He did manage to choke out, “You never saw me.”
Churchward said, “You could never pass me in the dark. If I didn’t hear you, I’d smell you.”
Tempted by the sound of that cutting, rubefacient voice, Arpad almost chanced a throw in the dark with the knife. He regretted his missed opportunity to plunge the knife in again and again. But he couldn’t dare.
“I’m leaving,” he said. “Don’t try to stop me.”
“Stop you? I wouldn’t dream of it. Go and be damned. It’s an excellent idea. I told them they should never have wasted their sympathy on you. This simplifies matters. I’ll just tell them that you decamped in the night. I must say, I don’t mind being proven right about you, you little beggar. So much for the sentimentalists.”
Arpad’s teeth were set so hard against each other that a tooth chipped under the pressure, startling him. He would learn the power of words, he would, and use them as weapons to club and cut. He spat the fragment of tooth out, and then turned away.
He could hear Churchward’s laugh as he took a deep aching breath, but the breath was free. The breath was of cool clear night air, and the way was open. That was enough, even though, as he began to trot away along the side of the river, he could hear the insulting sound of Churchward making water.
Nobody followed him. That was good, even though it meant only that nobody cared.
By the time he was out of sight of the fire glow around the first hill curve, the camp, the scoutship, Churchward and the Ship no longer existed for him. Erased. This wasn’t New Albion, but it would do. The last two years had never happened. Life was beginning again.
The windhovers rode the sun and wind like so many bird-shaped kites on leading strings, floating high above the hills. But were they free? Could they be pulled back to earth, reeled in at will? Who were they? Who were they? Arpad thought he knew.
The hills were eternal. The hills were home. Arpad walked through the green-brown short grass that covered the fingers and fists, elbows and shoulders. The grass whispered against his legs. He had an eye for country, a talent for finding his terrain, a pace to carry him forever, and a sense of direction that could take him across the miles and bring him home again. His spirits were high. The country was a delight. He felt at home. He felt as though he were home again.
These past two years had been his punishment for dreaming himself a Shippie. He’d taken pride in a father who was better because he had once traveled between the stars. He had felt set apart.
And he had been properly damned for his pride. He had been kidnapped and carried off to the Ship of his father, Moskalenka. Magicked and turned into a windhover.
Windhovers always come to earth again. They flit and fly, but in the end they always touch down again.
What plans did they have for Arpad? To prove themselves worthy, the windhovers have a puberty rite. They drop their children on a colony planet to survive like a common Mudeater for a month. They give them training first, but if the fledglings fail, small loss to the nest. It was from his Survival Class, here on Aurora for three days under the eye of its flightmaster, young Mr. Churchward, that Arpad had taken his leave.
Why wait another year? All that one year could offer was the opportunity to become a full-fledged kite—or to take up real life once more. He could do that now. He was doing that now.
This wasn’t New Albion, to be sure, but there was no way to return to New Albion. Windhovers never light in the same place twice—they sail above life. But Aurora would do. It was solid earth. It was real.
Arpad could make a life here. And if all went well, in time he might discover a way to clip wings. Churchward might yet learn what was the real world.
At sundown he stood at the top of a hill looking down on a cluster of wattle-and-daub buildings set in a valley bowl. They were a far cry from the sturdy board buildings he remembered from home. The buildings, thatched-roofed, looking like so many broad-capped mushrooms in the twilight below, squatted in the bare brown dirt. The lowering sun colored the far rising hillside a dull red. A haze of smoke hung above the roofs in the evening cool, and children raced in and out among the houses. He could hear them calling.
Arpad paused on the hillcrest, a stranger, a thin boy in red shirt and brown shorts carrying a pack on his back. Then he found the well-beaten path that took the easiest course to the bottom of the hill and made his way down to the gathering of huts. He was hungry and tired, but here he was. Finding. Found.
When he was halfway down the hill, he was seen by the children, who piped and pointed and then disappeared. One moment there were people to be seen in the village. The next, there was only smoke.
But when he reached the bottom of the hill, there was a three-man delegation walking toward him. Two of the men carried spears, short-handled, leaf-bladed. The three walked in a fashion that gave them an over-precise, affected appearance to Arpad’s eye. When they stepped, it was on the balls of their feet first, rather than down on the heel like most people. All three men wore knee-length pants and loose shirts and beards without mustaches. Arpad touched his face. He had no beard yet. No mustache, either.
Two of the men wore flat-crowned hats. The one without a hat was also without shoes, as though he had been stretched out for an after-dinner snooze in his mushroom and had only had time to grab a spear and come out to greet company. Arpad didn’t feel he rated spears, and he wondered what he should do to give a properly peaceful impression.
They brought a variety of odors with them from the village—smoke, food, and the gallimaufrous smell of strange people. When Arpad was close enough, he stopped. They continued to move, too close, looming, uncomfortably close, frighteningly close. Their spears looked all too real and deadly. He would have bolted if he hadn’t been so tired and hungry.
The man without a spear, the middle man, the youngest but clearly the leader, said flatly and brusquely, “What do you want, boy?”
“My name is Arpad Margolin. I need—” He stopped then, taken aback by the sounds of shock and dismay that the spear carriers made.
The one without a hat said, “Have you no sense of propriety? Oh, the shame! What your ancestors must think of you!”
The leader held up a silencing hand, and then in the same flat tone asked, “What do you want?”
His accent was strange but intelligible.
Arpad tried again. “They’ve been keeping me on one of the Ships for the last two years. Moskalenka. I’ve left now. I’ve run away and I’m…looking for somebody who will take me in.”
He gave them an anxious pleading look. He was, after all, only a thirteen-year-old boy. He might walk a full day into the unknown. He might make totals of his enemies and subtract and divide them in his mind. But his resources were limited.
“One of the Great Ships?”
“Yes.” Arpad nodded. Then he said, “Yes, sir.”
“And you left them?”
“Yes, sir.”
The three looked at him and then at each other. Then the leader pinched his nose between thumb and knuckle, snuffled, and pursed his lips judiciously. He rubbed his chin and then he said, “Stay here,” and beckoned to the other two.
They moved off about ten feet and huddled together in close conference. Arpad caught only fragments of the conversation. Something about, “We know his name. He’s committed us.” And “He is wearing red. Maybe it would be lucky to listen.” But none of it made sense to Arpad. It was just words.
At last they broke their huddle and surrounded Arpad again.
The leader nodded and said, “All right. You can stay. We will listen to your litany. We’ll have the accounting in an hour. For now, go along with this Bill.”
He pointed at the hatless, shoeless man. The man nodded and grinned, but it wasn’t quite a friendly expression. It reminded Arpad of the state of his stomach.
“Can I have something to eat?” he asked. He was sorry he asked it if it jeopardized his position, and he was ready to say so. Otherwise he really
meant it.
“Go on,” said the leader. “Go on.”
And Arpad uncertainly trailed after Bill. Bill was a big, balding, broad-nosed, broad-shouldered, splay-footed fellow. He walked on precisely placed toes through the village. Arpad walked behind, at first on his heels as he was used to, then in an imitation of Bill. The effect was approximately the same as he would have achieved walking on bare feet over sharp pebbles. Arpad wasn’t sure he had it right, but he wanted to please.
Bill ducked his head at the door of one of the mushrooms and disappeared inside. Arpad looked left, looked right, then followed him inside, ducking under the thatch.
There was only a single room inside the hut. It was a theater stage, a basically empty area that with the aid of props might be turned to any purpose. The property boxes were precisely placed around the room. The floor was hard-packed dirt broken by a fire pit and a larder hole.
A woman past her youth was scraping food out of a black earthen pot onto a large limber leaf. She set the pot down and began to fold the leaf like a cloth. Food. Arpad’s mouth watered.
Lying on a mat at the right of the door was an old man, head on a pillow, bird-eyes sparkling. His dirty bare feet stuck out of the cover. Almost automatically as he entered, big Bill kicked the sole of the old man’s right foot hard enough to make him suck for breath and pull both feet out of range. A resentful kick, a spiteful kick.
“Hold on with the food there,” Bill said to the woman. “The boy is hungry.”
Arpad nodded.
The woman found a small bowl and shoved some of the suspicious mess from her leaf into it with her hand. She passed it to Arpad with a smile that lit her face briefly and then was gone with an apologetic nod. There was no eating implement. Bill brought out a long piece of bread, looked for a knife, and then started to tear off a hunk. Arpad drew his all-purpose throat-cutter and handed it over, receiving a cut of bread in return.
Bill took a piece, too, shared a swipe into Arpad’s bowl and stuffed bread and mess into his mouth. He seemed to be harboring a secret excitement. His face kept almost twitching into a grin.
He continued to hold the knife for a long moment, testing the heft and balance. Around the food, he said, “Are all knives on your Ship of this quality? This is a fine knife.” But he didn’t seem inclined to keep it. He admired it and handed it back. And almost grinned.
Arpad began to eat. The food was strange in taste and stranger in texture. He might have had difficulty in getting it down if he had not already had the experience of learning to eat and like the range of food he had found aboard the Ship, from bland and mechanical stuff produced in vats to exotica from a dozen colony planets. This mess was comparatively palatable. He only had trouble with the lumps.
As Arpad was eating, Bill beckoned to the woman of the hut. She picked up a pot and they stepped outside behind Arpad’s back. There they spoke to each other excitedly for a moment and then their voices died away.
Arpad began to have the insistent feeling of being watched. Finally he turned abruptly and found the old man sitting up on his pallet and watching him with small, overly bright eyes. Arpad had forgotten about him.
He fluttered a hand weakly at Arpad. “Come here, boy.”
Arpad didn’t want to. The old man was thin and bony and hungry-looking, and Arpad didn’t want to share. The old man looked ill, and Arpad didn’t want to catch anything strange.
The old man said, “Come over here and talk.”
With an unadmitted, unemitted sigh, Arpad rose and crossed the room. He would do the things he didn’t want to do. He would adapt. He would do what was done here. He sat down by the old man, but he carefully kept his bowl and the remainder of his meal in his farther hand.
“Don’t be so standoffish,” the old man said.
Reluctantly Arpad skrinched closer, up to the very edge of the thick grass mat. That wasn’t close enough for the old man. He heaved himself halfway off the pallet the better to bathe Arpad in his sour old breath. Arpad felt overwhelmed. He moved his bowl and then shifted after it.
The old man edged after. “What are you doing here, boy?” He scrabbled at Arpad with a hand. “Tell me who you are.”
The sound of the old man’s yells of outrage brought big bald Bill charging into the hut. Arpad was ducking away. The old man was ineffectually trying to strike him, flailing at the air. The bowl of food lay spilled in the dirt.
“What’s going on here?” Bill asked as he boosted the old man back onto his pallet with the tip of his toe. He shook an admonishing finger at him.
In indignation, as though to vindicate himself, the old man said, “He told me his name! He told me his name!”
Arpad said, “But he asked me.”
“I never did! I only asked who he was and what he was doing. I didn’t ask his name. I’m too old to take on any more debts. You know I wouldn’t do that.”
Bill looked down at him with an expression that said that much as he might like to believe the old man, he wasn’t really sure that he did. Sneaky old men are capable of almost anything. But then he reluctantly acknowledged that perhaps this time, just this once, it might not have been his fault. Well, not entirely.
Bill turned to Arpad and shook his head, “You just don’t know any better, I guess. Coming from a Ship the way you do, I guess you wouldn’t. Nothing I ever heard about the Ships made me think they had any sense of what is fitting. You seem like a good boy at heart, and I don’t think you mean any harm. We forgive you. You’ll learn what’s proper.”
He turned to the old man and said somewhat resentfully, “What difference would one debt more or less make to you now? We probably don’t owe him anything, and maybe he’ll take over some of your debts.”
The old man’s eyes brightened. “He will?”
Arpad said, “But I don’t understand. Why shouldn’t I tell you my name? You told me your name.”
Bill managed to look both puzzled and affronted. “I never did. I wouldn’t do a thing like that.”
“You said your name was Bill.”
He tried to confine his laugh, and it came out in an amused snort. “Bill isn’t my name,” Bill said. “You really don’t know anything, do you? Bill is the Village Name. We’re all Bill until we decide about you. Then, if all goes well, you’ll be Bill, too.”
All of the men in the village were assembled in the largest mushroom, fifty men named Bill sitting cross-legged in the dirt of the Council Hut, when Arpad was brought in for judgment by the Bill that he knew best. His Bill had put on his shoes this time, but left his spear behind. Like all the rest of the Bills, he was wearing his flat-crowned hat, and he’d produced an extra for Arpad so that the boy could make as positive an impression as possible.
It was dark outside, and a bright fire burned in the center of the circle of men. No women were present. The leader waved Arpad to a place at the center of the circle, close by the fire.
“Stand there, boy, where we can all see and hear you,” the leader said. “Look him over well. Turn around, boy. Does anyone have objection to hearing his name?”
The fifty Bills were silent.
“There you are, boy. We’ve talked things over among us, and we’ve decided to let you tell us who you are. Are you willing to trade names, accepting all consequences, debting and paying as one of us?”
“May I say who I am now?” Arpad asked, and he heard someone murmur, “The boy is well brought up.”
With food in his stomach, some food, Arpad felt less tired and less helpless, but he still had no clear idea of what was happening. He wasn’t sure that he wanted to accept all consequences, or he wouldn’t have been if he could have thought about it, but now, in the middle of things, he could only let things happen as they would and make his decisions later.
Arpad said, “I don’t really understand your customs. Why can you tell your name some times and not others?”
The leader looked puzzled as though he were being asked to put things into words that had nev
er before required explanation. He seemed overwhelmed in his struggle to work out a proper answer.
At last he said, “Well, if you know a man’s name, you have to discover whether you owe him anything or not. Naturally. So you both have to agree that you are willing to accept the burden of each other’s names. I mean, that’s only right, isn’t it?”
Arpad nodded. He supposed it was so, though he didn’t see the point where he was concerned. He knew he hadn’t ever seen any of these people before. What could he possibly owe them?
“Tell us your name, then.”
“My name is Arpad Margolin,” he said, and stopped.
The leader said, “Go on.”
“Go on?”
“What about the rest? Recite your generations. Tell us your family.”
“Well, my father was named Henry Margolin. He was from Moskalenka, but they put him out. My mother was from New Albion. She was named Nesta Hansard. I don’t know if she’s still alive. My father died.”
He stopped again.
“Don’t you know your family?” the leader asked, and the fifty Bills shook their heads. “Can’t you name them all in their generations?”
Arpad echoed the Bills with his head.
“How very odd. Our children know their generations to the founding of Aurora.” The leader shook his head, too, and thought. At last he said, “Well, let’s see if we can find a way around.”
He questioned Arpad shrewdly. It helped that New Albion had been settled after Aurora and no one there present had ever heard of the place. It helped, too, that Moskalenka was not the Ship that had carried men to Aurora.
“Do you have any relatives aboard Jaunzemis?”
Arpad shook his head. “As far as I know, I don’t have relatives on any other Ship. People don’t seem to cross from one Ship to another much. It takes permission.”
“I guess that’s all, then,” the leader said. He polled the circle formally. “Does anybody here present claim or acknowledge debt or obligation?”
Farewell to Yesterday's Tomorrow Page 7
