“I shall try, Banichi-nadi.” From Cajeiri, with a certain dignity.
“Never mind trying,” Banichi said sternly. “Do, young sir. Do. Get up. Do you need help getting up?”
“I shall do it myself,” Cajeiri said. “I have done it.”
Bren worked his own way close to the herd, located Jago’s shadow against the sky and located a mechieti with an empty saddle. He thought it was his, and by the scrollwork on the saddle, it seemed to be. He got it to extend a leg and bow down, and he heaved himself, stiff and sore, belly down across the saddle, then straightened around, got his left foot in position at the curve of the neck and unsecured the guiding rein. Everyone else was up, by then, and without another word, they started moving, climbing the other slope, passing through the greatest likelihood of further ambush. Bren’s heart beat like a hammer while they passed that zone.
“Are we going to Taiben?” Cajeiri asked.
“Hush!” Jago’s voice, sharply, to a boy, who, if he was not shot in the next hour, might be aiji.
And who, having spent so much time away from geographic referents, away from any subtle sense of the land, or the clues of the heavens, had trouble telling what direction they were riding. Cajeiri was lost. Terrible things had happened to so much bright enthusiasm. The maneuver the boys had believed would be a grand adventure and a great success had turned very dark indeed, and there was no mending it, only staying alive.
But after they had passed that region, after Banichi and Jago had exchanged a few quiet words, Bren found Cajeiri and the Taibeni riding next to him.
“Young gentleman?”
“Nand’ Bren?”
“We are riding toward Taiben. The Kadigidi have attacked your great-uncle’s house, and those of us who might help defend it are out here.”
“Finding help!”
“Finding help, yes. But you should know it is well possible, young gentleman, that your encounter was not chance. Your enemies found you by means of your great-uncle’s unsecured com system. Messages flew back and forth, unsecured, trying to prevent your going out here. It was not well done, young gentleman.”
“And they might have ambushed Antaro and the escort all the same, nandi!”
Oh, the heir was not as beaten down as one might expect. He was his father’s son. And his mother’s. And that burgeoning arrogance, if unchecked, could get others killed.
“Consult. Consult Banichi and Cenedi, young sir. Consult me. If your young staff had reason for misgivings about the mission, you should have told us, not gone off, stealing mechieti, lying to the stable staff—”
“Grandmother would never have let me go.”
“And do you think there was no reason for us to refuse such a request, nadi? And was there an excuse for lying to us?”
“When asking does no good!”
“Except that Antaro is Taibeni and might have accomplished this mission with a certain finesse which one does not see evident in our current circumstance, young sir.”
“Except if Antaro was ambushed. And she was. And the escort would never listen to her opinions, or take her as important. And Cenedi thinks there are spies in the house. If I tell Banichi, Banichi tells you, you tell grandmother, grandmother tells Lord Tatiseigi and he tells his staff, and then the Kadigidi know everything you do, nandi. Maybe they can overhear the com units, but maybe, too, someone just told them.”
It was a very sharp young wit, and a certain command of language. One saw his father.
“That may be, young sir, but there are always ways to consult in secret.”
“No one uses them with me! No one takes us seriously! The Atageini would not listen even to me when I said we should keep going. They said we would sleep til dawn and I said they were fools! Now the Kadigidi are at the house attacking my grandmother, and it will be another day before we can even get to Taiben, let alone back again!”
“You are certainly right in that,” he had to admit. “But mechieti are not machines. They have to rest, and sooner or later, we will have to.”
“One does regret very much that the guards are dead,” Cajeiri said after a moment—a boy who had just shot at a man, killed him, and seen two decent men go down protecting him… never mind they had not done wisely.
“As one should always regret such an event,” Bren said, and let it go. The boy had passed from deep shock to a reasonable, shaken outrage at the situation. Only eight. Only eight, with physical strength exceeding an adult human’s and with two followers who had served only as a slight anchor on his high and wide decisions—an especially slight restraint in an Atageini hall whose lord radiated detestation of his Taibeni escort, and Ilisidi herself had maneuvered for advantage with that very powerful lord’s opinions.
Had that been Cajeiri’s inner conclusion as to why Ilisidi had sent Antaro away from him?
Not an accurate assessment of his great-grandmother, if that was the case, and Tatiseigi himself knew his old feuds with the Taibeni counted for nothing with Ilisidi. But he kept his mouth shut on further argument with the boy on that score.
“Well put, with the boy, Bren-ji,” Jago found the opportunity to say when they did dismount and take a breather. They were shifting saddles about, his bodyguard trading their gear to others of the herd, except only the herd leader, who constantly carried, at least, Jago’s lighter weight. She slid down to stretch her legs, keeping the herd leader at very short rein.
“One never knows, Jago-ji, what to say to him.”
“Someone should listen to these young people,” Jago said, uncommon criticism of, Bren thought, the dowager’s dealings with her grandson. “Tano has tried.”
“How should I advise them?”
“Exactly as you have.”
“I gave them no advice at all, nadi.”
“You listened to him as if he were a man, Bren-ji. That, in itself, makes a point.”
It did, perhaps. Perhaps he had done that. His acquaintance with children in his whole adult life had been, precisely, Cajeiri, whose developing mind was rapidly turning in unpredictable directions, and he worried. The boy had killed—a child who had been very far from his own kind, in a situation rife with violence, a child far too exposed to human culture, a child who, given present circumstances, might soon be aiji over three quarters of the world, and who had not been on his own planet long enough to know instinctively which was east and which was west.
“I hardly know that a human has any business at all advising him. He may have read far too many of our books.”
“He learned from the kyo as well, Bren-ji.”
Odd to think that, in instincts if not experience, he might be as alien to the boy’s hardwiring as were the kyo. Scary, to think that. They at least had shared a planet.
“Bren-ji.” Tano walked up in the dark and pressed a paper-wrapped object into his hand, one of those concentrate bars they had gotten from the escort, as it proved. He realized he had not eaten since breakfast, and the slight definition he began to see in figures and shapes advised him that dawn was not far off, a new day coming.
They had gone straight through till morning. A morning in which, if the defense of Tirnamardi had failed, every power in the world he knew might have changed, and everything he relied on might have gone down in defeat.
In that cheerful thought, he wasn’t sure he could get the food down, but he soberly unwrapped it and tried, a mostly dry mouthful. For the mechieti’s sake, they had stopped by a stream—perhaps the same one they had crossed before. He walked over past the herd, to drink upstream of the mechieti’s wading and drinking.
He squatted down on the soft margin, cupped up water in his hands.
Mechieti moved, heads lifting. He froze, looked up, and saw a man standing on the slight rise across the brook.