The Patrimony

19

Arhkeethoheeks Bili, Thoheeks and chief of Morguhn, Vahrohnos Deskati, Vahrohneeskos of the Order of the Golden Cat of the Confederation, Knight of the Most Noble Order of the Blue Bear of Harzburk, was nothing if not stubborn and set in his ways. Not even the rising wrath of his supreme overlord, Milo of Morai, High Lord of the Confederation, not even the vicious temper of the High Lady, Aldora Linszee Treeah-Pohtohmahs Pahpahs, could persuade him to leave Morguhn before the harvests were all in, the archducal taxes collected and his personal affairs set in order.

To one of the Undying High Lady Aldora’s more violent outbursts, he had replied with a calmness that further infuriated her, “Aldora, I don’t want to go north and become Prince of Karaleenos, and you well know it. I only do so out of loyalty to the Confederation and willingness to serve it when and as called upon.”

“But if go I must, then I’ll do it in my own way and at my own pace. There is much my son, Djehf, must know if he is to be a good chief and thoheeks of our clan. I must be certain that all sits well in Vawn and that young Thoheeks Tahm Adaimyuhn of Sanderz is adjusting well to his new and heavier harness of duty. At the same time, I must attend the thousand and one small but important functions of my present office, entertain my distinguished guests … and often waste precious time soothing the temper tantrums of one of them.”

The small, olive-skinned woman went livid and speechless with frustration and rage. She snatched her long belt dagger free of its case and made to slash its keen edge at Bili’s maddeningly unruffled face. But suddenly she became aware of the huge, slavering hound, stalking in from the next room, stiff-legged, with tail tucked and lips wrinkled up from the bared foam-covered teeth. Whirling, she flexed her knees and held her blade ready for stab or slash.

“Quick, Bili,” she said calmly, her temper dissipated in the urgency of the moment, “get a spear. I’ll hold him here. He looks to be gone mad.”

But he moved not a muscle, he only chuckled and, in less than the blinking of an eye … the hound was gone!

Aldora spun about, shouting, “Damn you, Bili Morguhn! Ahrmehnee magic! How dare you do that to me! Do you forget who I am?” She lunged upward at his body with the long dagger.

Still chuckling, he lightly skipped from the path of the thrust and struck the hand wielding it hard enough that the weapon went clattering into a corner. Then the delicate-looking little woman went for his face with her nails, but he clasped his arms around her, easily immobilizing both arms, while his questing lips found hers, locked upon them and remained for a long, long time, before wandering downward to pay brief court to a flat, tiny ear, and then burying themselves in the hollow of her throat.

Much, much later, as both lay, tired and disheveled, upon a badly rumpled bed, Aldora’s fingers traced the scars on his smooth, fair-skinned body, recalling that she had done so thirty-odd years before when this same, marvelous man had been a boy … no, never a boy, not him, not Bili! …

She sighed and lay back down beside him, snuggling to the hard warmth of his body. “How old are you now, Bili?”

He turned his head to smile down into her upturned, heart-shaped face. “Nearly fifty summers, my love. Why? Does this old man displease you?”

She shivered with thought of the recent pleasure he had given her and briefly raised her mindshield that he might know and be forever answered. “Oh, Bili, Bili, my own Bili,” she murmured with intense feeling. “Why could it have not been you, rather than this half-brother of yours?”

“I had almost forgotten, you know? Had almost ceased to remember just how wonderful, how complete and perfect it has always been with you … and only with you.”

In another part of the archducal hall, Milo of Morai—once Undying God of the Horseclans, now Undying High Lord of the Confederation, by his own reckoning, at least eight hundred years old—sipped wine and chatted with the three newest-found of his rare, mutant strain.

The tests devised by him and by Aldora and administered under their constant supervision had shown positive results in all three cases. The ancient High Lord was inordinately pleased and showed it plainly.

“Giliahna, Neeka, you’ll both love the new capital, Theesispolis, and especially the palace there. My wife, Mara, designed it and oversaw every step of its construction. And, speaking of Mara, she’ll be more than overjoyed to see you. She and Aldora, they … well, Aldora is seldom happy or contented for long and she envies Mara so much that about twenty years ago she tried to drown her—that being one of the few ways our kind can be slain. Since then, the two have consistently and most wisely avoided being in the same city at the same time.”

“I am, perforce, often in the western mountains on campaign and poor Mara grows lonely with only old Drehkos for company.” He took a long draft of the brandy-laced wine and clapped Tim Sanderz on the shoulder.

“As for you, Tim, you’re the incarnate answer to centuries of prayers. You enjoy campaigning and warfare. You’re good at it. You’re a natural leader and, moreover, you’re an experienced commander of organized troops, so presumably a good tactician. If you prove out as a strategist, as well, I may finally be able to get a few years of rest.”

“With Drehkos to govern the settled lands—something he’s quite skilled at—and you to command the armies and the frontier, Mara and I might go away for a while. We might sail out to the Islands or even clear across the Eastern Sea to the lands beyond—Ehspahneeah, Gahleeah or even Pahl’yos Ehlahs—it’s been centuries since either of us has seen those lands, or even been much beyond the borders of our own.”

Tim’s blue eyes were wide with amazement. “But … you mean you’d trust me with your entire military establishment, my lord Milo?”

“Tim, you’d better start remembering to call me Milo and comport yourself as the equal, the peer, that you all truly are.”

“With luck, we’ll have many centuries together, and even a single hundred years is a hellishly long time for one man to defer to another.”

“Yes, I’ll trust you with the armies … when you’ve proved you can handle them properly, win victories without too high a butcher’s bill, think for yourself, yet have the good sense to know when to accept and defer to the advice of your staff. But that will be five or ten years from now, Tim.”

“Immediately we all go back to the old capital, Kehnooryos Atheenahs, for the winter, you three will enter the Confederation Mindspeak Academy and we’ll then learn just what active and latent talents you each possess. But you’ll not only be studied, you’ll be taught, as well.”

“You’ll learn the many different levels of mental communication, and how to speak on two or three at the same time. You’ll be taught how to get around or through closed mindshields and, if you own the innate ability, how to do it without the shielded mind even knowing it. You’ll be taught to far-speak, and your range—with and without the added power of other minds—will be meticulously measured and recorded.”

“You may—one or two of you, anyway—learn to far-gather, though I confess we’ve had precious little success in teaching that highly esoteric skill. Those who have been able to learn already possessed the rudiments. The Academy simply honed an existing edge, as it were.”

Neeka shook her head slowly, then asked, “Lord, what is this far-gather? I’ve never heard the term.”

After long years with the arrogant, outspoken, bull-headed and often violent Aldora; with his loving but self-assured and frequently argumentative wife, the Undying High Lady Mara, Milo had felt instantly attracted to this quiet, humble and unassuming, basically gentle, raven-haired beauty. Though they two had been sharing a suite and a bed for some weeks, her public manner toward him remained one of humility and deep respect. He was becoming more and more fond of her and was seriously considering marriage to her after a few years, if Mara approved.”

“Far-gathering, Neeka, is the rare ability to mentally detect danger at distances and through many barriers. It is most applicable to soldiering and warfare and most useful therein. In the century or so of the Academy, the number of actual occurrences, either natural or induced, of real strength in its use has been pitifully small. All of those, saving only one, have been men.”

“That single exception was our present host’s first wife, Rahksahna Morguhn—Ahrmehnee-born, now deceased. Bili, himself, owns the strongest far-gathering talent ever recorded, yet none of his brothers so far tested has the power to any degree, and his three children by Rahksahna lack it entirely. I am now hoping against all the odds that Tim and Gil, as they both had the same mother as Bili, will prove latent far-gatherers.”

Milo drained off the other half of his goblet, then refilled it, continuing to talk while reaming his pipe and packing it with tobacco.

“You’ll learn to mindspeak with animals, not just horses and cats, but all manner of beasts. You’ll learn to see with others’ eyes, hear with their ears, smell with their noses, taste with their tongues and feel with their skins.”

His eyes caught Neeka’s and she lowered her gaze, flushing darkly, a small smile tugging at her lips. In their nights together, he had already commenced her education in those particular and erotically pleasurable directions.

“Finally, when you’ve absorbed all the Academy has to offer you, you’ll start learning languages and dialects. All of you know Mehrikan—Neeka knows one dialect, Gil two, and Tim five, but there are more than a dozen all told in the Confederation alone. You all can read and write and speak Southern Ehleeneekos, and Neeka knows the Northern dialect, but you’ll all have to learn the Island dialect, which differs markedly from mainland Ehleeneekos.”

“Tim and Gil speak a passable Ahrmehnee, already, and Neeka can quickly master it, no doubt, but you’ll all have to learn to read and write it, and that will take time, since they use an alphabet entirely different from Mehrikan and only distantly related to Ehleeneekos.”

“Neeka reads and writes Zahrtohgan, but she can’t speak it. Tim speaks Kweebehkeekos and Nyahgrahee, which are almost the same language, and a bastard pidgin-Zahrtohgan. The only language that at least one of you doesn’t have is English.”

All three looked puzzled at the unfamiliar word. Before any could frame the question, Milo explained.

“English was the language that was spoken and written by the people who dwelt on this continent almost a thousand years ago. The gullible and the superstitious of our time call those long-dead people gods, but they were not, any more than am I or are you. The Witch Kingdom, so called, deep in the southern swamps, is the only place that English still exists as a spoken language, though all the many Mehrikan dialects are its direct descendants.”

“If, after you’ve mastered all the more needful languages, you want to learn to speak English properly, fine, I’ll be happy to teach you … and I’m the only man outside the Witch Kingdom who can. But you must all learn to at least read English. Now and then, one or two or more of the ancient books turn up somewhere or other, my agents obtain them by hook or by crook and they are rushed to Theesispolis to be carefully preserved in the great library there, along with the volumes of my personal journal, which is also in English.”

“These books contain, oft-times, knowledge which has, does and will prove invaluable to us and our people over the centuries. So we must all have the ability to partake of it.”

All three nodded assent. Then Neeka’s brow wrinkled and she shyly asked, “But why learn all these other languages, my lord, when we can all mindspeak?”

Milo had arisen and was standing with his pipe stem in his mouth, its filled bowl inverted over a candle flame, while he sucked mightily and little spurts of wispy smoke jetted from his mouth.

Tim answered the question. “Because, Neeka, outside the Confederation, mindspeak ability is far less common than it is in our lands.”

Milo resumed his seat, he and his now well-lit pipe emitting clouds of fragrant, blue-gray smoke. He nodded. “Tim is right. But even in the Confederation, only a little more than half the people have real, everyday-usable mindspeak even though the percentage has been climbing every year for the last two hundred or more.”

“When I led the first ten thousand or so of the Kindred from the Sea of Grass and into Kehnooryos Ehlahs a bit more than two centuries ago, mindspeak—since it had long been a survival trait in the hard and too-often short life of the clanspeople on the prairies and high plains, as it was the means of communicating with their horses and the allied prairie cats—was present to some degree in between seventy and eighty percent of them.”

“But in the Southern Ehleenee, whom we conquered piecemeal, only one or two percent were accomplished mindspeakers, and even those with latent powers only brought the figure to something less than ten out of every hundred. There were two reasons for this: Since their culture differed so drastically from that of the Horseclans, they had no real, pressing need for the ability and so had never nurtured and developed it; and since their antique religion considered any unusual mental abilities to be an indication of witchcraft—for which ‘sin’ the penalties were harsh, hideous, agonizing and fatal—those who did possess mindspeak seldom used it.”

“As the Kindred and Ehleenee intermarried and interbred, the talent began to crop up with more frequency, especially among the nobility. Then, after I broke the power of the Ehleen Church a century and a half back; after I stripped their clergy of many of their ancient rights and privileges, revoked their tax-exempt status retroactively and seized much of their property for back taxes along with tons of gold and silver; after I disbanded and either killed or imprisoned their secret packs of night-riding terrorists; after I released the common Ehleenee from the Church’s emotional stranglehold and turned them against the clergy by exposing those clergymen for what they truly were—smugglers, brothel owners, receivers of stolen goods, extortionists, rapists and murderers, and most telling, slavers of the worst sort, who maintained a fleet of merchant ships to transport the children the priests demanded of their parishioners for ‘holy orders’ across the sea to be sold at auction; after all this had been done and most of the Ehleenee were truly free in both mind and body, the percentage of mindspeakers really began to climb.”

“But what I consider—as will you—progress is seldom comprehensible to those whose lives span only fifty or sixty years and often less. Nonetheless, the population of the Confederation now includes almost sixty percent mindspeakers, and that is a hopeful sign that, someday, all our people will share the same gift.”

In the late evening of yet another day, Milo sat with his pipe and a small goblet of fiery cordial, his nude, freshly bathed body wrapped against the chill of the night in a chamber cloak of silk and fur. His long, almost hairless, bare legs were extended before a fragrant fire of oak and apple wood.

Across the width of their chamber, warmed by a nearby brazier, sat Neeka. The woman occupied a low, padded stool, faced a mirror lit by flanking lamps, and was raptly concentrating on the meticulous brushing of her buttock-length black hair. Her own goblet of cordial sat on her dressing table, barely sipped, and the small, richly jeweled pipe she was trying to learn to smoke had been set aside to smolder out.

Between them, a big bed, its cherry-wood headboard carved with the arms of Clan Morguhn, awaited them. Milo was eagerly anticipating the warmth of feather mattress and quilted coverings, but Neeka, it soon became apparent, was thinking of other things.

“Milo,” she asked, still brushing, “people have to have something to believe in. It was wrong for you to destroy the Church, and that destruction can only breed more and more rebellions over the years. Someday, the Ehleenee may even unite and—”

Milo chuckled and interrupted her. “Ehleenee unite? Never! Neeka, they couldn’t even unite to face the threat of my armies conquering them, so factionalized and backstabbing were they … and they’ve not changed one whit over the years.”

“My few thousand Horseclansmen and Freefighters could never have defeated any really united Ehleen kingdom, especially if that kingdom had had the minimal support of the others, but none of them was ever completely united or even minimally supported. No sooner did I invade Kehnooryos Ehlahs from the west than that unhappy realm was invaded from south by other Ehleenee—the Karaleenoee, to be exact—from the north by Middle Kingdom types and threatened from the sea by the Ehleen pirates, plus being faced with one large and numerous smaller internal rebellions.”

“When I invaded Karaleenos, it was the same story. Karaleenoee nobles who had bones to pick with Zenos and his successors either openly allied with me or weakened his armies by refusing to contribute troops and supplies or actually rising and laying waste to his rear areas.”

“The last King of the Southwestern Ehleenee, Zastros, might easily have crushed the combined armies I had raised to oppose his advance north had not certain of his chief thoheeksee decided they’d had enough of him and his Witch Kingdom queen, slain her, turned him over to me and disbanded the army.”

“Even the people of whom you were born, the Northern Ehleenee, regularly have a civil war once or twice each century. The only Ehleenee who ever enjoyed any kind of stability for any length of time were the Islanders, those who used to be pirates. And the last king of the pirates, Alexandros, used to say that that was only because every pirate understood that total unity alone prevented the utter extirpation of them all.”

“No, little Neeka, I don’t doubt that there’ll be brief, bitter risings from time to time, but we actually have more of them amongst the recently conquered mountainfolk than amongst the Ehleenee. However, very few of them require intervention by Confederation troops, most being put down on the spot by locals.”

“But still, Milo,” Neeka went on relentlessly, “if you’d allow those who wish to follow the Ehleen Church openly, one bone of great contention would be removed and most of the present secret societies which often breed these rebellions would no longer have much cause for existing.”

Milo shook his head. “Neeka, all you say may well be correct, but such a reestablished Church would require close supervision, lest it become as rotten, corrupt and powerful as its predecessor. I simply have never had the time or energy to spare for such a task … or the inclination, to be honest. I’ve lived for a millennium, and in all that time, in all the many cultures in which I’ve resided, through which I’ve moved, my experiences with organized religions have never been good, so my opinion of them is abysmal.”

“But, if long life has taught me nothing else, my dear, it is that flexibility is a true asset, so I’ll promise you this: When, in twenty or so years, you’ve learned all that you must, if you still want to see an Ehleen Church reestablished and you are willing to supervise that Church and keep its clergy at least law-abiding if not really honest—no one could keep either a politician or a priest honest any more than they could render chicken dung into gold filigree—I shall then allow such reestablishment to take place.”

Tossing off his cordial, he laid his pipe on the hearth and stood up. “Now let’s get to bed, woman. We ride north tomorrow, and the dawn will come soon enough. Besides, you have at least five hundred years to brush your hair.”