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We’re ru
They’ll lend me a spear to use. Dain showed me how to hold it. I’m supposed to ride–one of the free Calibans the Weirds have come up with on this side of the river, the kind that don’t let themselves belong to anyone. I’ve seen it; we’ve looked each other in the eye. It’s not particularly big. I patterned to it and it nosed my pattern but it wouldn’t give me anything back. This is not a friendly one. But it’s born to the Cloud River pattern, Dain says; and so I trust it doesn’t hate me in particular, just the idea of being beast of burden.
That’s a human thought. And then I remember that I’m sitting in a house they made, in a land they own. I’m sitting in a word of the Statement they’ve made about Cloud River, one of the folk who write in squares and angles, no less; and it’s going to go where it pleases while I’m on its back, because I can’t stop it; I can’t defend it either, not with that spear. And it knows.
xlviii
205 CR, day 97
Upper Cloud
They rested, the sun lost among the trees, and cooked what they had of supper at the hunters’ fires, mealcakes and boiled dried meat, and a bit of starchy root that grew wild. “I’m going off that stuff,” Ma
“Come on,” Genley said, “you’ve got to eat, man.”
“It’s the water,” Kim said. “Told you. Man’s been here long enough, letting sewage in the rivers, on the land. Ma
“Shut up,” Ma
“Weak,” a hunter said, and nudged him with his elbow. This was Hes, who had had Ma
Ma
“Huh,” Genley said. That was nothing unusual, not the last two days. He ate his meal, watched the hunters about the fire. It was a man’s community, this. All hunters. Jin’s own, scattered wide in many camps along the streamside.
How many? he had asked of Jin. Jin had shrugged, but he had added it himself, from the number that he could see, that it was a great number: thousands upon thousands. The station would have seen them move; the station would spot the fires tonight and count them; the station could sense their presence virtually everywhere. But it would do nothing. This barbarian lord, this Caesar on the Styx, had gambled–no, not gambled: had calculated what he could do. Would take the world while the Base and the station watched. Would deal with Base and station then, himself, literal master of the world.
Poor McGee, Genley thought. Poor bastards. He made a dry grimace, swallowed down the brew. It had gone sour in the skins, taken on flavors somewhere between old leather and corruption, but it was safe. Kim was right. Boil the water. Drink from skins. Man had loosed his plagues in Gehe
Now the weak went under, that was all.
“Ma
“He’s all right,” Genley said, and stood up. Suspicion. They were still the strangers. He pointed, waved at Kim. “Get him–get him before there’s trouble.”
“Stop them,” Kim said, hesitating this way and that, pushed aside by the hunters. His eyes were wild. “ You, you do something–”
There was laughter from the brush. A crashing of branches. Laughter and quiet then, but for breaking branches. So they brought Ma
“You,” Kim said, “you talk to them, you’ve got the means–”
“Shut up.” Genley squatted down, gave a scowling stare at the hunters, put a hand on Ma
Ma
“Get the skin,” Genley said.
“I’m not your bloody servant,” Kim hissed. “You don’t give me orders.”
“ Get the skin. You take care of him, you bloody take care of him, hear me?” Jin had come; Genley saw it, gathered himself up in haste, drew a deep breath.
Jin stared at the hunter‑leader; at him, at one and the other, hands on his hips. It was not a moment for arguing. Not an audience that would appreciate it. After a moment Jin gave a nod of his, head toward the second, the smaller circle of hunters. “Genley,” he said.
Genley came aside, hands in his belt, walked easily beside Jin, silent as Jin walked, on soft hide soles, crouched down by the fireside as Jin sat, one of them, a leader with his own band, however poor it was. He had his beads, had his braids, had his knife at his side. Like the rest. Moved like them, silent as they. He had learned these things.
“This Ma
“Sick,” Genley said. “Bad gut.”
Jin thrust out his jaw, reached out and clapped a hand on his knee. “Too much patience. All starmen have this patience?”
“Ma
“What? What, my father?” Jin reached to the fire’s edge and broke off a bit of a cake baking on a stone. “For this bad gut, no cure. It’s his mind, Gen‑ley. It’s his mind wants to be sick. It’s fear.”
“So he’s not a hunter. He’s other things. Like Weirds.”
Jin looked up from under his brow. “So. A Weird.”
“We’re a lot of things.”
“Yes,” Jin said in that curious flat way of his, while the eyes were alive with thoughts. “So I give him to you. This Kim; this Ma
He drew in a breath, a long, slow one. Perhaps it was Jin’s humor at work. Perhaps it meant something else.
“You know weapons, Gen‑ley?”
Genley shrugged. “Starman weapons. Don’t have any. They don’t let them outside the Wire.”
Jin’s eyes lightened with interest.
Mistake. Genley looked into that gaze and knew it. “All right,” he said, “yes, they’ve got them. But the secret to it is up there. Up.”He made a motion of his eyes skyward and down again; it was not only Jin listening, it was Blue and others. It was the Tower‑lords. “First steps first, lord Jin. None before its time.”
“MaGee.”
“She’s got none.”
Jin’s lips compacted into a narrow grimace something like a smile.
“You put McGee in my keeping,” Genley said. He had worked for this, worked hard. It was close to getting, close to it, to get this concession. Save what he could. Do what he could, all rivalries aside. “You want Cloudside in your hand, hear, that woman knows what there is to know. You give her to me.”
“No.” There was no light of reason there, none at all in the look Jin turned on him. “Not that one.”
He felt a tightening of the gut. So, McGee, I tried. There was nothing more to do. No interference. Just ride out the storm. Gather pieces if there were pieces left. No place for a woman. She might get common sense at the last, run for it, get back to the Wire. It was the best to hope for now.
If Elai let her run.
205 CR, day 98
Cloud Towers
They gathered in the dawn, in the first pale light along the Cloud, and McGee clutched her spear and hurried along the shore. The leathers felt strange, like a second, unfamiliar skin at once binding and easy; she felt embarrassed by the spear, kept the head canted up out of likelihood of sticking anyone with it as calibans brushed by her carrying riders on their backs, tall, disdainful men and women who knew their business and were going to it in this dusty murk. God help me, she kept thinking over and over, God help me. What am I doing here?–as a scaly body shouldered her and its tail rasped against her leg in its passing, weight of muscle and bone enough to break a back in a halfhearted swing.