“You read a good name-tag, kid,” Miz said, winking at him.
“Yeah,” Cenuij said. “Stick with us, we’ll make you a waiter. Oh. You are a—”
Sharrow waved them both to be quiet. “Yes,” she said, staring rather blearily at the youth.
“Phone call for you, Commander. Military.” The young waiter scurried back into the bistro.
Sharrow looked puzzled. She put her hand into the pocket of her uniform jacket, which was hanging over the back of her seat. She winced and grimaced, then brought her hand out covered in red goo. “What miserable scumbag put ghrettis sauce all over my fucking comm set?” she roared, standing and letting the red sauce drip onto the pavement.
“Shit,” Miz said in a small voice. “I thought I did that to Dloan’s jacket, back at the inn.”
“Dloan’s?” Sharrow shouted at him. She pointed at Dloan’s uniform. “How many bars on his jacket? One! How many on mine? Two!” she yelled, pointing at them with her other hand.
Miz shrugged, smiling. “I thought I was seeing double.”
“Fucking double guard duties,” Sharrow muttered as she strode past him toward the bistro interior. “Get that shit out of my pocket; now!”
“Must be strong stuff, that ghrettis sauce,” she heard Dloan musing. “Mil comm set’s supposed to be waterproof to a pressure of…”
Inside the bistro it was quiet and dark; only the staff were there. “Thanks, Vol,” she said to the proprietor as she took the phone.
“Commander Sharrow here,” she said, nodding appreciatively to Vol when he handed her a cloth for her hand.
She closed her eyes as she listened. After a while she said, “Comm set broke down, sir. No idea why, sir.” Her eyes screwed tighter. “Possibly enemy action, sir.”
She wiped her hand and nodded again to Vol, who went to sit at the far end of the bistro with the rest of the staff.
She glanced back through the bistro’s windows to the street at the group, who were trying to sort out whose cap was whose. She smiled, watching them, then returned her attention to the phone. “Yes, sir! On our way, sir,” she said, and made to put the phone down. “I beg your pardon, sir?” She frowned at her reflection on the other side of the bar, visible through the glasses and between the up-ended barrels. “The doc? I mean, surgeon-commander…of course, sir.”
She looked at her reflection again, shrugged at herself.
“Yes,” she said into the phone. “Hi, doc; what’s the problem?” She leaned on the bar, pushing her cap up and rubbing her face. “What—? Oh, the check-ups.” She grinned at her reflection. “What is it; somebody taken a rad-blast, or are we talking exotic diseases?”
She listened for half a minute or so.
She watched the reflection of her face in the mirror go pale.
After a while she cleared her throat and said, “Yes, I’ll do that, doc. Of course.” She started to put the phone down again, then stopped and said, “Thanks, doc,” into it, and only then put it back behind the counter.
She stood there for a moment, staring at her image in the mirror. She glanced down at her shirt. “Shit,” she whispered, looking back up to her reflection. “And you’re pickling the little fucker.”
Vol came back round the other side of the bar with a tray full of dirty glasses. She started when she saw him, then leaned over, beckoning.
“Vol; Vol!” she whispered.
The aproned proprietor, burly-fit and placid as ever, leaned over to her and whispered back, “Yes, Commander?”
“Vol, you got anything’ll make me sick as a lubber?”
“Sick as a lubber?” he said, looking puzzled.
“Yes!” she whispered, glancing out at the others. “Filthy gut-grenaded, throat-scouring, turned inside-out sick!”
Vol shrugged. “Too much drink usually does the trick,” he said.
“No!” she hissed. “No, something else!”
“Stick your fingers down your throat?”
She shook her head quickly. “Tried that as a kid; got it to work on my half-sister, but never on me. What else?” She glanced at the others again. “Quickly!”
“Very salty water,” Vol said, spreading his hands.
She slapped him on the shoulder. “Fix me enough for two.”
She turned and walked toward the door, hesitated, then bit her lip and put her hand into a trouser pocket. She pulled out a coin and clutched it in her hand as she went out to the others. They looked up at her. Miz was still scraping her jacket pocket clean of sauce; the comm set lay on the table covered in red, like something butchered.
She spread her arms. “Well, they still haven’t sorted out the situation, guys,” she told them. There were various mutters, mostly of disapproval. “They’re still talking,” she said. “But meanwhile the festivities continue; looks like another tour at least. We’re overdue at Embarkation Asshole now.” She sighed. “I’ll go phone a truck.” She hesitated, then went up to Miz and presented the coin in her hand to him. “Toss that,” she told him.
Miz looked round the others. He shrugged, tossed the coin. She looked at how it landed on the table. She nodded and turned to go.
“Yes?” Miz said pointedly.
“Tell you later,” she told him, and went back into the bistro.
“Thanks, Vol,” she said, taking the glass of cloudy water from him and heading for the toilet. “Phone us a military truck, will you?” she called. She took a preparatory sip of the salted water. “Yech!”
“Commander Sharrow!” Vol called after her. “You said make enough for two; is that all for you?”
She shook her head. “Not exactly.”
“Bleurghch! Aauullleurch! Hooowwerchresst-t-t!” she shouted down the toilet-hole, and for a few moments, as her stomach clenched again (and she thought, Hell, maybe this’s doing the little bastard more harm than the booze would have), she listened to the noises she was making, and remembered the game they’d been playing, and actually found it all ridiculously funny.
Zefla watched Sharrow looking at the facade of what had been the Bistro Onomatopoeia, and which was now an antique bookshop.
Sharrow shook her head.
“Oh well,” she said. She looked down at a coin she held in her hand. “Guess that proves it.” She put the coin back in her pocket. “You never can go back.” She turned and walked away.
Zefla looked a moment longer at the bookshop sign, then hurried after Sharrow.
“Hey,” she said. “Look on the bright side; we’re looking for a book, and what do we find in one of our old drinking haunts? A bookshop!” She slapped Sharrow across the shoulders. “It’s a good omen, really.”
Sharrow turned to Zefla as they walked. “Zef,” she said, tiredly. “Shut up.”
11
Deep Country
She sat at the window of the gently rocking train, watching the Entraxrln roll past outside, the airily tangled, cable-curved vastness of it and the sheer size of the twisting, fluted nets of the composite trunks making her feel tinier than a doll; a model soldier in a train set laid out on the floor of a quiet, dark forest that went on forever.
Here the Entraxrln seemed much more mysterious and alien than it did in Malishu; it imposed itself, it seemed to exist in another plane of being from mere people, forever separated from them by the titanic, crushing slowness of its inexorably patient metabolism.
From this window she had watched hours of it pass slowly by; she had seen distant clouds and small rainstorms, she had watched herds of tramplers bound away across the floor-membrane, she had gazed at trawler-balloons and their attendant feaster birds cruising the high membranes, she had caught sight of the high, dark freckles on the lofted membranes that were glide-monkey troupes, peered dubiously at herds of wild jemers loping across open spaces with a strange, stiff-legged gait, knowing that they would be riding the tamed version of the awkward-looking animals, and she had seen a single great stom—black, somehow ferocious even as little more than a speck, and with a wingsp
an great as a small plane—wheeling around far above, effortlessly weaving its way between the hanging strings and ropes of growing cables.
Zefla sat opposite Sharrow, one elbow on the opened windowledge, a hand supporting her head. The warm breeze blew in, disturbing the blond fall of her hair. Her other hand held a portable screen. Her head rocked slightly from side to side in time with the creaking, flexing carriage.
The compartment door opened squeakily and Cenuij looked in.
“Welcome to nowhere,” he said, smiling brightly. “We just left the comm net.” He withdrew and closed the door.
Zefla looked vaguely surprised, then went back to her novel. Sharrow pulled out her little disposable phone. Its display flashed Transception Problem. She clicked a few buttons experimentally, then shrugged and put the phone away in her satchel.
Sharrow glanced at her watch. Another four hours on this train, another day on a second train, then two days after that they might just be in Pharpech if all went according to plan.
She looked out the window again.
“And this is the view from the back of the Castle; that’s looking south. No; north. Well, more northeast, I suppose. I think.” Travapeth handed the holo print to Zefla, who glanced at it and smiled again.
“Enchanting,” she said. Zefla passed the print across the conference table to Sharrow, who hardly bothered to glance at it.
“Hmm,” she said, stifling a yawn. She passed the print to Cenuij, sitting round the table from her. He looked at it. There was a sour, disgusted look on his face. He studied the holo as if trying to decide whether to tear it up, spit on it or set it on fire. Eventually he put it face down on a large pile of prints lying on the table.
They had hired a small office in a modern block in the city center; Travapeth—clad in an ancient and grubby professorial robe that had probably once been maroon—had visited two days in a row, drinking large amounts of trax wine on each occasion and holding forth at some length—and with gradually increasing volume—on any and every aspect of the Kingdom of Pharpech that Zefla, Sharrow or Cenuij could think of.
Miz and Dloan, meanwhile, were tracking down any further information they could find on the Kingdom in databases and publications; they were also completing the travel arrangements.
Zefla and Sharrow had been worried Cenuij would take exception to Travapeth’s bombastic demeanor; with Cenuij, things could always go either way when he met people who had as high an opinion of themselves as he did of himself. They had waited until Cenuij was in a particularly good mood before they introduced the two men to each other. It had worked; Cenuij seemed almost to have warmed to the old scholar, but today, after lunch in a private booth in a nearby restaurant, Travapeth had insisted on showing them the flat and holo photographs he had taken on his visits to the Kingdom, from the first time he’d gone there as a student fifty years earlier, up to his last visit, five years ago.
“Ah,” Travapeth said. He brought another carton of prints up from the floor at his side, depositing the carton on the table and delving inside. “Now, these are especially interesting,” he said, plonking the thick wad of prints on the polished bark table. Dust puffed out from between the holos. Sharrow sighed. Cenuij, a look of horror on his face, glanced beneath the table to see how many more cartons Travapeth had down there.
“These date from twenty years ago,” Travapeth said, helping himself to a blister-fruit from the bowl.
Something small and red wriggled out from a hole in the bottom of the carton the prints had been in; it ran fast and eight-legged across the table toward the edge. Travapeth brought his hand holding the blister-fruit crunching down on the insect as he said, “These date from the time of His Majesty’s coronation.”
Zefla stared at the old scholar’s hand as he rolled it back and forth, making sure the insect was fully squashed.
“As I say,” Travapeth went on, absently wiping his red-stained hand on a different colored stain already decorating the thigh of his robe, “I was personally invited to the coronation by His Majesty.” He polished the blister-fruit on roughly the same part of the robe he’d wiped the insect on, and then bit into the fruit, talking through the resulting yellowish mush and waving the dripping fruit around. “I shink thish shirst one ish a short of zheneral zhiew…”
Sharrow put one hand under her armpit and her other hand to her brow.
“Enchanting,” Zefla said, passing the print to Sharrow. It was sticky. Sharrow gave it to Cenuij.
“Ah,” Travapeth said, swallowing. “Now; still the coronation day, but here we have the ceremony of the holy book being brought out of the vault.”
Sharrow looked up.
“Holy book?” Zefla said brightly. She accepted the print from the scholar’s thin, age-spotted hand.
“Yes,” Travapeth said, frowning at the holo. “The monarch has to be sitting on the book, on the throne in the cathedral when he is crowned.” He handed the print to Zefla, a leery smile on his face. “Sitting on it with fundament bared, I may add,” he added. “The monarch has to bare his nether regions to the skin cover of the book.” The elderly scholar took another deep bite from the blister-fruit and sat smiling at Zefla as he masticated.
“Fascinating,” Zefla said, glancing at the print and passing it on. Sharrow looked at it. She sensed Cenuij waiting, tense, in the other seat.
The slightly blurred holo showed a crowd of serious looking but colorfully attired men holding the poles supporting an opened palanquin in which something light brown and about the size of a briefcase sat, resting on a white cushion. The by-now-familiar ramshackle bulk of Pharpech Castle rose in the background, at the end of the small city’s main square. She quickly turned the holo from side to side and up and down, but the image of the book in the palanquin didn’t reveal any more from other angles.
“What sort of holy book is it?” Sharrow asked. “Which one?” She pretended to stifle another yawn, and smiled apologetically at Travapeth as she did so. She handed the holo to Cenuij, who looked at it then put it down. He jotted something in his notebook.
“I have to confess, dear girl, that I don’t know,” Travapeth admitted, frowning. He took another bite from the fruit. “Shome short of ancient tome shupposhed to have been a gisht shrom—” He swallowed. “—the Ladyr Emperor to the first of the Useless Kings.” Travapeth waved the dripping fruit around. Zefla flinched, then calmly wiped her eye. “I of course offered to inspect the book for His Majesty, to determine its identity, provenance and importance, but in this was refused, unusually.” Travapeth shrugged. “All I know is that it’s an encased book, some sort of precious metal, probably silver. It’s about as thick as your hand, as long as your forearm and its breadth is roughly twenty-eight and half centimeters.”
Cenuij sat back in his seat, fingers drumming on the table. Sharrow felt herself evaluating the scene, trying to gauge just how much interest they appeared to be showing. Too little might look as suspicious as too much.
Travapeth crunched into the core of the blister-fruit, frowned and spat a few seeds into the carton the holos had come from. “The book’s never been opened,” he said. “Rumor is it’s booby-trapped, but anyway it’s locked and naturally there’s no key. I might have at least been able to establish the work’s identity had the old King not had it recovered—or rather additionally covered—in the skin of some revolutionary peasant leader some years before I first traveled to the Kingdom.” Travapeth sighed.
“It’s a very colorful ceremony, the coronation, isn’t it?” Zefla said, turning to Sharrow and Cenuij and tapping her notebook stylo on the table’s polished surface. Sharrow nodded (thinking good girl), as Zefla turned back to Travapeth, who was taking aim at the office’s litter bin, stationed beneath a window near one corner of the room. He threw the core of the blister-fruit; it thumped soggily against the wall above and fell behind the bin. Travapeth shook his head.
“It would make very good screen,” Zefla said to him. She glanced round at Sharrow and Cenuij. ?
??I’d just adore to record something like that ceremony,” she said (Sharrow and Cenuij both nodded). “So ethnic,” Zefla said to Travapeth, her hands out in front of her as though supporting two large invisible spheres. “So…so real.”
Travapeth looked wise.
“I don’t suppose,” Zefla said, “the current King is thinking of resigning or anything, is he?”
Travapeth wiped his hands on the front of his robe and shook his head. “I believe not, dear girl. The present King’s grandfather did abdicate; he took himself off to a monastery to pursue a life of holy despisal. But King Tard…well, he’s not really the religious type.” Travapeth frowned. “He does believe in their god, of course, but I don’t believe it would be inaccurate to term his religious observances perfunctory rather than assiduous.”
“They don’t ever re-enact—?” Zefla began. But Travapeth boomed on.
“Of course, sudden conversions to extreme holiness have been known to occur in the present royal family, usually following traumatic events in the life of the noble person concerned—involvement in an unsuccessful coup, being discovered with somebody else’s spouse or one’s own mount, finding one has been made general of an army being sent to root out guerrillas and revolutionaries in deep country; that sort of thing. But for a monarch to take up holy orders is relatively rare; they tend to die in harness.” Travapeth’s eyebrows rose. “Literally so in the case of the King’s great-grandfather, who accidentally strangled himself to death in a very unlikely position while suspended from the ceiling of a room in a house of less than spotless reputation.” The old scholar gave a sort of grunting laugh and grimaced dubiously at Zefla as he took a drink from a goblet of trax wine, and gargled with it before swallowing.
“Well,” Zefla said. “Perhaps we might be able to catch some other ceremony. If we do get permission to work there.”
“Certainly,” Travapeth said, belching. “There’s the annual re-dedication of the cathedral, the maledictions before the annual glide-monkey hunt—that’s quite colorful, and the hunt itself is exciting…Well, they call it a hunt; it’s more of a spectator sport. Then there’s the New Year mass-executions day, the debtors’ flogging festival…and there are always events celebrating the birth of a new royal baby or the King’s acquisition of some new piece of technology.”