“That single exception was our present host’s first wife, Rahksahna Morguhn—Ahrmehnee-born, now deceased. Bili, himself, owns the strongest fargathering talent ever recorded, yet none of his brothers so far tested has the power to any degree, and his three children by Rahksahna lack it entirely. I am now hoping against all the odds that Tim and Gil, as they both had the same mother as Bili, will prove latent far-gatherers.”
Milo drained off the other half of his goblet, then refilled it, continuing to talk while reaming his pipe and packing it with tobacco.
“You’ll learn to mindspeak with animals, not just horses and cats, but all manner of beasts. You’ll learn to see with others’ eyes, hear with their ears, smell with their noses, taste with their tongues and feel with their skins.”
His eyes caught Neeka’s and she lowered her gaze, flushing darkly, a small smile tugging at her lips. In their nights together, he had already commenced her education in those particular and erotically pleasurable directions.
“Finally, when you’ve absorbed all the Academy has to offer you, you’ll start learning languages and dialects. All of you know Mehrikan—Neeka knows one dialect, Gil two, and Tim five, but there are more than a dozen all told in the Confederation alone. You all can read and write and speak Southern Ehleeneekos, and Neeka knows the Northern dialect, but you’ll all have to learn the Island dialect, which differs markedly from mainland Ehleeneekos.
“Tim and Gil speak a passable Ahrmehnee, already, and Neeka can quickly master it, no doubt, but you’ll all have to learn to read and write it, and that will take time, since they use an alphabet entirely different from Mehrikan and only distantly related to Ehleeneekos.
“Neeka reads and writes Zahrtohgahn, but she can’t speak it. Tim speaks Kweebehkeekos and Nyahgrahee, which are almost the same language, and a bastard pidgin-Zahrtohgahn. The only language that at least one of you doesn’t have is English.”
All three looked puzzled at the unfamiliar word. Before any could frame the question, Milo explained.
“English was the language that was spoken and written by the people who dwelt on this continent almost a thousand years ago. The gullible and the superstitious of our time call those long-dead people gods, but they were not, any more than am I or are you. The Witch Kingdom, so called, deep in the southern swamps, is the only place that English still exists as a spoken language, though all the many Mehrikan dialects are its direct descendants.
“If, after you’ve mastered all the more needful languages, you want to learn to speak English properly, fine, I’ll be happy to teach you… and I’m the only man outside the Witch Kingdom who can. But you must all learn to at least read English. Now and then, one or two or more of the ancient books turn up somewhere or other, my agents obtain them by hook or by crook and they are rushed to Theesispolis to be carefully preserved in the great library there, along with the volumes of my personal journal, which is also in English.
“These books contain, oftimes, knowledge which has, does and will prove invaluable to us and our people over the centuries. So we must all have the ability to partake of it.”
All three nodded assent. Then Neeka’s brow wrinkled and she shyly asked, “But why learn all these other languages, my lord, when we can all mindspeak?”
Milo had arisen and was standing with his pipestem in his mouth, its filled bowl inverted over a candle flame, while he sucked mightily and little spurts of wispy smoke jetted from his mouth.
Tim answered the question. “Because, Neeka, outside the Confederation, mindspeak ability is far less common than it is in our lands.”
Milo resumed his seat, he and his now well-lit pipe emitting clouds of fragrant, blue-gray smoke. He nodded. “Tim is right. But even in the Confederation, only a little more than half the people have real, everyday-usable mindspeak even though the percentage has been climbing every year for the last two hundred or more.
“When I led the first ten thousand or so of the Kindred from the Sea of Grass and into Kehnooryos Ehlahs a bit more than two centuries ago, mindspeak—since it had long been a survival trait in the hard and too often short life of the clanspeople on the prairies and high plains, as it was the means of communicating with their horses and the allied prairiecats—was present to some degree in between seventy and eighty percent of them.
“But in the Southern Ehleenee, whom we conquered piecemeal, only one or two percent were accomplished mindspeak-ers, and even those with latent powers only brought the figure to something less than ten out of every hundred. There were two reasons for this: Since their culture differed so drastically from that of the Horseclans, they had no real, pressing need for the ability and so had never nurtured and developed it; and since their antique religion considered any unusual mental abilities to be an indication of witchcraft—for which ‘sin’ the penalties were harsh, hideous, agonizing and fatal—those who did possess mindspeak seldom used it.
“As the Kindred and Ehleenee intermarried and interbred, the talent began to crop up with more frequency, especially among the nobility. Then, after I broke the power of the Ehleen Church a century and a half back; after I stripped their clergy of many of their ancient rights and privileges, revoked their tax-exempt status retroactively and seized much of their property for back taxes along with tons of gold and silver; after I disbanded and either killed or imprisoned their secret packs of night-riding terrorists; after I released the common Ehleenee from the Church’s emotional stranglehold and turned them against the clergy by exposing those clergymen for what they truly were—smugglers, brothel owners, receivers of stolen goods, extortionists, rapists and murderers, and most telling, slavers of the worst sort, who maintained a fleet of merchant ships to transport the children the priests demanded of their parishioners for ‘holy orders’ across the sea to be sold at auction; after all this had been done and most of the Ehleenee were truly free in both mind and body, the percentage of mindspeakers really began to climb.
“But what I consider—as will you—progress is seldom comprehensible to those whose lives span only fifty or sixty years and often less. Nonetheless, the population of the Confederation now includes almost sixty percent mindspeakers, and that is a hopeful sign that, someday, all our people will share the same gift.”
In the late evening of yet another day, Milo sat with his pipe and a small goblet of fiery cordial, his nude, freshly bathed body wrapped against the chill of the night in a chamber cloak of silk and fur. His long, almost hairless, bare legs were extended before a fragrant fire of oak and applewood.
Across the width of their chamber, warmed by a nearby brazier, sat Neeka. The woman occupied a low, padded stool, faced a mirror lit by flanking lamps, and was raptly concentrating on the meticulous brushing of her buttock-length black hair. Her own goblet of cordial sat on her dressing table, barely sipped, and the small, richly jeweled pipe she was trying to learn to smoke had been set aside to smolder out.
Between them, a big bed, its cherrywood headboard carved with the arms of Clan Morguhn, awaited them. Milo was eagerly anticipating the warmth of feather mattress and quilted coverings, but Neeka, it soon became apparent, was thinking of other things.
“Milo,” she asked, still brushing, “people have to have something to believe in. It was wrong for you to destroy the Church, and that destruction can only breed more and more rebellions over the years. Someday, the Ehleenee may even unite and—”
Milo chuckled and interrupted her. “Ehleenee unite? Never! Neeka, they couldn’t even unite to face the threat of my armies conquering them, so factionalized and backstab-bing were they… and they’ve not changed one whit over the years.
“My few thousand Horseclansmen and Freefighters could never have defeated any really united Ehleen kingdom, especially if that kingdom had had the minimal support of the others, but none of them was ever completely united or even minimally supported. No sooner did I invade Kehnooryos Ehlahs from the west than that unhappy realm was invaded from south by other Ehleenee—the Karaleenoee, to be exact—from the north by Middle Kingdom types and threatened from the sea by the Ehleen pirates, plus being faced with one large and numerous smaller internal rebellions.
“When I invaded Karaleenos, it was the same story. Karaleenoee nobles who had bones to pick with Zenos and his successors either openly allied with me or weakened his armies by refusing to contribute troops and supplies or actually rising and laying waste to his rear areas.
“The last King of the Southwestern Ehleenee, Zastros, might easily have crushed the combined armies I had raised to oppose his advance north had not certain of his chief thoheeksee decided they’d had enough of him and his Witch Kingdom queen, slain her, turned him over to me and disbanded the army.