The Vanished Pearls of Orlov

Pick a lover you like. As long as he doesn't find out, everyone will be happy.

     Spring was always capricious when she danced her way up the steppes from the Equator, heading towards the northern lands and toying with the polar region. She was unreliable. Her moods were unpredictable for even the most weather-wise Hand. She lied like the fickle jade she was. She teased and flirted with warm breezes and sunny skies and then turned heartless with late frosts and freezing rains. The one true thing you could say about Spring was she could be trusted to be untrustworthy.

     This spring was no exception.

     Fen huddled with Coppertail under his tarp suspended between some big trees and waited patiently for the sleet, mixed with freezing rain, to stop. Rain was one thing. It was never pleasant to ride for klicks in the rain, sweating under a wool poncho and a big, broadbrimmed hat that always managed to let water drip down the back of the neck. But it could be endured. No matter how wet wool got, it kept you from freezing (up to a point) even if you did smell like sheep.

     Freezing rain and sleet were killers. It wasn't just the greater chance of hypothermia. It was the fact that the steppes were slick with an icy film. If Coppertail put a hoof wrong, he could stumble, fall, and break a leg. Fen would probably survive being dumped unceremoniously on the ground but Coppertail, his favorite gelding, would become a heap of meat in short order. Broken-legged horses didn't live long. They couldn't heal. The kindest, quickest, and most humane option was to cut the horse's throat rather than watch the animal suffer in agony.

     He listened to the sleet hissing down on the tarp overhead — waiting to hear a change in sound and direction that would tell him the storm was emptying itself out — and edged closer to Coppertail's warmth. The ground was still damp, with no dry spot, but it was somewhat higher ground so he and Coppertail weren't standing in a puddle of slowly freezing water mixed with mud. If he had judged the weather better, he'd have set up camp earlier and stayed drier.

     As Fen had predicted to Dawud and Kavan, he did need that cushion of fourteen days extra travel time. He was losing time right here, waiting on a knob on the side of a low hill, his back to a high rock outcropping that blocked the wind. This particular spot was a regular camping ground for someone demonstrated by the carefully placed fir trees blocking the worst of the weather and holding up his tarp, the convenient rock outcropping behind him, and the stone fire-ring currently holding some tinder and twigs which flatly refused to catch fire. Fen was deeply happy that he'd located the shelter soon after the sleet started and he was looking for a good place to wait out the storm. By his calculations, he had barely entered Armstrong's territory so this camping area had to have been set up in the corridor by an Armstrong crew for their own regular use. Foresighted, they had planted the fir trees a generation ago and shaped the hillside to ensure marginally drier ground when it rained.

     Fen wondered if he'd meet some of Armstrong's vassals, patrolling the government corridor between their demesne and Ozigbow, the agricultural demesne directly to the south. If what he'd been told was true, Armstrong, like Kenyatta, always had a crew or two patrolling for squatters and bandits. This location was ideal for keeping an eye on the road and the railroad lines next to it; conveniently close but carefully concealed from view. Only a Steppes Rider would locate this spot other than by accident. He had to wonder where they stabled their horses though. It didn't seem to be here, which was puzzling.

     Once past Armstrong, Krangland's demesne was next, then Daur, bordering both the east-west corridor he was riding through and the great Pole-To-Pole corridor that ran from Southernmost through Barsoom up to Northernmost. If his luck held, the storm would blow itself out, the sleet would melt off quickly, and he could head further down the corridor to the west and the setting sun. When he made camp for the night, the ground might have even dried out some.