“We can’t lift off tomorrow,” he said in his dragging tones. “We haven’t the bottom; most’s gone back to space. Besides, a panicky flight would make us a shooting gallery for the Avalonians. But we’ll organize to raise the worst cases, while we recall everybody to the main camp. We’ll have more ships brought down, in orderly fashion.” He could not control the twitch in his upper lip.
As the Imperials retreated, their enemies struck.
They fired no ground-to-ground missiles. Rather, their human contingents went about the construction of bases which had this capability, at chosen spots throughout the Equatorian continent. It was not difficult. They were only interested in short-range weapons, which needed little more than launch racks, and in aircraft, which needed little more than maintenance shacks for themselves and their crews. The largest undertaking was the assembly of massive energy projectors in the peaks overlooking Scor-peluna.
Meanwhile the Ythrians waged guerrilla warfare on the plateau. They, far less vulnerable to the toxicant peculiar to it, were in full health and unburdened by the space-suits, respirators, handkerchiefs which men frantically donned. Already winged, they need not sit in machines which radar, gravar, magnetoscopes could spot across kilometers. Instead they could dart from what cover the ground afforded, spray a trudging column with fire and metal, toss grenades at a vehicle, sleet bullets through any skimmers, and be gone before effective reaction was possible.
Inevitably, they had their losses.
“Hya-a-a-ah!” yelled Draun of Highsky, and swooped from a crag down across the sun-blaze. At the bottom of a dry ravine, a Terran column stumbled toward, camp from a half-finished emplacement. Dust turned every man more anonymous than what was left of his uniform. A few armored groundcars trundled among them, a few aircraft above. A gravsled bore rapidly mummifying corpses, stacked.
“Cast them onto hell-wind!” The slugthrower stuttered in Draun’s grasp. Recoil kept trying to hurl him off balance, amidst these wild thermals. He gloried that his wings were too strong and deft for that.
The Ythrians swept low, shooting, and onward. Draun saw men fall like emptied sacks. Wheeling beyond range, he saw their comrades form a square, anchored by its cars and artillery, helmeted by its flyers. They’re still brave, he thought, and wondered if they hadn’t best be left alone. But the idea had been to push them into close formation, then on the second pass drop a tordenite bomb among them. “Follow me!”
The rush, the bullets and energy bolts, the appallingly known wail at his back. Draun braked, came about, saw Nyesslan, his oldest son, the hope of his house, spiral to ground on a wing and a half. The Ythrian squadron rushed by. “I’m coming, lad!” Draun glided down beside him. Nyesslan lay unconscious. His blood purpled the dust. The second attack failed, broke up in confusion before it won near to the square. True to doctrine, that they should hoard their numbers, the Ythrians beat back out of sight. A platoon trotted toward Draun. He stood above Nyesslan and fired as long as he was able.
“Take out everything they have remaining in orbit,” Cajal said. “We need freedom to move our transports continuously.”
His chief of staff cleared throat. “Hr-r-rm, the admiral knows about the hostile ships?”
“Yes. They’re accelerating inward. It’s fairly clear that all which can make planetfall hope to do so; the rest are running interference.”
“Shouldn’t we organize an interception?”
“We can’t spare the strength. Clearing away those forts will empty most of our magazines. Our prime duty is to pull our men out of that mess we… I… sent them into.” Cajal stiffened himself. “If any units can reasonably be spared from the orbital work, yes, let them collect what Avalonians they can, provided they conserve munitions to the utmost and rely mainly on energy weapons. I doubt they’ll get many. The rest we’ll have to let go their ways, perhaps to our sorrow.” His chuckle clanked. As old Professor Wu-Tai was forever saying at the Academy — remember, Jim? — The best foundation that a decision is ever allowed is our fallible assessment of the probabilities.’”
The tropical storms of Avalon were more furious than one who came from a planet of less irradiation and slower spin could well have imagined. For a day and a night, the embarkation of the sickest men was postponed. Besides the chance of losing a carrier, there was a certainty that those flensing rains would kill some of the patients as they were borne from shacks to gangways.
The more or less hale, recently landed, battled to erect levees. Reports, dim and crackling through radio static, were of flash floods leaping down every arroyo.
Neither of these situations concerned Rochefort. He was in an intermediate class, too ill for work, too well for immediate removal. He huddled on a chair among a hundred of his fellows, in a stinking, steaming bunker, tried to control the chills and nausea that went ebb-and-flow through him, and sometimes thought blurrily of Tabitha Falkayn and sometimes of Ahmed Nasution, who had died three days before.
What Avalonian spacecraft ran the gantlet descended to Equatoria, where home-guard officers assigned them their places.
The storm raged to its end. The first Imperial vessels lifted from the wrecked base. They were warships, probing a way for the crammed, improvised hospital hulls which were to follow. Sister fighters moved in from orbit to join them.
Avalon’s ground and air defenses opened crossfire. Her space force entered battle.
Daniel Holm sat before a scanner. It gave his words and his skull visage to the planet’s most powerful linked transmitters, a broadcast which could not fail to be heard:
“—we’re interdicting their escape route. You can’t blast us in time to save what we estimate as a quarter million men. Even if we didn’t resist, maybe half of them would never last till you brought them to adequate care. And I hate to think about the rest — organ, nerve, brain damage beyond the power of regenerative techniques to heal. “We can save them. We of Avalon. We have the facilities prepared, clear around our planet. Beds, nursing staffs, diagnostic equipment, chelating drugs, supportive treatments. We’d welcome your inspection teams and medical personnel; Our wish is not to play political games with living people. The minute you agree to renew the ceasefire and to draw your fleet far enough back that we can count on early warning, that same minute our rescue groups will take flight for Scorpeluna.”
XVIII
The ward was clean and well-run, but forty men must be crowded into it and there was no screen — not that local programs would have interested most of them. Hence they had no entertainment except reading and bitching. A majority preferred the latter. Before long, Rochefort asked for earcups in order that he might be able to use the books lent him. He wore them pretty much around the clock.
Thus he did not hear the lickerish chorus. His first knowledge came from a touch on his shoulder. Huh? he thought. Lunch already? He raised his eyes from The Gaiila Folk and saw Tabitha.
The heart sprang in him and raced. His hands shook so he could barely remove the cups.
She stood athwart the noisy, antiseptic-smelling room as if her only frame were a window behind, open to the blue and blossoms of springtime. A plain coverall disguised the curves and straightness of her. He saw in the countenance that she had lost weight. Bones stood forth still more strongly than erstwhile, under a skin more darkened and hair more whitened by a stronger sun than shone over Gray.
“Tabby,” he whispered, and reached.
She took his hands, not pressing them nor smiling much. “Hullo, Phil,” said the remembered throaty voice. “You’re looking better’n I expected, when they told me you’d three tubes in you.”
“You should have seen me at the beginning.” He heard his words waver. “How’ve you been? How’s everybody?”
“I’m all right. Most of those you knew are. Draun and Nyesslan bought it.”
“I’m sorry,” he lied.
Tabitha released him. “I’d have come sooner,” she said, “but had to wait for furlough, and then it took time to
get a data scan on those long lists of patients and time to get transportation here. We’ve a lot of shortages and disorganization yet.” Her regard was green and grave. “I did feel sure you’d be on Avalon, dead or alive. Good to learn it was alive.”
“How could I stay away… from you?”
She dropped her lids. “What is your health situation? The staffs too busy to give details.”
“Well, when I’m stronger they want to ship me to a regular Imperial navy hospital, take out my liver and grow me a new one. I may need a year, Terran, to recover completely. They promise me I will.”
“Splendid.” Her tone was dutiful. “You being well treated here?”
“As well as possible, considering. But, uh, my roommates aren’t exactly my type and the medics and helpers, both Imperial and Avalonian, can’t stop their work for conversation. It’s been damned lonesome, Tabby, till you came.”
“Ill try to visit you again. You realize I’m on active duty, and most of what leave I’m granted has to be spent at St. Li, keeping the business in shape.”
Weakness washed through him. He leaned back into the pillows and let his arms fall on the blanket. “Tabby… would you consider waiting… that year?”
She shook her head, slowly, and again met his stare. “Maybe I ought to pretend till you’re more healed, Phil. But I’m no good at pretending, and besides, you rate better.”
“After what I did—”
“And what I did.” She leaned down and felt past the tubes to lay palms on his shoulders. “No, we’ve never hated on that account, have we, either of us?”
“Then can’t we both forgive?”
“I believe we’ve already done it. Don’t you see, though? When the hurting had died down to where I could think, I saw there wasn’t anything left. Oh, friendship, respect, memories to cherish, And that’s all.”
“It isn’t enough… to rebuild on?”
“No, Phil. I understand myself better than I did before. If we tried, I know what sooner or later I’d be doing to you. And I won’t. What we had, I want to keep clean.”
She kissed him gently and raised herself.
They talked awhile longer, embarrassed, until he could dismiss her on the plea, not entirely untruthful, that he needed rest. When she was gone he did close his eyes, after donning the earcups which shut out the Terran voices.
She’s right, probably, he thought. And my life isn’t blighted. I’ll get over this one too, I suppose. He recalled a girl in Fleurville and hoped he would be transferred to an Esperancian hospital, when or if the cease-fire became a peace.
Outside, Tabitha stopped to put on the gravbelt she had retrieved from the checkroom. The building had been hastily erected on the outskirts of Gray. (She remembered the protests when Marchwarden Holm diverted industrial capacity from war production to medical facilities, at a time when renewed combat seemed imminent. Commentators pointed out that what he had ordered was too little for the casualties of extensive bombardment, too much for those of any plausible lesser-scale affray. He had growled, “We do what we can” and rammed the project through. It helped that the principal home-guard officers urged obedience to him. They knew what he really had in mind — these men whose pain kept the weapons uneasily silent.) Where she stood, a hillside sloped downward, decked with smaragdine susin, starred with chasuble bush and Buddha’s cup, to the strewn and begardened city, the huge curve of uprising shoreline, the glitter on Falkayn Bay. Small cottony clouds sauntered before the wind, which murmured and smelled of livewell.
She inhaled that coolness. After Equatoria, it was intoxicating. Or it ought to be. She felt curiously empty.
Wings boomed. An Ythrian landed before her. “Good flight to you, Hrill,” the female greeted.
Tabitha blinked. Who — ? Recognition came. “Eyath! To you, good landing.” How dull her tone, how sheenless her plumes. I haven’t seen her since that day on the island… Tabitha caught a taloned hand in both of hers. “This is wonderful, dear. Have you been well?”
Eyath’s stance and feathers and membranes drawn over her eyes gave answer. Tabitha hunkered down and embraced her.
“I sought you,” Eyath mumbled. “I spent the battle at home; afterward too, herding, because I needed aloneness and they told me the planet needs meat.” Her head lay in Tabitha’s bosom. “Lately I’ve been freed of that and came to seek—”
Tabitha stroked her back, over and over.
“I learned where you were posted and that you’d mentioned you would stop in Gray on your furlough,” Eyath went on. “I waited. I asked of the hotels. Today one said you had arrived and gone out soon after. I thought you might have come here, and trying was better than more waiting.”
“What little I can do for you, galemate, tell me.”
“It is hard.” Eyath clutched Tabitha’s arms, painfully, without raising her head. “Arinnian, is here too. He has been for some while, working on his father’s staff. I sought him and—” A strangled sound, though Ythrians do not weep.
Tabitha foresaw: “He avoids you.”
“Yes. He tries to be kind. That is the worst, that he must try.”
“After what happened—”
“Ka-a-a-ah. I am no more the same to him.” Eyath gathered her will. “Nor to myself. But I hoped Arinnian would understand better than I do.”
“Is he the solitary one who can help? What of your parents, siblings, chothmates?”
’They have not changed toward me. Why should they? In Stormgate a, a misfortune like mine is reckoned as that, a misfortune, no disgrace, no impairment. They cannot grasp what I feel.”
“And you feel it because of Arinnian. I see.” Tabitha looked across the outrageously lovely day. “What can I do?”
“I don’t know. Maybe nothing. Yet if you could speak to him — explain — beg grace of him for me—”
Anger lifted. “Beg him? Where is he?”
“At work, I, I suppose. His home—”
“I know the address.” Tabitha released her and stood up. “Come, lass. No more talk. We’re off for a good hard flight in this magnificent weather, and I’ll take advantage of being machine-powered to wear you out, and at day’s end well go to wherever you’re staying and I’ll see you asleep.”
— Twilight fell, saffron hues over silver waters, elsewhere deep blue and the earliest stars. Tabitha landed before Arinnian’s door. His windows glowed. She didn’t touch the chime plate, she slammed a panel with her fist.
He opened. She saw he had also grown thin, mahogany hair tangled above tired features and disheveled clothes. “Hrill!” he exclaimed. “Why… I never — Come in, come in.”
She brushed past him and whirled about. The chamber was in disarray; obviously used only for sleeping and bolted meals. He moved uncertainly toward her. Their contacts had been brief, correct, and by phone until the fighting began. Afterward they verified each other’s survival, and that was that.
“I’m, I’m glad to see you, Hrill,” he stammered.
“I don’t know as I feel the same,” she rapped. “Sit down. I’ve got things to rub your nose in, you sanctimonious mudbrain.”
He stood a moment, then obeyed. She saw the strickenness upon him and abruptly had no words. They looked, silent, for minutes.
Daniel Holm sat before the screens which held Liaw of The Tarns, Matthew Vickery of the Parliament, and Juan Cajal of the Empire. A fourth had just darkened. It had carried a taped plea from Trauvay, High Wyvan of Ythri, that Avalon yield before worse should befall and a harsher peace be dictated to the whole Domain.
“You have heard, sirs?” Cajal asked.
“We have heard,” Liaw answered.
Holm felt the pulse in his breast and temples, not much quickened but a hard, steady slugging. He longed for a cigar — unavailable — or a drink — inadvisable — or a year of sleep — unbroken. At that, crossed his mind, we’re in better shape than the admiral. If ever I saw a death’s head, it rides his shoulderboards.
“What say yo
u?” Cajal went on like an old man.
“We have no wish for combat,” Liaw declared, “or to deepen the suffering of our brethren. Yet we cannot give away what our folk so dearly bought for us.”
“Marchwarden Holm?”
“You won’t renew the attack while we’ve got your people here,” the human said roughly. “Not that we’ll hold them forever. I told you before, we don’t make bargaining counters out of thinking beings. Still, the time and circumstances of their release have to be negotiated.”
Cajal’s glance shifted to the next screen. “President Vickery?”
A politician’s smile accompanied the response: “Events have compelled me to change my opinion as regards the strategic picture, Admiral. I remain firm in my opposition to absolutist attitudes. My esteemed colleague, Governor Saracoglu, has always impressed me as being similarly reasonable. You have lately returned from a prolonged conference with him. Doubtless many intelligent, well-informed persons took part. Did no possibility of compromise emerge?”
Cajal sagged. “I could argue and dicker for days,” he said. “What’s the use? I’ll exercise my discretionary powers and lay before you at once the maximum I’m authorized to offer.”
Holm gripped the arms of his chair.
“The governor pointed out that Avalon can be considered as having already met most terms of the armistice,” crawled from Cajal. “Its orbital fortifications no longer exist. Its fleet is a fragment whose sequestration, as required, would make no real difference to you. Most important, Imperial units are now on your planet.
“Nothing is left save a few technicalities. Our wounded and our medics must be given the acknowledged name of occupation forces. A command must be established over your military facilities; one or two men per station will satisfy that requirement while posing no threat of takeover should the truce come apart, Et cetera. You see the general idea.”
“The saving of face,” Holm grunted. “Uh-huh. Why not? But how about afterward?”
The People of the Wind Page 18