The People of the Wind

by Poul Anderson

  “You wouldn’t talk like that to — your father, a brother—” And you shouldn’t feel that way, either. Never. Estrus or no. Lonely, maybe; dreamy, yes; but not like some sweating trull in the bed of some cheap hotel room. Not you, Eyath.

  “True, it’d be improper talk in Stormgate. I used to wonder if I shouldn’t marry into a less strict choth. Vodan, though — Anyhow, Arinnian, dear, I can tell you anything. Can’t I?”

  “Yes.” After all, I’m not really an Ythrian.

  “We discussed it later, he and I,” she said. “Marriage, I mean. No use denying, children would be a terrible handicap at this stage. But we fly well together; and our parents have been nudging us for a long, time, it’d be so good an alliance between houses. We’ve wondered if, maybe, if we stayed hriccal the first few years—”

  “That doesn’t work too well, does it?” he said as her voice trailed off, through the bloodbeat in his ears. “That is, uh, continual sex relations may not be how Ythrians reinforce pair bonds, but that doesn’t mean sex has no importance. If you separate every lovetime, you, you, well, you’re rejecting each other, arent you? Why not, uh, contraception?”

  “No.”

  He knew why her race, almost if not quite uniformly, spurned that. Children — the strong parental instinct of both mates — were what kept them together. If small wings closed around you and a small head snuggled down alongside your keelbone, you forgot the inevitable tensions and frustrations of marriage as much as if you were a human who had just happily coupled.

  “We could postpone things till I’ve finished my studies and his business is on the wing,” Eyath said. Arinnian remembered that Vodan, in partnership with various youths from Stormgate, Many Thermals, and The Tarns, had launched a silvicultural engineering firm. “But if war comes — kaah, he’s in the naval reserve—”

  Her free arm went around his shoulder, a blind gesture. He leaned his weight on an elbow so he could reach beneath the wings to embrace her stiff body. And he murmured to her, his sister since they both were children, what comfort he was able.

  In the morning they felt more cheerful. It was not in Ythrian nature to brood — not even as a bad pun, they giving live birth — and bird-humans had tried to educate themselves out of the habit. Today, apart from a few retainers on maintenance duty, Lythran’s household would fly to that mountain where the regional Khruath met. On the way they would be joined by other Stormgate families; arrived, they would find other choths entirely. However bleak the occasion of this gathering was, some of the color, excitement, private business, and private fun would be there that pervaded the regular assemblies.

  And the dawn was clear and a tailwind streamed.

  A trumpet called. Lythran swung from the top of his tower. Folk lifted their wings until the antlibranch slits beneath stood agape, purple from blood under the oxygen-drinking tissues. The wings clapped back down, and back on high; the Ythrians thundered off the ground, caught an updraft, and rode it into formation. Then they flew eastward over the crags.

  Arinnian steered close to Eyath. She flashed him a smile and broke into song. She had a beautiful voice — it could nearly be named soprano — which turned the skirls and gutturals of Planha into a lilt. What she cataracted forth on the air was a traditional carol, but it was for Arinnian because he had rendered it into Anglic, though he always felt that his tricks of language had failed to convey either the rapture or the vision.

  “Light that leaps from a sun still sunken

  hails the hunter at hover,

  washes his wings in molten morning,

  startles the stars to cover.

  Blue is the bell of hollow heaven,

  rung by a risen blowing.

  Wide lie woodlands and mountain meadows,

  great and green with their growing.

  But — look, oh, look! —

  a red ray struck

  through tattered mist.

  A broadhorn buck

  stands traitor-kissed.

  The talons crook.

  “Tilt through tumult of wakened wind-noise,

  whining, whickering, whirly;

  slip down a slantwise course of currents.

  Ha, but the hunt comes early!

  Poise on the pinions, take the target

  there in the then of swooping —

  Thrust on through by a wind-wild wingbeat,

  stark the stabber comes stooping.

  The buck may pose

  for one short breath

  before it runs

  from whistling death.

  The hammer stuns.

  The talons close.

  “Broad and bright is the nearing noontide.

  Drawn to dreamily drowsing,

  shut-eyed in shade he sits now, sated.

  Suddenly sounds his rousing.

  Cool as the kiss of a ghost, then gusty,

  rinsed by the rainfall after,

  breezes brawl, and-their forest fleetness

  lives in leafage like, laughter.

  Among the trees

  the branches shout

  and groan and throw

  themselves about

  It’s time to go.

  The talons ease.

  “Beat from boughs up to row through rainstreams.

  Thickly thutters the thunder.

  Hailwinds harried by lash of lightning

  roar as they rise from under.

  Blind in the black of clawing cloudbanks,

  wins he his way, though slowly,

  breaks their barrier, soars in sunlight.

  High is heaven and holy.

  The glow slants gold

  caressingly

  across and through

  immensity

  of silent blue.

  The talons fold.”

  II

  Avalon rotates in 11 hours, 22 minutes, 12 seconds, on an axis tilted 21° from the normal to the orbital plane. Thus Gray, at about 43° N., knows short nights always; in summer the darkness seems scarcely a blink. Daniel Holm wondered if that was a root of his weariness.

  Probably not. He was born here. His ancestors had lived here for centuries; they arrived with Falkayn. If individuals could change their circadian rhythms — as he’d had to do plenty often in his spacefaring days — surely a race could. The medics said that settling down in a gravity field only 80 percent of Terra’s made more severe demands than that on the organism; its whole fluid balance and kinesthesia must readjust. Besides, what humans underwent was trivial compared to what their fellow colonists did. The Ythrians had had to shift a whole breeding cycle to a different day, year, weight, climate, diet, world. No wonder their first several generations had been of low fertility. Nevertheless, they survived; in the end, they flourished.

  Therefore it was nonsense to suppose a man got tired from anything except overwork — and, yes, age, in spite of antisenescence. Or was it? Really? As you grew old, as you neared your dead and all who had gone before them, might your being not yearn back to its earliest beginnings, to a manhome you had never seen, but somehow remembered?

  Crock! Come off that! Who said eighty-four is old? Holm yanked a cigar from his pocket and snapped off the end. The inhalation which lit it was unnecessarily hard. He was of medium height, and stocky in the olive tunic and baggy trousers worn by human members of the Ythrian armed services. The mongoloid side of his descent showed in round head, wide face, high cheekbones, a fullness about the lips and the blunt nose; the caucasoid was revealed in gray eyes, a skin that would have been pale did he not spend his free time outdoors hunting or gardening, and the hair that was grizzled on his scalp but remained crisp and black on his chest. Like most men on the planet, he suppressed his beard.

  He was wading into the latest spate of communications his aides had passed on to him, when the intercom buzzed and said: “First Marchwarden Ferune wishes discussion.”

  “Sure!” Holm’s superior was newly back from Ythri. The man reached for a two-way plate, withdrew his hand
, and said, “Why not in the flesh? I’ll be right there.”

  He stumped from his office. The corridor beyond hummed and bustled — naval personnel, civilian employees of the Lauran admiralty — and overloaded the building’s air system till the odors of both species were noticeable, slightly acrid human and slightly smoky Ythrian. The latter beings were more numerous, in reversal of population figures for Avalon. But then, a number were here from elsewhere in the Domain, especially from the mother world, trying to help this frontier make ready in the crisis.

  Holm forced himself to call greetings right and left as he went. His affability had become a trademark whose value he recognized. At first it was genuine, he thought.

  The honor guard saluted and admitted him to Ferune’s presence. (Holm did not tolerate time-wasting ceremoniousness in his department; but he admitted its importance to Ythrians.) The inner room was typical: spacious and sparsely furbished, a few austere decorations, bench and desk and office machinery adapted to ornithoid requirements. Rather than a transparency in the wall, there was a genuine huge window open on garden-scented breezes and a downhill view of Gray and the waters aglitter beyond.

  Ferune had added various offplanet souvenirs and a bookshelf loaded with folio copies of the Terran classics that he read, in three original languages, for enjoyment. A smallish, tan-feathered male, he was a bit of an iconoclast. His choth, Mistwood, had always been one of the most progressive on Avalon, mechanized as much as a human community and, in consequence, large and prosperous. He had scant patience to spare for tradition, religion, any conservatism. He endured a minimum of formalities because he must, but never claimed to like them.

  Bouncing from his perch, he scuttled across the floor and shook hands Terran style. “Khr-r-r, good to see you, old rascal!” He spoke Planha; Ythrian throats are less versatile than human (though of course no human can ever get the sounds quite right) and he wanted neither the nuisance of wearing a vocalizer nor the grotesquerie of an accent.

  “How’dit go?” Holm asked.

  Ferune grimaced. But that is the wrong word. His feathers were not simply more intricate than those of Terran birds, they were more closely connected to muscles and nerve endings, and their movements constituted a whole universe of expression forever denied to man. Irritation, fret, underlying anger and dismay, rippled across his body.

  “Huh.” Holm found a chair designed for him, sank down, and drew tobacco pungency over his tongue. “Tell.”

  Foot-claws clicked on lovely-grained wood. Back and forth Ferune paced. “I’ll be dictating a full report,” he said. “In brief, worse than I feared. Yes, they’re scrambling to establish a unified command and shove the idea of action under doctrine into every captain. But they’ve no dustiest notion of how to go about it”

  “God on a stick,” Holm exclaimed, “we’ve been telling them for the past five years! I thought — oh, bugger, communication’s so vague in this so-called navy, I’d nothing to go on but impressions, and I guess I got the wrong ones — but you know I thought, we thought a halfway sensible reorganization was in progress.”

  “It was, but it moulted. Overweening pride, bickering, haggling about details. We Ythrians — our dominant culture, at least — don’t fit well into anything tightly centralized.” Ferune paused. “In fact,” he went on, “the most influential argument against trading our separate, loosely coordinated planetary commands for a Terran-model hierarchy has been that Terra may have vastly greater forces, but these need to control a vastly greater volume of space than the Domain; and if they fight us they’ll be at the end of such a long line of communication that unified action is self-defeating.”

  “Huh! Hasn’t it occurred to those mudbrains on Ythri, the Imperium isn’t stupid? If Terra hits, it won’t run the war from Terra, but from a sector close to our borders.”

  “We’ve found little sign of strength being marshaled in nearby systems.”

  “Certainly not!” Holm slammed a fist on the arm of his chair. “Would they give their preparations away like that? Would you? They’ll assemble in space, parsecs from any star. Minimal traffic between the gathering fleet and whatever planets our scouts can sneak close to. In a few cubic light-years, they can hide power to blow us out of the plenum.”

  “You’ve told me this a few times,” Ferune said dryly. “I’ve passed it on. To scant avail.” He stopped pacing. For a while, silence dwelt in the room. The yellow light of Laura cast leaf shadows on the floor. They quivered.

  “After all,” Ferune said, “our methods did save us during the Troubles.”

  “You can’t compare war lords, pirates, petty conquerors, barbarians who’d never have gotten past their stratospheres if they hadn’t happened to ’ve acquired practically self-operating ships — you can’t compare that bloody-clawed rabble to Imperial Terra.”

  “I know,” Ferune replied; “The point is, Ythrian methods served us well because they accord with Ythrian nature. I’ve begun to wonder, during this last trip, if an attempt to become poor copies of our rivals may not be foredoomed. The attempt’s being made, understand — you’ll get details till they run back out of your gorge — but could be that all we’ll gain is confusion. I’ve decided that while Avalon must make every effort to cooperate, Avalon must at the same time expect small help from outside.”

  Again fell stillness. Holm looked at his superior, associate, friend of years; and not for the first time, it came to him what strangers they two were.

  He found himself regarding Ferune as if he had never met an Ythrian before.

  Standing, the Marchwarden was about 120 centimeters high from feet to top of crest; a tall person would have gone to 140 or so, say up to the mid-breast of Holm. Since the body tilted forward, its actual length from muzzle through tail was somewhat more. It massed perhaps 20 kilos; the maximum for the species was under 30.

  The head looked sculptured. It bulged back from a low brow to; hold the brain. A bony ridge arched down in front to a pair of nostrils, nearly hidden by feathers, which stood above a flexible mouth full of sharp white fangs and a purple tongue. The jaw, underslung and rather delicate, merged with a strong neck. That face was dominated by its eyes, big and amber, and by the dense, scalloped feather-crest that rose from the brow, lifted over the head, and ran half the length of the neck: partly for aerodynamic purposes, partly as a helmet on the thin skull.

  The torso thrust outward in a great keelbone, which at its lower end was flanked by the arms. These were not unlike the arms of a skinny human, in size and appearance; they lacked plumage, and the hide was dark yellow on Ferune’s, brown or black in other Ythrian subspecies. The hands were less manlike. Each bore three fingers between two thumbs; each digit possessed one more joint than its Terran equivalent and a nail that might better be called a talon. The wrist sprouted a dew claw on its inner surface. Those hands were large in proportion to the arms, and muscles played snakishly across them. They had evolved as ripping tools, to help the teeth. The body ended in a fan-shaped tail of feathers, rigid enough to help support it when desired.

  At present, though, the tremendous wings were folded down to work as legs. In the middle of either leading edge, a “knee” joint bent in reverse; those bones would lock together in flight. From the “ankle,” three forward toes and one rearward extended to make a foot; aloft, they curled around the wing to strengthen and add sensitivity. The remaining three digits of the ancestral ornithoid had fused to produce the alatan bone which swept backward for more than a meter. The skin over its front half was bare, calloused, another surface to rest on.

  Ferune being male, his crest rose higher than a female’s, and it and the tail were white with black trim; on her they would have been of uniform dark lustrousness. The remainder of him was lighter-colored than average for his species, which ranged from gray-brown through black.

  “Khr-r-r-r.” The throat-noise yanked Holm out of his reverie. “You stare.”

  “Oh. Sorry.” To a true-born carnivore, that was more rud
e than it was among omnivorous humans. “My mind wandered.”

  “Whither?” Ferune asked, mild again.

  “M-m-m… well — well, all right. I got to thinking how little my breed really counts for in the Domain. I figure maybe we’d better assume everything’s bound to be done Ythrian-style, and make the best of that.”

  Ferune uttered a warbling “reminder” note and quirked certain feathers. This had no exact Anglic equivalent, but the intent could be translated as: “Your sort aren’t the only non-Ythrians under our hegemony. You aren’t the only ones technologically up to date.” Planha was in fact not as laconic as its verbal conventions made it seem.

  “N-no,” Holm mumbled. “But we… in the Empire, we’re the leaders. Sure, Greater Terra includes quite a few home worlds and colonies of nonhumans; and a lot of individuals from elsewhere have gotten Terran citizenship; sure. But more humans are in key positions of every kind than members of any other race — fireflare, probably of all the other races put together.” He sighed and stared at the glowing end of his cigar. “Here in the Domain, what are men? A handful on this single ball. Oh, we get around, we do well for ourselves, but the fact won’t go away that we’re a not terribly significant minority in a whole clutch of minorities.”

  “Do you regret that?” Ferune asked quite softly.

  “Huh? No. No. I only meant, well, probably the Domain has too few humans to explain and administer a human-type naval organization. So better we adjust to you than you to us. It’s unavoidable anyhow. Even on Avalon, where there’re more of us, it’s unavoidable.”

  “I hear a barrenness in your tone and see it in your eyes,” Ferune said, more gently than was his wont. “Again you think of your son who has gone bird, true? You fear his younger brothers and sisters will fare off as he did.”

  Holm gathered strength to answer. “You know I respect your ways. Always have, always will. Nor am I about to forget how Ythri took my people in when Terra had rotted away beneath them. It’s just… just… we rate respect too. Don’t we?”

  Ferune moved forward until he could lay a hand on Holm’s thigh. He understood the need of humans to speak their griefs.