Gar’s eyes refocused; he nodded. “What do we do about them, though?”
With distress, Alea realized that she had already felt the impulse to call to Martha and tell her where her enemy lay. “Competition comes naturally to our species,” Gar told her. “Yes, but do I so quickly identify with one clan?”
Gar shrugged. “We’ve spent a few hours with them. They’re real to us now, but we don’t know the others at all.”
“We’re here to make peace,” Alea said grimly, “not to help one clan wipe out the other.”
Gar nodded. “Besides, they’d just pick a fight with the clan across the Belinkuns’ boundary, and you’d have another feud going. Better if you go with the reserves and I go with Isaac’s party, and we both try to scare off the others with as little bloodshed as possible.”
Alea felt her back go up. “Why do I get the reserves?”
“Good question,” Gar said. “You go with Isaac’s party and I’ll go with Martha’s. Good hunting.”
He strode away, leaving Alea looking after him, wondering if she had won a point or been manipulated.
Then she sighed, shrugged, and went off to join Isaac’s force.
The Farlands were grinning and boastful as they set out. “ ‘Bout time we got some action again!”
“You said it, Rilla! I been getting so rusty I can fairly hear my joints creak!”
“Ain’t had nothing to shoot at that stood a chance of shooting back in way too long,” one of the young men averred. “My aim’s likely off by most of an inch now!”
“An inch!” a young woman hooted. “Ezra, if you can shoot within a foot of your mark today, I’ll call it spring fever!”
But the farther they went from the house, the fewer the boasts became, until they crossed the fence into the pasture before the woods, and the whole force fell silent. Alea glanced from side to side and saw tense and glowering faces, jaw muscles bunched, eyes narrowing with remembered injuries.
Then they were in among the trees. Even in their thick-soled boots, the Farlands made almost no noise as they faded out of sight to either side with little more sound than the wind.
Alea swallowed hard and tried to imitate them, slipping from bush to bush, keeping a sharp eye open for twigs that might snap and give her away, but Isaac suddenly appeared beside her, whispering, “Best you stay here, ma’am. Anybody can tell where you are just from the noise.”
Alea stared at him, then whispered back, “What noise?”
“Cloth against leaves, for one,” Isaac answered, “and a dozen others too small to single out. Just wait for us here. We’ll tell you when there’s need of you.”
Then he was gone and Alea sat on her heels, simmering. To vindicate herself, she opened her mind, tracing Isaac’s progress from stump to trunk to bush—but she had to admit she would never have heard him with her ears.
Then she opened her mind forward and sensed the Belinkuns waiting in ambush.
Gar stayed well to the rear, but his height allowed him to keep Martha’s white-flecked red hair, peeking from below the brown brim of her hat, in sight. As they neared the northeastern boundary, a low fieldstone wall, he could feel the Belinkuns tensing as they saw her, feel the keenness of their anticipation, knew that one or two were already leveling barrels and centering her in their sights—but he couldn’t for the life of him see them, or even guess where they were hiding. The field had been mowed a few days before and was a long rise of stubble. True, a stream bed meandered through it and there were ditches to either side, but surely Martha and her troop were quick to see that.
Then a bird warbled and Martha sank to her knees, suddenly disappearing from view. So did her dozen clansfolk.
Gar blinked, astounded. If he hadn’t been able to follow them by their thoughts, he wouldn’t have known how they did it, but with telepathy, he realized that Martha had made the birdcry herself, that it had been the signal, and that hearing it, everyone had found a hiding place, be it so little as a fold in the ground or a clump of weeds. Looking down from his seven-foot height, he could see them but only because he was behind them and knew where to look.
Then he realized that the only person left visible was himself—and that he was very visible indeed.
He threw himself to the ground as a rifle cracked in front of him. He heard the ball cut the air where he had been standing. A Farland rifle answered it, then two more, then three. The Belinkuns answered with a whole fusillade, but the bullets whizzed overhead, hurting no one, for everyone was down. That wouldn’t last. Gar could already hear both clans thinking that the only way they would be able to stop the others was by taking the risk of rising up long enough to spot an enemy and squeeze off a shot, then drop down again—but they also knew the risk, and knew that they might die. Memories reeled by at the association and Gar saw that every one of them had seen relatives killed in just such a fashion.
Nonetheless, their resolve hardened, each and every one, to take exactly that risk. To them, it was worth their lives to protect their loved ones from their villainous neighbors.
It wasn’t worth it to Gar. He could see that the Belinkuns were just as good as the Farlands—no better, perhaps, struggling against their own human load of vices and weaknesses, but no worse, either. Gar couldn’t see letting them die because of a centuries-old crime—but how could he stop them?
Distract them, of course.
They were all lying on the earth. What would they think if it began to move? Or if the sticks and leaves around them began to burn?
Too showy and too slow. So much for earth and fire. Gar decided on air and wood. He stared at the trunks, picking out the dead trees that were still standing, or fallen but caught by the branches of their neighbors. The smallest was a foot and a half thick, but they blurred as his attention focused on the air high above. He set up waves, like a cook stirring soup with a spoon, but stirring faster and faster.
One or two of the clansfolk looked up, startled, as the wind began to moan through the branches above. The sky had been clear when they came into the forest, and was still clear when leaves blew aside enough to show a patch of blue. Where was the breeze coming from?
The wind was whirling nicely now, making a gyre, a spinning funnel of air. Gar used it as a spear, hurling it downward. The narrow end plunged, tearing leaves off their stems and spinning them into itself. Gar could see it now, a green whorl that he used to strike one of the leaning trees, to tear it loose from its neighbor’s fork …
The Belinkuns looked up, startled, hearing wood groan above.
Gar couldn’t have that, couldn’t have just one side distracted. He made the whirlwind bounce back up, then strike again, but much closer to him, strike with far more force than its size owned, strike at a hollow tree in the middle of the Farlands.
The Belinkuns shouted in alarm and dodged backward out of the way as the skeleton of a forty-foot oak slammed down in their midst. Half of them were in plain sight and no doubt would have fallen to the Farlands’ guns—except that the Farlands were shouting in fear and anger as the hollow tree exploded in their midst. They ducked low as chunks of wood sprayed over their heads, then leaped to their feet and dashed away from the moaning, bobbing whirlwind-dashed until they remembered the human threat and turned, leveling their rifles at the first enemy they saw.