Cajeiri lifted his weight from Bren’s shoulder, braced himself with a hand on the seat in front. “What was that, nandi?” he asked.
“What are we doing?”
“One has no idea,” Bren said, and hauled himself to his feet and past the boy, in search of information, in what was near dawn.
Details hung in a dim gray light, where before had been dark and silhouettes, and faces were weary and watchful, facing the windows.
Tano was the one of his staff closest by, he and Algini having traded off their seats to Banichi and Jago. He took a grip on Tano’s seat rail.
“What happened, nadiin-ji?” Bren asked.
“An isolated station, nandi. The pumps are booby-trapped. A team is working to clear it, for the hindmost. Our driver believes we can make it—if not, still to another pump, with a small detour.”
Communications must still be working. They had hardly slowed down to find this out. “Is there word of the dowager?” he asked them, “Or the aiji?”
“There is not, Bren-ji. But we have not passed the car, either, baji-naji.”
“What shall we do, then? Drive straight into the city?”
“Perhaps,” Tano said. “Perhaps, Bren-ji.”
Perhaps, if the fuel held out in sufficiency to keep the column together. If, baji-naji, the buses held together mechanically and they didn’t run head-on into ambush. Worse, they were going into a narrowing cone on the map, making it clearer and clearer to anyone that the city was their destination, and offering ample time for their enemy to put up a meaningful roadblock and a determined resistence.
He worked forward in the crowded aisle to have a look ahead for himself, and had an uncommonly clear view of the column in front, no longer a dust-obscured scatter of taillights, but a gray string of five small trucks and one bus stretching ahead of them down a hill, on a well-traveled market road. No car. No hint of a car aheadc whatever that meant. One hoped it meant that the dowager had gone off the route and tried some clever maneuver. It was no good asking. Whatever they got by radio—and it was even possible that his staff could reach Cenedi at short range—there was no news for him, or his staff would have waked him to inform him. Banichi and Jago were in a seat forward, themselves catching a few moments of sleep. He decided against interrupting that rest.
He went back to his seat, answered Cajeiri’s sleepy questions—the boy had finally, absolutely run out of energy—and when Cajeiri dropped off again, he watched out the window, watched grain fields pass, finally making a pillow of his hand against the outer wall and catching a few hazy moments of sleep.
Then the tires hit pavement. He jerked his head up, saw buildings, realized they were passing right through a town—a town he knew, by that remarkable red building on the hill, the old fortress. It was Adigian, firmly in Ragi territory.
And it was sunrise, and people were out on the roadside waving at them, cheering them on, some of them with weapons evident.
Cajeiri’s head popped up. “There are people, nandi!”
“Adigian. A Ragi town. Wave at them, young gentleman.”
Cajeiri did that, but soon they ran out of people, and only saw three trucks waiting in a side street, trucks crammed with passengers, a sight that whisked by them.
More would join them, had his bodyguard not said so?
His nerves were rattled. As the last of the little town whisked past the windows he found another priority. The bus had what genteel folk called an accommodation in the rear, which he visited, and returned to his seat. The bus meanwhile kept up its steady pace, never slowing once, not as they left the brief patch of pavement and struck out on the usual dirt surface.
If there was fuel in Adigian, they had declined it, because the driver judged they had enough. Most everyone had waked, but now heads went down again. And amazing himself, he dropped his head over against the seat edge on folded hands and caught a little more half-sleep, his mind painting pictures of the space station over their heads, the white corridors of the remote station where they had fought to rescue the colonistsc so, so much detail the world didn’t know. He remembered a boy playing at race cars in the ship corridors, Banichi on his knees helping repair a wreckc all these things. A curious dinner, with floating globes of drink, and fear of poisonc Odd-smelling, dark halls, then, the interior of a kyo ship. The wide, strange countenance of their own kyo guest, his broad hand descending on a pile of teacakesc His head spun. There were so many changes, so much water under the bridge.
Adigian. Home territory, if he had a home anywhere besides that mountain over on Mospheira. The Ragi heart of the aishidi’tat.
For the first time since returning from space, even in his sojourn in Tirnamardi, he began to have a real sense of location, as if a missing true north had settled back into his bones and reached conscious level. He knew where he was with his eyes shut. Shejidan was there, just there, ahead of them, a little off dead-ahead, as the road wound. Remarkable, that he hadn’t had that awareness until now, that it had taken ancient Adigian and that old fortress to stir it.
Early evening on a rail trip, the train passing through the same town, himself on the way to Taiben, a guest of Tabini-aiji, all those years agoc Making notes for the University back on Mospheira, attempting a sketch of the fortress, since a camera would never be accepted in those long ago, nervous days of human-atevi relationsc back before the station had found new occupants, back before there was a space program, back before the paidhi had lived in the Bu-javid’s noble apartments.
In those days the aiji inviting a human guest to Taiben was itself unprecedented. Revolutionary.
Teaching him the use of a firearm, and giving him a small, concealable pistol, had been a thunderbolt. Defend yourself, had been Tabini’s implication, though at the time he had had no idea how imminent that necessity would be. It had not been a large gun: It was a small enough weapon to fit his hand, to fit very easily into his coat pocket—one of the concealed sorts that atevi maidservants might have tucked away when they only looked unarmed. Banichi had replaced it with another, slightly heavier, the night that he had arrived in Bren’s service, never to leave him.
Tabini had seen conflict coming, hadn’t he? The aiji had made his own decision to draw the paidhi into the thick of court activity, and gotten—oh, far more than Tabini had ever bargained for, that was probably the truth; but likewise Tabini had already known what he was going to ask for his people, hadn’t he? More technology, more change—he had never offered more than Tabini was willing to take, and use, and go with, clear to the stars, and to societal change, and technological revolution that did, in the end, exactly what paidhiin had been appointed to preventc Paidhiin had operated on the theory that technological revolution would be devastating to atevi culture, atevi society. That it would mean another war, with the destruction of Mospheira or of atevi, or both. Paidhiin had resided quietly, down among the secretaries of the Bu-javid, and made their dictionary, and consulted on every word, every concept, building notebooks ever so tightly restricted to certain aspects of the University and the State Department, which supervised them.
He had broken those ties years ago. He had become part of the court. He had all but renounced connections with Mospheira in the end.
And that town had turned out to cheer them—to cheer Tabini-aiji, not the Kadagidi—hadn’t they? They were Ragi. It was natural they’d be on Tabini’s side. But not, necessarily, on his. He had to remember that, and not expose himself to danger, not until he’d delivered the final load of information— things the Ragi atevi might not like to hear, but had to.
Turn in the road. He lifted his head, quite sure in his bones where they were, and dropped it back against his hands, then against the bus wall, Cajeiri sleeping soundly against his shoulder.