Working inland, Wirrda’s encountered Brrao’s and Hrrouf’s. They did every year. The ferocious territoriality which the People had for their homes ashore did not extend to the shelf; packs simply made landfall at points convenient to their ultimate destinations. These three mingled cheerfully. Games were played, stories told, ceremonies put on, marriages arranged, joint hunts carried out. Meanwhile brains came wholly active, lungs reached full development, gills dried and stopped functioning.
Likewise did the shelflands. Theirs was a brief florescence, an aftermath of summer’s furious fertility. Plants died off, animals moved away, pickings got lean. Rrinn thought about Wirrda’s, high in the foothills beyond the tundra, where hot springs boiled and one river did not freeze. He mounted a rock and roared. Other males of his pack passed it on, and before long everyone was assembled beneath him. He said: “We will go home now.”
Various youths and maidens complained, their courtships among Brrao’s or Hrrouf’s being unfinished. A few hasty weddings were celebrated and numerous dates were made. (In the ringing cold of midwinter, the People traveled widely, by foot, sled, ski and iceboat. Though hunting grounds were defended to the death, peaceful guests were welcomed. Certain packs got together at set times for trade fairs.) On the first calm day after his announcement, Rrinn led the exodus.
He did not start north at once. With full mentality regained, Wirrda’s could use proper tools and weapons. The best were stored at Wirrda’s—among the People, no real distinction existed among place names, possessives, and eponyms—but some had been left last spring at the accustomed site to aid this trek.
Rrinn’s line of march brought his group onto the permanent littoral. It was a barren stretch of drifts. His Merseian acquaintances had shown him moving pictures of it during hot weather: flooded in spring, pullulating swamp in earth summer, later baked dry and seamed with cracks. Now that the shelf was exhausted, large flesheaters were no longer crossing these white sastrugi to see what they could scoop out of the water. Rrinn pushed his folk unmercifully.
They did not mind the cold. Indeed, to them the land still was warmer than they preferred. Fur and blubber insulated them, the latter additionally a biological reserve. Theirs was a high homeothermic metabolism, with corresponding energy demands. The People needed a large intake of food. Rrinn took them over the wastelands because it would be slower and more exhausting to climb among the ice masses that choked Barrier Bay. Supplies could not be left closer to the shelf or the pack, witless on emergence, might ruin everything.
After three days’ hard travel, a shimmer in the air ahead identified those piled bergs. Rrinn consulted Cuwarra. Females were supposed to be inferior, but he had learned to rely on her sense of direction. She pointed him with such accuracy that next morning, when he topped a hill, he looked straight across to his goal.
The building stood on another height, constructed of stone, a low shape whose sod roof bore a cap of white. Beyond it, in jagged shapes and fantastic rainbows, reached the bay. Northward wound the Golden River, frozen and snowed on and frozen again until it was no more than a blue-shadowed valley among the bluffs. The air was diamond-clear beneath azure heaven.
“Go!” shouted Rrinn exuberantly. Not just equipment, but smoked meat lay ahead. He cast himself on his belly and tobogganed downslope. The pack whooped after. At the bottom they picked themselves up and ran. The snow crunched, without giving, under their feet.
But when they neared the building, its door opened. Rrinn stopped. Hissing dismay, he waved his followers back. The fur stood straight on him. An animal—
No, a Merseian. What was a Merseian doing in the cache house? They’d been shown around, it had been explained to them that the stuff kept there must never be disturbed, they’d agreed and—
Not a Merseian! Too erect. No tail. Face yellowish-brown where it was not covered with hair—
Snarling in the rage of territory violation, Rrinn gathered himself and plunged forward at the head of his warriors.
After dark the sky grew majestic with stars. But it was as if their light froze on the way down and shattered on the dimly seen ice of Talwin. A vast silence overlay the world; sound itself appeared to have died of cold. To Flandry, the breath in his nostrils felt liquid.
And this was the threshold of winter!
The Ruadrath were gathered before him in a semicircle ten or twelve deep. He saw them as a shadowy mass, occasionally a glitter when eyes caught stray luminance from the doorway where he stood. Rrinn, who confronted him directly, was clearer in his view.
Flandry was not too uncomfortable. The dryness of the air made its chill actually less hard to take than the higher temperatures of foggy autumn. From the bus he had lifted ample clothing, among divers other items, and bundled it around himself. Given a glower, the structure where he had taken refuge was cozy. Warmth radiated over his back.
(However, the glower’s energy cells had gotten low in the three weeks that he waited. Likewise had his food. Not daring to tamper with the natives’ stockpile, he had gone hunting—lots of guns and ammo in the bus—but, ignorant of local game, hadn’t bagged much. And what he did get required supplementation from a dwindling stock of capsules. Nor could he find firewood. If you don’t convince this gentlebeing, he told himself, you’re dead.
Rrinn said into a vocalizer from the cache house: “How foresaw you, new skyswimmer, that any among us would know Eriau?” The transponder turned his purring, trilling vocables into Merseian noises; but since he had never quite mastered a grammar and syntax based on a worldview unlike his own, the sentences emerged peculiar.
Flandry was used to that kind of situation. “Before leaving the Merseian base,” he answered, “I studied what they had learned about these parts. They had plenty of material on you Ruadrath, among them you of Wirrda’s. Mention was made of your depot and a map showed it. I knew you would arrive in due course.” I knew besides that it was unlikely the gatortails would check here for me, this close to their camp. “Now you have been in contact with them since first they came—more than the Domrath, both because you are awake more and because they think more highly of you. Your interest in their works was often…depicted.” (He had recalled that the winter folk used no alphabet, just mnemonic drawings and carvings.) “It was reasonable that a few would have learned Eriau, in order to discourse of matters which cannot be treated in any language of the Ruadrath. And in fact it was mentioned that this was true.”
“S-s-s-s.” Rrinn stroked his jaw. Fangs gleamed under stars and Milky Way. His breath did not smoke like a human’s or Merseian’s; to conserve interior heat, his respiratory system was protected by oils, not moisture, and water left him by excretion only. He shifted the harpoon he had taken from the weapon racks inside. Sheathed on the belt he had reacquired was a Merseian war knife. “Remains for you to tell us why you are here alone and in defiance of the word we made with the skyswimmers,” he said.
Flandry considered him. Rrinn was a handsome creature. He wasn’t tall, about 150 centimeters, say 65 kilos, but otter-supple. Otterlike too were the shape of body, the mahogany fur, the short arms. The head was more suggestive of a sea lion’s, muzzle pointed, whiskered, and sharp-toothed, ears small and closeable, brain case bulging backward from a low forehead. The eyes were big and golden, with nicitating membranes, and there was no nose; breath went under the same opercula that protected the gills.