46 - I Wish We Had Owner's Fangs

The river of mounted warriors goes all the way into the city, winding up to the Sunrise Gates where Pa and Stepapa and their guards are waiting.  The Pre-Emir-al with the enormous gold standard flapping in the hot wind comes to a halt.

 

Most of the birds are white and brown with fluffy feathers around their beaks.  Plain.  The warriors are all in either blue, or black or brown.  All of those infantry are wearing sand and dark brown colours.  They might stand out a bit in Milar where everything is earthen green... or at least most of it.  The stones and the roads are all those desert colours though.

 

There’s a hundred Rasheem around my fathers, the gold on their tunics making it hard to look at them.  Stepapa has this polished helmet on that makes my eyes water.  Pa looks very regal in his parade armour, that he brought for show when we were delivering their Emperor to them.  This is just... odd.  It’s like having one’s head whipped back and forth between problems.  I’m just glad there’s so many of us working on all of them.  If it were just Stepapa or Kyrus all by himself it would be crazy.

 

I stand at the big gates, and watch Pa and Stepapa riding out in front of what look like thousands of warriors on warbirds.   

I have my arms around Maks on one side and Ilia on the other.  It is so strange to be told that Lainz... the enemy we’ve fought for years... is suddenly the safer place for us to be when Pa and the Emperor go off to make someone else stop being belligerent.  It’s a childish way of thinking about it but it’s how I just explained it to my sibs.  “It’s not fair!” Maks is still pouting.

 

“We just got here and we missed all the coding stuff and everybody being in danger and doing adventures...”

 

“... we read all about the zombie birds and lizards and sand sheets and bush dragons that you had and what happened to us on the road?” Ilia sniffed.  “Nothing!  It was so boring.  Well, riding into and through the badlands and all those underground villages was just enlightened!”

 

“But now our new sib and his best friend...” Hara had to smile to herself.  Both were disappointed to not be allowed to go with the ‘big kids’. “... and they get to go?  That sucks sand, Hara.”

“Shhh.  Yes.  But you’ll be able to help with another sib... Homa is going to need a lot of siblings, even if there’s nobody secretly trying to kill her.”

“Yeah,” Maks was grudging.  The two of them waved some more, even though Pa and Stepapa couldn’t see them, even if they looked.  The warbird ranks hissed and moaned at each other and the featherspitters had to keep them almost entirely hooded, with their breakbeaks shut tight so they couldn’t even pant, just to prevent bloody fights in the ranks.

How the Lainz managed to keep any kind of order with the warbirds, I don’t know.  Riding birds aren’t so wild, but then these are all older males, right on the edge of being too big to ride.  It couldn’t be more than a few hundred, interspersed with all the infantry, but it really looks impressive and the whole city is out, cheering them.

 

They know why in a way they never did before.  They've been writing about it to each other on the lin... arguing about it.  People know they aren’t just going out to conquer somebody.  They’re going out to show the Nadumon exactly how upset we are at their idea that they can just cut off our water.  It’s not a war, exactly.  At least not yet.  I’ll bet pa, especially with stepapa and all his warbird friends backing him up, will make come up with some kind of compromise.

 

There’s the last mounted group... right at the end.  The procession will wind up through the city, past us and then back down and out the other bridge.

 

I just wish that we... all the lost... or driven underground... owners of the planet had some kind of teeth to approach the owner... Thormentaler.  We don’t have any kind of way of stopping him doing what he likes, so we just have to trust we’re far enough away from his playground that he doesn’t notice us.  We need to find our power, our owner's fangs, or we can’t even talk about surviving, much less that he’s shut the water off on us.

That’s what I and the zardukar will be doing.  And Mariush. I won't think of that man on the moon...  I'm going to be working with Hive Lord Sander and Shashi.  I bet that there’s an Amir in that mess of Rasheem who I know.  Shashi’s father was ‘taken ill’ again and disappeared, supposedly back to their loggia.

 “Now that we’ve seen the procession off...  only a thousand... I should take you to the upper canyon and introduce you to the hives there.  There are several thousand kinds of bees, you know.”

 

“We can ride our birds?”

 

“We could ride horses if you wanted.”

 

“Ooooh!  Stepapa has horses?  Real earthen horses?”

 “Yes, he does.”