It wasn’t long before we saw a line of figures. Bren stiffened. I knew how weak our plan was, but we had no choice. “It’s alright,” I said. “They’re Terre.”
A big, dirty derelict band, dressed like penitents, a trudging little town. There were children among them. They looked at us through their masks. They were as intense as monks, too. Some backed away, muttered among themselves. A few temporary leaders came closer, and a few soldiers, refugee from that ruination, in scorched uniforms.
The Ariekei stayed back. They kept the self-deafened close, disguised its injury. The humans told us they’d run from the depredations of the Absurd, from pioneer homesteads and bio-rigging farms. This was everyone running: they’d found each other. Been joined by the AWOL and soldiers from defeated units. They were behind their attackers now, were following them to the city, like those prey-fish that seek safety in their predator’s wake. They had no plans, only the vague sense that this might keep them alive a few days longer. Their passage in the tracks of the enemy was a despairing homage to their own defeat.
A militia-man told us, “We were with Ariekei. Leaders. The most eloquent, I suppose. There to communicate. We were there to protect them, the negotiators, give them space, time, when they were trying to get through to...” The soldiers had been instructed to do whatever was necessary while the Ariekene speakers struggled to make the Absurd understand them. “They were trying to talk to them.”
“How?” I said.
“No how.” I thought he’d said know-how and didn’t understand.
“There was no how,” he said. “We wondered. We could see the Absurd coming; they had fliers and weapons and vehicles, and there were thousands of them. We wondered what it was the Ariekei were planning. What they’d cooked up. It was only, Jesus... They got ready by listening to EzCal on datchip. A couple of us in the unit understand Language...” He paused at that inadvertent present tense. “... They told me what EzCal was saying, in the recordings. ‘You must make them understand.’ Again and again. In all different ways. ‘You must speak to them so they understand you.’” The man shook his head. “That’s what they got high on. When the Absurd came, they shouted at them through loudspeakers.”
“But they’re deaf,” I said. He shrugged. The wind sent his greasy hair rippling from under his battered helmet.
“We sent some of them out to meet... the enemy... close. Their plan must have been... Well, the Absurd just came through them. To us.” There’d been no plan at all. I looked at Bren. There’d been no secret strategy: only the knowledge of what had to happen, with no idea how.
“They tried to do it by fiat,” Bren said. The god-drug had hoped their ineluctable instructions would carry this. What despairing deity.
“Jesus,” I said. “Do you think they thought it would work?” There were a lot of dead back there. “Where are the rest of your army?” I said. “EzCal’s army?”
The man shook his head. “Most of them... us... never wanted to fight,” he said. “They wanted to beg. But they can’t even. Beg. Can’t make them hear. They’re retreating back to the city. Getting behind the blockades.” He shook his head slowly. “Those won’t stop them,” he said. There was nothing between the Absurd army and the city, and Embassytown.
The refugees watched us go. Told us it was in the wrong direction and shrugged when we ignored them. They gestured goodbye and good luck with a kind of dead politeness, a strange courtesy. At the edges of the mass, those most monkish ones watched us with hostility I’m certain most of them couldn’t have explained.
We travelled in their hoof-churnings, and stalked the Absurd from just beyond their sight. From thickets, from behind rises. It rained. We sprayed muck. It didn’t seem to get very dark that night; it was as if the stars and Wreck were shining unnaturally, so I could lean against Spanish Dancer and watch it sketch hand signs with the Ariekes that was no longer a prisoner, and I could see the grey landscape.
When dawn came, there were a few cams around us, gadding spastically. Intel-gatherers for the army, still transmitting. Our sound and motion attracted them, and they paced with us in a flitting corona. I looked straight into the lens of one, through the air to someone watching in Embassytown.
We could hear the Absurd, now. They were just one segment of landscape over. The cams swarmed suddenly away, over flora and geography. A corvid flew close overhead on some frantic wartime job, and we had to hope it had not seen us, that we wouldn’t be eradicated, so close.
THERE WERE NO secret ways we could ensure a smaller group of Absurd would find us, no ways we could split one section of their expedition from the others. Each Languageless thought itself alone, though we knew that wasn’t true. The closest this huge vengeful mass would have to generals would be its unspeaking vanguard. We passed their flank, hidden by landscape, and made our way to a place they’d find us.
Finally, stinking in our suits, we left the vehicle. I was strongly conscious of what a scene we must have been. Four Terre. Me at the front. Behind me Bren, tense and ready. The marks of the journey had made YlSib easy to tell apart. They stood beside each other, each with a weapon poised.
The Ariekei. Ranged in a curve around us, as if they made up our group’s fanwing. Spanish Dancer was closest to me, and watched me with several of its eyes.
At the centre of the group stood the untethered Languageless. The thing that was no longer our enemy looked from one to another of its Ariekene companions. It made a motion with its giftwing. One by one most of the other Ariekei responded in a similar way. It made me a bit breathless to see.
There were two that didn’t. Dub and Rooftop watched the motions of their companions. Nothing they could understand was occurring.
Spanish Dancer said to me: “
.” I stared a while, and at last nodded. “You will,” I said. “We will. They will.”
“
,” it said. Two noises came out of it that meant nothing to me. It said something rapidly in Language, and its companions, and Yl and Sib and Bren looked up sharply. 
tried again. “
,” it said to me. I was silent. What could I say?
THE FIRST OF the Absurd came. Fliers squalled over the country, must have seen us, but perhaps decided that we were too nothing to be blown away. A loose, fast-moving posse of tireless Absurd became visible, moving toward us. We braced. Someone said something about the plan.
Those at the front of the army, the groups a kilometre or so ahead of the main force, saw us. They stampeded up the scree and at us, pointing giftwings, directing segments of their own crowd, which peeled off into wedge-shapes, flanked us, in the unsaid strategy they thought merely rage. I could hear their hoofbeats. Then I could see the shades of their skins, the craned forks of their eyes, the flanges of their fanwing stubs, as they raised weapons.
“Now,” someone said, and I truly couldn’t say if it was me.
Spanish said something too quiet for me to quite hear, that I don’t think was in Language. It walked forward with the other leaders of its revolutionary group and the Absurd came with them. It went farther, stepped out and raised its giftwing and the stalk of its fanwing, so its injury was plain. It waved them like standards. It announced its status—I’m one of you—and urged its comrades to stop, gestured to all the incomers, wait, wait, wait, wait.
The Absurd army didn’t slow at all. I felt sick. “Courage,” Bren said, in French. I did not smile. The inchoate motion language the fanwingless spoke was camouflaged by shared purpose. From their untidy ranks came a shot.