Interim Errantry 2: On Ordeal Read online

  Which was when Rho had lately found himself starting to twitch. In fact, the thought of the looks his lady mother got sometimes from others who didn’t stop, and who didn’t mind others seeing what they thought of those who did, was making him feel a little uncomfortable in his skin right this moment. When a passing businessman in dark green provider’s robes hesitated just briefly on the path at the sight of Rho, the feeling got more uncomfortable still.

  He was tempted to simply pause on the path and feel about in his robe’s pockets like someone who’d realized he’d forgotten some vital personal item, until the man lost interest and passed by. Somehow even that seemed too much for him to manage at the moment. However, off to the left of Rho stood a particularly large feathertree, its massive downhanging upper branches spreading close enough over the path to already be snowing downy scarlet pollen onto the pathway’s gravel. The branches’ long pendant fronds reached nearly down to the park’s close-cut ochre turf in a dense curtain of slim downy-furred amber tendrils all hung with small scarlet bells.

  On the moment’s impulse Rho stepped off the path to slip through the curtain and through it into the heart of the warm-shadowed space beyond. There he put his back up against the feathertree’s broad knobby dark-crimson trunk, and for good measure edged around to the tree’s far side, where he couldn’t be seen from the path at all.

  For just a few moments Rho leaned there against the tree-trunk with his eyes closed, relishing not only not being seen, but not having to be anywhere or do anything or act any particular way. Such moments were too few, too precious.

  This is childish, some mutinous voice muttered in the back of his mind, you are Sunborn, what ails you that you’re hiding yourself away like this?

  For the moment Rho ignored it. Waiting for his pulse to slow, he breathed in a few breaths’ worth of the metallic-spicy pollen scent that hung heavy all around him… then passed one hand over his face and let the hand fall, a gesture of resignation.

  There wasn’t any escape from his personal realities for very long. Always within a few minutes the sight of the buildings around the park, or other people on the path, or of the thin pale color of the high sky, would bring the burden back down on him—all those names, hanging around his neck like a weight. Roshaun ke Nelaid am Seriv am Teliuyve am Meseph am Veliz am Teriaunst and all the rest of them am det Nuiiliat, det Wellakhit—his mother and father and all that crowd of noble ancestors, each name a link in a chain of heritage weighing you down. And the oldest link, the heaviest, the most serious, shackling you to the ground: am me'stardet Wellakhir. “Guarantor of Wellakh.”

  Rho shook his head and opened his eyes, because there was no point in trying not to see the image that went with the concept. It would display itself before his mind no matter what he did: the fire from heaven, the innocent world lying beneath it, and the shadow that fell between—the shadow of those who willingly put themselves between Wellakh’s troublesome star and its otherwise defenseless planets. He was one of the ones who cast that shadow—the ancient family that had kept the world from being killed by its star, and was expected to do so until (apparently) that star went out.

  Now, as often enough before, Rho said to himself, One day that’s going to be me. It was a matter of honor to be part of a tiny comity tasked with the challenge of keeping a world alive and well, one that stretched back centuries and would do so, assuming everything went well, for who knew how many centuries more. To be its youngest member—at least for the moment—made him proud.

  But it also made him afraid. Reflexively he gulped and tipped his head back against the tree. The only problem is that some day I’m going to be left alone to meet the challenge unarmed…

  Quite quickly after that thought he started getting angry at himself. It doesn’t matter. It’s what we do; what my family does. If some of them are better at it than I am, that’s just how our luck’s fallen in this generation.

  But it didn’t help Rho that this thought had also crossed other people’s minds.

  At lessons, for example. It wasn’t as if any of his schoolfellows said anything to him about it openly; nor were they cruel to him. They didn’t dare to be. He was Sunborn.

  But that was an entirely different problem. They’re afraid of me, and not for the right reasons… if there are any right reasons. It wasn’t anything to do with his physical strength (which wasn’t bad for someone his age) or indeed strength of any other kind.

  Especially because the kind he should have had, he didn’t…

  Rho shook his head at the thought that always intruded… the truth he could never escape. His family had saved the world. And someday, when he was left alone in his ancestors’ wonted place, everybody on the planet would expect him to do the same.

  It had taken Rho a long time to understand, when he was littlest, either the danger of this or the pain it would eventually cause him. Everybody knew how the wizards who became the Sunborn had put themselves between Thahit’s wrath and Wellakh’s people, when the sun flared, and saved millions of lives at the cost of hundreds of their own. The tale was taught as part of every child’s earliest lessons about what had made their world the way it was. Rho simply hadn’t understood for a surprisingly long time that those lessons—in this generation, anyway—had been about his mother and father. And maybe, someday, about me…

  Then, when he’d finally made the connection, he hadn’t for the longest time been able to grasp why people honored his parents—and apparently, when they realized who he was, him too—but never seemed willing to be their friends.

  It had never made sense, when he was small. Since his family had saved the world, why did people fear them? He’d lie awake on his couch going around and around with the question, finding no answer that made sense. Why would you be scared of us?, he’d say to the night, as if it could hear what he wanted to tell them and pass the word along. Don’t you know we’re from the same place, we’re who you are, this is just our job?

  But eventually he realized that was the root of the problem. Once or twice in lessons he’d caught the eye of other students during the history modules and seen the expressions on their faces—the unease, the resentment. Saw them, at least, before they turned their faces away. He realized to his shock that people don’t like to be saved. People don’t like to be beholden. They don’t like being unable to save themselves. They don’t like their weakness shown, don’t like their need to be an obvious thing. When it is… they get angry.

  And then they try to control what they fear.

  He let out a breath. Like all Wellakhit students, he had some control over the subjects he studied at lessons. But by the Sunlord’s command, the studies he was never allowed to change, in either substance or frequency, were mathematics and history. When he was young he spent a lot of time complaining about this, but the complaints stopped when he started to notice that there were differences between the family’s own records of the Disaster—which his father himself reviewed with him—and what was taught in lessons.

  Slowly he learned to read between the columns, and saw his life as it really was. He and his parents were kept wealthy by the world government, and lived in a palace, and given whatever they asked for—of merely material things, at least. But the palace was on the other side of the world, away from all the normal people, in the very center of the world’s burnt side. The message was never spoken, and always clear: This is the only thing you’re for, and the less we have to think about you, the better. Make sure you do your job. As long as you do that we’ll leave you alone.

  It was easy to shrug and take it coldly, sometimes. It was just the way life was. But being left alone… Rho thought, and tipped his head back against the tree.

  Sometimes when at home after lessons, while spending spare time wandering through the entertainment feeds, Rho came across group-chat presentations in which people talked about how it would be for them if they suddenly became vastly wealthy—from an inheritance, perhaps, or a vast windfall from one of the
companies that ran public games of chance. Everyone understood the odds of such a thing happening were well against it; you had a better chance of being hit by a meteorite. Nonetheless all those people were happy to make plans for the eventuality. In the same way, these days, Rho occasionally caught himself wondering what he would do if someone at lessons should ever someday want to keep company with him, laugh with him, joke: if anybody would ever share the walk home with him, regardless of where and what home was.

  Then before he was even well started imagining what that would be like he’d scoff at his own ridiculous hopes, for no normal Wellakhit was likely to take the chance of getting close enough to a Sunborn of the ruling family for that to happen. If one should possibly fall out with someone so powerful, whose wellbeing could at any moment be vital to the planet—who knew what the government might do to them afterwards? It wouldn’t be as if the royal family would want anything bad to happen to a non-royal, of course. But in the past reputations had been destroyed, careers shattered, when word got out that there had been problems between a Wellakhit citizen and a Sunborn too highly placed.

  So Rho kept his ridiculous and impossible wishes to himself and concentrated on doing his learning-work well, noting (as if from a distance) the wary glances of those who studied with him. If he had to be Sunborn, he would be as good at it as he possibly could be.

  Rho sighed, stood away from the tree, straightened himself (pausing to brush off some of the feathertree pollen, which even in that short time had dusted him well with crimson) and moved back through the carmine shade toward the path. He had other business besides worrying about his own troubles. Our whole and proper occupation, his father always said, is worrying about others’ wellbeing.

  …And they know it, his mother would add under her breath, nearly in a growl.

  The thought made Rho smile for a moment as brushed the feathertree fronds aside and stepped onto the path again. Because of his seniority, the title and position of Sunlord had more or less inevitably been settled on Rho's father. (”A whole twenty-one tendays and a hand of days longer than mine,” Rho’s mother would murmur any time the subject came up, “you mean that seniority?”—while looking side-eyed and accusatory at the Sunlord.) But those who thought that Nelaid ke Seriv had bonded himself to the Lady Miril am Miril simply for the exalted stature of her bloodline and the color of her hair were normally jolted out of the impression within seconds of meeting her. If Rho had her schedule for today sorted out correctly in his head, she would be expecting him back to the city house about now. And one does not keep the Queen of Wellakh waiting…

  For the moment the path was empty except for him, so for a few tens of paces Rho strolled with his eyes down on the gravel, scuffing at the bright red pollen, here drifted in places a handspan deep. His mother, when she came this way and thought no one would see her, liked to scuff through the stuff and send it flying. Every now and then when Miril would be moving casually around the city house or their rooms on the other side of the world in Sunplace, picking through his father’s always-scattered paperwork while tidying her own, Rho would see not the woman offhandedly helping manage the business of a planet, but the woman plopping herself down in their common rooms in some chair carved by one of the planet’s great artists, pulling her shoes off and shaking out handfuls of ruby dust.

  Rho smiled at the image, which would have completely confused some of the upper-level governmental types who came wandering in and out of the city house between dawn and noon, the Wellakhit business day. Certainly everyone high up in Wellakh’s government knew quite well that if you were to convince the Lord Nelaid of anything, you had to first make it through the tangled, razor-edged hedge of questions and proofs that Miril am Miril would erect before you—behind which she would sit at her ease, watching for signs of poor reasoning, weakness or uncertainty. If you won through, she would then direct the interviewee to her royal spouse for the binding decision on whatever matter was at hand, for all the world as if her intervention had been a mere formality.

  But everyone who dealt with the ruler (or rulers) of Wellakh knew the truth of the business… and some of them much disliked the arrangement. One world, one ruler, they would intone. Rho snorted. As if half the Sunlords’ spouses haven’t wound up running things too. What’s a Lord to do? Keep their King or Queen in the cupboard until the Sunwatch passes to their heirs?

  The path was nearing the edge of the park, where the wind had less trouble getting in among the trees and the feathertree pollen had mostly blown away, leaving Rho no more of it to kick through. He sighed and gazed across the broad path that surrounded the park, and the pale-metalled road that surrounded it and separated the park from the block of townhouses across the way, one of them being the Sunlords’ city residence.

  All these houses were alike, each one a narrow white frontage with classic elective windows faired into the smooth stone, each with its little walled courtyard in front of it, and each with a broad two-leaved door in the wall facing onto the road, and a smaller postern door to one side. And even as Rho looked across to it, up to one of these postern doors from the intersection down the street to the right came a tall woman dressed in a light shortsleeved workaday tunic and loose trousers, with knee-length silver hair tied back in a tail. As she paused in front of the postern she began shifting a carrier bag from one hand to the other so she could touch the sensor plate that would open the door—

  And suddenly several people in dull-colored street clothes were coming toward her from behind, from either side of Rho, from other entries to the park. All of them were staring at her, intent, in a hurry—

  No, Rho thought, and broke into a run. He gasped in a breath and then caught it, strangling the urge to shout, because what if it distracts her—!

  One of the men hurrying toward Miril pulled something out of his robes, small and dark and rounded, easy to hide. Energy weapon, Rho thought, sprinting toward the rearmost of the men, gasping for breath again, mepi no!

  The bag fell from Miril’s hand. She turned in a whirl of long tunic and hair and made a small swiping gesture with the now-free hand. The three men in motion kept going toward her, and then, as she swiftly sidestepped, kept going past her without volition, like market-show puppets with their strings cut. All together they crashed to the ground, rolled once or twice depending on how fast they’d been going, and were still.

  Miril stood looking down at them with an expression Rho couldn’t remember having seen before: annoyance, mixed with a very peculiar tenderness, as if she was somehow actually sorry for the ingrates who had just been intent, at the very least, on hurting her, if not killing her. Then her shoulders slumped a bit, and she turned to pick up her bag again by its handles. She looked down into it and tilted her head back in the little gesture that for her meant “This is such a nuisance…”

  Rho’s momentum meanwhile brought him running nearly straight into his mother before he could stop himself. The main doors to the inside courtyard were already opening and a few of the house staff were coming out in haste to deal with the unconscious men… so that Rho didn’t even have the satisfaction of being able to grab her and hug her and call her mepi. Instead all he could do was take hold of her upper arms—decorously, formally, in the way one member of the Sunborn greeted another in public—and say in the royal recension of Wellakhit, “Queenly mother, are you unhurt?”

  “Unhurt, noble son,” Miril said in her soft voice, looking around her as if completely unmoved by what had happened. “But what about you? You’re pale. And you’re having trouble breathing?”

  There was no question of that, because while attacks like this happened to his parents all the time—in casual conversation they just called them “events”—this was the first time Rho had ever had one happen right in front of him. Now he felt as if he’d been punched in the chest. In fact he felt exactly the same way he had all those years back when someone in first-learners’ school had truly punched him in the gut… just before the learning-master
and a flock of proctors had appeared from nowhere to snatch the other boy away and surround Rho, babbling “Are you all right?” at him as if they were very, very afraid of something.

  But their fear then had nothing on Rho’s fear now. It had him rooted to the spot, holding his mother’s arms tightly enough that he could actually feel the pulse of the big arteries in them. The steady pulse reassured him for the moment. Later, though… later would probably be another story, but he would deal with that when he came to it.

  He swallowed and held himself a bit straighter. “It’s not— No,” he said after a moment, getting enough control over his lungs again to stop that concerned look on Miril’s face: a look that hadn’t so much as crossed it while armed would-be killers were rushing at her. “I am well enough, my Queen.”

  She touched his face and then turned away, brushing a strand of that long silver hair out of her eyes as she turned to watch the house staff taking care of business. One steward had come out carrying a few small crushcubes, one of which he now began unfolding into a floater pallet that would hold and restrain one of the attackers.

  In the distance Rho could hear a faint echo of the alert tone used by the city’s Watch cruisers. “They seem to be running a little later than usual today,” Lady Miril said as the staff started loading the first unconscious man onto the pallet. “The traffic was troublesome down around the market earlier. But at least I’d taken care of all my meetings and finished my walk, and I managed to get some of that fruitcloth your royal father likes, so the trip wasn’t wasted.“

  The noise of the approaching city-Watch cruisers got louder, and much louder, and very much louder, all in the space of the few seconds it took for Lady Miril to pick up the bag she’d put down, which had not just the fruitcloth but a couple of long rolls of bark-bread in it. That was a favorite snack of Rho’s, but now with sudden intensity he found himself hating the very sight of it, as acquiring it had brought his mother into danger.