They might have gotten him aboard the pinnace before he really understood the betrayal, if it hadn't been for Cindi. Cindi Ducanh, lesser daughter of Tran's cousin. Her family was important enough to live at court, but not important enough to matter. Cindi was fifteen, the strangest, wildest person Pham had ever known, so strange that he didn't even have a word for what she was—though "friend" would have sufficed.
Suddenly she was there, standing between them and the star folk. "No!It's not right. It does no good. Don't—" She held her hands up, as if to stop them. From the side, Pham could hear a woman shouting. It was Cindi's mother, screaming at her daughter.
It was such a silly, stupid, hopeless gesture. Pham's party didn't even slow down. His tutor swung his quarterstaff in a low arc across Cindi's legs. She went down.
Pham turned, tried to reach out to her, but now hard hands lifted him, trapped his arms and legs. His last glimpse of Cindi was her struggling up from the mud, still looking in his direction, oblivious of the axemen running toward her. Pham Nuwen never learned how much it had cost the one person who had stood up to protect him. Centuries later, he had returned to Canberra, rich enough to buy the planet even in its newly civilized state. He had probed the old libraries, the fragmented digital records of the Qeng Ho who had stayed behind. There had been nothing about the aftermath of Cindi's action, nothing certain in the birth records of Cindi's family forward from her time. She and what she had done and what it had cost were simply insignificant in the eyes of time.
Pham was swept up, carried quickly forward. He had a brief vision of his brothers and sisters, young men and women with cold, hard faces. Today, one very small threat was being removed. The servants stopped briefly before Pham's father the King. The old man—forty years old, actually—stared down at him briefly. Tran had always been a distant force of nature, capricious behind ranks of tutors and contesting heirs and courtiers. His lips were drawn down in a thin line. For an instant something like sympathy might have lived in the hard eyes. He touched the side of Pham's face. "Be strong, boy. You bear my name."
Tran turned, spoke pidgin words to the star man. And Pham was in alien hands.
Like Qiwi Lin Lisolet, Pham Nuwen had been cast out into the great darkness. And like Qiwi, Pham did not belong.
He remembered those first years more clearly than any other time in his life. No doubt the crew intended to pop him into cold storage and dump him at the next stop. What can you make of a kid who thinks there's one world and it's flat, who has spent his whole life learning to whack about with a sword?
Pham Nuwen had had his own agenda. The coldsleep coffins scared the devil out of him. TheReprise had scarcely left Canberra orbit when little Pham disappeared from his appointed cabin. He had always been small for his age, and by now he understood about remote surveillance. He kept the crew of theReprise busy for more than four days searching for him. In the end, of course, Pham lost—and some very angry Qeng Ho dragged him before the ship's master.
By now he knew that was the "handmaiden" he had seen in the fen. Even knowing, it was still hard to believe. One weak woman, commanding a starship and a crew of a thousand (though soon almost all of those were off-Watch, in coldsleep). Hmm. Maybe she had been the owner's concubine, but had poisoned him and now ruled in his place. That was a credible scenario, but it made her an exceptionally dangerous person. In fact, Sura had been a junior captain, the leader of the faction that voted against staying at Canberra. Those who stayed called them "the cautious cowards." And now they were heading home, into certain bankruptcy.
Pham remembered the look on her face when they finally caught him and brought him to the bridge. She had scowled down at the little prince, a boy still dressed in the velvet of Canberran nobility.
"You've delayed the start of the Watches, young fellow."
The language was barely intelligible to Pham. The boy pushed down the panic and the loneliness and glared right back at her. "Madam. I am your hostage, not your slave, not your victim."
"Damn, what did he say?" Sura Vinh looked around at her lieutenants. "Look, son. It's a sixty-year flight. We've got to put you away."
That last comment got through the language barrier, but it sounded too much like what the stable boss said when he was going to behead a horse. "No!You'll not put me in a coffin."
And Sura Vinh understood that, too.
One of the others spoke abruptly to Shipmaster Vinh. Probably something like "It doesn't matter what he wants, ma'am."
