The Stone Dogs (15 page)

"Needs a belt taken to her rump."

"That might be interestin', but I was thinkin' of yo' brother, sweet, in an aesthetic sort of way," Myfwany said, twitching at the other's braid. "Yo' a good-lookin' family."

"I'll tell him yo' thinks so," she said, grinning slyly. "I mean, seein' as Mandy's makin' moon-eyes at him already…"

Myfwany laughed and slapped her, shoulder. "Don't yo' dare; swelled heads runs in yo' family, too."

The armory was a single long room on the lower level, a twenty-by-ten rectangle smelling of metal and gun-oil, and of coffee and hot breads and fruit from the trays on the central table. The kitchen-wench had put it down and scuttled out; ordinary serfs were not allowed past the blank steel door with its old combination-lock and new palm-recognition screen. There were no windows, only a row of glowsticks along the ceiling.

Military-model assault rifles along the left wall, a light machine-gun, machine-pistols, helmets, body-armor, ammunition, communications gear and nightsight goggles.

Benches at the rear held the tools of a repair shop. Ismet sat there: a big balding ex-Janissary, the plantation's gunsmith and one of the four licensed armed serfs on Claestum, although he was technically State property, rented rather than owned.

The hunting gear was on the other wall. Broad-headed boar spears, javelins, crossbows, shotguns. And rifles of the type Draka thought suitable for game when cold steel was impractical, double-barreled models.

"Here," Yolande said. "This is my other Beaufort style… unless yo'd like somethin' heavier?"

"No, 8.5mm's fine fo' cat, I think," Myfwany said, popping a roll of melon and prosciutto into her mouth and dusting her hands together. She accepted the weapon and looked it over with an approving nod, thumbing the catch that released the breech; it folded open to reveal the empty chambers. The barrels were damascened, the side-plates inlaid with hunting scenes in gold and silver wire, the rosewood stock set with figures in ivory and electrum.

"Nice piece of work, really nice. Sherrinford of Archona?"

"Mmmm, yes," Yolande said, taking down her other rifle. They were part of a matched set, and Sherrinford worked only by appointment; you had to be born a client. Over-and-under style, like a vertical figure-8; her parents thought that made for better aim than the more usual side-by-side. She watched as her friend snapped the weapon closed and swung it up to dry-fire a few times.
How graceful she is.

Her brother finished taking down three bandoliers. "I'm usin'

the 9mm, but 8.5's fine as long as yo've got the right cartridge. A big male leopard can go full manweight, an' we're talkin' close bush country here. These're 180-grain hollowpoint express, ought to do it. There's a range with backstop at the lodge, Myfwany, so yo' can shoot-in on that gun."

"Lovely," Myfwany said.

The balloon tires of the open-topped Shangaan hummed on the pavement as they wound east from the manor. The road was like the broad-base terraces on the hills, and the stock-dams that starred the countryside with ponds: a legacy of the Land Settlement Directorate and the period when the estate had been gazetted, right after the War. The labor-camps were long gone, and the work of the engineers had had time to mellow into the Tuscan countryside. Babylonica willows trailed their fierce green osiers into the water, and huge white-coated cattle dreamed beneath them with the mist curling around their bellies.

Roadside poplars cast dappled shade, and the low stone walls of the terraces were overgrown with Virginia creeper.

"I like this time of year," Yolande said. "It's… like waking up on a holiday mornin'."

She inhaled deeply; the air was still a little cool as the sun rose over the Monti del Chianti to the east. The olives shone silver-gray, and the vineyards curved in snaking contour rows of black root and green shoots along the sides of the hills; the shaggy bush-rose hedges were in bloom, kilometer upon kilometer of tiny white flowers against the lacy thornstalks. Their scent tinted the air, joining smells of dust, dew, the blue genista and red poppies that starred the long silky grass by the roadside verge, the scarlet cornflowers spangled through the undulating fields of wheat and clover. The air was loud with wings and birdsong, plovers and wood doves, hoopoes and rollers. The white storks were making their annual migration southward, and the sky was never empty of them in this season.

"It's beautiful any time of year," John said; he was at the rear of the fan tail-shaped passenger section of the steamer. Yolande looked up; his voice was completely serious, different from the bantering tone he usually used with his youngest sister. "Yo love this place, don't yo', John?" she said.

He smiled, shrugged, looked away. "Yes," he replied musingly.

"Yes, I do. All of it."

They were passing through the lower portion of the estate, as close to flat as any part of Claestum, planted in fruit orchard, dairy pasture, and truck gardens. A score of three-mule plow teams were at work, sixteen-hand giants with silvery coats and Roman noses, leaning into the traces with an immemorial patience. The earth behind the disk-tillers was a deep chocolate color, reddish-brown, smelling as good as new bread. The work gangs were there already, unloading flats of seedlings from steam drags, pitchforking down the huge piles of pale-gold wheat straw used for mulch, spreading manure and sewage-sludge from the methane plant, or wrestling with lengths of extruded-aluminum irrigation pipe. Some of them looked up and waved their conical straw hats as the car passed; the mounted foremen bowed in the saddle.

"Y' know," he continued, and shifted the rifle in the crook of his arm, "we say 'Claestum,' and think we've summed it up. It all depends who's doin' the lookin'. A League accountant looks at the entry in her ledgers and sees forty-five hundred hectares, yieldin' so-and-so many tonnes of wheat and fodder, x hundred hectoliters of wine and y of olive oil per year. Security's District Officer down't' Siena calls up the specs on a thousand-odd serfs an' checks fo' reported disorders. An ecologist from the Conservancy people thinks in terms or" —a flight of bustards soared up from a sloping grainfield and glided down to a hedgerow—"that sort of thing."

"Ma and Pa?" Yolande said.
Damn, can't get to know your
own brother until you grow up,
she thought.

"They see it as something they made," he replied. "Almost as somethin' they fought and broke. I can understand it; every time they look out they can say, 'we planted these trees,' or 'it took five years of green-manurin' to get those upper fields in decent tilth.'

Pa told me once it was like breakin' a horse; yo' had to love the beast or you'd kill it in sheer exasperation."

"And yo', Johnny?" she continued softly, careful not to break the mood.

"It's… home," he said. "Some people need that feelin' of creation. I don't. I love… it all; sights and smells and sounds, the people an' the animals and the plants and… oh, the way the sun comes over the east tower every mornin', the church-bell soundin'— Shit, I'm no poet, sprout; yo're the only one in the family with ambitions in that direction."

He smiled ruefully. "I suspect I love this place mo' than any individual, which may say somethin' about yours truly. At least, a community an' place is longer-lived than a person. I won't change anythin' much, when it's mine. A bit of tidyin'-up here and there, maybe bring in a herd of eland, it'd do well…"

"Mr. Ingolfsson?" Myfwany asked.

"John," he said.

"Thanks, John… I was wonderin', don't mean to pry, but if yo'

like it here so much, why did yo' volunteer fo' officer trainin'?"

Everyone started equal in the Citizen Force, three years minimum and a month a year until forty, but not everyone wanted to prolong their spell in uniform.

"Payback," John said, opening a thermos of
caffe latte
and passing it around. Myfwany made an inquiring sound as she accepted a cup of the coffee.

"I pay my debts," he amplified. The road was winding upwards again, through fig orchards and rocky sheep-pasture dotted with sweet chestnut trees.

"Down at that school, they're probably fillin' y'all up with yo'

debt to the Race and the State." He shrugged. "True enough. I likes to think of it on a mo' personal level. A plantation can feel like a world to its own self, but it isn't. It only exists as part of the Domination. The Race makes possible the only way of life I know, the only world I feel at home in, the only contentment I can ever have."

He laughed. "Not least, by controllin' change. It must be powerful lonely to be a Yankee; by the time one of them is middle-aged, everythin' they grew up with is gone. Like havin'

the earth always dissolvin' away beneath yo' feet. Cut off from yo'

ancestors an' yo' descendants both. Here, barrin' catastrophe, I can be reasonable sure that in a thousand years, what I value will still exist."

"It's here because Ma and Pa an' others like them fought fo' it, bled fo' it. A decade of my life is cheap payment. I wouldn't deserve this unless I was ready to die fo' it, to kill fo' it." He blinked back to the present, and the gray eyes turned warm as he smiled at his sister. "It'll always be here fo' yo', too, sprout, when yo' come back from that space-travellin'."

The lodge was pre-War Italian work, only slightly modified; the plantations fronting the hill nature-reserve maintained it jointly, part of their contract with the Conservancy Directorate to manage the forest. Vine-grown, it nestled back into the shadow of the hill, flanked by outbuildings and stables and a few paddocks surrounded by stone walls. The huntsmen were waiting in the forecourt, with the horses and dogs, beside a spring-fed pool. A dozen liondogs, the type the Draka had bred to hunt the big cats in the old African provinces: black-coated, with thick ruffs around their necks and down their spines. Massive beasts, over a meter at the shoulder and heavier than a man, thick-boned, with broad blunt muzzles and canines that showed over the lower lip. They rose and milled as the car stopped, straw-yellow eyes bright with anticipation, until a word from the handlers set them sinking back on their haunches in disciplined silence.

"Menchino, Alfredo," John said, nodding. The huntsmen were brothers in their early thirties, one fair and one dark, with the slab-sided, high-cheeked faces of the Tuscan peasantry.

"Master John," Menchino said, making the half-bow as the Draka stepped down from the car and the driver pulled away in a
chuff
of steam and sough of pneumatics. There was a smile on his face; hunting was the brothers' religion, and John Ingolfsson had been a devout fellow-worshipper since he was old enough to carry a rifle.

"Missy—" Alfredo began. "Mistis," he corrected, as she frowned and tapped her gunbelt in reminder of her adult status.

Adult as far as serfs were concerned, at least. A slight glance out of the corner of his eye to the other serf, the hint of a shrug; she suspected it was the thought of two young females going after a dangerous beast. Italian serfs were funny about things like that, and Ma said it would take another generation or two to really break them of it.

They had learned not to let it
show
some time ago, of course.

"Well probably be back fo' lunch," Yolande said to the middle-aged housegirl on the veranda. "Myfwany, yo' pick y'

mount?"

The serfs lead the horses over, and the Draka checked their tack. Light pad-saddles, with molded-leather scabbards for their rifles; the huntsmen had much the same, though without the tooling and studs. The two Ingolfssons and their guests slid their weapons into the sheaths and fastened the restraining straps.

Their pack was sitting quiet, but the dogs knew what that meant; tails began to beat at the gravel of the drive, and deep chests rumbled eagerness.

"I'll have the dapple," Myfwany said, reaching for the bridle of a spotted gray mare. It blew inquisitively at her, and politely accepted a lump of brown sugar. She turned eyes bright with excitement to her friend. "Less'n yo'd rather?"

" 'S fine," Yolande said, gathering her own reins and vaulting easily into the saddle one-handed. The brown gelding sidestepped, then quieted as she gathered it in and pressed her knees. She ran a critical hand down its neck, checking the muscle tone, and turned an eye on the others. They were fresh but not rambunctious, which meant the lodge staff had been exercising them properly.

"Keep the dogs well in hand," John said to the huntsmen.

"They not used to anythin' bigger an' meaner than they are."

"That's it!" John said, reining in on the bank of the little stream. The sound of the pack had changed, the deep
gerrr

-whuffi barking giving way to a higher belling sound. "They've sighted."

"Less'n they've taken out after a deer." Myfwany grinned, reaching down beyond her right knee. The rifle came out of the scabbard with an easy flip, and she rested the butt on one thigh.

The other Draka followed suit.

One of the Italian serfs snorted, and the other coughed to cover it. John laughed. "Not this pack," he said. "Not when we gave them a clear scent."

They heeled their horses down the slope in a shower of gravel and dust. Two hour chase had brought them deep into the high hills; the Monte del Chianti were mountains only by courtesy, more like steep ridges, few more than a thousand meters high. It was just enough to keep the air comfortably crisp as the morning turned clear and brilliant. The forest was shaggy and uneven, part old growth, much new since the conquest; you could see the traces of old terracing, or the tumbled stones of peasant houses.

Oak and chestnut covered the lower slopes, with darker beech and pine and silver fir above; feral grapevines wound around many, and there were slashes of color from the blossom of abandoned orchards.

This spot was cool under tall black pines, full of their chill scent. There were poplars along the stream; the mounts stepped through cautiously, raising their feet high as horseshoes clattered on the smooth brown rocks. Spring rains and sun had brought a brief intense flowering where sun reached through the trees; the far slope was too thin-soiled to carry timber, and it blazed with wild field lilies, grape hyacinths, and sheets of purple-and-yellow crocus. Yolande rose slightly in the stirrups as the gelding's muscles bunched to push it up the hillside in a series of bounds. The bruised herbs raised a sharp aromatic smell, of sage and rosemary and sweet minty hyssop that shed anthrophora bees and golden butterflies in clouds before the horses' hooves.