At the fire, the weaver tapped her long-handled spoon on the cauldron’s rim and looked up. A naked back, with its small, sharp vertebrae curved toward the room — the young soldier sighed, but did not even glance around.
Across the commons a dog pranced and, its head back, yipped, till, loping past, Rahm turned and called jocularly: “Come on, there — cut it out now, Mouse!”
A child standing near turned to declare: “His name isn’t Mouse, and you know it, Rahm!”
Then both laughed: the girl’s, a brief, high sound, like a single note of the dog’s yipping; and Rahm’s, a broad-chested, doubled-over, head-shaking, arm-waving, hand-clapping, loud-then-high-then-low-again laugh that took him three, four, five steps along, going on and on and on — so that for uncomfortable moments he looked like a man with a creature clutching his shoulders whom he was trying to shake free.
—
Again seated on the edge of the blackened wood, Kire looked at his hysterical savior, as if Kire himself were hundreds of feet above and Rahm, dog, and child were on the ground. His miraculous rescue that dawn had catapulted Kire to some altitude from which, like a man afraid of heights, he could appreciate none of the view for the vertigo. Kire was still trying to recall the names of his units’ dead — unhappily aware that he could now really remember only one: Nactor, off in the shack. Then of course, there was his big guard in the wagon. And what had been the name of his little friend, the one with the freckled shoulders — a soldier whom Kire knew had died early in the operation, but for his life he could not remember a name or a face for the man. Somehow what had happened to Kire had so immersed him in life that little of death would stay with him — which made him feel awkward, uncomfortable, and inadequate.
His big body still lost in its laugh, again Rahm glanced at the seated Myetran. Kire looked out with green, distant eyes. Somehow the dark clothing, with the puma skin around them, had come all askew. I call him friend, Rahm thought. We have now each helped the other, yet I don’t know him — at all. And Rahm was glad the laugh’s remains kept the thought’s discomfort from his face.
The day of the Winged Ones’ coming and their routing of the Myetrans was a day of wonder — wonder that spread from the town dump, where Qualt finally drew up his own wagon full of baskets of yellow rinds and chicken feathers and milk slops and eggshells and corn shucks, to go once more, stiff-legged and leaning back against them, over the gravel to dump them from the ravine precipice into the soggy and steaming gully; wonder that spread over the common at the village center, where the grassy expanse was worn away down the middle by the daily setup of the barter market’s stalls just before the council house, where most of the women and many of the men mentioned in these chapters came to walk, judge, and trade; wonder that spread to the outlying grain fields and cane fields and cornfields and kale fields, in one of which Gargula stood, calf deep in greens, beside his plow, rubbing his nose and not quite ready to work, because he’d taken Tenuk’s mule from its shed under the thatched-out roof that day, fed it, watered it, and brought it to the field without asking anyone — because there’d been no one to ask; and the whole silent operation had left him with a tongue too heavy to speak.
The wonder and the mystery, as the village children would remember it, was that over all, now on the ground and more and more frequently in the air, the great shapes, like flitting shadows, moved, awkwardly on the earth and gracefully through the sky, translucent ears cocked left or right to hear, it seemed, everything, their little eyes fixed (it seemed) on little for very long. Thus, as had Naä and Rimgia, one walked about the streets — or the common or the refuse pit or the fields — with eyes continually lifting.
Back at the ravine, Qualt smacked the bottom of his last basket, turned it up to peer within its smelly slats, then dragged it behind him, rasping on rock, toward the dozen others, and looked up — as Rimgia came out into the clearing that held his hut as well as his yard full of odd, awkward, and broken things.
She walked thoughtfully, glanced up casually: a dozen Winged Ones circled above the ravine.
Have we mentioned that Qualt, even before the coming of the Myetrans, had for a while now been the most respected young man in town? In such a village, the garbageman knows more about what goes on (and goes out) than anyone else. As garbageman, Qualt was expected not just to know this but to study it and to record anything about it of interest, which he did two or three evenings a week, on parchment scrolls, with great diligence. It was Qualt, rather than Rahm, who as a child had pestered Old Ienbar to teach him his writing system. In the course of learning it years ago, Qualt had copied out, several times over, almost the whole of the death scrolls on store in Ienbar’s shack (he still had those early exercises in trunks piled beneath his grandmothers’ marriage blankets in his back storage room), and it was he to whom would soon fall the task of reconstructing them. Hara’s joking with Rahm about a possible seat on the council of elders was a gesture simply to make the big youth feel better. Hara’s jokes with Qualt, though they took the same form, were signs of a foregone conclusion of the whole Çiron council, that the lean youth would get the next seat — and would be the youngest “elder” ever to sit with them.