“I dreamt,” Rahm said gravely, “that I walked by a great, rushing stream. And as the sun rose and I ambled along beside the current, the water began to sparkle. Then, in the dream, a little branch feeding into the water lay before me, so I decided to wade across to the other side. I stepped in. The water was cold at first, but a few steps on, as the water reached my thighs and finally my waist, it grew warm. Then even warmer. And warmer. I woke”—he chuckled — “to find I had pissed myself, the way I used to when I was a boy in bed, a couple of times a week, even unto my fifteenth year — and my mother would become angry and say I made the shack stink.” The chuckle became a laugh. “Then she’d make me go sleep out in the tool cabin. But that, I’m afraid, was all there was of mystic dreaming!”
“Oh, Rahm — well, you’d better not tell Ienbar that.” Naä laughed outright. “Then again, maybe you should. He just might find something in it — if he just doesn’t find it funny too.”
“Then I found a very real, very un-mystic”—Rahm laughed again — “stream and washed myself; and went on my way. And this morning,” he finished, “I was attacked by a wild prairie lion and wrestled with her, to break her neck with my arm. Then I came home here.”
Naä shook her head. “Rahm, you folk amaze me.”
He looked at her as they walked, his amber eyes full of questioning.
“Three months ago, when I first came here, I’d never have believed such people as you existed.” Naä paused a moment, as if searching within for her answer. “Sometimes I still don’t believe that you do.”
“Why, Naä?”
“Rahm, I’ve traveled to lots of places, through lots of lands. I know songs and stories from even more lands and places than I’ve visited — more lands and places than you could imagine. But most of the songs and stories I know are about fights and wars, about love that dies, about death and betrayal and revenge. Yet here there is…” She raised her shoulders and looked up at the branches, whose early summer green had begun to go smoky after the first bright hue of spring. “But I can’t even name it.” She let her shoulders fall. “Here I go out and sing to Rimgia and to the other women in the fields. I come and exchange songs and tales with Ienbar, or go sit and talk with Hara over her shuttles. Sometimes I eat with you in the evening or take long walks alone in the foothills of the mountains. If any woman of the village comes around a corner of the path, my heart leaps as happily as if it were my own sister coming to meet me. If any man of the village crosses my path, we smile and call to each other with the same warmth I’d call to my own brother.” She glanced at him, then glanced away. “Whenever a group of you get together after work in the evening or before a council meeting, and everyone turns to me and asks me to sing…well, I’ve never sung better!” Naä looked down at the dust. “The only thing any of you say there is to fear in the whole of this land are the flying creatures from Hi-Vator. And no one can even remember why that is, so even that’s awfully easy to forget; and since I’ve been here, I’ve only once seen what might have been a silhouette of one against some moonshot clouds, anyway.
“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?”