“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.