March Upcountry

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Eleanora awoke to a high-pitched, atonal chanting and a low-tempo, muffled drum beat. Her eyes flickered open, and she froze in adrenaline shock at the sight of a swaying vampire larva. The perspective was weird as the flickering firelight of full dark combined with the swaying dance of the creature to make it seem a strange hallucination. It seemed to shrink to the size of a caterpillar, and then swelled suddenly up to the size of a... Mardukan in a mask.

The dancer swayed in the firelight, and as Eleanora blinked at him the long, dripping fangs of the beast were revealed as a crown about his head, the camouflaged body as a painted wrap. Behind the shuffling figure were more dancers: a giant, pincer-armed beetle, a two-armed snake like the legendary Naga, and a low, writhing, six-armed beast whose maw was filled with sharklike teeth.

The fog of sleep and firelight, the swaying of the dancers, the singing and drumbeats were hypnotic. Eleanora lay in a spell, trapped by the symbolism of the animistic rite as the drumbeats increased and the singing shifted through patterns of atonality. The tempo increased, and the dancers' rhythm became more frenzied, until with a final burst of song, now perfectly blended with the drums in tone and pitch, there was a final crash, and the dancers froze.

The audience was left with a feeling of pleasant incompleteness as the dancers departed and conversation broke out among the Marines and Mardukans. Eleanora tried to shake off her fog and looked around for something to help with the attempt, only to find herself rather dreamily contemplating a boot.

She blinked, and her eyes moved upward. The female Marine to whom the boot was attached stood at parade rest by her head, one arm behind her back, plasma gun cocked forward. Eleanora looked around, and discovered another one—this one a grenadier—at her feet. How interesting.

She sat up and rubbed her eyes. It didn't help. She still felt like death warmed over, but at least her brain was a little clearer than before the nap. She looked up at the Marine at her head.

"How long was I out?" She hadn't checked the time at any point in the afternoon, so the current time, halfway through the local evening, told her nothing. Nor did her question communicate very much to the Marine. It came out mostly as a croak, so she cleared her throat and tried again.

"Corporal... Bosum, isn't it? How long was I sleep? And, thank you, but guarding me was probably unnecessary."

"Yes, Ma'am." The Marine looked down and smiled. "But His Highness told us to make sure no one bothered you." She thought about the other question. "I don't know how long you were asleep before we got here, but we've been on guard for three hours."

"Five or six, then," was Eleanora's mumbled guess. "I should feel better than this after five hours' sleep," she muttered plaintively.

She stood up, and every joint in her body seemed to creak or pop. Her legs hurt so much that she felt lightheaded and queasy, and she swayed for a moment until the Marine corporal steadied her.

"Take it easy, Ma'am," the plasma gunner said. "You'll get used to it after a few more days."

"Oh, sure," Eleanora said bitterly. "That's easy for you Marines to say. You've got so many nanites running around in you, you're practically cyborgs! And you're trained for this, too."

"But we don't start out that way," the male Marine put in. "They start us off systems-free in Basic."

"He's right," Bosum agreed with nasty cheerfulness. "We all go through this the first few days in Basic. It's just your turn," she added with an evil grin.

O'Casey twisted her torso and gasped as she felt her back crack in half a dozen places. Rotating her shoulders, arms, and legs extracted more crackling, and she decided that with a shower, a bath, another shower, a couple of tubes of heating gel, and two days' sleep, she'd be just fine. Barring that...

"Where is His Highness?" she asked, as she glanced around the clearing without seeing either Roger or Pahner, who was bound to be close by the prince.

"I'll lead you to him," the plasma gunner replied, and the male Marine fell in behind as they wove their way across the stockade.

Roger, Pahner, Kosutic, and the senior Mardukans were in a nearby hut, watching the festivities. Roger looked up from feeding the lizard he'd apparently adopted and smiled as Eleanora hobbled in.

"Ms. O'Casey," he said formally. "You're looking better for your nap."

The creature swarmed onto his lap at the chief of staff's approach and hissed at her faintly. His Highness tapped it lightly on the head, and it ducked down and stretched out its neck to sniff at her. Apparently, it decided she was part of the pack, because it gave one last sniff, then twisted around and curled up on the prince's lap, exactly as if it belonged there.

"I feel like death warmed over," she answered. "If I'd known you were going to be taking me on adventure tours, I would have had the appropriate upgrades before we left."

She nodded at Matsugae as he handed her a plastic cup of water and two analgesic tablets.

"Thank you, Kostas." She took the tablets and a sip of the water, which was surprisingly cool. It had obviously been chilled by one of the bladders. "Thank you again."

She looked around the gathering. The Marines were scattered throughout the village, interacting much more fully with the Mardukans than they had been. Some of the humans were cleaning weapons, and some were quite obviously on alert, but most were socializing. Poertena had produced a pack of cards from somewhere and appeared to be teaching some of the younger Mardukan warriors poker while other Marines were demonstrating their entertainment pads or simply talking. Warrant Dobrescu had apparently set up an aid station and was doing a little "hearts and minds" work.

Dobrescu, it turned out, was a pearl beyond price in more ways than one. The chief warrant officer had gone to flight school as a second career track after spending sixteen years as a Marine Raider medic.

Normally, the Navy provided Marine units in combat environments with corpsmen, but the Raiders were the Empire's version of Saint special ops teams. They were designed to be out of contact with support for long periods of time, and thus needed specially trained medics who could do more than slap on a bandage and decide who went into the cryochambers and who didn't. The training was intense, and included everything from primitive methods of reducing gangrenous infection to serving as the hands of a remote surgeon for thoracic trauma surgery.

Since Prince Roger's company had never been intended for detached duty, none of the Powers That Were had ever considered the need to assign it an integral, dedicated medic. Unfortunately, DeGlopper's sickbay attendants had been needed to support the transport's final battle, and somehow not even Eva Kosutic had thought to point out that the company would require medical services on the planet. All of which made it extremely fortunate that Dobrescu was along.

At the moment, he was examining the Mardukans who were willing to let him and doing his best to repair the various wounds and infections that any jungle inflicts on its inhabitants. As in other jungles, both on Earth and other planets, surface lesions were the main complaint. The Mardukans' mucus covering helped in that regard, however, and only in spots where the coating had been damaged did the sores break out.

Dobrescu had analyzed the lesions and determined that they were primarily fungal in nature. A universal antifungal cream seemed to work on them and didn't cause negative side effects. Better yet, the cream was produced by yeast in an auger jelly which could be replaced with sterilized meat broth. That made it one of the few regenerating systems that they had, which meant he could be relatively spendthrift in its use. Since some of the Marines already sported similar infections, that was going to be a good thing.

With the cream and self-sealing bandages, he'd just about fixed all the simple problems in the village. There were a few advanced cases of infection that he was less sanguine about, and a couple of other cases where something was attacking eyesight had him scratching his head. But in general, he'd done good service to the village that day.

"What did I miss?" O'Casey asked as she watched the slight warrant officer packing up his tools. He'd obviously worked through the celebrations that she had slept through, and the realization made her even less thrilled with her physical weakness.

"Oh, you would've loved it," Roger admitted in Standard English, scratching the lizard's head. It hissed with pleasure and rubbed its chin on his chest.

"We had a nice little ceremony. Very symbolic of all sorts of things, I'm sure. Cord forswore all previous allegiances in my favor, while I promised not to throw his life away pointlessly. Then we had all sorts of bonding oaths: the usual suspects. Last, but certainly not least, it involved eating a small bit of slime from Cord's back," he finished with a grimace.

Eleanora chuckled and seated herself carefully on the ground with the rest of them. The hut was walled on three sides by bundled branches with mud packed in the cracks between them. There was a rolled up covering for the open front, woven out of some sort of fibrous grass or leaves, and the sleeping areas arranged along the back and sides were also covered with the woven mats, which appeared to be designed to be staked down. It would be an awfully warm way to sleep in the muggy heat.

"I'm sorry I missed it," she said, and meant it. She'd initially taken her third doctorate in anthropology because it was a traditional complement to sociology and political science. But she'd quickly found that one developed a richer and fuller appreciation for the politics of a culture if one looked at its underlying premises, which was what anthropology was all about.

"I don't understand all the fuss." Roger pulled his hair up off his neck. "I can't believe they treat all visitors like this."

"Oh, I'm sure they don't," O'Casey said as her mind gradually cleared of fog. "You do understand the meaning of all this ritual, don't you?"

"I suppose I don't," Roger said. "I don't really understand most rituals, even the ones on Earth."

O'Casey decided that it would be more discreet to avoid agreeing overenthusiastically with him, and took another sip of her warming water while she considered how best to respond.

"Well," she said after a moment, "this was a sort of cross between a wedding and a funeral."

"Huh?" Roger sounded surprised.

"Did Cord maybe take something off or put it on? Or maybe give something to someone?"

"Yeah," Roger said. "They gave him a different cape to replace the one he was carrying. And he gave a spear and a staff to one of the other Mardukans."

"I talked a little to Cord on the way down from the plateau," Eleanora said. "This asi thing is a form of slavery or bondage—you realized that?"

"Today I did," Roger said angrily. "That's crazy! The Empire doesn't permit slavery or bondage of any form!"

"But this isn't an imperial world," she pointed out. "We've barely planted the flag, much less started on socialization. On the other hand, I think you misunderstand the situation. First of all, let's take a look at the definition of slavery."

She considered how to go about explaining slavery, marriage, and the similarities between them that had existed for thousands of Earth's years to a man of the thirty-fourth century.

"For most of history—" she began, and saw him glaze over immediately. Roger was always interested in the battles, but get onto the societal structures and faction struggles, and he completely lost interest.

"Listen to me, Roger," she said, meeting his eye. "You just married Cord."

"What?"

"That got your attention, didn't it?" she asked with a laugh. "But you did. And you also took him as your slave. For most of history, the rituals of marriage and slavery were practically identical. In this case, you performed an action that required that you 'marry' the person whom you'd saved."

"Oh, joy," Roger said.

"And you are now required to 'keep' that person, for the rest of his life and into the afterlife, most likely."

"Another mouth to feed," Roger joked.

"This is serious, Roger," his chief of staff admonished, but she couldn't help smiling. "By the same token, Cord must obey your wishes religiously. And to his family, it's as if he's dead. Which is probably the origin of the big festivities at weddings, by the way. In most primitive cultures, there are practically no rituals involved in marriage bindings, but elaborate rituals for funerals. There's a strong theory that the wedding rituals eventually evolve out of the funeral rites because the bride and groom are leaving their families... just as would have been the case if they'd died.

"Now, I used the term 'marriage' because I knew it would get your attention," she admitted. "But I could have said 'permanently binding oath of fealty,' 'slavery,' or 'indenture.' The rites and customs for all of them were practically identical in most early human societies, and we've found parallels for that in almost all of the primitive nonhuman societies we've studied. But any way you look at it, it's a very important sacrament for the Mardukans, and I'm really sorry I missed it," she concluded.

"Well, the dance of the forest animals was apparently the climax," Roger told her. He picked up one of the blackened bits of meat and popped it into his mouth, following it up with one for the tame lizard. Her explanation made quite a few little bits which had been confusing him fall into place. He would worry about the ones that hadn't at another time.

"But I'm glad you woke up," he went on. "If you hadn't, I would have had to send someone for you. Cord has just broached an interesting subject."

"Oh?" She picked a leftover bit of fruit off a plate... and set it back down hastily when she saw that several of the "seeds" were moving.

"Yes. It seems that his tribe is in need of some advice."

The hut was hot, dark, and close.

The party had gradually broken up, and as people left the square, the front covers of the huts had come down. They were, indeed, designed to be pegged down, and the Mardukans had also laced up the sides. Most of the Marines were packed into the huts, while a few were in tents, but at least the entire company was under cover, and most of its members were asleep.

But in Delkra's hut, the futures of both the company and Cord's tribe were under discussion as Cord explained why the interruption of his vision quest and his departure with Roger constituted such a bitter blow.

"In the days of my father's father's father, traders came up the Greater River to the joining of Our River and the Greater River. Traders had long come upriver, but this group made peace with my father's father's father and took up residence on a hill at the joining. We brought the skins of the grack and the atul-grack, the juice of the yaden cuol and the meat of the flin. In my father's day, I was sent to Far Voitan to study the ways of the sword and the spear.

"The traders brought with them new weapons, better metals. Cloths, grains, and wine. The tribe flourished with the wealth that was brought in.

"But since that time, the town has grown greater and greater, and the tribe has become weaker and weaker. During my father's time, we were at our greatest. We were more numerous and more fierce than the Dutak to the north or the Arnat to the south. But as the city has grown, its people have taken more and more of our hunting lands. Starvation has loomed more than once, and our reserves are always scanty."

The shaman paused and looked around, as if trying to avoid an awkward truth.

"My brother has been overgenerous in this celebration. The barleyrice is purchased from the city, Q'Nkok, at great price. And the other foods... . There will be hungry mothers in weeks to come.

"The problem is the city. It has extended its fields too far, yet that's hardly the worst of it. Their woodcutters are not to go beyond a certain stream, and even in that stretch where they are permitted, they are only to take certain trees. That is the treaty. For that, we are to be given certain goods—iron spears and knives, cooking pots, cloth. Yet these goods have become of worse and worse quality, while the woodcutters drive deeper and deeper into the forest. They do not restrict themselves to the proper trees, and their intrusion drives out the game or kills what remains."

He looked around again and clapped his hands.

"If we kill the woodcutters, even if they are beyond the line, it breaks the treaty. The Houses of Q'Nkok will gather their forces and attack." He ducked his head in shame. "And we will lose. Our warriors are able, but we would have to defend the town, and we would lose.

"But if we attack Q'Nkok, without warning, we can take it by surprise as the Kranolta took Far Voitan." He looked around the humans, and Roger was forced to recognize that a fierce look was nearly universal. "Then we feed on their hoarded grains, kill the men, enslave the women, and take the goods that are rightfully ours."

"There is, however, a problem with this," Delkra said, and leaned forward as he took over the thread. "We will lose many warriors even if the attack is successful, and then Dutak and Arnat will fall upon us like flin on a dead flar beast. We didn't know which way to go, so Cord went on a spirit quest in search of a vision of guidance. If he'd seen peace in the future, it would have been peace. If he'd seen war, it would have been war."

"What if he hadn't come back?" Pahner asked. "He nearly didn't."

"War," Delkra replied simply. "I'm in favor of it anyway. Without Cord to hold me back, we would have attacked last year. And, in all honesty, probably have been eaten by Dutak and Arnat."

"Make peace with Dutak and Arnat," Roger said, "and attack in concert."

He felt O'Casey's elbow connect with his ribs and realized what he'd just said. He supposed that advising the local barbarians to cooperate with one another in the destruction of this Q'Nkok would hardly advance the cause of civilization, and he remembered what his chief of staff had said about barbarism and infant mortality rates. On the other hand, these "barbarians" were his friends, and he didn't particularly care for either of the possible outcomes Cord had described.

He started to glower at her, then stopped and looked down at his hands, instead. His history teachers—including Eleanora, when she'd been his tutor—had harped incessantly and unpleasantly on a ruler's responsibility to weigh the possible impact of his decisions with exquisite care. He'd never cared for their apparent assumption that he wouldn't have weighed such matters carefully without their pointed prodding. But now he suddenly realized just how easy it was for purely personal considerations to shape a decision without the decider's even realizing it had happened.

He drew a deep breath, decided to keep his mouth shut, and went back to scratching his pet dog-lizard. He'd seen larger specimens around the camp, and if this one grew as large as some of the larger ones, it was going to be interesting. The biggest had been the size of a big German Shepherd, and the species seemed to fulfill the role of dogs in the camp.

Delkra, unaware of the prince's thoughts, clapped his hands in resigned negation.

"The chiefs of both tribes are crafty. They have seen us weaken. They feel that if they just let us wither a bit more, they can take our lands and squabble over the leftovers."

"So how can we help?" Captain Pahner asked. From his tone, Roger decided, it was pretty obvious that he knew at least one way they could help... and just as obvious that he was unwilling to do so.

"We don't know," Cord admitted. "But it's obvious from your tools and abilities that you have great knowledge. It was our hope that if we described our quandary to you you might see some solution which has eluded us."

Pahner and Roger turned as one to look at Eleanora.

"Oh great," she said. "Now you want my help."

She thought about what the two Mardukans said. And about city-state politics. And about Machiavelli.

"You have two apparently separate problems," she said after a moment. "One on the receiving side, and one on the giving side. They might be connected, but that's an assumption at this point."

She spoke slowly, almost distantly, as her mind ranged back and forth over the Mardukans' description of events, and she scratched the back of her neck while she thought.

"Have you been actively offered offense in your dealings with the rulers of the city-state?"

"No," Cord answered definitively. "I have been to Q'Nkok twice recently to discuss the problems with the quality of the tribute and the unlawful intrusions of the woodcutters. The King has been very gracious on both occasions. The common people of the city don't like us, nor we them, but the King has been very friendly."

"Is wood-cutting a monopoly?" Eleanora asked. "Does one house cut all the wood? And what are these houses? How many are there, and how are they organized?"

"There are sixteen Great Houses," Cord told her. "Plus the House of the King. There are also many smaller houses. The Great Houses sit on the Royal Council and... there are other rights attached to them. No single house has the right to cut wood, and the woodcutters who offend are not from a single house."

"And the tribute? Is it supplied by the Houses or by the King?"

"It is supplied by the King through taxes on the Houses, Greater and Lesser. But it is usually conveyed by one of the Great Houses."

"Expansion of the city-state is inevitable," she said after a moment's thought. "And as long as they need the wood as a resource, they'll encroach farther and farther on your lands. Wars are usually about resources—about economics—at the base. But your concerns are certainly justified.

"I can't know what's going on from here. As I understand it, we're traveling to this Q'Nkok next?" She made it a question and looked at Pahner, who gave a confirming nod and then looked at their hosts.

"I ask that you hold off on any attack until we visit the city," the Marine said. "I ask for two reasons. One is that we need to trade for goods and animals to make our journey; Q'Nkok is the closest and most accessible source of what we need. The second is that we might be able to come up with a third option that would avoid the needless bloodshed of a war. Let us do a reconnaissance of the town, then we'll send back word of what we find. As outsiders, we might be able to discern something that you can't."

Delkra and Cord looked at one another, and then the chief clapped his upper hands in agreement.

"Very well, we won't rush to attack. When you go to the town, I will send some of my sons with you. They'll aid you on the trip and act as messengers." He paused, and looked around at the gathered humans, and his body language was sober. "I hope for all our sakes that you are able to find a third way. My brother is asi now, and dead to his family, but it would grieve him if his family were dead in truth."