Above the Desert

Flight was one of the miracles of the new age, a gift of the goddess Auschantaiyo, who had been a lowly Rekerisé girl from the Porotis. Princess Auschakôro was ashamed that she didn't remember the goddess' mortal name.

But a god's mortal name didn't matter. Her great-grandfather had been a fire spirit all along, Kôrekito-tayi, He Who Necessarily Awakens Others. It was quite rude to use the name he'd borne in the human world.

She brushed back a strand of her red-golden hair, settled in on this comfortable bench seat, and gazed out the window. An attendant passed, and she shook her head. She wasn't hungry.

The endless desert stretched out far below. The Chaiselasu, the Little Emptiness, on the way from nowhere to nowhere when one was traveling over land. But it was the most direct route to Cranes' Bay. She was bound for Taiutatis, the foundry city, once known for its bodkin arrowheads. Today its great shipyard supplied half of South Tacheiyis; her cousin Katarîyo was marrying into a great lineage of the city.

For all the good he had done for the world, Kôrekito-tayi had founded a royal house more rich in prestige than in power, money, or land. His son, the current king of the Ausharuhis, had been furious when Auschakôro had called him out for selling the daughters of the house for money. But the argument had changed nothing. Katarîyo's bride price was a river basin in East Ranuhis.

Princess Auschakôro knew that her time would come. It should have come already. She was twenty-four, quite old for the royal marriage market, and had turned down suitor after suitor, however her mother cajoled and pled. But she had been born nine months after Kôrekito-tayi returned to the Iron Realm. Would a being like that really choose to stay there? Pure spirits were genderless; some of their Chehirainan whispered that she was Kôrekito-tayi reborn.

And if the throne of Palanelé still existed, it would be hers, by the ancient law of enatic primogeniture. The kingdom that her divine ancestor had fought so hard to save. Sometimes she wondered.

#

In her reverie, she hardly noticed the man who sat down opposite her. Flight was so costly that anyone on an aircraft was worth speaking to; but he judged himself her inferior, and spoke first.

"If you'll pardon me, Lady," he said. "I have a daughter about your age, and you look like you need some cheering up."

He had addressed her in Tacheiyic, but with a strong Palanelé accent. She perked up.

"It would be a pleasure," she said, in the Palanelé dialect of Karanaiyé.

He was embarrassed, but only in the way a man is embarrassed when a peer shows him up, not in the manner of one speaking with a beautiful woman. Princess Auschakôro appreciated that; there were those who remained lecherous shockingly late into their lives, and had shamefully little respect for rank.

A few oblique questions later, she learned that this man was from Ushainis, the great port of the Iraden Empire. He was a shipping magnate, a senior executive of the Gold Lance Line. He was flying to Taiutatis to negotiate a contract for ship repairs.

And although the kingdom hadn't existed for a century, he saw himself as a man of Palanelé. Princess Auschakôro slipped a sentence or two of Iridic into the conversation, the language of the nomads who now ruled the kingdom, and he didn't understand it at all.

She steered the conversation towards the history that defined them both, the fatal last generation under Queen Karasaita and Princess Teoraia. (Queen Teoraia, rather; but Auschakôro always thought of her great-grandmother as a figure much like herself.)

"Haneati was a menace," the magnate admitted. "A tactic is always most dangerous when it's used first, and we had never faced Iradens with Chehiraineh shock troops in the van. Except Notokas a generation earlier."

"And Notokas nearly overran you," Princess Auschakôro prompted.

"He did," the magnate said, embarrassed. "But the capital held, long enough for the Guard to save us. If he hadn't picked that fight with the empire..."

"I think the empire would have helped even then. You were their oldest ally, and they'd saved you before. The trouble was all that came after Notokas, all those years of turmoil."

"Agreed," the magnate said. "Just one disaster after another."

"At least the years between the Black Herons and Haneati were quiet," Princess Auschakôro offered.

"Quiet?!" the magnate exclaimed. "There was the rebellion in the Haraduris we helped put down. The massacre of a whole grain convoy up beyond Aracheitis. The only way you could see that period as quiet was if you were seeing it through Kasiri of Isheirataké's --"

He looked at her. At some level, he saw her for the first time. Red-golden hair, steel-blue eyes, tawny skin, stern Tacheiyic features. She spoke very fluent Karanaiyé, but maybe fluency in many languages ran in the blood...

"Forgive me, Lady. I don't believe we've been properly introduced. I'm Nachriasan of Aripehusé, deputy director of the Gold Lance Line."

"And I am Auschakôro, princess of the Ausharuhis, enatic heiress of Queen Teoraia and Kôrekito-tayi."

She extended her hand across the table. He kissed it, bowing as deeply as a man at a table on an airplane could bow.

"Your Majesty," he said. "I do not follow the Chehiraineh religion, but I offer your progenitor my apologies, for calling him by his mortal name."

He blushed brick-red.

"And my opinions... are entirely recreational, with no bearing on the present day. I assure you that I'm a loyal subject of Emperor Rekuhai, and would never dream of rebellion or dissatisfaction. All of us are better off under Iraden rule."

Princess Auschakôro gave him a regal smile. Everyone knew that the common people of Palanelé were restless under the Iradens; but if even a shipping magnate, in a space like this with many eyes and ears, could get this heated about how the Iradens could have been kept out...

No one had waged a war between peer competitors in this new industrial age. Organizing a rebellion on the scale of a kingdom would be particularly difficult. But Princess Auschakôro had always liked a challenge.