Qualt woke, the sound around his head a solid thing. He rocked back, buttock banging the cart wheel. His hand went off the blanket, into grass and gravel. Scrabbling to sit, then to stand, he looked around the darkness. Gauzy light was cut off sharply by the familiar roof of his shack and two trees, rendered wholly strange. He took five steps, stopped —
Then something ahead of him and above darkened the light, the sky — where was it? And how huge was it, and what — but before he could ask what it was, it struck him. Hard. And he threw his arms around it, embracing it to keep from falling. And, with it, he fell. It was flapping and huge, smelled and moved like a live thing, and was — as he pushed one hand out — surrounded on both sides by a vast, taut membrane, that suddenly ceased to be taut as he struggled in it. Flailing on the ground, in the dark and that single-note scream filling every crevice of the night (but which came neither from him nor from whatever he struggled with), Qualt had two simultaneous impressions. First was that he’d stumbled into someone else, the two of them had fallen on the ground, and now were rolling together. The second was that some astonishing beast, with a pelt and an animal scent, was covering him like a puma leapt down at him from a roof or the sky, to fight with him there by his garbage cart — though so far, Qualt realized, he’d been neither bitten nor clawed.
Then the sound stopped — the chattering of twigs and leaves and small stones, because of his ears’ ringing, seemed to Qualt to make their noise now not beneath the two of them, but rather off in some ringing metal pan.
The arms of the thing he fought — for it had arms — suddenly seized him — held him; restrained him. Qualt grasped it back. Distantly, he heard a breathing that, for a moment, he could not tell whether it was his or this other’s. Then he felt himself go limp, because suddenly that was easier to do than to keep fighting in the black. Then, a voice that was not like any Qualt had ever heard before, because it seemed like a child’s, high and breathy, said into his ear, only inches away, at the same time as Qualt scented the breath of a man who had been eating wild onions, so that, if anything, Qualt suddenly felt something familiar in all this strangeness and struggle — because Qualt himself had often walked through the lower mountains, munching the wild onion stalks that grew there:
“Hi-Vator, yes — No! Pwew! Çiron, you — ?”
Rimgia dreamed that somebody, laughing hysterically, thrust a pole into her ear and out the other side of her head, then lifted her by it high into the air, over the glittering stream and she was afraid she would fall in, only it really hurt to have a pole that deep in your ear —
The pole cracked. She screamed. But before she could fall, she woke in the hut, to that incredible sound. Her father, Kern, was already striding about — she saw his shape pass darkly before the hearth embers. Pushing up quickly, a moment later she knelt at Abrid’s pallet, shaking him.
“What is it — ow! What — ?”
“Come on,” she insisted, surprised when she could not hear her own voice for the whining. “Come on!” she shouted, only realizing it was a shout from the feel in her throat. Kern had already opened the door, rushed out —
Rahm neared the common, where men and women had begun to gather. As he sprinted up the side street, someone grabbed his arm, spun him back, hissed: “Rahm. !” Then: “Where is Ienbar?”
Bewildered, he stepped back.
“For God’s sake, Rahm! Where’s Ienbar?”
“Naä? He’s…at the burial meadow.”
“Rahm. We have to leave — all of us. Right now!” “Leave? But why?”
“The Myetrans are coming! Didn’t you hear them? They want you to surrender.”
“I heard. Naä, what does this ‘surrender’ mean — ”
“Oh, Rahm…!” Then, suddenly, she was running away into the dark.
Puzzled, Rahm turned back to the gathering in the common.
A few people still dug forefingers in their ears. The drums were louder. From the eastern fields another light struck. Something — a long line of somethings — was moving toward the common. The sweeping beams threw shadows over the beets, the grain, the kale, all bending in the night wind.
Children and mothers and uncles and cousins looked at one another.
“Why do they come across the field? They’ll damage the harvest.”
“There are so many of them that they couldn’t fit on the road.”
“Such late visitors — and so many. Will we have food for them all? They walk so strangely…”
Grain stalks snapped under the boots in time to the drums. As searchlights swung away, in the inadequate light from the nail paring of a moon, straining to see among the armored figures, Rahm thought to look for his friend from the morning — and, there, thought he saw him: only a moment later, he saw another tall, cloaked figure. Then another. Among the armed men advancing, a number wore the uniform Kire had worn. Some rode nervous horses; others came on foot. Their capes, despite the wind, hung straight behind them, heavy as night. Above them all, on rolling towers, the searchlights moved forward.
With the others, Rahm waited in the square.
Soon, with their mobile light-towers, the soldiers had marched to the common’s near edge. The ground was fully lit. Villagers squinted. On a horse stepping about before the visitors, a bearded man in brown leather, wearing a single glove, barked at the short silver rod in his bare hand:
HALT!
Everyone looked up, because the word echoed and reechoed from the black horns high on the moving light towers. The soldiers stopped marching. The drums stilled.
The man with the silver rod rode forward. The villagers fell back. The man spoke again. Again his voice was doubled, like thunder, from the horns:
SURRENDER TO THE FORCES OF MYETRA!
Around Rahm, people looked at one another, puzzled. Then Kern, the quarryman, who was not really shy — only very quiet — stepped forward.
“Welcome to you…” he said, uncertainly. Then, which was almost twice as much as Kern ever said, he added: “Welcome, visitors in the night.”
“Are you the leader here?” the mounted man demanded.
Kern didn’t answer — because, as Rahm knew, Kern wasn’t anyone’s leader. (He was not even an elder — none of whom, Rahm noticed, seemed to have arrived yet.) Kern frowned back at the villagers behind him.
Someone called out:
“No — he’s not!”
Which made a dozen people — including Rahm — laugh. Rahm whispered to Mantice who was standing beside him, “That’s Tenuk,” though stocky Mantice knew it was plowman Tenuk being funny as much as Rahm did. They both grinned.
“You speak for the people here,” the mounted man said, which was funny in itself because Kern probably wouldn’t say anything more now. But the man spoke as though he’d heard neither Tenuk’s “No” nor the laughter. “You are the leader!” While his horse stepped about, he pushed the silver rod into his shirt, reached down, unfastened his sling, and lifted out his powergun — for a moment it seemed he was going to hand it to Kern as a gift.
Rahm had seen a powergun that morning, but not — really — what it could do.
Flame shot out and smacked Kern just below his shoulder. Kern slammed backward four feet — without either stepping or falling: upright, his feet just slid back across the grass — the left one was even slightly off the ground. Blood fountained a dozen feet forward. The horse’s flank was splattered and the animal reared twice, then a third time. Rahm was close enough to hear the meat on Kern’s chest bubble and hiss, as he fell, twisting to the side. One of Kern’s arms was gone.