A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows

XIV

First the planet loomed immense in heaven, clouds and ice lending it a more than Terran whiteness against which the glimpsed oceans became a dazzlingly deep azure. Then it was no longer ahead, it was land and sea far below. When Flandry and Kossara bailed out, it became a roar of night winds.

They rode their gravbelts down as fast as they dared, while the Hooligan vanished southward. The chance of their being detected was maybe slight, but not nonexistent. They need have no great fear of being shot at; as a folk who lived with firearms, the Dennitzans were not trigger-happy. However, two who arrived like this, in time of emergency, would be detained, and the matter reported to military headquarters. Hence Kossara had proposed descending on the unpeopled taiga north of the Kazan. The voivode of Dubina Dolyina must have patrols and instruments active throughout his district.

Even at their present distance from it, she and Flandry could not have left the vessel secretly in an aircraft. The captain of the picket ship which contacted Chives had settled for a telecom inspection of his papers, without boarding, and had cleared him for a path through atmosphere which was a reasonable one in view of his kinetic vector. Yet orbital optics and electronics must be keeping close watch until ground-based equipment could take over.

Hoar in moonlight, treetops rushed upward. The forest was not dense, though, and impact quickly thudded through soles. At once the humans removed their space-suits, stopping only for a kiss when heads emerged from helmets. Flandry used a trenching tool to bury the outfits while Kossara restowed their packs. In outdoor coveralls and hiking boots, they should pass for a couple who had spent a furlough on a trip afoot. Before they established camp for what remained of the night, they’d better get several kilometers clear of any evidence to the contrary.

Flandry bowed. “Now we’re down, I’m in your hands,” he said. “I can scarcely imagine a nicer place to be.”

Kossara looked around, filled her lungs full of chill sweet-scented air, breathed out, “Domovina”—home—and began striding.

The ground was soft and springy underfoot, mahovina turf and woodland duff. A gravity seven percent less than Terran eased the burden on backs. Trees stood three or four meters apart, low, gnarly, branches plumed blue-black, an equivalent of evergreens. Shrubs grew in between, but there was no real underbrush; moonlight and shadow dappled open sod. A full Mesyatz turned the sky nearly violet, leaving few stars and sheening off a great halo. Smaller but closer in than Luna, it looked much the same save for brilliance and haste. No matter countless differences, the entire scene had a familiarity eerie and wistful, as if the ghosts of mammoth hunters remembered an age when Terra too was innocent.

“Austere but lovely,” the man said into silence. His breath smoked, though the season, late summer, brought no deep cold. “Like you. Tell me, what do Dennitzans see in the markings on their moon? Terrans usually find a face in theirs.”

“Why … our humans call the pattern an orlik. That’s a winged theroid; this planet has no ornithoids.” A sad smile flickered over Kossara’s night-ivory lips. “But I’ve oftener thought of it as Ri. He’s the hero of some funny ychan fairy tales, who went to live on Mesyatz. I used to beg Trohdwyr for stories about Ri when I was a child. Why do you ask?”

“Hoping to learn more about you and yours. We talked a lot in space, but we’ve our lifetimes, and six hundred years before them, to explain if we can.”

“We’ll have the rest of them for that.” She crossed herself. “If God wills.”

They were laconic thereafter, until they had chosen a sleeping place and spread their bags. By then the crater wall showed dream-blue to south, and the short night of the planet was near an end. Rime glimmered. Flandry went behind a tree to change into pajamas. When he came back, Kossara was doing so. “I’m sorry!” he apologized, and wheeled about. “I forgot you’d say prayers.”

She was quiet an instant before she laughed, unsteadily but honestly. “I was forgetful too. Well, look if you wish, darling. What harm? You must have seen the holograms … ” She lifted her arms and made a slow turn before his eyes. “Do you like what you’re getting?”

“Sun and stars—”

She stopped to regard him, as if unaware of chill. He barely heard her: “Would it be wrong? Here in these clean spaces, under heaven?”

He took a step in her direction, halted, and grinned his most rueful. “It would not be very practical, I’m afraid. You deserve better.”

She sighed. “You are too kind to me, Dominic.” She put on her bedclothes. They kissed more carefully than had been their way of late, and got into the bags that lay side by side in the heavy shadow of a furbark tree.

“I’m not sleepy,” she told him after a few minutes.

“How could I be?” he answered.

“Was I wanton just now? Or unfair? That would be much worse.”

“I was the Fabian this time, not you.”

“The what? … Never mind.” She lay watching the final stars and the first silvery flush before daybreak. Her voice stumbled. “Yes, I must explain. You could have had me if you’d touched me with a fingertip. You can whenever you ask, beloved. Chastity is harder than I thought.”

“But it does mean a great deal to you, doesn’t it? You’re young and eager. I can wait awhile.”

“Yes—I suppose that is part of what I feel, the wanting to know—to know you. You’ve had many women, haven’t you? I’m afraid there’s no mystery left for me to offer.”

“On the contrary,” he said, “you have the greatest of all. What’s it like to be really man and wife? I think you’ll teach me more about that than I can teach you about anything else.”

She was mute until she could muster the shy words: “Why have you never married, Dominic?”

“Nobody came along whom I couldn’t be happy without—what passes for happy in an Imperial Terran.”

“Nobody? Out of hundreds to choose from?”

“You exaggerate … Well, once, many years ago. But she was another man’s, and left with him when he had to flee the Empire. I can only hope they found a good home at some star too far away for us to see from here.”

“And you have longed for her ever since?”

“No, I can’t say that I have in any romantic sense, though you are a lot like her.” Flandry hesitated. “Earlier, I’d gotten a different woman angry at me. She had a peculiar psionic power, not telepathy but—beings tended to do what she desired. She wished on me that I never get the one I wanted in my heart. I’m not superstitious, I take no more stock in curses or spooks than I do in the beneficence of governments. Still, an unconscious compulsion—Bah! If there was any such thing, which I positively do not think, then you’ve lifted it off me, Kossara, and I refuse to pursue this morbid subject when I could be chattering about how beautiful you are.”

At glaciation’s midwinter, a colter of ice opened a gap in the Kazan ringwall. Melt-begotten, the Lyubisha River later enlarged this to a canyon. Weathering of mostly soft crater material lowered and blurred the heights. But Flandry found his third campsite enchanting.

He squatted on a narrow beach. Before him flowed the broad brown stream, quiet except where it chuckled around a boulder or a sandbar near its banks. Beyond, and at his back, the gorge rose in braes, bluffs, coombs where brooks flashed and sang, to ocherous palisades maned with forest. The same deep bluish-green and plum-colored leaves covered the lower slopes, borne on trees which grew taller than the taiga granted. Here and there, stone outcrops thrust them aside to make room for wild-flower-studded glades. A mild breeze, full of growth and soil odors, rustled through the woods till light and shadow danced. That light slanted from a sun a third again as bright as Sol is to Terra, ardent rather than harsh, an evoker of infinite hues.

Guslars trilled on boughs, other wings flew over in their hundreds, a herd of yelen led by a marvelously horned bull passed along the opposite shore, a riba hooked from the water sputtered in Flandry’s frying pan while a heap of cloud apples waited to be dessert—no dismally predictable field rations in this meal. He gestured. “How well a planet does if left to its own devices,” he remarked.

“Nature could take a few billion years for R D,” Kossara pointed out. “We mortals are always in a hurry.”

He gave her a sharp look. “Is something wrong?” she asked.

“N-no. You echoed an idea I’ve heard before—coincidence, surely.” He relaxed, threw a couple of sticks on the fire, turned the fillets over. “I am surprised your people haven’t long since trampled this area dead. Such restraint seems downright inhuman.”

“Well, the Dolyina has belonged to the Vymezals from olden time, and without forbidding visitors, we’ve never encouraged them. You’ve seen there are no amenities, and we ban vehicles. Besides, it’s less reachable than many wild lands elsewhere—though most of those are more closely controlled.”

Kossara hugged knees to chin. Her tone grew slow and thoughtful. “We Dennitzans are … are conservationists by tradition. For generations after the Founding, our ancestors had to take great care. They could not live entirely off native life, but what they brought in could too easily ruin the whole little-understood ecology. The … zemly-oradnik … the landsman learned reverence for the land, because otherwise he might not survive. Today we could, uh, get away with more; and in some parts of the planet we do, where the new industries are. Even there, law and public opinion enforce carefulness—yes, even Dennitzans who live in neighboring systems, the majority by now, even they generally frown on bad practices. And as for the Kazan, the cradle of mankind out here, haven’t heartlands often in history kept old ways that the outer dominions forgot?”

Flandry nodded. “I daresay it helps that wealth flows in from outside, to support your barons and yeomen in the style to which they are accustomed.” He patted her hand. “No offense, darling. They’re obviously progressive as well as conservative, and less apt than most people to confuse the two. I don’t believe in Arcadian Utopias, if only because any that might appear would shortly be gobbled up by somebody else. But I do think you here have kept a balance, a kind of inner sanity—or found it anew—long after Terra lost it.”

She smiled. “I suspect you’re prejudiced.”

“Of course. Common sense dictates acquiring a good strong prejudice in favor of the people you’re going to live among.”

Her eyes widened. She unfolded herself, leaned on her knuckles toward him, and cried, “Do you mean you’ll stay?”

“Wouldn’t you prefer that?”

“Yes, yes. But I’d taken for granted—you’re a Terran—where you go, I go.”

Flandry said straight to her flushed countenance: “At the very least, I’d expect us to spend considerable time on Dennitza. Then why not all, or most? I can wangle a permanent posting if events work out well. Otherwise I’ll resign my commission.”

“Can you really settle down to a squire’s life, a storm-bird like you?”

He laughed and chucked her under the chin. “Never fear. I don’t imagine you’re ambitious either to rise every dawn, hog the slops, corn the shuck, and for excitement discuss with your neighbors the scandalous behavior of ’Uncle Vanya when he lurched through the village, red-eyed and reeling from liter after liter of buttermilk. No, well make a topnotch team for xenology, and for Intelligence when need arises.” Soberly: “Need will keep arising.”

Graveness took her too. “Imagine the worst, Dominic. Civil war again, Dennitza against Terra.”

“I think then the two of us could best be messengers between Emperor and Gospodar. And if Dennitza does tear loose … it still won’t be the enemy. It’ll still deserve whatever we can do to help it survive. I’m not that fond of Terra anyway. Here is much more hope.”

Flandry broke off. “Enough,” he said. “We’ve had our minimum adult daily requirement of apocalypse, and dinner grows impatient.”

The Vymezal estate lay sufficiently far inside the crater that the ringwall cut off little sky—but on high ground just the same, to overlook the river and great reaches of farm and forest. Conducted from an outer gate, on a driveway which curved through gardens and parkscape, Flandry saw first the tile roof of the manor above shading trees, then its half-timbered brick bulk, at last its outbuildings. Situated around a rear court, they made a complete hamlet: servants’ cottages, garages, sheds, stables, kennels, mews, workshops, bakery, brewery, armory, recreation hall, school, chapel. For centuries the demesne must have brawled with life.

On this day it felt more silent and deserted than it was. While many of the younger adults were gone to their militia units, many folk of every other age remained. Most of them, though, went about their tasks curt-spoken; chatter, japes, laughter, song or whistling were so rare as to resound ghostly between walls; energy turned inward on itself and became tension. Dogs snuffed the air and walked stiff-legged, ready to growl.

At a portico, the gamekeeper who accompanied Flandry explained to a sentry: “We met this fellow on the riverside lumber road. He won’t talk except to insist he has to see the voivode alone. How he got here unbeknownst I couldn’t well guess. He claims he’s friendly.”

The soldier used an intercom. Flandry offered cigarettes around. Both men looked tempted but refused. “Why not?” he asked. “They aren’t drugged. Nothing awful has happened since mobilization, right?” Radio news received on his minicom had been meager during the seven planetary days of march; entering inhabited country, he and Kossara had shunned its dwellers.

“We haven’t been told,” the ranger grated. “Nobody tells us a thing. They must be waiting—for what?”

“I’m lately back from an errand in the city,” the guardsman added. “I heard, over and over—Well, can we trust those Impies the Gospodar called in along with our own ships? Why did he? If we’ve got to fight Terra, what keeps them from turning on us, right here in the Zorian System? They sure throw their weight around in town. What’re you up to, Impie?”

A voice from the loudspeaker ended the exchange. Danilo Vymezal would see the stranger as requested. Let him be brought under armed escort to the Gray Chamber.

Darkly wainscoted and heavily furnished like most of the interior, smaller than average, that room must draw its name from rugs and drapes. An open window let in cool air, a glimpse of sunlight golden through the wings of a hovering chiropteroid. Kossara’s father stood beside, arms folded, big in the embroidered, high-collared shirt and baggy trousers of his home territory. She resembled her uncle more, doubtless through her mother, but Flandry found traces of her in those weather-darkened craggy features. Her gaze could be as stern.

“Zdravo, stranac,” Vymezal said, formal greeting, tone barely polite. “I am he you seek, voivode and nachalnik.” Local aristocrat by inheritance, provincial governor by choice of Gospodar and popular assembly. “Who are you and what is your business?”

“Are we safe from eavesdroppers, sir?” Flandry responded.

“None here would betray.” Scorn: “This isn’t Zorka-grad, let alone Archopolis.”

“Nevertheless, you don’t want some well-intentioned retainer shouting forth what I’ll say. Believe me, you don’t.”

Vymezal studied Flandry for seconds. A little wariness left him, a little eagerness came in. “Yes, we are safe. Three floors aloft, double-thick door, for hearing confidences.” A haunted smile touched his lips. “A cook who wants me to get the father of her child to marry her has as much right to privacy as an admiral discussing plans for regional defense. Speak.”

The Terran gave his name and rank. “My first news—your daughter Kossara is unharmed. I’ve brought her back.”

Vymezal croaked a word that might be oath or prayer, and caught a table to brace himself.

He rallied fast. The next half-hour was furiously paced talk, while neither man sat down.

Flandry’s immediate declaration was simple. He and the girl lacked accurate knowledge of how matters stood, of what might happen if her return was announced. She waited in the woods for him to fetch her, or guide Vymezal to her, depending on what was decided. Flandry favored the latter course—the voivode only, and a secret word to the Gospodar.

He must spell out his reasons for that at length. Finally the Dennitzan nodded. “Aye,” he growled. “I hate to keep the tidings from her mother … from all who love her … but if she truly is witness to a galaxy-sized trick played on us—we’ll need care, oh, very great care”—he clapped hand on sidearm—“till we’re ready to kill those vermin.”

“Then you agree Zorkagrad, the planet’s government and armed service, must be infested with them?”

“Yes.” Vymezal gnawed his mustache. “If things are as you say—you realize I’ll see Kossara first, out of your earshot, Captain—but I’ve small doubt you’re honest. The story meshes too well with too much else. Why is our crisis hanging fire? Why—Ha, no more gabble. Tomorrow dawn I’ll send … him, yes, Milosh Tesar, he’s trusty, quick of wit and slow of mouth—I’ll send him on a ‘family matter’ as you suggest. Let me see … my wife’s dowry includes property wherein her brother also has an interest—something like that.”

“Kossara will have to lie low,” Flandry reminded. “Me too. You can call me an Imperial officer who stopped off on his liberty to give you a minor message. Nobody will think or talk much about that. But you’d better squirrel me away.”

“ ‘Squirrel’?” Vymezal dismissed the question. “I understand. Well, I’ve a cabin in the Northrim, stocked and equipped for times when I want to be unpestered a while. Includes a car. Ill flit you there, telling the household I’m lending it to you. They can’t see us land at Kossara’s hideout, can they?”

“No. We foresaw—” Flandry stopped, aware of how intent the stare was upon him. “Sir, I’ve told you she and I aim to get married.”

“And aren’t yet—and nobody wants a hedge-wedding, not I myself when I don’t know you.” The voivode sketched a grin. “Thanks, Captain. But if you’ve told me truth, she needs a marksman more than a chaperone. Anyhow, whatever’s between you two must already have happened or not happened. Come, let’s go.”