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or secretive. He doesn't trust me that much, sir." "I'd say there's a 'now.'" Penrose got up, snapped a 289 EARTH DREAMS switch, and back in the passenger area a hatch sighed open, admitting birdsong. "Go say howdy. I'll be out in a little bit." The youth threw him a limpid, reproving look, and floated out of view. Rafe had no intention of allowing even a potential of alliance to develop between himself and Chaeron's little dream dancer. The boy was right: he knew nothing about any of the matters which concerned Penrose. Rafe was almost certain that Chaeron had sent him down here as a chastisement for allowing hostilities to break out among the slipbay crew two days before Marada's arrival ... it made more sense than Chaeron's intimation that he was protecting RP from possible im- plication in only-Chaeron-knew-what scheme, He heard Bitsy's bootheels clank on titanium, then saw the back of his head in his panoramic monitor. He could have gotten an overview by hooking Big Bird into any satellite of three now passing overhead, but he did not bother. He was here under duress; if he was sulky, in private, later he would find it easier to put on a face of complai- sance and obedience. He studied the figures on horse- back riding out of the t?ees where the meadow emerged abruptly from a humid green forest through which no de- tail could be seen, and from which the four had seemed suddenly to appear, full-blown, as if by materialization. No one had cared very much whether he made his peace with Lauren before they deployed her, first groundside, then to Spry, then out of Acheron like Cleopatra to Antony, rolled up in a Tabriz rug. Penelope Kerrion was, as far as Rafe was concerned, of even less account. He felt used twice-over, and a fool for having walked into a complication which Chaeron had predicted but RP had not believed would develop. He could make her out, now, on a dappled horse be- hind two bays. And he saw Cluny Pope, conspicuous be- cause no daylight could be spied between his knees and his saddle, while the others bounced helplessly, both in- Page 183 ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html telligencers holding their saddlehoms. He saw Pope's smile, his arm raised in salute to Bitsy, and saw that that hand had a tether to which the Kerrion girl's horse was attached. Her hair glinted ruddy-gold in 290 JANET MORRIS his monitors, and Rafe recalled what had made him deaf to Chaeron's warning. She was so like him! It was eerie, uncanny, to see Chaeron's almost exact duplicate in which feminity had won out. Ashera's bloodline was a strong one. The girl's wide, beryl eyes, the hint of scorn in her full mouth, the arch nose: Rafe had a deep and illogical affection for her male counterpart who bore all these traits. Raphael would manage to placate the young Kerrion heiress, who only wanted too much: one cannot have undying fealty from a pilot, especially one's brother's pilot. It was her single-minded attempts to mo- nopolize him which Rafe could not abide; he was not a child; he had neither time nor use for an obsessive. He slapped his screens off, and headed out to greet her, now halted where the two intelligencers and Cluny Pope had dismounted to talk with Bitsy, looking like the effete peacock Rate's prejudice called him, in blue and pink and orange among the aging summer grass. He stepped onto the ramp and heat assailed him, thick air full of overripe smells and dust which was difficult to breath. His space-trained reflexes recoiled: there was wind, hot and tainted; he found himself tensed to run for a pressure-suit, attentive to the stirrings of the mil in his lungs. He stood there blinking in the sharp, searing light, convincing his body that there was no pressure-crisis, no leak or pollutant spill. The wind, hot and angry, slapped at him, rearranging his hair. He could hear them talking, not words, just timbres (Pope's thick accent, the intel- ligencers' flat clipped bursts, Penelope's treble, edged with whine) rising above the wind that stirred the trees whose leaves hissed unbearably. Rafe heard a shrill scream; a shadow fell over him; looking up, he saw a great-beaked bird gliding, far up and away amid tattered clouds. Quickly, he looked down at his feet and made them proceed down the stepped ramp, onto the ground full of growing and crawling things. Penelope was in mid-com- plaint, constructing one of those peculiarly aristocratic thousand-word sentences the privileged delighted in im- provising. Someone, as sensitive to affront by that means as RP had once been, had assured him that the Kerrion record was held by Parma's father, whose word count for EARTH DREAMS 291 a single extemporaneous sentence was two thousand, two hundred and twenty-one. Chaeron had ceased the prac- tice, except when he was very angry, or very tired. . . . "Girl, be still," he called out to Penelope. "Gentle- men, get those beasts out of striking range." Gritting his teeth, he sidled between horses whose teeth, as over- large as their hooves, could be seen as their riders yanked on frothy bits, and reached up to take Penelope by the waist and help her down. The girl in Kerrion-blue expedition gear looked at him for one moment, lids lowered in contempt. Then she jerked back on her horse's reins. It shied, reared, pulling the tether out of Pope's hand and turning mutters to shouts. Panic froze RP motionless before the horse, who nailed the air with his front feet, pirouetting like a ballerina, From the din of squeals and snorts, he picked Page 184 ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html out Cluny Pope's urgent advice that Penny pound the horse on his crown; Bitsy shouting to him to grab for the bridle. Staring up at the horse's belly and deadly hooves tow- ering above him, Penrose at last regained the power of movement, spinning around and throwing himself aside to avoid Pope's mount, lunging after Penny's bolting beast in hot pursuit. Then, while confusion still whipped about him, RP heard whoops and awful yells, a woman's scream, and more hooves. The intelligencers, having sorted them- selves out, cursed and fumbled for their weapons. "Move, get back. Go!" Bitsy pushed him, a smudged face appearing out of a curtain of dust. His bright clothes were filthy, Rafe noted in an awful slow-motion, as he noticed the two intelligencers arguing procedure, while from above their heads gusts of evil, snickering arrows rained down. "Go on, move!" Bitsy pushed him. Rafe fell to his knees. Where had they come from, these barbed, feathered sticks, one of which was protruding from his calf just below the knee? It took forever to feel the pain, but that forever was full of ground shaking beneath him from horses' tread, of stones raining around him so that he huddled where he was, arms over his head, legs drawn up. With the pain's arrival came new sounds, thudding tonnage, horse 292 JANET MORRIS screams. He looked up to see militia riders bearing down upon them, two dozen, maybe more. "Run!" Bitsy's nose was bleeding, three arrows stuck out like quills from his [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] |
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