CHAPTER 22

AD 2233; AUC 2986

The command base of the Brikanti Navy was in a city called Dumnona, on the south coast of Pritanike.

The Navy was all over this city, as eighteen-year-old Mardina Eden Jones Guthfrithson already knew very well, with training establishments and administrative facilities, a deep old harbour that had accommodated ocean-going ships for centuries – and, on the higher ground inland, a vast modern spaceport from which a new generation of Brikanti-Scand ships sailed into the sky itself. But the old city was still a human place, crammed with barracks and a host of hostels and inns – and brothels, and gambling palaces – to cater for the huge resident population of support staff, as well as for the steady flow through the port of elderly officials and healthy young serving personnel. To Mardina, who had been fascinated by the Navy since she’d been a small child growing up in the austere newness of the Saint Jonbar Academy, Dumnonia was a place thick with history – even though, she knew, it had been repeatedly flattened to rubble in the wars with Rome, and even Xin, that had rolled over this countryside in the course of centuries past.

And of all the city’s buildings, more tradition was attached to the great Hall of the Navy than to any other single site.

The Hall was a sculpture of wood and glass and concrete whose form suggested the hull of a Scand longboat, of the kind that had first landed on the shores of north-eastern Pritanike to begin the engagement of two peoples. Now Mardina, in her new cadet uniform, walking into the Hall for the first time with her mother on one side and nauarchus Kerys as her sponsor on the other, looked up as she passed beneath the tremendous sculpted dragon’s head at the faux boat’s prow, as had thousands of Navy recruits before.

Beth stared up at the dragon, shading her eyes from a watery spring sun. ‘Good grief,’ she said in her native English, before lapsing back into Brikanti. ‘That thing looks dangerous.’

‘As if it will bend down and gobble us up, Mother?’ Mardina asked.

‘No, as if that silly lump of concrete is going to break off and land on our heads.’

Kerys laughed. ‘Highly unlikely. The concrete sculpting is reinforced by a massive steel frame which is designed to withstand—’

‘Unlikely, is it?’ Beth was fifty-six years old now, and was always sceptical, always impatient – always vaguely unhappy, Mardina was now old enough to realise, and with a temper that was not improving with age. When she frowned, the vivid tattoo on her face stretched and puckered. ‘I couldn’t list the unlikely events that I’ve had to survive in the course of my long life. That lot dropping on me wouldn’t come near the top.’

‘Now, Mother, you mustn’t show me up,’ Mardina said, faintly embarrassed, trying to hurry her on. ‘Not today.’ She glanced at Kerys, who was a pretty significant figure in Mardina’s universe. The ship’s commander who had once plucked Mardina’s mother from a hulk ship of unknown origins was no longer a trierarchus. Now she was a nauarchus, another hierarchical title borrowed from the Latin, a language replete with such words as Brikanti was not – a commander of a squadron of ten ships, and, it was said, overdue for further promotion, which she had refused so far because of her love of life in her own command, out in Ymir’s Skull.

But Beth said, ‘Oh, don’t worry. Your father will be embarrassment enough. Does he have to be here, Kerys?’

‘A recruit for officer school has to be sponsored by both sides of her family, Beth. Yes, I’m afraid he does.’

‘Well, just stop making silly remarks about the architecture then,’ Mardina said.

‘Actually your mother is being perfectly sensible,’ Kerys put in diplomatically. ‘One thing you’ll learn as an officer, Mardina, is that you don’t take unnecessary risks. A good survival strategy.’

‘There,’ said Beth, satisfied. ‘I remember very well my mother, your grandmother, Mardina, saying the same thing. She was a space officer, you know, Kerys.’

‘As you’ve told me once or twice since I picked you up in the Ukelwydd. Now, follow me.’ She led them to the Hall’s huge doors, and waved security credentials at the guards to gain admittance.

Inside the Hall, Mardina found herself facing a long corridor walled by rows of doors on two levels, the upper accessible by iron gantries and walkways. Clerks and other officials carrying bundles of parchment hurried along the central hall and the upper walkways, and strip lamps suspended from the ceiling cast a light that seemed to turn everything grey. Mardina felt oddly disappointed.

Kerys grinned back at her. ‘Not the romance you were expecting? This is where we administer the largest single organisation controlled by the Brikanti government – a Navy that now spans the planets and beyond, as well as its traditional seafaring arm. Mardina, it’s not some kind of temple, or museum – and nor does everything revolve around you, I’m afraid.’ She winked. ‘But don’t worry. I felt just as small and insignificant when I was in your position. The Navy does notice you, I promise …’

Beth grunted. ‘It’s like a hive. I grew up on an empty planet. You couldn’t get a place more unlike that, than this.’

Mardina shook her head. ‘Oh, Mother, please don’t start on about Before. Not today.’ The English word was their private code for Beth’s strange other life before she had come to this place, this world, to Terra, to Brikanti. But Brikanti was all Mardina knew. She had come to loathe all that strangeness, as if it was a kind of flaw in her own nature.

If Kerys was aware of all this, and after all it was she who had retrieved Beth from the ship that had carried her here from Before, she didn’t show it, to Mardina’s relief.

They came to a small office maybe halfway along the length of the Hall, a nondescript little room that Mardina probably couldn’t have found again without memorising the number etched into the wooden door. The room was laid out like a classroom, maybe, or a court, with rows of benches and small desks facing a more substantial table at the front. Here two officers sat, looking over paperwork, murmuring to each other; one, a burly man, was evidently the senior, judging by the ornate flashes on the shoulder of his tunic, and the other a scribe or adviser. The room was otherwise empty.

But it was in this mundane room, Mardina realised, one of a warren of such rooms, that her future was to be decided, for good or ill, in the next few hours.

She tried to stay composed as she sat with her mother on the front row of benches, close to the wall. The older man barely looked up at Kerys as she approached the table and presented a packet of papers, and he did not bother to look over at Mardina at all.

Beth whispered, ‘So who’s the big cheese?’

‘Stick to Brikanti, Mother.’

‘Sorry.’

Kerys sat with them. ‘That is Deputy Prefect Skafhog. Very senior. Do you know how senior, cadet? You should …’

Mardina nodded. She’d soon become aware that the most important thing a would-be naval officer had to learn was the constellation of ranking officials above her. ‘A Deputy Prefect reports only to – well, the Prefect. The chief of the whole Navy, who reports in to the relevant minister in the Althing—’

‘There are only a dozen Deputy Prefects to administer the whole of the Navy, on Terra and in the Skull. So you see, cadet, we are taking you seriously.’

‘Then it’s a shame such a prominent officer, with respect, is going to have to wait for you,’ came a voice behind Mardina. ‘Or rather, for all of us. Because we have family business to discuss.’

Beth stood slowly, her tattooed face a mask of anger. ‘Ari Guthfrithson. So you deigned to turn up.’

Mardina gave a look of pleading to Kerys, who shrugged and whispered, ‘It’s your family.’ Mardina closed her eyes for one second, made a fervent prayer to Jesu the Boatman, and stood with her mother.