“And divided. I swear they must be divided. I’ve seen so many societies like this, I can practically identify them by smell. A crazy-quilt pattern of feudalisrns and sovereignties, any higher authority a ghost. If as rich a planet as this one potentially is were united, it’d have made a far greater recovery by now, after the space attack, than it has done. Or it would have beaten the raiders off at least.
“So, if we have enemies here in Hanno, we probably have automatic friends somewhere else. And not dreadfully far away. Ai any rate, we’re not likely to be pursued beyond the nearest border, nor extradited back here. In fact, the Engineer’s rivals are apt to be quite alarmed when they learn he’s clapped hands on a real space warship. They’re apt to join forces to get it away from him. Which’ll make you and me, my dear, much-sought-after advisors. We may or may not be able to get Tom back unhurt. I vow the gods a hundred Blue Giant seabeasts if we do! But we’ll be free, even powerful.
“Or so I hope. We’ve nothing to go on but hope. And courage and wits and endurance. Have you those, Yasmin? Your life was too easy until now. But he asked me to care for you.
“You’ll have to help. Our first and foremost job is to get out of Hanno. And I don’t speak their damned language for diddly squat. You’ll talk for both of us. Can you? We’ll plan a story. Then, if and when you see there must be a false note in it, you’ll have to cover—at once—with no ideas from me. Can you do that, Yasmin? You must!”
—But conference was perforce by single words, signs, sketches in the red dirt. It went slowly. And it was repeated, over and over, in every possible way, to make certain—they understood each other.
In the end, however, Yasmin nodded. “Yes,” she said, “I will try, as God gives me strength… and as you do.” The voice was almost inaudible, and the eyes she turned on the bigger, older woman were dark with awe.
In midafternoon they reached a farm. Its irregular fields were enclosed by forest, through which a cart track ran to join a dirt road that, in turn, twisted over several kilometers until it entered the fisher village.
Dagny spent minutes peering from a thicket. Beside her, Yasmin tried to guess what evaluations the Krakener was making. I should begin to learn these ways of staying alive, the Sassanian thought. More is involved than my own welfare. I don’t want to remain a burden on my companions, an actual danger to them.
And to think, not one year ago I took for granted the star rovers were ignorant, dirty, cruel, quarrelsome barbarians!
Yasmin had been taught about philosophic objectivity, but she was too young to practice it consistently. Her universe having been wrecked, herself cast adrift, she naturally seized upon the first thing that felt like a solid rock and began to make it her emotional foundation. And that thing happened to be Roan Tom and Dagny Od’s-daughter.
Not that she had intellectual illusions. She knew very well that the Krakeners had come to help the Shah of Sassania because the Pretender was allied with enemies of theirs. And she knew that, if successful, they would exact good pay. She had heard her father grumble about it.
Nevertheless, the facts were: First, compatriots of hers, supposedly civilized, supposedly above the greed and short-sightedness that elsewhere had destroyed civilization… had proven themselves every bit as animalistic. Second, the star-rover garrison in Anushirvan turned out to be jolly, well-scrubbed, fairly well-behaved. Indeed, they were rather glamorous to a girl who had never been past her planet’s moon. Third, they had stood by their oaths, died in their ships and at their guns, for her alien people. Fourth, two of them had saved her life, and offered her the best and most honorable way they could think of to last out her days. Fifth (or foremost?), Tom was now her husband.
She was not exactly infatuated with him. A middle-aged, battle-beaten, one-eyed buccaneer had never entered her adolescent dreams. But he was kind in his fashion, and a’skillful lover, and… and perhaps she did care for him in a way beyond friendship… if he was alive—oh, let him be alive!
In any event, here was Dagny. She certainly felt grief like a sword in her. But she hid it, planned, guided, guarded. She had stood in the light of a hundred different suns, had warred, wandered, been wife and mother and living sidearm. She knew everything worth knowing (what did ancient texts count for?) except one language. And she was so brave that she trusted her life to what ability an awkward weakling of a refugee might possess.
Please don’t let me fail her.
Thus Yasmin looked forth too and tried to make inferences from what she saw.
The house and outbuildings were frame, not large, well-built but well-weathered. Therefore they must have stood here for a good length of time. Therefore Imperial construction methods—alloy, prestressed concrete, synthetics, energy webs—had long been out of general use in these parts, probably everywhere on Nike. That primitiveness was emphasized by the agromech system.
A couple of horses drew a haycutter. It also was wooden; even the revolving blades were simply edged with metal. From its creaking and bouncing, the machine had neither wheel bearings nor springs. A man drove it. Two half-grown boys, belike his sons, walked after. They used wooden-tined rakes to order the windrows. The people, like the animals, were of long slim deep-chested build, brown-haired and fair-complexioned. Their garments were coarsely woven smock and trousers.
No weapons showed, which suggested that the bay region was free of bandits and vendattas. Nevertheless Dagny did not approach. Instead, she led a cautious way back into the woods and thence toward the house, so that the buildings screened off view of the hayfield.
The Ki-akener woman scowled. “Why?” she muttered.
“Why what… my lady?”
“Why make—” Dagny’s hands imitated whirling blades. “Here. Planet… canted?… little. No cold?”
“Oh. Do you mean, why do they bother making hay? Well, there must be times when their livestock can’t pasture.”
Dagny understood. Her nod was brusque. “Why that ?”
“Um-m-m… oh, dear, let me think. Lord Tom explained to me what he—what you two had learned about this planet. Yes. Not much axial tilt. I suppose not an unusually eccentric orbit. So the seasons oughtn’t to be very marked. And we are in a rather low latitude anyway, on a seacoast at that. It should never get too cold for grass. Too dry? No, this is midsummer time. And, well, they’d hardly export hay to other areas, would they?”
Dagny shrugged.
It is such a strange world, Yasmin thought. All wrong. Too dense. That is, if it had a great many heavy metals, humans would never have settled here permanently. So what makes it dense should be a core of iron, nickel and things, squeezed into compact quantum states. The kind that terrestroid planets normally have. Yes, and the formation of a true core causes tectonic processes, vulcanism, the outgassing of a primitive atmosphere and water. Later we get chemical evolution, life, photosynthesis, free oxygen.