Jason Wander #03 - Orphan's Journey by Robert Buettner

Author:Robert Buettner [Buettner, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-03-08T23:00:00+00:00

THIRTY-THREE

JUDE WAS RIGHT. Bassin was a phony who had fooled me once. If he fooled me twice, shame on me. But Bassin had also saved me—and the people I was responsible for—once. And that made me as curious as it made Howard. Curiosity won.

I turned to the other three Earthlings, and waved them toward Bassin. “Let’s go sleep with the devil we don’t know.”

I patted Rosy good-bye, then the four of us got loaded one-each into chariots, and Bassin’s little caravan bounced downslope toward the river.

The Marini chariots were built of light woven reeds, for speed. Their solid-axle suspensions were for durability, not comfort.

I clutched the side rails as we bounded along, and shouted to my driver, “Why do you carry a marksman along in each chariot? He can’t hit anything from a platform this unstable.”

The charioteer shouted back, eyeing my unfamiliar armor. “Did you train in a cave? The marksman isn’t there to shoot the enemy. He’s there to shoot the wronk if it turns. I’d sooner trust a Tassini than a wronk.”

Our chariots skirted the Fairground. A few men struggled, loading corpses on wood carts and dragging them to pyres. They wouldn’t be able to cremate a tenth of the bodies before the scavengers arrived. Too many fairgoers had been asleep in their tents when the Slug attack fired the encampment. The dead had to number in the tens of thousands.

My driver shook his helmeted head, and asked nobody, “Why would they do this? The Peace of the Fair has held for three centuries.”

At the riverbank, Bassin’s chariots fanned out among the handful of ships that remained afloat, some listing in the shallows, some beached by their masters to save them.

My driver reined up in front of a green-lacquered vessel a hundred feet long. A man with a close-cropped white beard stood alongside it in the shallows, uniform trousers rolled above his knees, hammering wood pegs into a hull patch with a mallet.

My driver said, “She looks sound. You did well to beach her.”

The white-bearded man straightened, and stretched, hands at the small of his back. He nodded. “She’ll float the Locks.” He glanced back toward the Fair. “If my crew can scavenge replacement canvas, we’ll be the first to sail away from this graveyard.”

The charioteer said, “We need passage to the coast, Ship Master.”

“Suddenly everyone does. Who’s we?”

“I speak for the Queen’s personal representative.”

The Ship Master turned and cocked an eyebrow. “And who might represent Her Majesty this far upriver?”

“Bassin the Engineer.”

The Ship Master snorted. Then he threw back his head, laughed and slapped his ship’s hull. “Bassin? Bassin’s dead!”

The charioteer said, “No—”

“You’re blowin’ up the wrong trouser! I was this close to Bassin”—the Ship Master held his thumb and forefinger apart—“when the slavers offed his leg.” The Ship Master turned back to his patch job.

“An engineer’s faster on one leg than a pirate on two, Wilgan,” said a voice behind me.

I jumped, as Bassin limped up alongside me, and I stared at the well-formed prosthetic that had replaced the crude stump below his left knee.

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