After a lengthy hiatus, the taste dissipated and they got shakily to their feet once more. When they looked out, Snark had already attached her rope to the makeshift line. Mitigan hauled it in. Snark made an amazingly acrobatic leap out from her cavern to the tree branch, squirmed up and onto it with the rope between her teeth. Shortly afterward she called, and Mitigan went up the line like an ape. Leelson went next, though with rather less agility, and the two of them raised the rest, one at a time. First Leely, then the unconscious Saluez, tied into a kind of rope sling, then Lutha, her head reeling from the height, the immensity of the sea, the nearness of the Ularians. The ex-king came last, looking around himself delightedly, his cheeks pink with excitement.
The entire process, though lengthy, took place in virtual silence, bouts of strenuous, grunting effort interrupted by periods of frozen stillness when they tasted even the remotest presence of the great Ularians. Each time it was only a hint of taste, a momentary awfulness.
The sun was setting by the time all were assembled at the top of the cliff. Saluez lay wrapped in warm blankets—provided by Snark—while the rest hunkered down with their heads together, telling Snark how they had come to be with her and watching the sun set in a bonfire of reds and pinks and oranges against a purple sea and lavender sky. The shaggies had spread themselves evenly, a plane of blobby black shapes cutting the red orb of the sun into a knife edge of light.
"So you haven't come to rescue me." Snark laughed. It was a harsh, self-mocking sound. She looked directly at Lutha. "I guess I knew that as soon as I saw your face, Lutha Tallstaff."
"Why?" Lutha asked, puzzled.
Snark laughed again, like a cock crowing, half jeer, half boast. "I hate you, Lutha Tallstaff. And him, Leelson. Not that I can do anything about it. Prob'ly learn to hate him, too, the one that was king. Not her, though." She jerked an elbow in Saluez's direction. "She's like me. Life ate her up and spit her out, din it."
Lutha was both offended and mystified. "Have we met before?"
Snark told her where, and when. Lutha flushed. She had known the shadows were … people. Hadn't she? Or had she?
Unexpectedly, Leelson came to her defense. "Lutha doesn't know anything about shadows. None of the ordinary people do. Only the Procurator's people knew about them."
"Likely." Snark sneered.
"True," he said. "I am well connected in the bureaucracy, and I knew next to nothing about them until the Procurator told me, there on Dinadh."
Lutha added, "And if we've offended you, we're sorry."
"I killed you. I got even."
This required explanation, and Mitigan was much fascinated by Snark's description of a simul booth.
"Sensurround doesn't work that way! It has built-in censors," he said. "You can't kill anybody in sensurround. You can't do anything to a person that's against his will!"
"Shadows can." She sneered again. "Simuls let you do anything you want, and they let me kill her, more than once." She cast a ferocious glance in Lutha's direction, making the other woman pale and draw back.
The ex-king intervened. "As I've mentioned to Mitigan, we have no time for hating or killing, for our survival must come first. So tell us, Snark. How do we survive?"
She gave him the same up-and-down look she had given Lutha, though a more approving one, as she said offhandedly, "I've got me a few holes dug here and there, but they're only big enough for me. I don't know whether the big Rottens know I'm here or not, but I do know they like to play games."
"Let's take it one thing at a time," said Leelson. "Food, first."
"There's all you'll ever need in the camp. The Rottens don't seem to care if I take stuff. They don't seem to notice, I mean."
"Warmth?" Leelson asked.
"So far it hasn't been very cold. The team records say it doesn't get really cold. If you're out of the wind, all you'll need is a few blankets. There's both blankets and solar-heat storage units at the camp. 'Course, they'll have to be recharged at the camp, where the collectors are."
"And, finally, shelter?" asked Mitigan.
"Well, that's it, isn't it?" she agreed, with a lopsided, rather desperate grin. "That's what it's all about. Either they don't know we're here, the big Rottens—"
"Why do you call them big Rottens?" queried Leelson.
"Because it's descriptive, damn it! Call 'em Ularians if you like, I don't care. Like I was saying. Either they don't know we're here, or they know damn well we're here and are playing with us. If they don't know, then we got to stay hid, don't we? If they do know, it still makes sense not to tempt 'em."
"We can't stay in the camp?" asked the ex-king.
"Well, I'll tell you. Used to be the Rottens just came out at night. Lately, they've been coming daytimes, too, and they all the time hang over the camp. That's a favorite spot, that is. An it's not all that secure. Wasn't built to defend. 'F it was me, I'd go back behind the ridge north of the camp. There's a big rockfall there, pillars and blocks all tumbled down with spaces between. You'd be close to food stores and the solar collectors, and likely there's a place in there big enough for all six of you. Not real smart, to my mind, but then—"
"Why not?" Lutha asked.
"If the Rottens go after one of you, they'll get all. Spread out, maybe they won't get you all. That's the way my folks did it."
Mitigan smiled approval and she flushed. She was not accustomed to approval.
"Am I right in thinking you were here before?" Lutha asked her. "You were one of the 'survivors' the Procurator mentioned?"
Snark nodded, responding unwillingly. "Me. Yeah. There were five of us, all kids."
"Why were you … ?" Lutha didn't know how to ask the question.
"Made a shadow?" She laughed harshly. "Yeah, well. Things just happen to some people. Runnin' from scourges, you get what they call antisocial."
None of them knew what she meant by scourges, but they did not interrupt her as she went on:
"I'd had a few years of running before I was rescued. Makes you quick. Makes you—what you say—crude. Guess I didn't adapt real well to civilization."
This time Mitigan grinned admiringly at her. Snark returned the grin, a quick feral flash, no more used to humor than to approbation.
Lutha watched the two closely, thinking them a good pair. She, brown and lean, with muscular shoulders and calves, high, strong cheekbones, and a rounded but stubborn jaw; he wide as a door, his almost white hair drawn up into a tall plume atop his head, wearing a hide vest, a beaded crotch piece, and not much else besides a bandage and his many scars. If he'd ever worn Dinadhi dress, he'd dropped it before attacking at the omphalos.
Leelson peered down his nose at both of them, the aristocratic Fastigat sneer Lutha found so infuriating. Snark didn't bother to notice. She had seen so much of Fastigat superiority at Alliance Prime that it ceased to impress.
"What's happening back on Dinadh, do you suppose?" Lutha asked Leelson. "They must have seen what happened to us. Are you sure Trompe's … dead?"
Leelson looked at his boots. "I'm sure. The other … assassin was aiming at you or Leely, and Trompe jumped in front of him." He glared at Mitigan. "You had no reason to kill Trompe!"
"We weren't aiming at Trompe," said Mitigan, unmoved by Leelson's anger. "As for what's happening back there, your Procurator will be stirring dust. As will Chur Durwen. We are sworn to cover one another."
Leelson nodded. "The Procurator will mount a search immediately. He'll send probes through the vortex."
Lutha wondered, briefly, why Leelson hadn't noticed that the vortex was no more. She started to say so, but was cut off by the ex-king:
"Poracious Luv is on Dinadh. She will also put her considerable talents to the problem. And perhaps the songfathers of Dinadh as well. Though they won't want to admit they were wrong about the … Kachis."
His words made the hair rise on the back of Lutha's neck. She could infer from various things Saluez had told her that the songfathers wouldn't want to admit they
were wrong. In fact, if what had happened at this Tahs-uppi was what usually happened at the ceremony, they would not admit they'd been wrong. Every hundred years they would be disillusioned, and each time they would swear to hide their disillusionment in order to retain their power. "We won't tell anyone," they'd say. "We won't let anyone know. We'll deny it. We'll defend the traditional teachings!" Such things had happened before! Men in power had made mistakes or foolish claims and spent the rest of their lives and their successors' lives defending the indefensible, or hiding it. And arrayed against the impenetrable wall of the songfathers was only one big woman, one old man, and one warrior who might or might not take sides.
"Whatever they do," Snark remarked, "they're not going to do it tonight. Those little shaggies, they came out all along this cliff."
"Not just one place?" Leelson demanded.
"Hell, no. They spurted out from where you were, and from south of me a dozen places. Some of 'em even came out of that island out there." She pointed westward, where a stone point jabbed the glowing sky. "Doesn't matter where they came out, you still got the same problem. You need cover. You need food. You have to put that pregnant woman somewhere safe if you're going to try to keep her. Right after dark still seems to be a good time to move around. The Rottens haven't ever come over the camp right after sundown. I keep a kind of chart. When they come, how many, where. Then I try to stay away from the worst places, the worst times."
All of them were exhausted, but they could not argue with the local expert. They got wearily to their feet; Mitigan put Saluez over his shoulder with surprising gentleness; Lutha was less gentle with Leely; and they went in a weary straggle through the dusk. Before it was completely dark, they arrived at a shallow swale halfway up the slope north of the camp.
Mitigan rolled Saluez under a windrow of dried brush, and Lutha was appointed to keep watch over her and Leely while Snark took the three men down among the buildings. Leelson left her with a lingering stroke along her cheek and the remark that it might take them a while to find everything that was needed.
Lutha didn't care. She could have slept atop a volcano, so she thought, struggling to stay alert until they returned. The last of the dim purple along the sea horizon was being sucked into a black throat of night. Stars blazed on the moonless sky, like paper lanterns, their light diffused. Strange. Down in the camp small lights moved about, not radiating as one would expect, not making star shapes in her vision, but softened, dampened. She blinked, assumed the air was foggy, or that perhaps her sight was affected by fatigue. Then she realized it was not only sight that was affected but also sound. She shook her head, swallowed, twisted her head from side to side, trying to unplug ears that suddenly weren't working properly. All sounds were flat, with no resonance. Damped. Someone had lowered a curtain over the world.
Which trembled. Beneath her. Only a little, as though some large creature had taken a step near me. And another. And another yet. Three steps. Something. Something huge enough to make the stone backbone of the ridge tremble like a leaf.
She swiveled her head, silently, scanning the darkness, trying to see something, anything against the sprinkled star field. There … across the camp. To the southeast. On the horizon, the stars winking out, and those above them, and those above them, and those above … By the Great Gauphin, halfway to the zenith, the stars winking out. Something huge close up? Something even bigger far away?
She put her hands over her mouth and breathed quietly. The sound of the sea came as a series of flat slaps, no susurrus, no following hush. The world trembled again. She counted the steps, one, two, three, four. Five, six, seven. Eight, nine. Coming or going?
And then the stars bloomed in heaven and the sound of the sea was there once more, the soft rolling shush of waves on the gravelly beach. Down in the camp, the lamps made sparkling stars of refracted light.
Lutha was wide-awake when they returned laden with blankets, charged solar stoves, and camp lights plus a number of prepacked emergency kits full of food and other necessities.
"Did you hear?" Leelson whispered to her. "Did you feel?"
Snark said, "It's happened before."
"How often?" demanded Leelson.
In the light of her lantern they saw the shrug, the twisted mouth, the fear in her eyes. Still, her voice retained its usual offhand manner.
"A few times. Just a few times."
Deeply troubled, they straggled off again, uphill to a ridge spiked by stone fragments, scraggy as broken teeth, where—so Snark said—a natural dike had fallen. The remnants lay behind the ridge in a tumble of chunks and pillars, like a child's blocks dumped from their box. Among this rubble were the clefts and shelters Snark had described, places where the hunted could go to ground.
They found a room deep inside, roofed by huge pillars that had come to rest across a dozen rounded boulders, the floor cushioned by a few centuries of dust but no bird droppings. It was large enough for all six of them and their stack of provisions. Snark, very subdued, was nearest Lutha when they variously knelt or flopped or fell onto spread blankets.
"Really, have you counted how many times that thing happened?" Lutha asked her quietly, wanting to know but not wanting a general conversation about it.
"Once just before the first time I saw the Rottens," she said through her teeth. "And maybe three or four times since. There were times I thought it was maybe happening, but I wasn't sure."
"So it isn't the Rottens that do it?"
"You didn't taste Rottens when it happened, did you? So, if that means anything, it means they don't do it." She gave Lutha an almost friendly look. "You wanna know the truth, I'm glad it happened with you here. Those other times, I thought I was losing what little brain I've got left."
Mitigan approached them, his mouth full of questions about the Rottens. While he and Snark talked Lutha went to wrap Leely against the chill.
Snark said, "I'll hang around close. I got a hole up the hill there. You sleep. You all look like hell."
And with these helpful words she departed while Mitigan stood looking admiringly after her. At least Lutha assumed it was admiration that kept him standing there in the dark while the rest of them settled in like so many marmots, gathering close together to share warmth and wishing at that moment only to be safe, at least for a time.
CHAPTER 10
They slept restlessly on the rocky floor with a fair share of grunting and turning—all but Mitigan and Leely, both of whom were able to sleep anywhere, under any conditions. By the time enough gray light pried its way through the stone pile to make a few dim puddles on the floor of our shelter, they were all awake, aware of the morning's chill, coveting the warmth of the stove and something hot to drink.
All, that is, but Saluez, who had lain closest to Lutha during the night. At intervals she'd moaned softly, but she had not responded to Lutha's touch or voice, any more than she responded to Leelson, who bent over her in the early light, shaking his head.
"She's lost in something fearful and ugly. I sense feelings of betrayal and guilt. Hard to say what it may be."
Lutha thought that Saluez's feelings of betrayal were much the same as her own. Even now Leelson went past Leely as though the child did not exist.
"How cruel," said Jiacare Lostre.
Lutha turned, startled, but he wasn't talking to her. He was kneeling beside Saluez, holding her hand.
"A cruel joke on all of us," he said with a grimace, gesturing at the rocks around them. "Perhaps Saluez simply prefers to be out of all this."
She was lying supine, the melon swell of her belly rising above the slackness of her body.
Lutha said, "She's never mentioned how long she had left in her pregnancy. Poor Saluez."
"Why say 'poor Saluez'?" Mitigan demanded angrily from his corner, over the wheep, wheep, wheep of his sharpening stone. "She will soon have a child. All women want children. Bearing is what they are good for!"
"Thus speaketh a Firster," Lutha growled, deeply offended.
"I suppose your god came roaring out of a whirlwind to tell you the universe was made for man, and so were women!"
"I received the visitation from the Great Warrior, yes! At my coming-of-age." He glared his disapproval, then went scrambling off among the stones in the direction Leelson had gone a few moments earlier.
Lutha muttered, "Why is it all Firsters have to talk about their visitation. Even Leelson does it, though he dresses it up in philosophical language."
"And what did Leelson's god look like?"
"Like a Fastigat." She laughed grimly. "Of course."
Jiacare drew the blanket closer around Saluez's shoulders. "Mitigan was right about one thing. We can't assume she regrets her pregnancy. Most of us humans seem to find one excuse or another for increasing our numbers."
"Oddly enough, that didn't seem to be true on Dinadh. Trompe and I were surprised to see how many vacant hives there were. Dinadh's population is evidently decreasing."
He thought about this, his mouth pursing, his eyes squinting. "That would fit the pattern. The Ularian reproductive cycle would start with a growing human population and few Kachis, and the proportions would reverse by the end of the cycle."
Lutha shuddered. "Through predation?"
"It is a kind of predation," he mused. "If Saluez is an example. She's a young woman with an unimpaired body, but as I understand Dinadhi culture, she'll never have another lover or another child."
"Why maim her? Why not just kill her?"
"As she is, she can still work in the fields to produce food. Late in the cycle the Kachis probably get the biggest share of what food there is."
"If it's cyclical, then some Kachis must have remained on Dinadh to start the process over. Also, we've assumed the Kachis are the young of the Ularians. Where are the Ularians on Dinadh?"
He shrugged. "Being offspring of Ularians doesn't preclude multiple parthenogenic generations. Or even sexual reproduction as immature images—"
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