He saw Jago getting onto another of the spares, the last two men mounting up, as Ilisidi started into motion and Nokhada started to move with the group. His vision grayed out on him in the sudden motion—had been graying out since Jago had lit into him, for reasons doubtless valid to her. His hands shook, and balance faltered.
“You stay on,” Jago said, drawing near him. “You stay with the mecheita, do you hear me, nadi?”
He didn’t answer. It made him mad. He could understand Cenedi hitting him, he knew damned well what he’d done in going after Banichi. He’d violated Ilisidi’s chain of command—he’d forced them into a fight Cenedi would have avoided, because Cenedi was looking out for the dowager—and possibly, darker suspicion, because Cenedi would all along as soon leave Banichi and Jago in the lurch and have him completely to himself and the dowager’s politics. Cenedi personally would gladly sell him to the highest bidder, that was the gut-level fear that had sent him down that hill, he thought now, that and the equally gut-level human conviction that the treason he was committing was, humanly speaking, minor and excusable.
It wasn’t, for Cenedi. It wasn’t, for Jago, and that was what he couldn’t understand—or accept.
“Do you hear me, nadi, do you understand?”
“Where’s Algini and Tano?” he challenged her.
“On a boat,” Jago snapped, her knee bumping his, as the mecheiti moved next to each other. “Likewise providing your enemies a target, and a direction you could have gone. But we’ll be damned lucky now if—”
Jago stopped talking and looked skyward. And said a word he’d never heard from Jago.
He looked. His ears were still ringing. He couldn’t hear what she heard.
“Plane,” Jago said, “dammit!”
She reined back in the column as Ilisidi put Babs to a fast jog into the stream and across it, close to the mountain. Nokhada took a sudden notion to overtake the leaders, jostled others despite a hard pull on the rein.
He could hear the plane coming now. There wasn’t anything they could do but get to the most inconvenient angle for it that they could find against the hills, and that seemed to be their leaders’ immediate purpose. It wasn’t a casually passing aircraft. It sounded low, and terror began to increase his heartbeat. He wondered whether Ilisidi and Cenedi were doing the right thing, or whether they should let the mecheiti run free and get into the rocks. It wasn’t damned fair, being shot at without any weapon, any cover, any way to outrun it—it wasn’t anything like kabiu, it wasn’t the way atevi had waged war in the past—he was the object of contention, and it was human tech atevi were aiming at each other, human tactics…
They kept their course along the mountainside, Ilisidi and Cenedi holding a lead Nokhada wasn’t contesting now, the rest of the column behind, strung out along the streamside. Cenedi was worried. He saw Cenedi turn and look back and up at the sky.
The engine sound came clearer and clearer, illegal use, unapproved use, to fire from the air—they’d designed the stall limits to discourage it, considering that Mospheira was situated as it was, easily within reach of small aircraft. They’d kept the speed up, not transferred anything to do with targeting—no fuses, no bomb sights; it was the paidhi’s job to keep a thing like this from happening…
His mind was busy with that train of thought as the plane came down the stream-cut roadway, low, straight at them. Its single engine echoed off the hills. The riders around him drew guns, a couple of them lifted hunting rifles—and he didn’t know to that moment whether atevi had figured out how to mount guns on aircraft, or whether it was only a reckless pilot spotting them and trying to scare them.
The plane’s skin was thin enough bullets might get to the pilot or hit something vital, like the fuel tanks. He didn’t know its design that intimately. It hadn’t been on his watch. Wilson’s, it had probably been Wilson’s tenure…
His heart thudded in panic. Their column had stopped entirely now and faced about to the attack. He held Nokhada on a short rein, while gunfire racketed around him, aimed aloft.