Our hostess spoke of devils, saying that witches can command them, and they raise storms. I do not know whether either assertion is true. Perhaps they are, though I am prone to doubt it. But I realized long ago that the devils about which poor, ignorant people talk in the Long Sun Whorl, those malign beings who, it is said, crept into the Whorl without Pas's permission, were only inhumi by another name. At the time of which I speak, Krait revealed the secret that has permitted me, at times, to command them, the secret that they dare not let us learn, thinking that we could employ it to ruin them.
I do not believe we can. I tell you that openly and fairly, all of you who hear me now, and all of you who will read the account of our dinner that I intend to write. It is a great secret, truly. If you will, it is a great and terrible weapon. That is how the inhumi themselves see it, and I will not call them wrong. But it is a weapon too heavy for our hands. The Neighbors, whom you name the Vanished People, knew it; but they could not wield it against the inhumi, who drank their blood in their time as they drink ours today. If they could not wield it, there is little hope that we human beings can. Or so it seems to me.
Here I must pass over many things if I am not to keep you all night. After coming near death more than once and more than twice, the man who had been leader rejoined the men he had led. They traveled very far together and saw many strange things about which I will not speak tonight, until they found a deserted settlement, in whose center stood a ruined lander.
(Silk had thought the lander Mamelta showed him a tower underground; this was a tower indeed, its nose high as the tops of the tallest trees and its sleek lines radiating a strength it no longer possessed. I can see it now, that slightly canted tower gleaming dully in the reddish light of the stifling afternoon. Like a rotting corpse, it showed ribs where some sideplates had been taken. How we shouted in our delight, thinking it would save us!)
There were cards as well as bones in the wretched huts, the cards that were our money in the Long Sun Whorl and that are too often our money here as well-the cards that let a lander think and speak. We restored them to the lander, and directed by its monitor we tried to restore the lander itself, raiding the few settlements we could locate, and sometimes carrying heavy parts from other landers for scores of leagues. Then the leader's son found a woman in one of those settlements and turned against his father for good, helping the settlers fight him and his men.
And one by one they died, those men. Some fell prey to wild beasts, and some to rotting wounds and fevers. Some were killed by the settlers, some killed or captured by the inhumi. Always, it seemed to them that a few more parts would be enough, three more, two more, one more - only one more! - and their lander could fly again, and return them to the Whorl of the Long Sun.
Until at last there were only two left with the man who had again become their leader, and their leader lay dying.
They deserted him, taking both the fell black sword and the light he had been given. Perhaps they still hoped to find the waveguide coupling they needed. Perhaps they merely hoped to be accepted by some settlement. I only know that he lay dying in the lander, and that he silenced its monitor so that he might die in peace.
A terrible yearning for the life he was to lose came upon him when the monitor had gone. He took off the ring Seawrack had given him not so very long before, and clasping it between hands that had been thick and strong implored every god he could call to mind to send a Neighbor to heal him.
None came, and his legs were cold and dead. He felt the thirst of death, and it seemed to him at that moment that he had been cheated, that all his sons should be at his deathbed, and Nettle, who had been his wife, and Seawrack herself. And he raised... He raised-
Fava gave me her handkerchief, a little square of cloth scarcely larger than a pen wiper, trimmed with coarse lace; and Inclito pressed his soiled napkin into my hand.
He raised Seawrack's ring and put it to his eye, peering through its silver circle because a fathomless darkness was closing in. He saw the whorl then as something small and bright, receding into the night beyond the stars; and for senseless reasons felt that the ring's bright round might hold the night at bay.
Through the ring a Neighbor saw him, and she came to him in his agony. He told her what was in his heart; and when he had finished, she said, "I cannot make you well again, and if I could you would still be in this place. I can do this for you, however, if you desire it. I can send your spirit into someone else, into someone whose own spirit is dying. If you wish, I will find someone in the whorl in which you were born. Then there will be one whole man there, instead of two dying men, one here and another there."
That was all I told Inclito, Mora, and the rest that night; but I consented, and found myself upon my knees beside the open coffin of a middle-aged woman. My hands and arms and face and neck were bleeding, and an old, worn knife covered with blood was by my hand. There was no one else in the poor little house in which I knelt, and almost nothing in it that was not torn or broken.
I rose, and leaving the dead woman in her coffin opened the door and walked out into the whorl. It was a little after midday then, as well as I could judge from the narrowing line of the Long Sun.
Chapter 9
Fava's Second Story: The Girl on Green
Incanto set his story on Green. It was an unhappy one, as I think we can all agree. For me the saddest part was the death of the leader's son Krait. Incanto never told us how the two came to know each other, or why he had adopted an inhumu. That will be a very good story, I feel sure, and I am sorry I will not be here to hear it.
I am going to use that setting, too. Since none of us have ever been there, it will let my imagination play in any way it wants, and be a fit locale for a story as fanciful as mine.
On Green there was a little girl who lived happily in a warm, dark place. She could see nothing because the place was so dark, but she knew nothing about "seeing" anyway; so she did not miss it. She could hear only a little, though she could hear some noises now and then, and even wondered about them. There was food in the warm, dark place, of which she drank whenever she was hungry.
Her food dwindled away, and the warm, dark place grew more and more cramped until her arms and back and head were pushed against its sides more and more uncomfortably. Nor was that all. The harder she was pressed against sides of the warm, dark place, the more she understood that though it was her whole whorl, there was another whorl, a strange, cold, and frightening whorl, outside it. Her ears heard a few noises, as I told you. Her mind heard more, sounds of lust and hunger, both of which frightened her very much.
She drank the last of her food, and knew hunger not as a noise outside but as a need within. The woman in Salica's story, the woman who was pulled up the chimney by the storm, had eaten as much as she wished for years, and no longer wanted to move. This little girl's case was the reverse of hers. Starving, she soon began to long for another place, one where there would be food again.
That, you see, is the way of the whorl. The well-fed remain where they are, if they can. The ill-fed wander on.
I do not mean to imply that I, who will leave tomorrow to wander through many foreign towns with my father, have not been well fed at your table, Salica. You have always been more than generous with me, not only with food but with your love, just as your son has been a father to me while I have been with you. Nevertheless, I am hungry for the sight of others of my own blood. I hope you will understand how I feel, and even sympathize.
"I certainly do!" my host's mother exclaimed.
And Oreb, from my shoulder: "Bad thing! Thing fly."
A time came when the little girl could not bear her hunger any longer. Gathering her little body, she pressed outward as hard as she could with head, hands, and feet. And when that availed nothing, she clawed frantically at the walls of the warm, dark place that had been home to her for as long as she could remember.
The walls gave way almost at once, and she found herself among rotting reeds and leaves. She did not know what they were, you understand. She had no name for anything beyond her own person. To her, they seemed a further wall, an extension of the warmth and darkness that had wrapped her for so long. She clawed at them, too, and eventually, fatigued and weak with hunger, burst forth into the sunlit brightness of a riverbank.
As I have implied, she did not know who she was or where she had come from. She knew only that she hungered. Seeing the green water, she sensed that it was liquid, like her food, and pulled herself over the mud with her claws until she plunged in.
Soon she discovered that there were hundreds of other babies with her in the water. What games they played! Now and again one of the others tried to bite her, or she tried to bite them; but no harm was done. And every day they grew stronger and fewer, for the fish on which they fed, fed on them.
She was perfectly happy there, until one day-
Here Fava interrupted her story to ask me, "May I use your leader, Incanto? Your man on Green? I won't hurt him much, I promise."
I nodded, hoping that no one other than Oreb was aware of my agitation.
Until one day, as she jumped to escape a particularly large and aggressive fish, she caught sight of Incanto's leader walking all by himself along the riverbank. As soon as she laid eyes on him, she knew that everything she and her playmates had been doing in the river was wrong, and pulled herself up onto the bank. For a time, she ran behind him on all fours like a dog. But that too seemed wrong.
Swimming and eating and swimming again through the calm, sunlit waters had made her much stronger. She stood up as he did, and toddled along behind him, leaving her baby footprints in the mud.
Though she walked as fast as she could, she could not keep up with him, and once a green grabber burst from some thick leaves and snatched at her with claws that were those of a big owl, but ten times larger. Grabbers are horrible animals without feathers or hair, and they change color in ways that make them very hard to see. Think of a bad child as big as a grown man, with a long tail and hands like owls' feet, and you will have pictured one. This grabber forced her to hide in the water for a long while, while the leader walked on.
As Fava spoke, I had been picturing the events in her story; and by the time her little girl had leaped from the green water and seen me, they were painfully vivid.
We had called the "grabbers" colorcats from their claws and the shape of their faces; and I could picture the colorcat at that moment much more clearly than Mora, Inclito, and his mother, or the curving wall of age-old ashlars and the fire in the big fieldstone fireplace: a bull colorcat as green as grass, humpbacked with muscle, splashing through the shallows with high-kneed caution, its snakey tail waving behind it like a detached liana, peering into the water, turning and peering again-and at length pouncing, its horrible claws stretched wide, and coming up with nothing more than a crumbling half load of mud. My hand groped my side for the sword I no longer wore, and found it.
The little girl I've been telling you about would have been left hopelessly behind (Fava continued, with a puzzled expression) if the leader had not turned back. Apparently he had caught sight of the grabber, or more likely had heard it grunting and splashing as it searched for her. I doubt that the leader can have known it was hunting a little girl, but he seemed determined to save that innocent creature, whatever it might be. As soon as he caught sight of the grabber, he drew his sword and advanced upon it fearlessly. At the sight of his resolute face and that slaughtering black blade, the grabber lost heart.
My host's mother could contain herself no longer. "This leader, Fava? Was he-"
"Grandmother!" Mora exclaimed. "You're not supposed to interrupt. You know you're not. You're the one who always objects when Fava and I do it."
"Interruptions are permitted in cases like this, " my host's mother declared with great firmness. "Fava, I have to ask you about Incanto's leader, because Incanto never did describe him. Was he tall? As tall as Incanto?"
Fava shook her head. "That's funny. No, he wasn't. But almost as tall, though he didn't look it, and-"
Stocky. You can think of him as muscular if you like, and he certainly looked strong enough to fight and climb and the rest of it, but there was nothing heroic about him except his eyes.
The little girl whose adventures I have been recounting to you knew nothing about heroes and swords, or any such thing, but she was as curious as a monkey, and as soon as she realized what was happening she pushed her little head up out of the water, and as soon as the grabber was dead she overcame her natural shyness sufficiently to speak to the leader who had killed it and saved her, offering her timid thanks and after some hesitation venturing to say that she thought his was the best shape for everyone.
The colorcat lay dead, half in and half out of the muddy water, scarlet blood that looked no different from a man's or a hog's spurting from the gaping wound below its jaws. Dozens of young inhumi rose to drink it; wading in, I caught one by the nape of the neck and carried it to the bank with its tail lashing futilely and its arms and legs pawing air. "Can you talk?" I shook it.
It swung its head from side to side, then nodded. Already its lizard's face was softening a little, melting.
"You see that tree?" I pointed dramatically. "All I've got do is grab you by your tail and swing you against it, so you'd better do everything I say. What's your name?"
"Mee."
"You're changing your looks, and that's good, but you're making yourself too childlike. I want you older, so grow those legs. Are you a male or a female, Mee?"
"Girl."
"That's good too, " I told her. "I think I'll keep you. I need a little help. If you'll come with me and do your job, I won't hurt you, and I'll see to it that nobody else does, either."
So he cut off a big piece of the grabber's skin for her (Fava continued), and scraped it until it was thin and smooth, and as flexible as grabber-skin can be made. She wrapped it around herself, and they picked flowers and pretty leaves for her to wear in her hair.