Throne of Stars (17 page)
Authors: David Weber,John Ringo
“Oh, Krim,” she whispered. “Oh, Krim.”
“You had not realized, Your Light?” Slee asked. Pedi just looked at her, and the serf inhaled sharply. “Oh, Krim.”
“By the Fire, the Smoke, and the Ash!” Pedi cursed. “I had not
thought
. My father will kill me!”
“Your Light,” Pin said, “anyone can find themselves
benan
. It . . . happens.”
“Not for that,” Pedi said, cursing even more vilely. “For
forgetting
.”
Roger watched the freed prisoners as the discussion of how to crew the vessels wrangled on. Usually, when a ship was captured, a small prize crew was put aboard by the victors. Its purpose was more to ensure that the survivors of the original crew took the captured vessel to the capturing ship’s home port than to actually “crew” the prize itself.
But the Lemmar, almost to a Mardukan, had fought to the death. The reason for that ferocious, last-man defense had yet to be determined, but so far, the reaction to the pirates’ efforts on the part of the Bronze Barbarians and their auxiliaries was fairly negative. The Lemmar had fought viciously and without quarter, but not particularly
well
. In the opinion of The
Basik
’s Own, that changed them from heroic defenders to suicidal idiots.
Whatever the Lemmar’s reasons, there were too few left to man this ship, and much the same story was coming from all of the others. Coupled with the anticipated recapture of the convoy’s merchantships to the north, it meant that most of the flotilla’s present and prospective prizes would be severely undermanned by the time they reached their destination.
It was with that consideration in mind that Roger was examining the freed captives. Depending on their background, it might or might not be possible to press them into service as sailors. Thus far, though, they were looking fairly . . . odd.
For one thing, it was clear that the female Cord had “rescued” (to the extent that she’d needed rescuing) was in charge. That was strange enough, since there’d been only two places in their entire journey where women were considered anything but chattels. Even in those two places, a woman would not automatically be assumed to be the boss, but in this case, she most definitely was.
There was also the question of her age. Her horns were rather short and very light in color. That smooth, honey-yellow look was generally only found in very young Mardukans, but there was a darker, rougher rim at the base, so it was possible that their coloration and condition were manufactured rather than natural. The other female captive, who had been doing most of the talking thus far, also had horns that were smoother and somewhat lighter than normal. He wondered if the coloration and smoothness was a societal symbol? If that were the case, perhaps the warrior-female’s companions were deferring to her because the condition of her horns marked her as belonging to a higher caste.
Whatever they’d been talking about seemed to have been wrapped up, though, because the leader—Pedi Karuse, if he recalled correctly—was striding over to the command group with a very determined set to her four shoulders.
“Your girlfriend’s on her way over, Cord,” Roger said.
“She is not my ‘girlfriend.’” D’Nal Cord looked down at the prince and made an eloquent, four-armed gesture of combined resignation and disgust. “I do not play with children.”
“Just save ’em, huh?” Roger joked. “Besides, I don’t think she’s all
that
young.”
“It was my duty,” the shaman answered loftily. “And, no, she is not ‘that
young’; she is simply
too
young.”
“Then I don’t see what the problem is,” Roger continued. “Unless you’re just feeling picky, of course.”
He was enjoying the shaman’s discomfiture. After all the months of having Cord follow him around, dropping proverbs and aphorisms at every turn (not to mention thumping him on the head to emphasize the points of his moral homilies on a ruler’s responsibilities), it was good to see him off balance for once. And for all of his rejection of the local female as “just a child,” it was clear that the shaman was . . . attracted to her.
Cord glowered at him, and Roger decided to let his mentor off the hook. Instead, he turned his attention to the Mardukan female as she arrived.
“Pedi Karuse? What can we help you with?”
Pedi was unsure how to broach the subject, so she fell back upon ceremony.
“I must speak to you of the Way of Honor, of the Way of the Warrior.”
Roger recognized the formal phrasing as distinctly ceremonial, and his toot confirmed that the terms were in a separate dialect, probably archaic.
“I will be pleased to speak to you of the Way. However, most ways of the warrior recognize the primacy of current needs, and we are currently in a crisis. Could this discussion not wait?”
“I grieve that it cannot,” the Mardukan female answered definitively. “Yet the full discussion should be short. I have failed in honor, through my failure to acknowledge a debt. The debt and other points of honor are, perhaps, somewhat in conflict, yet the debt itself remains, and I must address it.”
“Captain,” Roger called to Pahner. “I need Eleanora over here, please!” He turned back to the Mardukan and raised a hand. “I need one of my advisers in on this. I suspect it’s going to involve societal differences, and we’re going to need better translation and analysis than I can provide.”
Although the
vern
’s accent was getting steadily and almost unbelievably quickly better, a great deal of what he had just said remained so much gibberish to Pedi. And whatever
he’d
just
said couldn’t change her obligations. Nor could the arrival of this “adviser” he mentioned.
“This cannot, on my honor, wait,” she said, and turned to D’Nal Cord.
“I am Pedi Dorson Acos Lefan Karuse, daughter of Pedi Agol Ropar Sheta Gastan, King of the Mudh Hemh Vale, Lord of the Mudh Hemh. I bring to this place only my self, my training, my life, and my honor. I formally recognize the
benan
bond under the Way, and I thus pledge my service in all things, from here until we reach the end of the Way, through the Fire and through the Ash. Long may we travel.”
“Oh, shit,” Roger muttered in Imperial. He glanced at Cord, whose incomprehension of Pedi’s language was only too apparent, and hastily consulted the cultural influence database of his toot. Then he consulted it again, cross indexing her words against the original language kernel and every other cultural matrix they’d passed through on their long trek. Unfortunately, it came out the same way both times.
“What?” Cord snapped. “What did she say?”
“Oh, man,” Roger said, and shook his head bemusedly. “And you guys don’t even have a language in common!”
“What?” Pahner asked, stepping over to the three of them.
“Hey, Cord,” Roger said with an evil smile. “You remember all those times I warned you to think before you leap?”
“What did she say?” the shaman repeated dangerously. “And, no, that was usually myself or Captain Pahner speaking to
you
.”
“Well, maybe you should have listened to yourself,” Roger told him, beginning to chuckle. He waved a sweeping gesture of his arm and Pedi. “She says she’s
asi
.”
“Oh . . . drat,” Pahner said. He gazed at Pedi for a moment, then swiveled his eyes to Cord. “Oh . . . pock.”
“But . . . But only my people recognize the bond of
asi,
” Cord protested. “I have had long discussions with Eleanora about the culture of the People and the cultures of others we have met on our travels. And only the People recognize the bond of
asi
!”
Roger shook his head, trying—although not very hard—to keep his chuckle from turning into full-throated laughter. The attempt became even more difficult when he looked back at Pedi and recognized her frustration at finding herself just as incapable of understanding Cord as he was of understanding her. Their complete inability to communicate struck the prince as Murphy’s perfect revenge upon the cosmopolitan shaman who had appointed himself Roger’s “slave,” mentor, moral preceptor, and relentless taskmaster. Especially since it looked very much to him as if Pedi was going to be at least as stubborn about this
benan
bond as Cord had been about the bond of
asi
.
“Well,” he observed with a seraphic smile, “at least you guys will have
that
much in common.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
“Oh, they have more than that in common,” Eleanora O’Casey told the people gathered in
Hooker
’s once again crowded wardroom just over three hours later. “
Much
more, in fact.”
The problem of prize crews had been partially solved. The five surviving pirate ships had been provided with skeleton crews drawn from all six of the flotilla’s schooners, along with a few of the K’Vaernian infantry who knew the difference between a bow and a stern. Then
Hooker,
Pentzikis,
Sea Foam,
and
Tor Coll
had headed northwest, closehauled and throwing up foam, while
Snarleyow
and
Prince John
(busy stepping a new foremast) kept company with Tob Kerr’s
Rain Daughter
and the captured Lemmaran vessels. It was fortunate that the flotilla had brought along replacement spars as deck cargo aboard
Snarleyow
. Replacing
Prince John’
s mast wouldn’t be a problem, but Roger wasn’t at all sure that they’d be able to replace the rigging of both dismasted pirates, as well. Whether repairs could be made or not, however, he felt confident leaving
Snarleyow
and
Prince John
to look after things while the rest of the flotilla tried to run down the rest of the convoy the pirates had captured.
The current meeting had been called to try to resolve some of the problems that they would face taking or “recapturing” the remaining ships. In addition, Roger and Pahner were in agreement that it was also time to consider what problems might be anticipated following landfall. As part of that second objective, the meeting would also serve to bring most of the core of the command staff up to date—as far as possible, at least—with the mainland political situation.
“Go ahead,” Pahner said now, pulling out a
bisti
root and cutting off a slice. “I’ve gotten bits and pieces of what we’re sailing into, but you might as well tell everybody else.”
“Of course.” Roger’s chief of staff pulled out her pad and keyed it on line. “First—”
“A moment, please,” Cord interrupted. “While all of us—” a waving true-hand indicated the humans, Diasprans, and Northerners crowding the compartment “—will understand you well enough, my . . .
benan
will not. She must be aware of this as well.”
“Oh, that’s okay, Cord.” O’Casey smiled with more than a hint of mischief. “We girls already hashed all this out. She’s up to date.”
“Ah,” Cord replied stoically. “Good.”
O’Casey waited a moment to see if she could get any more of a rise out of the shaman, but he only sat impassively. After several seconds, she smiled again—a bit more broadly—and continued.
“The pirates in the area, as Captain Kerr already informed us, are called the ‘Lemmar.’ Actually, I suspect that the term as he uses it isn’t exactly accurate. Or perhaps it would be better to say that it isn’t completely accurate. He seems to be using it as a generic ethnic term, but as nearly as I can tell, ‘The Lemmar’ appears to be a political unit, as well—similar to the Barbary Sultanate on Earth or the Shotokan Confederacy. It’s based on raiding, high-seas piracy, and forced tribute. As for our particular lot of Lemmar, we captured charts and logs from two of their ships, and we’ve got a good fix on our position, the position of the raid, and the probable route the prize ships will be taking on their way home. So we should be able to find most of them and chase them down. The little local fillip is that, as I’m sure everyone noticed, the Lemmar don’t care to be taken prisoner.”
A fairly harsh chuckle ran through the compartment at her last sentence. The fighters in the wardroom had been through too much—Diaspran, Vashin, and human, alike—in the last year to really care if someone wanted to be suicidal. If that was their society’s choice, so be it; the group that had taken to referring to itself as The
Basik
’s Own would be happy to oblige local custom.
Which didn’t mean that they were blind to the tactical implications of the situation, of course.
“That’s going to cause some problems retaking the ships,” Kosutic pointed out after a moment, “considering the fact that they apparently don’t care to allow any of their prisoners to be liberated, either. Should we even try to retake the prizes if the Lemmar are going to slaughter any captured crewmen before we get aboard? Will the mainland culture prefer to have their ships and no crews? Can we navigate them to the mainland with no crews? And is there any political payoff to retaking the ships if we get all of their crews killed in the process?”
“From what I’ve gleaned from Pedi, there should be both a political and financial payoff,” O’Casey assured her. “The ships are, technically, the property of the Temple, but if they’re taken on the high seas, fairly ‘universal’ salvage rules apply. If we return them, we’ll be in for at worst a percentage of their value. And the supplies they have on board were apparently very important to establishing the Temple’s presence on one of the formerly Lemmaran islands. The local priestdom has put a lot of political capital into that project, so helping save it from utter disaster should be viewed well, unless there’s some odd secondary reaction.”
“So retaking the ships would be a politically positive action?” Pahner said. “I want to be clear on that.”
“Yes, Captain,” O’Casey said. “I won’t go so far as to say it would be ‘vital.’ But failure to act could be construed as being less friendly—and certainly less ‘brave’—than taking action would be. In my professional opinion, barring clear military negative factors, it should be considered highly useful in making
positive
first contact with the mainland culture.”
“Okay,” Pahner said. “We’ll discuss means later. But getting most of the ships and getting them intact may be hard.”
“They’ll have scattered,” Roger mused aloud. “We’ll have to
find
them first. Then figure out how to take them without getting all of the original crews killed.”
“What about the Lemmar?” O’Casey asked.
“What
about
the Lemmar?” Roger asked in return. His response evoked another general chuckle, and the chief of staff nodded and turned to the next item on her list.
“In that case, I’d like to talk about what we’ll call ‘The People of the Vales’—the Shin, that is—versus the valley culture, or the Krath. I’ll also offer some speculation as to where the cultures come from. Julian will discuss the purely military aspects later.
“The Shin are a fairly typical upland barbarian culture. They’re centered around small, fertile valleys—the Vales—each of which has a clan chief, or ‘king.’ All of them are nominally independent, with a few of them allied to each other—or involved in blood feuds—at all times. There’s a ‘great king’ or war leader, in theory, at least, but his authority is strictly limited.
“We do have a contact with the Shin,” the chief of staff pointed out, nodding at the female Mardukan who’d taken a position beside Cord. The Shin would have sat behind the shaman, but with him already sitting behind Roger, there simply wasn’t room. It had occasioned a certain amount of negotiation when they first entered the cabin.
“And the straight-line distance from the valley entrance to the spaceport is shorter through the vales,” the chief of staff continued. “On the other hand, given the information thus far developed, we’re more likely to encounter difficulties passing through the vales than if we stay in the valley.”
“Those blood feuds,” Pahner said.
“Precisely.” O’Casey nodded. “The clans are constantly feuding. We would—could—presumably make contact with and get help and passage from the Mudh Hemh clan, but if we did, we’d automatically find ourselves at war with the Sey Dor clan. There’s also a ‘cross-valley’ dichotomy that Julian will discuss. But it shouldn’t affect us.”
“Great,” Roger said. “What about the valley? And what about the similarities between these . . . Shin and Cord’s people?”
“The similarities can be inferred from the linguistic and cultural matrix,” O’Casey replied. “The Shin language is
remarkably
similar to the language of The People. Same basic grammatical rules, similar phonemic structure, even the same words in many cases, and only mildly modified in others. There’s no question that they come from the same root society, and that the separation is historically recent.”
“Which, presumably, explains the cultural similarity between the
benan
and the
asi
bonds,” Roger murmured, then cocked an eyebrow at his ex-tutor. “Any idea what’s going on there?”
“Best guess is that the Shin are an aboriginal race of this continent which, like the Diasprans, survived the ice age by centering their culture on volcanic secondary features. That is, they stayed around hot springs and naturally warmed caves that should be fairly common on this continent. If I were to hazard a guess, I’d say that some of them then somehow moved over to Cord’s continent, on the eastern verge. That would be a heck of a sailing journey, but it’s possible that there’s a shallow zone between here and there that was partially or mostly exposed by the ice age. We’d have to do a lot of surveying and research to confirm that, though.”
“So the divergence is relatively recent, and you think the ancestral group is from this continent?”
“Yes, and a good example is language divergence,” O’Casey pointed out. “
Benan
is clearly derived from
‘banan
,’ which is the Krath word for ‘bride.’ But compare that to The People’s ‘
benahn
,’ which is their word for ‘marriage.’” She shrugged. “Obviously, all three words are descended from a common ancestor.”
“Obviously,” Roger agreed, then grinned, leaned over, and punched Cord on the arm. “Feeling married yet, buddy?”
“Oh, shut up,” Cord grumped. “It was for my honor.”
“I know,” Roger said, somewhat repentantly. “It was for mine, too. Sometimes, honor is a curse.”
“Often,” Pedi said, suddenly. “I . . . assure what . . . Light O’Casey understand. Word make sense. Some.” She twitched one false-hand in a grimace of frustration. “Almost.”
“Sort of,” Roger agreed, switching to Shin. “But even if the languages are related, that was a real hash of a sentence.”
“Yes, but I can learn People,” Pedi said.
“No. I learn Shin,” Cord said. “Here Shin. People not here.”
“Good, it sounds like we can get over the language divide,” Pahner interjected, then cocked his head at O’Casey and pulled the conversation back on track. “What about the Krath?”
“Looking at the map, the Shin vales probably make up the majority of the continent, which is mostly volcanic ‘badlands,’” O’Casey said. “But the continent’s bisected by a larger valley that curls like a tadpole, or a paisley mark, from the south in a big bend north and to the west. And that valley is where the majority of the population and real power of the continent lives.
“The valley of the Krath has a contiguous river that stretches, through some falls, all the way from a large upland vale to the sea. And, from Pedi’s description, it’s very heavily populated. The valley is one more or less continuous political unit, as well. I say ‘more or less’ because from the description of the scheming that goes on, the emperor, who is also the Highest of the High Priests and who rules from a capital near the spaceport, has only limited control over the lower valley.
“The society is a highly regimented theocracy, with the chief political officers of each region also being the high priests. And, unlike Diaspra, it is
not
a benevolent one. The society is similar to the latter medieval society of the Adanthi or the Chinese Manchu Dynasty. And it’s also heavily slavery-based, as Julian will now discuss.”
The NCO nodded at his cue and stood.
“We’ve got a bit of a problem. One of the reasons the Krath and the Shin don’t get along is that the Krath see the Shin as a ready source of slaves for their theocracy—what are called ‘The Slaves of God.’ In addition, the base barbarian society is bisected by the valley. On the generally western and northern side are the Shin, but on the eastern and southern sides, the vales belong to the Shadem. And the Shin and the Shadem don’t get along at all. In fact, the Krath use the Shadem for advance scouts for their raiding parties against the Shin. As a consequence, the Shin
really
hate the Shadem.
“As for the raiding parties themselves, they seem to be carried out by one of the three branches of the Krath military complex. In fact, the Krath military appears to be divided into these raiders, which are closely controlled by the Temple, and into an inner security military/police apparatus that maintains control of the civilian population, and a field army.”
“The reason for having an ‘army’ in the first place is complex,” O’Casey interjected. “With all due respect for Pedi’s people, the Shin are at best a minor nuisance for the Krath. In fact, the valley has no effective external enemy, so there should be no need for a significant field army. But the satraps apparently engage in a certain amount of somewhat ritualistic warfare to settle disputes. The raiders and the internal security forces are controlled by the priesthood, but the priests in charge of them are almost a separate sect. The field army, in contrast, is closely controlled by the high priests, some of whom have even been officers. It’s as if the internal security apparatus and these slave raiders are a ‘subclass’ of the military hierarchy. A necessary evil, but not particularly well regarded by the ‘regulars.’”
“Just how big and how ‘good’ is this army of theirs?” Pahner asked. “We may need to use it against the spaceport.”
“I’d guess they’re pretty good in a set-piece battle, Sir,” Julian replied. “All of our intel, presently, is from a single, biased source. Even allowing for that, though, my feeling is that they’re not terribly flexible. I’m sure we could use them in a charge, or in a fixed defensive position, but I’m not sure how useful they’d actually be in taking the spaceport. Much as I despise the concept behind them, their slave raiders might actually be better.”
“Justification?” Pahner asked. “And how numerous are they?”
“I don’t have any firm estimates on their numbers at this time,” Julian admitted. “From the fact that they appear to be the most . . . heavily utilized branch of the military, though, my guess is that they represent an at least potentially worthwhile auxiliary force. As for why they’d probably be more useful to us than the Krath field army, the raiders are the ones who regularly go in against the Shin, and the Shin are clearly no slouches on their own ground. The raiders have to be fast and nimble to handle them, and fast and nimble will probably be the way to go with the spaceport. So as . . . repugnant as they are, it would probably behoove us to try to . . .”
