“Yes,” Qualt said. “I see — ” Hara crossed toward the corner of the house. Qualt hurried after her, just as she stepped around the pots and hollyhocks. But the back yard, with the varied junk strewn about in it, and the garbage cart to the side, was empty.
“It won’t be an easy meeting, though — I tell you, boy! There’s seven hundred and forty people here at Çiron — oldsters and babes among us. While the Myetrans — well, there are thousands of them, it seems! And we have to figure out a way to — ”
“Hara,” Qualt said. “Hara, there’re not thousands of them!”
She stopped and looked at him.
Qualt crumpled the papaya rind and flung it into the bushes. “There’re not thousands of them. There’re not hundreds of them! There’re a hundred eighty-seven. Perhaps I’m off by five or six — up or down. But not by more!”
Hara frowned. “And how dost thou know, little dirty-fingers?”
“Because I counted!”
“When didst thou count?”
“Earlier this morning. They get their camp up at sunrise — and I… I counted. A hundred eighty-seven. A few more than half of them are in the village. Somewhat less than half are at their camp. There’s a group of five, whom all the others obey. They stay in three tents that are larger than the others, at the back of the encampment — the mounted one with the beard who killed Rimgia’s father last night is one of them. Then, among the rest, there are ten who wear the black clothes, with the black cloaks and hoods — who ride horses and tell their men, the ones who have only the swords and their metal and leather plates bound to them, where to go and what to do. The black ones and the five leaders alone have the powerguns — the things they killed Kern and Tenuk and… killed so many with. Powerguns are what they call them — someone overheard them speak the word, and told me. And there’re no more than twenty powerguns among them — and a dozen are resting, at any one time. That’s another thing they have to do — after they fire them twenty or thirty times they have to let them rest a while, so they’ll regain their fire. Someone — I heard them joking about them when they rounded up some forty-three of our people, wounded all, but who could still walk, and herded them into a wire corral where they have them imprisoned — ”
“Forty-three of us imprisoned?” Hara exclaimed. “Ah, thank the generous earth! For in town, they’ve started to count the bodies of those who were killed — and there — seemed to be more than thirty missing. Do you know who the corralled ones are, Qualt? Do you know which ones are their prisoners? You tell us that, and it would ease a lot of sick hearts, boy — ”
“I can tell you that: and I can tell you more — though I’ll have to learn it later. But there are ten in black, who, with the five leaders, have the powerguns.”
Hara had started walking again.
“But tell the council, Hara! There are five in charge. And only a hundred eighty-seven all together — give or take four or five…!”
“You can believe I’ll tell them, boy! You can believe it — ” Hara went on toward the quarry road, making for wherever the village council had decided to hold its meeting.
Qualt stood in the yard, breathing hard — as though the imparting of the information had been a sudden and painful effort.
You see, he was a very different person from Rahm.
Over the edge of Qualt’s roof thrust a sharp face with scooped ears. A moment later, a shadow flapped —
Qualt turned as the Winged One moved out onto the air — as if air were water and the Winged One pushed off into it as Qualt might push off from the quarry shore… and Qualt himself were looking up at it as a fish might look from the lake bottom.
The Winged One sailed over the yard — full of the things that, now and again, curious Qualt had rescued from the irredeemable arc into the ravine, a kind of sculpture garden of furniture, farm equipment, and even more unrecognizable stuffs, pieces leaning in odd positions, an occasional rope from one to the other from which some pot or bit of houseware hung.
Flapping wings settled, till the Winged One perched on the corner of Qualt’s garbage wagon. One sail out for balance, the Winged One moved the other’s edge across his mouth, knocking away the little seeds that had stuck to his face fur. “Say, groundling — there! You’ve told what we learned aloft this morning to one of your elders, like you wanted. Do you think that now you’ll let me take you up to Hi-Vator? There it would be fun — and you wouldn’t have to hide like you say I have to here …! Though there I might still have to hide from a few, because some folk there — some even of my own family — do not like me as much as all that!” The Winged One laughed out shrilly, the mighty sails out full — on which, with the sunlight behind them, Qualt could see scars that spoke of violence and adventure. “Sometimes I think I can not — or perhaps I should not — go back to Hi-Vator. Oh, there’re not many up there who listen for my return. Other times I think maybe I should go visit them, with one of you groundlings on my back to surprise them, as though I were a Handsman or a noble, who could make and break such laws at will. But if I could make and break such laws, then I would not be the outlaw I am. Oh, I assure you — I’m only a little outlaw. Don’t fear me, friend. I never broke any big laws. I just forget and do what I want sometimes, and discover it wasn’t what someone else wanted me to do. Then I have to fly…
“Yes,” Qualt said, absently. “This law, that thou spokest of earlier. Now what is this ‘law’ that you are outside of, as thou sayest — ”
But the Winged One just laughed. “I know, groundling! Perhaps we can roll around together on the earth the way we did last night — that was fun too, ‘ey? Or would you like to try it in the air? That was a good game, no? — even if it only came by the accident of that awful sound, so that I could not tell where I was when I flew into you! You groundlings do it in the dirt. We Winged Ones do it in the — ”
But suddenly Qualt turned, vaulted up on the bench of the garbage cart, and stood erect on the seat while the wheels creaked below them both. “No, my friend — there’ll be a later time for Hi-Vator.” Qualt stepped behind the creature’s great sail, like an object rejoining a shadow that had been momentarily lost to it by a mystery beyond naming. “Yes, like last night, we’ll fly a bit more at Çiron!”
By his final three hours at Hi-Vator, Rahm had decided that, no, the Winged Ones were a very, very different people from his — but that it was precisely those differences that made them a people. With each new thought or realization or insight about them, however, there came a moment when Rahm would stand, now for seconds, now for minutes, still as the cliffs rising above him, his mind fallen miles below, turning among memories of the light- and bloodlashed night, trying to hold coherent the idea of a people of his own. When he stood so long like that, some of the Winged Ones watched or listened quietly. Others, better mannered, merely listened and pretended not to watch at all — though more and more mewed about it to one another, out of sight and hearing.
Among the stranger things that had happened to him that afternoon was a conversation he’d had with an old Winged One, whom Vortcir had been eager to have him meet for more than an hour now. The Winged One’s fur was more gray than brown. Her eyes were wrinkled closed.
Rahm and the ancient creature hung together on one of the rope webs, above the waterfall, while the old Winged One explained to Rahm that one of the most important ideas around which all the Winged Ones’ lives revolved was something called god — apparently a very hard thing to understand, since it was at once the universal love binding all living things and, at the same time, a force that punished evil-doers, even as it forgave them: also it was a tree that grew on the bare peak of the world’s highest mountain, a tree older than the world itself, a tree whose roots required neither earth nor water — those roots having secreted the whole of the world under it, including the mountain it perched on. The tree’s leaves were of gold and iron. Its fruit conferred invisibility, immortality, and perfect peace. To make things even more complicated, for just a short while — twenty-nine years to be exact, the old Winged One explained — god had not been a tree at all, but rather a quiet, good, and simple woman with one deformed wing, who therefore could not fly and thus limped about the mountains’ rocks like a groundling. Various and sundry evil Winged Ones would come across her and try to cheat her, or to rob her, or — several times — even attempt to kill her, only to be shamed by a power she had, called “holiness,” whereupon they repented and — often — became extremely good, fine, and holy people themselves for the rest of their lives, during which they did nothing but help other Winged Ones.