They Fly at Ciron (20 page)

At the fire, the weaver tapped her long-handled spoon on the cauldron’s rim and looked up. A naked back, with its small, sharp vertebrae curved toward the room—the young soldier sighed, but did not even glance around.

Across the commons a dog pranced and, its head back, yipped, till, loping past, Rahm turned and called jocularly: “Come on, there—cut it out now, Mouse!”

A child standing near turned to declare: “His name isn’t ‘Mouse’—and you
know
it, Rahm!”

Then both laughed—the girl’s, a brief, high sound, like a single note of the dog’s yipping, and Rahm’s, a broad-chested, doubled-over, head-shaking, arm-waving, hand-clapping, loud-then-high-then-low-again laugh, that took him three, four, five steps along, going on and on and
on—
so that, for uncomfortable moments, he looked like a man with a creature clutching his shoulders whom he was trying to shake free.

Again seated on the edge of the blackened wood, Kire looked at his hysterical savior, as if Kire himself were hundreds of
feet above and Rahm, dog, and child were on the ground. His miraculous rescue that dawn had catapulted Kire to some altitude from which, like a man afraid of heights, he could appreciate none of the view for the vertigo. Kire was
still
trying to recall the names of his units’ dead—unhappily aware that he could, now, really, remember only one: Nactor, off in the shack. Then, of course, there was his big guard, in the wagon. And what had been the name of his little friend, the one with the freckled shoulders—a soldier Kire knew had died early in the operation, but to whom, for his life, he could now fix neither face nor name. Somehow what had happened to him had so immersed him in life that little of death would stick to him—for which he felt awkward, uncomfortable, and inadequate.

His big body still lost in its laugh, again Rahm glanced at the seated Myetran. Kire looked out with green, distant eyes. Somehow, the dark clothing, with the puma skin around them, had come all askew. I call him ‘friend,’ Rahm thought. We have now each helped the other; yet I don’t know him—at all, And Rahm was glad the laugh’s remains kept the thought’s discomfort from his face.

The day of the Winged One’s coming and their routing of the Myetrans was a day of wonder—wonder that spread from the town dump, where Qualt finally drew up his own wagon with baskets of yellow rinds and chicken feathers and milkslops and egg shells and corn shucks, to go once more, stiff-legged and leaning back against them, over the gravel to dump them from the ravine precipice into the soggy and steaming gully; wonder that spread
over the common at the village center, where the grassy expanse was worn away down the middle by the daily set-up of the barter market’s stalls just before the council house, where most of the women and many of the men mentioned in these chapters came to walk, judge, and trade; wonder that spread to the outlying grain fields and cane fields and corn fields and kale fields, in one of which Gargula stood, calf deep in greens, beside his plow, rubbing his nose and not quite ready to work, because he’d taken Tenuk’s mule from its shed under the thatched-out roof that day, fed it, watered it, and brought it to the field without asking anyone—because there’d been no one to ask; and the whole silent operation had left him with a tongue too heavy to speak.

The wonder and the mystery, as the village children would remember it, was that over all, now on the ground, and more and more frequently in the air, the great shapes, like flitting shadows, moved, awkwardly on the earth and gracefully through the sky, translucent ears cocked left or right to hear, it seemed, everything, their little eyes fixed (it seemed) on little for very long. Thus, as had Naä and Rimgia, one walked about the streets—or the common, or the refuse pit, or the fields—with eyes continually lifting.

Back at the ravine, Qualt smacked the bottom of his last basket, turned it up to peer within its smelly slats, then dragged it behind him, rasping on rock, toward the dozen others, and looked up—as Rimgia came out into the clearing that held his hut as well as his yard full of odd, awkward, and broken things.

She walked thoughtfully, glanced up casually: a dozen Winged Ones circled above the ravine.

Have we mentioned that Qualt, even before the coming of the Myetrans, had for a
while, now, been the most respected young man in town? In such a village, the garbage man knows more about what goes on (and goes out) than anyone else. As garbage man, Qualt was expected not just to know this, but to study it, and to record anything about it of interest, which he did two or three evenings a week, on parchment scrolls, with great diligence. It was Qualt who, rather than Rahm, as a child had pestered Old Ienbar to teach him his writing system. In the course of learning it years ago, Qualt had copied out, several times over, almost the whole of the death scrolls on store in Ienbar’s shack (he still had those early exercises in trunks piled beneath his grandmothers’ marriage blankets in his back storage room), and it was he to whom would soon fall the task of reconstructing them. Hara’s jokes with Rahm about a possible seat on the elders’ council was a gesture simply to make the big youth feel better. Hara’s jokes with Qualt, though they took the same form, were signs of a foregone conclusion of the whole Çiron council, that the lean youth would have the next seat that came vacant—and would be the youngest “elder” ever to sit with them.

Over the next weeks as his various accomplishments during the Myetran siege (from his gathering of information, to his help to Naä, to the water for the prisoners, to the multiple garbage peltings, and finally his own night-journey to Hi-Vator) would come to general awareness, they would make this modest young man into a true town hero—and the already high respect and regard in which he was held would become something quite stellar. What Rahm and Naä had done was the stuff of song. But what Qualt had done was finally the stuff of myth.

At this moment, however, neither Qualt nor Rimgia knew
the reputation for heroism that was to accrue. Right now, Qualt was moody, because an hour back he’d had to take his garbage wagon, along with ten other carts (along with Mantice and Brumer and some others), full of corpses, piled so high one or two regularly fell off—soldiers and villagers both—down some two-hundred yards, to dump them into a part of the ravine his predecessor at the dump, years ago, had told him about—the safest place to put corpses when, through man-made or natural catastrophe, the death toll exceeded what the burial meadow might reasonably hold.

The fact and the location were always with him; but this was the first he’d ever had to use it.

Rimgia wandered toward Qualt. Three days ago, she had wanted to make her questions interesting for Naä; but she’d wanted to take the most interesting of their answers to Qualt. Now, however, as she’d explained to Naä only a bit before, those answers in the aftermath of the violence seemed somehow irrelevant, and so she’d come here feeling oddly empty—yet had come just the same.

Between her fingers, she turned the stem of a black-eyed flower with yellow petals she’d thought to show him; but then, because even that seemed so childish, she threw it to the gravel. And Qualt, because he had seen her father burned down on the common the night before last and had wondered at her mourning, looked at her seriously and said: “Wouldst thou come in? I have some broth heating—I’ve knocked the marrow from half a dozen pork bones into it . . ?”

She stepped within the curve of the lean arm he held out, and they walked between the odd junk about his yard. From the Winged Ones flying above, shadows passed and pulled
away from them, till, at the door hanging, she turned and looked up, shifting her shoulders under his grip—which he loosened, but did not release. “Qualt, isn’t it odd?” she said. “The Winged Ones saved us—saved our whole village. They turned out to be brave and wonderful and generous. Yet we’ve always been taught to fear them; and now it seems there was no reason to fear. All this time, perhaps we could have been friends with them, learning from them, enjoying their ways and wonders while they benefited from ours. Doesn’t that make us seem like a
very
small-minded little village!”

“Perhaps,” said thoughtful Qualt. He squeezed her shoulder with his hard, large hand, near permanent in its glove of dirt.

“Dost thou
not
think so?” she asked, looking up—at him and at three (then three more) Winged Ones passing through the luminous space between his long curly hair and the roof’s edge.

“Perhaps,” he said. “But there still might be reason to fear.”

“To fear? The Winged Ones—who saved us? But why?”

Qualt took in a breath, squeezed her shoulder again, and looked slowly at the flying figures around them. “Maybe it’s only a little thing—but when it happened, it made me afraid. There was a Winged One who was with me, and whom I thought my friend. And when the Winged Ones came down at our request and were triumphant, and the soldiers had all surrendered, he was with us when we penned some of the Myetrans up in the corral of crossed wires they’d imprisoned some of our people in before. I’d put in both soldiers and officers. And my winged friend now called
through the wires, to one of the officers, standing just inside, all in black, still in his hood, with that straight, straight cloak they wear lapping smack to the earth—the only thing that let you know he was a prisoner, really, was that his powergun sling was empty; I’d taken it away from him and smashed it.
Well,
the Winged One wanted to know,
how do you like being a prisoner? Wouldn’t it be better to be free? And wouldn’t you like to fly, loosed from this cage, free of the fetters of the earth itself?
He kept on teasing him, in his little scrap of a voice. Then, with three flaps to take off, he was up, and inside.
Wouldn’t the officer climb on my back, just put an arm around my neck and hold to my shoulder?
I stood outside, grinning as broadly as a child, watching and wishing it was me who’d been offered the ride—that I could change places with him. Myself, I think the officer was afraid at first; and the other soldiers inside the enclosure only looked at the ground. But finally, perhaps because he was also afraid not to, the officer stepped up and put his arms around the Winged One’s neck; and, with a few beats of those great wings, making the leaves both inside and outside the fence spin up into the air, they were up among those leaves, then above them, then above the corral itself, .moving into the sky, higher, and higher, toward the sun. In less than a minute, they were small as a bird, flying now this way, now that way, against the sky’s burning white. Because of the scale, it was hard to tell what was happening; but, I remember, as I watched them, it seemed that the backwards and forwards turnings of that Winged One were awfully quick—dazzlingly fast, faster than I’d seen any of the others fly: a moth about a fire, darting back and about before the sun. Then, I realized the speed was not seemed, but was—for the officer’s cape spread and billowed and fluttered
and flapped, for the world like a third wing! Had the officer tried to choke the Winged One, perhaps, in his flight? For the Winged One, I realized, was trying to dislodge the man and throw him loose! He flew sideways, he dove head first, then whirled about and rose, now flew upside down, now back again! One thought the officer’s cape had gone mad! In no more than thirty seconds, I saw the man tear loose—and fall!

“For the first moments of his plummet, I wondered if my friend might swoop down below him and catch him. But he only flew away. Then, I wondered, if the falling man might spread that cloak and use it, somehow, to fly with—but no. It closed in the air above him, straight over his head. He arrowed down—landing among the trees, some hundred yards off.

“When my companion returned, I was still sure there’d be some explanation—that something had happened on the flight; but no: back on the ground the big fellow was laughing and strutting and boasting to us and all his fellows what a joke it had been; it seemed a joke—to some of them; and to some of them not.

“But why—?
I asked him at last.
Why did you do it?

“He cocked his head at me and said:
He was wearing a cape, like the one who seared my wing with his accursed powergun!

“But it probably wasn’t him,
I told him.
All the officers wear capes. You can’t just replace one person for another like that—

“But he shrugged his huge shoulders.
Well, I wasn’t ready to be a ground-bound female, limping along with only one wing and holiness to help me. Why
not
replace one with the other? Didn’t they flog four at random for the mischief of you and me? Oh, I see,
he went on.
I can hear it in your voice. Like all the others—among
my
people: You’re no longer my friend. You don’t like me
any more. You disapprove. You are afraid. Well, there was no reason to think you’d be otherwise. I’ll find some one else to play with.
Then he spread his great wings, with all their scars, and shook them in the sun; and beat them; and flew away.

“But that’s when I was afraid.”

Rimgia shuddered. “That’s terrible!” And after she shuddered, she watched his face, and thought what a sensitive and intelligent young man he was, to have such wonderful feet and hands. “If you wanted to do something like that, it would be better to take one of their dreadful guns and just shoot them through the fence!”

“Mmmm,”
Qualt said. But it was uncertain if he meant he agreed with her, or merely that he’d heard her. “Later—” Shadows around them became smaller and darker, larger and paler—“I and some of the others went to look at the Myetran who’d fallen among the trees. He’d taken down a lot of branches—and we put his body in a wagon.” Always the shadows moved. “As soon as I came back, I ordered the corral to be opened; and I told the soldiers inside to go—it was the corral I was in charge of; I mean, what were we going to do with them? And sullenly they went.”