Parnalee rubbed the carafe back and forth across his brow, then gulped down a good part of the water left in it. “Never mind the sayings, any hero tales?”
“Yeh, but most of them are set on Hordaradda. I’ll print you up some summaries, let me know which you want to look at closer. Um. Some narrative verse cycles from the War of the Prophets. Haven’t had time to do more than look at the titles.” She sipped at the fruitade, wiped her mouth. “I’ve come across mention of popular verse tales about the Conquest, the kind of thing that conquered peoples pass around, more or less mouth to mouth. Naturally the Huvved didn’t record any of them, though I suppose they knew about them, the mention was in a trial transcript of a Hordar accused of theft and murder. Huvved definitions of both. I think it likely he was some sort of rebel. You might ask Churri to see if he can dig up some of them, they should be still floating around in manuscript and memory, that kind of underground snoot-cocking can hang on for centuries.”
He smiled, a tight, sour twist of his lips. “I’ll enjoy that.” The smile, such as it was, vanished. “Insolent stupid arrogant shitheads, I could break them over my little finger. Gods, one more mincing cretin treating me like a dog…”
She filled a second glass with iced fruitade, got lazily to her feet and carried it to him. “It was your idea, Par.” He reminded her of Sarmaylen when one of his pieces was rejected; the thought made her smile and feel more tender toward him than she was wont to do. “You thought up the party catering bit, you went to Tra Yana and got him to rent you out. Here, take this.” While he drank from the tall glass, she smoothed her cold hand along his face and neck, then moved around behind him and began kneading at tight shoulder muscles. “You’re just not used to being a slave; that kind of stagnant society couldn’t afford you, lucky you. Uh! I’ve been on one or two feudal backwaters. Uh! No slaves, but some of the peasants might as well have been, bonded to the soil, sold with it. Uh! you’re all knotted up. I’ve seen the way their so-called betters treat them. Uh! To these highborn Huvved, you’re not as valuable as a dog, you can’t be dropped into a pit and live out their fantasies of manhood for them with your blood and pain.” She stopped talking, clicked her tongue. “Hmm, I wonder… Any smell of pit-fights with men instead of dogs?” She stepped back from him. “That’s a bit better. My hands are getting hot, might as well stop for now.” She strolled back to the lounge chair, stretched out on it and took up her own glass, resting it on the firm flesh over her stomach; her shirt was open except for a single button holding it together across her breasts. “Well, have you?”
He lifted his head, looked at her with dislike that melted into a smile more professional than warm, though that might be her own attitudes getting in the way. “I’ve arranged several such entertainments.”
She slid the sweating glass back and forth across her bare midriff. “Ah.” She was silent for a breath or two, then she said, “Be careful, Par.”
“Don’t angle for a promotion up to dog?”
“You got it.”
She heard the tinkle of ice cubes, then he grunted. When he spoke, he changed the subject (the change landed on her ear with a loud clunk that said he didn’t want to talk about this any more). “How’d the Huvved get here? Is there anything in that for me?”
“Hmm. Depends on what you want. You might be able to touch in undertones of Hordar pride and anger and take the curse off them. As long as you don’t get so explicit you rub up against Huvved paranoia.” She glanced at Parnalee, saw his annoyance, trying to teach him elementary tricks of his own trade, hah! she swallowed a grin, but… enough was enough, she’d gotten a small jab in for that look he gave her, time to be serious. “Let’s see. About three hundred years ago, again that’s standard not local years, when the good folk in the Huvved Empire got tired of their bloody rulers, or maybe desperate enough not to care all that much what happened to them, they rose up on their hind legs and kicked out the current Imperator. Came within a hair of putting their hands on him too, close enough they scared the shit out of the creep. He ran for his life in his last Warmaster, wrapped in her cloud of stingers, made the insplit just ahead of a swarm of Harriers. When they didn’t give up and dived after him, he ordered a random course punched in, ran along it full out until he lost them, then popped back to realspace so he could find out where he was. Poor old Pradites. Either Pradix’s holiness had worn off or Luck was out to lunch because where do you think he was when he stuck his nose up? A spit and a half from Horgul. They come all this distance to get away from home fights and bloody Huvved, spend seven centuries getting comfortable with their new world, and here comes the Huvved Imperator and his hopeful court to sit on their necks again. Hmm. One of those coincidences nobody believes, but they happen. Um. Shall I go on?”
“This is printed out?”
“Minus a few editorial comments that might annoy the spy who reads my hard copy.”
He squinted up at brilliant white sunlight glittering through interstices between the undulant leaves of the low broad tree spreading out above them, leaves like overlapping slices of translucent green jade. “I’ve got nothing better to do until it cools down. Go on.”
“Thanks a lot.” She sipped at the fruitade; it was still cool enough to be drinkable, though the ice had melted. She wiped away the sticky trickle spilling from the corner of her mouth and wished futilely for a little wind to stir the hot still air; with the outer curtain wall and the inner walls that shut in this much smaller space, any breeze around would give up and go home. “Right. Picture our Imperator and his bunch sitting up there in that monstrous Warmaster, drooling over what looks like a sweet setup for plunder. Picture their surprise when they tune in on the local comsets and hear a version of Hordar speech. It apparently hadn’t changed all that much in the centuries since the Pradites left Hordaradda, the Hordar are a pretty conservative bunch. Far as I can gather, there was an odd mix of technology. A lot like they’ve got now, in fact. Minus some flourishes laid on by the slave techs the present Imperator has been importing. Functioning comsets, the landers from the colony transport, some stray robotics, some sophisticated filters, touches here and there of tech they’d brought with them and managed to hang onto. They did some mining in the asteroid belt, dumped their worst criminals on the next world out, that kind of thing. Otherwise, they were pretty well early industrial with large feudal patches out on the grasslands, what they call the Duzzulkas. No ground traffic, but a busy sky. Airships. Hydrogen lift. All sizes, all over the place. Cheap and reliable. Don’t have to build roads. By the by, I’ve convinced Tra Yarta that I should visit a Sea Farm soon, tell you about that later. Anyway, where was I?”