Paisley began to speak words, an old song.

Far come they tae ya green grass land

Morning bright-o day

Where Dancer lead them hey come ho

Sunlight comes in morning.

“Maybe not,” added Jenny, as if she were answering her own question. “Pinto always hated those old tattoo songs. And anyway, there weren’t many mountains in Central. Nothing as old as those buildings, or so small. Size was an important consideration in impressing one’s acquaintances. He probably wouldn’t want to be reminded of it.” She frowned suddenly, her gaze focusing not on the scene outside but on some vision farther away.

Yehoshua sighed. Undoubtedly, the memory of Central had brought her round to thinking of Aliasing. He lowered his gaze to stare morosely at the multicolored network of lines on the tabletop. From the seats on the other side of the aisle, he could hear Deucalion haranguing the advocate he had hired to plead their cause. He glanced over to see Lily, no longer bothering to hide her smile, watching her half-brother with amusement clear on her features.

“There has to be some way to get out of the service requirement.”

“Deucalion. We’ve gone over this point ten thousand times.” To her credit, the advocate had the same look of amusement on her face that Lily did. “Service or prison. I can’t change that. What I can do is force them to accept a change of terms in the service. But we have to have an alternative that we can present to the tribunal.”

“It just infuriates me that that woman simply walked out of that hearing smug as you please, simply walked away from her misdeeds, from everything she did to us, as if she was the holiest person present.”

“Which she obviously thought she was,” said Lily. “Deucalion, we’ve gone over
this point
—if I may borrow a phrase—
twenty
thousand times. Min Havel has filed the charges and we’ll just have to wait. We can’t dwell on it. We have to move forward.”

Next to her, Bach sang softly, but Yehoshua could not quite make out the tune. He thought it sounded familiar.

“And she may well walk free without any charges sticking,” added min Havel. Deucalion groaned and grimaced, but restrained himself from a speech. “However much you may deplore it, that’s the way the system works.”

“Remember, Deucalion, however much I’d like to, as Jenny would say, pin her ass to the wall, that’s not my first concern. I need a job for the
Hope
and the crew that we can do. We can’t—don’t want—to go back to Reft space. We’d be fools to take up Yevgeny’s offer, and I don’t want to work for Intelligence anyway. So we have to find something legal that they’ll settle for.”

“Good luck,” muttered Deucalion, obviously still dwelling on Maria’s sins.

It occurred to Yehoshua that Lily’s advice was good: dwelling on things never got a person anywhere. So he coughed slightly, to gear himself up, and returned his attention to Jenny. She was still frowning, staring out the window but not seeing the landscape beyond. “Pinto wouldn’t have been interested in scenery anyway,” he said. “He’s like me—so used to space that this is more a curiosity than anything else. And he certainly wouldn’t have traded a look at Terra for being in on the
Hope
’s refitting. He and the Mule could hardly wait to get their hands on the new nav-pilot linkup.”

For an instant, Jenny looked at him as if he was as alien to her as the je’jiri. Then she grinned, and her usual cheerful cynicism sparked from her expression once again. “You’re right, of course. But I’m glad you came along, even if you would rather have stayed for the refitting. Those three”—she waved toward Lily and Deucalion and the advocate—“haven’t stopped wrangling since we left Concord, and I’ve got no patience for legal matters.” Yehoshua coughed to hide his smile. “It always seems more efficient just to blast the bastards. Oh well. And Paisley’s been gaping like an idiot ever since we came into orbit around Terra, so she’s no company. And Finch.” Finch was seated several seats back, strangers in the three seats around him; he was frowning with mute sourness at the com-slate he’d been given, presumably reading something. “I don’t know why Lily brought him.”

“Probably thought it’d do him good to be free of the ship for a while. He’s been out of sorts.”

“Finch is terminally out of sorts. So why the Hells do you suppose she’d think he’d feel better traveling in close company with Hawk all this way, I ask you? Because to be frank, Yehoshua,” and she dropped the level of her voice until he had to lean closer to hear her, “every time I look at Hawk, I
still
feel spooked. He gives me the creeps.”

Together, reflexively, they glanced over their shoulders to the four seats and table directly behind that at which Lily sat. Despite the train being crowded, despite the passengers in ones and twos filtering through at each stop as they looked for seats, the two aisle seats beside Hawk and Dr. Farhad remained empty. Hawk sat staring at Lily. His blue hair marked him as surely as a beacon would, but it was the entire attitude of his bearing, the cast of his shoulders, the way he tilted his head, sniffing rather than looking as anyone passed by, the inhuman way his mouth was set, that branded him and kept anyone from sitting down. Dr. Farhad seemed oblivious to her surroundings as she studied writing on her slate and occasionally glanced up to ask Hawk a question. Occasionally he replied. Not often.

The tabletop shifted color suddenly, and both of them jumped and then glanced about self-consciously. Gregori had changed the map; now he examined a grid of this island’s transport web.

“King’s Cross,” he said carefully, trying the words on his tongue. “What’s
king
mean?”

Yehoshua looked at Jenny and they both shrugged. “I don’t know,” replied Jenny. “What is it?”

“Terminal we left from, in that city.
London
.” His face brightened and he gazed up at his mother. “I know. Old Nanny Skipsy used to sing me this song, ‘London bridge is falling down.’ Do you remember her? I used to think it was a thing, like a stress factor. Do you think it was that city we come through?”

“
Came
through,” Jenny corrected automatically. “I don’t see why not. Old songs like that must have come from somewhere.”

“Nanny Skipsy?” Yehoshua asked.

“Engineer on the boat we shipped on before the
Easy Virtue.
Damn my eyes, but I’d swear that old woman was about one hundred years old. She knew the strangest things. Said she’d learnt them from her grand’mam, who learnt them from
her
grand’mam who was a crippled yeoman from the wreck of the
Bitter Tidings
, the old highroad boat that Central blew up when it tried to run Reft space.”

“Did you believe her?”

“No. I thought she was crazy. Now I’m not so sure.” She waved a hand to encompass the landscape, the train, and the many other occupants of the carriage, dressed in the unfamiliar fashions of the League and conversing in the unfamiliar cadences of League Standard.

“Never believed you’d be setting foot on Terra itself?” Yehoshua asked, grinning.

But before Jenny could reply, Paisley turned her head smoothly and fixed them with a gaze almost uncomfortable in its intensity. “Tirra-li. We hae found ya green grass land.” Her Ridani accent, which had softened over the course of their travels, had come back doubly strong. She began to chant in a low, singsong voice.
“We’ll come one day tae green grass land / Morning bright-o day / When Jehane he dance us down ya way / Sun shine bright-o morning.”

Yehoshua and Jenny regarded each other in silence. Paisley regarded them as if some great revelation had just come to her and she expected that it was as obvious to them as it was to her. A low chime heralded the conductor’s voice over the carriage intercom, which was embedded in the tabletop console.

“Cerrigydrudion.”

Deucalion rose abruptly. “We get off here,” he said.

Lily stood as well, glancing around to mark each of her people. “Let’s go.”

They pulled down their carrys from the overhead racks and got off the train. Finch trailed behind, standing at the edge of the group as the train pulled away from the tiny station and Deucalion surveyed the ticket booth and turnstile that led onto a quiet street, along which ranks of two-story, drab houses stood up against one another. Two people went through the turnstile. The man sitting in the ticket booth stared at them.

“This is the town he was born in,” Deucalion said to Lily. “It’s my best bet as where he’d go to ground.”

“But how do we find him?”

Deucalion grinned. “Obviously you’re not a native. First we get a place to stay and stow our gear, and then we go down to the pub and gossip with the locals. They’ll know about him, if he’s here. And I can’t imagine he’d go anywhere else in Cymru.”

“Lead on.” Lily hoisted her carry over one shoulder and waited.

The pub proved also to be the inn, and with some doubling up, and the relinquishing of their room by two of the children of the house, the innkeeper found enough room for the entire party. Yehoshua found himself in a room with Deucalion and Finch. Finch tossed his carry at the foot of his bed and lay down on his stomach, face turned to stare out the many-paned window—glass again, Yehoshua noted, whorled and so thick that it gave a slight distortion to the view outside. From their room they could see the pub’s courtyard and a gate that led onto a broad circle of green lawn in whose center lay a pond. As he looked, he saw Lily and Bach come outside, followed by Dr. Farhad and Hawk. They sat down at one of the tables, and a young woman came out after them and wiped the table off and then stood talking. She looked once at Hawk, eyes widening, and after that pointedly did
not
look at him again.

“Don’t see many je’jiri on Terra, do they?” said Yehoshua, and Deucalion, who had been looking outside as well, turned.

“Not any more. There were some incidents …” He declined to say more. “We’d better go down.” He threw his carry down on his bed and left.

“Are you coming, Finch?” Yehoshua asked.

“No.”

“Aren’t you hungry?”

“No.”

Yehoshua sighed and followed Deucalion out. Jenny had arrived before him, and she grinned and waved him over to the table where she sat with Gregori and the advocate. Deucalion had pulled a chair up to Lily’s table. “Where’s Paisley?” Yehoshua asked as he sat down.

“She pitched her carry on the top bunk and headed straight out the door. Look.” She directed his gaze to the gate, and then he saw Paisley out on the green, staring alternately at the grass, the pond, the steep hills surrounding the village, and the sky.

“It’s unusually good weather,” said the advocate. “It usually rains this time of year. I’d suggest the ale and the ploughman’s lunch.”

“What’s
ploughman
?” Gregori asked.

Under cover of the advocate’s earnest explanation of this term, Yehoshua leaned closer to Jenny. She rested her chin on her fist and tilted closer to him as well, so close that it took his breath away for an instant and he forgot what he was going to say. She smiled, and he flushed, abruptly aware that she knew quite well what effect her proximity was having on him.

“Finch is sulking,” he said, because it was the only thing that came to mind, or at least the only thing that came to mind that he could say in such a public place, at such a time.

“And Paisley is blissing. They ought to trade a little across and both come back toward center. I’m worried about her. It isn’t like her to be this quiet.”

“Knowing Paisley, she won’t be for long.” He paused as the young woman came and took their orders and retreated. Several people had gathered in the courtyard now, mostly, Yehoshua suspected, to stare at the newcomers. They politely kept their attention primarily on Bach, who floated at his usual spot just above and behind Lily’s left shoulder.

Jenny got a considering look on her face. “Last night Dr. Farhad asked me a second time about Gregori’s hair.”