Inheritor

As good as a ribbon, that was. A badge of honor.

“Nandi,” the boy said, and bowed with a modern conservatism, not going so far as the arm-waving extravagance of the riders of such beasts on the television. He managed not to look foolish.

From Jase there was silence. If they were lucky, Bren said to himself, there was deep thought going on.

Midafternoon. There was one break for, as the atevi put it, necessity, at which they all dismounted (it was Banichi’s comment that in less civilized days they didn’t dismount at all) and went aside with two spades from the packs, men to one side of a small rise, women to the other.

“Nadi,” Jase said in a faint, unhappy voice, “I can’t do this.”

“You’ll be terribly sorry in a few hours if you don’t,” Bren said with no remorse at all, and Jase reconsidered his options and went and did what he had to do.

He came back happier. Embarrassed, but happier. They rejoined the dowager and Jago, the mechieti having waited quite happily without a boy chasing them. Babsidi came to the dowager’s whistle, and riders sorted the rest out.

The boy from Dur and Jase were the last up, but they managed on their own.

Definitely better, Bren said to himself, safe and lord of all he saw, from Nokhada’s lofty back; and Babsidi started moving, which meant Nokhada had to try to catch him.

He let Nokhada win for a while. Jase was doing well enough back there, and was not slowing them down.

At no time yet had they hit an all-out run: they had mechieti carrying the packs, and that, he began to realize, was the primary reason. But the pace they did strike ate up the ground.

They were going west. And they reached a point that the sun burned into their eyes, and still the mechieti kept that steady gait.

He had shut his eyes to save them pain from the light when a hitch in Nokhada’s rhythm warned him of change ahead, and his eyes flashed open as they topped a low roll of the land.

The horizon had shortened. The land fell away here into golden haze.

The sea stretched out in front of them hardly closer than they’d seen from the plane. Rocky hills across a wide bay were only haze. An island in blued grays rose from the golden sheet of water.

The mechieti stopped as Babsidi stopped, on the rim of the land.

“That’s Dur!” the boy said, and added meekly, in courtesy, “nand’ dowager.”

“That it is,” Ilisidi said, and signaled Babsidi to go down. She was quicker to dismount than Cenedi, snatching her cane from the loop in which she had kept it, and with a hand on Babsidi instead of the cane, waved the stick at the immediate area. “Make camp.”

“What direction are we facing?” Jase asked quietly.

“West. That’s the sun. Remember?”

Jase pointed more directly at the sun, which was slightly to their left, and near a knoll of rock and gravel that shadowed dark against the sun and broke the force of the wind. “That’s west.”

“North.” Bren signaled the direction. “We’re facing west northwest.”

“West north,” Jase said.

“West northwest.”

It wasn’t a concept Jase got easily. But Jase repeated it. “West northwest. Dur to the north and west. Mospheira west. Shejidan is tepid.”

“South. Actually southeast.”

“South,” Jase amended his pronunciation. “East. Can the mechieti go down to the sea?”

“On a road or a trail they can. Trail. Small road.” He didn’t see one at the rim, which looked sheer to his eyes. “But we’ve done enough traveling for the day. Supper. I hope.” In fact the order was going out now to make camp, and he heaved a sigh, feeling a definite soreness that was going to be hell tomorrow.

“She said sit down?” Jase had heard it too.

“Settle for the night, nadi. Camp is the word.” Talking with atevi was a constant battle to have the numbers felicitous. Talking to Jase was a continual questioning of one’s memory on what words Jase knew would carry a thought.

“We go down to the sea in the morning.”

“Nadi, remember ma

Jase was disturbed. But he mended his ma

“There.” He pointed. “Taiben is in the northeast. Southwest is Onondisi Bay. This water is Nain Bay.”

“I know. It was on the map.”

Nain Bay was on the map. The sun wasn’t. And Shejidan was tepid.

One hoped, Bren said to himself, that this whole adventure would express itself only in Jase’s striking vocabulary. He hoped the night to come would be quiet, that the vans had been the caterers’, that Tano and Algini had stayed to manage the details of a welcome-home banquet—all possible—and that none of the things added up the way they might.

“Also,” he said, trying to think of everything with a man for the first time loose among the hazards of the outdoors, “nadi, be very careful of the cliff edge. Weather weakens the edge, do you understand? The earth could crumble and you could fall a long way if the edge is weak.”

“Then how do we get down?” Jase asked.

“Carefully,” Bren said. “And on a road if one exists. That’s what one does with roads.”

The packs began to come off the mechieti. Canvas bundles came down.

And sprang up rapidly as tents—spring-framed, modern tents, arising with blinding quickness.

For a woman who favored the ancient, Ilisidi certainly didn’t disdain the latest in camping gear. He knewthose atevi-scale tents. Northstar, the same brand of Mospheiran-made tenting that had served Mospheiran campers for generations, was a big export item to the mainland in atevi scale, a very, very popular export that helped Mospheira secure aluminum. The paidhi’s mind was full of such helpful eclectic data.

But a tent like this modern thing of aluminum and nylon certainly wasn’t what he expected the dowager to be using. And in hunting camouflage, not the house colors. They sprang up, arched, immediate, ground-sheeted, and pegged down with toothed lightweight pegs that went into soft ground like this like daggers into crusted bread.

“What are we going to do?” Jase asked, he thought somewhat obtusely, and he answered with a little impatience: “I suppose we’re going to have supper, nadi-ji.”

The packs gave up not only tents, but well-packed modern thermal storage, so there was no need of fire, and the mechieti, grazing, wandered off to join the mechiet’-aiji and to have Ilisidi’s men take off their harnesses.

Jason sat himself down on a hummock of grass and was examining a stem of bristle-weed as if it were of significance—and of course it was a curiosity, to him. The boy from Dur, Rejiri, had appeared to settle on Jase as a person of great interest and minimal threat and, having nothing else to do, had settled down opposite Jase, the boy talking to him rapidfire in a way that looked to have Jase engaged but confused. There was no knowing what Jase said, but Jase looked embarrassed, and the boy laughed.

But, Bren said to himself, Jase could handle himself. The boy who’d nearly bashed a plane into him wasn’t one to talk about taking offense at the paidhiin.

He could draw breath, at least, and allot concern about Jase to someone else as the sunset, beyond the picturesque spire of rock, drowned in a bank of leaden cloud.

He walked about at peace and off duty, stretching out muscle—doing nothing for bruises near the bone, but it did seem to prevent the worst stiffness. Banichi and Jago were talking with Cenedi; Ilisidi was talking to three of her young men who were about to set out the thermal containers. As a rough camp, it was a lot more grand than the night they’d spent dodging bombs in Maidingi’s hills.

And there was still nothing ominous on the horizon behind them. One could hope, maybe.