called them. A ripple of whispers spread throughout the beer shop, and bearded faces turned their way.
“It’s all because nobody liked my pa, ’n’ because they’re all cowards!” Her voice had risen to a shout, falling into the sudden silence.
“That’s a matter for your Jefe, missie,” Robre said. The soothing, humor-the-mad-girl tone made the blood pound in her ears. “’N’ the gathering of your clan’s menfolk.”
“I came to offer you two Mehk silver coins each, if you’ll come with me ’n’ help me,” she said, in a tone as businesslike as she could manage. “’N’ you can show these gutless, clanless bastards that a girl ’n’ an out-clan man can do what they can’t.”
“Sorry,” he said; the calm finality shocked her more than anger would have. “Not interested.”
“Then damn you to the freezing floor of hell!” she screamed, snatching up his mug and dashing the thick beer into his face. “Looks like I’m the only one in this room with any balls!”
That made him angry; he was up with a roar, cocking a fist-then freezing, caught between the insult and the impossibility of striking a freewoman of the Seven Tribes, and a maiden of another clan at that.
Shaking, Sonjuh turned on her heel, glad that the lanterns probably weren’t bright enough to show the tears that filled her eyes. She stalked out through the shocked hush, head down and fists clenched, not conscious of the two weird foreigners who blocked the door until she was upon them. One twisted aside with a cat’s gracefulness; the other stood and she bounced off him as she would off an old hickory post; then he stepped aside at the other’s word.
Sonjuh plunged past them into the night and ran like a deer, weeping silently, with Slasher whining as he loped at her heel.
“I wonder what that was in aid of?” Eric King murmured to himself, raising a polite finger to his brow as the room stared at him and Ranjit Singh, then walking on as the crowded, primitive little tavern went back to its usual raucous buzz-although he suspected that whatever had just happened was the main subject of conversation.
Even in the barbarian hinterlands, he didn’t think a girl that pretty dumped a pint of beer over a man’s head and stalked out as if she were going to walk right over anyone in her way, not just every night. In a way, the sensation she’d caused was welcome; the two Imperial soldiers probably attracted less curiosity than they normally would. Eric waited courteously while the man he’d come to see mopped his face vigorously with a towel brought by a serving-girl, looking around as he did. This wasn’t much worse than the dives he’d pulled soldiers overstaying their leave out of in many a garrison town; the log walls were hung with brightly colored wool rugs, and the kerosene lanterns were surprisingly sophisticated-obviously native-made, but as good as any Imperial factories turned out. He’d have expected tallow dips, or torches.
“Mr. Robre sunna Jowan?” he asked, when the man was presentable again. “I’m Lt. Eric King. This is my daffadar…Jefe’s-man…Ranjit Singh.”
“Robre Hunter, that’s me,” the native replied, rising and offering his hand. “Heya, King, Ranjeet.”
The hand that met his was big, and calloused as heavily as his own. They were within an inch or so of each other in height and of an age, but Eric judged the other man had about twenty or thirty pounds on him, none of it blubber. A slight smile creased a face that was handsome in a massive way, and the two young men silently squeezed until muscle stood out on their corded forearms. The native’s blue eyes went a little wider as he felt the power in the Imperial’s sword-hand, and they released each other with a wary nod of mutual respect, not to mention mutual shakings and flexings of their right hands. Eric read other subtle signs-the white lines of scars on hands and dark-tanned face, the way the local moved and held himself-and decided that native or not, this was a man you’d be careful of. And no fool, either; he was probably coming to the same conclusion.
“Dannul! Food for my guests from the Empire!” Robre bellowed. “And beer, and whiskey!”
King understood him well enough. The local tongue was derived from that of the Old Empire, and the Imperial cavalry officer had experience with the classical written tongue of the Pre-Fall period, with the speech of the Cape and Australian Viceroyalties, and some of the archaic dialects still spoken in remote parts of England, as well. With that, and close attention in weeks spent along the coast near Galveston, he could follow Robre’s speech easily and make himself understood with a little patience. It was mostly a matter of remembering a few sound- changes and applying them consistently.
“No beef,” he said. “Cow-meat,” he added, when Robre looked doubtful. The vocabulary had changed a good deal, too. “It’s…forbidden by our religion. Our Gods.” He pointed skyward.
To oversimplify, he thought, as Robre nodded understanding.
“ Yi-ah, like our totems,” the Bear Creek clansman said. “I don’t eat bear-meat, myself.”
King smiled. To vastly oversimplify, he thought.
His grandfather had eaten beef now and then; so his father had, at formal banquets among the sahib-log, though rarely at home. His own generation mostly didn’t touch it at all, although as Christians it wasn’t against their religion in theory. More a matter of not offending. The idea made him a bit queasy, in fact. Well, you don’t expect a taboo to make rational sense. That doesn’t make it any less real.
Luckily, Ranjit Singh was a Sikh, and so-apart from cow’s-flesh-had fewer problems with the ritual purity of his food than most Hindus. Nanak Guru, the founder of that faith, had made a point of having his followers eat from a common kitchen with converts of all castes, and even outcaste ex-Muslims; they were the Protestants of the Hindu world, more or less. It simplified traveling no end.
A stout middle-aged serving woman brought wooden platters of steaming-hot corn bread, butter, grilled pork-ribs slathered with some hot sauce, and bowls of boiled greens; the food was strange but good, in a hearty peasant-countryside sort of way. Local courtesy, according to Banerjii, meant that you had to eat with someone before getting down to serious business. And drink; the maize-beer was vile, but better than what the Seven Tribes called whiskey. The stuff they imported from the south, made from a cactus, was worse. The local wine was unspeakable even by those low standards.
“So,” Robre said. “You two are from the Empire?”
“Yes,” King said. Technically, so are you, of course, my friend. “We’re here to hunt. Mr. Banerjii tells me that you’re the man to see about such matters.”
“Awful long way to come just to hunt,” Robre said. “How’d you get the meat ’n’ hides home?”
“Ah-” Eric frowned. Obviously, the concept of hunting for trophies wasn’t part of the local scene. “We’re on our way home from England to India, which is the…biggest part of the Empire. That’s where I and my man here live…”
Robre frowned. “ England is part of your Empire? In the old songs, we spent a powerful amount of time fighting England.” He threw back his head and half chanted
“Fired our guns ’n’ the English stopped a-comin’ Fired again, ’n’ then they ran away-”
“Ah…well, that was before the Fall, you see.”
Local notions of geography were minimal; evidently these people had lost all literacy and most sense of the past during the Fall. Not surprising, since this area was on the southern fringe of the zone where total crop failure for three freezing-cold summers in a row had killed nearly everyone but a few cannibals who survived by eating their neighbors. These Seven Tribes might well be descended from no more than a handful of families. Small numbers meant fewer memories and skills passed down, and the older people who might remember most were most likely to die.
The lands farther south, what the old maps called Mexico, had preserved some remnants of civilization, with gunpowder and writing and a few small cities atop a peasant mass. India and the Cape and Australia had done much better, thanks be to Christ and Krishna and St. Disraeli…
There was no sense in stretching poor Robre’s idea of the world too far-and for that matter, King’s own schooling hadn’t covered the Pre-Fall history of the Americas in much detail. The Mughals and the East India Company had taken up a good deal more space, and so had the Romans. He did know that there had been a temporarily successful rebellion against the Old Empire here in North America by British colonists just about a century before the Fall, and that the New Empire had only started to make good its claim to the continent in the last couple of generations.
There’s so much else to do, he thought wistfully.
The growing tension with Dai-Nippon, for example, or the chronic menace of the Czar in Samarkand, hanging
