Coordinated Arm 01: Henry Martyn Page 2

  "Waenzi—Waenzi, it is all right, come here." Arran whistled to the little triskel. Thus encouraged, the three-legged, creature emerged from its hiding place and hopped onto the bed beside him, where the boy stroked its short, coarse fur in an attempt to soothe it, sneering down, as he did so, at the dramathille where it lay at the edge of the rug.

  Weighing less than a gramme (it was but seven siemmes in length, less than a tenth that in diameter, barquoded to— misindicate—its contents), its arrival at the wall had produced no racket to satisfy his frustration. It was, in essence, indestructible, promising him no emotional compensation had he been the sort to delight in its destruction, which he was not.

  They were all like this, each thille his tutor, Mistress Lia Woodgate, received from the capital, a tendentious hodgepodge of effete mannerism and incomprehensible fuss.

  Clavises? What did the currency of the Jendyne Empery-Cirot have to do with anything? What did any of it mean? Half the time Arran could not understand what that bugger Megrim-Boutade was saying through his cultured lisp and egg-shaped tones; the other half, his features were concealed, like those of the other actors—indeed, if Mistress Lia were believed, like those of every fashionable gentle-being upon Hanover—behind masques created in the likeness of obscure historical figures whose proverbial qualities were supposed to reveal something of the mood or intentions of the characters. Mistress Lia, also instructor to Arran*s brothers, Robret fils and Donol (and something more than this to the eldest), had shown him one of her own masques, avowing she favored a pale lavender portia, which, for some reason he had never understood, was supposed to be clever.

  "Wanque!" Arran pronounced the word aloud, startling Waenzi again and dismissing the Megrim-Boutade once and for all. He glanced round with a guilty expression to see if anyone had heard him utter the boyish obscenity.

  As it happened, someone had. A perfunctory pair of raps sounded in the small room. Startled again, the much-abused triskel hopped from the bed and vanished beneath it. Arran hoped he had not wet the floor. The door opened, spreading dessicated flower petals as it swung into the room. Old Henry Martyn followed, bearing a handworked tray the mere sight of which—rather of the tankard upon it, an original from this room and in likewise carven with an animal's form—made Arran shudder with recent but deep-grained reflex. Upon the tray, beside the hated flagon, lay another object which the boy thought he recognized, although the reason for its presence was a mystery.

  Noticing Arran's expression, the old man stepped over the throw-rug, set tray, tankard, and mysterious object upon a table, bent and picked up the dramathille. He gave a conspicuous nod toward the waste-chute in the wall across the room from the bookcases. "Methought Fd taught ye throwin' straighter'n that, young master." He gave the boy a broad grin and a blue-eyed wink. "Then, ye'd been touch sickly, ha'n't ye?"

  Waenzi reappeared to bump his torso, which served as the

  only head he owned, against the old man's ankles in greeting and hopped upon the bed again. Despite himself, Arran answered with a laugh. Old Henry had that effect upon him. Stooped and withered until he was scarce taller than the boy himself, the old man was the most ancient being Arran had ever known. Old Henry's sky-colored eyes twinkled among the furrows of a face like a dried apple, and a thick shock of pure white hair stood upon end like his brother Robret's thissbristle shaving brush. For all his venerability and apparent decrepitude, he moved with smooth alacrity and energetic purpose, without a hint of the tremble Arran had seen afflict many a younger man than Old Henry Martyn.

  "Yes, Henry," he answered, giving the timid anim.al an absent stroke, "I have been." He looked down at what he was doing. " 'Sick as a triskel'—though in truth I have never seen Waenzi sick a day. And I have been missing all the fun." He nodded toward the garland upon the door, although he might have meant the dramathille by his complaint. "A poor plain substitute such a thing as that, for games, and food, and music—"

  "Aye, an' noise an' excitement—"

  "The visiting nobility ..."

  "An' common folka Skye, come t'pay respects, more welcome at it in whole wide imperium-con^omerate'n they might'd been 'neath any other Drector's roof." The old man shook his head. "Aye, an' alia that. But even childhood cancer virus be serious matter, lad—had it m'self at yer age—an' serious matters must be seriously treated, ha'n't they?" Old Henry raised his thick and snowy eyebrows, nodding toward the dreaded flagon upon the table.

  Arran made a grudging face. With Old Henry's help, he lifted the heavy container, gulped down quick as he could the vile mixture it contained, and which was, he admitted, step by gradual step, making him well once more—though with less rapidity than he hoped it would.

  Scarcely remembering his own mother, dead these eight years, he thou^t it a good thing, his father's taking wife again, as had occurred the previous week while he lay wracked with drug-induced delirium. He was uncertain how he felt about his father's bride, the Lady Alysabeth Morven, but he had hated missing his father's wedding. Time enough

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  to decide about his new stepmother once she and Father were back from honeymoon travels. Likewise, he would hate missing his eldest brother's wedding, due to take place upon the senior couple's return in another month and a half. He was as fond of this particular bride-to-be as if she were already the sister she was about to become. Or the mother he had never known. Now that he felt better—which in contrast to the time of his father's wedding meant only that he was conscious—he would begin worrying about a gift. It must be appropriate both to the occasion and his feelings about those celebrating it.

  Old Henry took the flagon from him, inspected it to make sure it was empty, and set it back upon the tray. Curious, Waenzi leaned over to sniff at the container, gave out a strangled, mewling noise, and vanished beneath the bed again. Old Henry and Arran laughed.

  "Valorously done, lad," the old man commended the boy. "Valorously done. An' there be rewards for heroes." He made no move toward the other object lying upon the tray, as Arran might have expected, but, grinning his wrinkled grin again, took a step back. "Ye're t'get yerself outa bed now, an' take such exercise as ye feel capable of."

  A thrill went through the boy. "Henry! You are not having fun with me?" Not waiting for the old man to reveal that his words had been a joke, he sat up straight in bed. "I may, really?"

  "That ye may." The old man offered Arran a hand as the boy threw off the blanket and swung his legs past the edge of the bed for the first time in nine long, nightmarish weeks. What dizziness or infirmity he felt was more from prolonged involuntary rest than any disease afflicting him. When at last Arran stood upon the floor, both shoeless feet cool from the contact. Old Henry tapped an age-polished finger upon the object he had brought with him. "This, young master, be but firsta many surprises this day an' those t'come'll bring ye." He straightened, of a sudden formal, and cleared his throat. "Beginnin', as y'might someday swear, best an' busiest time ayer young life."

  Standing, his knees still weak, Arran looked down at the object with its ancient, unintelligible embossery of flaked gold metal. Not certain how it was done, although he had

  seen these things referred to in dramathilles about the ancient and romantic past, he picked it up, spread it open in his left palm, and let a gentle right thumb riffle through the brittle, symbol-covered sheets of which it consisted.

  His guess had been correct, although he had not known such objects to exist within his father's Holdings or even upon the planet Skye. He realized they were unique in one respect: they had been invented long before ulsic, an inbuilt property of artifacts which allowed them to perform complex functions without human attention. As many words and ideas as this thing might contain, it was nowhere near as "smart," say, as the most idiotic thille, or even the flagon keeping his medicine well mixed and at proper temperature.

  Still, he had been rigljt: it was a book.

  Chapter II: The Islays of Skye

  "Let it rain,"
Robret Islay declared to no one in particular, "I am none the less content."

  It was a remarkable confession from one unused to speaking his feelings. Tall, broad of shoulder, he claimed that mixture of brown skin, fair hair, and dark eyes under coal-black brows which marked him son (firstborn and principal heir) to the famous warrior-nobleman, Drector-Hereditary of Skye. He gazed out the many-paned windows of what an earlier age had called a library into the meadow surrounding the Holdings.

  The day, having dawned unnaturally brilliant, had deteriorated into light drizzle drifting from a gray overcast more typical of the planet. Oblivious to the weather, half a hundred of the Holdings' croppers stooped in the meadow, gathering groundberries and lawn-herbs which, later in the season, would sustain them during the arduous shroom-harvest. Excepting the quaint hats they wore, streaming with

  16 HENRY MARTYN

  moisture, their clothing was the same as the younger Robret's. Had Robret Senior been here, he and his family might have joined them in their labors.

  "For I ask both of you," Robret turned and faced into the room, "how could family affairs be more gratifyingly concluded? Our father, eight years the widower, remarried this week amJdst all the splendor and ceremony which our age, and his station in the order of things, afford ..."

  "And into a rich connection," intruded a male voice from across the room, "offering untold political advantage."

  Robret concealed the sour expression this cynical utterance might otherwise have cast upon his face. What had been asserted was true enough: Tarbert Morven, second son of the Drector-Hereditary of Shandish, Drector-Appointee in his own right, father of the bride, was an old acquaintance of the family Islay. In past decades, he had become a powerful figure in the Monopolitan 'Droom. Less lucky than Robret "the" Islay, he had been crippled in the conflict which had made Islay a hero and given him a Drectorate of his own, establishing the current dynasty upon Skye. That Morven lived at all was to the senior Robret's solitary credit. Nevertheless, that did not constitute a reason—he broke off the diatribe he had been about to deliver, smiling instead at a female figure seated nearer by.

  "And, heaping fortune upon fortune, leaving me at liberty to seek my own happiness." He lifted a hand toward the voice which spoke of connections. "My younger brother is awarded new responsibility, in which, perverse though it be, he finds as much satisfaction as I in the prospect of marriage." He glanced up, through the ceiling as it were, toward the old tower. "My baby brother, at death's door not long ago, is now upon the mend. Old Henry Redshirt had him up and about this morning, were you two aware?"

  Upon a low stool beside the room's modest firegrate (another the size of Arran's bedchamber dominated the great dining hall) Mistress Lia Woodgate glanced up from the cleverwork held in the lap of her voluminous skirts and smiled back at her fiance. Her hair, unbound and soft upon her shoulders, was a glossy brown. Her skin, over a frame of delicate bone, was fair where it was not heavily, and not

  unbecomingly, freckled. Her eyes, blue as RobrQtfils' were brown, upon this account were close to black. A hardpine log within the grate cracked with a startling noise and split from end to end, releasing a thousand short-lived fireflies to dance up the ancient chimney.

  Above the fireplace hung the cadet Arms of Islay. Upon the shield, against a field of native everblues, the tusk-jowled Skyan thiss crouched in wrinkle-snout defiance within a frame of steyraugs (thrustibles being considered modem by the heraldrists, and gauche). Cadet as might be, the Arms of Islay had just been redesigned to incorporate a silver pickaxe at each comer, juxtaposed with an ebony-and-golden miner's lamp. This device was symbolic of the Morven family, therefore also of the senior Robret's bride, Alysa-beth. Decades younger than the Islay—and, some avowed, inhumanly beautiful—she was the golden-tressed daughter of Tarbert who had been a fighting comrade to the senior Robret.

  Above the shield, upon hooks cast from ancient cartridge brass, hung the original from which the pictured steyraugs were conceived. An awkward mass of metal and green polymer, it represented precolonial arms which, a century ago, had been overcome by the thrustibles of invading Hanoverians. Both sides had collapsed from mutual exhaustion, the invaders' maladaptation to the planet, and the vicissitudes of a larger war which had so far lasted a thousand years. The Holdings were hung about with many such outdated artifacts.

  The buming log settled in its irons, scattering sparks. Lia pulled her skirts from the foot of the firescreen and injected them for scorch holes and embers before speaking. "Pray do not permit Old Henry to hear you call him thus. It would distress him. He repents of youthful days misspent amongst rebellious woodsmnners."

  Robret shook his head. His hair was straight, and, being somewhat longer than was the vogue, bmshed the collar of his well-wom brownish-green outdoorsman's jacket. "Ought I call him by the name the Unsurrendered among his kinsmen give him, *Henry the Uncled'? It is an ungainly calling, though I have heard it claimed it was a custom in

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  those ancient times, which saw this world first settled by our Predecessors, that a weaker foe must cry 'uncle'—why, I do not know—for mercy from stronger."

  Lia made a gentle noise denoting scorn in one of her gender and breeding. "'Unsurrendered' do they call themselves, while making mock of one such as Old Henry? Your father, I think with too much kindness, names them 'Holdouts.' Are they not those who have retreated, unmolested, to the deepest forest and the mountain fastness, partaking in full of the great unwritten Bargain he first put to them— thereby bringing unprecedented peace and happiness to Skye—one of tolerance and, at an arm's length, coexistence?"

  "And therefore," Donol gave his tutor's logic a cynical twist, "who is uncle-ing whom?"

  "Uncled." Robret repeated the awkward word as if he had heard neither his brother nor fiance. "You know, that might be a corruption. 'Cravens who have purchased their survival through submission.' The unculled. Ugly thought! You are quite right, my dear, I shall never call Old Henry by such a name again, he who was first henchman to lanmichael Briartonson," Robret had pronounced the name Bronson, "leader of the genuine rebels upon Skye!"

  "And," added Donol, "our mother's father."

  This time Lia expressed involuntary and uncharacteristic surprise.

  "Knew you not," Robret explained before his brother could lecture, "that my mother, Glynnaughfem nee Briartonson, came to the Holdings not only out of love, but as a highborn hostage? She, the only offspring of the rebel leader, dwelling in the heart of Hanover-Upon-Skye, as it was then known?"

  "It was your vehemence which moved me, darling," answered Lia. "I thought this to have been part of the Bargain. She must have been a great—"

  "A great something," he interrupted, "so the Holdouts called her. It hurt her all her life. Sometimes I think that this—not the genetic drift the bofl&ns speak of with such eloquence, which made her birthings of us and our unborn siblings difficult—was what killed her at the last."

  Silence followed for a time. Never upon previous occasion

  had such delicate and sanguine matters been discussed between the brothers, let alone with someone else who was, however temporarily, not yet of the family.

  "However ..." Robret continued as if there had been no intervening period of silence, as if the thoughts of all three had not wandered elsewhere, but still lingered upon the same subject, which indeed they did. "I brought it up to tell you something else you may not know, nor Arran, either.*' He glanced toward his middle brother. "Nor even you, Donol, at a guess.'*

  "What could it be, elder brother, that you have learned that I have not?"

  Robret smiled. Even his love Lia could not guess what feelings the expression intended to convey. "When lanmichael Briartonson had died—to his surprise of old age and of natural causes—and likewise our mother before her time, peace was still fragile and in need of husbandment. Old Henry Red—Old Henry Martyn, not so old in those days, who had been Briartonson*s chiefmost lieutenant—came here a
foot, of his own accord, willing to become a humble servant in order to take, in some small way, our mother*s place as hostage."

  Donol's expression was a puzzled one. "Robret, you were quite correct. I had not known. Why would anybody do such a thing?"

  "Have I not just explained?" He turned to Lia. "Perhaps you will see that when I called him *Redshirt* it was in token of respect. Perhaps we all—myself included, who has not thought upon these things in years—will henceforward respect Old Henry the more for it."

  Lia nodded and began to speak, but was by Donol interrupted. "Upon the contrary, brother, I disrespect him more who steps from leadership to servitude preserving a bargain made by others, decades old, which perhaps did not require it. To 'Redshirt' and 'Uncled,* let us add 'Wastrel'!"

  "Only,** Robret suggested, "if we grant you the honorifics 'Cynical* and 'Blackhooded.* '* He observed his beloved suppress a grin.

  Donol frowned. "Unlike you, my sage and elder brother, I speak of none of these affairs with any authority. They all transpired before my time, not to mention yours. I do

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  wonder why savages everywhere resist those pragmatic philanthropists intent upon bringing them the benefits of superior culture."

  "Perhaps they believe," Lia offered as if Donol's voice had not been laden again with sarcasm, "the asking price of those so-called benefits too dear, even were they given opportunity to bargain or demur." Before Robret could add whatever it was he planned, she turned to him. "Nor have I ever heard you speak with very high regard for the benefits of culture, your ordinary term of preference being, as I recall, *effete thiss excrement.'"

  Robret's reply was half chuckle, half snort. "Much exists, my darling, of which Old Henry might repent himself and does not." He attempted imitation of the ancient servant's voice. '"Mon didna always sail 'tween stars in mighty shipses . . .' Thus he fills young Arran's head with romantic tales of sailing the galactic Deep, enveloped in colorful and subtle auras, propelled by insubstantial sails bellying in the tachyon wind, sometimes being dashed to pieces in neutrino storms." This time the snort was unmixed with humor. "He pursued the selfsame folly with his grandson and namesake and has none but himself to blame for whatever befell the boy in the end."