In the Courts of the Crimson Kings (3 page)

“How can you work for the vaz-Terranan? They’re rich and they have some curious and powerful
tembst
, but by the First Principle, they’re ugly!” Jelzhau said, considering the board.

He moved his Chief Coercive diagonally two squares and threatened her Despot.

The woman who called herself Teyud za-Zhalt sipped at her flask of essence through the glass straw, savoring the musky tartness of the liquid, and then moved her Flier Transport onto the same square.

The mild euphoric was doubly pleasurable since Jelzhau would be buying if she won the game, and he had never toppled her Despot in a bout of
atanj
yet, unless she lost deliberately.

I am glad to have found alternate employment
, she thought, studying the board.
He never grasped that I was occasionally throwing the game, either
.

Guarding the life of someone you’d rather see dead was a means of earning your water too heavily spiced with irony for inner peace. Besides that, he was a cheapskate. Occasionally his
atanj
play was good enough to be entertaining, but usually . . .

Ah, yes. Once again, excessive conservatism in his employment of the Coercives and Clandestines. He relies too much on his Blockade and Boycott pieces, as might be expected of a spice merchant
.

If you didn’t exercise your Coercives, you increased the odds of their defection.

“You deal with the
vaz-Terranan
, too,” she pointed out, as he threw the dice to determine whose piece would win the battle for the square. “Extensively.”

“That is a series of expeditious meetings. You have to
associate
with the hideous things. Ah, randomness falls out in your favor.”

The dice showed three threes; that gave the paratroops in her Flier Transport time to emerge and capture his Chief Coercive.

“Oh, not necessarily so very hideous,” she said, taking the dice. “Some are grotesque—like a squashed-down caricature of humanity—but some are just stocky and perhaps a bit irregular of feature
and extremely muscular. The ones I’ve met are all rather clever, too, if naïve.”

Jelzhau shuddered. “And they
ooze
. They’re positively
slick
with water and mucus most of the time. You can feel it on their breath. An extra three on whether my Chief Coercive will defect?”

“Oozing would be unaesthetic,” Teyud admitted. “Three, agreed.”

She threw; three ones, a low-probability result. In the game, that meant her paratroopers had bribed or threatened his Chief Coercive to turn against his Despot. She moved the pieces, now both hers, into another square.

“Your Despot is now confronted,” she said formally. “He must restore
Sh’u Maz
, or abdicate.”

Jelzhau sighed and tipped over the tower-shaped piece. “He abdicates; your Despot proves superior fitness to perpetuate his lineage and establish Sustained Harmony. And as for the
vaz-Terranan
, they have a distinct and unpleasant odor, as well.”

Her nostrils flared in irony; Jelzhau was given to excessive use of
odwa
-scent, himself.

“I can’t detect any untoward odor most of the time. In essential respects, they resemble us. For example, they have their own internal disputes and differences.”

“They all seem much alike to me.”

Privately she thought the spice-factor was being a little bigoted, even if there was some truth to the physical description. The travelers from the Wet World couldn’t help their semblance, and the ones from Kennedy Base usually dressed in local garb, and
tried
to behave in seemly fashion. Which was more than you could say of some of her own race, such as that clutch of deep-chested highlander caravaneers who were singing—they probably thought it was song—over in one corner, and pawing at one of the De’ming servitors.

If you couldn’t integrate an essence without losing harmony, you shouldn’t partake in public.

Mind you, the
Blue-tinted Time Considered As A Regressing Series
was that sort of canal-side dive. It had seen better days, but those had probably been when the Crimson Dynasty still ruled. Someone was neglecting the glow-globes set in the fluid-stone of the ceiling fifteen feet overhead; badly fed, they gave off less light than they
should, and it had an unpleasant greenish cast that made the figures of scholars and warriors on the wall look decayed.

And there was a grease mark on the smooth pearl granite behind her head; the taverner claimed that it had been made by the famous unbound hair of Zowej-ar-Lakrid in the Conqueror’s student days, fifteen hundred years ago, when he was conspiring to overthrow the city’s despot while playing
atanj
in this very spot, and that it would be sacrilege to remove it. Some deep layer of it might indeed be that old.

For the rest, the stopping-place looked depressingly like a thousand others she’d seen, from one end of the Real World to another: a circular room on the ground floor of a tower more than half abandoned. In the more-traveled places near the exits the hard green stones of the floor were worn into troughs that menaced the balance of the patrons. Deepest of all were the spots before the entrance to the spiral staircase in the center of the room.

The floor was set with circular tables of
tkem
wood that had been polished blackness once and were nicked and dark grey now.

Hers held a tiny fretted-copper brazier with a stick of cheap incense burning, and a bowl of tart dipping sauce for the small platter that had held raw
rooz
meat cut into strips. She took the last strip between a mannerly thumb and forefinger, touched it to the sauce and ate.

Too hot
, she thought.
Cheap
narwak
badly ground, or steeped too long
.

The meat at least was decently fresh, pleasant, lightly marbled, deep red, richly salted, and slightly moist; the animal had not lost its flaps in vain.

Just then the clock over the entrance to the staircase opened its mouth, gave a sad, piercing cry and sang:

Hours like sand
On the shores of a bitter sea
Flow on waves of time;
Seven hours have passed
Since last the Sun
Rose in blind majesty;
It shall yield heedless to night
In ten more.
One . . . two . . . three . . . four . . . five . . . six . . . seven.

That meant the flier would be arriving soon. Teyud packed her board and set, folding them into a palm-sized rectangle and slipping it into its pouch at her belt as they rose; Jelzhau would have taken the lead if Teyud had not adopted a hipshot pose of astonished sorrow. He flushed darkly and made his bow excessive.

“True, you are no longer in my employ, Most Refined of Breeding,” he said.

“Indeed,” she replied tranquilly, neglecting to add an honorific.

I wonder what the Wet Worlders truly think of
us she wondered idly, as they began to trot upward.

It was still hard to have a conversation with them beyond the obvious, and they were less than frank about some things. That was probably wise of them—everyone loved flattery, and criticism was rarely popular—but a pity nonetheless. They were the first new things to come into the Real World for a very long time.

Even as her father’s lineage reckoned such things. And they had ruled this world for twice ten thousand years.

But they do so no longer; now they hide in ruins and brood
, she reminded herself.
Do not waste life span in reverie on things past, as your father did . . . does. For each being, the time from birth to death is as that of the universe itself. You are not in the Tollamune Emperor’s court at Dvor Il-Adazar now . . . and if you were within sight of the Tower of Harmonic Unity, you would die slowly
.

“This trip is the first time I’ve seen this many Martian faces uncovered,” Jeremy Wainman said as the
Zhoming Dael
slowed on its approach to the tall slimness of the tower. “Here on Zho’da, that is, not in videos back Earthside.”

Martians called their planet Zho’da; that meant “The Real World,” or possibly “The Only Significant Place.” It was all a matter of perspective, he supposed.

“It makes sense to muffle up outside on this planet,” said Captain Sally Yamashita of the United States Aerospace Force Astronaut Corps. “Dry, cold, windy, lots of acrid dust. Plus—”

The Martian airship had made several stops on its way from Kennedy Base, but those had been at caravanserais and isolated trading posts. He and his superior were the only Earthlings—
vaz-Terranan
in demotic Martian—in the curved forward lounge with its transparent outward-sloping wall. The dozen or so locals mostly remained seated in their nests of cushions and traveling silks and furs, many with a board between them and the eternal Martian
atanj
game under way; it was routine for them. Jeremy leaned eagerly over the railing, looking as the long bright line of the canal opened out into the glittering shapes of the half-ruined city ahead.

“Plus,
it’s the custom
,” he said, grinning and quoting the most common phrase in the orientation lectures that had started back on Earth right after the summons he’d dreamed of but not seriously expected, and had continued at short intervals while the
Brackett
made its long passage out and then at Kennedy Base too.

“I
am
an anthropologist, you know,” Jeremy added. “With a secondary degree in archaeology, to boot, and one in Martian history.”

Sally nodded. She was tall by Terran standards—everyone assigned to Mars was, though like her, most were below the Martian average. But even at five-eleven, she gave an impression of close-coupled energy, and her slanted hazel eyes were very keen. Her father had been California-Japanese, richer than God and a marine biologist with a hobby in martial arts; her mother was from a long line of Napa Valley winemakers but had broken the mold by going into modern dance. Sally’s own specialty was the study of Martian technology; she had degrees in molecular biology and paleontology. But she was also a general fixer and contact person, helping Kennedy Base interface with the Martians. And, at thirty, she was several years older than Jeremy, with the weathered skin of an Old Mars Hand.

And . . . I think she’s a spook. Not all the time, we’re all multitasking here, but I think that’s what she is if you dig down through all the layers. Why are they sending a spook on an archaeological scouting mission? Granted, this can be a very hairy planet, and she looks like she can clip hair with the best of them, but
. . .

“You’re an anthropologist . . . a very
inexperienced
anthropologist,” she said.

It
was
his first trip outside Kennedy Base. He’d seen pictures of these towers with their time-faded colors and the lacy crystalline bridges that joined them, the transparent domes below full of an astonishing flowering lushness, the narrow serpentine streets
between blank-faced buildings of rose-red stone . . . but now he could see them for himself. They reminded him a little of Indian Mughal architecture done by someone on opium and freed from the limits of stone and the constraints of gravity, but there was a soft-edged quality to them unlike anything his world had ever bred, as if they had
grown
here.

In the distance loomed jagged heights that had been the edge of a continent when the site of this city was below the waves of a vanished sea . . .

Sally snorted; he had a sudden uncomfortable feeling she knew just what sort of greenhorn romantic twaddle he was thinking. Her words confirmed it.

“Even the experienced are just scratching the surface here. Venus may be full of hunter-gatherers or Bronze Age types like the Kartahownians, but this isn’t Venus—the Martians were doing calligraphy and building cities forty thousand years ago. The Crimson Dynasty ruled before the Cro-Magnons painted mammoths on those caves in France, and it
fell
about the time we invented writing.”

“We came to them, not vice versa,” Jeremy pointed out.
And I’m teasing you. Do you have to be so
solemn
about everything?

Apparently she did. Even her nod was grave as she went on.

“We have a technological edge. Sort of, or so we like to think. But Earth’s a long way away and there aren’t many of us here. We can’t push these people around and we don’t impress them much, either. I repeat: This isn’t Venus. We can’t play Gods-from-the-sky here. We’re on sufferance. And never forget we don’t know dick about this place, really.”

“Yes, teacher,” he said good-humoredly. “I’ll try to make us a little
less
abysmally ignorant, hmm? We
do
need to start learning more about Martian history. Besides what their chronicles tell us. They don’t always ask the same questions we want answered and it’s always a good idea to check words against the stones and bones anyway.”

“Yeah, so you talked them into sending us to do a dig at Rema-Dza. Which may or may not actually exist.”

“The satellite photos show
something
large is there. And according to the chronicles, it could only be the city of Rema-Dza.”

“Now who’s relying on words? Those are chronicles after fifteen
thousand years of recopying, sometimes by people who thought it was a good idea to goof on their descendants, as interpreted by contemporary Martians who sometimes like to play see-what-the-Terran-barbarians-will-swallow. I’m still not sure it was a cost-effective decision.”

It was hard
not
to be good-humored. He’d finally
made
it here. He’d dreamed about it since he was old enough to distinguish the stuff on the news from the fairy tales his mother had read him. He’d worked and planned and sweated and competed, but tens or hundreds of millions had shared that dream. Now he’d
done
it, while they went on dreaming and reading bad novels about people like him, and watching even worse movies and video shows and breathless documentaries on the
National Geographic
channel.