Way Of The Clans Page 4

  Her face darkened momentarily, as did the visages of Aidan and others in the sibko at the mere mention of the awful word, freebirth. "I know," she said. "We are not supposed to love one another. We are supposed to love all. "

  "And we do. Do we not?"

  "I suppose so. But the love for all is not the same as—"

  "Do not even say it, Marthe."

  And they stopped saying it, but the need that Aidan so often felt for Marthe's company, to the exclusion of the others, continued. He wondered if Marthe felt the same uneasiness at violating what was, after all, the way of the Clan.

  3

  The season had changed at least three times since they had come to Ironhold. As the cadets listened to Dermot, who was now droning on about the Exodus from the Inner Sphere, the hot, humid air was difficult to breathe. This oppressiveness, in turn, made concentrating on Dermot's dull lecture nearly impossible. Aidan felt sweat accumulating under his training uniform, a jumpsuit of rough cloth that chafed against his hot, damp skin every time he moved. He believed that the uniform, which had been issued to everyone in sizes either too small or too large, was intended as just one more adversity on the list of many calculated discomforts of warrior training. His uniform, too small when he got it, now seemed even more so. Not only had he grown a few centimeters, but had been adding muscle on muscle from the intensive physical training, long, seemingly pointless marches and drilling, and hard, demeaning labor that were part of the military routine for the cadets. The material of the uniform was being stretched thin.

  He longed for a larger uniform, or at least an airier one. Right now he did not know which was the worse, listening to Dermot or his uniform's chafing, a sensation just marginally more pleasant than rolling around naked on a bed of pumice.

  Dermot was offering his regular catechism on Clan history, beginning with General Aleksandr Kerensky's carefully planned Exodus from the corrupt and quarreling star empires of the Inner Sphere. Unable to restore the Star League as a political entity, he had led his people to this new sector of the galaxy where, after overcoming many hardships and uprisings, he had set up his new government on the planets of Arcadia, Babylon, Circe, Dagda, and Eden. (Aidan had been hearing this ancient history from, it seemed, his cradle days, and perhaps even since the canister, the sibko's slang term for the artificial womb from which he and all his siblings had been born.) After the Exodus, it had been necessary to conduct a shakedown of the forces. Societies did not survive on the skills of warriors alone, so it became necessary to relocate three-quarters of the Regular Army and Navy personnel. Eventually this demobilization led to the formation of the castes, as new skills had to be learned and new duties assumed by the warriors without portfolio who had been judged not quite good enough to remain in the general's service.

  The demobilization, it turned out, was not simple. Characteristics essential to warriors did not always blend in smoothly with normal society. Some warriors became yojimbos, a word whose origin was buried in past history. The yojimbo's escapades on several Clan planets became nettlesome. Many became outlaws, roaming the countryside looking for any kind of work that would make use of skills no longer really in demand. Occasionally someone might hire them to serve in a private army, and a few employers had problems that only a bit of muscle and military expertise could solve.

  It was a hard time, the time of the yojimbo, a transition period between the end of the Exodus and the beginning of the Clans. Restlessness and rootlessness, disorientation caused by the hardships of the new worlds and the yearning for the old worlds, led to individualism. If not for for the wisdom of Nicholas Kerensky, this dangerous trend could have created political divisions among the settlement worlds that would have been as destructive and violent as those that had disintegrated the Star League into the quibbling and chaotic dominions of the Inner Sphere.

  Dermot's drone rested heavily on the oppressive air as he described how the Clan worlds were expanded into a nearby group of stars called the globular cluster. It must have been an exhilarating time for those who were there, but Aidan, at this remote distance in time, could not concentrate on the dry history of it all. He wanted stories, not a recitation of facts. Stories of heroes and yojimbos, warriors and villains.

  * * *

  They had been very young. It was in the time when the sibko was still full, before the first eliminations of its members through failed tests, lost trials. They were all young hawks then, nestlings at hack but not willing to fly too far away from each other, much less the sibparents. One of the cadre of sibparents in charge at that time was named Glynn. She was a tall woman, one against whom Aidan and Marthe were later to measure their own considerable height. They would become taller than Glynn, but not until they were well into their adolescence. By then, Glynn, too soon dead, was no longer around to be measured against.

  Glynn had wanted to be a warrior but had failed in the middle training stages. Everyone in the sibko adored her and thought her the loveliest person ever created. Later they saw that she was not beautiful, but merely pleasant-looking, with a bland face that was too gaunt and wonderful yellow hair that was too stringy. They made up stories in which she defeated formidable, firebreathing monsters and slaughtered hordes of barbarians.

  Aidan sat beside Marthe. Even at that early time, barely out of the toddler stage, they were friends. The child Aidan had never seen a more beautiful face than Marthe's.

  "Mifoon faced his adversaries, who were lined against him across the wide boulevard," Glynn was saying. This story was one of the many she knew about the legendary yojimbos. Whatever the tale, the protagonist always had the strange, almost absurd name of Mifoon.

  "In the line of villains, Mifoon recognized at least four who had once been of the noble yojimbo caste." The sibko knew there had been no caste system at the time of the yojimbos, but they allowed her the fancy because she equated the wandering fighters with warriors, as if they had been precursors of the Clan system rather than aimless, out-of-work warriors, disenfranchised by Kerensky edict.

  "With his right hand holding the whip the Ice Queen had given him and brandishing Toshiro with the other"— Toshiro was the name of Mifoon's magical sword, awarded him for valor by General Kerensky, who had ordered him to rid the land of the new villainy—"Mifoon screamed the falcon cry and rushed down the boulevard toward his antagonists who, in turn, were speeding toward him." (Glynn also gave Mifoon characteristics suggesting he was a precursor of the Jade Falcons, and therefore someone extra special.)

  "First he faced the wicked merchant Canfield, who directed the barrel of a laser pistol toward Mifoon, his finger closing on the trigger. Quickly Mifoon released Toshiro. The sword, true to its mark, sailed toward Canfield. The merchant could not get out of the way and Toshiro sailed into his chest, sending blood flying out and along its blade." (The children oohed and aahed, as they always did when the hero disposed of a villain. They also thrilled at the kinetic movement with which Glynn punctuated her stories, holding a hand to her chest to "feel" the sword implanted there, flying with her arm on its return to Mifoon.)

  "Canfield fell and the sword returned to Mifoon's hand, the blood on it magically dissolving. Mifoon, out of the corner of his eye, saw the yojimbo Pablo rushing at him, his eyes filled with rage at how Mifoon had killed his lover Susan in the moonlight raid on Brender Camp." (Glynn's eyes suddenly duplicated her hero's fearsome rage.) "Mifoon knew he could not bring his sword around to be used effectively on Pablo, so he flicked the Ice Queen's whip, with its heat-guidance tip, at the on-rushing adversary. Of course it caught Pablo in the neck, first bouncing off it, then wrapping itself tightly around his neck and choking him to death." (Glynn's eyes bulged at the feel of an imaginary whip on her own neck; she seemed to expire as the whip tightened, then her eyes shot open, sending some of the children reeling backward in fright.) "Stepping over the body of Pablo, jerking the whip off the dead man's neck, Mifoon now turned to greet the attack of the evil—"

  "Glynn!" It was the
voice of sibparent group leader Gonn, who often destroyed her stories with his uncanny ability to find the secret place where they had gathered, then interrupting at an especially crucial part. "Telling your lies again?"

  Suddenly the formidable Glynn seemed to shrink, her shoulders sliding in as if on runners, her good posture turning into a postulant's supplication. "They are not lies," she said in a small voice. "They are stories."

  Gonn scoffed. "Stories are lies. It is demonstrable, you know that. If you fill the sponges in their heads with unsubstantiated legends about roving malcontents, they could become malcontents themselves. That is not the way of the sibko, quiaff?"

  "Aff," she responded weakly. "Not the sibko's way."

  "Or the way of the Clan, quiaff?"

  "Aff. Not the Clan."

  "Truth unites us, quiaff?"

  "Aff. United by truth. Truth the binder of belief."

  "Very good. Belief the underpinnings of truth, the destroyer of pallid myth."

  As they went through their ritual, Aidan—and perhaps the others—grew restless. He wanted more story. He wanted to know what had happened to Mifoon. That might not be the way of the sibko, or the way of the Clan, but it was the way of Aidan. . . .

  4

  Dermot, who read poetry in a halting voice that tended to obscure the import of the words, was now reciting a long segment from The Remembrance, the wonderful saga whose verses, simple on the page but resounding when recited by one who could convey the epic sweep of it (anybody but Dermot), described the founding of the Clans, how Nicholas Kerensky had restructured society after planets had been ravaged by those who thought land equated with power.

  Nicholas Kerensky took over his newly won dominion armed with a plan to forge a new society out of the disparate populations that made up the Exodus survivors. By mining the resources of its own diversity and channeling the energies of its warlike inclinations, the reborn society would unify his people into a force capable of achieving his greatest dream—a return to the inner Sphere to reestablish the Star League, the form of government that had once existed there. Everything directly connected to the Inner Sphere was suddenly banned, while nationalistic ties to the past were discouraged.

  The Clans themselves had their origins earlier, during Nicholas' exile on Strana Mechty, when he had reorganized his armies into twenty groups, or clans, of forty warriors each. Within each clan, Nicholas decreed smaller units, what another age would have called platoons. Each of these sub-units was composed of five warriors and was eventually termed a "Star," the image presumably based on the conventional five points in the usual star symbol. Later, when the Clans had grown to their present massive proportions, the star imagery was continued and much of the organization was still based on quintuple segments.

  The reorganization of society involved resettling outsiders into the various clans, a move that tended to further destroy nationalistic leanings. (Dermot's voice was itself resettling down into its deepest, most boring register, the voice whose vibrations Aidan seemed to feel so deeply through his body that they gave him back pain).

  As the class recited the names of the Clans in unison and in precisely clipped words, Aidan's thoughts drifted off again, even as he stayed right in rhythm with his classmates . . .

  * * *

  Only a few days before the sibko had left for the training cycle, Aidan and Marthe had gone grave visiting. First, they went to the grave of Warhawk, whom Aidan had buried just outside the cemetery fence, then marked with a stanchion so that he could always find the site again. Warhawk's death had been unfortunate, the result of a malicious member of another sibko who thought he could bring honor to his own group by flinging a stone at the falcon. If Warhawk had not lost the sight in her right eye in a brutal skirmish with a renegade hawk, she might have seen the stone coming and executed one of her incredibly beautiful swooping arcs away from it. But the shot had been true, and Aidan watched her seem to come to an abrupt stop in the air, then drop to the ground like a lead weight. When he found her, her body still, her neck twisted and seemingly stretched, he had gone into a rage, found Warhawk's murderer, and nearly sent him to his own grave. For a while, an unpleasant feeling between the two sibkos led to many skirmishes (which Aidan's sibko usually won, led by his fierce charges, his punishing blows), but the conflict ended abruptly when the boy who had killed Warhawk was himself slain in a fight within his own sibko.

  Now, he found, it was difficult to tell exactly where Warhawk lay beneath the ground. The mark was still on the stanchion, but it seemed to Aidan that something about the ground had changed, that in some way its configurations had shifted or that the way he remembered them had altered. Now there was grass where none had previously been, and that complicated his search even more. He wanted to place his feet along the sides of the burial site, a silly ritual that he always performed during each visit to Warhawk, but this time it was impossible. As he stared at the spot where the grave might be, he fingered the edge of his leather vest at the place where Warhawk had often bit and nibbled. Bite marks were still there, rough and frayed to Aidan's touch.

  "Do not be sad," Marthe advised. "We are leaving here soon and may never come back. If we do, the fence may even be gone or rearranged to suit new dimensions of the graveyard. We lose boundaries all the time, quiaff?"

  Next they went into the cemetery and searched out Glynn's grave. Dav, the most artistic member in the sibko, had carved out a fighting sword on top of the grave marker, so it was easy to locate. In the shelter of a bushy tree, the sword seemed to thrust out of the ground, as if the corpse beneath was holding onto the hilt from inside the tomb. The shadows cast by the tree created the illusion of fresh bloodstains along the blade.

  Standing silently by the grave, Aidan thought of Glynn's wasted death. One day a roving band of bandits had come too near the sibko, which was undergoing extended wilderness-survival training, camped in some geodesic domes abandoned by another sibko whose members had gone on to the next stage of their training. Gonn, an insecure military strategist at best, had panicked and set up a perimeter defense outside the encampment. It was clear to Aidan that the bandits might have passed them by if Gonn had not drawn their attention.

  Aidan remembered lying on the ground, his hand tightly clutching the low-powered laser pistol that had become standard issue for the sibko after its tenth birth-noting. It could not kill, but it could cause extreme discomfort, as Aidan learned when Peri, the sneaky little runt of the siblitter, had shot him during a mock infantry exercise. The beam caught Aidan in the neck, sending a steady pain through it that was worse than any headache or muscle spasm he had ever endured. The pain made his eyes tear up and he fell to the ground. Peri, fearful that her toy had been set too high, ran over to him. When she saw that he was still alive, she laughed triumphantly. That was Peri's way; she exulted in her victories and let her victims know that she was happy to have defeated them.

  In spite of his pain, Aidan had grabbed Peri about her legs, tipped her over, and disarmed her of the toy laser pistol, which he then held to her head. At that moment he had wanted to give her a headache the equal of the pain she had inflicted upon him. Fairness won out, however. Aidan accepted the skirmish victory as his due, sending the now-frowning Peri back to the assembling area with other defeated child-warriors, all waiting for their next turn in the battle game.

  Aidan watched the bandits come toward the entrenched sibko. He could hardly make out the features of their faces, so begrimed were they with the dirt of the road that it looked as though they'd been wallowing in mud. Their clothes were mostly old and ripped, though here and there a bandit wore relatively clean, new-looking garments, probably booty from their most recent raid. The hair of the man at the head of the pack was tightly wrapped in a trio of short pigtails that bounced against his forehead with each step. Three pigtails identified him as the antikhan, a title that marked his rebellion against the warrior caste (he had no doubt been a disgraced warrior or failed warrior cadet). The word
itself showed contempt for the rigid political structure of the Clans, each of whose leaders was called a khan, while the leader of all the Clans was given the exalted title of ilKhan.

  Each member of the attacking horde seemed to grow in size as he or she came nearer. It was an optical illusion, Aidan knew, but the front ranks of the bandits were nevertheless populated by bulky, thick-muscles brutes who looked like warrior caste flush-outs.

  Aidan, remembering Glynn's latest Mifoon adventure, took aim at the bandit leader's forehead and waited for him to get as close as possible before firing. Sibparent Gonn, who was in charge of weaponry training, had told Aidan that his main flaw as a marksman was that he was always the most eager to fire and most ready to fight in the entire sibko. Therefore, Gonn said, he should train himself to use proper caution. Aidan was now trying to be cautious, while his finger longed to pull the trigger and blast the bandit leader between the eyes. (According to Gonn, Aidan was one of the two or three best shots in the sibko, too).

  He would have fired, and he would have stunned the leader and perhaps averted the attack if it were not for Glynn. No one ever had a clear notion of why she did it, though Gonn would later say the fanciful tales she told had chipped away too much battle armor from her mind, and that she probably thought she was some roving yojimbo out to save the local community from ravagers.

  At any rate, Glynn marched past the line of sibko-defenders. With her height, she seemed like a giant stepping over ordinary people, especially with all the members of the sibko prone and looking up at her with awe. As though her long legs propelled her with a life of their own, she headed right for the advancing horde, which came to a halt at a signal from the tri-pigtailed leader.