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 to 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, 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 piles of 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 like to 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 I’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 backward and forward 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 real — for the officer’s cape spread and billowed and fluttered and flapped, for all the world like a third wing! Had the officer tried to choke the Winged One in his flight? For the Winged One, I realized, was trying to dislodge the man and throw him loose! He flew sideways, he dove headfirst, 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 anymore. You disapprove. You are afraid. Well, there was no reason to think you’d be otherwise. I’ll find someone 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.