“Can’t go on until moonrise,” said Ashes. “Can’t see where to go. We’ll build a little fire and have some food, catch some sleep.”
Bane and Dyre were too tired to complain. They ate, dropped into sleep, only to be wakened again, this time for hours of careful, slow travel by landmarks only Ashes could see, until almost dawn.
“The way’s tricky from here,” Ashes remarked, dismounting and hobbling his horse once more. “We’ll wait for full light.”
Full light came. They rode. Darkness came. They stopped, until moonrise once more, then went on. Shortly before dawn, after a long climb, they drew up near the edge of a cliff that marked the rim of still another immense and ancient caldera. Early light bleached the eastern sky. Two moons threw silver reflections in a lake far below, and beyond the lake flickered the amber glows of a scatter of campfires.
“Our people,” said Ashes. “Wilderneers.” He moved restlessly on his saddle, then turned to the boys and told them to dismount.
When they were afoot, he brought them close, within arms’ distance, and muttered, “Before we go down there, there’s things you got to know.”
“Yeah?” sneered Bane. “And what would that be?”
Ashes reached to his side, thrusting back his coat to let Bane get a good look at the whip coiled around his waist, the sharp end
hanging at his side, then grasped him by the shoulder in a grip that made him cry out. “You want some more of what you had before, boy? I’m not one of your flowery fencing masters or your wet-eared boys or some woman you can smart-mouth to. I’m Ashes and Thunder, and you’ll hark or you’ll suffer.” He gave Bane a shake and released him, glaring into his face. “Now the two of you. You listen.
“A long time ago, we came here, a bunch of us, from the planet Thor. We’d had a bit of a disagreement with our brethren there, and we decided to find ourselves a new place where we could do things right without having to explain every other move … “
“What was the disagreement about?” asked Bane, interested in all this.
For a moment Ashes looked angry, but then he breathed deeply and said, “Women. How we were going to handle women. We said women had no right to refuse any man anything. Whatever man she belonged to, he owned her just like he owned a horse, and you didn’t let a horse say it wasn’t going to be bred or saddled. We took a few women just to prove the point, and we killed some families that got in the way, and the whole thing blew up into a sort of war.
“Well, we had hostages, and we said we’d let the hostages go if they’d let us go, and they said so leave. They wouldn’t let us bring any women, but we figured we could pirate some from somewhere, once we got settled. So, we scouted a few places and decided on this one, then we met up at a transfer point, and we captured a colony ship with almost a thousand men aboard, people we could use as slaves, and we came here. The place suited us. We settled in, we planted crops, we built a couple of fortresses, we started building towns, we did some hunting, some trapping, we sold furs off planet—after we learned how to get ‘em off planet—we brought in some recruits, we sold biologicals, Dingle and Farfaran and other such stuff, and after a score or so years, after most of the towns were built and most of the slaves were dead, we decided it was time to bring in some women.”
Dyre gaped. “Why’ja wait so long?”
“Too much trouble to get them earlier. Our system is, women are for breeding, and that’s it. You gotta keep ‘em locked, you gotta keep ‘em private. Letting other men see your women, that’d be shameful. So, before we brought women in, we had to make places to keep ‘em, places they could stay out of the way, do their own work without being seen. Courtyards, like. Like there in House Genevois. That wharf behind there, we shipped furs and stuff down river from there. When the courtyard was empty, the Timmys used to come out into it, and I used to sit up there under the tower watching them dance.”