Half a Savage - Part 5

"Field duty at last -- for both of us, sir!"

Beyond the scorching fumes of the freighter's landing jets, seeping inevitably into the cabin air systems as the locks cracked open, the young official could have sworn -- and it was not his imagination -- that he could detect already the alien/familiar tang from outside. The atmosphere of Horizon. His home. His planet.

"Now, Ro..." The patient note in his tutor's voice was one he'd heard a hundred times in the last couple of years, in varying tones of affection, exasperation and occasionally warning. But it occurred to Ro, remorsefully, for the first time that a posting out to remote Horizon at Ro's own request might have held less potential appeal for the older man than the full Commissar-ship in one of the inner worlds that could by rights have been considered his due.

"I'm sorry, sir." And the words, for once, held a genuine contrition.

The Assistant Commissar sighed. "Ro, you are the ruler here. What have I tried to teach you? The unrest in these last years has been enormous. The people here regard you as their returning prince, their salvation from direct Federation control. By all means remember that you are a graduate of the Central Educational Complex --" his gaze softened perceptibly as it rested on the graduation order he himself had pinned upon his protege's breast with such ceremony -- "but do try not to allude to your home-coming as a field-duty assignment, at least in public."

He forestalled Ro's next words with an upraised hand as he began to unclasp his seat-restraints. "And remember: you govern this planet. You need address no Federation officer as 'Sir'."

"No -- Commissar," Ro agreed quietly, trying to conceal a smile as he saw the corners of his teacher's mouth twitch a little at the flattery. Even his respected superior had his weaknesses. Lessons in statecraft could have a more immediate application than their authors sometimes realised.

But it was an affectionate grin, for all that. He knew, none better, just what an honour it was for a member of staff to be sent personally to guide a new graduate on his first posting (on his return home, he corrected conscientiously), especially to such a remote planet as his own. But more than that, he happened to know that the Assistant Commissar had not been sent, but had specifically volunteered his services for this mission.

It hadn't been mentioned to Ro, of course. Not officially. But he had good reason to suspect that it was true. They'd got on so well together, these last few years.

He'd ended up spending more time on his studies, after Porah had left the C.E.C. Porah had been a good friend -- but perhaps, he admitted to himself now, perhaps they'd been right after all when they'd suggested he was a bad influence.

It was funny, sometimes, how things worked out. Porah had questioned everything from the justice of the Federation to Ro's father's own rule; and yet it was the older boy, in the end, who'd gone quietly back to Horizon, the homeworld Porah had once been at pains to disclaim, and Ro, who'd dreamed of Home for years, who had come at last to find himself a little ill at ease in the role of returning prince. He wondered, suddenly, if Porah would be down there with the reception committee waiting for him, and doubted it with a faint twinge of regret. They'd simply grown up, and grown apart.

No, he understood what was truly important, now, for his own future and for that of Horizon and the whole Federation; he'd learned from the best of teachers. He glanced across at the Assistant Commissar, who had risen to his feet, waiting for Ro to precede him out of the cabin, and returned the benevolent smile. He'd had the best of teachers, and for the first few months of his rule he'd have the best of guidance. He was no longer an untutored savage. He owed everything to the Federation, and he would not fail them.

It did not prevent the faintly guilty thought occurring that Selma -- whom he had not seen for at least as long as Porah -- might also be there to meet him in the hours ahead. He had a feeling the Federation might not entirely approve of her; they had sent away Porah, so he had not mentioned Selma. Not yet. They had been very young. He wondered if she remembered him...

"Ro, are you coming, or are you going to stand there all day?"

The Assistant Commissar's tones were somewhat more testy than usual, and, caught out in his reverie, the young man flushed and began to climb hastily to his feet. But even as he moved the other was already shaking his head and holding up a hand in exasperation to wave him back down into his seat. There was a faint percussion as the airlock slid shut; but in the moment before it sealed, a rising wave of angry voices could be heard. "I thought we had this sort of thing under control..."

"What do you mean? What is it?" Ro was still standing, staring at him. "We were told there was going to be a festival -- celebrations -- a welcoming committee --"

"Nothing to worry about." The smooth professional voice excluded him, demoting him back to sub-adult status, as a figurehead to be shielded and protected. "Just a minor technical hitch in the organisation. I'm sure the reception will be ready soon..."

"That was no official reception. That sounded more like a riot!" Ro bit his lip and tried for a more placatory tone. "How can I learn to rule if you keep things from me, Assistant Commissar? If there's a problem with my people I need to know. I was given to understand that this was to be a triumphal home-coming --"

"So was I," the Assistant Commissar said grimly, with a glance over his shoulder out into the crew quarters beyond. The cabin door was still half- open, and Ro could glimpse the men of their escort hastily assembling in the passageway outside. "Unfortunately, it seems discontent among the primitives has flared up again. We've governed too long in this place with a velvet glove -- now they dare try to lay hands on their ruler himself --"

He broke off, listening. The word of command from the other side of the doorway had carried clearly.

"Right. Captain Ovisco and his men are going to clear the way. The moment the resistance is broken, I want you to make your entrance just as if nothing had happened -- head up, back straight. Walk straight down toward the buildings on your left. Remember, these are savages. Appearance is everything. Don't let them even for one moment see you're afraid."

"I'm not afraid!"

A faint, sour, smile. "Then you're a fool."

He crossed the cabin back towards Ro and took him brusquely by the shoulders, adjusting his uniform and brushing it down, flicking a clinging strand of hair from his collar. Lightning inspection over, he thrust him towards the door. "Get ready. Remember your training. Never forget what you have become."

There was a hiss as the locks cracked open again, and a rush of feet outside; weapons-fire. Ro flinched.

But the angry voices from below were ebbing in panic, to be replaced by the shouted orders of his own men, the Federation troops. And there was a hard shove between his shoulder-blades, and a swift admonition in his ear... and then he was through to the air-lock and the exit ramp, scrambling out over the sill -- at the last moment he remembered to try and make it dignified -- and the landing field stretched away almost empty before him, a wide cinderblock space dwarfing the human figures that darted upon its margins; and all around and over all there soared the tall brown-orange peaks of the mountain's shoulder. The Walls of the World. Half-forgotten, never leaving his dreams. The mountain-crests of home.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

There was a reception, after all. Pretty black-haired girls with garlands; trays of fruit and highly-spiced dishes; worthy speeches from men who were dressed like poorly-made copies of his father, wearing robes and armlets with the somewhat self-conscious air of those who had spent too many years in tunic and trousers to be comfortable in ceremonial garb. It was -- quaint. He identified the word with slight reluctance. You could not go back to the past, he knew that, but he could not help somehow the feeling that you should not make a parade of it like this for others' eyes.

Officials were introduced to him. Outgoing Federation staff, some of the newcomers, various important individuals on the planet itself. None of them were native-born, but they deferred to him all the same. Searching for faces he knew among the crowd, here on his own world Ro became achingly aware for the first time in long years of how few of those around him now shared the warm coloration of his own people. Porah had not come. Selma had not come. The dancing-girls watched him with the blankly professional smiles they turned upon the rest of the foreigners, twirling their garlands with mechanical allure.

The wall-panels, beneath the welcoming banners, had been carelessly laid and were beginning to sag with age. The hall was over-full and airless, an unlovely space in the unlovely range of low buildings clustered around the edges of the landing-field that could have passed for anywhere in the Federation. The passageways and lecture rooms of the Central Educational Complex had been shabby, but it was the comfortable shabbiness that came with long use and the constant flow of bodies. This place, Ro saw with a sinking heart, had been shoddily built to begin with and then faded from mere neglect. It seemed there had been few enough causes for public celebration on Horizon in the years since the high hopes of that first landing.

He was almost grateful when the Assistant Commissar came shouldering through the throng, a familiar face among strangers, with a grim expression that drained the last pretence of enthusiasm from the party where he passed.

"Excuse me." The courtesy was threadbare. "I beg your pardon -- excuse me --"

He reached Ro's side and caught him by the elbow, plucking him free from the crowd with a grip that bit to the bone. "Captain Ovisco and his men have completed the clear-up operation," in an undertone, for his ears alone. "I think you had better be present."

Ro nodded, and followed him across into the passageway and out through the double doors at the end. In the open walkway between the buildings, it was suddenly very quiet. The sun was low enough to shine directly between the stanchions, and great fingers of shadow reached out across the landing- field from the mountains beyond. The world was tinged in copper and red.

The Assistant Commissar's pale hands looked almost as if they had been dyed in blood, Ro thought, trying to remember who Ovisco was among all the introductions he'd just endured. The name came to him just in time, out of an earlier set of memories, as they plunged into the deep shadow at the end of the walkway. Commander of the troop escort they'd carried on the ship. Of course.

It was the Captain himself who opened what was clearly a security door in an otherwise undistinguished grey block, and Ro, who had become accustomed during the voyage to being regarded in the light of little more than an annoying supernumerary cargo, flushed at the punctilious salute he now received. "I gather there's something I should see, Captain?"

There was nothing to be glimpsed past Ovisco's shoulder but a blank corridor. The man was smiling.

"I think the authorisation would come better from you," the Captain said smoothly, moving aside to usher them in. "After all, it was a direct attempt upon your life, not merely upon the Federation..."

"You caught them then?"

The interruption came from the Assistant Commissar, and Ovisco raised an eyebrow of military condescension. "But naturally we caught them. Primitives, all of them. Five or six were even careless enough to let themselves be taken alive."

"That can be remedied," Ro said grimly, with a little flare of anger of his own that had nothing to do with the glance of approbation his teacher bestowed. The memory of the fear he'd denied still stung. He'd come to this planet with high hopes and an open heart, and their first welcome had been an attack on his ship.

"Quite so," Ovisco agreed, signalling to a trooper standing guard beside a door to their right. The man spoke briefly into his communicator, and the door opened. "Will a firing-squad suffice, or do you require something more --"

Looking at the Captain's smiling face, Ro could guess at what he had in mind. Nascent dislike hardened into disgust.

He turned on his heel, abruptly, and thrust ahead of the man into the room beyond. "No. Take them out and shoot them." The order, flung back over his shoulder, was curt.

For a moment, in the dim light of the holding-chamber, he could barely see. The flash of torchlight directed into the room by the guard behind him glanced across copper bodies stripped to little more than a sleeping-cloth, tumbled limbs, and a clumsily-daubed Serpent across the wall that writhed in the moving light. Recognition caught him by the throat. Warriors in his father's Cave, and himself a child startled from sleep --

"Lord." A man was grovelling at his feet, abasing himself, grizzled hair loose about his shoulders. Ro shrank back, but the prisoner followed, trying to kiss the young man's shod feet. "Lord, Lord of the Caves. Save us. Protect us. Our lives are yours, the lives of your warriors --"

"Get up!" Ro tried to thrust him away, horribly conscious of Ovisco's sardonic eyes from the open door; but the other captives were flinging themselves down before him, writhing in terror... No. It was not fear. The jolt was unpleasant. It was the ritual obeisance.

"Get up." He moistened his lips. "You don't have to do that. I'm not a High Priest. I'm not a savage. I'm a Federation citizen like the rest of you -- get up --"

You humiliate me, you humiliate my people by your uncivilised display... But he could not say that, not beneath the eyes of Captain Ovisco and his old tutor, with the measured tread of Federation troopers coming along the hallway outside.

The prisoner at his feet groaned at the sound. "Lord, our lives are in your hands. Only save us, your people, from the vengeance of those who rule --"

He might as well have struck Ro across the face.

"I rule here." For a moment, words choked him, burning like molten rock. "Rest assured your death will come at my hands, from troops who do my bidding, for your attempt on my person, honoured friend of the Federation you fear so much -- yes, that same Lord you claim to venerate, you the mob who howled for my blood --"

He broke off with a gasp of breath, as the first soldiers began to file through the door, black-clad and faceless, and saw the savages cringe. There was a fierce satisfaction in that.

"Get these men on their feet. Get them out of here. Let them pay the penalty for what they tried to do to me --" He managed a level, judicial voice, with no hint of the tremor that had threatened for a moment to rob him of official dignity, and earned a glance of commendation from the Assistant Commissar that warmed him a little.

Bewildered for the most part, blinking in the sudden light, the primitives were marshalled in the passageway at gunpoint. They made no show of resistance.

But as the squad leader gave the signal for the final march, the oldest of the men doubled free suddenly, ducked clear of the guard, and made a dart back down the corridor towards those who watched. Ovisco had his weapon drawn and aimed in an instant with a hiss; Ro caught at his arm to hold him back, almost without thinking. The man had stopped short and flung himself prostrate in submission.

It was only a moment before he was hauled to his feet and dragged out to join the rest; but in that moment, the firelit shadows of Ro's memory supplied a name for the ruined hulk of the warrior before him, with a jolt.

"Ihtalpa..." It was hardly even a whisper, but he felt the Assistant Commissar move sharply at his side, as if in warning. He did not spare him a glance, his own gaze held by the fierce dark eyes that would not deign to plead. "...How did you come to this?"

Then his father's sworn shield-man was torn from his sight by soldiers of the Federation, and there was only the gasping echo of the old man's voice as he struggled against his captors all the way to the door: "On my oath, we sought only to greet you, Lord. To do honour to the son of your father. But they tried to drive us back from the field --"

And then he was gone. In the moment before the heavy door was shut, the first order came clearly from outside. "Squad, take aim!"

"No --" Ro tried to dash forward; found his arm trapped in a grip like a vice. The closing of the door echoed with a final, dull sound, and he tried to claw free. The captain had him from the other side -- he tore loose from his tutor's grasp and struck Ovisco across the face, one glorious, stinging blow that finally wiped the sneer from those lips, before the soldier caught his free hand and dragged it up behind the younger man's back in a merciless hold that brought unbidden tears to his eyes.

"You are neither a child, nor a savage -- I trust!" The Assistant Commissar's own face was flushed by the brief struggle, but his tone was purest ice. "You wish to be ruler here, Ro -- then rule! But unless you are a great enough fool to ignore everything I taught you, do not begin by countermanding your own twice-repeated orders... for they were your orders, I believe?"

"I--" Ro broke off, flinching.

Despite the muffling walls, something died within him at the sound of the volley.

"It was my order." His voice was very low, and he felt Ovisco release him with what could have been a laugh.

"Good." The Assistant Commissar's face softened briefly, and he laid a sympathetic hand on Ro's shoulder, guiding him towards the rear door. Captain Ovisco snapped to a perfunctory pose of attention as they passed, and the older man acknowledged him with the merest nod.

"Half our troubles on this planet have stemmed from the military." He was shaking his head sadly as they rounded the corner. "Now, a good Colonial Service training..."