“Couple of days, unless I got a medical kit in the platform. I kept one in the other platform,” he added accusingly, “but I don’t remember if I got one in this one. I’ll go look.”
“Be careful,” Farrari cautioned. “Keep to the fields as much as possible.”
Bran nodded, parted the hedge, and scurried through. Farrari followed him and sat down by the hedge to watch Bran lope off across the field. After a time he felt uneasy in the open, even in a zrilm enclosed field, so he crept back into the hedge and waited there.
Then a squad of cavalry came down the lane. Farrari fingered his spears longingly but did not throw—an ambush seemed perfectly safe to him as long as he could hit and run, but he could no longer run. He watched the squad pass, instantly concerned about Bran—because these troops rode walking grilz, and a walking gril made no noise at all. It suggested that the rascz were setting up an ambush of their own.
As soon as the column passed, Farrari started after Bran. He used his staff as a crutch, but stumbling around the hills of tubers made slow and painful going. He crossed several fields and finally came to a lane, where he cautiously parted the zrilm and looked through.
Bran lay a short distance down the lane, his body bristling with spears. Farrari staggered to his side, but he knew before he reached him that he would be dead, that no one could survive so many wounds in vital places.
He paused there only for a moment, but when he straightened up the cavalry troop was almost upon him. With two good legs he might have reached the hedge—barely—but he could manage only a staggering lunge before the spear crashed into his side. As he hit the ground he screamed—or tried to scream“skudkru,” but the second spear was already on the way.
XV
It was night, and he was being carried. The soft breeze that rattled the dry zrilm leaves felt numbingly cold to his feverish face. Stars floated dimly beyond a swirling film of smoke and haze.
The air was pure on Branoff IV. The nights were clear or cloudy, and there was no haze.
He blinked, and the haze remained.
He became aware of a new sensation: from far away, as though through a different kind of haze, he heard singing. He thought he grasped some of the words, ol words, and he told himself, “Impossible! The olz have no culture. They can’t sing. No one has ever heard an ol sing.”
The song continued, a solemn, stirring, rhythmic exaltation; an unfettered, searing, lilting outpouring of emotion; a prolonged lament of triumph suspended above the quite irregular, thumping beat of death. His one recollection was of the second spear hurtling toward him. He started through the haze at the starry night and listened through the haze to the stirring ol song, and he decided that he was dead.
It was day, and he lay in the shadow of a zrilm hedge. Insects had found his clotted wounds, and their furious buzzing throbbed thunderously. He willed himself to brush them away, but his hand did not move. He was alive, and he had dreamed the night sky and the singing, but he could not remember how he came there.
It was night. Again he was carried but now the haze had swallowed the stars. Strangely enough, he could hear clearly. The singing at which had marveled sounded loud and close at hand, and he discovered it to be the unsyllabic, unintelligible grunts of olz at work. He had a sensation of falling until he realized that his head was lower than his feet. On and on he was carried, down a down, louder and louder sound the grunts of the laboring olz as every sound echoed and magnified and suddenly light bloomed to flash and sparkle above him.
He was in a cave, and tiny stalactites formed a lacy fairy mist on irregular ceiling. Then the ceiling veered beyond reach of the flickering torches and a blast of cold struck him.
Lowered to the ground, he rolled helplessly down a slight incline and came to rest on his side, and with a shuddering finality he knew that he was dead. Directly before him rose a vast pile of the pathetic, inert bodies of olz, and even as he was comprehending what it was hands lifted him and placed him upon it. He was one with the dead olz, and the living olz had brought him here for burial.
He was alone with the dead. Water, dripping from somewhere far above, sounded random drum taps on the piled bodies. The flush of fever had faded. He felt cold, drained of life, and his only thought was that eternity, in such a place, would be very dull indeed.
He slept, and when he awoke he found himself able to turn his head slightly, wiggle a finger, lift a hand a centimeter or two. He was alive, but paralyzed by weakness, and the olz had interred him with their dead.
The olz returned. Farrari watched the flickering shadows thrown by their torches and listened to the padding of their bare feet. Their shuffling footsteps receded into the depths of the cave, returned, encircled the mounds of dead. Abruptly a voice was raised in a strange, rhythmic chant of ol speech sounds intertwined with guttural nonsense. The chant performed an endless dialogue with its own echoes, the footsteps receded and returned, and finally Farrari became aware that there was a pattern, a cycle to what the olz were doing. From a whispered beginning the chant crescendoed to a shout followed by abrupt, motionless silence. This was repeated several times, the procession receded into the distance and returned, and a new cycle began.
Hands removed a body from the pile upon which Farrari lay. He tilted and began to roll, and the hands eased him to the ground almost as gently, he thought, as though he’d been alive. With an exhausting effort he managed to turn his head, and he could now witness the dancing, chanted death rites of the olz.
They gathered around the body, and a priest in fluttering robes performed a contorted, leaping dance. The priest—priestess, Farrari decided, or young priest—began the whispered chant, his dance became wilder, his voice louder, and he leaped through the flaming torches and returned again and again to the dead ol whom the living encircled, embracing the fire of life in a dance of death, and the chant took on melody and lilt and began its remorseless crescendo. Then four olz sprang forward, seized the dead ol, and flung him into the air.
The chant ceased abruptly; the body disappeared. Although Farrari could not see it, he surmised that there was a chasm or crevass, a bottomless abyss, so deep that bodies vanished into it soundlessly, and here the olz disposed of their dead.
The specialists at base would have been fascinated, but this priceless discovery seemed likely to die with its discoverer. The olz padded back from the depths of the cave, and the next body they took was Farrari’s.
He lay on his back at the center of the circle of mourners. The priestess began her dance, began the chilling, whispered preface to her chanted lament. The ceiling arched far above the shallow circles of light thrown off by the torches, and Farrari, looking upward, could see nothing at all. Occasionally the priestess brushed past him; once she fluttered her hands before his staring eyes. Her chant became louder, her dance more agitated. Suddenly she appeared above him, her weirdly dilated eyes fixed on his face, her features contorted, her lips shaping shrieking incantations, her face—