94 - Mother of Her Nation

"I've never been off the flat,” Archie said in Kyrus's ear. He clung to Ky's waist, riding double, though the warbird hissed and complained and fought the hood being forced to carry so much. 

"So you don't have anything to ride but those monster birds? I guess they're best where there's enough solid ground and enough seeds to feed them. Both of those are really hard in the desert.” 

"Yes. They are a variant of seed eater that when we started growing the feed, they started getting bigger, getting fed regularly. They make magnificent draught animals.” 

Archie's fluffy sat on his head and not only clung to his sarband but to Kyrus's at the back of his head, which was annoying but since he missed Tizzy, he didn't say anything about it. 

The Nadumon moas were hitched to sand sledges full of injured people and people that just had no clue how to keep up. They'd tried having some people walk but that didn't work well, with riders having to go back and gather up the long trail of people floundering behind. Each sledge had one lantern so that no one got lost in the dark. A faint line of lanterns in the desert could be seen from above as biolume. 

The Lainz Asses usually rode double with a feather spitter for long distance travel anyway but the Nadu survivors overwhelmed the number of birds they had. One of the Heads had suggested the sledges, using the ruins on the edges of the blast zone and their 'cliners had made as many as could be drawn by their surviving birds, even though they hated heading into the desert. 

The wind blew the stink of dirty, hard worked people and fowl back into Ky's face, steadily now that they'd turned south. The rains would be coming soon, leaving them stranded in sand-soup until the water all burned off. They had to get to the wadi today or the Nadumon would be in trouble trying to rebuild through the winter, the cooler dry season but still dry. 

"We look like a rag-tag bunch, don't we?” Archie, exhausted, sounded even younger as he looked back at their slow-moving track in the early night. “I'm sorry, I'll try not to whine.” 

"That's all right.” Ky didn't say that it was getting on his nerves and made him want to punch the boy. “You've lost your home and a lot of your friends and are heading out into something so weird and strange you can't even imagine it. AND you've worn yourself thin mandering.” 

"Good advice, siwion,” the Amir's voice rumbled out of the dark. Apply it to yourself,too.  

Ky was so tired he felt transparent as desert glass. His eyes were gritty and there was dust between his teeth. His mouth was so dry his tongue felt like leather and he worked saliva up by rolling a sucking stone around his mouth. This was how bad he felt, with all the extra attention a prince was getting. He couldn't think of how bad everyone else must be feeling. 

The refugees from Nadumon Station had mostly stopped talking while on the move. At first, even the invalid had been talkative but as they trekked into the desert they found that the Lainz hadn't lied when they advised them against a lot of talking. It dried you out. But Archie was young and knocked flat. Talking helped him keep steady. 

Kyrus rolled his pebble to the other side of his mouth, gentle of his teeth. "We should be at the wadi just around midnight... We'll be able to set up camp and make sure everyone's out of the sun and gets some rest before you figure out if you'll be able to live there.” 

A moa croaked along the line the sound rumbling through the sand and was taken up by others making it impossible to talk until they quieted again. "My mother thinks we have enough programmers–" he used the Nadu word instead of 'mander or 'cliner "--to access the bioequipment.”

"We'll get you there before the water Haboob arrives. That would be a misery." Kyrus could taste the first, faint hints of moisture on the change wind. 

"Really? Right now I'd think that any water would be welcome. I'm thirsty."

"Yes, so am I. So are our fowl. We'll be able to drink all we like once we get to the wadi, even the great hoard of us. There's help already there. A bunch of our zardukar, what you'd call programmers, and supplies and the Milar are sending help as well. I've never seen their desert horses.”

"Really? They have horses?" "Their horses actually have more stamina in the desert than our birds, though they're slower." He wasn't going to say it was that stamina in part that had won the war for the Milari eleven years ago. 

"That's how the Milari won, isn't it?" Kyrus gritted his teeth, felt his pebble click on the outside where it sat in his cheek. "How on earth did they manage to get horses across the deepest dry?”

Ky could almost feel the Amir listening and struggled to make his tone diplomatic, a prince couldn't just dump another prince on his ass in the dirt, though he thought he might be able to pretend his bird got away from him if Archie didn't watch his mouth a little better.

"It seems that when their founders left Prime... open rebellion where they walked away and he laughed and said the desert would kill them, he wouldn't have to. They took their things; all their supplies and their earthan animals with them. They didn't trek across the bottom of the basin, the deepest deserts, but had someone fly them in and drop them off, though they didn't keep that machine. It was somebody fighting Prime in his own way.” 

"Really?” 

Another deep breath that pulled his filthy veil against his face. "Yes, really, and the Milari said that those animals were carrying dozens of pregnancies at once.” When the biologist had explained, Kyrus had wanted to sink into the floor. It seemed so raw and, well, icky. His mother had even found code from the first Empress that showed Lainz had done such things. Surely not with people.  

He felt Archie twitch. “Using their flocks to carry their own diversity! That's genius.”

That was one way of putting it. I will not dump the callous little oyuck. I will not dump him, or punch him, or spit in his soup. "Yeah. Genius.” Only a fraction of those creatures had survived their first years though. They called Anna Marie Milar the mother of their nation. She wouldn't have done something like that herself, would she?