“So I wasn’t likely to be offered another wife. And a bachelor there can’t hope to be more than an ill-paid hireling. Unless he turns robber, which in my bitterness I actually considered.
“Yes—there was the Gathering. There was the trade it makes possible. In the spring, the merchant ships started coming again for our hides, minerals, salted ichthy, preserved bipen eggs. By then I was in sorry shape, but somehow talked myself into a deckhand’s stall.
“And for the next forty-eight-odd years I wandered half the world. I’d never imagined how big and wonderful it is. Eventually I joined the Zera, and later found me the female I still have. Everything came to me out of the Gathering.
“Lads, this isn’t all that civilization is about, not by a long spearcast. But it’s a sizeable part of the thing. Take a while to imagine what your lives would’ve been like without the Gathering. Ask yourselves if you don’t owe an equal chance to your children.”
Larreka folded his forelegs and settled back down. The group took the hint that he wished to speak no further, and made ready to retire. Jill scrambled to kneel beside him and throw an arm across his neck. The mane rustled scratchily. His warmth, the blent smells of iron maleness and tobacco smoke, a sense of rubbery muscles beneath the moss-like pelt, flowed through her.
“Uncle, you never told me,” she said in English.
“Never got around to it before.” He left unspoken:
How much can I tell you of a life which has already been four times as long as the most you can hope for?
“What say we get some sleep?” he went on immediately “Anu’ll soon be up. blast its bloated belly; and we’ve stiff country to cross. Never miss a chance to flop your bones, soldier.”
“Yes, sir. Good night.” She brushed lips across a leathery cheek. The cat-whiskers tickled her.
Stretched out on the bag, arm across eyes, she wondered what he would choose to dream of. And what would come to her?
Or who? If she could pick, whom would she most like to have join her in dream?
FOURTEEN
EVER AS MIDSUMMER drew nigh, the True Sun paced closer on the heels of the Red One. Meanwhile the Cruel Star grew and grew in heaven. At its nearest, said old stories, it would loom seeably larger than its rival. Drought seared Valennen, but storms lashed the Fiery Sea.
Likewise did the Tassui. During the past octad. Overlings had been building fleets to harry islands from which the legions were departed, and the commerce between them. Arnanak had been too busy ashore for much buccaneering of his own. However, he used all the labor he could spare in Ulu’s shipyard. Some vessels he lent out to raiders whom he egged against the east coast and the Ehur archipelago. They pulled the attention and strength of the enemy in that direction while he readied his inland campaign. Some keels he held in reserve until now—now when his time looked ripe to close the ring.
For the Zera sat only in Port Rua. Its sallies were fitful into those hinterlands which, a bare year ago, civilization had imagined it dominated. United behind Arnanak, the warriors of Valennen beat off every such foray, or faded from sight and let it waste itself on emptiness.
He was not content with that. As long as the Gathering had a sea-supplied base here, his flanks and rear would be too unsafe for the ventures further south that he planned on. Due haste was needful. Though scouts and spies reported no sign of a movement anywhere in the Gathering to send reinforcements, this could change. Before it did, he wanted Port Rua under siege ashore and blockade afloat… and not a single soldier getting home to fight on a later day.
Thus he put himself at the head of a flotilla. They sailed afar to Castle Island, overcame a weak defense, pillaged widely, and tore down stone buildings raised by agents of the Gathering. Else these might have become fortresses. Arnanak meant for the inhabitants erelong to have Tassu masters, where they were not simply replaced in their still fertile home. Beyond this, his purposes were to learn by direct experience how well his naval organization, modeled on the legionary, worked: to exercise a number of quite young males; and to get away for a span from dull demands on the Overling of Overlings. On their way back northwestward, a typhoon scattered his ships. He didn’t believe any would be lost. His people had a tradition of outfacing wild weather. But it was the reason why he had only two hulls with him when he spied the vessel from Beronnen. “Sail ohai-ah!”
The lookout’s call brought Arnanak springing to the poop. Seas ran high, gray-green and foam-laced, blueblack in their troughs. Spindrift flew blindingly and stingingly off wave-crests. Overhead, low clouds raced gray, high clouds roiled. Double shafts of sunlight struck through, double colored, to shatter in glints and spill in beams. A wind shrilled nearly cold. The waters brawled and rumbled, the deck swung underfoot.
He picked the strange craft out, a fleck afar. Behind it, the peak of a volcano on Black Island thrust above a dim horizon. Smoke blew tattered from the mountain’s throat. He focused a telescope he had once bought from a trader. The shape grew clear, not a lean low Valennener but a high-sided two-masted square-rigger such as plied out of Beronnen.
“A Gathering transport, bound for Port Rua,” he decided, and offered the telescope to Usayuk, the mate. “Surely alone. Steer to intercept and signal Devourer to come along.”
“I’d say yonder’s a legionary, not a merchantman,” Usayuk replied carefully. “Belike they’ve guards aboard and ballistas ready cocked.”
“The better reason for a close look. Fear not. We can maneuver around them like fangfish closing in on a sea judge.”
Usayuk stiffened. “I never said I was afraid.”
Arnanak gave him a stark smile. “Nor did I. Let me own, instead, that I am he who feels a little unease, at what their faring may portend.”
For if the enemy has decided after all to pay the cost of holding fast north of the equator—No, now. What use a single shipload?—Well. a convoy may have been flung apart as we were. Or if it carries something those humans are giving the legion to fight with—
Arnanak thrust the thought away. Worry was bootless, the more so when he knew not with any surety what the will or the powers of the aliens were. Therefore, let him go boldly forward. The Three would dance out his fate: in the mighty rhythms of Sun and Ember Star, and in that chaos the Rover brought, from which free will might snatch a chance to begin a new cycle of destinies.
Commands and responses roared the length of Leaper’s decks. It had been tacking. To catch the foreigner meant a nearly straight downwind run. The mainmast boom came over in a thunder of cloth. Arnanak considered ordering the topsail unfurled, but abided by the mate’s judgment that jibs and mizzen simply be kept poled out wing and wing with the mainsail. Devourer did likewise. Both gaudy hulls bounded ahead.
Males busked themselves. Deckhands fastened onto ankles those hooks whereby they could swarm into the rigging at need. Some climbed aloft as archers. Others went below to stand by the oars. The rest of the crew unlashed timbers and dovetailed these together to make a platform and gangway forward of the mast. There several took stance, while followers waited beneath. Arnanak was among the former. Aside from helmet and shoulderpieces, he had left off armor—it would drown him should he go overboard—and carried just shield, spear, and cutting weapons.
The platform jutted slightly over the water. He stood at its edge, feet braced against roll, pitch, and yaw. The wind from aft thrummed in shrouds and tossed the leaves of his mane. It smelled of salt and wildness. To him came Igini his son, who asked in a growl, “When we board, may I take the lead?”