a large man, next to Bardo, whether by hologram or actual presence in the body, he did seem rather small. ‘Who was it who called the Fellowship of Free Pilots together at his house when everyone was quaking at Lord Pall’s goddamned edicts against assemblage? Who gave them then name? Who led the attack on the Lightship Caverns? It was Bardo, by God!’ Bardo said. ‘It was Bardo, too bad.’
‘We honour you for your efforts,’ Cristobel said with a sneer. ‘But it seems you’ve already found your place beneath the Sonderval.’
Here the Sonderval’s hologram appeared in the pits of the lightships. His handsome face had fallen as hard as the granite of Icefall’s mountains. To Cristobel, he said, ‘He is pilot-captain of twenty lightships and a hundred and twenty other vessels beneath the Lord Pilot of the New Order.’
‘But he’s still only a ronin pilot, after all,’ Cristobel said.
Now, as if regarding a wormrunner or some loathsome species of alien, the Sonderval slowly shook his head. ‘When you speak to me, Cristobel, you may address me as “Lord Pilot”.’
‘But you are not my Lord Pilot, after all.’
‘No – is that Salmalin the Prudent, then?’ the Sonderval asked, naming the Old Order’s present Lord Pilot.
‘I have no Lord Pilot.’
‘Then if you’ve left the Order and are without a Lord Pilot, you are as much of a ronin as Bardo.’
‘Not so,’ Cristobel said. ‘We of the Fellowship carry the spirit of the Order with us. The true Order, before Ringism corrupted it.’
‘And I honour your spirit,’ the Sonderval said. ‘But is it your intention to appoint yourself Lord Pilot of the Fellowship?’
Here several pilots of the Fellowship began to speak in favour of Cristobel becoming Lord Pilot of the Fellowship. It was obvious to Danlo, as it must have been to others, that they had planned this power play immediately upon learning that Bardo had been successful in reaching the New Order on Thiells.
‘By God, if anyone is to be Lord Pilot of the Fellowship, it’s Bardo!’ Bardo roared.
‘Why should the Fellowship have a Lord Pilot at all?’ Richardess quietly asked when Bardo’s voice had faded to a hum. In his body and face, he was as delicate as Yarkona glass, but he was the only pilot ever to have dared the deadly spaces of Chimene. ‘We already have a great Lord Pilot in the Sonderval. Why don’t you pilots of the Fellowship simply join us?’
‘Why don’t you pilots of the New Order join us?’ Cristobel countered.
‘Because you’re ronins!’ Zapata Karek said.
‘And you’re ignorant of what is really occurring in Neverness,’ Vadin Steele said.
‘Ignorant! Well, you’re as power-hungry as a Scutari shahzadi.’
For a long time, the pilots argued among themselves like novices unable to choose captains for a game of hokkee. Danlo listened to then words grow wilder and more belligerent with every pilot who spoke. Their childishness might have amused him, but a great many lives hung on the slender thread of then reaching an understanding. Although Danlo felt time slipping away like sands on a windswept beach and was eager to complete his journey, he felt that he should be sure of who led the Fellowship of Free Worlds before acting on their behalf as an ambassador to Neverness. And Demothi Bede, when Danlo roused him from the half-sleep of quicktime, agreed with him. Lord Bede seemed particularly shocked at the unforeseen play of events.
‘But this is madness!’ the thin, reedy Demothi Bede said in his thin, old voice. He crowded with Danlo into the pit of the Snowy Owl. ‘If we don’t do something, we’ll be at war with each other instead of the Ringists.’
‘Truly, we should do something,’ Danlo said as he floated in his formal black robes. ‘Since we’re supposed to be ambassadors and peacemakers.’
‘It’s obvious that the ronin pilots must join us,’ Lord Bede said. He was very much a traditionalist, and his face fell dour and smug. ‘They should take vows to the New Order.’
Now Danlo did smile, for although a thousand Civilized Worlds were represented in the ships sailing through space all around them, Cristobel and the Sonderval – and the Lord Bede – acted as if only the pilots of the two Orders mattered. But what right did they have, Danlo wondered, to choose the fates of thirty thousand ships and millions of men and women? These lords and masters of his Order obviously assumed that after they had decided upon a Lord Pilot, they would parcel out the other ships to their command like colourfully-wrapped presents given at Year’s End – or rather as the Sonderval had already done with the black ships and deep-ships he had escorted to Sheydveg. Or if the Sonderval and Cristobel could not decide who should lead whom, then the two hundred pilots from Thiells and the Fellowship of Free Pilots might fight independently of each other – after first fighting each other for the prize of the vast fleet waiting in the light of a cool, orange star.
‘I must speak to the pilots,’ Danlo told Demothi Bede. For the moment, he was faced away from his fellow pilots’ arguments, and the pit of his lightship was quiet. ‘This fighting among ourselves, this arrogance of ours … is shaida.’
‘Do you have a plan, then, Pilot?’ Demothi Bede asked.
Danlo nodded his head, then told him his plan.
‘Very well,’ Demothi said, smiling his approval. ‘If you’re to try to stop a war, you might as well begin now.’
And so Danlo added his voice to the cacophony filling the pits of three hundred and five lightships. As a master pilot he had as much right to speak as anyone, and he too instantiated as a hologram among them. Because of his renown at mastering a chaos space and crossing the entire Vild – or perhaps because of his blazing blue eyes – the other pilots fell silent and listened to him.
‘We pilots,’ he said, ‘have thought of ourselves as the spirit of the Civilized Worlds. But we have never been their rulers. The Fellowship of Free Worlds – but where is our fellowship when we call each other names like barbarians? And where is the freedom of these worlds if they must simply wait for us to order them to war? Do they, who have homes and children, risk less than we? If we cannot stop this war, they will die like snowworms caught in the sun, perhaps a thousand or a million of them for every pilot who loses his ship. Truly. Where is their freedom, then, to choose their own fate? We are pilots of three hundred and five lightships. Outside my window I have counted … a hundred times as many other ships. Shouldn’t we let their pilots choose who will lead them to war?’
Most of the lightship pilots, upon listening to Danlo, immediately saw the sense of what he said. In truth, few of them really wanted to wage war as two separate Orders of ships, and they dreaded the uncertainties of Cristobel’s dispute with the Sonderval. The Sonderval, for his part, was loath to surrender any important decision to such inferior beings as the pilots and peoples of the Civilized Worlds. But he was at heart a shrewd man whose farsightedness overshadowed even his arrogance. And so, with carefully feigned reluctance, after trading knowing looks with Danlo, he approved this proposal. Only Cristobel, really, and a few of his closest friends such as Alesar Estarei, argued against Danlo. But the tide of passion – the tide of history – had already turned against him. In the pits of their ships, two hundred and fifty pilots struck their diamond rings against whatever hard surface they could find, and called out that the Fellowship of Free Worlds should decide its
