Rahm’s hearing had almost returned to normal.
Somewhere drums thudded.
Naä dreamed she had stumbled into her harp. Only it was huge. And as she tried to fight through the strings, they began to ring and sing and siren — they were all around her, her arms and head and legs, till the harp itself broke — and she woke, pulling herself out of her sleeping blankets and scrambling from under the lean-to’s edge, disoriented at the incredible sound.
Qualt had his own house, but slept outside that night with his back against his wagon’s wheel, because the weather was warm and the night was easy.
We won’t say that as he lay there, breathing across his large, loose fingers, relaxed before his face, he was actually dreaming of Rimgia. But when, earlier that night, he’d first lain down on this blanket to stretch out beside his garbage wagon, certainly he’d been thinking of her.
For recently sleep had become an entrance into the part of him that was becoming aware that the shape and limit of his tenderness toward her could be learned only from the thought of her hand in his hands, his face against her belly, her lap against his cheek, his mouth against her neck. So when later, the noise came, sirening in the dark, it tore him out of something comforting as a good dream — yet without sound or image or idea to it, as dreams have.
Qualt woke, the sound around his head a solid thing. He rocked back, buttock banging the cartwheel. His hand went off the blanket into grass and gravel. Scrabbling to sit, then to stand, he looked around the darkness. Gauzy light was cut off sharply by the familiar roof of his shack and two trees, rendered wholly strange. He took five steps, stopped —
Then something ahead of him and above darkened the light, the sky — where was it? And how huge was it and what — but before he could ask what it was, it struck him. Hard. And he threw his arms around it, embracing it to keep from falling. And with it, he fell. It was flapping and huge, smelled and moved like a live thing, and was — as he pushed one hand out — surrounded on both sides by a vast, taut membrane, that suddenly ceased to be taut as he struggled in it. Flailing on the ground, in the dark and that single-note scream filling every crevice of the night (but which came neither from him nor from whatever he struggled with), Qualt had two simultaneous impressions. The first was that he’d stumbled into someone else, the two of them had fallen on the ground, and now they were rolling together. The second was that some astonishing beast, with a pelt and an animal scent, was covering him like a puma leaping down at him from a roof or the sky, to fight with him there by his garbage cart — though so far, Qualt realized, he’d been neither bitten nor clawed.
Then the sound stopped — the chattering of twigs and leaves and small stones, because of his ears’ ringing, seemed to Qualt to make their own noise now not beneath the two of them, but rather off in some ringing metal pan.
The arms of the thing he fought — for it had arms — suddenly seized him, held him, restrained him. Qualt grasped it back. Distantly he heard breathing, which for a moment he could not tell whether it was his or this other’s. Then he felt himself go limp, because suddenly that was easier to do than to keep fighting in the black. Then a voice that was not like any Qualt had ever heard before, because it seemed like a child’s, high and breathy, said into his ear, only inches away, at the same time as Qualt scented the breath of a man who had been eating wild onions, so that, if anything, Qualt suddenly felt something familiar in all this strangeness and struggle — because Qualt himself had often walked through the lower mountains, munching the wild onion stalks that grew there:
“Hi-Vator, yes — no! Phew! Çiron, you?”
Rimgia dreamed that somebody, laughing hysterically, thrust a pole into her ear and out the other side of her head, then lifted her by that same pole high into the air, over the glittering stream, and she was afraid she would fall in, only it really hurt to have a pole that deep in your ear.
The pole cracked. She screamed. But before she could fall, she woke in the hut to that incredible sound. Her father, Kern, was already striding about; she saw his shape pass darkly before the hearth embers. Pushing up quickly, a moment later she knelt at Abrid’s pallet, shaking him.
“What is it — ow! What?”
“Get up!” she insisted, surprised when she could not hear her own voice for the whining. “Come on!” she shouted, realizing it was a shout only from the feel in her throat. Kern had already opened the door, rushed out —
Rahm neared the common, where men and women had begun to gather. As he sprinted up the side street, someone grabbed his arm, spun him back, hissed: “Rahm!” Then: “Where is Ienbar?”
Bewildered, he stepped back.
“For God’s sake, Rahm! Where’s Ienbar?”
“Naä? He’s…at the burial meadow.”
“Rahm. We have to leave — all of us. Right now!”
“Leave? But why?”
“The Myetrans are coming! Didn’t you hear them? They want you to surrender.”
“I heard. Naä, what does this ‘surrender’ mean?”
“Oh, Rahm!” Then suddenly she was running away into the dark.
Puzzled, Rahm turned back to the gathering in the common.
A few people still dug forefingers in their ears. The drums were louder. From the eastern fields another light struck. Something — a long line of somethings — was moving toward the common. The sweeping beams threw shadows over the beets, the grain, the kale, all bending in the night wind.
Children and mothers and uncles and cousins looked at one another.
“Why do they come across the field? They’ll damage the harvest.”
“There are so many of them that they couldn’t fit on the road.”
“Such late visitors, and so many. Will we have food for them all? They walk so strangely…”
Grain stalks snapped under the boots in time to the drums. As searchlights swung away, in the inadequate light from the nail paring of a moon, straining to see among the armored figures, Rahm thought to look for his friend from the morning — and thought he saw him there: only a moment later, he saw another tall, cloaked figure. Then another. Among the armed men advancing, a number wore the uniform Kire had worn. Some rode nervous horses; others came on foot. Their capes, despite the wind, hung straight behind them, heavy as night. Above them all, on rolling towers, the searchlights moved forward.
With the others, Rahm waited in the square.
Soon, with their mobile light towers, the soldiers had marched to the common’s near edge. The ground was fully lit. Villagers squinted. On a horse stepping about before the visitors, a bearded man in brown leather, wearing a single glove, barked at the short silver rod in his bare hand:
HALT!
Everyone looked up, because the word echoed and reechoed from the black horns high on the moving light towers. The soldiers stopped marching. The drums stilled.
The man with the silver rod rode forward. The villagers fell back. The man spoke again. Again his voice was doubled, like thunder, from the horns:
SURRENDER TO THE FORCES OF MYETRA!
Around Rahm, people looked at one another, puzzled.
Then Kern, the quarryman, who was not really shy — only very quiet — stepped forward.
“Welcome to you,” he said uncertainly. Then, which was almost twice as much as Kern ever said, he added: “Welcome, visitors in the night.”
“Are you the leader here?” the mounted man demanded.
Kern didn’t answer — because, as Rahm knew, Kern wasn’t anyone’s leader. (He was not even an elder — none of whom, Rahm noticed, seemed to have arrived yet.) Kern frowned back at the villagers behind him.