For a moment it looked as if the creature had not been harmed by Robin's shots. Then the creature began to bleed fire that spilled across the sky, and the landscape was washed in a dull orange light. Chris looked up in time to see the explosion and could barely hear it for the shrill, warbling victory cry of Robin the Nine-fingered.
"Send me more buzz bombs!" she shouted.
They all watched as the creature arced high and began its death roll. There was a supersonic keening just before it hit ground on the far side of Ophion.
When ten minutes had passed with no more sign of the creatures, Cirocco crawled to Gaby and suggested they make a run for the boats. Chris was all for it; he worried about being out on the river, but anything was better than hugging this little patch of ground.
"Sounds good," Gaby agreed. "Here's the plan, folks. Don't waste any time. When I give the signal, humans will mount and Titanides will head for the boats at top speed. Ride facing backwards, and keep your eyes open. We've got to cover all points of the compass and be ready to hit ground instantly because we may not have more than two or three seconds. Any questions?"
"I think you must find another mount," Psaltery said quietly.
"What? Is it that bad? What is it, your leg?"
"Worse, I think."
"Hand me that lamp, will you, Rocky? Thanks, now... ." She froze, cried out in horror, and dropped the lamp. In its soft light Chris had seen her hands and arms smeared with dark red blood.
"What has she done to you?" Gaby moaned. She fell on the prone body and began trying to turn him over. Cirocco shouted for Hautbois to come quickly, then ordered Robin and Valiha to stand watch. It was not until she turned back to the injured Titanide that Chris realized the sticky mud on his own face and chest was mixed from the spilled blood of Psaltery. He moved away, appalled, and still he was sitting in mud. The Titanide had bled rivers of it, was lying in a pool of his own making.
"Don't, don't," he protested as Gaby and Hautbois tried to turn him. Hautbois did stop, but Gaby ordered her to start again. Instead, the Titanide healer put her head close to Psaltery's and listened for a moment.
"It's no use," she said. "His death is arrived."
"He can't be dead."
"He still lives. Come, sing good-bye to him while he hears."
Chris moved away, went to kneel beside Robin. She said nothing, looked at him for only a moment, then resumed her watch on the night sky. He recalled, shakily, that minutes before he had been sure an attack was coming. In fact, one had, but not the kind he expected.
There was no sound but the singing of Hautbois and Gaby. Hautbois's voice was sweetly melodic, not sorrowful. Chris wished he could understand it. Gaby would never be a skilled singer, but it did not matter. She choked but kept at it. At last there was just the sound of her sobbing.
Cirocco insisted they turn the body over. They had to examine the death wound, she said, to understand how it had happened and learn more about the buzz bombs. Gaby did not argue but stood by herself some distance away.
When they lifted his legs and began to turn him, a bushel of shapeless wetness spilled in the mud. Chris hurried away and fell to his hands and knees. His stomach continued to heave long after it was completely empty.
Later he learned that the wound had run the length of Psaltery's body, had come quite close to severing his trunk from his lower body. They decided that the long right wing of the creature had swept along his side seconds after Chris threw Gaby to the ground. It had cut so neatly that it had to be razor-edged in front.
They brought Psaltery to the bank of the river, to a place protected from attack by a few trees. Chris stayed back with Robin, watched as Gaby knelt and cut off the bright orange hair, then stood and tied it securely. Without ceremony, the three gathered Titanides rolled the body into the water and pushed it out into the current with long poles. Psaltery was a dark shape bobbing in the gentle ripples. Chris watched him out of sight.
They stayed there for ten revs, not wanting to catch up with his body. No one felt like doing much, and there was very little talk. The Titanides spent the time weaving and singing quietly. When Chris asked Cirocco to translate the songs for him, she said they were all about Psaltery.
"They're not particularly sad songs," she said. "None of these three was really close to Psaltery. But even his best friends won't mourn the way we do. Remember, to them he's gone. He doesn't exist anymore. But he did exist, and if he is to live in any sense, it must be in song. So they sing of what he was to them. They sing of the things he did that made him a good person. It's not much different from what we do, except for the lack of an afterlife. It's doubly important to them because of that, I think."
"I'm an atheist, myself," Chris said.
"So am I. But it's different. We both had to reject the concept of life after death, even if we weren't brought up to believe in it, because all human cultures are steeped in the idea. You get it everywhere you turn. So I think in the back of your mind and my mind-no matter how we deny it-there's some part that hopes we're wrong or maybe even is sure the reasoning mind is wrong. Even atheists experience out-of-body transformations when they die and are brought back. It's deep in your soul, and it just does not exist in theirs. What amazes me is that they're such a cheerful race in the face of that. I wonder if Gaea built that into them, too, or if it's their own invention. I won't ask her because I don't really want to know; I'd prefer to think it's their particular genius to rise above the futility of it all, to love life so much and demand nothing more of her."
Chris had never thought about the advantages of a "decent burial." He could not help, in his human way, thinking of the body as the person. That connection was what caused humans to seal their dead in caskets to keep the worms away or to burn them and remove all possibility of further depredation.
The river burial had a certain rustic poetry, but Ophion cared not at all about preserving the decency of the dead. The river deposited Psaltery on a mud flat three kilometers downstream. When they passed her ruined body, the Titanides did not even glance at it. Chris could not look away. The corpse crawling with scavengers haunted his sleep for a long time.
28 Triana
Maps of Gaea often used the device of shading the six night regions to emphasize that the sun never shines on them. This made the days all the more vivid. Tethys was usually printed in yellow or light brown to indicate that it was a desert region. It sometimes led travelers to believe that the desert began in the Phoebe-Tethys twilight zone. This was not the case. The hard bare rock and drifting sand enfolded the central swamp of Phoebe, extending arid arms north and south of it and as far west as the central cables.
Ophion flowed due east through the middle of eastern Phoebe, apparently gouging out a hundred-kilometer watercourse known as Confusion Canyon. But as the name suggested, few geological concepts applied inside Gaea. The canyon was there because Gaea wanted it; her three million years was not nearly enough time for water to have cut so deeply. Nevertheless, it was a passable imitation, though bearing a closer kinship to the subsidence formations of the Martian Tithonius Lacus than to the hydrologically formed Grand Canyon of Arizona. Why Gaea chose to imitate such planetary geology no one could say.