"About five minutes now."
The pilot's words woke me, and I raised my seat-back. It had been nearly night when I'd fallen asleep, right after we'd lifted from Momiji Tani-gawa, most of an hour earlier. I'd been dreaming that Lemmi and I were drilling Dakotah verbs and idioms, a kind of dream that happens after deep-learning a language.
Seen through the cabin windows, forest stretched black beneath us, interrupted by farm settlements, their fields and pastures side-lit by a crescent moon. Across the aisle, Lemmi was looking out his window. Tahmm and the pilot sat up front, identifiable by their white hair. Fur. Carlos and Peng had taken seats toward the back.
Five minutes.
I remembered the map. Tahmm had routed us via Mizzoo, to drop off another new master at the Momiji Tani-gawa brother house, so it would be Ilanoy we were flying over. Northern Ilanoy, where Jamila had come from. Lemmi was probably looking out at the Misasip, and at Iwa on its west bank. It would be high spring down there. Back in the Sangre de Cristo, that noon, the snow had still been deep, in the spruce forest and above timberline. But at Momiji Tani-gawa they'd already put up the first cutting of hay. I hadn't actually seen it—it had been deep dusk—but there was no mistaking the smell.
Below us the clearings slowed, nearly stopped, and I felt us dropping. I could make out a large building a short way off, dark with shadow, and growing. The brother house. We were settling toward a field, or more likely a pasture, with a lane on one side bordered by hedge-apple trees. Closer by, real trees were reaching upward, their tops climbing past us, exciting my stomach. This was the beginning of a new life.
We slowed, stopped. The windows were still on one-way transparent, but when the cabin lit up, it was faintly. We didn't want light shining out the door when it opened. Tahmm stood up. "Time to unload," he said, then walked down the aisle, passing me. Grinning, Lemmi got to his feet and I followed him aft. We four new graduates—Lemmi and I, and Carlos and Peng—picked up our baggage and carried it down the ramp.
The scout floated inches above the ground. We were in the shadow of the woods. It was chilly enough, the mosquitoes were lying low; I didn't even hear tree-toads. It smelled like high spring—new foliage, the damp mull of last year's fallen leaves and, faintly, cow manure. Toward the middle of the pasture, cows and calves stood watching.
A man on horseback approached, leading a string of saddle and pack horses. He'd been waiting in the hedge shadow, by the lane. He didn't call to us, and when he arrived spoke quietly. "I'm Brother Krikor, the majordomo here. If you'll load your gear, Fedor and Freddy are waiting."
After lashing our baggage on the pack saddles, we mounted, and rode toward the lane with its fifteen-foot hedge. The chance of any local having seen the scout was as good as zero. As we approached the hedge's narrow gap, I looked back. The scout was already gone. Standard security procedure. He'd probably go up ten or twelve miles, park on a gravitic vector, and catch up on his sleep and reading, then pick Tahmm up after dark tomorrow.
I remembered another country lane, in a beaver meadow in Adirondack, when the first scout I'd ever seen, barring the lizard scout, had loaded Lemmi and Jamila and me in the dark, and changed all our lives. But that was then. This night didn't feel anything like that.
The Moleen brother house was bigger than the one I'd done my brother training at, back in Mizzoo. Brother Krikor opened the heavy oak door and led us through a vestibule to a sitting room. "Your guests, Master Fedor," he announced, then left. He was in the know about floaters, but probably not about magisterial mission ops. A pair of lamps gave off light and the smell of fragrant oil. Two of the waiting men wore master's sashes; I could guess their names. The third, well-fed and graying, wore a bishop's habit.
It was Tahmm who introduced us; he was senior to us all. "Fedor, Freddy, Bishop Foley, I'd like you to meet my new magisterial missioners: Master Luis Raoul DenUyl and Master Lemmi Tsinnajinni." He gestured. "And teaching masters Carlos del Passo and Ho Peng, who will establish a brother house and school near Hasty, and provide ops support for Luis and Lemmi." He turned his attention to us four new graduates. "You know something of Fedor and Freddy," he said.
We knew one thing certainly: it was they who'd broken with tradition and trained Jamila as the first female brother. Their Moleen brother house was the most prominent in the Archdiocese of the Central Misasip Valley, with three resident masters training novices and brothers. The Order was expanding everywhere, since the "need-to-know limitations" had run out, and the chaos cults had learned about Terra.
"And this is Bishop William Foley," Tahmm was saying. Normally a bishop wouldn't have known about Lemmi and me, and surely not about Tahmm, so this was no ordinary bishop. "Besides being bishop of the Moleen Diocese," Tahmm went on, "Bishop Foley is in charge of the Ecclesiastical Network from Sanlooee north to the wilderness. He knows a lot about the Kingdoms of Sota, Skonsin, Iwa and North Ilanoy, and what goes on there."
The Ecclesiastical Network, the "EN," is the Church's basic hierarchical layer: the parishes and their priests. All centered on their dioceses and bishops, in the next layer up. The bishops in turn are centered on the archdioceses and their archbishops, which in turn are centered on the Holy See in Norlins, with its ecclesiastical bureaucracy centered on the Holy Father. The general structure had existed long before Armageddon, though with differences, but only after Archbishop Kuczinski had been raised to cardinal had it become the Ecclesiastical Network—big E, big N—Norlins' intelligence network. Call it quality control. We'd learned that in Church 101.
As a junior parish priest, Kuczinski had been one of the first clerics selected to the Academy. Earlier, only Higuchean brothers had been selected. After returning from the Academy, he'd had been elevated rapidly—to bishop, Archbishop of Chesapeake, and then to Norlins as assistant to Cardinal Bau, in the Sacred Congregation for the Defense of the Church. As Bau's chief of staff, Kuczinski had his finger on the ecclesiastical pulse of North Merika.
I glanced at Lemmi, catching his eye. Foley was another Academy grad; had to be.
It was Fedor who spoke next. "Bill," he said to Foley, "tell our guests what you've learned about the Helverti."
The bishop spoke seated. "To start with," he said, "they're Fohanni. Tahmm's world-kin."
Tahmm smiled ruefully. Foley continued: "They're from a different culture than the Kelgorath sado-hedonists you dealt with in the People's Democratic Republic. They're here illegally, and they're in illegal contact with—" he paused, grinning "—with the indigenous sophonts. The likes of you and me. Beyond that, not even UncleArvind knows anything about them." Uncle Arvind is the nickname for the artificial intelligence at the Academy. "The little we know is from informants.
"Consider their name: Helverti. That's what they call themselves. You all recognize helvert as a Xiox adjective meaning 'excellent.' Attach the suffix and you get the derivative noun Helverti. But Arvind doesn't list it as a proper noun, which means it's either secret, or has very limited use.
"Still, to me, when first I heard it, the name Helverti didn't imply anything negative. I'm proficient but not fluent in Xiox. And not surprisingly, when you think about it, each Xiox-speaking world has its own usages, rooted in the specific life form and planetary culture, and influenced by the indigenous language, even when effectively extinct. Often this results in a distinctive dialect of Xiox. And Tahmm assures me that on r'Fohann, where the indigenous language is tonal, the word helverti, given a certain tonality, means 'scoundrel.' In the literal sense.
"We don't know how the Helverti pronounce it, but Tahmm is confident they selected it for its double meaning. Which suggests an attitude: they take pride in their criminality.
"Our informants are two traveling ironmongers who trade with the buffalo tribes, dealing in pots and pans, arrowheads and axes, glass beads, silver and copper for making wire and ornaments . . . that sort of thing.
"The buffalo people travel a lot, following the buffalo, which often takes them across tribal boundaries. And the tribes tend to be territorial, so sometimes they clash. To some, a territorial boundary is a temptation and a challenge, rather than an exclusion. Mostly their clashes aren't very bloody—skirmishes and an occasional punitive raid—but they can be more. And more, the Dkota occasionally prey on farm settlements in the marches, the border zone with the Kingdom of Sota. But until the last ten years or so, their raids were infrequent and on a small scale. Then the Dkota elected a new war chief, Mazeppa Tall Man, a leader of exceptional charisma, especially for young warriors. Sometime during the next few years he became principal chief. Principal chiefs are generally older men, less interested in fighting, but Mazeppa is neither old nor peaceful. Under his leadership, the Dkota raided deeper than ever into Sota, with more warriors than ever, and more killing and burning.
"Three years ago, Mazeppa made a peace treaty with the King of Sota, actually signed his name to it, and smoked the peace pipe. Then promptly turned his attention to his neighbors on the west, another buffalo tribe calling itself the Ulsters. Beat them soundly in what for the tribes was a large-scale battle. Afterward he praised the Ulster warriors for their bravery and skill."
"Wait a minute," I said. "Signed his name? We were told the Dkota are illiterate."
"Mostly they are, Luis. But Mazeppa's senior wife is said to be Sotan, a nun taken captive on a raid. The story is, she taught him, whether simply to sign his name or to actually write, my informant didn't know."
"So he defeated the Ulsters," Lemmi said, "and softened the blow with praises. Then what?"
"He arranged a lot of marriages between the tribes, took Ulster boys into Dkota tipis and sent Dkota boys to Ulster tipis, to live with foster families. All with big ceremonies, while proclaiming the two tribes to be part of a new and larger one."
I wondered what the exchanged boys thought of that. Novices at a brother school can be as young as thirteen, and generally like it fine, but they're there because they want to be.
"We know of no buffalo tribe ever doing such a thing before," Foley went on, "and the elders of the other northern tribes—the Yellow Bears and Wolves—are said to have agreed to stand together if the enlarged Dkota tribe harasses them. The assumption among Mazeppa's own people seems to be that he'd annexed the Ulsters to build Dkota strength. Might he have signed the treaty with the Sotans to lull them into carelessness? It seems well to operate on that assumption."
"What do the Sotans think of all this?" I asked.
The bishop grunted. "It depends on what Sotan you're talking about. I'm not sure the Sotans even know the Ulsters and Dkota have joined ranks, though they may have heard of the battle. But they differ bitterly on trusting Mazeppa. King Eldred, along with Archbishop Clonarty of the Upper Misasip Archdiocese, believe absolutely in Mazeppa's honesty. Or claim to. They insist he'd had a religious epiphany, and that the treaty grew out of it. But most of the nobles consider Mazeppa a liar, and the king a gullible fool."
"Hmm. Any prospect of an uprising against the king?"
"There's a Williamite parish a few miles northwest of Hasty," he answered. "Pastor Linkon there has numerous contacts, in Hasty and elsewhere in Sota. He follows its government and politics closely. I have other sources there, but Linkon's the man I rely on most. When you get there, look him up."
That led to an hour of discussion that left things hanging. Afterward I spent forty minutes meditating before going to bed, and seven hours sorting things out in dreams. At least that's what seemed to be going on.