* * *
“Hunf!” Geoffrey Niles grunted, beginning to regret accepting Skida’s offer to spar. His forearms slapped down on the boot just before it hit his midriff, and his hands twisted to lock on the foot. Skilly spun around the axis of the trapped foot, tearing it out of his bands before the grip could solidify and then rolled backward off her shoulder, out of his reach and flicking up, then boring back in. The circle of hidehunter faces around the campfire watched with mild interest, jaws moving stolidly as they scooped up stew.
It’s going to be difficult to win this without thumping her, he thought; he had not expected that. The Belizean was a big woman, very strong for her weight, but he had fifteen kilos on her and none of it was fat. She must have had some training. There would be bruises on his upper arm, where she had broken a clamp-hold by stabbing at the nerve cluster. . . .
Flick. Snap-kick to his left knee. He let the right relax, and gravity pushed him out of the way; then he punched his fist underarm toward her short ribs. She let the kicking foot drop down and around, spun again with a high slashing heel-blow toward his head; the punch slid off thigh muscle as hard as teak, but his other palm came up hard under her striking leg to throw her backward. Street-warrior style, those high kicks, he thought critically.
She went with it, backflipping off her hands and doing a scissor-roll to land upright facing him. Then she surprised him, coming up out of her crouch, shrugging with a grin and turning away toward the fire.
Thank goodness, he thought. She was so damned fast, sooner or later he’d have had to hurt her, and that would be unfair, undermining her in front of her people. And—
Even then he almost caught the backkick that lashed out, the long leg seeming to stretch in the dim light. But there had been no warning from her stance.
“Ufff,” he croaked, folding around his paralyzed diaphragm. She caught the outstretched hand in both of hers, twisted to lock the arm. A boot-edge thumped with stunning force into his armpit, then the leg swung over to lock around his elbow, and they were both going down. The ground sprang up to meet them with unnatural heavy-world swiftness, jarring every bone from his lower spine up as she landed half across him with a scissor on his right arm.
The Englishman writhed, turning on his left and reaching behind; there were three ways to break that hold, or with strength alone. . . . He froze as a hard thumbnail poked into the corner of one eye.
“Lie still,” the liquid voice said from behind his ear; he could smell the sweat that ran down her face, and the mint she chewed. “This heavy planet, a real gentlemon always let de lady get on top.”
“Your point!” he said hastily. He had been around the Upper Valley hidehunters long enough now to know why so many were one-eyed.
“Sure, just a friendly match,” Skilly said. She rolled off him and stood, offering a hand and pulling him up after her. They dusted themselves off; the campside was a sandy dried riverbed, with little vegetation. “You not bad, Jeff-my-mon, just . . . Skilly hasn’t fallen for that trick since she was ten. You fight too much like a rabiblanco, you know?”
They walked over toward the fire; the fuel was some native plant like a dense orange bamboo, which burned low and hot and gave off a smell of cinnamon. The camp was simple, a ring of saddles and buffalo-hide bedrolls around the hearth. Horses stamped and nickered occasionally where they were tethered a few meters away, and in the distance something howled long and mournfully. Cythera was full, nearly half again as large as Luna, silver-bright against a sky filled with stars in constellations subtly different from Earth’s. Meteors streaked across it every few minutes, multicolored fire.
“Rabiblanco?” he said. No Spanish that he recognized.
“Oh, nice clean gym, nice flat mats, pretty little white suits and colored belts, hey?”
Too academic, he translated mentally. Well, she has a point. The shoulder felt stiff, and he rotated it gingerly.
“Yes, but what does it mean?” he asked. They leaned back against their saddles, nearly side by side, and one of the others handed them plates of stew and metal cups of strong black coffee from the pot resting on the edge of the fire.
“Rabiblanco?” she said. Her teeth showed in a friendly grin. “White-ass.”
* * *
“You’re quiet today, Skilly,” Niles said.
“Skilly is thinking,” she said. “We nearly there.”
That was a bit of a relief. Not that she chattered; it had been more like a continuous interrogation nearly every day, starting two hours after breakfast, once she learned of his background at Sandhurst. A grab bag of everything he had sat through in those interminable lectures: leadership, communications, how to parade a regiment, logistics, laser range-finding systems, how to hand-compute firing patterns for mortars, how to maintain recoilless rifles, tactical use of seeker missiles . . . She had taken notes, too. Afternoons and they were back in the saddle and she was grilling him on how to use it, comparing it with things she had heard from others or read in an astonishing number of books, making up hypotheticals and hashing out alternative solutions. Evenings around the fire it had been about him. His relations, who knew who, how were you presented at court, what were the rules about giving parties, schools, table manners. . . .
It had been two weeks since they left the Upper Valley plains and rode into the hill country called the Illyrian Dales, and he was feeling pumped dry. It was like being picked over by a mental crow, all the bright shiny things plucked out and sorted into neat heaps and tirelessly fitted together again. He had mentioned the thought to her, and she had given that delightful laugh and said: Bird that know the ground doan get into stewpot, and begun again.
What a woman, he thought contentedly. Not exactly what you’d bring home to mother—he blanched inwardly at the thought—but absolutely riffing for this caper. From hints and glances, even more delightful when they had some privacy. Burton and Selous should have had it so good, he thought. Although Burton would probably have made more of his chances; the man had translated the Kama Sutra, after all.
“Jeffi, you smiling like the jaguar that got the farmer’s pig,” Skida said, coming out of her brown study.
“Beautiful country,” he said contentedly, waving his free arm around.
That was true enough. The Illyrian Dales were limestone hills, big but gently sloped, endlessly varied. Most of the ridgetops were open, in bright swales of tall grass gold-green with the first frosts. The spiderweb of valleys between was deeper-soiled and held denser growth. Sometimes thickets of wild rose or native semibamboo so dense they had to dismount and cut a path with machetes, more often something like the big maples that arched over their heads here.
Those were turning with the frosts too, to fire-gold and scarlet, and there was a rustling bed of leaves that muffled the beat of hooves from the horses and pack-mules. Afternoon light stabbed down in stray flickers into the gloom below, turning the ground into a flaming carpet of embers for brief seconds. Sometimes there would be a hollow sound under the iron-shod feet of the animals, or they would have to detour around sinkholes; the others had told him of giant caves, networks that ran for scores of kilometers underground. Few rivers, but many springs and pools. West and south on the horizon gleamed the peaks of the Drakon Range, higher than the Himalayas and three times as long. The air was mildly chill and intensely clean, smelling of green and rock.
Best game country I’ve seen, too, he thought happily. Whoever was sent on ahead to make camp could count on finding supper in half an hour; there were usually a couple of fat pheasant or duck or rabbit waiting to be grilled, and the hidehunters had grumbled at having to eat venison four days in a row when one of them snapshot a yearling buck from the saddle.
“Thinking like a rabiblanco again,” Skilly said, gently teasing. “Outback is bugs and boring, solamente, you know? Skilly is here because of her job, then it’s city life for her.”
“Incorrigible white-ass, that’s me,” Geoffrey laughed.
Ahead and to their right he could see a herd of bison on a rise in the middle distance, about a kilometer away. A few of the bulls raised their heads at the sound of hooves, and the clump of big shaggy animals began a slow steady movement away, flowing like a carpet over the irregular ground.