The Sea Peoples(27)
The party went in, and by the time órlaith reached the main common-room a swift efficient unpacking had begun, with a little quiet push-and-shove about who got barracked where. Heuradys settled that and the guard register with brisk authority—it was part of her job as Head of Household to see that órlaith didn’t have to worry about details—and picked a room beside the master-suite órlaith would be using, which had a small private garden and fountain of its own.
“Nice,” órlaith said judiciously as Macmacon lapped noisily from one of the pools, jumped up on a cushioned chair and circled until he was a ball of fur and dozed.
She looked around the central lounging room’s cool airy spaciousness, with walls open on the shaded verandah and an interior court fragrant with jasmine and frangipani and drooping blue sprays of Queen’s Wreath, the splashing of a fountain in a pool big enough to swim in sounding pleasantly in the background. The sound made her want to strip off her clothes and jump in, which she intended to do just as soon as possible.
Hilo had plenty of rainwater from cisterns and more still piped in from the slopes of the mountains southward, for drinking and sanitation and to power the machinery she’d sometimes heard whining and thumping while the parade went through the streets. The mansion’s layout was also cunningly sited and planned to catch every possible breeze by moving the screens and partitions. They weren’t backwoodsmen here, and from the looks of things must have good engineers on call.
The furniture was comely but functional, mostly of laminated bamboo and white cotton, some of polished stone tops or hard attractive woods she didn’t recognize. Susan Mika flopped down on a sofa and tossed a few fried poi chips from a bowl into her mouth after dipping them into a spicy red sauce. Like a lot of short, thin wiry energetic people she had a bottomless capacity for food when it was available.
“Nice? You can say that again, Orrey,” the Lakota girl said. “Of course, back home on the makol they think it’s not really a home unless you can put wheels on it and haul it around with you while you shear sheep and punch cows and steal horses—that part’s fun, I gotta admit—and harvest tatanka.”
Makol was what the Lakota—the people outsiders often called Sioux—named their own territory on the high bleak prairies beyond the Rockies on the realm’s eastern borders. It was part of the High Kingdom and the realm bore the title of Guardian of the Eastern Gate, but sheer distance from anywhere else meant it was even more autonomous than most of Montival’s members.
Heuradys raised a brow as she shed her armor with órlaith’s help, a groan of relief and a strong smell of sweat.
“You don’t agree, Susie?” the knight asked. “Do I detect a note of skepticism?”
“I left, you may notice. Glad I did, too, even if I miss my family. All that nomad virtue and hardiness and buffalo pemmican and ancestral chants around the fires in our freezing fucking winters . . . bo-ring! Not to mention we copied the gurs we actually live in from that Mongol friend of my granddad, so much for ancient tradition. Yeah, they’ve got tipis beat all to hell, especially in cold weather with a nice airtight stove, but you know what I mean.”
One thing the Sword of the Lady did was tell you whether someone was speaking truth, or more precisely whether they thought what they were saying was the truth. Outright lying with intent tasted like metal foil clenched between your back teeth. In this case the answer was yes . . . and no; a sensation like what you felt waiting for someone to complete a sentence when they paused, only much stronger.
That response was one reason órlaith thought there had been some sort of scandal involved in the wiry little easterner’s departure from the high plains of the realm’s borderlands too—they were a straight-laced lot there—but had never pushed for the details. You had to be careful when you carried the Sword. Her father had said that if you weren’t you’d become impossible for ordinary people to be around without hatred.
“Lila washté!” Susie exclaimed, going down the corridor and sticking her head into a room, her broad-cheeked brown face splitting in a grin. “Totally excellent! Nice big bed, and it’s perfectly positioned for guarding Her Immense Importantness. Dibs on the right-hand side.”
“Left-hand for me,” Faramir Kovalevsky said quickly, grinning and running a hand through his pale-gold curls as he shed his helmet with a sigh of relief.
“Amarth faeg!” his cousin Morfind Vogeler said as she did likewise, which was a complaint about the woes of one’s fate in Sindarin, then added: “Uff da!”
Rangers from Stath Ingolf insisted that that was Sindarin too; if pressed they’d admit it was from the Wisconsin Kickapoo Valley sub-dialect of Elvish, which was where Ingolf Vogeler had originally come from.
Her hair was straight and black; she was a handsome young woman of his own twenty years, a little taller than the blond Ranger, with a bad ax-scar down one side of her face that was only a year old and still purple-colored.
“Why do I always get the middle spot?” she went on; órlaith was glad to hear the teasing in her voice, since she tended to be quiet and brood.
“Because he and I both get up to pee more often than you do, my beautiful Ranger lady of the capacious bladder,” Susie said. “I’m just minimizing the waking-you-up-by-climbing-over-you-in-the-dark stuff.”
They shouldered their duffels and weapons and went inside the room to unpack, bickering amiably as they went. órlaith reflected that they made her feel very adult sometimes, and she wouldn’t reach the quarter-century mark for another eighteen months. The relationship they’d settled into seemed to suit them. Though it would be at least mildly frowned on by Ranger custom, Faramir and Morfind being first cousins.