They Fly at Ciron

by Samuel R. Delany

  They had reached the center of the field.

  “If he is at home.” Rahm looked around. He cupped his hands to shout. “Ienbar, I am here! Where art thou?”

  On the meadow’s far side, a door in a board wall between two trees flew open. A figure lurched out. White hair and white beard jutted in small braids. “Rahm!” the old man shouted and began to rush bandy-legged across the grass. Round his neck jangled half a dozen thongs tied with animal teeth. His long arms were heavy with copper bracelets. At his waist, a leather apron was hemmed with metal pieces worked with symbols and designs. Metal circled his ankle above a skinny foot. Several huge brass hoops hung from his ears, their thickness distending pierced lobe and rim.

  Ienbar threw his clinking arms around Rahm, stepped back, then embraced him again. “My son!” he said, in a voice cracked and crackling, then stepped back, while Rahm steadied his scrawny shoulders in his big hands. “Thou hast come safely from thy wandering.” Turning to Naä, the old man seized her wrist. “And thou hast come too, my daughter, to sing and play for me. It is good to see thee this fine day.”

  “It’s always good to see you, Ienbar,” Naä said. “Just like it’s good to have Rahm back with us.”

  “Come, the both of you,” Ienbar declared. “Well, boy, where hast thou been and what didst thou see?”

  In the hut, they sat on mats Rahm tossed across small benches, while Ienbar heated his pot. Shelves about them were stacked with bones and parchment scrolls, bits of beautiful uncut stone, lengths of painted wood, dried lizards, stuffed bats, and the mounted skeletons of various ground birds and field creatures. Some of the village children still entered here with fear—but to Rahm it had been his home since the death of his parents when he was fifteen.

  “… what a dream!” Ienbar chuckled. “What a dream, indeed! Yes, I recall that river, from the first years thou hadst moved in with me here, I do—” Ienbar grinned at a reproving look from Rahm. “Well, I do! Sometimes, I think, thy sleeping corner still smells of it—and I’ve told thee before, I don’t mind. I rather like it. A bit of dung, a bit of urine, fresh turned earth, and new cut grass—those are good smells!” Ienbar broke a small bone and, on the pot’s rim, tapped the marrow into the broth. “The smells I don’t like, now—charred meat, rotten vegetables, and the stench of clogged water that should be running free.” Ienbar turned to serve Naä, then Rahm; for himself, at last, he filled a third bowl. “Well, well, what a dream, what a stream… !”

  Rahm took one sip; then, bowl between his knees, he began on the rest of his wander. But when he reached the encounter with the Myetran, the old man’s face wrinkled. Ienbar put his soup on the hearth-flags by his big-knuckled toes with their thickened nails, sat back, and moved his tongue about in his mouth without opening his lips.

  Questioningly, Rahm lowered black brows. “Why art thou and Naä so concerned about these Myetrans?”

  Ienbar sucked his gums. “Oh, sometimes one hears stories—”

  Naä interrupted: “I’ll tell you a story, Rahm—” She looked across her bowl at the old man. “Ienbar—in Calvicon, we hear stories too. And the stories of Myetra were never good. I told you about my brother’s friend, Rahm? Well, he said that his powergun was from Myetra. And he told stories of the destruction that went on there—between man and man, between one race and another. You have your flying neighbors at Hi-Vator? Well, Myetra is on the sea—and once there were people who lived and swam in the water, and could breathe under it like fish do in the ponds and the stream in the quarry. But Myetra fought them; and made slaves of them; and finally killed them. And there are no more water folk around the Myetran shore. That’s the story my brother’s friend told us. Then, one day, long after he had told us this, my brother’s friend disappeared—and the tale that came back was that he and another man had gotten angry at one another, gotten into a fight, and finally my brother’s friend had used the powergun to kill him. He disappeared the next day, and we never saw him again.”

  “To kill…?” Rahm asked.

  “Yes, there have been stories of such things before.” Ienbar nodded.

  “To frighten a Winged One, yes. But why to kill—and another man? Human beings do not kill each other. Thou killest a goat to roast it, an ox to butcher it. But not a human being …”

  “If they come by here,” Ienbar said, “we must keep out of their way—”

  “But this did not seem to be a brutal man that I met—not a man who would kill. He frightened away the Winged One. He spoke to me as to a friend.”

  “That is a good sign, I suppose. Perhaps there’s nothing to fear.” Ienbar shrugged, clinking, to pick up his bowl and stare across it at the flames that, because of the open window, were so diminished by the Çironian sun. “Perhaps… after all, it is only a single soldier wandering through the country—”

  “I think that’s what he was,” Rahm said, and raised his bowl to drink. “Yes,” he said between sips. “That is what he was.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Naä said, less confidently. Then she swung the harp to her lap to pluck a run on the lower strings.

  CHAPTER III

  RAHM slept deeply, one hand low on his belly. His lids showed white crescents between black lashes. Outside the shack the air cooled. For a while, despite the warmth, it seemed a light rain might come; but at last, without a drop’s falling, the moon’s curve came out, as thin as what showed of Rahm’s eyes.

  The clouds moved away, and the night air dried in the new moon light as if it had been full sun.

  Then sound jabbed into sleep.

  It grew till it ripped sleep apart—and Rahm sat upright, to smash his hands’ heels against his head, then again, trying to find his ears to cover them… against something he could not, for this moment, distinguish between pain and sound.

  Ienbar leaned against the fireplace, shaking, his mouth opening, closing. His arm flailed about—but the clinking of his bracelets was lost in the wailing that filled Rahm’s ears with pressure enough to burst them.

  Rahm lurched to his feet and staggered to the door, pulling it open. The sound—because it was a sound—came from across the village. As Rahm stepped outside, it became a booming voice:

  SURRENDER, PEOPLE OF ÇIRON!

  SURRENDER TO THE FORCES OF MYETRA!

  Then silence.

  The absence of sound stung Rahm’s ears.

  He tried to blink the water out of his eyes.

  The wailing began again. Anticipating pain, Rahm stepped back into the doorway as the voice churned through the darkness:

  PEOPLE OF ÇIRON!

  SURRENDER TO THE FORCES OF MYETRA!

  Behind him, Ienbar was crying.

  Rahm sprinted out onto the path, shaking his head to clear it while he ran, to throw off the pain and the steady high hum, loud as any roaring, that covered all else. Leaves pulled away, and the village lights flickered. As he passed the first houses, he heard distraught voices. Certainly, no villager still slept!

  To the east, light flared. Then another flare. Another. Three lights fanned the dark, lowering, till they struck—blindingly—among the huts.

  Rahm’s first panicked thought was that the shacks would burst into fire under the glare. But apparently the lights were for illumination—or for the terror such illumination in the midst of darkness might bring.

  Rahm’s hearing had almost returned to normal.

  Somewhere drums thudded.

  Naä dreamed she had stumbled into her harp. Only it was huge. And as she tried to fight through the strings, they began to ring and sing and siren—they were all around her, her arms and head and legs, till the harp itself broke—and she woke, pulling herself out of her sleeping blankets and scrambling from under the lean-to’s edge, disoriented at the incredible sound.

  Qualt had his own house, but slept outside that night with his back against his wagon’s wheel, because the weather was warm and the night was easy.

  We won’t say that, as he lay there, breathing across
his large, loose fingers, relaxed before his face, he was actually dreaming of Rimgia. But when, earlier that night, he’d first lain down on this blanket to stretch out beside his garbage wagon, certainly he’d been thinking of her.

  For recently sleep had become an entrance into that part of him that was becoming aware that the shape and limit of his tenderness toward her could only be learned from the thought of her hand in his hands, his face against her belly, her lap against his cheek, his mouth against her neck. So when, later, the noise came, sirening in the dark, it tore him out of something comforting as a good dream—yet without sound or image or idea to it, as dreams have.

  Qualt woke, the sound around his head a solid thing. He rocked back, buttock banging the cart wheel. His hand went off the blanket, into grass and gravel. Scrabbling to sit, then to stand, he looked around the darkness. Gauzy light was cut off sharply by the familiar roof of his shack and two trees, rendered wholly strange. He took five steps, stopped—

  Then something ahead of him and above darkened the light, the sky—where was it? And how huge was it, and what—but before he could ask what it was, it struck him. Hard. And he threw his arms around it, embracing it to keep from falling. And, with it, he fell. It was flapping and huge, smelled and moved like a live thing, and was—as he pushed one hand out—surrounded on both sides by a vast, taut membrane, that suddenly ceased to be taut as he struggled in it. Flailing on the ground, in the dark and that single-note scream filling every crevice of the night (but which came neither from him nor from whatever he struggled with), Qualt had two simultaneous impressions. First was that he’d stumbled into someone else, the two of them had fallen on the ground, and now were rolling together. The second was that some astonishing beast, with a pelt and an animal scent, was covering him like a puma leapt down at him from a roof or the sky, to fight with him there by his garbage cart—though so far, Qualt realized, he’d been neither bitten nor clawed.

  Then the sound stopped—the chattering of twigs and leaves and small stones, because of his ears’ ringing, seemed to Qualt to make their noise now not beneath the two of them, but rather off in some ringing metal pan.

  The arms of the thing he fought—for it had arms—suddenly seized him—held him; restrained him. Qualt grasped it back. Distantly, he heard a breathing that, for a moment, he could not tell whether it was his or this other’s. Then he felt himself go limp, because suddenly that was easier to do than to keep fighting in the black. Then, a voice that was not like any Qualt had ever heard before, because it seemed like a child’s, high and breathy, said into his ear, only inches away, at the same time as Qualt scented the breath of a man who had been eating wild onions, so that, if anything, Qualt suddenly felt something familiar in all this strangeness and struggle—because Qualt himself had often walked through the lower mountains, munching the wild onion stalks that grew there:

  “Hi-Vator, yes—No! Pwew! Çiron, you—?”

  Rimgia dreamed that somebody, laughing hysterically, thrust a pole into her ear and out the other side of her head, then lifted her by it high into the air, over the glittering stream and she was afraid she would fall in, only it really hurt to have a pole that deep in your ear—

  The pole cracked. She screamed. But before she could fall, she woke in the hut, to that incredible sound. Her father, Kern, was already striding about—she saw his shape pass darkly before the hearth embers. Pushing up quickly, a moment later she knelt at Abrid’s pallet, shaking him.

  “What is it—ow! What—?”

  “Come on,” she insisted, surprised when she could not hear her own voice for the whining. “Come on!” she shouted, only realizing it was a shout from the feel in her throat. Kern had already opened the door, rushed out—

  Rahm neared the common, where men and women had begun to gather. As he sprinted up the side street, someone grabbed his arm, spun him back, hissed: “Rahm . . !” Then: “Where is Ienbar?”

  Bewildered, he stepped back.

  “For God’s sake, Rahm! Where’s Ienbar?”

  “Naä? He’s…at the burial meadow.”

  “Rahm. We have to leave—all of us. Right now!” “Leave? But why?”

  “The Myetrans are coming! Didn’t you hear them? They want you to surrender.”

  “I heard. Naä, what does this ‘surrender’ mean—”

  “Oh, Rahm… !” Then, suddenly, she was running away into the dark.

  Puzzled, Rahm turned back to the gathering in the common.

  A few people still dug forefingers in their ears. The drums were louder. From the eastern fields another light struck. Something—a long line of somethings—was moving toward the common. The sweeping beams threw shadows over the beets, the grain, the kale, all bending in the night wind.

  Children and mothers and uncles and cousins looked at one another.

  “Why do they come across the field? They’ll damage the harvest.”

  “There are so many of them that they couldn’t fit on the road.”

  “Such late visitors—and so many. Will we have food for them all? They walk so strangely…”

  Grain stalks snapped under the boots in time to the drums. As searchlights swung away, in the inadequate light from the nail paring of a moon, straining to see among the armored figures, Rahm thought to look for his friend from the morning—and, there, thought he saw him: only a moment later, he saw another tall, cloaked figure. Then another. Among the armed men advancing, a number wore the uniform Kire had worn. Some rode nervous horses; others came on foot. Their capes, despite the wind, hung straight behind them, heavy as night. Above them all, on rolling towers, the searchlights moved forward.

  With the others, Rahm waited in the square.

  Soon, with their mobile light-towers, the soldiers had marched to the common’s near edge. The ground was fully lit. Villagers squinted. On a horse stepping about before the visitors, a bearded man in brown leather, wearing a single glove, barked at the short silver rod in his bare hand:

  HALT!

  Everyone looked up, because the word echoed and reechoed from the black horns high on the moving light towers. The soldiers stopped marching. The drums stilled.

  The man with the silver rod rode forward. The villagers fell back. The man spoke again. Again his voice was doubled, like thunder, from the horns:

  SURRENDER TO THE FORCES OF MYETRA!

  Around Rahm, people looked at one another, puzzled. Then Kern, the quarryman, who was not really shy—only very quiet—stepped forward.

  “Welcome to you…” he said, uncertainly. Then, which was almost twice as much as Kern ever said, he added: “Welcome, visitors in the night.”

  “Are you the leader here?” the mounted man demanded.

  Kern didn’t answer—because, as Rahm knew, Kern wasn’t anyone’s leader. (He was not even an elder—none of whom, Rahm noticed, seemed to have arrived yet.) Kern frowned back at the villagers behind him.

  Someone called out:

  “No—he’s not!”

  Which made a dozen people—including Rahm—laugh. Rahm whispered to Mantice who was standing beside him, “That’s Tenuk,” though stocky Mantice knew it was plowman Tenuk being funny as much as Rahm did. They both grinned.

  “You speak for the people here,” the mounted man said, which was funny in itself because Kern probably wouldn’t say anything more now. But the man spoke as though he’d heard neither Tenuk’s “No” nor the laughter. “You are the leader!” While his horse stepped about, he pushed the silver rod into his shirt, reached down, unfastened his sling, and lifted out his powergun—for a moment it seemed he was going to hand it to Kern as a gift.

  Rahm had seen a powergun that morning, but not—really—what it could do.

  Flame shot out and smacked Kern just below his shoulder. Kern slammed backward four feet—without either stepping or falling: upright, his feet just slid back across the grass—the left one was even slightly off the ground. Blood fountained a dozen feet forward. The horse’s flank was splatter
ed and the animal reared twice, then a third time. Rahm was close enough to hear the meat on Kern’s chest bubble and hiss, as he fell, twisting to the side. One of Kern’s arms was gone.

  When it hit the ground, Kern’s remaining hand moved in the grass. Kern’s heavy fingers opened, then closed, with not even grass blades in them. Kern’s face was gone too—and half Kern’s head.

  The bearded man lowered the powergun from where the retort had jerked the barrel into the air. “Your leader has been killed. So will you all be killed—unless you announce your surrender!”

  Rahm felt a vast and puzzling absence inside him. Nothing in it seemed like any sort of sense he could hold to. Then, something began to grow in that senseless absence. It grew slowly. But he felt it growing. At the same time, something—a strange understanding—began to grow in the face of the bearded man on his horse, who raised his gun overhead.

  Suddenly the man turned sharply in his saddle and barked back at the troops:

  “They refuse to surrender! Attack!”

  Though he had learned far back to fight well, like many big men Uk did not like fighting. Uncountable campaigns ago, he’d also learned that little Mrowky actually gloried in the insult, the attack, the pummeling given and received, the recovery, the re-attack. Mrowky could make as much conversational jollity at losing in a melee as he could at winning.

  Since men—and sometimes women—so often feel obliged to start fights with big men, Uk had grown grateful for Mrowky’s willingness, even eagerness, to jump in, when others, to prove themselves, picked quarrels with him in strange towns and taverns. Since people tended not to start fights with runty men like Mrowky (who enjoyed the fight so much), hanging out with broad-shouldered, beer-bellied Uk was a way to guarantee a certain frequency of entertainment—possibly it was the core of their friendship. For both were different enough from one another to preclude close feelings in any situation other than war.