And slowly, inexorably, predictibly, Nokhada lengthened stride and came closer and closer to Ilisidi and Cenedi. Banichi and Jago moved with him, up through the herd.
There was never a word said. Ilisidi, a competition rider, rode with that easy grace that put them all to shame, and Babsidi’s long strides challenged all of them that followed her, reminding them that Babsidi wasquality, from his finely shaped head to his powerful rump. No one got ahead of Babsidi. And Nokhada’s joy was dampened only by the presence of Cenedi’s mechieta, her chief rival, who alwayshad a rider, an entitlement of some kind Bren had never figured out. Unridden, Nokhada hung back and caused no trouble; with him aboard, she aspired, that was all, she aspired to the front line—and made her rider feel guilty that he was so seldom there.
But he had no idea, absolutely no idea what drove her, or whether she’d been glad to see him when she recognized him after an absence or whether her fierce mechieta heart just saw justification for raising hell. He patted her shoulder. It got a flick of the ears; but no understanding of her. He said to himself he had to arrange to ride more often, somehow.
Among other dreams.
The mind could grow quiet, watching that motion, hearing the noise of mechieti at that comfortable pace all about them. Watching that horizon. Watching the shadows that had been in front of them slowly, slowly overtake them until the sun beat down on their heads.
Then Ilisidi took the group to a slower pace, and to a stop. Jase caught up to him for the first time in over an hour, and Jase had done it—had stayed on, had even, with encouragement from the riding crop and his feet and the rein, gotten Jarani to move through the crowd.
“Good for you,” Bren said as they sat on the hard-breathing mechieti. “How are you doing?”
“Alive,” Jase said, and seemed to be in pain.
Jago and Banichi moved up close. Meanwhile two of the men had slid down and were getting one of the mechieti to kneel, to let them reach the pack it carried.
“Do we go back now?” Jase asked.
“Not yet,” Banichi said; and the men hastily getting into the pack had come out with a bag of sandwiches, which they passed about, beginning with the dowager.
They ate the sandwiches, and the mechieti under them grazed the sparse vegetation, and wandered as they grazed, taking them in whatever direction or association the mechieti chose. They never got down. Canteens were an ordinary part of their equipment, and they drank. After that, the men afoot adjusted the canvas on the one pack they’d gotten into, remounted, and Ilisidi started moving again.
Not back toward the fortress, but dead ahead as they’d been bearing.
They’d started at dawn, they were going on past noon—they weren’t going to be back by dark, that became clear as they kept going.
But now that Jase failed to besiege him with questions he began to have questions of his own, no longer wherethey were going: that was, he suspected almost beyond question, eventually, Mogari-nai.
Why should they be going there? Considering the contingent of vans that had moved in behind them, coupled with Tano’s and Algini’s absence, he had a notion, too, of that answer: that Tabini-aiji was not pleased with the establishment at Mogari-nai, or the Messengers’ Guild.
Dared the aiji take on a Guild, and what would happen if he did? The Astronomers had fallen from highest of all the Guilds when they’d misinterpreted the Foreign Star, when the ship had appeared in the heavens the first time and slowly built the station. In the time when the Astronomers had predicted the future, they had entirely failed to know the nature of their universe, and they had fallen.
Possibly the Messengers had failed to know the nature of theiruniverse, and the aiji had resolved to see that his messages flowed accurately. But to take on the Messengers when the political situation was so difficult and so fraught with trouble, with Direiso urging his overthrow and Hanks and her radio broadcasting to atevi small aircraft.
Yet there it was, if he thought about it. The radio.. Another communicationsproblem: another problem that could be laid right in the Messengers’ laps. Radio traffic was a problem of which the Messengers were in charge, which Mogari-nai could have heard, especially situated where they were, near the coast.
If there were difficulty with one Guild, what other Guilds would stand by the aiji most firmly? What Guilds hadstood most firmly by the aiji? The Mathematicians—and the Assassins.
Direiso had benefit in that illicit radio. Shewould stand by the Messengers, if they were turning a blind eye to the problem.
The government had potential difficulties up here. And Banichi and Jago weren’t saying a thing.
Maybe it was Ilisidi’s orders. He had the sudden sinking feeling Ilisidi had found their vacation a fine excuse to be out here, and the paidhiin might be superfluous to her intentions to visit Mogari-nai.
Certainly Jase was.
But dammit, there were things he needed to know too. And he was going to find out, if they could just shake loose some answers.
19
It was a long, long ride at a fair clip after that. Nokhada disliked eating dust and fought to get forward, which Bren fought to prevent, not wishing to leave Jase alone, even if the spacing necessary to the mechieti for their sheer body size made conversation difficult.
That meant that the strangers to Ilisidi’s company all rode in a knot that strung out at times, but never broke entirely apart so long as Bren kept a tight rein on Nokhada, who eventually seemed to resign herself to the notion that due to some failure of ambition or temporary insanity on her rider’s part they were not going to dash forward and attempt to occupy the same space as Cenedi’s mechieta—for maybe this little while.
Ilisidi, meanwhile, ignored them to hold consultation with the armed young men who took her orders, and one or the other would fall back to the rear guard. Bren kept glancing at the horizons, asking himself what was going on. There was no recourse to the pocket coms, nothing to indicate any problem. But something had changed.
There was a wicked, angry streak in this woman, not just in a human opinion but in twospecies’ ways of looking at it. Ilisidi had been genial at the dinner last night; that was the velvet over the steel. Ilisidi was the gracious lady, the lame old woman—and the aristocrat, lord of her scaffold-supported hall. She’d arranged that crystal-laden table simply because it was difficult, and because her staff, too, did the impossible at her whim.
This morning she’d ceased to make things difficult for her staff and, astride Babsidi, whose four strong legs carried her with more speed, agility and strength than any man alive, she began to make things difficult for them. It was her way of saying to the world, he began to think, Those who follow mehave to follow at disadvantage and difficulty. It was the condition of her life. She was notaiji. But those who served her treated her wishes as if she were.
And to the powers around Tabini she said, When you who rejected meas aiji suddenly want my help, damn you all, you’ll bleed for it.
So the aiji’s security (along with the paidhiin, who were excused from the normal considerations of man’chi and courtesies due, but not from the suffering part of it) didn’t get full information from her, either: they were simply supposed to follow in blind obedience whenever fortune and chance, those devils of Tabini’s designs, put his agents temporarily under her instructions.
That was one way Bren summed it up, having seen it in operation at Malguri and again in the Padi Valley.
Or possibly it was nothing of retribution on Tabini at all.
Perhaps it was just the native style of the old-fashioned, unabashed atevi autocrat she was—as old-fashioned in some ways as the fortress of Malguri off in the east—to make them follow her only under her terms.