At the fire, the weaver tapped her long-handled spoon on the cauldron’s rim and looked up. A naked back, with its small, sharp vertebrae curved toward the room — the young soldier sighed, but did not even glance around.
Across the commons a dog pranced and, its head back, yipped, till, loping past, Rahm turned and called jocularly: “Come on, there — cut it out now, Mouse!”
A child standing near turned to declare: “His name isn’t ‘Mouse’—and you know it, Rahm!”
Then both laughed — the girl’s, a brief, high sound, like a single note of the dog’s yipping, and Rahm’s, a broad-chested, doubled-over, head-shaking, arm-waving, hand-clapping, loud-then-high-then-low-again laugh, that took him three, four, five steps along, going on and on and on — so that, for uncomfortable moments, he looked like a man with a creature clutching his shoulders whom he was trying to shake free.
Again seated on the edge of the blackened wood, Kire looked at his hysterical savior, as if Kire himself were hundreds of feet above and Rahm, dog, and child were on the ground. His miraculous rescue that dawn had catapulted Kire to some altitude from which, like a man afraid of heights, he could appreciate none of the view for the vertigo. Kire was still trying to recall the names of his units’ dead — unhappily aware that he could, now, really, remember only one: Nactor, off in the shack. Then, of course, there was his big guard, in the wagon. And what had been the name of his little friend, the one with the freckled shoulders — a soldier Kire knew had died early in the operation, but to whom, for his life, he could now fix neither face nor name. Somehow what had happened to him had so immersed him in life that little of death would stick to him — for which he felt awkward, uncomfortable, and inadequate.
His big body still lost in its laugh, again Rahm glanced at the seated Myetran. Kire looked out with green, distant eyes. Somehow, the dark clothing, with the puma skin around them, had come all askew. I call him ‘friend,’ Rahm thought. We have now each helped the other; yet I don’t know him — at all, And Rahm was glad the laugh’s remains kept the thought’s discomfort from his face.
The day of the Winged One’s coming and their routing of the Myetrans was a day of wonder — wonder that spread from the town dump, where Qualt finally drew up his own wagon with baskets of yellow rinds and chicken feathers and milkslops and egg shells and corn shucks, to go once more, stiff-legged and leaning back against them, over the gravel to dump them from the ravine precipice into the soggy and steaming gully; wonder that spread over the common at the village center, where the grassy expanse was worn away down the middle by the daily set-up of the barter market’s stalls just before the council house, where most of the women and many of the men mentioned in these chapters came to walk, judge, and trade; wonder that spread to the outlying grain fields and cane fields and corn fields and kale fields, in one of which Gargula stood, calf deep in greens, beside his plow, rubbing his nose and not quite ready to work, because he’d taken Tenuk’s mule from its shed under the thatched-out roof that day, fed it, watered it, and brought it to the field without asking anyone — because there’d been no one to ask; and the whole silent operation had left him with a tongue too heavy to speak.
The wonder and the mystery, as the village children would remember it, was that over all, now on the ground, and more and more frequently in the air, the great shapes, like flitting shadows, moved, awkwardly on the earth and gracefully through the sky, translucent ears cocked left or right to hear, it seemed, everything, their little eyes fixed (it seemed) on little for very long. Thus, as had Naä and Rimgia, one walked about the streets — or the common, or the refuse pit, or the fields — with eyes continually lifting.
Back at the ravine, Qualt smacked the bottom of his last basket, turned it up to peer within its smelly slats, then dragged it behind him, rasping on rock, toward the dozen others, and looked up — as Rimgia came out into the clearing that held his hut as well as his yard full of odd, awkward, and broken things.
She walked thoughtfully, glanced up casually: a dozen Winged Ones circled above the ravine.
Have we mentioned that Qualt, even before the coming of the Myetrans, had for a while, now, been the most respected young man in town? In such a village, the garbage man knows more about what goes on (and goes out) than anyone else. As garbage man, Qualt was expected not just to know this, but to study it, and to record anything about it of interest, which he did two or three evenings a week, on parchment scrolls, with great diligence. It was Qualt who, rather than Rahm, as a child had pestered Old Ienbar to teach him his writing system. In the course of learning it years ago, Qualt had copied out, several times over, almost the whole of the death scrolls on store in Ienbar’s shack (he still had those early exercises in trunks piled beneath his grandmothers’ marriage blankets in his back storage room), and it was he to whom would soon fall the task of reconstructing them. Hara’s jokes with Rahm about a possible seat on the elders’ council was a gesture simply to make the big youth feel better. Hara’s jokes with Qualt, though they took the same form, were signs of a foregone conclusion of the whole Çiron council, that the lean youth would have the next seat that came vacant — and would be the youngest “elder” ever to sit with them.
Over the next weeks as his various accomplishments during the Myetran siege (from his gathering of information, to his help to Naä, to the water for the prisoners, to the multiple garbage peltings, and finally his own night-journey to Hi-Vator) would come to general awareness, they would make this modest young man into a true town hero — and the already high respect and regard in which he was held would become something quite stellar. What Rahm and Naä had done was the stuff of song. But what Qualt had done was finally the stuff of myth.