Indeed, it might have been that what had occurred there had been done to balance what had occurred in California, when Rowan the first had fled, a sea-borne single Noah, an Aeneas fleeing fatherless across the sullen seas. None could say.
So the centuries continued to pass; there, in the Kar-chee-created (yet Kar-chee-ignored) northern land, as in the fragment of former South America which Rowan found, man rediscovered old skills and learned and developed new ones. New societies began to form, were formed, and new forms of civilization arose. A distorted memory of what had happened remained with them in both places, as in others. But for the most part a life was lived which concerned itself more with the present than with the past. And then, in a village located on the high hill which was once the Hebridean island of Benbecula, men looked out and saw, with astonished anger, the Kar-chee coming at long last.
It was different this time than the first time. The human race had recovered from its fatigue, for one thing. For another, distance and the long, blind oblivion of time had hidden from Liam and Cerry and their fellows experience of how dangerous the Kar-chee really were.
The great war-horns sounded, the alarm-drums were beaten, the farmers came running from the fields and the herdsmen from their kine, the fishing-coracles put in from sea. And while Liam and the other fighting men mustered on the palisades which topped the earthen embankments around the townlet, Cerry and the other women boiled huge earthen pots of water by dropping red-hot stones in them. Thus they had prepared themselves against attack by either local factions or pirate-raiders from across the seas; and thus, straining and pulling and pushing, they set the lumbering catapults in place and loaded them with cold charges and set the stone shot to heating in the fires. On the part of the men, then, all proceeded according to plan.
But the Kar-chee, seemingly, had other plans.
A miner takes small heed of the swarming of an ant-hill.
The men of Benbecula had no such things as surveying-instruments; they would not have recognized them even had the devices been of human manufacture. The local chief, peering through the single and ancient telescope the place afforded, saw only that enemies had engines and that these moved in direction to and fro, and when they paused a moment and seemed pointed and poised at his defenses, he waited not, but gave the signal to fire.
Probably not a single shot struck the cluster of tall and slightly stooping black figures, but the thumping and crashing of their various impacts nearby drew the attention of the Kar-chee. The tiny triangular heads whipped up from their instruments and peered around; the stout anterior arms unfolded and waved about. The Kar-chee commenced to move on. Perhaps they did so merely because it was time to move on. But the men of Benbecula did not consider this. They had fired on their enemies and their enemies were beginning to retreat. When the enemy retreats, advance. Thus, the old maxim. And, thus, shouting fierce cries of triumph and menace, waving war-clubs and making feints with their bone-tipped lances, arrows ready to be nocked on bowstrings, the levy en masse poured out of the fortified hamlet and down upon the aliens. The wind shifted and suddenly smelled no more of woodsmoke and heather and human sweat, but of something murky and pungent and strange. The shaggy ponies on which the lancers were mounted, toes gripping leather stirrups, neighed, fought, bolted for a less hateful air.
The charge, to give credit, did not stop for more than a moment. Liam, frank, said later to Cerry, “We didn’t dare retreat, for then they should have attacked us—and they had the longer legs!” Now the Kar-chee did retreat, it seemed, or most of them did. Others stayed and whipped about them with the tripods of their instruments (clumsy weapons, the men considered!), but, being to being and implement to implement, not even the superior height of the Kar-chee availed them victory. Their longer legs did not prevent their being clubbed to the ground, and if their chitinous exoskeletons protected them for a while against thrusting points, it was only a short matter to discover that this armor had unprotected under-folds. The lances entered, were pressed home, the clubs beat and threshed, soon the clickings and churfings of the aliens ceased; the alien limbs twitched but a moment more.
So, dragging bodies and booties behind them, and singing impromptu songs of victory — including several verses directed at the unhappy cavalry — the triumphant defenders returned. The postures of defense were abandoned as quickly as they had been assumed, and Benbecula plunged into a frenzy of drunken feasting and rejoicing.
But Liam did not entirely join in it.
“What’s wrong?” Cerry asked him. She had never at all made the error of thinking that because his eyes were different colors and his appearance therefore odd that there was anything at all wrong with the rest of him.
His face twisted, and he shook his head. All around him drunken shouts resounded. She put her ears to his lips. “Don’t like it,” he said. “Acting as though they’d driven off a raider-bunch from Orkland or Norland… This is more, Cerry — much, much more…”
He mumbled, shook his head, frowning, like a bothered child: another of the things which made some people think him a mere daftie. She knew better. She listened. She heard him, reconstructing from his mutterings, explain what was vexing him. That not everything the oldmothers nattered about the Kar-chee as they sat warming their dried-up feet by the fire, not all of it was or could be true: of course not, else the Kar-chee would have arrived riding upon their dragons as in the old tales, flying through the air and throwing bolts of fire. Would have picked up the land bodily and flown it away to the Northern Hell, whence the sight of the flames could be seen of nights now and then. Would have dipped it in the burning waters and burnt them off like beetles off a burning log.
Well, then? she asked. If not true — and he reasoned well that it was not — why worry, then? A merrymaker came garbling up to him, waving what seemed to be a Kar-chee’s foot, and Liam pushed him away with such force that he never came back for explanation or fight, but hunted a horn of honey-strong to soothe his bewilderment. Why worry, then? Because, clearly, not all the oldmothers’ tales had been false, either. For the existence of the Kar-chee, whom none of them had ever seen or smelled until today, was the very warp and woof and thrums of the oldmothers’ tales…
Now Cerry had the turn to frown and squint. Although sharing in the rejoicing, initially, and feeling no more misgivings than resentment at not having gotten to scald the attackers with boiling well-water, her long-felt and distinctive respect for Liam convinced her that if he thought something was wrong, then something was wrong. She tried to follow his line of thought, but it was too strange for her. So, instead, she tried to tell him what she felt for him and about him; but all that came out was the old, conventional question: “Shall I take my sheepskin and come and be a while in your cabin?”
If he had given one of the old, conventional answers — say, if only, “Take and be”—why, that would have been good and she would have been happy; if, “You may take your featherbed and come and be in my cabin forever,”—why that would have been very, very good and she would have been very, very happy.
But now instead he looked, at her straightly, one odd eye as brown as loch-water and the other as blue-green as the open sea itself; and what he said now was stranger yet: “You may take your sheepskin and follow after me, if you will, but not to lie by me as a woman lies by a man. For I fear there will be many nights upon the cold ground and many upon the cold, cold sea before ever we may think of love or bairns or houses once again.”