It wasn’t a concept Jase got easily. But Jase repeated it. “West northwest. Dur to the north and west. Mospheira west. Shejidan is tepid.”
“South. Actually southeast.”
“South,” Jase amended his pronunciation. “East. Can the mechieti go down to the sea?”
“On a road or a trail they can. Trail. Small road.” He didn’t see one at the rim, which looked sheer to his eyes. “But we’ve done enough traveling for the day. Supper. I hope.” In fact the order was going out now to make camp, and he heaved a sigh, feeling a definite soreness that was going to be hell tomorrow.
“She said sit down?” Jase had heard it too.
“Settle for the night, nadi. Camp is the word.” Talking with atevi was a constant battle to have the numbers felicitous. Talking to Jase was a continual questioning of one’s memory on what words Jase knew would carry a thought.
“We go down to the sea in the morning.”
“Nadi, remember manners. Don’t bring up the matter at supper. The dowager gives. She won’t have things demanded of her or she’ll say no. Face.”
Jase was disturbed. But he mended his manners, made his face void of thoughts, and bowed slightly. “Nadi. I shall remember. North. Northwest. South. Southeast. Is there a northeast, nadi?”
“There.” He pointed. “Taiben is in the northeast. Southwest is Onondisi Bay. This water is Nain Bay.”
“I know. It was on the map.”
Nain Bay was on the map. The sun wasn’t. And Shejidan was tepid.
One hoped, Bren said to himself, that this whole adventure would express itself only in Jase’s striking vocabulary. He hoped the night to come would be quiet, that the vans had been the caterers’, that Tano and Algini had stayed to manage the details of a welcome-home banquet—all possible—and that none of the things added up the way they might.
“Also,” he said, trying to think of everything with a man for the first time loose among the hazards of the outdoors, “nadi, be very careful of the cliff edge. Weather weakens the edge, do you understand? The earth could crumble and you could fall a long way if the edge is weak.”
“Then how do we get down?” Jase asked.
“Carefully,” Bren said. “And on a road if one exists. That’s what one does with roads.”
The packs began to come off the mechieti. Canvas bundles came down.
And sprang up rapidly as tents—spring-framed, modern tents, arising with blinding quickness.
For a woman who favored the ancient, Ilisidi certainly didn’t disdain the latest in camping gear. He knewthose atevi-scale tents. Northstar, the same brand of Mospheiran-made tenting that had served Mospheiran campers for generations, was a big export item to the mainland in atevi scale, a very, very popular export that helped Mospheira secure aluminum. The paidhi’s mind was full of such helpful eclectic data.
But a tent like this modern thing of aluminum and nylon certainly wasn’t what he expected the dowager to be using. And in hunting camouflage, not the house colors. They sprang up, arched, immediate, ground-sheeted, and pegged down with toothed lightweight pegs that went into soft ground like this like daggers into crusted bread.
“What are we going to do?” Jase asked, he thought somewhat obtusely, and he answered with a little impatience: “I suppose we’re going to have supper, nadi-ji.”
The packs gave up not only tents, but well-packed modern thermal storage, so there was no need of fire, and the mechieti, grazing, wandered off to join the mechiet’-aiji and to have Ilisidi’s men take off their harnesses.
Jason sat himself down on a hummock of grass and was examining a stem of bristle-weed as if it were of significance—and of course it was a curiosity, to him. The boy from Dur, Rejiri, had appeared to settle on Jase as a person of great interest and minimal threat and, having nothing else to do, had settled down opposite Jase, the boy talking to him rapidfire in a way that looked to have Jase engaged but confused. There was no knowing what Jase said, but Jase looked embarrassed, and the boy laughed.
But, Bren said to himself, Jase could handle himself. The boy who’d nearly bashed a plane into him wasn’t one to talk about taking offense at the paidhiin.
He could draw breath, at least, and allot concern about Jase to someone else as the sunset, beyond the picturesque spire of rock, drowned in a bank of leaden cloud.
He walked about at peace and off duty, stretching out muscle—doing nothing for bruises near the bone, but it did seem to prevent the worst stiffness. Banichi and Jago were talking with Cenedi; Ilisidi was talking to three of her young men who were about to set out the thermal containers. As a rough camp, it was a lot more grand than the night they’d spent dodging bombs in Maidingi’s hills.
And there was still nothing ominous on the horizon behind them. One could hope, maybe.
They were up here, notably, with the establishment at Mogari-nai, which had not made Tabini happy. And if they were up here to rattle the foundations of Mogari-nai and the Messengers’ Guild, that Guild was not a warlike crew. Their hostilities mostly expressed themselves in the paidhiin’s fouled-up mail.
There was also the matter of the tower up by Wiigin, and the pilots and the communications regulations. That as well as the communications fallouts he was sure was on the agenda, if they were paying an official call on Mogari-nai, and he certainly didn’t rule it out.
And if he got all that straightened out, he might possibly get another chance to make a phone call, this one with the weight of the aiji and the aiji-dowager behind him, to crack the phone system.
He wondered what had happened with his family now. No calls, he was reasonably sure, at least nothing that had gotten past Mogari-nai, through which the incoming calls from Mospheira were all routed. By the luck that dogged him in that department, there was a good chance any incoming call that Toby sent was hung up in politics. Ilisidi, if she was planning a housecleaning at Mogari-nai, couldn’t head the agenda of the aiji of Shejidan with a query from the paidhi-aiji. It just wouldn’t look right. But he might get that call through after other business was finished.
So he walked and he stretched his legs. He walked closer to the sea than he would have liked Jase to come, and he shouldn’t have done it. Jase followed him, with the boy from Dur trotting along with him, pointing out the sights, telling them there was, approximately, Wiigin, in that haze across the bay, and there was Dur, one could just see the lights in the gathering gloom, and that was the fishing port, but his father’s house at Dur-wajran, thatwas on the height of the island, which had been a fortress in the days of the first sailing ships, but the inhabitants of Saduri on the body of the mainland, with their deeply inland harbor, had attempted to take the trade, even if they’d had to dredge the bay, because of the deeper draft of modern ships.
It was all done with scarcely a breath. And Jase looked a little desperate.
“Supper,” Jago came to say, “nadiin-ji.”
They had set the tents in a semicircle, the back of each to the wind that escaped the knoll. The company settled down to a lightless supper as the dusk settled about them, and there was good hot food from the insulated containers.
There was also a wind getting up that, in Bren’s estimation, was going to make two humans glad of their jackets and the insulated tents before morning. The synthetic canvas fluttered and rippled in the wind, and the clouds flew in rags above their heads, gray in an apricot sky.
The mechieti grazed in apparent contentment. Jago had stowed the computer, little good that it was besides mental comfort, and had put it in his tent. They passed out sandwiches and had tea from instant heat containers in insulated cups.
When the dowager wantedmodernity, it attended her. Clearly so.
“So, Ja-son-paidhi,” Ilisidi said. “How do you fare?”
“Well, nand’ dowager, thank you.” Jase was on his very best behavior, and bowed with courtly grace.
“And you, son of Dur-wajran?”
“I am well, nand’ dowager. Very well.”
“And you, nand’ paidhi?”