All the more reason, then, for proceeding slowly and carefully, Fralk thought. Otherwise, he might run the army into a krong’s nest before he found out the beast was there. He remembered how Tolmasov’s rifle had riddled the krong back on the west side of Ervis Gorge. What would have happened, though, had the krong had a rifle, too?
“Hit them now!” Ternat shouted. His males cried “Reatur!” and rushed through the brush toward Dordal’s waiting warriors. They yelled back. The snorts and whistles of the massi Ternat’s band had already freed only added to the din.
This time, Ternat thought as he drew near the enemy, his warriors lacked the advantage of surprise. They had just finished smashing one half of Dordal’s would-be ambush and sent the survivors fleeing to warn the other half. Ternat wished Dordal’s warriors were like humans, blind to half the world around them. Were that so, none of the first batch of males might have escaped.
As it was, Reatur’s eldest was happy enough with himself. Because people were as they were, surprise attacks were hard to pull off. But Dordal’s males had been surprised, sure enough, when the war band came crashing through the undergrowth at them. A good three out of every eighteen had turned blue and thrown down their spears; Ternat’s warriors had some of them back with the massi. Even the ones who hadn’t turned craven also had not fought well, most of them.
Then Ternat had no more time for reflection. Spears were flying, out toward his males and from them back at Dordal’s. This second band was larger than the one his warriors had already smashed and better situated, too, with several large boulders giving Dordal’s males almost the protection of a wall. If they stayed back there, they would have an edge.
Some did. More did not. As was true of the band Ternat led, most of Dordal’s warriors were young males with more temper than sense. They charged to do battle with their southern neighbors.
Along with Reatur’s name, the war band also shouted, “Thieves!” Dordal’s males screamed insults back at them.
“Why aren’t you hiding in the chambers under your castle, waiting for the Skarmer?” one of them yelled.
Ternat froze and almost took a spear in the gut because of it. But he had heard that voice before. “That’s Dordal himself!” he cried. “Get him and we bring a lot more than massi home!”
The warriors surged forward. Now fewer spears were in the air, and more clutched tight between males’ fingerclaws. One of Dordal’s warriors thrust at Ternat. He turned the stroke aside with his shield, tilting it upward as he had been drilled. He thrust back, low. The male managed to get a shield down to block that spear but left himself open for Ternat’s other one. He wailed as Reatur’s eldest drove it home and bled like a mate when Ternat pulled it free.
Ternat and another warrior engaged one of Dordal’s males from three arms apart. The beset male was good, but not good enough to resist for long two foes attacking from opposite directions. He went down, briefly yammering.
A rock grazed Ternat, just below one arm. He swore, twisted an eyestalk so he could look down at himself. He wasn’t bleeding or swelling up too badly. He decided he would live.
He looked around for another male to take on. There weren’t any, not close. The bravado that had fed that first rush from Dordal’s warriors faded as they found Ternat’s war band meant business-and had more males than their own force. Even the chance to gain glory by excelling where the domain master could see them was not enough. The northern males gave ground.
“This is harder work than stealing massi that can’t fight back, isn’t it?” Ternat shouted.
Dordal’s males were less interested in returning taunts now, more concerned with finding safety behind their heap of boulders. For a moment they made a stand there, but the rocks proved an insufficient barricade. One of Ternat’s males-Phelig, he saw it was-killed a warrior in the gap between two stones and then took control of it for himself. His fellows swarmed after him into the breach.
Then Ternat’s warriors forced their way through another opening. That proved too much for their foes. Some surrendered, others fled. Dordal was one of those who tried to run. When three of Ternat’s males dragged him to the ground, the last fight went out of his warriors.
“Get their spears and other weapons, and see to the wounded,” Ternat said. As his warriors began to obey, he walked slowly over to Dordal. That bruise he had taken started to hurt. He had forgotten all about it till now.
As Reatur’s eldest had remembered, Dordal was a large, imposinglooking male, very much the opposite of Elanti the massiherder: even standing tall, he was so well fed he looked widened. His eyestalks, however, were at the moment drooping dispiritedly. He raised one eye a little to see who was coming up. He did not widen himself, though Ternat saw that he recognized him.
“Domain master, you made a mistake,” he said, giving Dordal the courtesy of a title he knew his captive might not enjoy much longer.
“What are you doing here, Ternat?” Dordal’s voice was still proud but confused-he hadn’t changed much since the embassy, Ternat thought.
“I would think that was obvious, domain master-we are taking back what is ours. If you hadn’t crossed the border, we wouldn’t have come. Since you did-“ Reatur’s eldest let Dordal draw his own conclusions.
Those, as was characteristic of the northern domain master, were bizarre. “I think you were lying about the Skarmer this whole time, to lure me into raiding you without enough males.” Dordal sounded thoroughly indignant.
Ternat thought Dordal was a fool, but then he had thought that for a long while. “I’m afraid your greed made you stretch your eyestalks further than your arms would reach,” he said.
Dordal started to turn yellow. Ternat’s eyestalks twitched. Dordal quickly greened up again. Even he was not so stupid as to show his captor he was angry. “What will you do with me?” he asked.
“Take the lot of you back to our domain, I suppose,” Ternat said. He hadn’t thought much about that; he hadn’t expected to win such a complete victory. “Reatur will decide in the end. If I had to guess, I’ll say he’s likely to let you go back home after your eldest pays enough ransom to remind you not to trifle with us again.”
He waited for Dordal’s reaction. It did not disappoint him. This time Dordal turned yellow in earnest. “My eldest!” he shouted. “Grevil won’t pay a strip of dried meat for me! Let that grabby budling loose among my treasures and mates and he’ll want to keep everything for himself.”
Maybe Dordal did have some sense: that confirmed Ternat’s impression of the northern domain master’s eldest. It also confirmed that Grevil was his father’s budling. Dordal, Ternat was certain, would have done exactly the same thing in Grevil’s place.
“Well, we’ll just let Reatur sort that out,” Ternat said. “Perhaps if Grevil doesn’t grant you the respect and obedience a clanfather deserves, Reatur will send some males north to help you reclaim your domain-after the Skarmer are settled, of course.”
“I don’t care a three-day-old massi voiding about the Skarmer,” Dordal howled. “And if I get my domain back with help from Reatur’s males, there will be cords running from his arms to mine forever after.”
“Yes, there will, won’t there?” Ternat agreed cheerfully. “Maybe you should have thought about that before you decided to go massi-raiding. As it is, you’ll have some lovely three-day-old voidings to look at as we travel back to my clanfather’s domain.”
Dordal twisted all his eyestalks away from Ternat. Reatur’s eldest did not care how petulant Dordal felt. While the northern domain master was not looking, he walked away. Dordal started to talk again. He abruptly fell Silent when he turned one eyestalk back and noticed that no one was listening to him.
Ternat didn’t care about that, either. He was shouting to his own warriors now, getting them back into some kind of order so they could lead their prisoners and the re.c. aptured beasts home without half escaping in the process. Ternat did not have three eighteens of plans for overthrowing his clanfat
her. His time would come one day. Until then, he was content to wait.
And that, he supposed, only went to show that he was Reatur’s budling. “Good enough,” he said out loud.
Sergei Tolmasov watched Rustaveli lean back in his chair. As usual, the Georgian was wearing a mischievous expression. He said, “I doubt much work is getting done aboard Tsiolkovsky at the moment-not much that involves the brain, anyway, unless Yuri is reading Katya some of his poetry.” He had just brought the rover back to Hogram’s town after Katerina drove it down to the ship.
“Not much work getting done here, either,” Tolmasov said, not rising to the bait.
“You, my friend, are entirely too serious, as I’ve said at least a hundred times.”
“At least,” Tolmasov agreed. Rustaveli snorted.
“That does not mean he is wrong, Shota Mikheilovich,”
Valery Bryusov put in. He often had trouble recognizing a joke.
“No, it doesn’t,” the pilot said, “because there isn’t much getting done here.” He had never imagined he could become irrelevant during the Minerva mission, but he had. He didn’t like it one bit.
Damn Oleg Lopatin! Athena was screaming at Washington and, almost incidentally now, at Tolmasov; Washington was screaming at Moscow; and Moscow, not incidentally at all, was screaming at Tolmasov. He could not even blame any of them- had he been any place in the loop but where he was, he would have been screaming, too. But he had no one to scream at, not when Lopatin wouldn’t use his cursed radio.
He couldn’t even ask Hogram to send on a written message. For one thing, the local domain master was barely in communication with his army on the far side of Jotun Canyon. Crossing that stream was almost as hard for the Minervans as getting to Minerva had been for the Soviet Union and United States.
For another, problems between people meant nothing to Hogram. Because Hogram had talked with the Omalo domain master on the radio, he had to acknowledge there were more humans than the ones he had met. But he simply did not believe in a whole planet full of them, all at each other’s throats because one man had gone berserk. Given what Hogram knew, Tolmasov wouldn’t have believed it, either. Unfortunately, it was true.
And so the crew of Tsiolkovsky went through the motions of doing more research: Bryusov comparing country and town dialects, Rustaveli working on his rocks, Katerina and Voroshilov joining together on a biochemical study. None of it seemed to mean much now.
“Yuri isn’t sorry Lopatin’s gone and got himself in this mess,” Rustaveli observed.
“Then why did he cut you off when you called the Americans?” Tolmasov answered his own question. “Because his head might roll, too, I suppose, if anyone back home”-as polite a euphemism as he had ever come up with for the KGB-“thought he’d overhead you and done nothing. But I daresay you’re right, because of Katya if for no other reason.”
“There are others,” Rustaveli said slowly. The pilot glanced over at him, he rarely sounded so serious. Seeing he had Tolmasov’s attention, the geologist went on, “Yuri complained that Lopatin snooped through the poems he wrote for her and stored them in his secret computer file. Evidence, I imagine, but only a chekist could say of what.”
“I’d hate a man for that, too,” Tolmasov said.
“And I,” Bryusov agreed, though Tolmasov had trouble imagining Bryusov worked up enough about anything to hate the man who did it. Maybe if an academician from Arkhmolinsk stole something from one of his papers and published it first: anyone would be furious over that kind of pilfering.
Then the full meaning of Rustaveli’s words got through to the pilot. “Wait a minute,” he said. “How does Yuri know they’re in Lopatin’s secure file?”
“How else?” Rustaveli put a flippant shrug in his voice. “He read them.”
“That’s impossible.” Tolmasov had tried to access Lopatin’s secure file, tried and failed. If the pilot of a mission was not trusted with the passwords he needed to get into a KGB man’s files, what were the odds a chemist would be? There was no way…, no, there was one.
Rustaveli was waiting when Tolmasov looked up. The Geol’gian nodded. “That’s right,” he said. “But you will notice I have not told you any such thing.”
“Like that, eh? No, of course, you haven’t, Shota Mikheilovich. But Yuri! Who ever would have thought that about Yuri?”
“Shota hasn’t what?” Bryusov asked. “Who would have thought what about Yuri?” The linguist sounded as confused as if his companions had started speaking Navajo.
“Never mind, Valery Aleksandrovich. Nothing important,” Tolmasov said kindly. Some people, he thought, were really too innocent to be running around loose.
His feeling of smug superiority lasted not quite two minutes. Then he remembered he had thought the same thing about Yuri Voroshilov. He shook his head. Sometimes you just couldn’t tell.
“Are you all right, Reatur?” Lamra asked when the domain master finally got around to paying attention to her. Them, though, she had little to complain about: he hurried through his hellos to the rest of the mates so he could spend uninterrupted time with her.
If he had looked tired before, now he looked tired and battered. One of his arms jerked when he sighed, a wince that showed he had been hurt. “I’ve been better, little one,” he answered. “The domain has been better, come to that. The Skarmer beat us, beat us badly.”
She saw herself start to turn blue and tried to stop but couldn’t.
“What will we do?” she said.
“’We’?” Reatur asked gently. “Lamra, right now there isn’t much you can do. I wish there were. As for me, I am going to fight them again. Maybe here, closer to the castle, closer to where most of my males live, they will make a better showing.”
“What if they don’t?”
The domain master pulled in arms and eyestalks, released them: a shrug. “Then we won’t have to fight a third time, that’s certain. Do you understand what I mean?”
Lamra thought about it. “We’ll have lost?” She didn’t want to say that; she didn’t even want to think it.
But Reatur seemed to approve. “That’s right,” he said. “Your thoughts should always be thin, clear ice, Lamra, so you can use them to see through to what’s there, no matter what it is. If you don’t think clearly, it’s like trying to look through muddy ice.”
“Oh,” Lamra said. She wanted to show Reatur she could use what he was telling her. “Then are you going to show me why you haven’t opened one of your hands since you came into the mates’ chambers? Do you have something in there? Is it for me?”
His eyestalks wiggled-slowly, but they wiggled. “Thin, clear ice indeed, little one. Yes, I have something for you in that hand.” He turned so it was in front of her.
She held out a hand of her own. He gave her the present. She peered down at it with three eyestalks at once. “It’s a runnerpest!” she exclaimed. “A little runnerpest, carved all out of wood. It’s wonderful, Reatur. Thank you.” She felt proud for remembering to say that. “Where did you get it? Did you carve it yourself?”
“Yes,” he said. He hesitated, as if unsure whether to go on, but after a moment he did. “I wanted you to have something to remember me by, even if-the worst happens.”
“I’ll keep it always,” Lamra promised. Then, wanting him to know she was still thinking clearly, she amended, “For as long as I have, anyhow.”
“For you, that’s always,” Reatur said firmly.
“I suppose so.” Lamra kept looking at the little runnerpest.
‘I’m going to poke this around a corner and scare Peri silly with it. Not that she isn’t silly already, that is.” No matter how hard she worked at it, staying serious was never easy.
This time, Reatur’s laugh was unrestrained. “I’m glad I came to see you, little one. One way or another, you always make me feel better.” He turned an eyestalk down toward her bulges. “Do you want to hear something foolish, Lamra?”
“I don’t think you can be
foolish, clanfather,” she declared. “That only shows how young and foolish you are still,” Reatur said. “I was just thinking it’s a shame you’re carrying budlings. I’d like to plant them on you now.”
‘That is foolish,” Lamra agreed. Once Reatur had succeeded in planting budlings on her, her interest in mating, once so intense, disappeared. She did her best to think like a male. Altogether unsure how well she was succeeding, she said, “There are lots of other mates here.”
“I know,” Reatur said. “It wouldn’t be the same, somehow. Planting buds on you now would be like, like”-the domain master sounded like someone groping after an idea-“like mating with a friend.” He stopped in surprise. “That must be what the humans do,. with their mates who live as long as males. It would be comforting, I think, especially in bad times.”
“I suppose so,” Lamra said indifferently. But the notion Reatur had presented was so strange, she couldn’t help thinking about it. “If the humans keep me alive after my budlings drop, will I want to mate with you again?”
That seemed to surprise Reatur all over again. “I truly don’t know, Lamra. If we’re all very, very lucky, maybe we’ll find out.”
“Sometimes you just can’t tell, Pat.” Irv felt like an idiot the moment the words were out of his mouth, but he was lucky-
Pat wasn’t listening to him. She was off in that disconnected place where she had spent so much time since Frank hadn’t answered his last radio call.
His wife glanced toward him and Pat, toward Athena, toward Reatur’s castle. “I don’t think that eloc mate is ever going to drop its budlings,” Sarah said. They had checked the mate five times in the last two days. It looked ready, but it wasn’t doing anything. “I’m going over to the castle to examine Lamra again,” Sarah went on. “I just keep hoping she can hang on until we know we have some real chance of doing her some good.”
Irv shrugged. “I think I’ll head back to the ship. I’m hungry.”
“Okay.”
Sarah and Irv both paused, waiting for Pat to decide what she was going to do. She paused, too, as if rerunning a tape of the last few seconds in her head so that she could catch up with what was going on. Then she said, “I guess I’ll go back to the ship, too.”
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