by Grass(Lit)
Noise. Two beasts screaming. He staggered to his feet, eyes fixed on them. They were trying to crawl toward him. trying to get up on three legs. He turned the knife to its maximum length and moved forward, slashing once, then again, cleaving the two skulls down through those clamping jaws, to leave the truncated, cauterized necks to lash themselves into quiet.
A great noise was coming from somewhere else. He turned just in time to see the Hippae who had been ranked along the wall charging at him, hooves high, jaws extended. There was no way to avoid them. He threw himself behind the bodies of the dying Hippae and cut at the legs and teeth that sought him from above. Blood rained down on him, blinding him.
Something struck him on the head. He slumped, stunned. There was sound, roaring, screaming, voices howling. Hippae shrieking as they backed off. Blackness came up around him, sucking at him.
Persun Pollut's voice said, "Up, up, sir. Get in. Oh, get in, we can't hold them off for long."
Then vibration, the sound dwindling, and at last the blackness took him entirely.
It was Figor bon Damfels who reached Stavenger first, after waiting a considerable time for the Hippae to finish their slaughter and go away. Roderigo Yrarier's servants had driven the Hippae off with the aircar, had leapt out and rescued him. Figor was astonished at this. None of the bon Damfels servants or the bon Laupmon servants had made any move to protect their masters. The twelve riders had borne the full brunt of the Hippae fury. All twelve had died, most of them bon Laupmons, fourteen deaths including Stavenger bon Damfels and Obermun bon Haunser. Stavenger showed no wounds, though he was pale and cold. His boots were in tatters. Figor unbuckled the strap that held the boots high and drew them off. Stavenger's feet came with them. Only a thin strip of leather on the inside had kept the boots together. They had filled with blood and overflowed. Stavenger had bled to death, without moving.
Four Hippae were dead also, the two who had taken part in the joust and two others, their legs lopped off as though by some great cleaver. It was this death of Hippae that the others had sought to avenge.
The death of Hippae, though perhaps Yrarier's escape had infuriated them more. They had danced and howled and leaped, trying to get their teeth into the ascending car. While all of it had been going on, Figor had not had time for much thinking, not time, nor ability. There was nothing in anyone's mind then but red rage and a furious astonishment. After the Hippae had gone away, however, room for some thought had opened up. Thought and reflection on what eyes had seen even while minds had been unable to comprehend.
"Figor," his cousin, Taronce bon Laupmon, said. "I found this where the fragras was."
Figor took it. Some kind of tool. It had a thumb switch and he clicked it on. The blade quivered, humming with deadly force, and he clicked it off again. He whispered, shocked, "By our ancestors! Taronce!"
"It must be what he used on the mounts," cousin Taronce whispered, rubbing at his shoulder where his prosthesis joined his body. "Cut their legs out from under them Chopped their heads in two. The way they chop at us. They way they chopped at me." He looked around, guiltily. "Put it away before someone sees it."
"What does Obermun bon Laupmon say? Lancel?"
"He's dead, Gerold is alive. He wasn't one of the mounted ones."
"How did this all..." He gestured around him. "When I got here, it was already started."
"The Hippae were waiting this morning, waiting on the gravel court. They took people, that's all. They took Stavenger as soon as he arrived, and bon Haunser, as well."
"No one bothered me."
"No one else was bothered, just twelve riders, and Stavenger, and Jerril bon Haunser. And now they're all dead."
"Plus four mounts," whispered Figor. "I've got the thing put away. I won't let them know we have it."
"You'd use it, wouldn't you?"
"Would you?"
"I think so. I think I'd use it. It's so neat. So little. You could keep it in your pocket. They wouldn't know you had it. Then, if one of them came at you..."
"If Yrarier had this thing, they're probably easy to get. In Commons, maybe."
"Why didn't we know? Before?"
"They didn't let us know before. Or maybe we haven't wanted to know, before."
When Persun and Sebastian Mechanic reached Opal Hill they left Rigo in the aircar while they called Persun's father on the tell-me and told him they wanted to evacuate the estancia. Rigo was unconscious. There was nothing they could do for him; he needed to go to the hospital in Commons at once, but there was this other very important consideration.
"Evacuate the village?" Hime Pollut asked. "You're joking, Pers."
"Father, listen. Rigo Yrarier killed at least two Hippae. I don't know how many men died in the ruckus we left behind us, but some must have. I'm remembering the stories of Darenfeld estancia. How it was burned after somebody wounded a Hippae. How all the people in the village died. The people at Opal Hill village, the servants here in the big house, they're our people, Father. Commons people."
"How many at Opal Hill?"
"A hundred and a bit. If you can get Roald Few to send out some trucks..."
"Will the people be ready?"
"Sebastian is on his way to the village now. If you can get the trucks we use when we go into winter quarters, they can bring the livestock in. They'll need their animals...."
A long silence. "Can you bring the foreigners from the estancia?"
"His Excellency, yes. His secretary and her sister. The old priest. That's all."
"Where's the wife? The children? The other priest? Yrarier's fancy woman?"
"Asmir Tanlig took Eugenie to Commons this morning. None of the others are here, but I don't have time to explain about them now." He left the tell-me and ran through the dwelling, stopping all the servants he met. They were all from the village. Some he sent to find Father Sandoval and Andrea Chapelside and her sister, telling them he could allow only an hour for packing. Waiting even that long might endanger Rigo's life, but he could not simply gather up the women and fly away, leaving all their belongings behind. They would need things. Women always needed things.
Marjorie. She, too, would need things. He gathered three of the maids together and told them to pack Marjorie's things. "Her clothes," he said. "Her personal things."
And Stella's? Would Stella ever be found? What did Stella value? "How long, Persun? What shall we pack?"
"Never mind," he said in frustration. "Take a few sensible clothes for Marjorie and Stella, their jewelry and treasures, and leave it at that."
And perhaps it was all mere supposition, mere paranoia. Perhaps the Hippae would do nothing to Opal Hill at all. Perhaps the village would be safe.
And perhaps not. In panic he went back to the tell-me. "Roald Few has borrowed four cargo trucks from the port," his father said. "They're on their way. He agrees on the importance of saving the livestock."
Well then, it was not merely his own fear. Or, if it was, he had been successful in spreading it about. He scurried through the place to Marjorie's study, intent upon saving anything there that she might ever want again. He came face to face with the panels he had carved for her, a lady moving among the trees of a copse, sometimes clearly seen, sometimes hidden, her lovely face always slightly turned away. Like a dream, just out of reach. There were birds in the trees. He reached out to touch one of them, stroke one of them, wondering foolishly if there were time to cut the panels out and save them. He broke away with an exclamation. No time.
When he had gathered together what he could, he picked up Sebastian and those who were ready and drove the aircar directly to the hospital near the Port Hotel. The doctors carried Rigo away; Andrea, her sister, and Father Sandoval went to the port hotel.
Asmir was there. "Where's Eugenie?" Persun asked.
"I don't know. Wasn't she with you?" Asmir asked in return.
'This morning she wanted to come in to Commons."
"She told me she'd changed her mind. I just came to pic
k up some supplies."
Persun counted his passengers on his fingers and ran to ask them where Eugenie was. No one knew. He flew back to Opal Hill, anxious to use all the daylit hours. In the village the trucks were loading: people, livestock, necessary equipment. Another truck landed as he stood there. Sebastian was driving it.
"I can't find Eugenie," Persun yelled at him.
"His Excellency's woman? Isn't she in Commons? Didn't she go in with Asmir?"
"She didn't, Sebastian. She changed her mind."
"Ask Linea, over there. She took care of Eugenie."
Persun chased the indicated woman and asked. Linea didn't know. She hadn't seen Eugenie since early this morning. She thought Eugenie must be in her own house, or perhaps in the garden.
Persun ran back up the trail to the estancia, to Eugenie's house, cursing under his breath. She wasn't there. Soft pink curtains blew in the spring wind. The house smelled of flowers Persun Pollut had never seen. The woman wasn't there. He went out into the grass garden and searched for her, down this path and that, the mild spring airs moving above him and around him, the perfumes of the fragrant grasses like a drug in his nostrils.
He called, "Eugenie?" It did not seem a dignified thing to do, to walk about the gardens calling her by her first name, but he knew no other name to call her. It was what everyone called her. "Eugenie!"
From the village the trucks rose with a roar of engines. He went there once more, plodding. A few remaining people. A few remaining pigs, chickens, a lonely cow lowing at the sky. The sun, down in the west, burning its hot eye into his own
"Are they coming back?" he asked. "The trucks?"
"You don't think we planned to stay here with everyone gone, did you?" an old woman snapped at him. "What happened? No one seems to know, except that the Hippae are coming to slaughter us all in our beds."
Persun didn't answer. He was already on his way back to the house to try one last time, He went through the big house, room by room. She wasn't there. To her own house again. She wasn't there.
He did not think to go to the chapel. Why would he? The people of Commons had scant use for chapels. Some of them claimed religions, but they were not of edificial kinds.
He went out to the car, offered the old woman a seat in it, loaded her crate of chickens aboard, and took off once more, flying low as he cross-hatched the grass gardens, looking for Eugenie. Once at commons, he searched for her again, thinking perhaps she had been in one of the trucks.
Darkness came. "I have to go back," he cried to Sebastian, who had just returned from a final trip. "She has to be still out there."
"I'll go with you," the other said. "I've got everyone unloaded. They're all getting settled down in winter quarters." "Have you heard any news of His Excellency?" Sebastian shook his head. "No one's had time to ask. How was he hurt?"
"His legs were trampled. And he was struck on the head. He was breathing well, but he didn't move his legs at all. I think he may be paralyzed."
"They can fix that kind of injury."
"Some kinds they can fix." They lofted the car once more and headed it away from Commons toward Opal Hill. They had not gone far before they saw the fire, wings and curtains of fire, sweeping across the grasses and towering above the estancia.
"Ah, well then," murmured Persun. "So I was not a hysteric after all. Father said I might be."
"Are you glad of that?" Sebastian asked curiously, turning the car in a long curve so that he could look down on the blaze. "Or would you rather have been called a hysteric and Opal Hill still be whole? I saw the panels you carved in the lady's study. They were the best things I have seen in a long time. No, the best I have ever seen."
"I still have my hands," Persun said, looking at them, turning them over, thinking what might have happened to them if he hadn't been skittish as any old woman. "I can carve more." If Marjorie was safe, he could carve more. If they were for her.
"I thought the gardens were supposed to stop the fires."
"They do. Unless the fires are set and dragged through the gardens and carried into the buildings. As these were, Sebastian. As these were." He peered down at the ruin, biting back an exclamation. "Look! Sebastian. Look at the trail!"
Away from Opal Hill, toward the swamp forest, straight as an arrow, a trail trampled into the grasses as though ten thousand Hippae had marched there in files. The two looked at one another in horrified surmise.
"Do you suppose she's down there?" Sebastian whispered.
Persun nodded. "Yes. She is. Was. Somewhere."
"Shall we-"
"No. See there, in the flames. Hippae. There must be hundreds of them. Some dancing near the flames. Some going down that great trail. How many of them did it take to make that trail? And hounds, too. Every hound on Grass must be down there, all moving toward Commons. No. No, we can't go down. We'll come back tomorrow. When the fire burns out, we'll look. Maybe she got into the winter quarters. I hope she doesn't burn."
Eugenie didn't burn. The hounds that had swept through the place ahead of the flames had seen to that.
Commons was in a considerable uproar, busy with speculation and rumor. The housing of a hundred or so people was no great thing. The winter quarters were large enough to hold the entire population of Commons plus those of the villages, and only the very young among them found these underground halls and rooms at all new and frightening. The caverns had been here when men first came, but they had been enlarged and fitted out for human occupancy, and everyone over one Grassian year of age knew them well. The evacuated animals went into the winter barns. Though this year's cutting of hay had not begun, there was enough of last year's hay and grain to keep them. Feeding the people was no great thing either. They began using the winter kitchens with the ease of long practice.
Despite this ease, this familiarity, there was disquiet and anxiety both among those who had arrived and those who had welcomed them. The burning of an estancia was not a familiar occurrence. It had happened before, but that had been long ago, in their great-grandparents' time It was not something easy to comprehend or accept. When Persun Pollut brought news of the great trail toward the swamp-forest, anxiety deepened. Everyone knew the Hippae couldn't get through the forest, and yet... and yet, people wondered. They were uneasy, wondering if this event betokened mysterious dangers.
The unease spread even to Portside, where those occupied in serving and housing strangers became jittery. Saint Teresa and Ducky Johns were not immune to the common case of nerves. They met at the end of Pleasure Street and walked along Portside Road, Ducky bobbling and jiggling inside her great golden tent of a dress, Saint Teresa stalking beside her like a heron, long-legged and long-nosed to the point of caricature. He wore his usual garments: purple trousers tight at the knee but baggy elsewhere, and a swallow-tailed coat cut of jermot hide, a scaly leather imported through Semling from some desert planet at the end of nowhere. His bare cranium gleamed like steel in the blue lights of the port, and his great hands gestured as he spoke, never still for an instant.
"So... so what does it mean?" he asked. "Burning Opal Hill that way. There was no one there...." His hands circled, illustrating a search from the air, then swooped away, conveying frustration.
"One person," Ducky Johns corrected him. "That fancy woman of the ambassador's is missing."
"One person, then. But the Hippae dragged fire through the gardens and burned it. all of it. It's burning now." His fingers flickered like flames, drawing the scene on the air.
Ducky Johns nodded, the nod setting up wavelike motion which traveled down from her ears through all the waiting flesh below, a tidal jiggle, ending only at her ankles, where her tiny feet served as a check valve. "It's why I wanted to talk with you, Teresa. The things are obviously raging. Furious. Out of all control. You knew the ambassador killed some of them."
"I heard. First time that's ever happened, from what I hear."
"So far as I know, yes. Darenfeld wounded one, years and years ago, before the
Darenfeld estancia burned."
"I thought that was a summer fire. Lightning."
"So the bons say, but others say no. The bons pretended it was lightning and began to build grass gardens around themselves, but Roald Few says the Commons Chronicle called it what it was. Hippae, going rampageous."
He compressed thin lips into a tight line, more disturbed than he cared to admit. "Well, so! The bons are no concern of ours. If all of them got crisped tomorrow, it wouldn't make a whit of difference to custom, Ducky. They may think they're the pinnacle of creation, but we know different."
"Oh, it's not just them. It's this plague, too. We're hearing more and more of that."
"There's none here."
"So there isn't, which is strange on the face of it. I hear things. Asmir Tanlig has been around, asking this, asking that. Sebastian Mechanic has been around, digging here, digging there. Questions. Who's been sick. Who's died. Both of them work for the ambassador. So he's trying to find out something. I talked to Roald about it. He talked to some others, including some of us here in Portside who've heard what foreigners have to say. Seems there's plague everywhere but here. Hidden, though. Sanctity trying to keep the lid on it, but the word getting out, getting around."
