Kay gracefully changed the subject. “Valavirgillin, will you return to Center City, mate and raise a family?”
“I mated,” she said.
Kay suddenly had nothing to say.
He didn’t know!
What had he been thinking? That he and she would be, come formal mates? Valavirgillin said, “I made myself rich with a gift from Louis Wu of the Ball People.” How she had done that was nobody’s business, and illegal. “I mated then. Tarb’s parents were friends of my family, as is usual with us, Moonwa. He had little money, but he’s a good father, he freed me to engage in business dealings.
“I grew restive. I remembered that Louis Wu suggested… no. Asked if my people make tools from the sludge that remains after we distill alcohol. Plastic, he said. His talking thing would not translate, but I learned his word. He said it means shapeless. Plastic can take any shape the maker likes. That sludge is useless, nasty stuff. Clients might be grateful if we had a reason to haul it away for them.
“So I funded a chemical laboratory.” She shrugged in the dark. “Always it cost more than anyone expected, but we got answers. There are secrets in that goo.
“One day most of my money was gone. Tarablilliast and the children are with my sire-family, and I am here, until I can feed them again. Coriack, are you ready to take guard?”
“Of course. Hold the thought, Whandernothtee. Vala, what’s out there?”
“Rain. I glimpse something black and shiny, sometimes, and I hear tittering. No smell of vampires.”
“Good.”
Moonwa had lapsed into Grass Giant language and was making jokes that set Beedj roaring. In the gray light of morning the Gleaners spoke together, waved at the brightening land, then more or less fell over in a pile.
“Do you think they came?” Spash asked nobody in particular, and he stepped out of the tent.
Whand said, “I don’t care. Let’s sleep.”
“They came,” Spash said.
Vala stepped out.
It was moments before she realized that one sheet was empty. Which? Far left… six Gleaner dead. The rest were untouched.
Beedj came forth briskly, swinging his scythe-sword. More Giants were coming down the earth wall. They conferred, then fanned out to explore, looking for evidence of what the Ghouls hod done.
But Vala climbed up the wall to sleep in the payload shell.
At midday she woke ravenous, with the smell of roasting meat in her nostrils. She followed the smells down to the tent.
She found Gleaners and Machine People together. The Gleaners had been hunting. The fire they had made to cook their kills, Barok and Whand had used to make bread from local grass.
“We eat four, five, six meals in a day,” Silack told her. “Pint says you eat once a day?”
“Yes. But a lot. Are you finding enough meat?”
“When your men came down to eat, ours went to hunt more. Eat what you see, the hunters will be back.”
The flatbread was a good effort, and Vala complimented the men. Smeerp meat was good, too, if a bit lean and tough. At least the Gleaners didn’t have a habit found in other hominids: changing the flavor of meat by rubbing it with salt or herbs or berries.
Vala wondered about breeding smeerps in other places, but all traders knew the answer to that. One hominid’s local bounty was another’s plague. With no local predators to restrict their numbers, smeerps would be eating somebody’s crops, breeding beyond their food source, then vectoring diseases when starvation weakened them.
Meanwhile she had eaten everything in sight. Gleaners and Machine People alike were watching her in amusement. Silack said, “Heavy exercise last night.”
“Did I miss anything?”
Kay said, “The Ghouls were active. There aren’t any dead Grass Giants between the wall and the tall grass. Beedj found neat piles of bones in the grass. They didn’t touch the vampires. Saved them for tonight, I guess.”
“Considerate of them.” With their dead gone, the Grass Giants’ mourning was over, except… “More considerate if they would take the rest of our dead. Anything else?”
Silack pointed.
It wasn’t raining now. The clouds formed an infinite flat roof, way high. You could see a long way across the veldt. What Vala could see was a sizable beast-drawn wagon plodding toward Grass Giant domains.
Five great big-shouldered beasts. More than that high-sided wagon needed, though it was big.
“It will be here well before dusk. Even so, if your species can sleep in spurts, you will have time.”
Vala nodded and climbed up the wall to sleep some more.
Paroom was riding in the guide seat beside a much smaller red-skinned man. Three more Reds rode in the enclosed space beneath.
They stopped the wagon just under the wall, near the opening. They lifted a thing out of the wagon bed. Vala squinted, trying to see something almost invisible. Her mercenary instincts raced along her nerves, gibbering.
At the Fall of the Cities, flying vehicles were the most common of fallen objects. This curved transparent sheet was the kind of thing people found in fallen cars. Most were shattered. This one looked intact. Its value must be immense!
The Reds came forward, carrying it at the corners. Each carried a sword nearly as long as himself, hung from his back in a leather sheath. They wore dyed leather kilts and leather backpacks, men and women both, though brighter colors adorned the women’s. Their teeth were pointed, all of them, a double row of canines.
Valavirgillin, Kaywerbrimmis, Moonwa, the Thurl in full armor, Manack, and Coriack waited to greet them. The group had been pruned a little.
“Thurl, this is a window,” one Red male said solemnly. “It is a gift from the Marsh People, who cannot go from where they live. They beg that we shall ward them from the spreading plague of vampires. The Marsh People cannot flee, for only the marsh gives them life.”
Valavirgillin caught the Thurl’s questioning look. “We know species like that,” she said. “Marsh, desert, one side of a mountain, a forest that is all one kind of tree. Their bellies have changed to accept only one food, or they cannot survive cold or heat, or too little moisture in the air, or too much. But this is a magnificent gift.”
“It is. We will do what we can for the Marsh People,” the Thurl said. “These, our allies, were able to reach us…” and the Thurl made introduction, speaking slowly, pronouncing the names of Gleaners and Machine People with varying accuracy.
“I am Tegger hooki-Thandarthal,” the Red male said. “This is Warvia hooki-Murf Thandarthal. We travel with Anakrin hooki-Whanhurhur and Chaychind hooki-Karashk.” The other two Reds had moved away to tend to the loadbeasts.
The Thurl asked, “How do your people deal with rishathra?”
“We cannot,” said Warvia, and did not amplify.
Paroom grinned, and Vala grinned back, picturing the male Grass Giants’ disappointment. The Thurl as host spoke for all, as protocol required, but briefly. What point in enlarging upon a guest’s skill at rishathra, for a species that couldn’t do that at all? Tegger and Warvia merely nodded when he fell silent. The other Red males were not even listening. They were examining the vampire corpses lying on one sheet, and chattering at high speed.
Tegger and Warvia looked much alike. Their red skins were smooth; their faces were hairless. They wore kilts of soft leather with decorative lacing. They were as tall as Machine People, but much thinner. Big ears stood out from narrow heads. Their teeth seemed to be not filed, but grown that way. Warvia had breasts, but almost flat.
“We never hear of so many vampires found together,” Warvia said.