Fiona gulped air, trying to stabilize her own body’s reactions. She knew what the Brodainu had done; it was the mardan-clannu, the “thrust of mercy” delivered to end a man’s suffering. It had been a gesture of compassion after all; there was a certain perverse honor conferred with the act, in that the Brodainu had considered the thief’s suffering worth noticing. The warrior cleared her sword, cleaned it on the victim’s body, and returned it to its scabbard.
“He will not distract us further,” she said. “We Brodaini have power of justice on the river; the other will be turned over to the city authorities. You are most fortunate, ilean. You bore no weapon?”
“No. I do not carry weapons.”
The Brodainu nodded, appraising. As far as Fiona knew there was no system of weaponless combat practiced here; the most evolved combat technique was Brodaini, and appeared to concentrate on disarming attackers in order to turn their own weapons against them. Fiona had made an impression on the Brodainu’s mind; it might not be a favorable one. A deadly woman, claiming to be a conjuror, speaking Gostu and traveling downriver to Arrandal... the Brodaini, guardians of Arrandal’s peace, might wonder if she were a fugitive from foreign justice, or worse a spy or assassin. At any rate, worth further study.
The two male Brodaini arrived, keeping the crowd back from the cabin door. The Brodainu who had spoken to Fiona gave a few clipped orders — it appeared she was senior — and the body was carried from the cabin. The second thief was urgently picked up from the floor — he yelped, cradling his broken arm — and was led out by two silent warriors to meet whatever penalty, presumably death in some form, was demanded by local justice. The pale-eyed Brodainu bent to pick up the broken dagger from the cabin deck. She held up the pieces. “This was the thief’s, ilean?”
“Yes.”
The warrior looked at the badly-forged shards with the distaste of the connoisseur for the third-rate, then bowed and left the cabin. The other woman Brodainu looked briefly at Fiona’s — her face was scarred, the nose once broken — and then bowed and followed. Outside there was a quick flash of spinning sun-struck metal as the dagger shards were scaled out into the river. Two of the boatmen approached, buckets and rags ready to clean up the blood, looking at Fiona apprehensively.
“Go ahead. Clean,” she told them, and she bent to pick up her scattered clothing and stuff it in her trunk; then she hauled both trunks to their places beneath her bunk and sat down on the thin mattress while the crewmen busied themselves. She drew her knees up protectively. Her hands were no longer trembling, but she clasped the edge of the bunk, white-knuckled, and when the crewmen finished and turned to glance at her, something in her look made them hurry silently from the room, closing the door behind them.
Until now, until she had seen the young thief spasming on the deck, she had not really believed it, this new existence. She was in a feudal, violent world; if she was to fulfill her mission, she would have to become a part of it.
Perhaps the thing that frightened her most was the possibility that she already had.
*
Only a few days of her journey remained. Abessas and Gostu beat at her brain; she could feel herself submerging into their assumptions, many of which her old life told her were wrong, and in the conflicts between noumena — she felt herself drowning. The intensity of the world around her was terrifying, the native plants burgeoning, the strange, antique mode of transportation that daily grew more familiar, the tall, oddly-proportioned people with their rude, confident assumptions about the world and their place in it... Her own body horrified her: had this hand killed? Had this foot lashed out to cripple? The privy-coat she wore under her blouse and skirts, shaped like a hooded undergarment, supple and soft to the touch but with an intrinsic, invisible awareness of its own that made it capable of repelling any weapon the planet was likely to develop for the next few hundred years, began to weigh on her shoulders. She knew it was a hallucination, a trick of the mind that made the privy-coat feel as heavy as Brodaini armor, but still she felt it bearing down on her, a reminder of the violent world she’d entered.
She made nightly reports to her superiors on the spindle she concealed in her magic chest. The reports mentioned little of her daily struggle to keep Echidne from overwhelming her; they stayed in the jargon she had been taught, concentrating on efforts to achieve rapport with the natives, to analyze the level of technology and technological awareness. She made notes about proxemics, and practiced behavior observation. The jargon began to seem more like an alien language, something outside the reality she was dealing with — how could the disinterested, dusty words possibly describe the meaning of the place? The dictionary phrases faded in contrast to the bright, burgeoning world, and Fiona was filled with a fear that she was losing everything she had been; that soon her past would fade entirely, vanish into a memory that grew progressively less substantial. The familiar voices on the communicator, Tyson’s gruff irony, Wenoa’s calm tenor, seemed increasingly distant; their reality, even that of Tyson who had, for a time, been Fiona’s lover, was slipping away. She found herself forgetting their faces, their eyes. She wished she could contact Kira without having to patch the call through the ship — Kira, she knew, would understand.
Fiona wondered if she would be able to return; perhaps she was already a creature of this planet: backward, violent, ineffably strange. Echidne, perhaps, had taken her — no, not Echidne, but Demro, or Achadan, the native names for the planet. Still, she knew the world could not have her as long as she could not comprehend it entirely as long as the noumena flailed within her skull for meaning. Reygran, amil-deo, dine, Abessas noumena; vail, hostu, demmin, dai-terru, demmis-dru, mysterious words used by the Brodaini soldiers, their speech so alien it was difficult to accept it as a tongue spoken by humans.
A part of her mind insisted on understanding, but another part quailed at it, afraid that understanding would mean her absorption into the world, into its primitive horrors.
The river branched at last into its delta and the barge came to Arrandal. The mast was unstepped and the two mules unloaded and harnessed to the towlines; the barge passed beneath a water-gate, its massive portcullis hanging overhead like the teeth of a dragon about to swallow them, followed amazingly by the pale, hairy buttocks of a citizen who was crouching with his trousers about his ankles, one arm draped casually about an iron mooring-post, apparently preparing to defecate into the canal. He held off while the barge passed under him, grinning down at the surprised, upturned faces, and then went about his business.
The city began crowding close to port and starboard — tall, pinched houses, faced with stone or pastel-colored brick arranged in gay patterns, arched bridges with tow-paths running cobbled beneath, tall brick smokestacks marking public baths, innumerable boats: houseboats, big deep-burdened river barges, swift, small oared galleys bearing passengers, messages, and soldiers. Teeming humanity, chiefly male, chiefly in a hurry. Their language boiled up about her.
The bowman unhitched the towing mules and draped the hawser over a bollard; another crewman lassoed a second bollard and the barge was brought to the dock, ripples of water curling from its rudder and stem. From among the swarm of urchins on the bank Fiona found two boys to carry her trunks. As she stepped off the barge she saw the eyes of the scarred Brodainu on her — thoughtful, wary eyes. Perhaps she would be followed to her inn, though not by the Brodaini themselves — they were too conspicuous, tall and armored in this throng — but by some hired boy.