Worlds That Weren't

All the foreigners stood out, among his own folk of the Seven Tribes-the fearless free-striding maidens in shifts that showed their calves or even their knees, wives more decorous in long skirts and headscarves, men much like himself in thigh-length hunting shirts of linsey-woolsey or cotton, breechclouts and leggings of deer hide, soft boots cross-laced to the knee, their long hair confined by headbands and topped by broad-brimmed leather hats often decorated by a jaunty feather or two, their beards clipped close to the jaw.

Robre returned waves and calls with a polite heya, but stopped to talk with none, not even the children who followed him calling Hunter! Robre the Hunter! Story, story, story!

Partly that was a wordless shyness he would never confess at the sheer press of people; he was more at home in the woods or prairies, though he knew he cut a striking figure, and had a fitting pride in it, and in the fact that many men knew his deeds. He was tall even for his tall people, his shoulders and arms thick, chest deep, legs long and muscular, a burly blue-eyed, black-haired young man who kept his face shaved in an outland fashion just spreading among some of the younger set. His hunting shirt of homespun cotton was mottled in shades of earth brown and forest green; at his waist he bore a long knife and a short sword in beaded leather sheaths, with a smaller blade tucked into his right boot-top. Quiver and bow rode at his shoulder-he preferred the shorter, handier recurved horn-and-sinew Kumanch style to the more usual wooden longbow-and a tomahawk was thrust through a loop at the small of his back.

The man he sought should be down by the levee on the riverbank, where the flatboats and canoes clustered. And where…

Yes. That’s it, and no other.

The boat from the coast was huge, for all its shallow draft, like a flat tray fifty feet long and twenty wide. At its rear was an odd contraption like a mill’s wheel, and amidships was a tall thin funnel; a flag fluttered red and white and blue from a slender mast, a thing of diagonal crosses-the Empire’s flag. Somehow a fire made the rear wheel go round to drive the boat upstream Robre made a covert sign with his fingers at the thought, and whistled a few bars of the Song Against Witches. The steamboat was an Imperial thing. Imperials were city folk, even more than the Mehk, and so to be despised as weaklings. Yet they were also the masters and makers of all things wonderful, of the best guns, of boats pushed by fire and of writing on paper, of fine steel and fine glassware and of cloth softer than a maiden’s cheek. And they told tales wilder than any Robre had made around the fire of an evening, about lands beyond the eastern seas and a mighty queen who ruled half the world from a city with a thousand thousand dwellers and stone houses taller than old-growth pines.

Robre snorted and spat again. The Imperials also claimed their Queen-Empress ruled all the land here, which was not just a tall tale but a stupid, insulting one. The Seven Tribes knew that they and none other ruled their homes, and they would kill any man among them who dared call himself a king, as if free clansmen were no better than Mehk peons.

I figure the Imperials come from one of the islands in the eastern sea, Robre thought, nodding to himself. Everyone knew there were a mort of islands out there: England, Africa, the Isle of Three Witches. Past Kuba or Baydos, even, maybe. They puff it up big to impress gullible folk down along the coast.

The clansman pushed past an open-fronted smithy full of noise and clamor, where the blacksmith and his apprentices hammered and sweated, and on to a big shack of planks. The shutters on the front were opened wide, and he gave an inward sigh of relief. He’d have had to turn round and go home, if the little Imperial merchant hadn’t been here; he usually stopped first at Dannulsford Fair on his yearly rounds, but not always.

“Heya, Banerjii,” he said.

Banerjii looked up from the gloom inside the store, where he sat cross-legged on a cushion with a plank across his lap holding abacus and account book.

“ Namaste, Hunter Robre, sunna Jowan,” he said, and made an odd gesture, like a bow with hands pressed palm-to-palm before his face, which was his folk’s way of saying heya and shaking hands.

“Come in, it being always wery good to see you,” the trader went on, in good Seven Tribes speech but with an odd singsong accent that turned every v to a w.

Odd, Robre thought, as he sat and a few local boys hired by the trader saw to his baggage and beasts.