Orion Shall Rise (61 page)

‘What he did to my country –’

‘I agreed before, that’s inexcusable. The end did not justify the means. Mikli is a sadist, and this must have been an irresistible prospect, playing Satan on a continental scale; so he persuaded the Wolf leadership it was desirable. I suppose from a strategic viewpoint it was. For one thing, it entailed suborning a lot of high-ranking Yuanese, and I imagine those fellows are frantically busy on our behalf, trying to blunt the Mong attack. But I agree, the Domain didn’t have to be made a sacrificial goat. It was doing us no harm, and Jovain’s gratitude has evaporated overnight, hey?’

Stones scrunched underfoot. A raven flapped past, blackness momentarily blotting out the sun, and croaked, startlingly loud.

‘But you know something, sweetheart?’ Ronica said. ‘I realize this isn’t a logical argument. Just the same, if you’d become the Captain of Skyholm as was your right, I’d never have met you. I can’t help my selfishness, I’m glad.’

He stopped. She did. They gazed at each other. He seized her to him. Her cheek was cool against his. ‘And I, and I,’ he avowed.

She stepped back a pace, took both his hands in hers, and said: ‘Okay, if we can revenge you later on Mikli, fine. But he isn’t worth a lot of trouble. What we should make our goal is giving the Domain a legitimate government, that’ll restore order and justice and hope. It can be done. It will be, Iern. Every report tells how shaky Jovain’s rule is. It may well collapse of itself. If not – after Orion has risen, a word from on high is all that will be needed. And that word can be yours, Iern, you who helped us in our dark days. We Norries are no angels, but we do honor our debts.’

‘Yes – yes – we discussed that last night –’

‘It deserves repeating today, when the booze is out of our heads. And I’ve thought of something else. I warn you, darling, this could be a shock.’

Iern flashed a grin. ‘Your shocks are generally high-voltage. I’m prepared.’

She became earnest. Her voice dropped, her eyes held as steady as if she were sighting over a rifle. ‘About that next Captain in Skyholm. We’ve been taking for granted he would be you. But do you really want it anymore?’

‘What?’ broke from him.

‘Think. You were rambling on last night about a heap of things. Including mention of how you’d always wished to travel around the world, and being Captain would nail you in place. But it was a duty, maybe, and a big challenge, certainly. Since then, however –wouldn’t you rather lead the way into space?’

He stood wonderstruck.

‘The Domain must be full of Talences who’d make suitable Captains,’ she pursued. ‘You’d fulfill your obligation if you saw one of them in Skyholm. We haven’t got too goddamn many genius pilots. And Orion isn’t: just for the Northwest Union. It’s all humanity’s last chance to get out into the universe.’

He was still for a minute or two before he said, nearly under his
breath, ‘You were right. You have rocked me back.’

She kissed him.

He knuckled his eyes. ‘You read me truly,’ he sighed. ‘But, well, could be I’ve seen a little more of politics in action than you have, in spite of your haring around with Karst. I can’t be as idealistic as you about this undertaking here.’

‘After your experience,’ she replied low, ‘I wouldn’t expect you to be. Nor do I suppose we humans, any bunch of us, are more than glorified apes. Sure, we’ll fuck up in space same as we’ve done on Earth. The point is, we’ll
be
there, beyond the death of the sun.’

‘And learn, and do, and dare –’ Iern laughed aloud. ‘What a pair of orators we’re becoming!’

Again they stood silent in the wind.

‘Very well, Ronica, most beloved,’ he said. ‘I am with Orion … and my heart
is
. It’ll be a dreadful thing if we lose that: not the war, but Orion. Partly because I think we belong out there, partly because – you’re right – it’s what I most want to do in the world, except for loving you – and mainly because I do love you, and this
is
where your own heart
is.’

She came back to him.

‘But I have swallowed as much as I can,’ he warned. ‘I will not condone any further monstrosities.’

‘Nor I,’ she promised through unexpected tears.

2

After the days-long turmoil of assembly and the two days and nights of horrible crampedness aboard a troop train, it was incomprehensibly marvelous to be out in the open again. Kal-Gar, railhead and frontier settlement in southwestern Chukri, was no shrine of grace or delight, and the ruins left from before Death Time made it melancholy in a way that the relics looming above big, hectic Chai Ka-Go did not. Winds blew bitter across whitened plains, dry snow whirled, clouds went in tatters or joined to hang low as the ceiling of a tomb. Yet Vanna Uangovna felt she had been set free.

In part, this was true. Back east, and still more on the train, they had incessant need of her – the young, scared soldiers, abruptly plucked from home and dispatched to a war they did not understand. Thrown together into a strange camp, then jammed together
in the stinking, rattling gloom of freight cars, they engendered ghastly rumors. Ucheny and proróchina, she moved among them, spoke to them jointly and individually, led them in chant and meditation, made them remember that it was Gaea for Whom they fought. Fear bared its teeth at her, shrank, and scuttled off to chitter from dark corners. But she could not radiate serenity like that without draining her own wellsprings.

There was again uproar at Kal-Gar, as men and horses burst forth. There was more life to it than had been at the loading. For two days the troops got leave, by turns, to seek what wineshops, gambling dens, and joyhouses the outpost boasted; and Vanna could walk the prairie alone, breathing clean air, and return to her bunk and sleep. Meanwhile Orluk Zhanovich and his fellows in the leadership organized for departure.

The Western majority of his Bison Polk had come north through Bolshareka to join his command. Units from all the Five Nations assembled likewise, putting themselves mutually under a Yuanese Grand Noyon. These were the elite cadres and their drafts, that could be mobilized fast and efficiently. Their assignment was to invade the Northwest Union through several Rocky Mountain passes. They would seize positions bestriding both valleys of the Fraser River, and thus interdict enemy passage north or south. Concurrently, the rest of the regiments would gather their strength and bring it up. And then the Soldati would follow the routes of their ancestors, back to the Yukon Flats, before they swung down again to seize and bind Orion.

Few of them knew that that was the objective. The Maurai announcement had not reached many pastoral homes, and even a townsman might be excused bewilderment about the idea of a spaceship. The commonest impression was that the Norries had been hatching the same kind of evil
egg
as a generation ago, and this time the Maurai needed help in a new Power War. After that had been won, soldiers growled, the whole devil-ridden country should be occupied and domesticated.

The Mong army uncoiled itself into half a dozen serpents and struck west.

Vanna had never seen mountains before. Words and pictures had brought to her no ghost of their beauty. On the fourth day she rode with Orluk and the staff, about a
third of the way back from the van. She would rather have been off by herself. Surrounded by men and their racket, she could not truly seek Oneness in the awe everywhere about, as she had been able to do earlier on the march. However, yesterday skirmishing had taken place between forerunner patrols and Norries who came down from the heights. Today spotter aircraft had reported enemy activity originating at a small fort some twenty kilometers ahead.

Orluk heard the latest bulletin, replaced his miniradio in its bag, and nodded, stonily satisfied. ‘We’ll see action before this day is done,’ he said. ‘They’re deploying field artillery, including a pair of fair-sized rocket launchers, while their foot are digging in.’

‘Oh, no,’ Vanna whispered.

An officer laughed. ‘Did you expect them to strew roses?’ he gibed.

‘Major, one does not address the reverend lady in that style,’ Orluk rapped.

The man stiffened in his saddle. ‘I’m sorry, sir.’

‘You will apologize to her, not me. She’s done more to hold this outfit together than any of you.’

‘Reverend lady, I was thoughtless. I abase myself.’

‘No, please,’ Vanna said. ‘It doesn’t matter in the least. I… I should not have spoken as I do. We
must
go on.’

Orluk said, unwontedly awkward: ‘As a matter of fact, reverend lady, it should not be much of a fight. They seem to be the usual unprofessional Norrie militia, scarcely at more than battalion strength. I expect they’ll tease us with shells and sniping as we come in range. But two can play at that game, and we can call in a few fighter-bombers as well, if they get too troublesome. We may or may not find it worthwhile to root out their sharpshooters or reduce the fort.’

‘Sir,’ another officer said, ‘may I suggest we don’t delay for that? We’ve been lucky so far. A snowstorm could do us more harm, cause more delay, than some holdouts at our backs.’

They had indeed been fortunate, Vanna reflected. Clear, stingingly crisp weather the whole way. No need for shovels or snowplows, because the Norrmen themselves had reopened the road after the last blizzard. On the other hand, though they were plainsmen, she didn’t think her dear, hardy boys would suffer unduly from anything the highlands could throw at them, or be unable to carry on. And the vernal equinox was only a few days off, the beginning of spring.…

‘Yes, probably,’ Orluk said. He laughed aloud. ‘How long since I was campaigning in mountains! How good to be back!’

And how I understand him
–
now
flowed upward in Vanna on a wave of affection.

Almost, she could ignore the column that trotted, trudged, and rode on groaning wheels, through this defile and heavenward. Or else she could take them as another flowering of the Life Force, comely in their fashion. Leather creaked beneath her, muscles surged between her knees, a sweet smell of horse sweat softened the chill of the air, reins in a hand and mane rough under a palm when she stroked the beast confirmed her own aliveness. Filling the road, helmets nodded above uniforms, as rifles did across the shoulders of infantrymen; the lances of riders swayed like wheat before the wind, while pennons and banners made bright splashes. (O flags inscribed with honors! Her name was on one of them.) Wagons and field guns rumbled behind mules. The occasional armored car was almost jewel-like in its polished workmanship, at its distance among these distances. A sound rolled through the division, the reverberation of its advance, that she imagined would recall the sound of an incoming surf to those who had seen the ocean.

On the right, a river brawled merrily in reply. Gray-green, it dashed brilliant sprays off rocks, swirled, eddied, surged. Beyond it, and to the left, the mountains reared, incredible in their steepness, their grandeur. Precipices, talus slopes, outthrusts stood blue-gray above snow that remained utterly white, save where sunlight sprang off it in diamonds or shadows lay blue as the sky overhead. She could not see either summit from here, but crowns gleamed before and behind, too splendid for arrogance.

The sun had advanced far enough toward noon that it shone down into the gorge, on into her bloodstream. An eagle hovered up yonder.

Iern told me of the Alps in Yevropea
.

How can it be wrong to rise high? Karakan Afremovek himself cited ancient records, how the spacefarers of those days saw the planet suddenly as our home in the cosmos, alive, infinitely precious
.

Flat, booming sounds echoed down between the rock walls from afar. ‘They’re enfilading our advance company,’ Orluk said. He might have been discussing a deal in cattle. ‘It’s supposed to retreat and draw them on, while we advance in close order. Hoot the bugles.’

Word went back. Trumpets awoke to wildness. Echoes cried
answer. A kind of muted roar went along the ranks, in which the shouts of sergeants were nearly drowned.

‘Now whatever happens, reverend lady,’ Orluk told Vanna, ‘you stay by Lieutenant Bayan here.’ To the young man: ‘Lieutenant, don’t forget, you are responsible for the proróchina’s safety. Don’t forget, either, she’s worth as much to us as any single corps we’ve got.’

‘Oh, no,’ Vanna protested. ‘Please –’ Pain jagged through her.
Us? Our aim? Destruction of those spaceships. Yes, true, we cannot let the heedless Norrmen lay hand on all Earth. But could we ourselves not, later – we, and you of Skyholm, Iern –?

‘Look there!’

The cry brought Vanna’s gaze aloft. Something flew. It gleamed silver against azure, a maned head and a long tail, heart-stoppingly lovely.

Orluk shaded his eyes and peered. ‘A rocket of theirs,’ he said. ‘Well, we know they don’t have but a few, and that bugger’s poorly aimed. We may not take any casualties at all from it.’

Rocket,
Vanna thought.
What would Orion have been like, rising?

The sky exploded.

She crept back to herself and to her feet. Naked, she rose. The blast had stripped the garments from her, as it dashed her against the road. Asphalt clung to the smashed bones of her left arm, from which its moltenness had eaten off the flesh.

First she must set the agony aside. It seemed that nothing existed but agony, that the fire would burn her forever. From somewhere infinitely deep she raised a mandala. It had the form of Earth, small, cool, blue, amidst the stars of space. The mantra that sounded around it was
Living, dancing, forever love. Living, dancing, forever love
. …

As she returned to herself, she saw smoke blow off sprawled black unshapes. Vapors roiled above the river, though it had ceased boiling.

Other things were crimson, swollen, cooked but not yet dead. They staggered or crawled about, making noises.

Vanna heard them only dimly. She thought her eardrums must be broken. Her right eye was missing, too; she fumbled a finger into the socket, then withdrew her touch from the jelly beneath and the
char and protruding bone beneath that. Her left eye saw through a blur, but clearly enough, what the rest of her was like.