The Stone Dogs Read online

  Yolande sniffed deeply, sighing with pleasure. The scent of the brewing pot mingled with the delicate sweetness of the flowers over their heads and the hot breads under their covers, iodine and seaweed from the ocean beneath their feet, and suddenly she was hungry. For food, for the day, for things that she could not know or name, except that they made her happy. She looked around at the faces of the others, and everything seemed clear and beautiful, everyone her friend. Even the serf, a swarthy thick-set woman with a long coil of strong black hair; the identity number tattoo below her ear showed orange as she bent to fill the cup, and the coffee made an arc of dark-brown from the silver spout to the pure cream color of the porcelain.

  "Thank yo'," she said to the servant, with a bright smile. "I'll have some of those—" she pointed to a mound of biscuits, brown-topped and baked with walnuts —and the fruit, and some of those egg pies."

  "Grapefruit," Muriel said sourly, watching with envy as the others gave their orders and Yolande broke a roll. It steamed gently, and the soft yellow butter melted and sank in as soon as it was off the knife. The plump girl had lagged badly when they sprinted the last half-kilometer of the run, and bruised herself doing a front-flip over one of the obstacles. The wench put two neatly sectioned halves before her. "I loathe grapefruit."

  "Then don't be such a slug, Muri," Myfwany said ruthlessly, looking up from a clipboard. "You were doing quite well last year, and then spent all summer lolling about stuffin' yo'self with ricotta and noodle pie."

  Somebody else giggled, and Muriel's face went scarlet; her expression went from sullen to angry, and then her eyes starred with unshed tears.

  "Honest, Muri, everyone's just tryin' to help—" one girl began.

  There was a rattle of crockery as Muriel pushed her half-eaten plate away, rose, and left at a quick walk that was almost a run. Myfwany scowled at the girl who had tittered.

  "Veronica Adams, that was mean."

  "Well, I didn't call her a slug, anyway."

  "An'I didn't laugh at her. Are we her friends, or not? I thought yo' two were close."

  Veronica frowned and pushed strips of chicken breast and orange around her plate. "Oh, all right." she muttered. A moment later: "I'll tell her I'm sorry." A sigh. "It's just… all the trouble we went to, an' she slides back down the hill when we stop pushin'."

  "Things aren't easy fo' her," Myfwany continued, expertly filleting her grilled trout. Aside, to Yolande: "Her parents are religious."

  Yolande kept silent for a moment, biting into the biscuit and catching a crumble beneath her chin with the other. Myfwany was obviously the leader of the group, and it would not do to offend… not while she was on probation.

  There was a slight taste of honey and cinnamon to the pastry, blending with the richness of the butter and the hot morsels of nut. The egg pies looked good, too, baked in fluffy pastry shells with bits of bacon and scallion; she ate one in three swallows, feeling virtuous satisfaction. Her body felt good and strong and loose, warmed from the run and the swim, relaxed by the masseur's fingers.

  It would not do to look tongue-tied, either. She swallowed, looked up and raised a brow. Religious… That was unusual, these days. "Aesirtru?" she asked. You still found a scattering of neopagans about, though even in her grandfather's time it had been mostly a fad.

  "No, worse. Christians."

  Yolande made a small shocked sound, one hand going unconsciously to her mouth. Very unusual, and not altogether safe. Not forbidden, precisely. After all, only a few generations ago most Draka had been at least nominal Christians. But now… it was enough to attract the attention of the Security Directorate. Believers were tolerated, no more, provided they kept quiet and out of the way and gave no whisper of socially dangerous opinions; the secret police took the implications of the New Testament seriously, more so than most of its followers ever had. And it could kill any chances of a commission when you did your military service, even if the krypteia could do no more to you than that.

  She felt the eyes of the others on her. "Well, she's a Citizen," she said with renewed calm, undoing her hair and shaking it out over her shoulders. The sea breeze caught it and threw it back, trailing ends across her eyes. "She's got a right to it, if she wants to."

  Myfwany smiled with approval. "Oh, it didn't take," she said, waving her fork. "That's part of the problem, we talked her out of it last year—partly us, some of the teachers helped— and then when she went home it was one quarrel with her parents after another, and she was gloomin' all the time. She'll snap out of it." Another hard look at Veronica. "If we help her."

  "I said I'd say I was sorry," the girl snapped back, then bridled herself with a visible effort. Softly: "I am sorry." She was broad-shouldered, with a mane of curly dark-brown hair and the sharp flat accent of Alexandria and the Egyptian provinces. "What's today?"

  "Intro Secondary Math 8:00 to 10:30," Myfwany said, glancing back at the clipboard. "Classical Lit from 10:45 to 12:15. Historical Geography till lunch, rest period, and then we're back to Bruiser and The Beak. Shouldn't be too bad, Beak's givin' us a familiarization lecture on rocket-launchers today."

  "Moo," the third girl said. "Secondary Math." Yolande fought to remember the name. Mandy Slauter. Tall and lanky and with hair sun-faded to white, pointed chin propped in one hand. "Tensor calculus, an' Ah had trouble enough with basic. Euurg, yuk, moo."

  "Y'can't make flying school without good math," Myfwany said, reaching for a bunch of grapes from the bowl in the center of the table. She stripped one free, flicked it up between finger and thumb and caught it out of the air with a flash of white teeth. To Yolande: "Yo've fallen in among a nest of would-be spacers."

  They all gave an unconscious glance upward. It had only been a few years since the first flights to orbit, but that was a strong dream. Only a few thousand Draka had made the journey beyond Earth's atmosphere as yet, and rather more Americans, but it was obvious that the two power blocs who dominated the planet were moving their rivalry into space. There would be thousands needed when the time came for their call-up in half a decade.

  Yolande flushed. "Me, too," she said. "Both my parents were pilots in the War." With shy pride: "Pa was an ace. Twelve kills." Some of the others looked impressed. Thank you, Pa, she thought. Well, it was impressive.

  Mandy shrugged. "But tensor calculus… Sometimes Ah'd rather just settle fo' the infantry. Not so much like school, anyway." She reached for a passionfruit, cracked the mottled egg-shaped shell, and dumped the speckled greyish contents into her mouth.

  "How can yo' eat those things with your eyes open?" Veronica said. "They look like a double tablespoon of tadpoles glued together with snot." In an aside to Yolande: "Mandy's boy-crazy already, that's why she's considerin' the infantry." The pilot corps was two-thirds female, while the ground combat arms had a slight majority of men.

  Mandy laughed and raised the fruit rind threateningly. "Ah am not boy-crazy—"

  "Aren't we all a little old fo' food-fights?" Myfwany said, looking at her watch. "Class time."

  Chapter Two

  … sorry it took so long to write but it's been a bit of a whirl. The school is very pretty here on the bay, and my rooms are fine. I checked on the servants' quarters and food and everything, like you said. Bianca complains about the cooking but that's just because it's Neapolitan, and they all have trouble understanding the Italian around here (so do I) which isn't like Tuscan at all. The school servants can mostly speak English anyway, since they come from all over. A lot of them can read, too. The classes are about like the old school on Elba, but we've got a really tough Unarmed Instructor and I'm learning a lot. You have to or she thumps you, which I suppose is fair.

  The other girls are mostly nice and I've made some friends already, especially Myfwany and Muriel and Veronica and Mandy. People are calling us the Fearsome Five, and we're all going to try for pilot training and the space program. Can I invite them up to home for the Novembers?

  Anyway, I miss you all the time. M
other, and Pa, too, and Edwina and Dionysia and even John but don't tell him or he'll be even worse than he usually is. And Tantie Rahksan and Deng, too, and the house and everything.

  Love, Yolande

  P.S. The stables are pretty good here, so could you send down Foamfoot? The school hacks have all got mouths like saddle leather.

  Letter From Yolande Ingolfsson

  To Her Parents

  Dated: October 21st, 1968

  From Contemporary Poets Series

  Trackways Of The Heart

  Archona Press, Archona, 1991

  BAIAE SCHOOLDISTRICT OF CAMPANIA

  PROVINCE OF ITALYDOMIMATIOTI OF THE DRAKASEPTEMBER 18, 1968

  The classroom was comfortably cool, even though the day was growing sultry in the hours after noon. Half the frosted-glass panels of the inner wall were folded away, leaving gaps between the slender pillars of white-streaked rose marble; beyond was the shade of the inner colonnade, and hot white light on the courtyard's gardens and fountains. Yolande still fought to stifle a yawn; there was a feeling of drowsiness to the hot air. It smelled of cool stone, seawater, and the summer-scent of pine resin baking out under the unmerciful sun. Her eyelids fluttered down, and she brought herself back up with a jerk. It had been like that since her periods started a year before. Wild energy, and then sleepiness in the middle of the day; despair and happiness switching on and off like a light-switch.

  And I don't even have breasts yet, she thought resentfully, looking down at a chest still almost as flat as a boy's. She looked over at Mandy, in the next desk. She already looks like a woman and she's tall, too. It isn't fair!

  Myfwany hissed at her and she rose as the teacher walked briskly through the colonnade, followed by a serf with a double armful of books and papers.

  "Make yo'selfs comfortable, girls," the instructor said. There was a rustle as they sat again. "Just leave it all, Helga," she added to the servant.

  How elegant she looks, Yolande thought, watching the teacher as she arranged the materials. Sort of distinguished. Sixtyish, with graying brown curls cropped close to her head; slender, with a scholar's well-kept hands and an athlete's tan, dressed in a long gray robe with a belt of worked silver vine-leaves. And a miniature gold circlet pinned over her heart; the corona aurea, the Archon's highest award. Awed, Yolande wondered what it was for. Usually for bravery-above-and-beyond, or some really important accomplishment for the Race.

  "Service to the State," the teacher said formally.

  "Glory to the Race," the students murmured in perfunctory unison.

  The class was a little over average size, twelve pupils seated at desks of African flame-cedar in irregular clumps across a floor tiled in geometric patterns of blue and green, facing the rear wall and the teacher's station.

  "I'm Catherine Harris," she said, sitting with one hip on the edge of the green malachite slab that was her desk.

  There was a big display-screen on the wall behind her, one of the new crystal-sandwich types; she touched a control on the desk and it lit with a world map in outline. The smaller screens on the students' desks came alive as well, slaved to the master control. Countries were shown in block colors: black for the Domination, with the Draka firelizard sprawled across it, and shades of green for the nations of the Alliance.

  "Well start with a regression. This is the situation today, with more than half the world under the Yoke." All Africa, all Europe, all of mainland Asia except the southern peninsulas running India-Malaysia-Indochina. "Now before the Eurasian War, in 1940." The area of black shrank; now the Domination was mostly Africa, with the Middle East and Central Asia and only a toehold in the eastern Balkans. The names of vanished lands reappeared on the screen: Germany, France, Russia, China.

  "Now 1914, before the Great War. Which, difficult as it may be to imagine, infants, I can remember." Muffled laughter, and the screens showed Africa alone in black, with outliers in Crete and Cyprus and Ceylon. "Ten-year intervals back to the beginning." The dark tide receded, from the western bulge of the continent and from the interior. 1800, and Egypt went pale. Two decades more, and there was nothing but a tiny black spot around Cape Town in the extreme south.

  Yolande stirred uneasily at the sight. The sequence was familiar, but showing it in reverse was not. Usually the maps started with the tiny speck, and then it flowed irresistably forward. Doing it this way seemed vaguely… improper, somehow. She glanced at the servant, who was sitting on her heels by the side of the desk, hands folded neatly in her lap and eyes cast down. A wench in her twenties, blond and with a Germanic-looking pallor, very pretty—what Pa would call a hundred-auric item—with the serf-number standing out orange beneath her ear.

  I wonder what she thinks of the course, the Draka girl thought suddenly. The wench must have heard it dozens of times. Some people said serfs didn't think at all, except about things like food and sex and their work, but that wasn't true. Serf children played quite freely with the offspring of the Great House when they were young, and Yolande had learned all their gossip; the stories, whose mother yelled and hit, and whose father drank too much smuggled grappa. Deng thought a lot, he was really smart even if he wasn't very talkative. Rakhsan, Mother's Afghan maidservant, she could tell you things about times way back before the War. It was the older fieldhands who kept so quiet, never speaking unless you asked them something, the ones old enough to remember the War and the times right after it, the purges and the camps.

  "… Sure yo're quite familiar with it," the teacher was saying. "What I'm goin' to teach is the realities beneath it. Question: how did we get from that,"—she moved her head toward the screen—"to this." A hand indicated the school.

  Myfwany raised her palm. "We won, Miz Harris," she said, and there was another muffled giggle.

  Harris smiled herself, and reached into the folds of her gown for a gunmetal cigarette case. "Pardon the bad example," she said sardonically at their round-eyed stares. Draka of their generation did not often smoke, at least not tobacco.

  "I was raised befo' we knew it was bad for yo'. Yes, Myiwany, we won. But war isn't the explanation, it's the result. We're a warrior people, and our weakness is that we tend to think too much of battles and not enough of the things which lead up to victory. There are problems that don't yield to the butchershop logic of the sword. Yo' can say a man dies because his heart stops, but it doesn't explain. We need to know the why."

  She turned slightly, leaning back against the desk and cupping her right elbow in the left hand. "School is trainin', and not just to fight."

  "Yo', girl." She pointed at Mandy. "How many Draka are there?"

  The tall girl started. "Hum, ah, sixty million? Roughly." Under her breath: "I hope. Moo."

  "Fifty-eight million, nine hundred and twenty thousand-odd. How many serfs?"

  "Lots, ah, a billion and a half?"

  "Correct. So we're about three percent of the total; that's not countin' the billion or so wild ones in the Alliance countries. It's not enough to be strong an' fierce, good fighters. Necessary, but not enough; to use the old cliche', we aren't a numerous people and nobody loves us. We have serfs enough in the Janissary legions for brute force, to carry rifles and die. Yo' are Citizens, and need to be able to think."

  A meditative puff. "History is process; like dancin', or an avalanche. Sometimes it's… too ponderous to move, just grinds on regardless. Sometimes it balances delicately, and a minor push can turn it. Other times, yo' can turn even a pretty heavy movement with a small force by findin' the right lever to magnify yo' strength."

  "That's how we dominate. Leverage… and this class is goin' to teach yo' how the process works. Look to either side of the screen, now."

  Murals flanked the two-meter square of the display panel, a landscape of hills rocky and steep and covered with the olive-green scrub bush of southern Africa. A labor-gang was building a road through it, black men in leg-hobbles swinging picks and sledgehammers; others pushed wheelbarrows full of crushed rock, chipped granite b
locks for the curbs, pulled stone rollers beside yoked oxen. Draka worked with surveyor's transepts and spirit levels to mark the course, swung their whips over the bent backs of the serfs, sat mounted and armed to guard.

  "Question," the teacher said. "Date this mural and place it."

  Yolande blinked at it, dredging at her memory. No powered machinery, just ox-wagons and horses. Probably before the 1820s. Her eyes switched to the right, a close-up of a horseman. Canvas-sided boots, baggy leather pants, a coarse cotton shirt, and a jerkin of zebra-hide; long yellow hair in a twisted braid down his back to the waist. A saber at the belt, and a saw-hilted flintlock pistol in his right hand, double-barreled and clumsy-looking. Two more in holsters at his saddle-bow, and a fourth tucked into the high top of a boot. The long-barreled musket slung across his back was the same as the heirloom antique Mother had brought north from her family's plantation in the far south, a Ferguson breech-loader.

  Her hand went up. "1790s?" she said, when the teacher glanced her way. "Uhhh, somewhere north of the Whiteridge? Limpopo valley, I think." Myfwany glanced her way, and Yolande caught the thumb-and-forefinger gesture of approval with a flush of pleasure.

  "Excellent," Harris said. She looked down and tapped again at the controls set in the stone, and a map of Africa appeared on the screens. It jumped as the focus shifted, narrowing down to the southeastern corner of the continent, and a red dot appeared. "1798, in the Northmark." That was the province north of the Limpopo. "Not far from where I was born, just south of the Cherangani mountains. A wild place and time."

  Yolande looked at the man in the picture again. There was a trick she knew, of getting inside someone's head. You had to think really hard, and imagine you were wearing their skin, feeling what they felt. Sometimes it worked; sometimes you could even put it down in words, and that was the most magical feeling there was. She fixed her eyes on the face in the picture, made herself forget that it was pigments on a flat surface.

  There was pale stubble on his cheeks, and she could see the sheen of sweat on it; the hand that held the pistol was tight-clenched, with half-moons of black under cracked nails. He would stink, of sweat and leather and gun-oil and sulfury black powder, and his hands would have the sweet-sour pungent smell of brass from the hilt of his sword. It was a good picture… no, not a picture, that's how he looked.