The Gathering Flame (49 page)

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Authors: Debra Doyle,James D. Macdonald

BOOK: The Gathering Flame
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“She isn’t here, Jos.”
“Which way is she, then?”
Errec pointed again. “That way. The landing field.”
Jos turned
Warhammer
in the direction Errec had indicated and slowed the ship as much as he dared. He couldn’t afford the time he’d lose if they overshot the field and had to come back again from the other direction.
“This should be the An-Jemayne spaceport field,” he said a few minutes later. “But I still can’t see anything. We’ll have to go down and take a look.”
“Perada’s here,” said Errec. “Somewhere close. But be careful. The surface isn’t what I’d call stable anymore.”
“Then we won’t set down on it. Stand by to lower ship.”
Jos cut in the heavy-duty ventral nullgrav units that under normal circumstances would slow the final stages of the
’Hammer
’s landing and settle her down properly onto her legs. This time, though, he didn’t hit the toggle that brought the heavy metal landing legs unfolding out of their niches in the freighter’s belly. The engines growled in protest, and the nullgravs echoed the note, but they responded without stinting to the increased demand.
Warhammer
hovered obediently, no more than a tall man’s height above the broken ground.
Jos unstrapped his safety webbing. “Hold her, Errec. I’m going to drop the ramp and see for myself what’s out there.”
He made his way to the
’Hammer
’s main hatch and hit the button to open the door and lower the ramp. The view he got wasn’t encouraging—if he hadn’t trusted Errec’s word on it, he’d never have known that this broken-up expanse of rock and metal was the landing field for Entibor’s largest spaceport.
It didn’t look like there was anybody left alive. The fumes in the air made his eyes water and sting. Then he heard a voice calling his name.
“Jos! Over here!”
He jumped off the end of the ramp and ran as fast as he could over the uneven ground in the direction of the cry. He came to where four people stood close together in the lee of a small stubby-winged aircar that looked at first glance like part of the surrounding rubble. One was Tillijen, and one was—of all the people to meet again in this place and time—the pale, clerkish-looking man whom he’d surprised and tied up with curtain cords in the back room of the Double Moon. And one was Nivome do’Evaan of Rolny, and the last—the last was a small and extremely pregnant woman wearing the Iron Crown of Entibor.
She was the one who had called out his name.
“’Rada,” he said. He hadn’t expected to get here in time, in spite of everything he’d said to Errec and everything he’d done. He’d hadn’t expected it, but she was alive. “You’ve cut your hair.”
“I had to,” she said. “If I wanted to leave the planet. We were going to meet a courier ship, but it never came … . We were waiting for the fire, but then I saw the
’Hammer
come down through the smoke, and I knew that you’d come back.”
 
The captain’s cabin aboard
Warhammer
hadn’t changed. It was still a spare, unadorned bit of cubic, scrupulously tidy, with the same faint but unmistakable shipboard smell to the recirculated air. Perada—too numb from the sudden change of fortune to raise a protest—let Gentlesir Aringher strap her into the acceleration couch while Jos and Tilly hurried to take their places for liftoff.
“There are, it seems, still a few Mage warships in the system,” Aringher said as he worked on the buckles of the safety webbing. “After all the trouble these nice people have gone through to rescue us, it wouldn’t do for us to get blown up on our way to hyper.”
“No,” Perada said. “I suppose not.” For herself, she wasn’t sure she cared. “What about you and Gentlesir Nivome? Has the captain given you places?”
“I daresay we’ll ride out the lift-off on the couches in the common room,” Aringher said. “Or perhaps crew berthing. At an impromptu party such as this, seating arrangements are of necessity made on an informal basis. In any case, Your Dignity, you needn’t worry. We can take care of ourselves.”
But I’m the Domina
, she thought, as the door of the captain’s cabin slid shut again behind the Galcenian Ambassador.
If I don’t have my people to take care of, what reason do I have for still being alive?
“All hands, stand by for liftoff. Stand by.”
The announcement came over the shipboard speaker in the captain’s cabin. Perada recognized Jos’s voice, but she didn’t feel a welling of renewed emotion at the sound. She’d rather expected that she would—when he had first appeared out of the smoke on the landing field, then her heart had clenched within her. Instead, now, there was nothing, only a numbness where feeling should have been. She wondered a bit about that.
The nose of the ship came up, and in the same moment, as part of the motion, the press of inertia shoved her down into the couch. It was a hard, fast launch, the gees more than she ever remembered experiencing, but this time there was no exhilaration to it. Instead there was only the relentless pressure, and a heaviness in her mind like a cold, numbing fog.
I have to decide,
she thought, as the pressure shoved her deeper and deeper into the padded couch. The child inside her kicked and squirmed in furious protest against the constraints of the safety webbing—a reminder that someone, at least, still needed help that she could give.
When this is over, I won’t be the Domina of Entibor any longer.
I have to decide if I’m going to be anything at all.
 
Warhammer
sped along the hyperspace arc to Galcen, safely out of reach of Mage warships and the firestorms of a dying planet. Jos Metadi set the cockpit controls on autopilot and headed for his cabin. Nannla and Tilly had already abandoned the gun bubbles and headed off together for a reunion in number-one crew berthing; Jos decided that he envied them. ’Rada had seemed glad enough to see him when they met on the landing field, but under the circumstances, she would probably have welcomed anybody who showed up with a working starship.
He started to palm the lockplate, then changed his mind and hit the buzzer first. Virtue, or at any rate courtesy, had its reward—he heard a muffled “Come in” and the door slid open. He entered, and the panel slid shut after him.
Perada was sitting up on the edge of the acceleration couch. She didn’t look well—her face was too thin, and her skin was too pale under its coating of grit and wind-borne ash. She sat awkwardly, as though the bulge in her abdomen belonged to somebody else altogether.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“Yes.” She gave a weak laugh. “But please—don’t
ever
let me ride through a lift-off when I’m this far along again. No matter how much I say I want to do it.”
“I won’t,” he said. He nodded toward her swollen belly. “How long before …”
“Soon. But not right away, I hope.”
“We’ll be on Galcen in a few days.”
“Good. I like Galcen.” She sounded tired; her brief humor of a moment ago had faded. “I used to have friends there. Maybe I can stay with them until I can think of what I ought to do.”
“What do you mean?”
She shrugged. “I trained all my life to be Domina of Entibor, and I don’t really know what else I’m good for. Maybe I ought to put up a sign and offer private lessons in folksinging and galactic politics.”
“You could do that,” he said. He took a deep breath. “Or you could marry me and stick around
Warhammer
for a while.”
“Marry you?” She stared; her blue eyes looked even bigger than usual without the braids to frame her face. “But you told me you weren’t … that you didn’t want to … that you weren’t going to
do
that with me anymore.”
“I told you a lot of things,” he said. “Most of them were pretty stupid. And I don’t believe in being stupid twice.”
“I’ve never been married,” she said. “I don’t even know where I’d go to sign the papers. Or whatever it is people do.”
“They share bread and wine in front of witnesses,” he said. “On Gyffer, anyhow. The paperwork is optional.”
“That sounds nice. Could we do it that way, do you think?”
“Right now, if you want. Tilly and Nannla can witness … what do you say?”
“Yes.”
 
 
Festen Aringher considered himself, if nothing else, a philosopher. So it was with an air of philosophical detachment that he agreed to preside over the wedding of Josteddr Metadi, citizen of Gyffer, and Perada Rosselin, not currently a citizen of anywhere. He’d never performed a marriage, but he supposed that it was one of the things that an ambassador from Galcen had the power to do.
“I suppose,” he remarked to no one in particular, as the crew decorated the common room of
Warhammer
, “that I could declare this to be the first act of the new Republic.”
The thought struck him as amusing, and he smiled.
“How are we doing this?” called a female voice from the galley.
“Gyfferan-style, I guess,” replied Tillijen the armsmaster, who was wiping down the mess table with a handkerchief she’d pulled from her sleeve. “Dominas don’t marry, so there isn’t any rite on Entibor.”
“How do they do it on Gyffer?”
“I spent my life avoiding finding out that sort of thing. Don’t ask me.”
Jos Metadi came into the common room from the engineering spaces as she spoke. “How we do it on Gyffer,” he said, “it’s bread and wine, and we pour wine for each other, and break bread for each other, and then say that we’re married. That’s how it’s done.”
“Bread and wine?” Nannla said. “Jos, Cap’n, we don’t have either, far as I know.”
“Philosophically,” Aringher said, “it’s the symbolism, not the actual items. Unless you wouldn’t
feel
married without the real things, of course.”
“Wouldn’t know how married feels,” Metadi told him. “So I suppose that part doesn’t matter.”
Tilly dived back into the galley and emerged with a packet of compressed ready-to-eat meatmeal and a brick of dry biscuit. “This is what we’ve got. Lots of both, but not much variety.”
“The biscuit,” Metadi said. “It’s closer.”
“Wait a minute,” Nannla said. She ducked out of the room. In a moment she was back with a bottle wrapped in tissue. “I got this, last port call in Innish-Kyl,” she said.
“Firewater? You expect anyone to drink that and be good for anything afterward?” Tilly asked.
“It’s good enough, and we’re honored,” Aringher said. “I think everybody’s ready. Shall we assemble everyone?”
“Let’s do it.”
The members of
Warhammer
’s temporary crew—the Entiboran Fleet ensign and young Wrann the Selvaur from Maraghai—joined the others in the common room. A moment or so later, the door of the captain’s cabin opened and Perada came out. She was wearing a borrowed night-robe that clearly belonged to somebody much taller; belted high under her breasts, it skimmed her ankles in front and trailed on the floor behind.
She looked apologetic. “Nothing else on board fits me anymore.”
“That’s all right,” Nannla told her. “Nobody’s handing out points for style.”
Aringher cleared his throat. “I think everybody’s here who’s going to be here—shall we begin?”
He stepped over to the mess table and set out two cups and two plates, with the opened bottle of firewater and the brick of compressed biscuit between them. Then he nodded to Perada Rosselin. “Pour the wine,” he said; “and let him pour some for you.”
She poured with a steady hand until the cup was full almost to the brim, then handed the bottle across to Metadi. He took it—Aringher noted, again with some private amusement, that the captain’s hands were not nearly as steady as hers—and poured a shallow splash of firewater into the other cup.
The biscuit was white and hard, and breaking it presented a challenge. After a couple of tries, Metadi took the dagger Tilly offered and used it to break off a chunk, then handed the knife to Perada. She worked at it for a minute and managed to lever a bit off of one corner.
At another nod from Aringher they exchanged scraps of bread, and then tasted the firewater. Perada only sipped at hers, which Aringher privately considered wise under the circumstances, but Jos Metadi drained his to the bottom.
“Now,” said Aringher, “do you two gentles have any statements or changes to declare?”
“Yes,” Metadi said. “I declare in front of the Lords of Life and these my friends that Perada Rosselin is my wife from now henceforward.”
“And I declare in front of the Lords of Life and these my friends that Jos Metadi is my husband from now henceforward.”
Aringher felt a deep sense of satisfaction. “It pleases me,” he said, still smiling, “as an ambassador plenipotentiary of the Republic and of Galcen, to know that I have seen both the beginning and the end of this affair. Be happy, children, and blessings on both of you.”

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