March To The Stars

rejection of the local female as 'just a child,' it was clear that the shaman was ... attracted to her.

Cord glowered at him, and Roger decided to let his mentor off the hook. Instead, he turned his attention to the Mardukan female as she arrived.

'Pedi Karuse? What can we help you with?'

Pedi was unsure how to broach the subject, so she fell back upon ceremony.

'I must speak to you of the Way of Honor, of the Way of the Warrior.'

Roger recognized the formal phrasing as distinctly ceremonial, and his toot confirmed that the terms were in a separate dialect, probably archaic.

'I will be pleased to speak to you of the Way. However, most ways of the warrior recognize the primacy of current needs, and we are currently in a crisis. Could this discussion not wait?'

'I grieve that it cannot,' the Mardukan female answered definitively. 'Yet the full discussion should be short. I have failed in honor, through my failure to acknowledge a debt. The debt and other points of honor are, perhaps, somewhat in conflict, yet the debt itself remains, and I must address it.'

'Captain,' Roger called to Pahner. 'I need Eleanora over here, please!' He turned back to the Mardukan and raised a hand. 'I need one of my advisers in on this. I suspect it's going to involve societal differences, and we're going to need better translation and analysis than I can provide.'

Although the vern's accent was getting steadily and almost unbelievably quickly better, a great deal of what he had just said remained so much gibberish to Pedi. And whatever he'd just said couldn't change her obligations. Nor could the arrival of this 'adviser' he mentioned.

'This cannot, on my honor, wait,' she said, and turned to D'Nal Cord.

'I am Pedi Dorson Acos Lefan Karuse, daughter of Pedi Agol Ropar Sheta Gastan, King of the Mudh Hemh Vale, Lord of the Mudh Hemh. I bring to this place only my self, my training, my life, and my honor. I formally recognize the benan bond under the Way, and I thus pledge my service in all things, from here until we reach the end of the Way, through the Fire and through the Ash. Long may we travel.'

'Oh, shit,' Roger muttered in Imperial. He glanced at Cord, whose incomprehension of Pedi's language was only too apparent, and hastily consulted the cultural influence database of his toot. Then he consulted it again, cross indexing her words against the original language kernel and every other cultural matrix they'd passed through on their long trek. Unfortunately, it came out the same way both times.

'What?' Cord snapped. 'What did she say?'

'Oh, man,' Roger said, and shook his head bemusedly. 'And you guys don't even have a language in common!'

'What?' Pahner asked, stepping over to the three of them.

'Hey, Cord,' Roger said with an evil smile. 'You remember all those times I warned you to think before you leap?'

'What did she say?' the shaman repeated dangerously. 'And, no, that was usually myself or Captain Pahner speaking to you.'

'Well, maybe you should have listened to yourself,' Roger told him, beginning to chuckle. He waved a sweeping gesture of his arm and Pedi. 'She says she's asi.'

'Oh ... drat,' Pahner said. He gazed at Pedi for a moment, then swiveled his eyes to Cord. 'Oh ... pock.'

'But ... But only my people recognize the bond of asi,' Cord protested. 'I have had long discussions with Eleanora about the culture of the People and the cultures of others we have met on our travels. And only the People recognize the bond of asi!'

Roger shook his head, trying—although not very hard—to keep his chuckle from turning into full-throated laughter. The attempt became even more difficult when he looked back at Pedi and recognized her frustration at finding herself just as incapable of understanding Cord as he was of understanding her. Their complete inability to communicate struck the prince as Murphy's perfect revenge upon the cosmopolitan shaman who had appointed himself Roger's 'slave,' mentor, moral preceptor, and relentless taskmaster. Especially since it looked very much to him as if Pedi was going to be at least as stubborn about this benan bond as Cord had been about the bond of asi.

'Well,' he observed with a seraphic smile, 'at least you guys will have that much in common.'

CHAPTER TWELVE

'Oh, they have more than that in common,' Eleanora O'Casey told the people gathered in Hooker's once again crowded wardroom just over three hours later. 'Much more, in fact.'

The problem of prize crews had been partially solved. The five surviving pirate ships had been provided with skeleton crews drawn from all six of the flotilla's schooners, along with a few of the K'Vaernian infantry who knew the difference between a bow and a stern. Then Hooker,Pentzikis,Sea Foam, and Tor Coll had headed northwest, closehauled and throwing up foam, while Snarleyow and Prince John (busy stepping a new foremast) kept company with Tob Kerr's Rain Daughter and the captured Lemmaran vessels. It was fortunate that the flotilla had brought along replacement spars as deck cargo aboard Snarleyow. Replacing Prince John' s mast wouldn't be a problem, but Roger wasn't at all sure that they'd be able to replace the rigging of both dismasted pirates, as well. Whether repairs could be made or not, however, he felt confident leaving Snarleyow and Prince John to look after things while the rest of the flotilla tried to run down the rest of the convoy the pirates had captured.

The current meeting had been called to try to resolve some of the problems that they would face taking or 'recapturing' the remaining ships. In addition, Roger and Pahner were in agreement that it was also time to consider what problems might be anticipated following landfall. As part of that second objective, the meeting would also serve to bring most of the core of the command staff up to date—as far as possible, at least—with the mainland political situation.

'Go ahead,' Pahner said now, pulling out a bisti root and cutting off a slice. 'I've gotten bits and pieces of what we're sailing into, but you might as well tell everybody else.'

'Of course.' Roger's chief of staff pulled out her pad and keyed it on line. 'First—'

'A moment, please,' Cord interrupted. 'While all of us—' a waving true-hand indicated the humans, Diasprans, and Northerners crowding the compartment '—will understand you well enough, my ... benan will not. She must be aware of this as well.'

'Oh, that's okay, Cord.' O'Casey smiled with more than a hint of mischief. 'We girls already hashed all this out. She's up to date.'

'Ah,' Cord replied stoically. 'Good.'

O'Casey waited a moment to see if she could get any more of a rise out of the shaman, but he only sat impassively. After several seconds, she smiled again—a bit more broadly—and continued.

'The pirates in the area, as Captain Kerr already informed us, are called the 'Lemmar.' Actually, I suspect that the term as he uses it isn't exactly accurate. Or perhaps it would be better to say that it isn't completely accurate. He seems to be using it as a generic ethnic term, but as nearly as I can tell, 'The Lemmar' appears to be a political unit, as well—similar to the Barbary Sultanate on Earth or the Shotokan Confederacy. It's based on raiding, high-seas piracy, and forced tribute. As for our particular lot of Lemmar, we captured charts and logs from two of their ships, and we've got a good fix on our position, the position of the raid, and the probable route the prize ships will be taking on their way home. So we should be able to find most of them and chase them down. The little local fillip is that, as I'm sure everyone noticed, the Lemmar don't care to be taken prisoner.'

A fairly harsh chuckle ran through the compartment at her last sentence. The fighters in the wardroom had