Conquerors' Heritage

The Humans had moved to either side of the table, speaking quietly to each other as they laid out a neat row of surgical instruments. All right, Prr't-zevisti told himself. Maybe he couldn't fight like a traditional warrior. But he was in the middle of enemy territory, with the enemy apparently unaware that he was still there. That had to be good for something.

All he had to do was figure out what it was. And in the meantime he would set himself to becoming better acquainted with the Humans' language.

Moving to a spot beside the room's ceiling light source, Prr't-zevisti came up as close to the lightworld as he dared. He'd had a short but intense briefing on the Human language by the Elders from the Base World 12 group before the expeditionary force had hit Dorcas, plus a fifteen-fullarc course in the Etsijian language way back before he'd landed with the expeditionary forces in that war. Minimal fluency, equally minimal linguistic expertise, but he'd once been fairly good with languages. At least it gave him somewhere to start.

One of the Humans reached a hand to a small black box on one corner of the rolling table. "Doctor-Cavan-a," it said, its voice echoing faintly from the walls. "(Something) fifteenth, twenty-three-oh-three. Assist (something) by (something) (something). Prepare (something) for second (something) on (something) (something)."

Doctor-Cavan-a. A startlingly Zhirrzh-type name, even down to the -a female suffix. Coincidence? Undoubtedly. Still, it gave Prr't-zevisti his first solid verbal anchor to these aliens. And, paradoxically perhaps, it somehow made him feel not quite so lost and alone here. Maybe these aliens could be understood, after all.

6

Still, the Overclan Prime had seemed inclined to listen to the Speaker's argument; and it was to Thrr-gilag's surprise, therefore, when he reversed himself at the last beat, stipulating only that Thrr-gilag be back at the complex at least a fullarc before the expedition was scheduled to leave.

Five hundred cyclics ago, when the Overclan Seating was first established, the trek from Unity City to the Kee'rr clan's ancestral territory would have been a serious and difficult journey. Two major mountain ranges lay between them, as well as the ancestral territories of forty to fifty other clans. Clans whose suspicion toward outsiders had always been high, who with the carnage and devastation of the Third Eldership War fresh in their minds would have been even less hospitable toward strangers than usual. The last thing any of them would have believed was that a time of peace was even possible, let alone near at hand.

But it had happened. They'd pulled it together, all of them: the clan and family leaders first, the common Zhirrzh afterward. The Third Eldership War had been Oaccanv's last, and within two hundred cyclics even minor border skirmishes had all but disappeared. It had taken a special breed of Zhirrzh, Thrr-gilag had always believed, to have created such a future from the ashes of war. A unique group of visionaries, drawn together by destiny and necessity alike, who had risen above the traditional patterns of the past and found a way to bring the rest of the Zhirrzh race along with them.

Gazing out the window of the suborbital transport, Thrr-gilag stared at the lush green landscape beneath them. And wondered if, even with those same visionaries available to advise them, any Zhirrzh leaders since that time would have been able to pull off such a miracle.

The transport put down at the landing field outside Citadel, once the main stronghold city of the Kee'rr and still the clan's political and cultural center. The Thrr-family territory and shrine were three hundred thoustrides farther on, perched on the edge of a line of hills between two small branches of the Amt'bri River. A supply transport was getting ready to leave Citadel for the region; with a little fancy wordwork and judicious waving of his Overclan-complex pass, Thrr-gilag was able to talk himself aboard. Ten hunbeats later they were in the air.

"Heading home, eh?" the pilot commented as he brought the transport to its cruising altitude and leveled off. He was a middle-aged Zhirrzh, with age wrinkles around his eyes and an interesting crack-scar on his mouth. His tunic threads placed him as a member of the Hgg, the same family the current Speaker for Kee'rr belonged to. "Getting out of the fast pace for a little while, eh?

"A very little while," Thrr-gilag told him. "I have to be back in Unity City in a few fullarcs."

"Ah," the pilot said, throwing him a speculative look. "I hear the Overclan Seating's going crazy back there over this Human-Conqueror thing. You involved with any of that?"

"The whole Zhirrzh race is involved with it," Thrr-gilag said, marveling yet again at the sheer speed of the Elder information network. Less than a single fullarc since the Overclan Prime had coined the term Human-Conqueror, and here was a pilot on a minor supply run four thousand thoustrides away already using it.

"Involved right up to our tonguetips, from what I've heard," the pilot agreed darkly. "My grandfather was telling me about it last fullarc. Vicious warriors, nasty weapons, plus lots of Elderdeath stuff they're not shy about using. You know anything about that?"

"I've heard some of those same rumors," Thrr-gilag said evasively, wishing he knew exactly how much information the Overclan Seating had officially released to the general public. The last thing he wanted to do was toss more rumors into the general mix, especially considering the trouble he was already in. "Was your grandfather with one of the survey ships?"

"No, but he got it pretty straight," the pilot said. "One of his old co-workers has a friend who'd talked directly to the first cousin of an old warrior friend of one of the Elders on the mission."

"Sounds pretty straight, all right," Thrr-gilag conceded. If the Elders were talking, it was all over the eighteen worlds by now, official release or not. "I wouldn't panic just yet, though. We've got some pretty good weaponry, too, you know."

"I suppose," the pilot said. "I just hope we haven't sliced off more than we can eat here. This isn't just three planets' worth of Chig this time, you know."

"The war wasn't exactly our idea," Thrr-gilag reminded him, a twinge of almost-guilt tugging at him. Pheylan Cavanagh's insistence that the Humans hadn't started it... "Don't forget, they fired first."

"Yeah, that's what they say," the pilot said doubtfully. "Course, they might say that anyway."

"I suppose that's possible," Thrr-gilag murmured, turning to look out the window and putting his own doubts resolutely out of his mind. In a couple of tentharcs, with a little good luck, he'd know the truth about that battle.

The Kee'rr clan's ancestral territory extended across most of the fertile Kee'miss'lo River valley, from the river delta nearly to its source in the Phmm'taa Marshes. With few if any natural barriers to protect their land against outside aggression, the Kee'rr clan had been forced by necessity to become the dominant military power in the region. Political power had inevitably followed, bringing the Kee'rr up against neighboring clans in the ever-shifting patterns of alliance and betrayal and conflict that had formed the backdrop to much of Zhirrzh history. The political clashes had necessitated still more military might, which had created more political clashes, and so on.

Most of the clan and family leaders from that age had perished when their fsss organs had been destroyed in the Second and Third Eldership Wars. Thrr-gilag had often wondered what they would have thought of the changes their successors had created.

He smiled sourly to himself, thinking back to the passengers on that suborbital transport. Members of fifty different clans, traveling freely and without restriction to and from Kee'rr territory. No, the old clan leaders wouldn't have liked this new Oaccanv at all. They probably would have reacted rather violently to the whole idea, in fact.