You’re not getting Renna! That voiceless cry lent Maia strength. Adrenaline overwhelmed pain as she whirled her stave to assist the woman to her left, who had helped her the moment before. Now Thalla was corps à corps with a grim-faced reaver several centimeters taller and much heavier. Seeing no other way, Maia cut a sharp blow to the raider’s thigh. The woman buckled. Taking advantage, Thalla used the yoke portion of her bill to pin her foe to the ground. An eye-flick of thanks was all she could spare.
“Virgie, watch out!”
The yell accompanied a flash overhead. Swiveling barely in time, Maia ducked a noose cast by an attacker riding one of the foe-vessel’s mast spars. It was a nasty tactic that risked strangling the victim. Maia seized the dangling cord and gave a savage yank with all her might. The screaming invader fell a long time before crashing into a tangle of fellow red-bandannas.
Something changed in the roar of combat, palpably spreading from that event. The rising tide, till now fed by pressure below, seemed to lose momentum. For an instant, the rail near Maia was clear for meters in both directions. “Well done!” Naroin cried, offering Maia a grin.
There was just time for a moment’s thrill before another voice—Renna’s, she realized—screamed one chilling word: “Treason!”
The starman’s cry made Maia glance back just in time to flinch as Thalla collided with her, backpedaling before a fierce assault. Maia’s former cottage-mate desperately fended blows from an unexpected quarter, behind the defensive line. Struggling to keep her footing, Maia gasped, recognizing the assailant …
Baltha! The hireling’s trepp bill whirled like the vanes of a wind generator, slapping and toying with Thalla’s frenetic efforts to parry. Nor was Baltha alone in her betrayal. With a pang, Maia saw the entire squad of Southern Isles mercenaries had donned scarlet bandannas, falling on the defenders from behind. Several headed straight toward where Naroin and most of the other rads went on, blithely unaware, confidently dealing with more groping hands at the rail.
“Watch out!” Maia yelled. But her voice was overwhelmed by the roar of confused battle. Trapped behind Thalla, she knew there was nothing she could do for either of her comrades. Fractions of seconds seemed to stretch endlessly as she worked her way around writhing, struggling forms, trying to bring her own weapon up, watching helplessly as Naroin was struck from behind with an unsporting head shot that toppled the small woman like a poleaxed steer.
Maia yelled in rage. She found her opening and launched herself at the bosun’s assailants in a fury, catching one with a belly blow that sent her to the deck, gasping. The other southerling parried Maia’s strike and fought back with an expression that shifted from grimness to amusement as she recognized the young fiver who liked playing men’s games.
The ironic smile faded as Maia attacked in a blur of energetic, if inexpert blows, driving the traitor away from Naroin’s crumpled form, step by step, right up to the portside rail.
More red bandannas appeared. Maia managed to slash one pair of hands a glancing stroke while still pressing her attack on the turncoat. The hands fell away, to be replaced by others. This time a younger face, soot-stained, flushed with heat and adrenaline, hove into view.
Maia blocked a heavy buffet from her chief opponent’s bill, and caught it in the yoke-hook of her own. Twisting with all her strength, she managed to yank her foe’s trepp away.
That face …
To evade Maia’s followup, the panicked southerling flung herself over the railing. Maia wasted no time swiveling to divert her strike at the newcomer now struggling to bring her own weapon up.
Maia froze, halting as if she had been quick-frozen. Sweat-blinded, save through a crimson-rimmed tunnel of terror and wrath, she peered at the face—a mirror to her own.
“Le … Le …” she goggled.
Recognition also lit the young reaver’s eyes. “I’ll be a bleedin’ clan-mother,” she said with a wry, familiar smile. “It’s my atyp twin.”
Too stunned to move, Maia heard Renna’s voice shouting through her muzzy shock. But Leie’s presence filled every space, engulfing her brain. Glancing past Maia’s shoulder, her sister said, “You better duck, honey.”
Slowly, glacially, Maia tried to turn.
There was a distant crumping tumult of polished wood striking somebody’s skull. She had come to know the nuances of such sounds, and pitied the poor victim.
Dimly perceived movement followed, as if viewed through an inverted telescope. Perplexed by the suddenly approaching deck, Maia wondered why her muscles weren’t responding, why her senses all seemed to be shutting down. She tried speaking, but a faint gurgle was all that came out.
Too bad, she thought, just before thinking nothing at all. I wanted to ask Leie.… We have so much … catching up to do. …
Peripatetic’s Log: Stratos Mission: Arrival + 50.304 Ms
Myth envelopes the male-female bond. Countless generations since supposedly winning conscious control over instinct, most hominids still cling to notions of romantic love and natural conception—the way of a woman with a man. Even where societies encourage experimentation and alternative lifestyles, the presumption remains that a parental pair, one male and one female, compose continuity’s spindle.
On Stratos, few songs or stories celebrate what is elsewhere obsession. Males are necessary, sometimes even liked, but they are peripheral beings, somewhat quaint. Anachronistic.
Passion has its brief seasons on Stratos. Otherwise, this world does not seem to miss it.
Still, partnership happens, often through business or cultural alliances. Caria’s leading symphony orchestra has long consisted mostly of musicians from four extraordinarily gifted groups—O’Niels provide the strings, Vondas focus on woodwinds, Posnovskys at horns, and Tiamats on percussion. (I hope to hear them if I’m still here in autumn, when the season starts.)
On occasion, clans join in even closer associations. Relationships that might be called romantic, marital. They may even share offspring.
It’s simple, in practice. First, both clan A and clan B arrange to have clutches of summer offspring. If clan A has a boy child, it does the usual thing, raising him carefully and then fostering him to one of the oceangoing guilds. Except in this case, he promises to return one summer, when he’s older.
Meanwhile, clan B has had summer daughters. One is chosen to receive the best education a variant girl can get. She is sponsored a niche, even a winter pregnancy, all so she’ll be ready to repay the debt when the son of house A returns from sea. Any child resulting from that union is then technically the heterozygous grandchild of both clans.
It makes for interesting comparisons. If one likens clans to individuals, that makes the girl-intermediary the equivalent of an egg, and the boy a sperm. The two clans fill the role of lovers.
At times I find all of this quite boggling.
How much more can I take? I must keep my mind on the job. Yet that job is to investigate the intimate workings of this human subspecies. I cannot escape the subject of sex, from dawn to dusk. Sometimes my head feels like it’s spinning.
If only the women of this world weren’t so beautiful.
Damn.
19
That thing’d break up in the first good squall. Or even sooner, when you drop it over th’ cliff. How d’you plan on steerin’ the smuggy thing?”
With a bang that made Maia wince, the big sailor, Inanna, slammed down the rock she had been using for a hammer. “Bosun, you just shut up. You’re no shipcrafter, an’ you sure ain’t givin’ orders no more.”
Maia watched Naroin consider this, then reply with a shrug. “It’s your necks.”
“Ours to risk,” Inanna assented, gesturing at the other women, hard at work cutting saplings and dragging them toward an area laid out with chalk lines on the rocky bluff. “You two are free to come along. We can use good fighters. But all the arguin’ and votin’ are over. Either put up or take your samish asses to ’tarkal hell.”
Prepar
ing to give a hot reply, Naroin cut short when Maia grabbed her arm. “We’ll think about it,” Maia told Inanna, trying to pull Naroin away. The last thing anybody needed, right now, was to have a shouting match come to blows.
For a long moment, Naroin seemed rooted in stone, unmovable until she abruptly decided to let it go. “Huh!” she said, and swiveled to march up the narrow, forested trail toward the campsite. Despite being taller, Maia had to hurry to keep up. All this noise and shouting wasn’t easing the headache she had nursed since awakening, days ago, with a concussion, a captive of reavers.
“They may have the wrong plan,” Maia suggested, trying to calm Naroin. “But it keeps them busy. There’d be fights and craziness without something to do.”
Naroin slowed to look at Maia, and then nodded. “Basic command principle. Shouldn’t need you to remind me.” She glanced back at where the women sailors of the Manitou labored alongside a half-dozen of Kiel’s younger rads, cutting and trimming saplings with primitive tools, laying out the beginnings of a rude craft. “I just hate to see ’em try something so dumb.”
Maia agreed, but what to do? It had all been decided at a meeting, three days after the reavers dumped them on this spirelike isle whose name, if any, must be lost to another age. Naroin had argued for a different scheme—the building of one or two small boats, which a few selected volunteers might sail swiftly westward in search of help. That proposal was voted down in favor of the raft. “Everyone goes, or nobody!” Inanna declared, carrying the day.
Left out was how they proposed to make such a big contraption seaworthy, then get it down the sheer fifty-meter drop, and away from the spuming interface of wave and rock. Only one place along the forested rim of the jagged promontory featured a way down. There a winch had lifted the prisoners and their provisions, just before the Reckless and the captured Manitou sailed off. Inanna and her friends still schemed to use the lifting machine, despite its metal casing, locks, and earlier warnings of booby traps. In the long run, however, they might have to resort to building a primitive crane of timbers and vines.
“Idiots,” Naroin muttered. She thrashed at the low foliage by the trail, using a short stave she had trimmed just after landfall. It was no trepp bill, but the small, wiry seawoman seemed more comfortable with it in her hands. “They’ll never make it, an’ I’m not drownin’ with ’em.”
Maia was getting fatigued with Naroin’s impatient temper. Yet, she did not want to be alone. Too many dark thoughts plagued her when solitude pressed close. “How can you be sure? I agree your plan would have been better, but—”
“Bleeders!” Naroin slashed with her staff, and leaves flew. “Even a bunch o’ frosty jorts oughta see that raft’s all wrong. Say they do get it down, an’ the sea don’t smash it right up. They’ll just get plucked again, like floatin’ melons. If the pirates don’t grab the chance to send ’em straight to Sally Jones on the spot.”
“But we haven’t seen a sail since we were marooned. How would the reavers know when and where to find them unless …” Maia stopped. She stared at Naroin. “You don’t mean …?”.
The bosun’s lips were thin. “Won’t say it.”
“You don’t have to. It’s vile!”
Naroin shrugged. “You’d do the same, if you was them. Trouble is, there’s no way to tell which one it is. Or maybe two. Didn’t know any o’ them var hands before I hired on, at Artemesia Bay. Can’t be sure of any of ’em.”
“Or even me?”
Naroin turned and regarded Maia straight on. Her inspection was long and unsettlingly sharp. After five seconds, a slow smile spread. “You keep surprisin’ me, lass. But I’d bet my sweet departed berry on you, despite you bein’ no var.”
Maia winced. “I told you before. That was my twin.”
“Mm. So I recall from th’ old Wotan days. At least, it’s what you two said then. I admit, that wasn’t clone-sister sweetness I saw, when she dumped you here.”
Maia managed not to flinch a second time. The reminder was like stretching new scar tissue. The memory was still intense, of Leie’s soot-streaked face, peering at her through that concussion haze, murmuring in a low, urgent voice of the necessity of what she was about to do.
“I’m happy you’re alive, Maia. Truly, it’s a miracle. But right now you’re a smuggy nuisance to have around. My associates have a thing about people who look too much alike, if you know what I mean. Even if they believed me, there’d be suspicions. My plans would be set back. I can’t afford to have you screw things up, right now.”
There had been a wet, sticky sensation. Something tingling slathered across Maia’s face, and a burning sensation crossed her scalp. At the time, Maia had been semidelirious, frantic to speak to her unexpectedly living sister, unable to comprehend why her mouth was gagged. Only much later, when she had a chance to scrub at one of the island’s tiny freshwater springs, did she figure out what Leie had done. Using coal tar and other chemicals from the Reckless engine room, Leie had darkened Maia’s skin and hair, altering her appearance in a makeshift but effective way.
“This won’t fool anyone for long,” Leie had murmured, examining her handiwork. “Maia, be still! As I was saying, it’s a lucky break your captain chose to flee right toward our base. No one’ll have a chance to look at you closely before we dump off the first group of prisoners.”
From Leie’s remarks, Maia later gathered that the reaver base lay amid this very archipelago of devil-fang peaks. Apparently, the pirates planned to divide their captives, interning some on isolated isles. First to be marooned would be those least dangerous to the raiders’ plans—Manitou’s women crew members. While sorting through the wounded, Leie had managed to put Maia with that group.
“You’d never believe what I’ve been through since the storm split us up, Maia. While you were following your bosun friend around, leading the peaceful life of a deckhand, I’ve seen and done things …” Leie had shaken her head, as if at a loss to explain. “You wouldn’t like where we’re taking the rads and their space-pervert creature, so I’ve arranged for you to be dropped off where you’ll be more comfortable. Just sit tight till I figure things out, you hear me? By summer I’ll get you to some town. We’ll think up a way for you to help me with my plan.”
Leie’s eyes had been filled with that old enthusiasm, now enhanced by a new, fierce determination. Through a fog of injury, pain, and confusion, Maia wondered what adventures had so changed her sister.
Then the import of Leie’s words sank in. Leie and the reavers were going to put her ashore, and sail off with Renna! Kiel and Thalla and the men of the Manitou, as well. That was when Maia started struggling against her bonds, grunting to tell Leie she had to speak!
“There there. It’ll be all right. Now, Maia, if you don’t settle down, I’m going to have to … Aw, hell, I should’ve expected this. You always were a wengel-headed pain.”
Maia caught a scent of strong herbs and alcohol as Leie pushed a soaked cloth over her nose. A cloying, choking sensation spread through the nasal passages and sinuses, making her want to cough and gag. Events got even more vague after that, but still, she had a distinct image of her sister leaning forward, kissing her on the forehead.
“Nighty-night,” Leie murmured. Darkness followed.
The memory of pain and betrayal still hurt Maia, darkening and confusing her natural joy to find that Leie lived. But there was another matter. Burning foremost in her mind was one fact she focused on. An innocent, helpless man was being held captive somewhere on one of those other isles, without a friend in the world.
Except me. I must get to Renna!
Through the blue funk of her thoughts, she followed Naroin along a trail overlooking the bright sea, walking in silence back to where the reavers had dumped enough food and supplies to last until the next promised shipment. Lean-tos and makeshift tents made a ragged circle, offset from the trees. A cook fire was tended by one crew-woman whose ankle had been broken in the failed battle. She looked up desultori
ly and nodded without a word, going back to stirring lentils in a slowly simmering pot.
Naroin returned to her own chief pastime, using sharpened pieces of chert to shave a tree limb into a primitive bow. Not a legal weapon. But then, it wasn’t legal, either, for the reavers to have dumped them here. Seizing the Manitou should have been followed by “dividing the cargo,” then letting its crew and passengers go.
The special nature of this “cargo” made that unlikely, especially when it was one eagerly sought by every political force on the planet. When Maia last saw Captain Poulandres, hands bound on the quarterdeck of his own ship, the red-faced man had been threatening to raise hell, building toward a full summer rage by sheer anger. The reavers ignored him. Clearly, Poulandres had no idea what trouble he was in.
“It’s for huntin’,” Naroin said about the bow and slim arrow shafts. No one had seen anything larger than a bush shrew on the isle, but nobody complained. Anyway, the authorities were far away.
Maia threw herself on the blanket she had spread under a rough lean-to, atop a bed of shredded grass and leaves. Of her three possessions, her clothes and Captain Pegyul’s sextant she kept with her always. The last item, a slim book of poems, she had found on her person as a ship’s boat rowed the captive sailors to internment. During the ride up the creaky winch-lift, she had managed to focus on one randomly chosen page.
Have I been called? What is the aim
Of thy great heart? Who is to be
Bought by thy passion? Sappho, name
Thine enemy!
For whoso flies thee now shall soon pursue;