Which seemed a civilized arrangement.
“If he intends to jump,” Cenedi told him, “do as you did. Your weight won’t bother him.—Are the stirrups short enough?”
“I fear, nadi, I wouldn’t possibly know.”
“If your legs cramp, say so.”
“They don’t.” He didn’t complain of the rubbery condition. He put that down to sheer fright and a workout of muscles he wasn’t used to using.
“Good,” Cenedi said, and rode off at a steep diagonal up the ridge, Cenedi’s mechieta ducking its head and sniffing the ground intermittently, while its long legs never broke stride.
Curious ability. It was smelling for something along the ground, and lifted its head to smell the wind as they reached the crest of the ridge.
And Cenedi kept the creature under control so damned effortlessly. Cenedi stopped, signalled them with a wave of his hand, and Ilisidi put Babs up the ridge at a fair clip.
Nokhada took the diagonal course uphill, then, hellbent on regaining second place to Babs. Dammit! Bren thought, cutting the guards off in their climb; but he was afraid to pull on the rein, among the rocks and sliding gravel.
“Excuse me!” he called back over his shoulder. “Nadiin, it’s her idea!” That drew laughter from the guards, as Nokhada fell in at Babs’ tail. Better than resentment, at least. There was a hierarchy among mecheiti, and Ilisidi and everyone in the party had known Nokhada was going to follow Babs, come hell or high water. They’d had their joke. He’d gained a cut lip and sore muscles, but he hadn’t fallen off and he’d been a fair sport about the joke—it was the way he’d learned to deal with Tabini’s court, at least, and the way he’d learned to deal with Tabini, early on.
One just didn’t back away from a challenge—and atevi would try a newcomer, if for nothing more than to determine his place in the order of things: they did it to anyone and they did it as a matter of course, on an instant’s judgment to find out a fool or a leader… neither of which he planned to be with them, not to threaten Ilisidi or Cenedi or any of them.
And after he had realized Ilisidi’s joke at his expense and let them know he saw it, then things were easier, then he could ride at Babs’ lazily switching tail and be easy about the position in which Ilisidi had set him, giving him a mecheita proper to a high-ranking visitor from Tabini’s own staff; he could quite well appreciate the humor in that, too—a mecheita that was going to give the unskilled visitor hell, especially if he thought he was going to adjust his position in line, or argue with Ilisidi.
Humiliate him? Ilisidi could do that with a flick of her riding crop. Follow a competition jumper in terrain like this? The paidhi-aiji would be extremely lucky if only his dignity fractured.
But he must have passed Ilisidi’s trial of him, since Cenedi had given him at least a fair sketch of left, right, go, and stop—enough knowledge to put a fool in trouble or keep a wiser man from outright folly—like that business on the exit from the gate, and the cliff, which now he was convinced must not have been so sheer as his immediate impression of it, or Nokhada more in command of her footing than she seemed. Dump the paidhi down-slope? Yes. Lose a high-bred mecheita? The woman who’d attacked a course official with her riding crop, over scratches?
He wasn’t wholly certain. The tea service had certainly been calculated to send some message; and he wasn’t wholly certain Ilisidi was innocent in the matter of the tea—although he would bet the severity of his reaction had left the dowager and Cenedi some little chagrined: a general atevi recklessness toward questions of life and death and bihawa, that aggressive impulse to test strangers, had betrayed them and left them somewhat at disadvantage: to that degree he suspected it was in fact an accident—a blemish on mutual dignity they had to repair.
Had to. And he couldn’t have accepted the breakfast invitation and then declined to come with Ilisidi on this ride. He’d read it right, let Banichi say what he would, he’d read it correctly.