The baby nursed and nursed, as if there were no tomorrow. "Hungrier than mine, he is," said the woman who held him at one breast and her own, much bigger, daughter at the other. She did not sound angry, but rather indulgent, motherly, almost proud.
"He has every reason to be," Kisirja answered. Under her, the yurt swayed and rolled, as if at sea. Horses snorted, muskylopes grunted. Kisirja was only glad Nilufer had given birth three T-months before, and so had milk to spare. Otherwise they would have lost the child she'd rescued.
"What will you call him?" Nilufer asked.
Kisirja had thought about that all through the long, cold journey home. "His name will be Juchi."
" 'The Guest.' " Nilufer smiled. "Yes, that is very good. Juchi he shall be."
When at last he'd drunk his fill, Juchi burped lustily against his wet nurse's shoulder. His head stayed steady and upright on his shoulders, instead of wobbling like most newborns'. The nomad tribes near Angband had fostered enough babes over the centuries that such was not uncommon, though.
He had some Sauron genes in him, then, Kisirja thought. But the Saurons did not cull just babies in whom their strain was too weak. If it was too strong, an infant could die of a heart attack like an old man or spasm to death when overenhanced reflexes sent it into convulsions at the slightest sound. Whether Juchi was a permanent guest remained to be seen.
"May Allah and the spirits make it so," Kisirja murmured. Nilufer nodded, understanding her perfectly.
Juchi burped again, sighed in contentment. The wet nurse handed him to Kisirja. He looked up at her. Even baby-round, his face was longer than those of most children born in the yurts, and his eyes had no folds of skin to narrow them. Kisirja did not care. He was hers now, for however long she had him.
Brigade Leader Azog thumbed on the Threat Analysis Computer. As the screen lit, he smiled at the machine. It was one of the last pieces of high-tech gear the Base had that still worked. The computer console contrasted strangely with the massive stones of the walls and the steelwood of the ceiling. The core of the Base had been a native hill fort before the Saurons came, and they had thriftily incorporated what went before. There had been little steel or concrete or synthetic available here anyway, even in the days when the Dol Guldur's wreckage still smoldered. The armored fiber-optic and power cables overhead were slung between massive forged-iron brackets screwed into the ceiling beams.
Azog punched in the first of his usual questions: THREATS TO ANGBAND BASE—RANK ORDER. His typing was one-fingered but rapid, a curious blend of lack of practice and Sauron speed. Once the TAC had been able to speak aloud—it could still listen, and give commands through the screens. Commands for data, mostly; data of every kind, important and seemingly inconsequential. It would demand that they interrogate a prisoner again and again, sometimes; even if the answers were always identical save for phrasing. And the pickups were everywhere in the Base, perhaps elsewhere as well.
It was well worth the trouble.
The TAC muttered to itself. Words appeared on the screen: THREATS TO ANGBAND BASE:
1. THE CITADEL
2. THE BANDARI
3. STEPPE NOMADS, CLAN OF DEDE KORKUT
4. TOWN OF TALLINN
5. STEPPE BANDITS, MUSTAFA'S BAND
OTHERS TOO LOW A PROBABILITY TO BE EVALUATED.
Azog eyed the screen, frowning a little. The Citadel and the Bandari were always one and two on the TAC's list; the Citadel because it might wish to bring the outlying Bases under tighter control, and the Bandari . . . well, that feud had started the day the first stone of Angband was laid. Piet van Reenan himself, the Bandari Founder, had died in single combat against a Sauron from Angband Base . . . haBandari legend said he'd killed a Sauron and crippled another, possibly a Cyborg, before dying.
The last time Azog had checked the TAC, ten or twelve cycles before, the nomads had been fifth on the list. The time before that, no clan had even been named. He wondered what this Dede Korkut was up to. Maybe one of his shamans had tried cooking up smokeless powder and not blown himself sky high in the attempt. The TAC could evaluate and link clues too small for even the most perceptive human observer, although it volunteered nothing.
Frowning still, the Brigade Leader cleared the screen. He typed his second ritual question: THREATS TO CO, ANGBAND BASE, RANK ORDER. Again the TAC went into its own private ritual of thought. The answer took so long to come out that Azog wondered if it was working as it should.
Just as he began to worry in earnest, he got his answer: THREATS TO CO, ANGBAND BASE:
1. SENIOR ASSAULT GROUP LEADER DAGOR
2. STEPPE NOMADS, CLAN OF DEDE KORKUT
3. BREEDMASTER GRIMA
OTHERS TOO LOW A PROBABILITY TO BE EVALUATED.
Now Azog was frankly scowling. END, he typed, and the screen went dark. His own thoughts cleared more slowly. He'd commanded Angband Base for close to twenty T-years, far longer than any other CO since the Dol Guldur landed on Haven and the Citadel sent out an expedition to found Angband in the far southwest In all that time, he'd never seen anything but one of his fellow Soldiers listed as a threat to him personally. Dagor was no surprise; a purebred Soldier of the Citadel's strain, likeable as his race counted such things. Charismatic, that was the word.
I wish they'd sent us machinery instead of men, he thought once more; but the Citadel had more men to spare. As the equipment from the Dol Guldur wore out, most of it was never replaced, and each Base hoarded what it had.
He had anticipated that Dagor might become a problem. What were those cursed nomads up to?
The Brigade Leader's eyes lit. Had he been a man who laughed, he would have chortled. Instead, he nodded in slow satisfaction. This was what the battle manuals called an elegant solution.
"Why you?" Badri demanded.
Dagor shrugged. "Because I am ordered." He went on checking his combat kit, methodical as a good Soldier ought to be. He was especially careful examining his ammunition; most of the pistol cartridges were reloads. He set aside a couple that did not satisfy him.
He was leaving his assault rifle behind, heading out as a man who could be anyone rather than a Soldier. Since many Haveners tried to kill Soldiers on sight, that might prove useful. It made him feel very vulnerable, but, he told himself, a lone raider ought to feel that way. And he was his own best weapon, always.
"You are too senior for a seek-and-destroy mission," Badri insisted. The two Haven years—fifteen T-years—that had passed since her first breeding had refined young-girl prettiness to a dangerous beauty. Black eyes sparked above a proud scimitar of a nose; her cheekbones seemed high and unconquerable as the cliffs that walled off Tallinn Valley.
The years had refined her wits, too, making her in all ways a fit companion for the Soldier who, folk whispered, would next wear Brigade Leader's leaves. Quietly, quietly, she fed those whispers.
Dagor shrugged again. "I know. But I am not senior enough to refuse." To rebel, he meant, and they both knew it. In that as in all things, timing was critical. If he moved against Azog now, he would fail; and Angband Base would continue its long decay into a mere feudal outpost with legends about its ancestry. "Once I return, though, with the added prestige of having ended a threat to the Base . . ."
" . . . when Azog has not gone into the field in a Haven year or more," Badri finished for him. It was not cowardice that kept the Brigade Leader at his desk, only good sense—combat stress killed more middle-aged Soldiers than any foe. And for a Soldier, Azog was downright elderly. Troopers noticed, though, and also noticed that Dagor was still of an age to lead from the front.
"Aye," he said. "Once I return, I think the time will have come at last to settle accounts with him."
"And with Grima." Badri's voice was flat, determined. Since the twins the Breedmaster had forced her to expose, she'd given Dagor two more sons, neither of whom Grima had dared condemn. Neither still lived. One had died in hand-to-hand combat training, the other from a fall.
The Breedmaster had had no part in their deaths. She blamed him for them anyway, for ruining her children's luck. And even were that nonsense, without him she would have had two children who lived.
Dagor had his own reasons for wanting Grima dead. "Aye, he's Azog's toady, sure enough. When I come back, I'll set the Base to rights. The risk to me, I'm certain, is less than Azog hopes."
"It had better be." Badri clasped him with almost Soldier's strength, kissed him fiercely. Reluctantly, he pulled away. "Duty," he said, reminding himself as much as her. Her genes were not as enhanced, he thought, but she was almost all Soldier just the same. The thought ran against indoctrination. He believed it even so.
Still, once he was out on the steppe, trotting north fast and tireless as a muskylope, he found himself eager to meet these nomads who had the presumption to menace Angband Base. Time to remind the barbarous cattle, it seemed, just what the cost of facing Soldiers was. He smiled, an expression that had as much to do with good humor as a tamerlane's reptilian grin. He would enjoy administering the lesson.
Juchi rode along, every now and then shouting from muskylope-back to keep the sheep going in the direction they were supposed to. He wondered which were stupider, sheep or muskylopes. It was one of the endless arguments that kept the clan amused through the long, cold second-cycle nights.
Flicker of motion, far off the steppe. Without his willing it, Juchi's eyes leaped the intervening distance. The flicker expanded into a man: a man wearing a shaggy sheepskin cape much like his own. Whoever the stranger was, though, he did not move like a nomad—he was far too self-assured on foot.
Juchi tilted up his fur hat so he could scratch his head. He glanced at the sheep. They were, for a wonder, going in the right direction. If they did start fouling up, Salur on the other side of the flock could deal with them for a while. Anyone alone and afoot on the steppe needed checking out.
Sometimes Juchi's extraordinary vision made him underestimate how far away things were. The muskylope's steady amble also helped deceive him. Not until he looked back at the flock did he realize he had ridden close to three kilometers.
He grew uneasily aware that he had only a knife at his belt; he could not afford a good saber, and there was no point in carrying a bow on muskylope-back, since you rode lying flat on your belly. He slowed his mount, thought about heading back to Salur, who could afford a horse and was carrying a bow. Pride forbade it. In any case, there was but one traveller, not carrying a bowcase or quiver; without a mount, he probably had no gun. Juchi rode on.
Dagor waited for the nomad to approach. His feet ached inside his boots. Just because he could run like a muskylope did not mean he enjoyed it. And here came a muskylope for him to ride. That the beast belonged to the young man lying on it never entered his mind.
The youth asked formally, "Who comes seeking the yurts of Dede Korkut?"
Dagor grinned: the very clan he'd been looking for! And here was a lovely way to start making life miserable for them. He produced his pistol, watched the cattle lad's eyes get round. "I require your muskylope. Kindly climb down."
"No," the youth said, as if not believing his ears.
Dagor gestured with the pistol. "Mind your tongue, boy, and I may decide to let you live. Now climb down!" He put some crack in his voice, as if dressing down one of his troopers.
As the youth descended, his hand went halfway to the hilt of his knife. Then he thought better of it and stood very stiff. "Thief," he whispered.
"Robber," Dagon corrected genially. He gestured with the pistol again, more sharply this time. "Now move away from that muskylope."
The nomad went red; he had, Dagor thought, more Caucasoid genes than most steppe-rovers. But he did not stand aside. "He's mine," he protested with the innocence of the young. "You can't just come and take him away from me."
"Can't I?" The Senior Assault Group Leader did all he could do not to burst out laughing. "How do you propose to stop me?"
The plainsboy surprised him by blurting, "I'll fight you for him."
"Why shouldn't I just shoot you and save myself the trouble?" As Dagor spoke, though, he lowered the pistol. Man to man, hand to hand—that was what Soldiers were bred for. Let this upstart cattle boy learn—briefly—who and what he faced. "Knives, or just hands?"
"Hands." The young man took the knife from his belt and tossed it in back of him. He fell into a crouch that said he knew something of what he was about.
Dagor shrugged off his cape, then his pack. He threw his pistol twenty meters behind him. If the nomad wanted it, he would have to go through Dagor to get it. The Soldier took off his own knife and, as he did, his foe jumped him.
He'd expected that. Indeed, he'd been ostentatiously slow disarming himself, to lure the nomad in. His foot lashed out to break the youth's knee. After that, he thought with grim enjoyment, he would finish him at leisure.
But the nomad's knee was not there. Dagor was almost too slow to skip aside from his rush, and still took a buffet that made his ear ring. He shook his head to clear it, stared in amazement at the plainsboy. "You're quick," he said with grudging respect. "Very quick."
"So are you," said the nomad, who sounded as disconcerted as Dagor.
They circled, each of them more wary now. Another flurry of arms and legs, a brief thrashing on the ground, and they broke free from each other once more. Dagor felt a dagger when he breathed—one of his foe's flailing feet must have cracked a rib. Blood ran from the steppe nomad's nose; a couple of fingers on his right hand stuck out at an unnatural angle, broken or dislocated.
Dagor willed his pain to unimportance. He had to be getting old, he thought, to let a puppy—and a puppy from the cattle, at that—lay a finger on him, let alone hurt him. Old? He had to be getting senile! All right, the fellow was fast and strong for an unaugmented man, but that was all he was, all he could be. Perhaps a few genes from a great-grandmother who entertained a passing Soldier, or a culled reject. It did not suffice.
No more play now, Dagor thought, and waded back into the fight.
Even when he lay on the ground with the nomad's arm like a steel bar at the back of his neck, he could not believe what had happened to him. "I will spare you if you yield," his opponent panted.
Instead, as any Soldier would, Dagor tried once more to twist free. That steel bar came down. He felt—he heard—his vertebrae crack apart, then felt nothing at all. "Badri," he whispered, and died.
"More kvass, my son?" Before Juchi could answer, Kisirja handed him the leather flask. He drank, belched with nomad politeness, drank again. The fermented mares' milk mounted to his head, helped blur the hurts he had taken in the fight with the outlaw. Not too much: Juchi already had a name for a hard head in his cups.
He belched again, touched the pistol on his belt. After endless searching, he'd found it and the ammunition the outlaw had carried for it. Better than either had been the awe on Salur's face when he brought his prizes back to the flock.
"Who was the bandit?" Kisirja asked, for about the tenth time. "Who could he have been?"
Juchi shrugged, as he had each time she'd asked. "By his gear, he could have been anyone. He was very fast and strong, stronger than anybody I've wrestled in the clan."
"Could he have been"—Kisirja felt a sudden spasm of fear, remembering what she had drilled herself never to think of: how Juchi had come to her, come to the clan—"a Sauron?"
He stared at her. "How could I hope to best a Sauron, my mother?" The tribes all had a little Sauron blood; how not, after three hundred years? In some it cropped out more than others, difficult to tell among normal variation. But an unaugmented man was still cattle to a full-bred Sauron warrior.
"It is a Sauron weapon—see, it has brass cartridges such as the Bases make—but those have been known to fall into human hands. No, I think he must have been a bandit of some son, perhaps exiled from the Bandari. They have Frystaat blood, many of them, which makes them fast and tough, but as I say, I can't be sure. I'll never be sure, just glad that I'm here."
"As am I, my son." A haBandari outlaw, Kisirja mused.
That was possible, maybe even probable. For the first time in years, she wondered what had become of the exposed Sauron babe the Bandari woman had taken when she found Juchi.
And, for the first time in even more years, she found herself feeling odd to hear Juchi call her "mother." No one in the clan had ever told him he was not theirs by birth. The nomads stole babes from Bases' exposure grounds now and again, aye, but they feared the Saurons too much to let those babes learn their heritage. The genes were valuable, and indeed cropped up naturally from time to time. Everything that went with them . . . Kisirja shivered.
Juchi hugged her, tight enough to make her bones creak. "Don't worry, my mother. There was but the one of him, and he is not coming back to rob honest men any more."
"Good." Kisirja smiled and did all the things she needed to do to reassure him. Even his embrace, though, somehow only made her own worries worse. That effortless, casual strength—she felt like a filebeak that had hatched a land gator's egg.
The land gator named Juchi was, for the moment, quite nicely tame. "I have to go now, my mother. The clan chief himself invited me to his yurt, to see the pistol and hear my story." He puffed out his chest and did his best to strut in the cramped confines of the yurt, then kissed Kisirja and hurried off to guest with Dede Korkut.
Kisirja should have been proud. She was proud, and all her forebodings, she told herself, were merely the fright of any mother at her son's brush with danger. After a while, she made herself believe it.
"He is not coming back," the Breedmaster said.
"How can you be sure?" Badri wanted to scream it at him. Ice rode her words instead. Ice was better for dealing with the likes of Grima. "He's only been gone twenty cycles." It was the truth: Dagor was too fine a soldier, and too much a Soldier, for her to imagine any mere human vanquishing him.
"I fear I can." The Breedmaster did not sound as though he feared it; he sounded glad. "And not only do I believe it, so does Brigade Leader Azog. He has ordered me to put your name on the reassignment list. You are not as young as you once were, but you have at least a Haven year's worth of fertility left to give to the Race, maybe close to two. You may yet bear many children, many Soldiers."
Badri fought panic, felt herself losing. She had seen this happen to other women at Angband Base, but had never thought it could be her fate. Dagor, dying in combat against cattle? As well imagine Byers' Sun going out. Without thinking, she looked up to see if the star still shone. It did, of course. But Dagor was gone.
"Children." She forced the word out through the lips that did not want to shape it. "Children by whom?"
Grima smiled. Badri wished he hadn't; the expression stretched his face in directions it was not meant to go. "By me," he said. "Our genetic compatibility index is very high." His eyes slowly travelled the length of her body, stripping her naked—no, worse, spread and exposed—under her gray tunic and trousers.
"No," she whispered.
"Why not?" That smile returned; suddenly Badri preferred it to the hungry expression it replaced. "I am Breedmaster, no mere trooper to despise. One day, who can say, I may rank higher yet. As my consort, you will be a person of consequence. If you refuse me, do you think another would risk my anger by choosing you?"
Numbly, Badri shook her head. The Breedmaster could do too much harm to a Soldier who opposed him. She thought again of her twins, more than half a lifetime gone now. How could she lie with the man who had ordered them set out for stobor? But even Dagor had accepted that, reluctantly, for the good of the Race. Now, though, Grima was as much as saying that he might twist birth analyses for his own purposes.
Through her confusion, his voice pursued her, tying off her future as inexorably as the noose of a hangman bush: "Shall I visit you after mainmeal, then?"
She felt the noose's spikes sink into her neck as she muttered, "Yes."
Much, much later, after Grima finally left the cubicle she had shared so long with Dagor, she lay alone on the bed, huddled and shivering. The Breedmaster had been worse even than she'd imagined, cruel, selfish, caring nothing about her save as a receptacle—several receptacles—for his lust, and, almost worst of all, with his Soldier's strength utterly tireless. Had he not had work to do, he might have been here with her yet.
He'd enjoyed himself, too, she thought furiously, no matter how still and unresponsive she lay. "We'll do this many more times," he'd promised as he was dressing.
"I'll kill him," she said into her pillow. But how? How could she, of mere human stock, kill an enhanced Soldier? Grima never relaxed, not even in the moments just after he spent. And if she tried and failed, he would only relish punishing her. The thought of giving him pleasure in any way made her want to retch.
Instead she washed herself, again and again and again, as if soap and hot water could scrub away the feel of his mouth chewing at her breast, his hands rough on her most secret places. "I'll kill him," she vowed. "One day, somehow, I will."
Doubtless he did not even remember leaving her twins out for the stobor. Badri did. She would never forget, even though she did not know if they had lived or died.
"Shulamit," Miriam bat Lizbet said, exhaustion and sadness in her voice. "Her name would have been Shulamit."
"It will be," her sister Dvora the Judge said, resting a hand on her shoulder and looking down at the tear-streaked face. "The medikos say you can try again in a couple of T-years. The name will keep. You're very young for this, anyway."
They were all sitting in a curtained alcove in Strang's small, scrubbed infirmary. Miriam and her Yohann—he was in soldier's leathers, in from a patrol sweep to the north. He had the classic haBandari build, square and muscular-stocky, with a thick braid of black hair; only his eyes were unusual, bright blue. They were misted too, as he sat holding her hand. This had been their first try for a child. Stillbirth was nothing unusual—not anywhere on Haven—but the pain was none the less for that.
"Yes," Miriam said, eyes drooping with sleep as she looked up at her elder sister; perhaps that explained her words. "You should marry again, Dvora," she whispered. "Have more of your own."
Dvora stiffened slightly. "Chaya is trouble enough," she said, forcing a smile into her voice. "Speaking of which, I should collect her. You sleep."
She bent down to kiss the younger woman's forehead, exchanged a quick hug with her brother-in-law. Then, as she was Judge, she had to stop briefly at the other bedsides, to congratulate and dandle. Each birth was a victory for the People, a victory as important as a battle won. Labor, even in the protection and relatively high air pressure of the valley, was long and exhausting. Even given the febrifuges and antibiotics that three T-centuries of ingenious Bandari kitchen chemists had devised from herbs and molds, childbirth on Haven was still a risky business. Usually it was a pleasant duty—happiness was contagious—but this time . . .
Emerging from Strang's infirmary into the cold of the first-cycle night, she tensed. Her hand, on which Lapidoth's ruby gleamed like a gout of blood, dropped to her beltknife. The streets hereabouts were narrow between blank adobe walls, built when the Eden Valley's capital had been called Strong-in-the-Lord rather than Strang; before van Reenan's band first came, in the days of the Wasting, just after the arrival of the Dol Guldur. Sound echoed far.
Children shouting; that was all. If her daughter Chaya were here, doubtless Chaya would put name to every voice and tell her exactly how each child was feeling. Dvora frowned. The Pale's children were not brought up to shout like windechaverim, like wild little animals, or to run heedlessly through crowded streets. And . . . there. A knot of young figures, dodging among a string of dromedaries loaded high with rugs, past a cart piled with sacks of rye, around a rabbi and his cluster of students—
Just as well that she saw them, rather than one of the Eden farmers with his stern ways and even sterner belt. I almost died, Dvora thought, as she did every time she visited the newborn. When she miscarried on the steppe, only her native toughness and pure Litvak stubbornness (a phrase her father had often used to describe her mother) had pulled her through.
Dizziness . . . heat pouring down her thighs . . . her body cooling even as she bucked and spasmed to expel what had already died . . . Lapidoth holding her hand, weeping over it as he drew her back from a too-easy death . . . her hand shook, pulsing, the bloodlight in the ruby dancing . . . so cold by the small fire that was all they dared kindle . . . the torturous ride tied to a muskylope, as her strength returned . . . . and then the thin wails of cold and hunger . . . weakening even as she neared them . . . .
She had spent months in Tallinn Town, recovering and hiding from the woman-hungry Saurons, until she healed enough to join a merchant train back to the valley where medikos of her own kind—not the tribal midwives whose skill and cleanliness she profoundly distrusted—observed her, tested her and warned her a second pregnancy would bring risk.
She was almost relieved: if she dared not conceive, she need not remarry, need not risk loss such as Lapidoth's death had caused her. By then, too, she had had her work: the laborious and successful preparation of the case against Botha, followed by the Judgeship that had been her husband's.
Dvora shuddered, remembering Botha's eyes, and the weight of the rock in her hand. He had been a strong man, and an unpopular one—the circle of neighbors had carefully avoided throwing at his head, and he had stayed alive and conscious until he was almost covered in stones.
Then the Pale and Dede Korkut's men had ridden out against the bandit Mustafa, the first time that the two communities had worked together. Lapidoth would have been proud to see that. Now she rode circuit as Judge, well-guarded. That was going well . . . and the young kapetein, Mordekai bar Pretorius, called on her for advice more and more often. Sometimes he even took it, too. It was by Dvora's suggestion that a team of Sayerets—the Scouts—now waited in various disguises, as merchants, pilgrims, even travelling holy men, by the culling grounds of the Sauron Bases within reach of the Pale. What had been done occasionally by merchant caravans passing a Base was now done by system, on a much larger scale—secretly, of course.
The running feet pounded closer and then into sight. She recognized some of her daughter's classmates.
"Is it the swordsmith?" she asked, stepping forward into their path. Young Heber bar Non was back in the Pale, looking for a wife, it was rumored, although he was young for that. He had wandered over half of Haven—as far as the Shangri-La—and then succeeded his father in running the forge in Tallinn Town, northwest of Eden. Well enough, Dvora had thought at the time. A match between the swordsmith and a girl of Eden Valley might be good for trade, unless it drew the Lidless Eye of Angband Base down upon him.
"Or perhaps you sklems are running around yelling to announce a Sauron raid?"
At the sight of their valley's Judge, the children jolted to a whispering halt. "Here she comes! Here comes the Judge!" She had sat in judgment over too many of these children's parents not to know what the guilty huddle, the downcast eyes and thinned mouths meant.
"Sauron . . . Sauron . . . how'd she know?" came the whispers, as she stood there, ostentatiously tapping her foot.
"Laila tov, Judge," came the voice of her friend Barak's son.
"Using Ivrit to get round me, are you, Avi?" she asked. Her breath wreathed about her like a pale cloud in the night air. "How are you going to get round your teachers if you come in late and have time enough just to do your chores, not your schoolwork?" That finished Avi. What about the others? "Well, are you going to explain so we can all go home, or do we stand in the cold all night?" she demanded, waiting with her arms crossed. "And speaking of home, where's my daughter?"
A few of the children—youngsters in their teens, really—looked like Edenites. They were adults by the standards of their people, who seldom kept children in school long; the thronging chores of fields, barns and dairy were more important, among the farmer folk.
Gayamske koff, she muttered inwardly in Bandarit: heads like savages. Even after three hundred T-years of coexistence, haBandari and the original settlers of Eden still had their differences; and, wouldn't you just know it, child-rearing—the most vital and precarious thing on this whole iceball!—was chief among them.
Muttering and hissing rose from the boys and girls who faced her. Most were near or a little past Eden Valley adulthood of two Haven years, bar or bat mitzvah age. Her own daughter had gone through the mikveh, the ritual bath that only the very strictest of haBandari knew how to conduct, besides the usual coming-of-age ceremony. There had been need, need to establish clearly that Chaya was hers, Bandari and Ivrit, but . . . she shook that thought from her mind. Thirteen or fourteen was the age at which young men and women could own land, sign contracts, bear arms and marry. And yet they were children to her, and they looked younger each year.
"Well? Do you want to tell me why you're all making more noise than a cliff lion battling for his mate?"
Avi, who sported a fine black eye, looked resigned, opened his mouth, then shut it, clearly reluctant to betray a classmate.
Dvora shivered and sighed. "Someone tell me what's going on before I call your parents!" she snapped. The huddle tightened, then divided, leaving two of the strangers standing before her. Their heavy clothes were wrinkled and torn, and dried blood still crusted the mouth and nose of the boy who stood between her and the girl, clearly his sister. He tried to stick out chest and jaw, and quailed as Dvora glared at him.
"I'm Joseph-Beloved-of-God," he said, "and this is my sister, Hagar. We came in for the day. And my father says . . ."
"Tell her!" cried another girl. "Tell the Judge that you tried to boss her daughter, and when Chaya ignored you, you called her a 'breed' and said she should have been thrown out at birth like a Sauron cull!"
The boy paled beneath the grime and blood, and Hagar's eyes widened, her mouth opening in dismay.
Her daughter. Dvora shut her eyes in pain that racked her heart as badly as the pains of her miscarriage, so many years ago. Adults still called her Lapidoth's child . . . but no hiding the Sauron blood, not when it ran so strong. Chaya had it in overflowing measure. She was also the Judge's daughter, under every eye. And hence . . . .
The shoemaker's child goes barefoot, thought Dvora, the baker's child has no bread, and the Judge's daughter has the story of her birth thrown at her by strangers.
"That's prejudice." Dvora made herself shake her head. Highly dangerous prejudice, she thought Especially now that part-Saurons were becoming numerous, with the new policy.
Useless to punish the children, who doubtless repeated what they heard at home. "Chaya is my daughter and your neighbor." She drew on her memories of Bible quizzes throughout the years of her schooling. "For ye were strangers in the land of Egypt—" she intoned impressively. "Who of us isn't a stranger here?" she demanded. "Who of us can avoid working together if we are not all to starve, freeze or fall to bandits or Saurons?
"Think about it!" Her voice took on the resonant, lecturing tones that, she had learned, gave her verdicts the greatest weight. "For this, Ruth bat Boaz hung from the cross and was lifted down by Piet van Reenan? For this, a gentle girl had turned general and rebel? So two young fools on their first visit to town could overturn three hundred T-years of work?"
What did you expect? One lifetime isn't enough—even if it's yours. Or your husband's. Memories of Lapidoth, thoughts of how angry this would make him, made her frown even more deeply.
As often as not, the Edenites still used Bible names—when they weren't burdening children with something like Sword-of-the-Lord or Fly-from-Fornication. The Bandari shared the old scriptures with them. Apart from that, very little—including the ways of men and women, and whether children should follow unquestioning in their father's or mother's steps, to plow and spade or loom and kitchen. Joined by force, they were not one people, not wholly—any more than the nomad women forced to wed with the Saurons were one with their appalling mates.
She waited, holding this Joseph's eyes, outglaring the Cat's Eye with her own anger, her own fear, until his eyes fell.
"And you, Hagar, do you know the story of your own name? I'd suggest you go home and read about it. And both of you, keep silent, if you cannot speak decently. Whether the girl you insulted was my own child or not, your childishness weakens the valley just as surely as if you sowed a field with salt. Now, get out of here, all of you! I shall talk to you and your father later."
And she would, too. If that kind of bigotry was springing up in the outlying settlements, she would have to. The black eye and bloody nose that I saw will be nothing. They'll use guns and knives next, and we'll have riots, pogroms, civil war. And if we don't finish each other off, the bandits will.
Hagar and Joseph fled, Hagar's sobs loud in the night air. Let them worry for a bit about offending the Judge; punishment enough, when she rode out to their farm. After she found out where it was. Among the million or so other things that she would have to do. First, though, to find her daughter. The other children dispersed more slowly.
"I think Chaya hid in the bunker." Avi's words floated behind him like a message from the p'rknz, the spirits.
The stablehand looked a little startled when Dvora slid a bow into the case on her saddle and rode out into truenight, bundled to the ears. He said nothing, nor did the officer at the gate in Strang's city wall; if the Judge chose to ride out, that was her business. It was five or six hours' journey up into the Bashan Pass, rising all the time. The soft yellow lights of the city fell away behind her, hidden by the folds of the foothills below the Shield range; the scattering of farmhouse lanterns thinned away as well. She passed a pair of riders on patrol; one dipped his lance as he recognized her. Then she was alone with her thoughts and the hollow tock of hooves on the graveled road.
The bunker had been built when the Elder of Strong-in-the-Lord still ruled Eden Valley. Three hundred T-years ago the exiles from Frystaat and the New Vilnius refugees who had made up the proto-Bandari took this valley, and the bunker had been captured without the loss of a single man on either side. The site of a victory that neither group wanted to talk about, it had fallen into ruins. The modern forts were better sited, kilometers farther up.
A cliff lioness could have made her lair here, birthed cubs for all Dvora knew. Or some outcast, more clever and more desperate than most, could have risked the Bandari guards to hole up there, waiting his chance to steal women, drugs or weapons. It wasn't safe for a child or a young woman to wander about distressed, unaccompanied, and unarmed, though Dvora knew that whatever else her daughter was, she was never without protection. Dvora loose-tied her horse to a snag of rock—it would be able to pull away if stobor or cliff lions came—and took the faint ancient pathway.
The climb to the old bunker left Dvora panting, sweating under her sheepskins despite the cold of the night. She set her feet carefully, testing her footing. A pebble landed in her path.
"You might have warned me what some of the outbackers would say." Chaya's voice floated over her head, accusing and too collected for a girl's.
"Told you what?" Dvora said, guilt sharpening her voice. "That there's always a serpent in Eden? In this Eden, it's fools and bigots. That's life, daughter, and you'd better face it. And face me, too, while you're at it."
Most would have made a noisy, scrabbling production of climbing down from the fragment of roof that jutted out above Dvora. Chaya managed it in a quick, smooth dismount, her sheepskin jacket flaring open about her. As always, Dvora noted how well suited her daughter was to the stark Haven environment. Sturdy and strong, she carried no extra weight beyond what would keep her warm. She breathed easily in the thin air, but did not display the barrel-chested, hyperdeveloped rib cage of high-altitude dwellers. As the Cat's Eye flashed, she glanced aside. Moisture flickered briefly in her eyes, then dried; her high cheekbones bore no traces of tears.
Conservation of body fluids, Dvora thought, and wondered once again why the Saurons had chosen to discard her daughter. On a planet full of enemies, Saurons were the enemy; but like the People, they needed what girl children they might have. Why discard a girl? Saurons culled for undesirable traits; yet Chaya seemed healthy in every way.
"You didn't fight," Dvora stated, rather than asked.
"They're still walking, aren't they? I wish you'd let me join the Sayerets," Chaya said. She patted a beltknife in a tooled leather sheath. Both looked new, yet familiar. "I'm quiet, fast, strong; no one would see me. Doesn't matter, does it, if a half-breed monster keeps you safe so long as you don't have to look at her?"
So that was why she had fought the idea of training to be a Judge! She feared that defendant and plaintiff alike had already condemned her as an outsider. Judge then, Judge. The case of Chaya bat Dvora versus Eden Valley. Dare I make such a case, even for my own child?
"And Barak says . . ." Chaya went on, beginning to quote the commander of the Sayerets.
"Barak talks too much!" Dvora snapped. "All right, so you'd make a fine Sayeret. But I had to make that rule, and I can't make an exception of it. Stop trying to make me feel guilty." Women were to be barred from the Sayerets until they had children—in which case, they would probably not want to enlist in a unit under arms most of the time, unlike their clan reserve regiments. She reached out to her daughter, but the girl stepped back.
"Tell me again," said Chaya. "I know, I grew up knowing that I'm at least half Sauron. But tell me again."
"This is no place for it," Dvora replied. "Anything could come, a tamerlane, a bandit." A Sauron, she had almost said, but stopped in time. "Or someone with a complaint I don't know which would be worse, right now!" That forced a shaky laugh from Chaya.
"Let's go. We'll go back to the house; I'll make a cup of tea; you'll have something to eat; then we'll talk. All right?"
Sauron Chaya might be, but she was also a child, glad to have someone to comfort her. For as long as I can, daughter. And I don't have to be a prophet to know that that won't be much longer. She remembered where she had seen toolwork like that on Chaya's beltknife: Heber's work. She had dreamed of training up her daughter to be Judge after her, but the heart had its own logic.
The eggbush tea was strong and sweet in the large, crude mugs that Chaya had made years ago in school. The firelight was dimming, and the lamps had burned down almost to extinction. Chaya liked the dimness; she could see well enough in trueday light, but a fraction of that was most comfortable for her. No need to say why.
Perhaps the nomads had the right of it; Lapidoth had once told Dvora they never revealed the ancestry of a child from the culling ground for fear of Sauron vengeance. Bandari were used to free speech, and to using their eyes and minds, as well. At least most people didn't mention it, in public.
Was this marriage with Heber her daughter's way of punishing for her refusal to admit women to the Sayerets? You could be anything else, she had cried once. Only don't leave me! And was that fair? Was that just?
Here is another case for you, Dvora. She could hear Lapidoth's voice, quizzing her as he had in the days when he was the Judge and she a student. Two people come before you, a parent and child. The child is offered a chance to make a new, rich life; the parent has attempted to restrain the child. What will you decide?
Put that way, there was no case at all, except between her desires and her conscience. She had spent a lifetime making conscience the victor; and she would not give up now.
The girl doesn't know how to tell you. She needs your help.
Faced with that familiar, beloved need, Dvora suddenly knew how to begin.
Chaya moved slightly, the dusky light gleaming off the bone and metal hilt of that fine new knife.
"Nice beltknife," Dvora said. "What did you pay for it?"
"Heber gave it to me," Chaya replied, her olive coloring suddenly more vivid. "He said he'd come by tonight." Her pupils grew enormous, despite what was, for her, the relative brightness of the house.
To be wife to a swordsmith in Tallinn Town? To scuttle from the menfolk who came to guest, and to efface herself? That was no life for her Chaya. And besides, was Heber even Ivrit anymore, even Bandari?
"To ask for you? I assume you want me to give my consent." A girl was formally marriageable after her bat mitzvah, although a parent's consent was needed until the eighteenth T-year "What else do you want me to say?"
"It's not what you think," Chaya muttered. "I'll travel with him, learn to forge swords myself . . . wear a mask against the glare. And I'll be . . ."
Free of this place. Not for the first time, Dvora could cheerfully have cursed Barak and the other Sayerets, that young maniac Hammer-of-God he'd picked up—the one who not only killed raiders but sneaked into their yurts and left the heads for sleeping kinfolk to find—all the tough warriors whose honor was expressed in edged steel. There were other ways, other honors, as Chaya must learn in Tallinn, if she did not learn it here in the Pale. And it could be worse. If she ran away and joined up as a caravan guard, she could end up a continent away, not three weeks' ride.
"Look at me, girl," Dvora said in her Judge-voice. "You asked for the story of your birth."
That had been a while ago, when she noticed that she was stronger than the other children, including the boys. She had thought it was Frystaat blood—the inheritance of the Founder's people, who were high-G adapted. That was the common assumption when a child showed abilities far beyond the norm, although after all these centuries the genes for such abilities came as much from fostered Sauron culls as the Founder.
With Chaya, no such pretense was possible. The memory of her face when she learned her strength was instead the legacy of the People's worst enemies was a bitter one.
"Do you want to hear it again with him, or do you want to tell him?"
Whatever else her daughter was, she was no coward. That was not surprising. Neither were her parents, whichever set. Chaya raised her head, her eyes flaring like the Cat's Eye that had long sunk into second-cycle night. "I'll do it. Tell me again, so I can make it live for him."