Alien Wind
by
Lisa Gabriella
 

Part One

Chapter One

The young female leaned against the side of the carriage and looked down the River of Ind. It was near to the Winter Solstice, and in the dawn she felt cold. Now the midmorning Solar Star warmed her and sparkled on the river, making her screw up her eyes. She saw boats moored in the stream and a Wryten engineer working over a plane table on the far bank. That was where the bridge would go up. From behind her, on the other side of the carriage, a sharp voice cried out.

“Enya! Enya! Where are you? We are waiting.”

 Warriors stood around her, talking in many languages, and transport beasts grunted, but the young female took on her mother’s mood and rebelled, staying silent where she was.

After a moment she cried aloud, “Oh gods, it is no good,” and stood upright.

“I am here, Mother.”

“Where have you been? Your father is waiting. This is not our carriage.”

“I know, Mother. I am going riding today. You said that I could.”

“Oh yes. Who with? Very well. Good morning, Actiongroupleader Helyng. You are sure that you do not mind Enya’s company?”

“It is an honor, madam.”

Actiongroupleader Helyng was already mounted. The young female watched him smiling down at her mother, and detected her mother’s controlling smirk. The Actiongroupleader’s good left eye, on Enya’s side, twinkled cynically. His voice was soft and his mouth hard.

He was forty-eight. His right hand ended in a stump and a fake hand. He led an ungainly column that was already on the move. The travelers wound out in due order from the ferry head, their faces to the northern frontier of Synd.

The wheels, the hoofs and the boots pounded the road. Enya’s groom helped her to mount. She adjusted her hat and robe, took her crop from the groom’s hand and was ready to go. Her father had been posted to the garrison of Pashwyr, and she and her mother were going with him.

She looked at the river again and at the huge sharp rocks found by Adyk. “It is the filthiest place that I have ever seen.”

“You will see grimmer.”

“I do not want to. Look at that horrible steep cliff.”

“That is called Jelyl. And the one on the other side is called Kemyl. They are named after heretics whom an ancient emperor had thrown into the whirlpool. That has a name too.”

He was a strange thin male, with unexpected humors and odd enthusiasms. She watched the engineer at the table and listened with half an ear to her companion. The engineer was little more than a vision in the distance, but she imagined his face and warmed towards him. He was building a bridge. The bridge would carry a roadway across the River of Ind. Then the roads would reach forward again and bring peace into this desolation.

These travelers who pressed forward about her were the forerunners. They were not settlers, but they brought peace and law with guns in their hands and musical instruments in their baggage. There were warriors, mountaineers and Synds, marching in step. There were officers’ families, with wardrobes and chests and trunks full of curtain material, linen and crockery. The families traveled in carriages or on riding creatures. Their chattels filled a string of beast carts.

She watched the carts, and behind them saw a sectiongroupleader and his wife Adyna in a carriage. She waved shyly. Adyna wore a heavy veil to protect her complexion from the Solar Star rays. Perhaps she had not seen the wave. Actiongroupleader Helyng gestured, and his eyes flashed.

“Ishkandyr the Conqueror crossed the river a few kilometers upstream...”

It was funny how, as she grew older, she could tell by the sound of a male’s voice whether he liked her and in what way. The land was trying to speak too, in the rustic of a dry wind over barren earth.

It was a low, harsh voice, saying, “Remember, before you forget.”

She remembered the dawn, those few days back, where the roads ended. That was in the Panjyb, where peace had already settled. In that dawn the frost made the grass white, and the mountain warriors blew on their fingernails and chased each other between the roadways like youths, yelling to keep warm. And the little Synd swung their arms around, stood hunchbacked and stamped their feet.

Back there in Synd males tilled the fields and females lit the cooking fires. This seventeenth day of the last season of the year 2879, she had crossed the River of Ind. Synd lay behind her. The rest of the largest continent ahead. Yesterday she had seen a shimmer of white suspended in the sky above the northern horizon, above the dust, above the clouds.

She touched her riding creature’s flank with her heel and trotted up the road. Actiongroupleader Helyng fell into place beside her, and soon they caught up with her parents’ carriage. Her mother looked up crossly, but Enya knew she would say nothing in Actiongroupleader Helyng’s presence.

The Actiongroupleader was mature and a bachelor, so Enya had to be treated as a sensible, grown female of twenty-three, fully ready for the responsibilities of marriage. One day her mother would say so in as many words. Then Enya would seize her opportunity.

Across the scrub-covered plain approached males with riding creatures. The males had the faces of hunters and walked with a long, slow, lifting stride. One of them looked up as he passed by. Enya smiled at him, expecting the greeting and the answering smile of an ordinary Synd wayfarer. But this was not Synd.

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