As if, ateva to the core, she provedthe direction not only of the man’chi of the mechieti she lent them, but that of the men she led.
Bren reasoned his way to that precarious point, while slowly stretching muscles he only used when he skied and when he rode, and bruising points of contact he onlycontacted when he rode. He’d asked for it. He’d asked for it for good reasons, but he’d forgotten how badly one could ache after a ride with Ilisidi.
There was, however, the suffering of the boy from Dur, who now rode with inexpert desperation and, being taller, leaned more, with a more committed center of gravity.
The boy from Dur fell off, and fortunately held to the harness on his way down.
The dowager kept going, as Bren reined in, as the boy’s mechieta tried to keep going, as Banichi and one of Ilisidi’s men reined in and Jago went on with Jase, who had no success stopping Janari at alclass="underline" if the herd was going, Jase was going.
“Bren!” Jase called back in alarm, as if he were being kidnapped.
The boy from Dur meanwhile proved that one of atevi weight and from a standing start (or from upside down with one foot still in the bend of the mechieta’s neck and the other on the hither side of the beast, while hanging onto the saddle straps) could not leap or even crawl back into the saddle. To a likely devotee of television machimi, it was surely an embarrassment.
“I’d get off,” Banichi said dryly, as he, Bren, and Ilisidi’s man Haduni all watched from mechieta-back. “I’d make him kneel and get up from the ground.”
One suspected if anyone could dothe television trick, Banichi might, but the boy from Dur gave up his foothold on the mechieta’s neck and hopped to the ground, whereupon the mechieta decided he was through for the day and decided to wander off.
The boy was clearly mortified, took a swat with the riding crop while holding to the rein and the mechieta bolted, jerking the rein from the boy’s hand and flinging him flat.
Haduni rode after the mechieta, which was on its way to join the herd.
The boy nursed a sore palm and bowed and bowed again.
“I’m sorry, nandi. I’m very sorry.”
“Shouldn’t have hit him,” Banichi said. “That’s for running.”
“Yes, nadi.” The boy, a lord’s son, bowed, clearly in pain.
Meanwhile Haduni had caught the mechieta and brought it toward them.
Banichi tapped a strap on his mechieta’s saddle. “Hold and tuck up,” Banichi said, and that was something Bren had seen in the machimi, too. For the short distance they had to go, the boy held to the saddle strap while Banichi swung to the other side and counterbalanced, and they met Ilisidi’s man and the recovered mechieta.
Then the two men gave the boy a very quick lesson on how to get the mechieta’s attention with a tug on the rein, where to touch the crop to get it to kneel, how fast to get his foot into the stirrup, and how to use the animal’s momentum to settle on, with what tension of the rein. It was familiar stuff. And it was a good lesson, which the boy from Dur seemed to take very gratefully.
“Very much better, nandi,” Ilisidi’s man said.
“You have a chance,” was Banichi’s judgment, and they set off at a brisk clip toward the rest, who were now over the horizon of a land that didn’t look all that rolling. But it was. And the dowager, Jago, Jase, and the rest were as invisible as if they’d sunk into the sparse, gravel-set vegetation.
It wasn’t the only time they had to stop for the boy from Dur, whose mortification was complete when, at one such crisis, the mechieta led him a chase, body-length by body-length, as it grazed on the fine spring growth and the boy would almost lay hands on it only to have it move on.
There was laughter.
“Someone should help him, nadi,” Jase said, as if suggesting he should do it; but Bren shook his head. “They laugh. If they meant ill, they wouldn’t. If the boy laughed it would be graceless and impudent.”
“ Why?”
“Because, nadi, it would signal his mastery of the matter.” The mechieta eluded the boy another body-length, and the boy this time made a sprint for it. The mechieta, almost caught by surprise, bolted, and the boy went sprawling, clutching his leg. There was laughter at that, too, but fainter, and one of the men got down to see to the boy and another chased down the errant mechieta.
“Good try, boy,” the dowager said. “Bad timing.”
The boy, clearly in pain, bowed. “Thank you, nand’ dowager.” And limped over to the mechieta the man brought back for him. He properly had it kneel, had it hold the posture, the lesson of his last fall, and got on with dignity.
“Good,” Ilisidi said shortly, and Bren guessed there was—if not devotion forming in a young atevi heart, for atevi reasons: man’chi would determine that—at least a knowledge that respect could be won from her.
As good as a ribbon, that was. A badge of honor.
“Nandi,” the boy said, and bowed with a modern conservatism, not going so far as the arm-waving extravagance of the riders of such beasts on the television. He managed not to look foolish.
From Jase there was silence. If they were lucky, Bren said to himself, there was deep thought going on.
Midafternoon. There was one break for, as the atevi put it, necessity, at which they all dismounted (it was Banichi’s comment that in less civilized days they didn’t dismount at all) and went aside with two spades from the packs, men to one side of a small rise, women to the other.
“Nadi,” Jase said in a faint, unhappy voice, “I can’t do this.”
“You’ll be terribly sorry in a few hours if you don’t,” Bren said with no remorse at all, and Jase reconsidered his options and went and did what he had to do.
He came back happier. Embarrassed, but happier. They rejoined the dowager and Jago, the mechieti having waited quite happily without a boy chasing them. Babsidi came to the dowager’s whistle, and riders sorted the rest out.
The boy from Dur and Jase were the last up, but they managed on their own.
Definitely better, Bren said to himself, safe and lord of all he saw, from Nokhada’s lofty back; and Babsidi started moving, which meant Nokhada had to try to catch him.
He let Nokhada win for a while. Jase was doing well enough back there, and was not slowing them down.
At no time yet had they hit an all-out run: they had mechieti carrying the packs, and that, he began to realize, was the primary reason. But the pace they did strike ate up the ground.
They were going west. And they reached a point that the sun burned into their eyes, and still the mechieti kept that steady gait.
He had shut his eyes to save them pain from the light when a hitch in Nokhada’s rhythm warned him of change ahead, and his eyes flashed open as they topped a low roll of the land.
The horizon had shortened. The land fell away here into golden haze.
The sea stretched out in front of them hardly closer than they’d seen from the plane. Rocky hills across a wide bay were only haze. An island in blued grays rose from the golden sheet of water.
The mechieti stopped as Babsidi stopped, on the rim of the land.
“That’s Dur!” the boy said, and added meekly, in courtesy, “nand’ dowager.”
“That it is,” Ilisidi said, and signaled Babsidi to go down. She was quicker to dismount than Cenedi, snatching her cane from the loop in which she had kept it, and with a hand on Babsidi instead of the cane, waved the stick at the immediate area. “Make camp.”
“What direction are we facing?” Jase asked quietly.
“West. That’s the sun. Remember?”
Jase pointed more directly at the sun, which was slightly to their left, and near a knoll of rock and gravel that shadowed dark against the sun and broke the force of the wind. “That’s west.”
“North.” Bren signaled the direction. “We’re facing west northwest.”
“West north,” Jase said.
“West northwest.”