They Fly at Çiron
For
Dennis Rickett
and with thanks to
Sam Debenedetto,
Leonard Gibbs,
& Don Eric Levine
Proem
Among the tribes and villages and hamlets and townships
that ornament the world with their variety, many have existed
in mutual support, exchange, and friendship. Many others
have stayed to themselves, regarding their neighbors
with unease, hostility, and suspicion. Some have gone
from one state to the other. Some have even gone back.
But when the memory of a village is no older than the four
or five generations it takes a grave-scroll record to rot,
there is no history — only myth and song. And the truth is,
while a minuscule number of these may echo down the ages,
only a handful endure more than a season; and the vast majority
from such handfuls linger (listen to the songs and myths about you!) less than a lifetime.
Note
In my second-floor flat at the dead end of East Fifth Street in summer of 1962, I first wrote They Fly at Çiron as the longest (forty-five pages) of five short stories I’d hoped to cobble together into a novel. From my spiral notebooks I typed the first version on a mechanical typewriter in late spring ’62. My editor, Don Wollhiem, did not buy it, however; nor was I really satisfied with the tale. Some time toward 1969 I gave the manuscript of what I felt was the most salvageable section to my friend James Sallis. Jim reworked the opening half-dozen pages. That version appeared as a collaboration under our paired bylines in the June ’71 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Twenty years later, though, it struck me that the story could still use a pass through the word processor. When I was done, I had a manuscript of 150 pages. For all I’ve added, two clauses excepted, I’ve kept none of Jim’s inventive amendments. Nevertheless, they formed an invaluable critique, defining lacks I’ve now addressed otherwise. As none of Jim’s language remains, I can no longer reprint They Fly at Çiron as a proper collaboration. But neither can I publish it — far truer for this than for the ’71 version — without acknowledging that critique as responsible for anything now in it worth the reading. In 1992, equally detailed critiques of the new version came from Randy Byers and Ron Drummond — as did an astute half page of notes from my Amherst collegue and friend Don Eric Levine. In my sunny Amherst study, I responded here and there to all of them as best I could — and the manuscript is now fifty pages longer. In one sense, this is my second novel — but it has taken me thirty years to write.
Chapter One
“They are dogs.”
“My prince — ”
“They are less than dogs. Look: they inch on their stomachs, like maggots.”
“Prince Nactor, they are men — men who fought bravely against us — ”
“—and whom we vanquished, Lieutenant Kire.” The prince slipped long fingers through the fence’s diamond-crossed wires and grasped. “That gives me the right to do anything I want to them.” With his free hand, still in its leather gauntlet, he lifted his powergun from its sling. “Anything.”
“My prince, yours is also the right to be merciful —!”
“Even this, Kire.” Nactor put the barrel end through the wire. “Now watch.” The first time he fired, the two who could still scream started in again. Another who could move dragged himself over the dirt, took hold of the fence wire, and tried to pull himself up. His fingers caught. Silently, he opened his mouth, and closed it, and opened it. Nactor glanced back, grinning through his beard. “Smells like barbecue, doesn’t it?” Turning again, he thrust the barrel between the wires into the prisoner’s eye.
The gun and the fence both jumped at the report.
Charred neck and bloody hands slid to the ground.
He took out the noisiest two last, some forty seconds apart. During those seconds, while the smoke above the fence settled back down, Nactor began to smile. The one huddling into himself opened his eyes, then squeezed them tight — he was making a sound more between a wheeze and a whine than a scream. Nactor’s beard changed shape a little as, behind it, his face seemed to grow compassionate. He leaned toward the wire as though at last he saw something human, something alive, something he could recognize.
Without stopping the sound, again the prisoner began to blink.
Nactor lowered the gun.
The man finally let an expression besides terror twitch through the scabs and the mud; he took a breath…
Nactor thrust the gun through — and shot.
The fence jumped.
A hand, charred now, slid through the muck. Something no longer a face splatted down.
Nactor reslung his weapon and turned from the corral, releasing the wire. “I find killing these”—the fence vibrated — “easier than those creatures from their cave holdings that we exterminated three attacks ago. These at least were human. But those, with their shaggy pelts and their thickened nails like beast claws — I suppose they reminded me of my dogs at home. There, your requests for clemency, your sour looks and your sulkings, really got on my nerves, Kire. This was worth doing just to keep you quiet.” He glanced where Kire’s hand jerked, now toward, now away from, the sling at his own hip. “That is, if it doesn’t actually cheer you up. Lieutenant?” (Three more jerks, and Kire’s arm, in its black sleeve, straightened.) “Is it really necessary to remind you that the purpose of this expedition is conquest — that Myetra must expand His boundaries or He will perish? When the time comes for our final encounter with Calvicon, you will…I trust you will distinguish yourself in war, in service to Myetra, bringing honor to your superiors, who watch you, and to your men, who trust you.” The prince palmed the powergun’s handle, moving gauntleted fingers on the sling’s silver embossing, worked into Kirke, Myetra’s totemic crow. (The silver came from the Lehryard mines; the guns were smithed in the Tradk Mountains. For both guns and silver, Myetra traded wheat taken by force from the veldt villages of Zeneya. Even Kirke, Kire reflected, had come from a distant county he could no longer name, but which Myetra had long ago laid waste to.) “What is our mission now, Kire? Just so I know you haven’t forgotten: To march our troops across this land in a line as straight as…as what?”
“ ‘As straight as a blood drop down a new-plastered wall.’ ” The lieutenant’s voice was low, measured, but with some roughness in it that might have been a social accent, an emotional timbre, or a simple failure in the machinery of tongue, throat, and larynx. “Shoen, Horvarth, Nutting, and fourteen other hamlets lie devastated behind us. Çiron, Hi-Vator, Requior, and seven more villages lie ahead to be crushed, before we reach Calvicon for our final encounter.”