The main encampment, built on a bluff overlooking the ocean, stood like a
pavilion over the billowing waist-high dune grass. On his Earth, the ocean
might have been the Pacific but on Atvar, he learned later, was named the
Nippon Sea. The country road, grown wide and paved with a mixture of gravel,
seashells, and some pinkish-gray compound, continued on but their journey ended
at the next crossroads.
A convoy of self-propelled wagons preceded Brian into the
compound. Groups of men - some clean and fresh, others in the same state as he
- paraded purposefully down the wider boulevards between the rows of structures
or gathered in small knots near the intersections where tiny alleyways dived
into the deep shadows under the eaves.
The buildings were hybrids, an unequal cross between tents,
thatched huts, and stone houses. Most had fieldstone knee walls and support
columns. The spaces between the pillars had canvas covers; some drawn and
others gathered back like drapes. The lower roofs were thatched and lacquered
with a sticky-looking substance. The higher buildings had sienna colored tiles,
slate sheets, or shake shingles.
They came to a wide palazzo - a town square or a marketplace -
where the crowd thinned the further in they went.
Brian followed Cade through the tangle, across an empty
stretch of cobblestone, and up on a dais where two strangely and inexplicably
frightening older men sat amidst sheaves of papers, which were tied together in
bundles with various colors of ribbon. The closer they came to the pair, the
uneasier he felt. Without deigning to speak, Cyn stood across from them,
waiting. Finally one noticed her shadow and, without looking at her, said,
"Pick any doss, girl."
Cade plucked her dagger from its sheath and buried the tip and
a goodly part of the point in the wood. Brian could feel the twanging in the
soles of his feet as the tempered steel vibrated from the force of her strike
and he wondered where she found the will to move when he felt like road
kill-to-be.
Both men startled but, as they shrank away, Brian flung out
his painfully cold fingers and stilled the blade. "Cade's Cadre, sirs. I think
we need directions." Cyn grabbed her knife handle and, judging by her tight
forearm muscles, with difficulty yanked it free.
"Ah!" said the second man. He plucked the stopper from the
mouth of a tiny metal flask and lifted the bottle, reverently. He carefully
dribbled a few ounces of clear liquid into a shallow silver bowl and whispered
an unknown language across the surface. The little circles spread outward but
froze when the first wavelet touched the outer rim.
"Touch the silver," he said. When Cade tapped the outside of
the bowl the ice-like substance thawed and became scarlet-hued. The other man
shuffled through the piles of paper until he found one with a ribbon of the
same color. He yanked out one sheet and dipped the edge in the bowl. The liquid
seeped into the paper, wicking upward like veins in an oak leaf. When the color
stopped spreading, he held the paper out but whatever had allowed Brian to
react and speak earlier didn't free him again.
Cade snatched the document and turned her back on the old men.
Brian followed, each step easier than the previous one. She paused at the
corner of a mostly stone building to examine the paper covered with serpentine
and straight lines intersecting and radiating from a central hub.
"It's a map, Baycoo," she said, unnecessarily. The drawing had
begun to make sense as soon as she'd held it upright. She oriented using the
dais as the hub and traced the red-marked turns, twists and straight-aways
before using the same finger to indicate a direction.
"Shouldn't we wait for the others?" Brian asked. Cyn snapped
her nail against a darker square embedded in the ornate border design. "They'll
come. This'll tug 'em to us, in the by and by."
The directions ended before a long low structure of the sort
with canvas between the columns. The arched door was split down the center and,
unlike the rest of the building, made of a sturdy-looking wood with verdigris
hinges. A pair of dark smudges marred the polished surfaces at shoulder height.
Above the lintel, as he watched, a ornate series of characters appeared in
ghostly pale shadows but blossoming to the same scarlet hue as the border on
Cade's map.
"What's it say?" he asked, nudging Cade as she cut the wax
seal on the mysteriously solid door. She glanced up at the rapidly brighter
inscription and shrugged.
"I don't know, only that this is our doss for as long as we
are camped in this place." She pushed open the doors that swung open like ones
in a spaghetti Western saloon. Brian noticed, as he caught them on the back
swing, that his palms landed well within the dark smudges. How many thousands
of times would have human hands had to made contact on those very spots in
order to leave permanent marks? His guess-timate constricted his throat and
left him breathless but that frightening consideration slipped from his mind as
he stepped into the restful shadows of the barracks.
At first, the space within appeared to be a single large
rectangle, slightly wider than deep but, as his eyes adjusted to the relative
dimness, he detected additional details. Only the front part of the structure
was a single room. About halfway back, perpendicular to the exposed rafters,
ropes were strung garland-wise. Thick accordions of off-white cloth hung in
gathers at the ends of the ropes nearest to the outer walls. Pulled across as
curtains, they would break the rear area up into alcoves.
On the floor, piled up next to the walls in a haphazard way,
were thick cylindrically shaped bundles that looked like mushroom stems of
various shades of brown, tan, and gray. He was reminded of a childhood pastime
of using a golf club to whack the heads off toadstools when they sprouted after
a heavy rain. The aftermath of his driving practice cum mushroom mass murders
resembled the scene before him so completely that he could almost smell the
damp grass and fungus spores.
Here and there, chains dangled from the rafters. A few held
shiny jar-like containers while most had no discernable purpose. Even in the
shadow-rich darkness, Brian could follow the uninterrupted length of each of
the ceiling beams from the front wall to the rear. The trees from which these
girders had been cut had to have been as tall as redwoods. A dark rectangle in
the far wall could only be another door.
Cade yanked on one of the canvas window coverings and, with a
jangle of copper rings, slung it aside, letting daylight into the quarters. She
strode toward the back of the chamber, scooping up one of the toadstool stems.
She bypassed most of the cubicle spaces for one situated against the base of
the back wall. With a practiced snap, Cade flipped the bundle open. The pallet
and blanket landed with a thump and she nudged it into place with her toe.
She hung her pouch-laded belt on a knob that protruded from
the mortar cementing the flat stones in the waist-high wall, and unlaced her
boots. She kicked them off and let them lay where they landed. Cyn plopped down
on the cushion with a sigh and rubbed her calves, her bare toes wiggling in her
pleasure, while resting her chin on her drawn-up knees. Finally she pointed to
the next alcove and said, "That's yours."
Brian grabbed some bedding and dropped it where she indicated.
He hung up his sundries belt on a similar peg. He started to remove his other
belts but stopped when Cade shook her head. "Why not?"
"You don't know us that well," she said.
"Yet - or ever?" he asked, unrolling his mattress. He folded
the blanket and squared it with the upper edge of the bed.
She shrugged. "Besides, you're not just anybody. You're my
el-tee."
"Which means?"
"Always prepared. Always ready. Always on guard."
He wasn't certain if being her second was worth the constant
vigilance. "Always?"
Cyn made a wry face. "Until some nobody wants to be a somebody
badly enough to take it from you." So he'd have to fight to retain his place at
her back, and fight to protect her back, and fight to not be laid in the ground
on his back.
"So what's the upside of this fucking job? Maybe I want to be
a nobody. It seems like it would be a helluva lot easier."
Without blinking, she snatched up the smaller dagger from her
rumpled boot and hurled it. The draft of its passing stirred the hairs on his
neck and, after the thunk of landing, he could hear the blade vibrating. Open
jawed, wondering why she missed and what he'd done to offend Cyn, he stood
waiting for her to attack but she just wiped her hands on her tunic and
shivered. Her nonchalance mystified him but, giving himself a mental kick for
his belated response, he half drew his sword.
"Not to mention safer." She pointed at the wall and said, "I
think I got him." A large furry spider dangled from her thrown knife, legs
drooping a good two inches from the point. "Venomous... Though I'd kill 'em
even if not."
"Most people would have just squashed him with a boot." His
hand shook as he let his sword drop into place. Scared, yes. But angry, more,
and almost disappointed not to use it. He clenched his fingers, hiding the
tremble.
She smirked. "I'm not most people."
"I noticed - but whizzing daggers? You could have missed. A
bit of over-kill, doncha think?"
"I try not to. Think - I mean. I never miss."
In spite of trying not to, he laughed and she won him back.
"Stick with me. You may learn a thing or two." She lay back on
the bedding, tucked her hand behind her head, and smiled up at him. In any
other girl those words plus that same smile would have been an invitation and
he wondered if she knew how attracted he was to her - even as grubby as they
both were. Not wanting to torment himself more, Brian turned away and kicked at
his mattress until it was centered on his personal bit of floor space. All of
the other cubicles were at least twice as large. Cyn had claimed one of the two
smallest and assigned him the other. Mere days prior, he'd been contemplating a
new apartment with A/C and a treadmill. Now he simply hoped to live long enough
for a meal and a bath. He acknowledged his new priorities with a wry smile and
a grunt of disgust.
"So, I'm a somebody. I get a private room."
He untied the canvas curtain and drew it aside. Outside, a
stranger startled at the sudden movement. He scurried away noiselessly,
buttoning his fly, almost stepping in the mud made of his piss and the bare
soil of the alley.
"With a view."
She couldn't possibly have seen the guy outside but she
chuckled. She'd probably seen the same thing a dozen times.
"Welcome home, Baycoo."
