His eyes stung with reading in the flickering light; keeping the fire lively enough to cast light to the chair made the fireside uncomfortably warm, and the oil lamps made the air thick. He found himself with a mild headache, and got up and walked, quietly, so as not to disturb the staff, into the cooler part of the room—too restless to sleep, yet.
He missed his late-night news. He missed being able to call Barb, or even, God help him, Hanks, and say the things he dared say over lines he knew were bugged. He was all but down to talking to himself, just to hear the sound of human language in the silence, to get away, however briefly, from immersion in atevi thoughts and atevi reasoning.
A motor started, somewhere. He stopped still and listened, decided someone was leaving the courtyard and going down to the town, or somewhere in between, and who thatwas, he had a fair notion.
Damn, he thought, and went to the window, but one couldn’t see the courtyard from there because of the sideways jut of the front hall. A pin held the latch of the side window panels, and he pulled that to see if he could tell whether the car was going down the main road or off into the hills, or whether he was about to trigger a nonhistorical security alarm by opening the latch.
Only the airline transport van, hell. Malguri had a van of its own. Food and passengers came up the road. They could have gotten him from the airport.
But Banichi had thought otherwise, perhaps. Perhaps he wanted to sound things out before relying on Cenedi.
Perhaps he still had his doubts.
The sound of the motor went up and around the walls.
He couldn’t tell. But the night air coming in was crisp and cold after the stuffiness of the room. He drew in a great breath and a second one.
First night he had been here that it hadn’t been raining, the first hour of full dark, and the sky above the lake and the mountains to the east were so clear and black and cold one could see Maudette aloft, faintly red, and Gabriel’s almost invisible companion, a real test of eyesight, on Mospheira.
The night air smelled wonderful, loaded with wildflowers, he supposed; and he hadn’t realized how he’d missed the garden outside his room; or how pent up he’d felt.
He’d been able, on clear nights on Mt. Allan Thomas, to see the station just around sunset or sunrise. He didn’t keep up with its schedule the way he had in his youth, when Toby and he had used to go hiking in the hills, when they’d used to tell stories about the Landing, and imagine—it was embarrassing, nowadays—that there were atevi guerrillas hiding in the high hills. They had used to have imaginary wars up there, shooting atevi by the hundreds, being shot at by fictitious atevi villains, about as good as the atevi machimi about secret human guerrillas supported by egomaniacs secretly concealing their base aboard the station… the Foreign Star, as atevi had called it in those long past and warlike days.
At least they’d achieved a common mythology, a common past, a common set of heroes and villains—and which was which only depending on point of view.
He never had mentioned to Tabini that his father was Polanski’s descendant several illegitimate generations down the line, the Polanski who’d generaled the standoff on Half Moon Beach, the one that had kept atevi reinforcements off Mospheira.
Nothing Poianski’s remote descendant had anything to do with—nothing, in his present job, that he wanted to admit to.
One made progress as one could. He wished atevi children didn’t see humans as shadow-players and madmen; he wished human children didn’t play at shooting atevi in the woods. The idea came to him of making that a major theme in his winter speech to the assembly… but he didn’t know how one got at all the film and all the television on both sides which kept reinforcing it all.
But not totally smart, with realities as they were, to be standing with the fire at his back. Jago had pulled him away from this very window last night… a danger from the windows or the roof of the other wing seemed stupid. But anybody could have a boat on the lake, he supposed, though not close enough to give an assassin a good target. Anybody could land on Malguri’s shore, give or take the walls and the cliffs below the walls, which were formidable.
He stepped back and began to close the window. Lights flashed on all about him. An alarm began to ring as he blinked in the glare of electric light, and slammed the window shut and latched it, heart beating in utter startlement, with the sound of bare feet crossing the wooden floor of the next room.
Tano showed up, stark naked, gun in hand, Djinana close behind him, and Maigi after that, Maigi dripping wet and wrapped in a towel, with the thump of people running out in the halls, everywhere in Malguri, the alarm still sounding.
“Did you open a window?” Tano asked. “Nadiin, I did, I’m sorry.”
His rescuers drew a collective breath as the latch rattled in the next room, and Tano dismissed Djinana in that direction with a wave of his hand.
“Nadi, they’ve brought us on-line again,” Tano said, “Your security had rather you not open the windows, for your own protection. Particularly at night.”
Djinana had let someone in from the outside hall. Cenedi showed up with Djinana and a couple of the dowager’s guard, to hear Tano say, “The paidhi opened the window, nadi.”
“Nand’ paidhi,” Cenedi said. “Please, hereafter, don’t.”
“I beg your pardons,” he said. The alarm was still going, jangling his nerves. “Can someone please turn off the alarm?”
Cenedi gave the orders. It still took time to sort out, and the oil lamps all had to be put out before he could get his rooms clear of staff.
He sank down on the side of his bed after the clatter and the commotion had died, after the doors and windows were shut, asking himself where Banichi had been and what black thoughts the dowager must be having about him at the moment.
Damned sloppy, having an alarm system down with the power. It wasn’t Banichi’s style. He didn’t think it was Cenedi’s. He didn’t think he’d seen everything that guarded Malguri. Solar-batteried security, he’d bet on it. They had the technology.
It didn’t keep the paidhi from waking the house and looking like a fool.
It didn’t make Ilisidi happier with him. He could bet on that, too.
VIII
« ^ »
Anoisy night,” Ilisidi said, pouring her own tea—the smell of it drifted with the steam, across the table, and Bren’s stomach went queasy.
“I’m extremely sorry,” he said, “and embarrassed, aiji-mai.”
Ilisidi grinned, positively grinned, and added sugar.
It was little barbs all during breakfast. Ilisidi was in an excellent humor. She wolfed down four fish, a bowl of cereal and two cakes with sweet oil, while he stayed to the cereal and the breakfast rolls, thinking that, considering the pain he was in sitting on a hard chair this morning, he would almost rather drink Ilisidi’s tea than get onto Nokhada’s back again.
But it was downstairs, Ilisidi reveling in the stiff breeze blowing in off the lake, a breeze that tore at coat-skirts and knifed right through sweaters when one passed out of the sunlight and into the stable court.
Nokhada at least was willing to get down for him this morning, and this time, at least, he was ready for the snap of Nokhada’s rising before he was quite astride.
It hurt. God, it hurt. Not exactly the kind of pain a man could admit to, or beg off from. He only hoped for early numbness, and told himself his human ancestors had been riders, and somehow continued the species.
He brought a quick stop to Nokhada’s milling about, determined to have the final word on their course this morning—which lasted until Ilisidi moved Babs out and Nokhada jostled Cenedi’s mecheita for position at Babs’ tail in a sudden dash out onto the road.