Heart of a Warrior

41

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BRITTANY HADN'T MISSED TOO MUCH OF THE TOWN, just the approach. And Sha-Ka-Ra was bigger than she'd expected after Martha's remark that their towns didn't come in sizes she was used to-not so much in head count, but in the buildings being spread out with plenty of breathing space between each one. It was perched on a flat plateau, so nothing was built on the slopes of the mountain.

The main street was very wide, lined at regular intervals with trees of different colors-none that she actually recognized, though a horticulturist she was not-and lampposts. The posts were similar to what was used in the nineteenth century, when someone came by each night and lit the candles in them, but these used gaali stones that supposedly didn't need lighting, just uncovering, to reveal their soft glow.

She was looking forward to seeing one of these gaali stones she'd been told about up close and personal, a small one, though, since she'd been warned that large chunks were so bright they could blind. Yeah, right, something they couldn't prove to her, but she'd like to see how they were going to hide the seams of a battery compartment on the smaller stones.

Just now, though, she was experiencing some disappointment in finding that none of the buildings in the town were built of wood. Everything was light tan in color, either plaster or stone, she wasn't close enough yet to tell which. Mostly one-story houses, a few two-story, many with lovely arches, windows in all kinds of different shapes, each with its own yard and stable, its own garden. There were even some with balconies on their flat roofs, like sun decks. And clean. There wasn't a single piece of rubbish on the ground anywhere.

It was an even mix of old and new. The buildings were modern-looking, but the people weren't, and plenty had turned out to view the homecoming. Fifty men from this town had been absent for a long time, so their families were on hand to welcome them home. The procession started breaking up as each warrior was met by two or more members of his family. Oddly, never just one member, or more specifically, a lifemate. Even more oddly, now that it was noticed, there wasn't a single woman on the street standing alone.

Each woman there had a man with her. Each one was wearing one of those scarfy outfits they called chauri, each with a cloak draped behind them. They came in a wide range of colors, but an solid colors. There wasn't a single garment on anyone that was a mix of colors.

She found out later that the only reason she hadn't been given a cloak the color of the house she now belonged to was because her white T-shirt and blue jeans were already the two colors representing Dalden's house. That he'd let her wear her jeans, when the women of his town weren't allowed to wear pants of any kind, had been an exception made just for her because she wasn't Sha-Ka'ani and he'd wanted his people to see that plainly. It wasn't such a strict rule anymore though, now that his country knew that other countries like Falon's didn't even follow that rule, so exceptions for visitors did get made now, when that didn't used to be the case. It was still their rule though, which was why she was going to be supplied with a full new wardrobe and was expected to wear it.

She didn't mind. She was definitely tired of jeans after wearing hers for three months, even though they'd been cleaned and returned to her each day by that thing Dalden called dial-a-closet. She'd been offered ship's uniforms but had declined. She had never felt that her height looked good in one-piece jumpsuits of the clingy sort.

Old-style again were the marketplaces-they looked like something out of a medieval fair, with small tents with tables in front of them, or goods laid out on rugs. Then a beautiful park with a pond in it and children playing, that could have been in any American hometown.

The streets were laid out in even, straight lines. Turning one brought the biggest building in the town into view, a towering white stone castle. Brittany's jaw dropped. It wasn't a castle as she knew them; it looked more like something that could be found in a fantasy picture book. It wasn't one big building, either, but built in sections, some round, some square or rectangular. All of the sections were in different heights and shapes so that none of them were the same, yet they grew in height pyramid fashion, the shorter towers on the outside, the tallest at the center. There were conical roofs on some, spiral roofs, normal roofs, and flat roofs on others, even crenellated walkways on top of some of the towers.

Tall white walls surrounded the castle, with a wide-open archway spanning the street to enter the inner castle yard. And they were heading to it. This was where Dalden and his family lived.

It was too much. They couldn't have built something like that just for this project; it had to be something they'd found and were going to make use of The whole town, for that matter. Maybe somewhere in Russia or that part of the world. Didn't they have strange-looking buildings like this? And beautiful untouched countrysides? And towns so different-looking from anything she was used to?

She felt better with that conclusion, on firm ground again, and ready to be impressed as they rode through the archway into the castle yard. There was a long rectangular building right in front, with steps spanning the length of it, and at the center, a tall pair of steel-looking doors flanked by two warriors guarding it.

There was a stable for the hataari out front, and she got her first sight of small men that worked in it. They weren't really small, just not giant-sized like the warriors, and they dressed differently, too, in thin white pants and shirts. Darash males of the servant class apparently, whom she'd been told about. They were descended from a people conquered so long ago that no one had the date of it anymore.

They weren't slaves, but were more like a mix between a medieval serf and someone from the servant class of eighteenth-century England. They were the working class, the ones who did all the menial labor warriors snubbed their noses at, though they didn't get paid for it. There were laws to govern them, they had some rights, but they couldn't just pick up and move like normal working-class people. For the most part, she'd been told, they were a happy lot who knew their worth in as much as the warrior society would probably collapse without them.

Dalden's parents led the way inside. Shanelle would be staying a few more days, but then would be leaving for Ba-Har-an, a country that used to take a good three months to reach by hataar, but now was just a few minutes away by airobus. The distance, or prior travel time, was why not much had been known about Ba-Har-an before Challen had been asked to contact them for trade with the League, plentiful deposits of gold having been scanned in that region that other planets were interested in.

But it wasn't really the distance that had kept the two countries virtual strangers for so long, but that the Sha-Ka'ani were a sedentary warrior species. They might differ here and there in each separate country, but they pretty much universally weren't explorers. By nature, they preferred to stay, grow, and prosper in familiar surroundings.