The Navigator of Rhada (7 page)

Kynan, for his part, was suddenly stricken mute by the blond beauty of his brother’s almost-betrothed. He remembered her only as an adolescent girl playing in the gardens at Star Field.

They both spoke at once. Then the girl, better trained in the amenities, inclined her head for a formal blessing and made the sign of the Star.

“Janessa,” Kynan said. “I’m sorry to find you here.”

The girl’s eyes flashed with sudden anger. “No sorrier than I to be here, Nav Kynan.” Kynan frowned. He had come to her quickly, driven by powers he did not fully understand, yet powers that he trusted completely. The Royal Vulk’s instructions had been direct and compelling. He knew enough about the Vulk mind-touch to understand that the reasons implanted in his subconscious by Gret would surface with time to rest and consider. He also knew that he would not act, even on the urgings of the Vulk of Rhada, if the reasons im
bedded in his personality by the alien were improper or repugnant to his spirit and personality. He felt no such reservations, only a deep and anxious urgency.

“I must take you out of here, Janessa. To do it, I need your absolute obedience and cooperation.”

“Out?” Janessa suppressed the hope that rose in her with skepticism. “Out past five hundred warmen--all, apparently, now my enemies?”

“We can manage it, with luck. I am a Navigator and the king’s bond-son,” Kynan said, with a touch of youthful bravado.

“Take me only as far as Kreon, Kynan,” Janessa pleaded. “I haven’t been allowed even to see the star kin
g.” The Navigator’s face sobered beneath the dark round thatch of his hair. “Didn’t you hear the death songs and the war horns?”

Janessa’s heart felt cold. “He’s dead? The old king is really dead?”

“Murdered,” Kynan said.

“No Auroran killed him!” the girl said with spirit.

“I believe that. The Rhad Vulk believes it, too. But we are the only ones who do. LaRoss and Tirzah have ordered General Crespus to prepare a strike force against Aurora.” The girl stepped closer to the Navigator and protested. “Kynan, you must not let them do it!”

“I am not certain I can prevent it, Janessa. I am a bond-son, not the true heir to Gonlan. That’s why we must leave here.”

“And go where?”

“With luck, to the Order’s enclave on Aurora. I have no authority to go there, but neither I nor Gret see any alternative. Somehow, the priest-killers are behind all this. We feel it.”

Janessa walked to the window and stood for a moment regarding the Navigator. This talk of “we” meant that he was fresh from--if not full Triad--at least mind-touch with the Royal Vulk. Janessa, like many of the inhabitants of the Empire, still feared the strange Vulks. She knew that Navigators went regularly into Triad with them, and Rhadans generally did the same, though not so often. It was, in fact, this policy of Rhad-Vulk integration that had prevented Aurora, in Kier the Rebel’s time, from becoming a part of the Rhadan Palatinate. Yet, she thought, to her certain knowledge, no harm had ever come to a human from a Vulk. She must not permit her inbred Auroran prejudice to impair her trust in Kynan, who was a priest of the Order--and, incidentally, a very handsome young man. That thought brought a touch of color to her cheeks, and she tossed her head so that the long straight fall of her hair shimmered in the torchlight.

Kynan, for his part, had been studying the girl. She looked steady enough; strong enough, too, for what could only be a hellishly difficult journey to the spaceport. She had been wearing court dress when she was abducted from Star Field. But someone, perhaps the Navigator commanding the Rhad starship that brought her to Gonlan, had seen to it that she received more serviceable clothing, for the climate of the Gonlan coast was severe. Now Janessa’s slender figure was encased in the tights, leotard, and kilt of a Rhadan cadet. Except for her hair, one might almost take her for a page or an ensign of the castle garrison. Almost--not entirely. Janessa, for all her athletic slenderness, was unmistakably female. And Navigators were
not
celibates.

As if to chastise himself for his thoughts, Kynan said, “If you’ll cooperate with me, we’ll try to stop this insanity before it’s started--and bring you safely to my brother.” Whose wife she was destined to be by agreement, custom, and tradition, Kynan thought. Remember
that.

“I will obey you, of course, Nav Kynan,” she said formally, the color still in her cheeks. There was a strange rapport between them that she sensed now, very strongly. She knew with great certainty that he had been admiring her, and it both disturbed and excited her.

“The Lyri starship that brought me to Gonlan should still be in Gonlanburg. It wasn’t to leave until tomorrow morning. I’ll go now and raid the stable for horses. If we can get away from Melissande within the hour, there should be time.”

And then, because he suddenly realized that he had been giving orders to a noblewoman of the Empire, who was also a very attractive girl, he paused in some confusion.

“It is for the best, Lady Janessa. You mustn’t stay here,” he said. “Will you make ready?”

“I will do anything you say, Nav Kynan,” Janessa replied with unaccustomed humility.

Kynan bowed and withdrew, wondering why it was that, in spite of the perilousness of the situation, he felt lighthearted.

But once in the lower levels of Melissande, Kynan’s Janessa-induced euphoria began to fade. The guardrooms and barracks were filling with warmen--the individual soldiers gathering their kits for a protracted off-world campaign. Those who recognized him as the returned bond-son of the warleader paused in their activities to salute him, and here and there he would encounter one more religious than the rest who would make the sign of the Star in request of a benediction before battle.

Kynan tried to estimate how long it would be before General Crespus would be able to assemble a complete strike force for an attack on Aurora. The Rhad were warlike and organized for battle, but all the Rhadan worlds were more or less primitive when compared to the Inner Planets, where Kynan had recently been serving. It would take more time to assemble an expedition here than, say, in the Lyra province, where communications were swifter.

Thirty-six hours would be a reasonable guess, he thought. A day and a half to assemble the first elements of a strike. The bulk of the Gonlani star fleet would be off- world at this moment, but he had no doubt that the starships within the Rhadan volume of space would already have been recalled to the home planet for troop-carrier duty with the levies. The first of them would be arriving within hours. The Lyri starship that had been his, and that had brought him home, might already have been requested to clear the port of Gonlanburg to make room for the homecoming vessels. Kynan prayed that Brother Evart, to whom he had turned over command, would be as deliberate in making his plans for departure as he was in performing his other holy offices.

As the young Navigator made his way deeper into the bowels of the sprawling castle-hunting lodge toward the stables, the images planted in his mind by the Rhadan Vulk began to surface. The facts, if facts they were, surprised him; their intellectual and emotional inferences, however, did not. Many times, after undergoing Triad both in the Theocracy and later in Lyra, Kynan had attempted to rationalize the peculiar effect of the experience.

For several generations now, humans had been undergoing the symbiotic experience of Triad with the ancient Vulks. Much of what men knew of their own history was learned in this way, for Vulks lived extraordinarily long lives. But far more significant than the simple interflow of information among Vulk and human minds during the experience was the emotional rapport established. In the Dark Time--and even before, during the Golden Age of the First Empire--men had feared and hated the Vulk simply for being
different.
But with the growth of the Triad experience, sanctioned by the Order of Navigators only in the last century, a new depth and dimension had been added to human domination of the old worlds of the Empire.

It was, for example, only since Triadism that men had begun to understand that the Empires, First
and
Second, were stellar rather than truly galactic--that is, that the outposts of human power were scattered throughout the known galaxy, but that they in no way dominated the immense star-cloud known as the Milky Way. The Vulk were the only intelligent life-form men had ever discovered in the galaxy. But the actual number of habitable worlds visited by either Stellar Empire was minute compared to the number existing. This concept alone was both sobering and instructive to men.

But the important consideration was that a man who had undergone the experience of Triad could
accept
such a diminishing fact
emotionally
because the Vulk, a far calmer people than humanity, accepted it with grace and thoughtful caution rather than with alarm.

Thus it was that Gret could charge Kynan’s subconscious with a set of the most disturbing facts, secure in the knowledge that he would respond to each emerging bit of information calmly and without shock.

Item.
The AbasNavs who attempted to kill him on the sea cliffs had been employed by someone within the household of Melissande.
Somehow, Gret
knew
this. And Kynan knew it now. Had he learned it from any source other than the Vulk’s mind-touch, he would have been infuriated and alarmed. He was not. It was simply a fact--to be evaluated and put into perspective among other facts, after which a course of action must be devised.

Item.
Kynan was under periodic scrutiny--by what means he did not know--of powerful members of the Order.
This would probably not have surprised or alarmed Kynan in any case. As a junior priest of a great Order, he expected ghostly supervision by his superiors. What
was
remarkable was that Gret knew (and so, therefore, did Kynan now) that he, Kynan, was considered important to the watchers.

Item.
The Vulk, grown old in the practice of statecraft, believed that the war between Aurora and Gonlan was being fomented to excuse Imperial intervention. If Rhada supported her vassal state Gonlan, the war would engulf the entire Rim. The Order’s enclave on Aurora was the key.

Kynan frowned. His head ached with unaccustomed thought. He was after all, he told himself, only a small priest of the Order of Navigators. His business was the piloting of holy vessels, not interstellar intrigue and politics.

But he was a Rhad by adoption, a member of the royal house of Gonlan by bond and affection and now protector (self-appointed) of the princess and heiress of Aurora. If great affairs pivoted on him in ways he did not understand, let them. He would do his duty as a priest, as a man, and as a citizen of the Empire.

The high-flown phrases sounded a bit absurd to him as he made his way into the stable court. What he was actually planning at the moment was horse-stealing and illegal flight with a prisoner of the government of Gonlan--which could earn him the rank of traitor in addition to all the rest.

It had been so long since he had been home that none of the war mares in the court recognized him--none but the old beast who had carried him from Gonlanburg. He called her in the darkness.

“Ky-nan.” Tigerish teeth, once needle-sharp but worn down with age, nipped at his shoulder in greeting.

Fresh from his mind-contact with Gret, Kynan could feel clearly the savage affection emanating from the animal. He was the one familiar inhabitant of the castle, and the old mare, bedded down with the younger mounts of the warmen of Melissande, had been lonely.

He touched her gray muzzle gently, breathing in the rank smell of the stable and the tang of fresh blood. The animals had only just been given their daily meal of newly slaughtered game.

The other war horses, mostly mares because the stallions were well-nigh unmanageable, began to mill about restlessly. They recognized him as a Rhadan and one who belonged at Melissande, but he was unfamiliar to them, and this made them restless.

“We go?” the old mare asked, tossing her head. “We go fight now?”

Kynan had planned to steal other horses. Younger and stronger animals might very well be needed for the flight across the desolate Stoneland Peninsula to Gonlanburg. But the mare’s entreaty touched him. She had seen better days, and he knew that some warman, perhaps needing a stronger mount and lacking the money to buy her a hunt-pasture, had had to sell her to the hack renter at the spaceport. Now her adventure on the cliffs was fresh in her mind, and she imagined she was once again a warman’s charger.

“Skua--will--fight,” she breathed restlessly.

”Skua. Is that your name?”

“Yes, yes.” She stamped impatiently, remembering old battles.

Kynan made a decision. It was probably unwise, but, he reflected, many an austere superior had remarked on his impulsiveness, and he was still alive, still functioning as a priest-Navigator. One must allow instinct free rein sometimes, he reminded himself. Skua would do as a mount for Janessa. “Yes,” he told the mare. “Soon we go.” He searched the milling horse herd for another mount and found one, a tall and silvery mare rolling her eyes nervously at him.

He caught her attention and commanded her to come to him. Skua made jealous noises, and he quieted her with a touch. The silver mare stood dancing before him. “Not --my--master,” she muttered, backing.

She was difficult to dominate, but he held an image in his mind: a stretch of beach below the seawall. He gave both animals the strongest commands he could manage, picturing in detail the causeway across the defensive ditches, the low wall of the horse paddock, the winding path to the sea.

While he did this, he busied himself with light saddles taken from the saddletrees lining the walls. He was able to equip Skua without trouble, but the silver mare still resisted him, her mind a confusion of baffled loyalty and his explicit commands.

“You will go there,” he said to the young mare.