“Rahm, the last time I was in my own father’s hut in Calvicon, when I and my four brothers and my sister were all together, it was when my stepmother, who had been so good to us once my real mother died, was so ill. We sat around with my father beside my stepmother’s sickbed, talking together about our childhood. And how joyful and wonderful and loving and free it had been, because of him, because of her. And as we sat there, talking softly and laughing quietly in the firelight, I kept thinking, ‘Nobody has a childhood as wonderful as we’re now all saying we did. I certainly didn’t.’ For, like any other parents, however much they loved us, often they had been bored with us, and sometimes they slapped us, and now and again they were sullen and angry that we weren’t interested in the things that concerned them—while they were wholly oblivious to what we felt was so important. Yet we all—my brothers, my sister, and me too—went on talking about that time as if the moments of love and concern—my stepmother’s smile at a chipmunk my youngest brother caught for a pet, the corn cakes my father baked for a friend of mine’s party when I asked him, or the songs the two of them sang together just once, after dark by our bedside—had been, indeed, the whole of it. And while the flames fell back into the embers, it struck me: this isn’t a story of some real childhood that we’re telling of now. No, this story is a present we’re making for my worried old father and my sick, sick stepmother, for having been two very, very fine parents indeed—and who’d certainly given us a childhood fine enough. But once I realized what sort of present it was, I was happy to sit there for another hour, completing that present, weaving it together with my brothers and sister. I was happy to make it for them, happy to give it to them; and I went to sleep afterwards content that we’d done it. And three days later, I left on another journey, knowing I would never see that fine old woman again, and that there was a good chance I might not ever see my father again either—but thinking no more about the story we’d given them, those few nights ago, than anyone ever thinks about a present you’ve given gladly to someone who deserves it.” Naä was silent a few steps more. “At least I didn’t think about it until after I’d been here, oh, three weeks or a month. Because, you see, Rahm, you’ve all here given a present to me.
“You’ve given me—not another childhood; but rather a time like the story of childhood we put together that evening to help my parents through their final years. And till now I wouldn’t have believed a time or a place like that was possible!” They walked on together over the warm earth. “It’s beautiful here, Rahm. So beautiful that if I were anywhere else and tried to sing of this beauty, the notes would stick in my throat, the words would stall on my tongue—and I’d start to cry.”
They had reached a stretch of green graves and stopped to gaze at where stone slanted from the smoky grass. “Yes,” Rahm said after a moment. “It is beautiful, Naä. Thou art right.”
Naä took a long, long breath. “So you brought a puma back with you. Did you leave it down with Kern and Rimgia? I wonder what sort of stew Ienbar will make out of that—before he puts the claws on his necklace.”
“I didn’t bring it back,” Rahm said. “I gave it to a friend.”
“You gave it to someone in the village before you brought it to show Ienbar?” She laughed. “Now that’s the first thing I think you’ve ever done that’s shocked me!”
“Not a friend in the village. This was a man who helped me on my journey. As I fought the cat, a Winged One flew close. This man frightened it away with a powergun.”
Naä turned to look at him. “A powergun? In my home, Calvicon, a man came through once with a powergun. He used it to do scary tricks—set a bushel of hay on fire—in the market square. But he told my big brother, who was his friend for a while, that they could be really dangerous, if used improperly. Where was he from?”
Rahm shrugged. “He wore a black cloak. And black gloves. And a black hood. There was a silver crow on his shoulder and on the sling that held his gun. His name was Kire, and I—”
“Myetra…” Naä’s forehead wrinkled.
“Possibly,” Rahm said. “But why dost thou look so strangely at this?”
“Crow, cloak, and hood, in black and silver, are the uniform of officers in the Myetran army. What would such a soldier be doing here—so close you could leave him in the morning and be here by noon?” She walked, considering. “And with a powergun. Were there others with him?”
“I saw only the one alone. He said he was a wanderer like me, out to see our land.”
“With a powergun? It doesn’t sound good at all.”
“By why, Naä? We do not know them.”
“Calvicon knows them,” she said. “And what they know isn’t good. We’d better tell Ienbar, anyway.”
They had reached the center of the field.
“If he is at home.” Rahm looked around. He cupped his hands to shout. “Ienbar, I am here! Where art thou?”
On the meadow’s far side, a door in a board wall between two trees flew open. A figure lurched out. White hair and white beard jutted in small braids. “Rahm!” the old man shouted and began to rush bandy-legged across the grass. Round his neck jangled half a dozen thongs tied with animal teeth. His long arms were heavy with copper bracelets. At his waist, a leather apron was hemmed with metal pieces worked with symbols and designs. Metal circled his ankle above a skinny foot. Several huge brass hoops hung from his ears, their thickness distending pierced lobe and rim.
Ienbar threw his clinking arms around Rahm, stepped back, then embraced him again. “My son!” he said in a voice cracked and crackling, then stepped back, while Rahm steadied Ienbar’s scrawny shoulders in his big hands. “Thou hast come safely from thy wandering.” Turning to Naä, the old man seized her wrist. “And thou hast come too, my daughter, to sing and play for me. It is good to see thee this fine day.”
“It’s always good to see you, Ienbar,” Naä said. “Just like it’s good to have Rahm back with us.”
“Come, the both of you,” Ienbar declared. “Well, boy, where hast thou been and what didst thou see?”
In the hut, they sat on mats Rahm tossed across small benches while Ienbar heated his pot. Shelves about them were stacked with bones and parchment scrolls, bits of beautiful uncut stone, lengths of painted wood, dried lizards, stuffed bats, and the mounted skeletons of various ground birds and field creatures. Some of the village children still entered here with fear—but to Rahm it had been his home since the death of his parents when he was fifteen.
“What a dream!” Ienbar chuckled. “What a dream, indeed! Yes, I recall that river, from the first years thou hadst moved in with me here, I do.” Ienbar grinned at a reproving look from Rahm. “Well, I do! Sometimes, I think, thy sleeping corner still smells of it—and I’ve told thee before, I don’t mind. I rather like it. A bit of dung, a bit of urine, fresh-turned earth, and new cut grass—those are good smells!” Ienbar broke a small bone and, on the pot’s rim, tapped the marrow into the broth. “The smells I don’t like, now—charred meat, rotten vegetables, and the stench of clogged water that should be running free.” Ienbar turned to serve Naä, then Rahm; for himself, at last, he filled a third bowl. “Well, well, what a dream, what a stream!”
Rahm took one sip; then, bowl between his knees, he began on the rest of his wander. But when he reached the encounter with the Myetran, the old man’s face wrinkled.
Ienbar put his soup on the hearth flags by his big-knuckled toes with their thickened nails, sat back, and moved his tongue about in his mouth without opening his lips.
Questioningly, Rahm lowered black brows. “Why art thou and Naä so concerned about these Myetrans?”
Ienbar sucked his gums. “Oh, sometimes one hears stories—”
Naä interrupted: “I’ll tell you a story, Rahm.” She looked across her bowl at the old man. “Ienbar, in Calvicon, we hear stories too. And the stories of Myetra were never good. I told you about my brother’s friend, Rahm? Well, he said that his powergun was from Myetra. And he told
stories of the destruction that went on there—between man and man, between one race and another. You have your flying neighbors at Hi-Vator? Well, Myetra is on the sea, and once there were people who lived and swam in the water, and could breathe under it like fish do in the ponds and the stream in the quarry. But Myetra fought them and made slaves of them and finally killed them. And there are no more waterfolk around the Myetran shore. That’s the story my brother’s friend told us. Then one day, long after he had told us this, my brother’s friend disappeared—and the tale that came back was that he and another man had gotten angry at each other, gotten into a fight, and finally my brother’s friend had used the powergun to kill the other man. He disappeared the next day, and we never saw him again.”
“To kill?” Rahm asked.
“Yes, there have been stories of such things before.” Ienbar nodded.
“To frighten a Winged One, yes. But why to kill—and another man? Human beings do not kill each other. Thou killest a goat to roast it, an ox to butcher it. But not a human being.”
“If they come by here,” Ienbar said, “we must keep out of their way.”
“But this did not seem to be a brutal man that I met—not a man who would kill. He frightened away the Winged One. He spoke to me as to a friend.”
“That is a good sign, I suppose. Perhaps there’s nothing to fear.” Ienbar shrugged, clinking, to pick up his bowl and stare across it at the flames that, because of the open window, were so diminished by the Çironian sun. “Perhaps…after all, it is only a single soldier wandering through the country.”
“I think that’s what he was,” Rahm said, and raised his bowl to drink. “Yes,” he said between sips. “That is what he was.”
“I hope you’re right,” Naä said less confidently. Then she swung the harp to her lap to pluck a run on the lower strings.
chapter three
Rahm slept deeply, one hand low on his belly. His lids showed white crescents between black lashes. Outside the shack the air cooled. For a while, despite the warmth, it seemed a light rain might come; but at last, without a drop’s falling, the moon’s curve came out, as thin as what showed of Rahm’s eyes.
The clouds moved away, and the night air dried in the new moon’s light as if it had been full sun.
Then sound jabbed into sleep.
It grew till it ripped sleep apart—and Rahm sat upright to smash his hands’ heels against his head, then again, trying to find his ears to cover them…against something he could not, at this moment, distinguish between pain and sound.
Ienbar leaned against the fireplace, shaking, his mouth opening and closing. His arm flailed about, but the clinking of his bracelets was lost in the wailing that filled Rahm’s ears with pressure enough to burst them.
Rahm lurched to his feet and staggered to the door, pulling it open. The sound—because it was a sound—came from across the village. As Rahm stepped outside, it became a booming voice:
SURRENDER, PEOPLE OF ÇIRON!
SURRENDER TO THE FORCES OF MYETRA!
Then silence.
The absence of sound stung Rahm’s ears.
He tried to blink the water out of his eyes.
The wailing began again. Anticipating pain, Rahm stepped back into the doorway as the voice churned through the darkness:
PEOPLE OF ÇIRON!
SURRENDER TO THE FORCES OF MYETRA!
Behind him, Ienbar was crying.
Rahm sprinted out onto the path, shaking his head to clear it while he ran, to throw off the pain and the steady high hum, loud as any roaring, that covered all else. Leaves pulled away, and the village lights flickered. As he passed the first houses, he heard distraught voices. Certainly no villager still slept!
To the east, light flared. Then another flare. Another. Three lights fanned the dark, lowering, till they struck—blindingly—among the huts.
Rahm’s first panicked thought was that the shacks would burst into fire under the glare. But apparently the lights were for illumination, or for the terror such illumination in the midst of darkness might bring.
Rahm’s hearing had almost returned to normal.
Somewhere drums thudded.
—
Naä dreamed she had stumbled into her harp. Only it was huge. And as she tried to fight through the strings, they began to ring and sing and siren—they were all around her, her arms and head and legs, till the harp itself broke—and she woke, pulling herself out of her sleeping blankets and scrambling from under the lean-to’s edge, disoriented at the incredible sound.
—
Qualt had his own house, but slept outside that night with his back against his wagon’s wheel, because the weather was warm and the night was easy.
We won’t say that as he lay there, breathing across his large, loose fingers, relaxed before his face, he was actually dreaming of Rimgia. But when, earlier that night, he’d first lain down on this blanket to stretch out beside his garbage wagon, certainly he’d been thinking of her.
For recently sleep had become an entrance into the part of him that was becoming aware that the shape and limit of his tenderness toward her could be learned only from the thought of her hand in his hands, his face against her belly, her lap against his cheek, his mouth against her neck. So when later, the noise came, sirening in the dark, it tore him out of something comforting as a good dream—yet without sound or image or idea to it, as dreams have.
Qualt woke, the sound around his head a solid thing. He rocked back, buttock banging the cartwheel. His hand went off the blanket into grass and gravel. Scrabbling to sit, then to stand, he looked around the darkness. Gauzy light was cut off sharply by the familiar roof of his shack and two trees, rendered wholly strange. He took five steps, stopped—
Then something ahead of him and above darkened the light, the sky—where was it? And how huge was it and what—but before he could ask what it was, it struck him. Hard. And he threw his arms around it, embracing it to keep from falling. And with it, he fell. It was flapping and huge, smelled and moved like a live thing, and was—as he pushed one hand out—surrounded on both sides by a vast, taut membrane, that suddenly ceased to be taut as he struggled in it. Flailing on the ground, in the dark and that single-note scream filling every crevice of the night (but which came neither from him nor from whatever he struggled with), Qualt had two simultaneous impressions. The first was that he’d stumbled into someone else, the two of them had fallen on the ground, and now they were rolling together. The second was that some astonishing beast, with a pelt and an animal scent, was covering him like a puma leaping down at him from a roof or the sky, to fight with him there by his garbage cart—though so far, Qualt realized, he’d been neither bitten nor clawed.
Then the sound stopped—the chattering of twigs and leaves and small stones, because of his ears’ ringing, seemed to Qualt to make their own noise now not beneath the two of them, but rather off in some ringing metal pan.
The arms of the thing he fought—for it had arms—suddenly seized him, held him, restrained him. Qualt grasped it back. Distantly he heard breathing, which for a moment he could not tell whether it was his or this other’s. Then he felt himself go limp, because suddenly that was easier to do than to keep fighting in the black. Then a voice that was not like any Qualt had ever heard before, because it seemed like a child’s, high and breathy, said into his ear, only inches away, at the same time as Qualt scented the breath of a man who had been eating wild onions, so that, if anything, Qualt suddenly felt something familiar in all this strangeness and struggle—because Qualt himself had often walked through the lower mountains, munching the wild onion stalks that grew there:
“Hi-Vator, yes—no! Phew! Çiron, you?”
—
Rimgia dreamed that somebody, laughing hysterically, thrust a pole into her ear and out the other side of her head, then lifted her by that same pole high into the air, over the glittering stream, and she was afraid she would fall in, only it really hurt to have a pole that deep
in your ear.
The pole cracked. She screamed. But before she could fall, she woke in the hut to that incredible sound. Her father, Kern, was already striding about; she saw his shape pass darkly before the hearth embers. Pushing up quickly, a moment later she knelt at Abrid’s pallet, shaking him.
“What is it—ow! What?”
“Get up!” she insisted, surprised when she could not hear her own voice for the whining. “Come on!” she shouted, realizing it was a shout only from the feel in her throat. Kern had already opened the door, rushed out—
—
Rahm neared the common, where men and women had begun to gather. As he sprinted up the side street, someone grabbed his arm, spun him back, hissed: “Rahm!” Then: “Where is Ienbar?”
Bewildered, he stepped back.
“For God’s sake, Rahm! Where’s Ienbar?”
“Naä? He’s…at the burial meadow.”
“Rahm. We have to leave—all of us. Right now!”
“Leave? But why?”
“The Myetrans are coming! Didn’t you hear them? They want you to surrender.”
“I heard. Naä, what does this ‘surrender’ mean?”
“Oh, Rahm!” Then suddenly she was running away into the dark.
Puzzled, Rahm turned back to the gathering in the common.