Protector: Foreigner #14 (24 page)

“Take-holds,” Artur said. “Good!” Artur seemed a lot happier with that idea.

Irene had not said much. She had agreed, but she was scared. She always was, of new things. But she was going to try.

She was not going to get hurt. He had his mind made up on that.

He just wished he could convince Irene, who probably was not going to get a lot of sleep tonight.

She had said, when they had walked back to the room, “The table was so pretty. Everything was so pretty.”

She had even eaten the pâté, and never complained, though after they had gotten back to the room, she had gone looking for the little medical kit in her baggage, saying her stomach hurt.

She had tried so hard. But Irene always had.

Now she leaned with her chin on the windowsill and watched the lightning and listened to the thunder, only flinching at the loudest thunderclaps. “It’s real,” she said. “Pictures aren’t enough. They just aren’t enough.”

B
ren dressed in his roughest clothes the next morning—his valets had packed a good outdoor coat for him, and had anticipated a country venue might require it. They had assured him through the usual servant-to-servant whispering that that would be perfectly fine for breakfast—that the guests would be in their ship-style clothing.

His aishid prepared in their own way, but their preparations were less about wardrobe than armament, in case, and in communication with the house security station. The word was, throughout the system, it was a fair morning with a light, nippy breeze, and there was nothing changed in the security stance.

Jase turned up, alone, but cheerful, in his blue station fatigues and an insulated brown coat. “Kaplan and Polano beg off. I gave them the chance. They said if anything did go amiss, they’d need rescue themselves. They said better take two more who know what they’re doing.”

“Not nervous, are you?”

“Not as long as I ride with the kids,” Jase said. “You do as you please, friend.”

“I’m perfectly content with that.”

They all met downstairs, in the dining hall, the breakfast room being for intimate gatherings. Ilisidi and Tatiseigi had turned out in riding clothes, while Cajeiri wore a sturdy black twill coat, and Jase and the youngsters from the station all wore their own comfort-wear, with jackets.

It was a quick light breakfast and out and around to the mecheita pens, where a rumbling low complaint said the grooms were letting their charges know they were indeed going to work this morning. The sky was clear blue, and the air was chill—it was not quite to the stage of breath frosting, but it was close, and the mecheiti were in high spirits.

A party of their size meant saddling just about every mecheita, and while it ordinarily meant more control, with more of the herd under rein, with novice children in the group, they needed a serious rider to handle the herd leader, and whatever constellation of fractious competitors the herd’s current composition afforded them. In days past it would have been Ilisidi riding foremost, with Cenedi and Nawari right beside her, hellbent for anything the terrain offered.

But that wasn’t Ilisidi’s choice today. Tatiseigi, who was of an unguessable age, likewise declined, and while one could have ultimate faith in the dowager’s skilled hand, one worried.

Not to mention worrying about his own lately unpracticed self. And Jase.

A groom brought the herd leader out to the pen, and Tatiseigi gave the order for two grooms to take the lead, which was, in Bren’s opinion, the best arrangement.

Other mecheiti came out, under saddle. Ilisidi and Tatiseigi and their bodyguards went into the pen to mount up—they had no trouble to get their mounts to extend a leg and allow an easy mount, but Ilisidi accepted a little help from Cenedi at the last. Tatiseigi managed on his own, on what Bren rather suspected was a retired herd-leader, a mecheita with a conspicuous raking scar on his rump.

And from that lofty vantage Ilisidi and Tatiseigi called Cajeiri over, and introduced him to a fine-looking ten-year-old, a rusty black, with a red tassel on the bridle ring and a ring of red enamel on each of the bright brass tusk-caps.

This was Jeichido, no question, and Cajeiri looked uncharacteristically nervous and excited—quite, quite happy, and emoting just a shade too much around a high-bred mecheita. Ilisidi gave a quiet, “Tut, tut, tut,” that meant calm down, pay attention, as if she were talking to the mecheita.

The young gentleman calmed himself, took the single rein, made a spring for the mounting loop set high on the animal’s shoulder, and with his left toe in the assisting fold of leather, he was up, rein and quirt in hand, the first leg over, and the second foot settling comfortably into the curve of the mecheita’s nape. Jeichido fidgeted a few steps, then swung neatly about at a light tap of the quirt. Antaro and Jegari were up.

“Good luck to us,” Jase muttered, then.

It was their turn. The junior grooms were kind, and afforded them the mounting block, with two grooms to steady the mecheiti, who were not likely to regard an unskilled demand for the extended leg. His aishid needed no such help, and that was six more of them safely in the saddle.

That left the children, and three quiet, older mecheiti, sleepy-looking animals—there were four younger spares and a new foal milling about the pen at loose ends, making trouble, occasioning a threatening head shake from Tatiseigi’s mount and a warning from the junior grooms. But these were the oldest in the herd. They’d follow the herd leaders at whatever pace they could muster, to the ends of the earth, but they wasted none of their energy. The first stood with eyes half-shut as the grooms first lifted Artur up, and then led up a mecheita for Irene.

The herd-leader, however, had gotten wind of odd-smelling small strangers, and was circling under taps of the groom’s quirt, wanting to get closer, chuffing and blowing, sloping hindquarters aquiver with impatience. He—it happened to be a male—let out a moaning rumble, a threat, a warning. They very much needed to get this lot out of the pen and moving on this cool morning.

Irene looked at the herd-leader, who had been put into another frustrated circle, and with a slip of her foot on the first step of the mounting block, she recovered her balance. Then she froze, with a look of terror on her face.

“Come on, Reny,” Gene called out. “Move! You can do it!”

She came unfrozen. She settled her balance on the block, faltered her way up another step onto the top of the block, dropping the rein as she caught her balance. The groom handily caught it as it fell and gave it back, folded the same hand about the quirt and shoved her upward without any preamble. Irene grabbed the saddle back, not the mounting strap, missed the toehold, and as the mecheita took a step forward, she lost contact with the mounting block and hung there, dropping the quirt. Bren loosed his rein and shifted his quirt, deciding to ride alongside and tell Irene to go back upstairs and ask Cajeiri’s servants for a cup of tea.

But she had hold of the front ring instead of the quirt, and she started hauling herself upward. The groom caught a flailing foot in his hand and lifted. Irene landed belly down, managed to drag her right leg over the saddle back and, as the groom tried to keep the old mecheita still, Irene hauled herself upright, grabbed the ring, dragged her left foot into its proper place in the curve of the neck and, panting, took the quirt a second groom put back into her hand.

“Loop around your wrist,” Bren said in ship-speak. “Are you all right?”

“Yes, sir,” she said. She gave her head a shake, getting the hair out of her eyes. “Yes, sir!”

Bren worried. She looked very, very small up there, and looked terrified as the old mecheita moved in response to the shifting of the rest of the herd, but she had made it.

Meanwhile Gene had tried to go up Cajeiri’s way, didn’t quite have the reach, but two grooms had just swept him up and put him into the saddle as if he weighed nothing at all. Gene awkwardly sorted out reins and quirt as the mecheita, let at liberty, turned and came alongside Irene’s, giving it a casual butt of a tusked jaw.

“Hold on,” Jase said. Gene had acted as if he had an idea what he was doing, the grooms had let the mecheita go, and there was a butt and a head flung back, the two old girls in a momentary fuss, brass tusks flashing, but there was no great fire in it. Algini rode in and settled the situation with a little flick of the quirt.

The head groom then let the leader move toward the gate, the herd-leader’s rivals shouldered their way after him, and a junior groom opened that broad gate and rode it outward as it swung. The herd-leader exited, ready to stretch out and run, and the entire pen emptied out in rough order of herd rank, except the one youngster trying to keep up with its mother and scrambling with amazing shifts through the towering crowd. The impetus of the herd slowed fast—the three lead riders got them all to a sedate pace.

Bren, carried through the gate in the initial rush, looked back at the youngsters at the rear, made sure they had all made it. Cajeiri and his aishid pulled aside from the leaders, likely trying to wait for his young guests, but stopping began to entail a discussion with Jeichido. The boy was managing at least to hold his position, but only just. Jeichido was having none of it, and he began to let Jeichido move up again, but Jegari peeled off and rode back to the rear, a lad who’d grown up riding and who had no trouble violating the herd order, even on a strange mecheita.

So Jegari was going to ride with the kids.

Good, Bren thought, took a deep breath and relaxed as the mecheiti, denied a mad dash, swung into their traveling stride. They swept along beside the house and across the drive to the end of the low inner hedge. Beyond that was pasturage damp from the rains, so wide and rolling a range the limiting hedges were out of sight.

On grass, the pace stretched out and became as smooth as silk, and Bren relaxed. His aishid was with him. Jase was. The air was brisk, the sky was brilliant, and, God, it felt good to ride again, even if it was not his Nokhada—he felt a pang of longing for that troublesome but excellent beast, whom he’d not seen since he’d gone into space. He didn’t know this one’s name, nor did it greatly matter this morning, just that she was not an ambitious sort. Behind Tatiseigi’s bodyguard was perfectly fine for him and for Jase, and Banichi and the others were on his right.

He looked back from time to time, double-checking on the youngsters with Jegari—he saw Irene laughing, riding beside Gene’s mecheita with no trouble. A little into the ride, after a little argument to the side of the group, Cajeiri and Jeichido finally came to an understanding about dropping back in the order, and Cajeiri and Antaro and the older pair of his guards held back to ride with his guests for a bit. That lasted maybe a quarter of an hour. Then those three gradually drifted forward in the order. They stopped to talk to him and Jase, while Jeichido wanted to keep going, and that sparked another little exchange, which disturbed all the mecheiti around them.

“This mecheita is determined, nandiin,” Cajeiri laughed. “Great-uncle said she will need work.”

“She is very fine,” Bren said, and Cajeiri held Jeichido steady about that long before she wanted to break forward again. He held her long enough to make the point, then waved and was off again, forward, up to his great-grandmother.

Ilisidi seemed to be enjoying herself at least as much as Cajeiri. She had walked with a cane as long as Bren had known her, but in the saddle, it always had been a different story. He had seen her, on Babsidi, take rocky hillsides that challenged her young men—worse, he had been on a mecheita who wanted to follow her. She was laughing, talking to her great-grandson, and so was Lord Tatiseigi—those who knew them only in the Bujavid would be amazed. But he was not. Open country was where Ilisidi had always been happy, far removed from the Bujavid and as removed from politics as Ilisidi ever was.

Today, everything was entirely as she had arranged it to be, Tatiseigi was happy, Tatiseigi had given the boy the earnest of the gift
she
had arranged for him—the continuance of the line of mecheiti she had ridden to national legend.

And if her great-grandson’s happiness entailed three human children—he wasn’t that sure she hadn’t had a hand in their getting down here, too. Geigi did nothing that displeased her: if she wanted those three to come down, he’d make certain it happened.

One had to wonder, however at her
reasons
for that decision. Happiness? Possibly, but one got onto very shaky ground, assuming Ilisidi made any choice based on grandmotherly softness.

That the boy had had no atevi contacts at all who were children—that had not been her choosing. Her goal had been to keep him alive. That was first. Giving him a childhood? Not even a factor.

But when the boy went out and made his own associations among the humans, she also hadn’t fought it. Ever. She was a master chess player. Had she suspected even then the possibilities in such an association?

Silly question.

What Jase had said, what Geigi had said, about the factions shaping up in the human half of that equation—did one lay any bet at all that Ilisidi hadn’t heard, from Geigi, the entire business, and that Ilisidi hadn’t made up her own mind that, while her great-grandson had had to come down to the world and deal with atevi and let atevi instincts shape his reactions—he should not give up his direct links to the powers in the heavens either?

When it came to atevi in the heavens, Ilisidi, who stood for the traditional—was hell-bent on being sure atevi were well-informed and in charge.

It wasn’t cynicism that made him absolutely certain Ilisidi had had all the reports on the politics involved in her grandson’s guests, or that she had had a hand in getting them down here. It was experience.

Their course took them far, far beyond sight of the house, but still within the hedges, in a pasturage so wide that, where one saw a hedge, it was only on one side. There was no road here, only grass. There was no disturbance in the world.

Until the lead mecheiti stopped, cold, head up, and the foremost dipped their heads and snuffed the ground.

Every mecheita in the herd jolted to a stop. Ranks closed. Bren looked back to check on the youngsters. They were all still in the saddle, their sensible mounts quiet, alert but not jostling each other.

“Track,” Jago said, as Banichi talked, probably with Cenedi, short-range. “Mecheita. It was made since the rain. We advised the camp this morning—perhaps a little late—to keep their riders in camp.”

One didn’t want two herds encountering, not with new riders in the group. The lead mecheiti all had their heads up, nostrils working, hindquarters stretched, and one, the herd-second, actually raised up a little on her hind legs, the long neck giving her a view of all the grassland about. She came down, backing and turning under the rein and taps of the quirt.

The herd-leader gave out a moan that shocked the air. Every mecheita in the herd was head-up, alert, heads all facing toward the same point on the horizon. They had mayhem in mind, no question.