Fiona fled back to the barge and cursed herself for cowardice.

  She spent one night on the barge before the craft was scheduled to head downstream to the city of Arrandal, her destination. During the night the hold was loaded with local produce, the harvested winter crop, and with blocks of grey, hard stone, products of the local quarries. In the hours before departure she saw her first Brodaini: tall, disdainful men and women, their long hair arranged in elaborate ringlets and lovelocks, all bearing armor and weapons both alike in their clean, symmetrical beauty and their utilitarian, deadly purpose — elegantly crafted stuff, the armor a functional mixture of brigandine and plate, the hilts of the swords elaborately carved and inlaid with precious metal. Each carried a ten-foot spear on which a long, sharp, wickedly-curved sword blade glittered.

  They were by far the tallest people on the boat: the smallest stood a head taller than Fiona. In addition to the stature that was their inherited due, Fiona knew they ate a special diet, one her ship’s computers had calculated would produce muscle and weight without adding more than a healthy amount of fat.

  The demeanor of the Brodaini, their reserved physical presence, each movement controlled with the careful economy of the trained athlete, set them off completely from the hurried bustle of the landing stage. The four Brodaini, two men and two women, took cabins on the port side and remained in them until the barge raised its creaking yard, sheeted the patched square sail, and cast off. Afterwards, from time to time, Fiona saw them, always together, always distant, standing apart from the others on the deck. They did not take their meals with the rest due to their special diet.

  She would have to study this people, she knew, and she watched them when she could. It was curious, a warrior race that gave high status to their women. There would be reason for such an anomaly, she thought; she hoped she would be able to find it.

  It was a leisurely, sunny journey to the city; although it rained occasionally, the showers were scarcely of long enough duration to more than temporarily discomfort the deck passengers who slept on the forward hatches. Fiona grew to recognize most of her fellow passengers: the children who played on the hatch covers, the elderly, dyspeptic merchant who lived in the next cabin and who spent each night lecturing his companion, a tolerant nephew, in a whining, querulous voice. The crew of the barge belonged to a single family: there was a husband and wife, five children, a brother and sister-in-law just starting life together, and a toothless granny.

  Fiona spent her time watching the passengers and crew, watching the bank of the river and seeing the new world revealing itself around each bend, the planet called Echidne in the old star charts of the Terrans, Demro in the Abessas language spoken on the plain and in Arrandal. Achadan by the Brodaini, who had come across the ocean from the north. On the banks of the river Fiona could see square fields newly-planted, men and women working on the levees and dykes, villages clustered on high ground safe from spring floods, frequent towers and castles occupied by the feudal aristocracy. The barons didn’t dare charge tariffs on the river traffic; they knew it would only bring the power of Arrandal on them, a fleet of river-craft full of plundering mercenaries, Brodaini engineers, deissin overseers. It had happened before: every so often Fiona saw torn curtain walls and shattered keeps, massive ruins that loomed above the river and bore eloquent witness to the power of the North.

  That power came from city-states which, lying on the coast of a great northern sea, had in the last century been expanding their influence. The largest social units on this part of the planet, they controlled trade on the rivers and the sea and had been encroaching on the feudal privileges of the southern barons, regularizing their quarrels, stabilizing political relationships. They were not doing it for the sake of peace and amity, Fiona assumed; she knew that trade required stable borders and an orderly flow of season commerce, and that the big cities thrived on merchant traffic. They were the source of stability on a chaotic continent; their trade networks extended far abroad, and from there any new idea or any useful innovation would be sure to spread quickly. They had even formed a federation of sorts, carving out areas of influence and trade, attempting to dominate any competition: the federation had a curious name, Elva vor Denorru-Dorsu, the Alliance of/for Community of Interests, its name alone proclaiming a certain sophistication. Of the cities, Fiona’s destination, Arrandal, seemed to be the largest — her ship’s cameras and computers approximated half a million people within its walls and suburbs — and was probably the most influential.

  Much of the cities’ expansion had come in the last twenty years, since they’d formed the league between themselves and started importing Brodaini soldiers from across the sea. The Brodaini had brought military knowledge the cities lacked and a brand of professionalism the mercenaries and city militia had never known: and after the first baronial keeps had come crashing into ruin the other feudal lords had seen reason.

  The broad outline Fiona knew, and some of the details. For two years her ship had been in stationary orbit above this land, sending down robot spies, driving electronic spikes into roofbeams to pick up audio and video. Computers had analyzed the languages; cameras had mercilessly scanned the interiors of native buildings, public rooms, secret chambers; spikes had driven themselves into the roof-beams of schoolhouses, watching over the students as they bent over their lessons; the writing had been learned, analyzed, and fed into the recordings that in turn had been fed into Fiona’s mind. Fiona knew as much about the culture she was entering as any outlander could.

  Much of her knowledge, of course, lacked clarity. She knew names for things she had never seen; she knew it was insulting and vulgar to call someone a scottu, but had no idea why. Worse of all were the noumena, the words expressing the concepts by which the culture defined itself, the world it saw, the sociological universe into which each individual fit himself... The noumena expressed not thought or action but concepts untranslatable into Fiona’s own language, understandable only from context if at all.

  The noumena beat at Fiona’s brain, demanding understanding: she had absorbed two languages, Abessas and Gostu, the language of the locals and of the military Brodaini; and they warred in her mind, mutually contradictory when they were not being maddeningly vague. Demmin, a Gostu word: it translated as “honor,” but why was “honor” inadequate? There were other contexts where “honor” had not seemed to work, contexts involving correctness, initiative, advantage, esteem, place, self-worth. Hostu, another Gostu word, seemed to have two referents in Fiona’s own language, “stasis” one, “perfection” the other. Was stasis necessary for perfection in Brodaini society? Or was the word a homonym? Or was there a larger meaning encompassing both these definitions, the meaning incomprehensible to the literal-minded language computer on board the mother ship?

  Abessas was a little better; she understood the wide-traveled, practical merchant culture better than she did the military caste of the Brodaini, but the words still had implications that puzzled her. The most-used term of respect, the equivalent of “mister,” was cenors-stannan, literally “most fortunate,” but there was a subtle emphasis on the word stannan that seemed to imply that “fortune” was to be taken more as an indicator of wealth than of luck— though, as in Fiona’s own language, it contained both meanings.

  There were dozens of noumena in each language, stumbling blocks that hampered her mastery of the tongues. For everyday use she did well enough; but did not her mission demand utter confidence, perhaps even eloquence? Her lack of fluency, her lack of understanding, fretted her as the days went by and Arrandal approached.

  One afternoon of brilliant sun she sat forward on the hatches, watching as a landing-stage approached and the crew competently set about the process of getting the clumsy barge to the pier while the passengers tried simultaneously to watch the sights and keep out of the way. A crowd of townsmen gathered on the wharf. The tillermen, because of the cabin built forward of their station, could not see forward, so the grandmother stood up on the roof of the cabin barking orders. The pier approached. The square sail came down on the run as startled passengers jumped clear, and a bowman, with a show-off grin, roped a bollard on the first try. Passengers tailed onto the line and the barge was hauled to its place on the wharf. A family leaped aboard to welcome some long-absent relatives; the bowman was bursting with profane orders to get a hatch raised; and suddenly alarms were buzzing.

  Fiona blinked in surprise and glanced around in apprehension at the electronic roar, then saw no one else had heard it: it was her private signal. Her baggage was being tampered with.

  Certain of her nerves had been rewired to grant this knowledge. She alternately prolated and oblated the muscles of her left forearm, which shut off the alarm and allowed her to think. Unnoticed in the bustle, unknown to anyone present, she slipped through the crowd to her cabin door, pulled her hood over her head and face, prepared herself mentally for violence, and snatched open the door.

  Two young men, deck passengers for the last two days, were wrestling with one of her two chests, the one that contained her magic show and her offplanet technology. The other chest, which contained her clothing, was already upended and its contents scattered. No doubt the thieves intended, if they found anything valuable, to walk off the barge with it in the general confusion of landing, but the fact they hadn’t stationed a lookout spoke for their amateurishness, and, unknown to them, it was going to take a more forceful technology than this world had ever possessed to open the chest.

  They were amateurs at violence as well. Fiona, though unblooded, was not. Her training in self-defense had been thorough; certain pre-programmed reactions were triggered automatically as the nearest thief, his eyes wide at the sight of her smooth, blank-featured face mask, came for her with the dagger he’d been using on the chest’s offplanet lock.

  He came up from the deck, the knife rising with him, striking for her belly to rip up to the lungs and heart. Fiona let the knife do its worst, ignoring it; the badly-tempered blade shattered on her privy-coat and in the meantime a strike with stiffened knuckles had crushed the thief’s windpipe. He staggered, clawing at his throat, the remains of his dagger clattering to the deck; Fiona’s booted foot lashed out, doubling the other thief over as he stood. She reached for him, twisting his arm back before he could draw a weapon; she snapped the arm and threw him into the bulkhead in the same movement.

  There was a sudden stillness, an end to motion. The dying thief had fallen half out of the cabin, thrashing as he strangled. The other lay crumpled against the bulkhead, too terrified to move. Fiona pulled her hood back and began to gulp air, feeling the thunder of her heart begin to slow as the crisis-reaction passed, as passengers and crew began to gather in silence at the door. She clasped her hands, trying to restrain the instincts that had been built into her, that were clamoring for her to attack once more, lunge at the astonished crowd outside the cabin door...

  The passengers parted and two Brodaini, the two women, came striding arrogantly into view. One of them stationed herself at the door as a guard — no amateurs, these — and the other looked at Fiona with appraising pale eyes.

  “What occurred?” she said in badly-accented Abessas.

  “These men are thieves, ban-demmin,” Fiona answered in the Brodaini’s own tongue, aware her voice was uncontrolled, near breaking. “I caught them in my cabin, trying to loot my possessions.”

  “Indeed,” said the Brodaini. Her eyes had widened slightly at Fiona’s use of her own language, including the honorific ban-demmin, “honored” or “respected,” one of the word-combinations most often used in Gostu polite address. A non-Brodainu who spoke the language was fairly rare; rarer still, presumably, was a woman who, slight though she was, could crush two bigger men in such fashion that neither had a chance to cry out.

  The Brodainu’s eyes cut to the man sprawled in the doorway. The man’s limbs, deprived of oxygen, were beginning to convulse; there was foam on his lips, and his broken windpipe rattled as his lungs tried frantically to draw air. With a strangely withdrawn tenderness — there was compassion in the Brodainu’s look, but it was almost an unearthly compassion, like a painted angel or saint — the warrior drew her straight, double-edged sword and drove the point into the thief’s heart. Fiona felt as if her own heart had stopped; she wrung her hands — oddly the only gesture that seemed possible — and tried to control the feeling of horror and the simultaneous mad impulse, triggered by the unsheathing of weapons, that urged her to strike out against danger.

  Fiona gulped air, trying to stabilize her own body’s reactions. She knew what the Brodainu had done; it was the mardan-clannu, the “thrust of mercy” delivered to end a man’s suffering. It had been a gesture of compassion after all; there was a certain perverse honor conferred with the act, in that the Brodainu had considered the thief’s suffering worth noticing. The warrior cleared her sword, cleaned it on the victim’s body, and returned it to its scabbard.

  “He will not distract us further,” she said. “We Brodaini have power of justice on the river; the other will be turned over to the city authorities. You are most fortunate, ilean. You bore no weapon?”

  “No. I do not carry weapons.”

  The Brodainu nodded, appraising. As far as Fiona knew there was no system of weaponless combat practiced here; the most evolved combat technique was Brodaini, and appeared to concentrate on disarming attackers in order to turn their own weapons against them. Fiona had made an impression on the Brodainu’s mind; it might not be a favorable one. A deadly woman, claiming to be a conjuror, speaking Gostu and traveling downriver to Arrandal... the Brodaini, guardians of Arrandal’s peace, might wonder if she were a fugitive from foreign justice, or worse a spy or assassin. At any rate, worth further study.

  The two male Brodaini arrived, keeping the crowd back from the cabin door. The Brodainu who had spoken to Fiona gave a few clipped orders — it appeared she was senior — and the body was carried from the cabin. The second thief was urgently picked up from the floor — he yelped, cradling his broken arm — and was led out by two silent warriors to meet whatever penalty, presumably death in some form, was demanded by local justice. The pale-eyed Brodainu bent to pick up the broken dagger from the cabin deck. She held up the pieces. “This was the thief’s, ilean?”

  “Yes.”

  The warrior looked at the badly-forged shards with the distaste of the connoisseur for the third-rate, then bowed and left the cabin. The other woman Brodainu looked briefly at Fiona’s — her face was scarred, the nose once broken — and then bowed and followed. Outside there was a quick flash of spinning sun-struck metal as the dagger shards were scaled out into the river. Two of the boatmen approached, buckets and rags ready to clean up the blood, looking at Fiona apprehensively.

  “Go ahead. Clean,” she told them, and she bent to pick up her scattered clothing and stuff it in her trunk; then she hauled both trunks to their places beneath her bunk and sat down on the thin mattress while the crewmen busied themselves. She drew her knees up protectively. Her hands were no longer trembling, but she clasped the edge of the bunk, white-knuckled, and when the crewmen finished and turned to glance at her, something in her look made them hurry silently from the room, closing the door behind them.

  Until now, until she had seen the young thief spasming on the deck, she had not really believed it, this new existence. She was in a feudal, violent world; if she was to fulfill her mission, she would have to become a part of it.

  Perhaps the thing that frightened her most was the possibility that she already had.

  *

  Only a few days of her journey remained. Abessas and Gostu beat at her brain; she could feel herself submerging into their assumptions, many of which her old life told her were wrong, and in the conflicts between noumena — she felt herself drowning. The intensity of the world around her was terrifying, the native plants burgeoning, the strange, antique mode of transportation that daily grew more familiar, the tall, oddly-proportioned people with their rude, confident assumptions about the world and their place in it... Her own body horrified her: had this hand killed? Had this foot lashed out to cripple? The privy-coat she wore under her blouse and skirts, shaped like a hooded undergarment, supple and soft to the touch but with an intrinsic, invisible awareness of its own that made it capable of repelling any weapon the planet was likely to develop for the next few hundred years, began to weigh on her shoulders. She knew it was a hallucination, a trick of the mind that made the privy-coat feel as heavy as Brodaini armor, but still she felt it bearing down on her, a reminder of the violent world she’d entered.

  She made nightly reports to her superiors on the spindle she concealed in her magic chest. The reports mentioned little of her daily struggle to keep Echidne from overwhelming her; they stayed in the jargon she had been taught, concentrating on efforts to achieve rapport with the natives, to analyze the level of technology and technological awareness. She made notes about proxemics, and practiced behavior observation. The jargon began to seem more like an alien language, something outside the reality she was dealing with — how could the disinterested, dusty words possibly describe the meaning of the place? The dictionary phrases faded in contrast to the bright, burgeoning world, and Fiona was filled with a fear that she was losing everything she had been; that soon her past would fade entirely, vanish into a memory that grew progressively less substantial. The familiar voices on the communicator, Tyson’s gruff irony, Wenoa’s calm tenor, seemed increasingly distant; their reality, even that of Tyson who had, for a time, been Fiona’s lover, was slipping away. She found herself forgetting their faces, their eyes. She wished she could contact Kira without having to patch the call through the ship — Kira, she knew, would understand.