They Fly at Çiron: A Novel

  “Please,” Qualt said, suddenly stepping forward, “please—thou must understand. But we heard something—!”

  At which, with a sudden straightening of his hips, his companion pushed himself off the cliff, dropped into the black, like a feet-first dive into ink, then a moment later rose out of it, into the firelight, soaring now beside them, sailing now above them—with a triumphant hoot that Qualt had never heard before!

  After that, Qualt and his companion both were given lots of attention.

  Naä ran—well beyond the camp, now… still waiting for footsteps behind her, wondering at the fact that, somehow, she was still alive, to flee, to run, to escape—from her own absurd and dangerous plan. She took long breaths with her mouth wide, to make as little sound as possible. Ienbar’s knife was still in her belt. She still held Rimgia’s shawl at her neck—and only an hour later, in the woods at the other side of the village, did she realize that she had gone beyond the town as well. She was going up a slope: this way, she realized, would take her toward the quarry where the stone workers went to hew in the day.

  Leave this village, she thought. I am a singer! (In the dark, she clutched the knife hilt till it hurt her hand, till it bruised the undersides of her knuckles, till it stung with the salt on her palm.) I am no woman for this sort of thing, whatever this sort of thing was—killing on the sly, making brainlessly heroic rescues. A bit wildly she thought: I could make a ballad out of what I’ve already done today and tonight and have the satisfaction of knowing no one will ever believe it! You may have lost Rahm. But you saved Rimgia. Reasonably, you can’t do more. So go! Go on—!

  Which is when her foot went into the ditch—and with the shooting pain, she turned, she fell. I’ve probably twisted my ankle, she thought. She got herself free, stepped gingerly on it—it didn’t hurt that much. But in ten minutes, or when next she got off it, certainly then the throbbing that precluded walking would begin.

  From somewhere, the moon (that, earlier, Uk had expected to light his way into town), rose with its crescent of illumination to light Naä’s way through the woods. The underbrush tried to slow her, but she hurried on. Then, at the height of another slope, brush gave way to grasses and trees—one of the pear orchards above the village. She started out across it, still cursing her foolhardiness, and shivering when she thought of the mad-luck that had let her get this far.

  She shivered again, though the night had grown warmer—and was of the sort that, any other evening, would have been pleasant.

  Between moonlit trees, in a small space a few yards to her left, Naä saw dark forms stretched on the grass. More corpses, was her first thought. Even up here… ?

  Nothing particularly happened to change her mind; but she decided to go closer. Would it be villagers she knew? When she was a yard away, it occurred to her that they might be sleeping soldiers the Myetrans had stationed—which was when one raised on an arm and whispered, “Who art thou …?” in a voice that, even as it started chills on her back, she recognized.

  “Abrid… ?” she asked the shadowed figure.

  “Who art thou… ?” He repeated.

  She told him; “It’s Naä!”

  The moon had leached all red from his braids, leaving them near the gray they were after his work day in the quarry, so that one could see his father in his face…

  “Rimgia!” she heard the boy whisper, leaning toward the other sleeping figure. “It’s Naä!”

  A moment on, Naä crouched between the two youngsters, demanding: “But what are you doing here—?”

  “Thou saidst I should get Abrid,” Rimgia whispered sleepily. “I did. We came here—to hide.”

  “But they’ll find you, if they look for you!”

  Rimgia sat cross-legged now, rocking backward and forward a little, clearly exhausted. “Why didst thou come up here?”

  “To bring you your shawl,” Naä said, shortly. She tugged the printed cloth from her shoulder. It had gotten torn several more times. Naä’s legs and arms were scratched; and she was still waiting for the ghost of the pain to reassert itself from when she had gone into the muddy ditch—but that was long enough back so that, if it hadn’t started to pain her yet, then maybe she hadn’t really twisted her ankle at all. She laughed at the thought that luck could go with you as easily as against (the escape seemed beyond luck; like the luck of being born at all)—and tossed the cloth toward the girl; who simply looked at it, where it landed in the grass, tented in three places on stiff stalks.

  Naä said: “It got a bit messed up, I think.” Then, simply, she laughed. “I’m so glad to see you, girl—I’m so glad to see you both!”

  Abrid was squatting now. He said: “Naä, nobody will find us up here!”

  “I found you,” Naä said. “And I wasn’t even looking! You’ve got to go much further. And really hide this time. But the two of you, together!”

  Rimgia raised both hands to her neck, rubbing. “Naä, how did you get away? What happened—why did you come here? Where are you going—?”

  “Get away? It was dumb luck. What happened? I’ll tell you the next time we see each other. Where am I going? I—” and she stopped, because she couldn’t bring herself to say: I’m terrified and I’m running away…

  Then Abrid asked: “Where is thy harp?”

  Naä looked down at the knife in her hand, its blade black as water. For the first time in many minutes she relaxed her fingers; the pain bloomed like a hot glow around her fist as her fingers loosened on the handle. “I …I put my harp away for a while. It’s not a time for singing. Look, you two must keep going—you must get miles from the village. As if you’re on a wander together. And then you must hide, not anywhere you’ve ever hidden before. But somewhere new.” Slowly, the glow went out. “And so must I—”

  “You’ll go with us?” Rimgia demanded, leaning forward now, her eyes, for a moment, bright in the moon. “I don’t know whether I—”

  But then Rimgia’s eyes turned away, up toward the sky. Abrid was looking, too.

  Like a vast and strangely shaped leaf, a figure crossed the moon. Then another. And then another—going in the other direction. A cloud’s tendril touched the crescent. Another flying form swooped below it.

  “They scare me,” Abrid said, dropping back on his buttocks, his crossed feet coming down loudly in the grass. He hugged his knees in tightly, looking up. Half a dozen of the creatures moved in the sky. He spoke in a whisper. “Everyone’s always been afraid of them …”

  “Dost thou think they can see us?” Rimgia asked. “There’re so many frightening things around—I’ve heard of creatures which can weave a man into a web and suffocate him; and lions that roam the level lands; and the Winged Ones—”

  “I wish thou wouldst sing a song for us now,” Abrid said.

  “I don’t have my harp,” Naä said shortly. “And the Myetrans, I’m afraid, have stolen my voice for a while.”

  Again she looked at the knife. Again she looked at the sky. “You two,” she said, “at least get out of the orchard here and back somewhere in the woods. And hide! I have to go—”

  “Where art thou going?” Rimgia asked, now on her knees, now rocking back to get her feet under her. She stood.

  “I think,” Naä said, “I’m going back to town. Again.” “Naä—?”

  For the singer had abruptly turned.

  She turned back again. “Yes—?”

  Rimgia bent to pick up the shawl. “Thank you!” “For going back?”

  “For trading places with me!”

  Naä laughed. Then she started again through the trees. If they’ve stolen my voice from me, she thought as she entered the woods to descend the slope, I must steal something from them in return. But what can it be that they’ll sorely, sorely miss . . ?

  Qualt was in love with Rimgia.

  We’ve written it; it was true.

  Thus it would be silly to believe that in the course of all Qualt’s enterprises, she was never once in his mind. But it would b
e equally simplistic to think she formed some sort of focus for him—that somehow, all his acts were envisioned, performed, and evaluated with her image bright before him—that they were done for her. Rather, the sort of social catastrophe which Çiron had undergone takes selves already shattered by the simple exigencies of the everyday and drives the fragments even further apart, so that the separate selves of love and bravery, misery and despair, run on a pace, influencing one another certainly, but not in any way one.

  As such catastrophes occasionally evoke extraordinary acts of selflessness or bravery, they sometimes evoke extraordinary efforts to make one part of what is too easily called the self confront another part.

  Naä had found Rimgia doubtless because she was not, in that final dash through the woods, looking for her. But once he had conveyed the gravity of what his winged companion had overheard to the Handsman and—a few minutes later—to the Queen at Hi-Vator, Qualt decided with the same force of will which had impelled him for the whole of the day, even to this height, that he must now find Rimgia and speak to her.

  Perhaps Qualt’s failure—his only failure, really, among all he’d attempted since the Myetrans came—was because he was so certain he knew where to find her.

  The scrabblings on the roof were the footsteps of one Winged One, or three, or perhaps more. On the ground beside the hut, light from the crescent moon was lapped and loosed by a score of beating, crossing, conflicting wings.

  Someone, unthinking, mewed.

  Someone else went, “Shhush!”

  Then Qualt lowered himself down from the roof’s edge, feeling for the window, the toes of his right foot catching on the shutter’s planks—while the night air that, minutes before, had been a torrent around him, was just a breeze at his back. When he swung his other foot against it, the catch gave and the shutter swung in. Stepping about and finding purchase on the sill, he caught the fingertips of his right hand over the upper lintel, and let himself down, till he was sitting in the window, holding onto the beam above with one hand and the window’s side with the other, his head—along with both legs—thrust into the darkened hut.

  Recalling the motion with which his companion had pushed himself off the upper ledge into the night, Qualt jumped forward—and landed in a squat that dropped him low enough to scrape the knuckles on his right hand painfully on the floor—while his left hand flailed out; because the floor was closer than he’d thought.

  Regaining his balance, he whispered: “Rimgia… ? Abrid… ?” He stood. “Rimgia . . it’s me, Qualt!”

  The darkness across the room to his left he recognized as the fireplace—its embers dead. There, next to it, that must have been Kern’s pick. And that was probably Kern’s—or Rimgia’s—fishing pole, against the wall.

  “Rimgia… ?” He took another step across the kitchen, feeling suddenly the emptiness of the house as the noises on the roof lifted his eyes, but brought forth no sound within.

  Didn’t Rimgia sleep in the back, over there… ?

  He pushed the hanging aside and stepped inside. From a half-open shutter, night-light from the moon lay over a pallet bed, with a wrinkled throw across the matting—not unlike the one he so rarely slept on these summer nights in his cottage down by the dump. “Rimgia… ?” And Abrid’s sleeping space just beyond the wall… “Abrid?” He said that out, full voice, three times. Then he said again, more softly, “Rimgia?” He stood there; and while the hanging swung behind him he pulled his lower lip into his mouth, to press it with his front teeth—till, at sudden pain, he let it free, and put his tongue up over his upper lip now. He rubbed both forearms against his ribs—and swallowed; and coughed; and swallowed again. The chill aloft on the night had been refreshing; but its memory made him want to hug himself in his desire for warmth. A vision he’d had, during the whole of the flight down, was of coming in (through the window, more or less as he’d done), to kneel on one knee by her bed, to reach out and touch her shoulder as she slept; then, when his touch startled her awake, so that she lifted her head, pulling copper hair over the pillow (the moonlight was supposed to be full silver, not just this gauze of half-shadow), he would say… Qualt took another breath, stepped forward, dropped to a squat, knees winging up beside him, and reached for the bed. He only rested his wide fingers on the wrinkled throw, however—while he tried to take in the fact that she was really not here.

  Still, if she were absent, it was her absence. And everything hers was, it seemed, extraordinarily important at this moment.

  “Rimgia,” he said, “I like thee—like thee a lot! Dost thou like me? I mean… really like me?”

  Then, because of the scrabbling above, Qualt was up, into the other room (to flee the vacant house that had just held his bravest act that day), to vault onto the sill and twist about, reach up for the lintel, his broad feet—a moment later—disappearing above it.

  CHAPTER VI

  WHAT’S going to happen to him, do you think? They’re gonna kill him?”

  Uk said: “Executed at dawn—that’s the prince’s order.”

  There was a grunt in the darkness. “Pretty rough on the lieutenant.”

  Uk said: “About as rough as it gets.” He chuckled. It was a dry, dreary, unfeeling chuckle—one he’d started coming out with to make himself seem less feeling than he was. Now, he noted, he did not, indeed, feel much.

  “He was a good officer, Lieutenant Kire,” another voice said, from the dark on the other side. (No one else had laughed.) “He was always fair.”

  And another: “He was the best.”

  “He was a damned good officer,” Uk said. “It’s too bad—but I guess I understand it. I don’t like it. But I understand it.”

  “Sabotage? Incompetence—treason? You think the charges are fair?”

  “I don’t know,” Uk said. “I don’t know if anything in this war is fair—or unfair. But I was standing right out there, with the prince, when the lieutenant was in there talking to her—he’s in there, telling her how he’s been disobeying orders, trying to make things easier on the villagers, making a flogging of ten lashes into two, things like that. She’s supposed to be a prisoner, and he told her right out she could leave if she wanted. I heard him.”

  “Well, he was good to us, too—and he tried to be good to them, where it wouldn’t hurt. It doesn’t sit right with me, executing a man ’cause he’s fair-minded.”

  “Naw,” Uk said. “It don’t work like that.”

  “How is it supposed to work then! What do you mean, it don’t work that way?”

  “That’s how I thought it worked, too—when I first got here,” Uk said. “We’d come into one of these places, hacking up the locals—and I’d think, just like you: it’s like swatting at flies with a swatter. Everyone you hit goes down—dead! This isn’t fair. So one time, I started pulling my sword swings, aiming for the arms and legs, rather than the neck or the gut. But then I saw what it looked like later—the ones who didn’t die right off. And that was awful—the time it took and the pain it took for them to die anyway. I was walking around, looking at all these people, not dead—but half dead. Half dead’s a lot worse than dead, when you know you’re gonna die in another three, six days no matter what anyone does. No—if the lieutenant wanted this war business over, the way to end it is to go in there, fight as best you can, as hard as you can, and get it over as fast as you can. That’s how it works. Holding things back, holding things up, slowing things down—that doesn’t do any good for anyone. Not for the villagers—and certainly not for you and me. He was just making it longer and harder for us—and the longer and harder it is for you and me, the more chance you and me got of getting killed. No—I liked the lieutenant. He never did anything to me personally; I’m sorry it worked out this way for him. But if I can understand it, he should’ve been able to figure it out, too. He’s an officer.”

  “Now that’s common sense speaking there, Uk,” a soldier said, from the dark.

  “Sometimes, I think Uk is the only one in this ou
tfit with any common sense at all,” another said.

  “That means I’m talking too much,” Uk said. “Go to sleep now. We have to get up early.”

  “You mean we got to go see it, like that other time? Aw—good night!”

  “The lieutenant’s really going to be executed?” asked still another, younger, troubled voice.

  “That was the order, boy.” Grunts and shushings came as a soldier slid further down into his bag. “Now go to sleep.”

  Rahm sat in the corner, looking over the dark figures who slept, crowded together on the council-cellar floor. A dozen feet away, Gargula was breathing loudly and irregularly; he’d worked on this foundation with Rahm. Old Brumer leaned his shoulders against the wall, head nestled down in his near-bushel of a beard: he’d been their foreman. Now all of us, Rahm thought, are prisoners here. At the tiny window, just beneath the ceiling, gray had nudged away a corner of black, enough to silhouette the stems outside. Small leaves shook with a breeze.

  Then the door creaked.

  Someone looked up. Two turned over without looking. Between two black-caped officers, with a regular soldier behind them, a bearded man stepped in. One officer carried a light-box, that, now, he flipped on. A harsh filament glowed white. A fan of light put harsh blacks on the far side of the two dozen sleepers about the floor.

  “Well, we have some men in here,” said the bearded Myetran. He wore one brown leather gauntlet. His other hand was bare. From some time that seemed at once impossibly immediate yet long ago, Rahm recognized the man who had ridden his horse on the common, who’d spoken into the silver rod—who had burned down Kern. “For a moment, I thought this was the women’s holding cell. Lord, it stinks in here!” (A depression in the far corner was full of urine and feces; but it had long since overflowed, to wet almost half the floor.) The man took a few steps—over some sleeping figures. “I have a job for one of you. For a good and lively dog. A strong dog—you, perhaps. Or you…?