This is mad, he thought as they came out onto the landing overlooking the courtyard, seeing that the mecheiti were rigged out in all their gear, with, moreover, saddle packs and other accoutrements they’d never used on their morning rides.
This isn’t two hundred years ago. They’ve planes, they’ve guns like that one back on the stairs…
Something exploded, shaking the stones, a vibration that went straight to his knees and his gut. Someone wasn’t waiting for the mob in the buses.
“Come on!” Cenedi yelled up at them from the courtyard, and he hurried down the steps, with some of Cenedi’s men behind him, and the handlers trying to get the mecheiti sorted out.
It was a crazed plan. Reason told him it was beyond lunacy to take out across the country like this. There was the lake. They might have arranged a boat across to another province.
If the provinces across the lake weren’t the ones in rebellion,
A second explosion hammered at the stones. Itisidi looked back and up, and swore; but Cenedi grabbed her arm and hurried her along where handlers held Babs waiting.
He spotted Nokhada, darted, arms encumbered, among the towering, shifting bodies; and wondered how he was to load the saddle packs with his bundled clothes and the computer, but the handlers took his belongings from him.
“Careful!” he said, wincing as the handler almost dropped the computer, the weight of which he hadn’t anticipated. His computer went into one bag, the clothes and the kit went into the other, on the other side of Nokhada’s lean and lofty rump, Nokhada fidgeting and fighting the rein. The mecheiti this morning all had a glimmer of brass about the jaw, not blunt caps on the rooting-tusks, but a sharp-pointed fitting he’d seen only in machimi—brass to protect the tusks.
In war.
It was surreal. The fighting-brass was, with Nokhada’s head-butting tendencies, not a weapon he wanted to argue with or even stay on the ground with. He took the rein one handler gave him, couldn’t manage it with the sore arm, shifted hands and hit Nokhada with his fist, trying to make the creature drop a shoulder. Riders all around him were already up. Nokhada objected, fidgeted up again, and resisted a second order, circling him, wild-eyed in all the surrounding haste and excitement. That was how things were going to go, he thought, unsure he could restrain the creature in an emergency—scared of its strength and that jaw as he hadn’t been since the first.
“Nadi,” a handler said, offering a hand, and atevi strength snared and held the rein.
He grabbed the mounting-strap, relied on the unceremonious shove of the handlers, shoved his foot in the stirrup on the way up and landed, sore-boned, and with a wrench of his sore shoulders, on the pad, with his heart pounding. He took a quick fistful of rein to bring Nokhada under control in the general confusion, as someone opened the outward gate.
Cold morning wind blasted through the court, stinging his face as all the mecheiti began to move. He looked distractedly for Babs and Ilisidi. He brought Nokhada another circle, and Nokhada found a fix on Babs before he even saw Ilisidi.
He couldn’t hold Nokhada, then, with Babs headed for the gate. Nokhada shouldered other mecheiti and struck a loping pace in Babs’ wake, into the teeth of an incoming gust that felt like a wall of ice.
The arch passed around him as a blur of shadow and stone. The vast gray of the lake was a momentary, giddy nothingness first in front of him and then at his right as Nokhada veered sharply along the edge and up the mountainside.
Follow Babs to hell, Nokhada would.
* * *
XII
« ^ »
It was across the mountainside, and up and up the brushy slope, across the gully, the very course he’d bashed his lip taking, the first time he’d ridden after Ilisidi.
And ten or so of Ilisidi’s guard, when he snatched a glance back on the uphill, were right behind him… along with a half a dozen saddled but riderless mecheiti.
They’d turned out the whole stable to follow, leaving nothing for anyone to use catching them—he knew that trick from the machimi. He found himself in a machimi, war-gear and armed riders and all of it. It only wanted the banners and the lances… no place for a human, he kept thinking. He didn’t know how to manage Nokhada if they had to break through a mob, he didn’t know whether he could even stay on if they took any harder obstacles.