Orion Shall Rise (47 page)

‘You, the exiled Prince, don’t?’ The words tumbled from Plik. He gestured wildly. ‘Well-a-day, he seldom does, he knows not who he
is,
before he comes to his kindom or his death. You’re in the myth now, you know, completely in the myth. You’ve identified yourself with Orion, and here he is the sleeping hero who shall wake to set free his people – or else the Giant in Chains, who shall burst his bonds and storm forth to take vengeance. The dead are leaving their graves. In this rainy land I have seen the old Merican spirit rising huge from where it lay centuries buried, and the foundations of the world are atremble –’

‘You’re drunk, Plik, drunk again.’

‘What else? Come, join me, let’s drink while we can.’

2

Fog hung thick and white, turning nearby trees into blurs of dimness, obliterating all that lay beyond. The dank air made Terai wheeze and think morbidly of tombs. Silence pressed inward. From time to time a horn lowed, not as if in warning but as if it mourned for ships long sunken.

Though the cabin was warm enough and well lit, a sense of the outside chill pervaded it. Terai thought that that was because it was a prison, the windows hastily but stoutly barred, the door to the outside reinforced and nailed shut. He and Wairoa had this half to themselves, but through a functioning door he heard their guards in the adjacent room. A poker game was in progress. He was tempted to go in and join it – anything to break the unending sameness – but he had no money. Besides, no matter what the game, he doubted he’d be well received. Monotony had turned the Norrmen resentful of their captives. He and Wairoa might have cultivated better relationships, but had instead armored themselves in sullen pride, and it was probably too late now for camaraderie.

He prowled from wall to knotty-pine wall. The pipe between his jaws had made a haze of its own, blue and biting. His tongue felt like scorched leather. But what was a man to do?

Wairoa sat reading a book. The Wolf chieftains had been generous about providing those. Also available were a radio, phonograph, record library. The Lodge maintained Shaw Island as a resort for members. Neighboring cabins stood vacant at the present season; perhaps a few occupants had been persuaded to move elsewhere for the rest of their holidays. It would have helped if Terai had been allowed to use the hobby shop, do things with his hands, but the keepers had their strict orders to be wary of him. He and Wairoa could walk and exercise outdoors when they chose, but always under heavy guard.

‘Mong to Norrmen,’ he muttered. ‘I wish we could have stayed with the Mong. They treated us mast-high better.’

Wairoa continued reading, but made reply. He could divide his attention like that. Once he had broken his reticence and described the peculiar neural connections between his cerebral hemispheres, but most of what he related had gone over Terai’s head. ‘I suspect we would have had our throats cut, after polite apologies,’ he said.

‘Our presence was potentially most inconvenient for various influential persons.’

‘I know, I know. How often have we been over this ground before? I don’t see how you can stay so calm, Wairoa, I truly don’t.’

‘Deprivation drives you crazy. I have no family to miss. I do have an ever-changing reality to perceive on this patch of soil, the waters around, the sky above. Don’t you remember what Ronica Birken pointed out – Hold.’ Wairoa lowered his book and raised a hand.

For a minute silence prevailed in Terai’s hearing, then he caught the noise too, remote but approaching, the stutter of an outboard motor. Surprised remarks, delighted oaths, chairs scraping back across planks showed that the guards had also heard.
Who in Nan‘s name might that be? No random boatsman, I’ll wager, if he burns fuel like that
. The heart slugged in Terai’s breast.

The motor stopped and different sounds drifted from the wharf. Several newcomers, walked up the trail to the cabin, guided by men whose forms were almost as unfamiliar in the eddying fog. They were led off, presumably to shelter – except for one, who stepped closer to this building and vanished from sight around its corner.

Soon he came in to the Maurai. And he was Mikli Karst.

– ‘How cordial do you expect us to be, for Haristi’s sake, when you tried to murder us?’

From the chair he had taken, Mikli smirked at the man looming over him. ‘That was professional, not personal,’ he said. ‘In your place, I’d take a sporting attitude.’

‘And keeping us locked away like animals, that’s damn near worse,’ Terai growled.

Wairoa sat quiet in a corner, watching from the mask around his eyes, surely perceiving with every enigmatic sense that was his. Fog in a window behind him was as revealing as his countenance. No sound reached Terai from the next room. The guards had withdrawn to it and were poised alert behind the door, doubtless hoping that this dismal service of theirs was near an end.

Mikli waved his cigarette. ‘Oh, I’d say you’ve been pretty pampered animals,’ he laughed. ‘We had no choices, you know, except to kill you or hold you incommunicado.’

Yes, we’ve too much to tell,
Terai thought wearily, for the hundredth or thousandth time.
Where to find the plutonium and its carrier, absolute proof of Northwestern guilt, a casus belli that
should satisfy the most rabbity pacifist. Just as critical, the information that the Wolf Lodge is in this business to the tips of its hairy ears. Our corps can’t learn a worthwhile thing from the Union government, because that gaggle of powerless clowns doesn’t
know
a thing. But a lead to Wolf– and to Kenai in Laska, from words that got dropped along the trail – yes, that’s the exact kind of clue the Federation needs, to track the monster down
.

‘After all, your people have been aware for a while that fissionables are being collected,’ Mikli went on. ‘They alerted the Mong governments –’

‘How do you know it was us who did?’ Terai demanded. The answer might point toward something that would be useful, if ever he got loose. ‘They could have found out for themselves, couldn’t they?’

‘Unlikely. They weren’t geared to notice. Consider how blandly ignorant the Domain has been. The Maurai doubtless saw no reason hitherto to notify Skyholm, because they had no indications of any such antics in Uropa until lately.’

Mikli trickled smoke from his nostrils. His lazy voice continued: ‘Now, of course, the Federation authorities have had your report to alarm them further, as well as one or more actual nuclear explosions.’

‘What?’ Terai bellowed, and Wairoa stirred in his corner.

Mikli nodded. ‘Yes. It happened about the same time as Jovain’s coup and all the interesting action that followed, so there was no chance to notify you. I didn’t hear about it myself till I’d returned home. But, yes, Mong observers picked up clear traces of atmospheric detonations in a high latitude and west of them. They notified the Maurai, who confirmed it. Communications have been super-tip-top hush-hush. Mustn’t poke the anthill unnecessarily, at least not before the party responsible
is
identified beyond doubt. Otherwise the devil alone knows what would come of the global hysteria that’d follow.

‘Meanwhile, the Federation is rushing additional personnel to its Inspectorate in the Union. Its fleets are converging from around the planet to Awaii – closest major base to us, and we are the most obvious suspects.’

‘You are guilty,’ Terai said in a flat voice. The effort not to seize the creature before him and kill shuddered through his body.

‘Well, you and I know that, but where’s the clinching proof?’

Mikli retorted smugly. ‘What shall the Inspectorate search for, and where? Whom shall the Navy attack? A new war against the Northwest Union would be essentially a war against innocent bystanders, who’d fight but not have had the least part in … Orion. It would drag on as long as the last one did, or longer, because you’re not mobilized for it as you were then, and – in the absence of anything except allegations – it would be unpopular at home.’

Terai swallowed. He felt sick. Everything he had heard was correct: not true, if ‘true’ meant ‘honest,’ but correct. He remembered learned professors in Wellantoa who described the Power War as militarism gotten out of hand – oh, yes, nuclear generators could never be permitted, but the abandonment of that project could have been negotiated. He remembered commentators and preachers who denounced the continued Maurai presence in the Northwest as cultural imperialism, a boot stamping down on the very diversity that the Federation claimed to treasure. He remembered demonstrations by the youthful and their graybeard imitators, many of them affecting bits of Northwestern garb, in favor of peace and freedom, which they seemed to think they had invented; some had jeered at him when he happened to be in uniform. (And he remembered youth in cities of the Union, aping Maurai fashions.) More to the immediate point, he remembered talking with mature and sober tribal leaders, from end to end of Oceania, who wondered if the cost of patrolling the world was not falling too heavily on their folk.…

But no matter that. The fact was that while the Maurai chased shadows, and maybe even put an army back on the mainland, the Wolves and whatever allies were theirs would keep busy; and it seemed they had begun testing their instrumentality of damnation.

Wairoa’s words crackled dry through Terai’s despair: ‘A question, Karst. How do you know the Mong detected a blast and informed the Maurai, if this has otherwise been kept secret?’

Taken aback, Mikli said, ‘Intelligence operations,’ in a tone less cocky than usual.

‘Furthermore,’ Wairoa pursued, ‘why where we sent from Yuan in your custody? Why should the Yuanese trust Norrmen with something so major as interrogating us?’

Recovering his balance, Mikli grinned. ‘Well, yes, we have succeeded in getting cooperation there.’

‘From certain Yuanese officers only. Else the whole world would
know of an alliance, or at least a partnership, between the former enemies.’

Mikli stubbed out his cigarette and reached for a fresh one. ‘You’re smarter than I supposed, Wairoa Haakonu.’

‘Infiltration,’ the hybrid said. ‘Not by your nugatory government, but by Wolf and whatever other Lodges are in the plot. You have had twenty years. The polks are no longer nomadic war bands where everybody knows everybody else; they have members widely scattered, who move wherever circumstances may take them individually. You could introduce agents who could pass for Mong and work their way up – Injuns, Asian-descended Norries, or some of the actual Mong who still live here and there in your eastern Territories. Or white men, for that matter; the Mong are a heterogeneous lot. You could bribe, you could blackmail, you could convince sincere people that helping you was in the best interest of their countries. You wouldn’t try for the top echelons; that would be too risky, especially given the regimental hierarchy and merit system. But you could have your agents in place at nexuses through which information and command pass – your sleepers, your whole network to call upon at need. The Mong are naive to a pitiful degree. You and your kind are not.

‘Ye-e-es, I daresay also that when their legitimate officers imagined they were dealing with your government, its representatives were Wolves, who passed on to Vittohrya what they saw fit, and no more. Congratulations on a bad job well done.’

The sheer purposefulness of it – twenty years! – broke over Terai like surf.

Plain to see, Mikli did not like to be on the receiving end of talk. He rose. ‘Well,’ he snapped, ‘you may get a chance to ask further, when you’ve rejoined your friends of our little forest excursion.’

Terai hunched his shoulders against whatever blow would land next. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Why,’ Mikli taunted. ‘Iern Ferlay has enrolled under our banner, and Plik is inevitably tagging along. My home is in Laska, where we’re going to need better security arrangements, so I’ll come too. Why not keep the old gang together? We shouldn’t hold you here any longer anyway, what with the Inspectorate dashing about like so many waterbugs. We’ll take you with us. Pack up. We leave in an hour, while this helpful fog lasts.’

He turned and went into the next room. The door slammed
behind him. For a while both Maurai were mute and motionless. Then Wairoa said slowly, in the language of their home: That is an evil man. Not simply an opponent. He radiates evil. Can’t you smell it?’

‘No,’ said Terai. ‘But I believe it.’

He stared into the cold formlessness outside before he finished, ‘I’ll get word back. I will, or die.’

3

Clouds drove low across Dordoyn. Their grayness veiled the heights and turned somber the hues of autumn on the steeps beneath. Wind wailed, a sound as cold as the air itself. Damp odors blew about, in between spatters of rain. Roads had become rivers of mire, squelching to weary hoofbeats.

More than ever, Castle Beynac seemed to belong here. The modern additions looked dream-unreal against those stark old walls and towers. Riding from Port Bordeu, Ashcroft Lorens Mayn had come to yearn for warmth, firelight, ease, and he was no weakling. He had chosen to fare in this manner with his retainers so that the pysans could see their new castlekeeper and feel assured that he meant them well. They had given him flinty stares and returned none of his genial gestures. Now he wondered how much comfort awaited him at journey’s end.

A reception committee stood outside the gate, wrapped and hooded. They had mustered an honor guard, too, which was encouraging – militiamen in uniforms and crested helmets, daggers at belts, pikes, crossbows, and rifles at shoulders. Lorens urged his horse to a final canter up the approach, drew rein, and lifted an arm in salutation. From visits in earlier days, he recognized faces. The first officer, Iern Ferlay’s fellow Clansman Hald Tireur, waited in the forefront, his back and time-plowed countenance held stiff. The secretary, a young groundling named Ans Debyron, waited nearby, a parchment in his hands, no friendliness in his face either … or in any of those confronting the newcomers.

At Lorens’ back, a score of mounts snorted, stamped, and came to a halt. He counted the men before him: twice the number of his, two dozen among them armed. Wishing to avoid provocation, he had confined weapons in his party to knives, a few pistols, and four lances that were mainly for display of pennons.