The wind brought fog with it. The fog curled about their bodies, though their heads were above it. Laintal Ay understood the wind, knowing that a layer of cold air poured down like water from the distant mountains on their left flank, down over the mounds into the valley, seeking lower ground. It was a local wind; the sooner they left its numbing grip, the better.
Skitosherill’s wife gave a faint cry and halted, leaning against her yelk and burying her face against her arm.
Skitosherill returned to her concernedly and placed a grey-clad arm round her. The icy air wrapped his cloak about his leg.
He looked worriedly up at Laintal Ay. “She can’t go on,” he said.
“We’ll die if we stay here.”
Dashing the moisture from his eyes, he looked forward. In a few hours, he realised, the valley would be warm and harmless. At present it was a death trap. They were in shadow. The light of the two suns slanted across the left slope of the valley above their heads; the light lay in thick vertical bars, where the shadows were cast of giant rajabarals which stood on the opposite crest. The rajabarals were steaming already in the morning sunshine, the vapour pouring up into the sky, casting a rolling shadow.
He knew this place. Its configurations had been familiar to him when snow clothed it. It was normally a welcoming place—the last pass before a hunter gained the plains on the edge of which Oldorando stood. He was too cold even to shiver, body heat snatched by the wind. They could not continue. Skitosherill’s wife still leaned sickly against the flank of the necrogene; now that she had given way, her maidservant also felt able to release her miseries and stood screaming with her back to the tide of air.
“We’ll get up among the rajabarals,” he said, shouting the words into Skitosherill’s ear. Skitosherill nodded, still involved with his wife, whom he was trying to help up into the saddle.
“Mount, all of you,” Laintal Ay called.
As he shouted, a flutter of white caught his eye.
Above the hillside on their left flank, cowbirds appeared, fighting the cold downdraught, their feathers flickering from white to grey as they rode in the shadows of the rajabarals opposite. Below the birds was a line of phagors. They were warriors; they carried spears at the ready. They moved to the edge of the mound, to poise themselves there as steady as boulders. They looked down at the humans embroiled in the tumbling mists below.
“Fast, fast, up, before we’re attacked!” As he shouted, he saw Aoz Roon was staring up at the brutes, without expression, making no move.
He ran to him, clouting him across the back. “Up. We’ve got to get out of here.”
Aoz Roon said something harsh in his throat.
“You’re enchanted, man, you’ve learnt some of their accursed language and it’s rendered you powerless.”
By force, he heaved his friend into his saddle. The scout did the same with the servant woman, who was sobbing in terror.
“Up the slope to the rajabarals,” Laintal Ay shouted. He slapped Aoz Roon’s mare across its shaggy rump as he ran back to mount his own. Reluctantly, the animals started to climb. They made little response to heels in their ribs; a hoxney would have been lighter and faster.
“They won’t attack us,” the Sibornalan said. “We’ll give them the maidservant if there’s trouble.”
“Our mounts. They will kill us for our mounts. To ride or for food. You stay behind and haggle if you wish.”
With a sick look, Skitosherill shook his head and swung himself into his saddle.
He went first up the slope, leading his wife’s beast. The scout and the maidservant followed close behind. Then there was a gap as Aoz Roon listlessly rode his yelk, allowing it to stray away from the others, despite Laintal Ay’s shouts to keep together. He brought up the rear with the pack yelk, frequently casting glances back at the eminence behind them.
The phagors did not move. It would not be the cold wind that worried them; they were creatures of the cold. Their immobility need not imply decision. It was impossible to know what the brutes thought.
So they mounted the rise. They were soon out of the wind, to their great relief, and tugging with urgency on their reins.
As they came over the brow of the hill, the sunlight shone into their eyes. Both suns, near enough to look amid their dazzle as if linked, glittered between the trunks of the great trees. Just for a moment, dancing figures could be seen in the heart of the gold, lightly tripping—Others at a mysterious festivity; then they vanished as if the acid glory of light had inexplicably dissolved them. The party drew into the protection of the smooth columns, still gasping with cold. With the canopy of steam overhead, it was almost as if they had entered a hall of the gods. There were about thirty of the massive trees. Beyond them lay open ground and the way to Oldorando.
The phagor detachment moved. From complete immobility, it sprang into total action. The brutes came plodding concertedly down the slope on which they had remained poised. Only one of their kind was astride a kaidaw. He led. The cowbirds stayed shrieking above the valley.
Desperately, Laintal Ay looked about for a refuge. There was none, except that offered by the rajabarals. The rajabarals themselves were emitting internal rumbling. He drew his sword and spurred over to where the Sibornalan was lowering his wife from her mount.
“We’ll have to stand and fight. Are you prepared for that? They’ll be on us in a minute or two.”
Skitosherill looked up at him with agony etched in every line of his face. His mouth was open in a kind of snarl of anguish.
“She has the bone fever, she will die,” he said.
His wife’s eyes were glazed, her body stiffly contorted.
With an impatient gesture of dismissal, Laintal Ay called to the scout, “You and I then. Look lively—here they come.”
For answer, the scout gave him a villainous grin, at the same time making a gesture with his finger of slitting windpipes. Laintal Ay was grimly encouraged.
He cast about furiously by the base of the trees, looking for earths down which the Others had disappeared, thinking that here somewhere near at hand might be refuge—refuge and a snoktruix; but never his snoktruix, never again.
Despite their abrupt retreat, the Others had left no trace. Well, then there was no alternative to fighting. No doubt they must die. He would not expire until his breath could escape from every wound he received from the spears of the ancipitals.
With the scout by his side, he went to the edge of the mound to challenge the enemy as they appeared.
Behind him, the rumble in the rajabarals grew louder. The mighty trees had ceased to pour out steam and were making a noise like thunder. Below him, the first slanting rays of the linked suns had penetrated almost to the bottom of the valley, where they lit the spectacle of the phagors fording the katabatic wind, their sturdy bodies enmeshed in writhing fog, the stiff hairs of their coats stirred in their progress. They looked upwards and gave a churring cry at the sight of the two humans. They began to move up the hill.
This incident was witnessed from the Earth Observation Station and, a thousand years later, by those who came on sandalled feet to the great auditoria on Earth. Those auditoria were fuller now than they had been at any time over the last century. People who went to view that enormous electronic recreation of a reality that had not been real for many centuries were wishing in their hearts that the humans whose lives they had followed would survive—always using the future tense, which comes naturally to homo sapiens, even for such events as this, so long past.