Orphan's Alliance (Jason Wander) (14 page)

The second row was heads of state. By skullduggery, that included me, instead of the Duck’s boss, who got bumped back to row four.

Behind the dignitaries would march the Palace Household Guard, followed by striped-pants Halberdiers, bands dismounted and mounted, artillery, cavalry, infantry, militia, police and firemen, game wardens, child ballerinas, then the navy. I kind of liked that last part.

As a big wheel, I was full-dressed out like Captain Hook, down to my sword and sash. But in that second row I looked like a Cub Scout.

The Chief of the Council of Headmen of the Hundred Encampments of the Tassini wore a pavement-length, hooded purple cloak that matched the indigo tint of his face and hands. His sword’s scabbard and belt weren’t encrusted with ordinary jewels, but with Cavorite Stones the size of walnuts. Raw, Stone Hills meteoric Cavorite doesn’t eat gravity, though a Stone is as light as a ping pong ball. A Stone is a translucent, insulating rind that this universe grows around a stray sliver of a universe next door. The sliver isn’t matter, at least not as matter exists in the four dimensions of this universe. Harkening back to Howard Hibble’s visualization of this universe as one sheet of newspaper, Cavorite is a piece of the preceding page that lays up against this page, and they both got balled up together.

Physics aside, even one Stone glows red, so the Tassini Chief looked like a neon beer sign walking. Yes, even heads of states at war with Marin attended, under truce. The Casuni and the Tassini shared a sovereign with Marin the way Canada and Australia shared a sovereign with England. But less chummy.

“May the Bitch burn in hell for eternity!” Casus, ruler of the Casuni, bent toward me and whispered, so close that I could smell the groundfruit crumbs in his black beard. Casus was nearly as tall, nearly as broad, and half as hairy, as a grizzly.

I whispered back, “We wouldn’t have won the war without her, Casus.”

Casus grinned, and slapped my back so hard that I bounced off the Tassini Headman, who stumbled, then scowled at both of us.

Casus said, “Now, there was a war! When the Emerald River runs with your enemy’s blood, you know it’s going to be a good day!” He wore a gold helmet with a nose guard, and a stiff, red-plumed crest on its centerline. His metal breastplate and órea yogauntlets matched his helmet, and his breeches, cape, and gold-spurred boots were black. His four pistol holsters, two on his belt and two at his pectorals, were empty in deference to the occasion, but he wore a sword as broad as a canoe paddle. The Queen’s cold, uncasketed body lay atop the bier, elevated on a solid silver catafalque, dressed in a silver tiara, and a gown of feathers, each hammered from silver. Bassin’s mother, who in life might have weighed a hundred pounds after dessert, couldn’t have stood in the dress. A whip cracked, and the bier inched forward, then began to roll smoothly on the Queen’s final, three-mile journey, “the Miles,” as it was called. For all its gold and silver, the bier’s mass scarcely fazed the team that pulled it.

A strock looks a lot like a Styracosaur, which looks like a size quintuple-x rhino, with a frill of multiple, rear-pointing horns, as though it were wearing one of those indian-chief headdresses. Marini farmers that plow behind strocks file down their nose horn and frill horns, because a bull’s neck muscles are so strong that its horn can punch through an armored wagon.

The six matched pairs of ebony bull strocks that drew the queen’s bier needed all those neck muscles. The face, frill, and curving horns of each bull were masked behind a concave gold helmet, piped in silver, that must have outweighed a brick pallette.

Behind us, the massed bands began a dirge.

As we walked, Casus said to me, “I suppose you’re right about her. I should pull the long face today. But the truth? I’d dance the Miles barefoot.”

Because the Clans cremated their dead, their language had no idiom for dancing on someone’s grave. Casus had stated the equivalent Casuni idiom. We didn’t all walk directly behind the royal bier. We all walked behind, but fifteen feet to the right of, the bier. A dozen adult strock take in nearly three tons of water and dietary fiber every day. The thrust of the idiom was that you’d have to be really, really happy that someone was dead to walk directly behind their bier barefoot for three miles. The Duck had bribed the cortège director to diagram me lined up next to Casus, because Casus and I had another of those combat-bonded personal relationships that diplomats love to leverage. Walking three miles with the commander of Marin’s enemy was a SNO, which was a diplomatic idiom, unrelated to poop. A Serendipitous Negotiation Opportunity was one created without investment of negotiating capital. Neither side had to yield about the shape of the negotiating table, or give in by requesting the meeting. The parties, apparently thrown together by circumstance, just talked. Women understood this technique since the first one dropped her handkerchief. It took men four years at Harvard to figure it out. As we walked, me taking two steps to Casus’ one, I asked, “If the Slug war was good, why is this war bad?”

“We gain nothing from it. We can’t eat the Stones we capture. We can’t sell them to you, because the Marini control the ports.”

“Then why did you start it?”

“The Bitch,” he darted his eyes around, then continued, “—God praise her memory,óise”

“Do you know why?”

“Some lie about fuel surcharge.”

I closed my eyes and sighed. Howard. “Did you talk to her about it?”

“I said when the last war ended that I’d talk to her again if we met in hell. Jason, I have lost sons in this war.”

I patted his forearm, but not too hard. Casus grieved for every son he had lost. But he would have been devastated if any of them chose a low-mortality profession, say, retail, instead of pillaging. And at last count he had sired over six hundred of them.

Along the route, a weeping Marini freewoman in housemaid’s robes broke from the crowd, and hurled a clothes iron at Casus. “That’s for my son! Burn in hell, you ogre!”

The iron bounced off Casus’ breastplate like a pebble, and he stared back over his shoulder as guards wrestled the woman to the pavement.

The rest of the Miles passed uneventfully. Women held infants above their heads, to witness the Queen’s passage. Men wept. The bier’s wheels creaked.

Isolated raindrops plocked the Boulevard’s cobbles as the bier halted at the stair that stretched up the royal pyre.

It took twenty of the Queen’s Household Guard thirty minutes to march the Queen’s silver catafalque up the two hundred steps to the pyre’s apex.

Bassin, bareheaded, in black armor, followed them with a lit, upraised torch. Marini artificial limbs were more torture implements than they were modern organic prosthetics, but after three miles on only one real leg, Bassin betrayed neither a limp nor a twitch of discomfort.

Casus said, “Her son’s as tough as she was. He could almost pass for Casuni.”

“Would you talk to
him
then?”

“About what?”

“Patching up the alliance. You’ve lost sons. The Marini and the Tassini have lost sons. My world and yours could lose more than that if the Slugs return. So at least talk, that’s all I’m suggesting.”

The pallbearers rested Her Majesty atop the pyre, then retreated, and left Bassin alone above the throng. He raised the torch, and the crowd replied to the gesture, speaking with one voice the last toast made at all Clan funerals, “May paradise spare you from allies!”

Bassin knelt, lit the kindling beneath the catafalque, then returned down the stairway, as the flames spread, and the temperature soared until molten silver coursed down troughs that bordered the stairway alongside him.

The thundering, growing fire seared my cheeks, as Casus shrugged. “In paradise, we need no allies. But apparently I’m going to hell.”

THIRTY-TWO

THAT EVENINö6" G, I cornered the Duck at the wake, an intimate gathering for six thousand, held in the Summer Palace inner court. The skies had cleared, and Bren’s second moon, the red one, sped north to south above us. It was a pretty thing, but I never could understand why Howard spent so much time studying it. It didn’t even affect the tides, the way a proper moon should.

“It was the Spooks’ goddam fuel surcharge!”

“What?”

“That’s what set Casus off.”

The Duck grimaced, and pumped his fist. “Damn! How could we have known?”

“You could have asked him. Duck, all diplomats do is talk to each other.”

“Jason, the Casuni have no diplomats. They have no embassy. Casus lives in a yurt and follows migrating dinosaurs. We would have had to retask an overhead ’Bot just to find him.”

A servant passed us silver mead goblets. I sipped, then said, “Anyway, he’s willing to talk to Bassin.”

The Duck smiled, and tinged his goblet against mine. “I think we can end this war cheap. We reverse the surcharge—”

“That just gets Casus back to where he was. He’s lost sons.”

The Duck raised his palm. “Let me finish. If we strip the weapons systems off one Kodiak, we can make Casus a present of it, without exceeding our authority.”

I bugged my eyes. “A cheap bribe?”

The Duck frowned so hard that his lips made a beak. “A gesture of respect and shared humanity. In 1945, Roosevelt made the King of Saudi Arabia a present of an airliner and Roosevelt’s spare wheelchair. The ‘special relationship’ between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia held into this century. Would the death of even one more parent’s son be cheaper?”

Five weeks later, Howard, Ord, the Duck, and I watched from our Consulate’s roof, as a transport carrying the first Cavorite cargo to leave Bren in months lifted off. The Duck turned to a holo gen, and keyed up a real-time overhead image with audio, from a TOT

operating over the Casuni Highlands. Snow patched the grassland, and a herd of thousands of grazing duckbills drifted across the rolling landscape.

As we watched, duckbills at the herd margin raised their heads, and stared in the direction of distant thunder. They began to trot, then the herd stampeded, a living tsunami that shook the ground. A Kodiak, painted in purple and yellow stripes, with a sawed off stub protruding from the turret’s cannon housing, fishtailed across the plain at fifty miles per hour. It roared toward the stampeding herd, trailing a dust plume behind its skirting. Waist deep in the commander’s hatch atop the turret, his hands gripping the bare gun mount ring, swayed Casus. He wore tanker’s goggles under his plumed helmet, and his beard and cape snapped in the slipstream. The Kodiak roared in among the duckbills, spun doughnuts, and they scattered, honking. Casus threw his head back, and yodeled. Ord stood with his arms crossed, shaking his ûd, us head.

I smiled at him. “Not a regulation paint job, is it, Sergeant Major?”

“Hardly, sir. But I know many dead men who would love to see it.” Ord clapped the Duck on the shoulder. “Peace well made, Mr. Muscovy.”

The Duck and I walked to the brick wall that rimmed the Consulate roof, rested our forearms on its cool, tile rail, and looked out across the city. The Summer Palace, granite pink and spired, loomed to our left, the onion towers of the Great Library rose to our right. The four-story Consulate nestled among stuccoed villas of the wealthy, amid tree-lined streets.

We peered down into the gardened courtyards of two villas, side by side. The Duck pointed at an orange pennant, hung alongside the servant’s entrance of the left-hand villa. “Well, at least one slaveholder agrees with Bassin.”

Marin’s new monarch had embraced peace with the Casuni and Tassini for its own sake, but also to free his nation to remake itself. However, change is hard, especially change for the better. Marini, Casuni, and even Tassini, custom had always allowed an owner to emancipate a slave. Longevity in service, acts of heroism, even the declining ability of the owner to support his household, were common reasons. And there was a small class of freemen and freewomen who filled similar jobs to those slaves held, mostly doing laundry.

Bassin the First had the absolute power to simply abolish slavery. But the vile thread of man owned by man had been woven into the Clans’ fabric for millennia. By comparison, the United States’

Emancipation Proclamation after “only” a few hundred years of slavery had been overdue, but its aftermath hadn’t exactly been smooth sailing. Bassin the First was wise enough to take it slow, because Bassin the Assassinated couldn’t accomplish much.

The first token of Bassin’s administration was to encourage slave holders to replace their slaves by hiring freemen and freewomen. An orange pennant by the door meant the household was hiring. We could see a hundred villas. We saw one pennant.

In each courtyard below us a robed gardener bent, tending flowers. The man on the right wore the yellow bracelet of indenture. The man on the left didn’t. He was a freeman. Both lived with their families in modest quarters behind the big house. Both sweated dawn to dark. Both were paid less in a month than their master or boss paid for wine in a week.

The Duck said, “You could argue there’s no practical difference.”

“You wouldn’t. I wouldn’t. Bassin wouldn’t.”

“Then tomorrow should go great.”

THIRTY-THREE

THE NEXT DAY, Bassin became the first Clansman to see his planet from space, unless you counted his ancestors, who the Slugs had brought to Bren from Earth as slaves thirty thousand years before. Marini were more worldly than a plains nomad like Casus, but getting an average Marini citizen to climb into a claustrophobic tin box that fell straight up wþ">Mould have resembled kidnapping. Bassin wasn’t average.

He rapped his knuckles against the four-inch thick quartz window beside his seat, then traced the joining between it and the hull’s plating. “The pressure differential is that great?”

The Loadmaster nodded, then leaned across Bassin, and pointed to the planet four hundred miles below. “You can make out Marinus, below. Where the cloud breaks, and the river joins the coast, sir. Your Highness.”

The transport slid cleanly into the empty bay it had left on
Ike
. The swabbies fitted Bassin with complimentary blue coveralls, with “H.M. Bassin I” sewn above the breast pocket, and a red baseball cap with an
MCC-3 D.D. Eisenhower
patch on the peak. Baseball was hardly the only thing new to Bassin here, but he sponged up every detail.
Ike
’s skipper, himself, gave Bassin a tour, then the new king sat together with Howard, the Duck, and me in
Ike
’s wardroom. Duck pitched the general idea, which was that Marin should want to move toward the more advanced reality that the
Eisenhower
represented. Then the Duck pitched the specific idea that, with Bassin’s nation unexpectedly at peace thanks to us, Bren could and should commit its considerable non-slave civil engineering capacity to Mousetrap. Of course, our Spooks bungled Bren into the war in the first place, but the Duck skipped over that.