They Fly at Ciron

by Samuel R. Delany

  “You’re called Kire,” she said. “My name is… Naä. I’m a wanderer, a singer; I’m someone who’s come very much to love this place, over which you wreak fire, slaughter, and misery.”

  What he did next rather surprised her. He lifted the puma pelt from the bed and swung it over his back. She caught a glimpse of its underside, where bits of red and things rolled into black fibres and filaments, only just dried, still clung to the uncured hide. With the motion came a heightened smell—it was the source of the stench! The catch under one set of claws, sewn there clumsily with a thong, he hooked to a fastening on the other side of the pelt. Affixed to the Myetran that way, the puma head leered from his shoulder, beside his own.

  “Why do you wear that?” she asked.

  “This?” He spoke as though the dropping of the cloak and the donning of the hide had been the most unconscious and happenstance of acts. “It was a gift. From a friend. I like it. Cloaks are supposed to blow and ride out behind you on the wind—but ours are too heavy. It takes the glory out of soldiering. This, at least, looks like what it is.” With a black glove, he caressed the face beside his own, with its sealed lids, its bared fangs. “And it will remind you, no matter how pleasant I seem, really, I have teeth.” (That he might call this odd and smelly space pleasant almost drew a surprised comment from her. But she held it in.) “Come—if you’re going to stay, sit here, in the chair—” He indicated the seat at his desk—“where we can talk more easily. Won’t you take off your shawl?”

  She only held it tighter. But being closer to him would be good. Yes, get closer. She sat in the chair, her knees inches from his.

  Yellow fires ran round within the copper rim of the small brazier by his elbow. “You know these people well,” Kire said. “Tell me, are they really as gentle as they appear?”

  “Yes,” she said, unable to keep the challenge out of her voice. “They are.”

  He smiled: “Couldn’t you tell me something small-minded, mean, and nasty you’ve found among them; or maybe even some overt and active evil: a crippled child teased and made fun of? An old woman’s milk stolen from her goat so that she must go hungry, once again—something that might ease my dreams just a little? Certainly the ordinary pettiness, jealousies, the envy and ire that hold any little town together, beneath the polite greetings and pleasantries in the market square about last week’s rain and today’s fine weather, must be as common here as they are in any other village. You’re a well-traveled woman. You’ve seen none of the provincial nastiness here that makes the children of such places so frequently loathe their home and yearn to flee somewhere with breathing room, intelligent conversation, and fine music?”

  “They’ve been happy with the music I’ve brought,” Naä said. “And I’ve been happy with their conversation. I haven’t looked for more. And what sort of fool are you—” she looked at him as sharply as she spoke—“that you think the things you speak of could possibly balance the death, the misery, the evil you inflicted here within the hour of your coming?”

  He looked back at her, directly. The lion beside him, for the instant, seemed a creature who’d closed its eyes to keep from hearing. A muscle moved in the lieutenant’s unshaven jaw. Then he said: “Do you know anything about Myetra, singer? If you visited us, you might be surprised at how pleasantly our farmers and their daughters can dance in a spring evening to the great log drums their wives make in the mountains; or how colorful and cunning the representation of sea creatures and sea plants are that are raised on the tiles decorating the facades of the waterfront warehouses. It’s a pleasant place—but there are too many people in it. There is not enough food—and above all not enough land for our people. It’s very simple, singer, what we’ve chosen to do. It’s a plan as clean and as imperative as …as a blood drop rolling down a new plastered wall. You see us now taking lives, breaking apart cultures and traditions, here at Çiron, next at Hi-Vator, after that at Requior, then Del Gaizo and eventually at Mallili—finally, even, at Calvicon. But soon what you will see, in a band from water to water, is the growth of a rich, intelligent, and wonderfully hardworking and resourceful people, taking land, making food, imparting their ways and wonders on these myriad backwards folk who have no notion of their own histories for more than five or six generations into the past—the length of time a burial scroll will last before it simply rots away. It’s a fine plan, singer. And it inspires the officers above me as well as it inspires the simple soldiers below me.”

  “And does this plan give you the right to do anything, anything at all—at any level of cruelty and destruction to anyone in your way?”

  The lieutenant mused. “There are some among us who think that it does.” At every third sentence, the roughness to his voice made her wonder if he weren’t drunk.

  “And you? What do you think?”

  “There are some, both above me and below me, who probably say that I think too much.”

  In the stench of the uncured hide, within hearing of the burry tones that, really, sounded more animal than human, Naä wondered how anything that anyone might call thinking at all could go on here.

  But he moved his forearm, with the black glove on his hand, along the edge of the desk by the yellow-burning lamp. “Tell me, singer: what would you do if we were in each other’s place? What would you do if you wore a stiff black cloak and, despite your love of your home, a sense of injustice—not of justice itself. But, yes, the truth is: I’m troubled at justice’s absence—and that trouble stays as close to me as this lion’s face is to my own. Would you try to leave, feign sickness, resign your post to another? Or would you stay, mitigating the crimes which those around you commit—changing a death sentence to a prison term, making an execution a flogging, reducing a flogging of twenty lashes to ten? Tell me, singer?”

  Naä frowned. Then stopped frowning, and thought: This is perhaps the moment to do it. But the words came from somewhere: “I would get very little sleep.” And because these words came too, she said: “If you love your own home, can’t you love the idea of home that other people have? That’s what a sense of justice is, isn’t it? And the plan you talk of, it’s not a just one at all. I’ve looked your men in the face. I’ve heard your superiors talking. Your men have forgotten all plans and are only faithful to following orders. And all your superiors are after is the power and privilege the plan has most accidentally ceded them! So without justice behind it, or real commitment to support it, what is your plan after that?” The words came, she found herself thinking, like the words to a new song. “Why not turn openly against it? Why not fight it and them until they strip skin and muscle from you, till no muscle moves, till there is no blood left in you to move them—”

  “Now—” and she was thinking, will actions come as fast and as easily as those words? when he said—“I should probably smash you across the face with my fist, for daring even to suggest resistance to Myetra.” He raised his hand, and the gloved fingers curled slowly in. “And show you why, through sheer force, that is such an absurd notion. But I don’t think I shall …this time.” He looked at her seriously.

  Again she felt her whole body begin to tingle. “You mitigate,” she said. “You turn twenty lashes to ten. And when you are told to rape, break, and violate, you turn it into talk—”

  He raised a bronze eyebrow. “Who told you that?”

  “Your guard,” she said quickly, “when he was bringing me back from town—those were Prince Nactor’s… orders, yes?”

  “Uk?” The lieutenant looked honestly puzzled. Then, he barked a syllable of laughter. “You’re a liar—or a fool! That sort of loose tongue is not Uk’s style. Believe me, I know my men. No, we had a guard here, once, who might have said that. But he’s …not with us now. And what I said to Nactor, I left with Nactor, young lady. Right now, I hate Prince Nactor as he hates me. No…I think, perhaps, I will walk you back to the village. We will go together: this way you will have no problems with obstreperous—or loose-tongued—guards.” He rose. />
  And amidst the tingling, she thought—somewhere on the burnt field, somewhere in an alley of the town, yes, when the two of us are alone together, that’s where I’ll do it. Certainly that would be better——

  He stood, and reached down for her shoulder. But suppose he binds me again? she thought, as she rose in his grip. Wasn’t it better to do it now and have done? (His black-gloved fingers on her shoulder were strong.) Or was hers simply the endlessly rationalized delay of someone blatantly terrified of killing?

  “I think,” she said softly, “you are a good and thoughtful man.”

  What she thought was: You are an evil pig a-wallow in a rotten sty!

  He didn’t pick up the rope as, holding her arm, he walked her by the brazier, the chair, the desk, across the matting toward the tent flap.

  Still supporting her, with his other black glove he took the canvas and pulled it back.

  Standing just outside, the prince ran his gauntleted hand down one side of his beard, then the other, and said: “Kire, you are a fool! ‘Hate Prince Nactor…?’ Guards—” Naä pulled back, as Kire released her arm. A dozen shadowy soldiers waited in ordered formation behind the bearded prince—“arrest Lieutenant Kire—for incompetence, insubordination, and treason! And also the woman—”

  The hesitation that had plagued her moments ago vanished before the immediate. Naä dodged behind the lieutenant, lunged for the table, thrust her hand under the brazier, and hurled fire—in a sheet that astonished her, even as it hung a moment in the air, and flickered, and threw up coiling smoke tendrils, a curtain of blue and yellow effulgence, of falling, flaming oil, dropping to the matting, arching toward the striped wall opposite. That same moment she hurled herself to the floor and rolled against the tent’s back canvas. Guards shouted. Were any of them dodging around the back? But, yes, and she was under, up in the dark and the cool night, running—mercifully no tree or water barrel stood before her, or she would have smashed into it and knocked herself unconscious.

  Naä ran.

  Branches raked at her, bushes snatched at and scraped her. Rimgia’s shawl caught and tore—Naä paused to jerk it (swallowing the impulse to scream); she pulled free, snatched it after her, and ran again in a chatter of brush and leaves, till she tripped—and went sprawling. What she’d tripped on was large and rolled a little, loudly.

  Flies in the dark make an unholy sound—and hundreds of them scritted, disturbed now, from whatever she’d fallen over. She caught the stench—like the puma pelt and the basket and the ravine itself, intensified to gagging, eye-watering level—and pulled herself away.

  (She would forever recall it as some villager’s corpse, slain and left to lie. Actually, though, it was a prairie lion carcass: the evening just before the attack, Mrowky and Uk had been ordered to dump it in the forest three hundred paces off. But Mrowky couldn’t stand the thing and had insisted on leaving it here, right now, we’ve taken it far enough, nobody’ll find—no, I mean it! I’m leaving it! I don’t care what you do. Put the damned thing down, I said—now!)

  Turning, gasping, Naä saw flames behind her; between the sounds of her breaths, back in the camp she heard soldiers shouting.

  Another sound: the splat of water tossed on canvas (with the sound of the last flies settling)—how close she still was! How little ground she’d covered! And there were soldiers beating loudly in the brush behind the burning tent. Naä pushed herself up and ran again. For a long time.

  Qualt’s and his companion’s mischief had also continued on, as you surely inferred. At various places about the town and the camp there’d been four more rains of garbage from the trees. The one Qualt felt most satisfied over was when, during the distraction that the last shower of fish heads, peachpits, and old birds-nests caused, his flying friend, still unseen, had been able to drop two skins of water into the diamond-wired corral where more than a dozen oldsters and infants were sitting or standing, more or less bewildered, in the burning sun.

  But now, with the Winged One, in the darkness, Qualt was once more crouched among the trees beside the Myetran camp, listening—rather the Winged One was listening and reporting to Qualt what he heard, for they were too far away from the tent for Qualt to hear directly. Heads bent together in the dark, ear touching ear, the Winged One related: “He asks if you folk are as gentle as you appear …She says, yes, you are …Now he wants to know what town secrets, what petty jealousies, envy, and ire she can tell him of; while she … she says you like her music, and she likes what you have to say… he tells her what a pleasant place his own home, Myetra, is, and how, after they have crushed Çiron, they will go on to destroy HiVator, Requior, Del Gaizo—”

  Somewhat to Qualt’s surprise, it was at this mention of Hi-Vator that the Winged One suddenly went a-quiver in the dark. The wind of his sails set the leaves about them shaking and shushing. And one membrane brushed and brushed Qualt’s back.

  “We must go to Hi-Vator—now, we must go! Don’t you think so, groundling? And you can hide there as I have hidden here—and maybe we can even play some tricks as we have played here? But I will tell them of their danger! Though perhaps, after we get there, it would be best if I hid—and you went up to implore the Queen and her Handsman to save themselves; for there are few in Hi-Vator who ever paid much attention to me—and then, most of them, only to curse me. Of course, we could go together …and no one who knew the true import of the message I bring could really think evil of me anymore—do you think?”

  “Dost thou think,” Qualt demanded, his hand on the hard, furry shoulder beside him, that flexed and flexed in darkness, “that the Winged Ones there might help us here?”

  “Help you?” The beating paused a puzzled moment. “I dare say they could if they wanted. But help you? After all the help I’ve given you today, carrying you here, getting you there, lifting you out of this danger and away from that one, don’t you think it’s time, given the gravity of this turn, for you to think about helping me?”

  “Then we must go to thy nest at Hi-Vator! Here, let me mount thee—” and, rising in the darkness from his squat, steadying himself on the shoulder below him, Qualt stepped over and around to the soft dirt behind. The warm back rose against his belly, his chest.

  “Hold tight—we have not gone this far before! But you know now how it’s done!”

  In the black, Qualt clutched the Winged One’s neck. Great vibrations started either side of him. Twigs and soft soil dropped away beneath his bare feet. Swinging free, his legs brushed their calves by the Winged One’s rough heels. “But what of the singer?” Qualt thought to call.

  “Oh,” and the head strained back beside his, “she has already escaped them—and is off running in the woods! There, look—their tent’s on fire. And all is confusion with them.” And they rose above the trees, Qualt looking down over the furred shoulder, to see flames lapping at the striped wall flare now, then retreat under the slap of water, then surge still again. Beside him, wings gathered up, beat hugely down—

  How, Qualt wondered, could such flight be carried on in the dark—even as the first moonlight cleared. Then he forgot the paring of light above and simply clung, sometimes with his eyes closed, sometimes merely squinting against the wind.

  They rose before the mountains.

  And rose.

  And rose—till, beside the rush of water over the rocks, at last Qualt stepped away from his flying companion, arms tingling, oddly light-headed.

  “See there—the fire up on that ledge?” the Winged One said, while Qualt tried to catch his breath. “Climb for it, groundling!”

  “Climb… ?”

  “Up the webbing there. See the guy-lines running from under those rocks?”

  There was no talk now—and Qualt was glad of it—of either of them continuing alone or either of them hiding. They climbed the sagging net.

  As Qualt passed one ledge, a Winged One, very fat, waddled quickly to the edge and, with lips pulled back from little teeth and little lids squeezed closed, foll
owed them with her face from below to above.

  They walked along a stone cliff, Qualt picking his way carefully, lagging further and further behind his companion, who, wings wide, bounded ahead, till three youngsters half ran, half soared from the cave-mouth beside him, to freeze, ears cocked and gawking. At a sudden mew within, they retreated. But now his companion waited for Qualt to catch up, making some disgusted comment about the children Qualt didn’t wholly follow.

  Steps had been carved into the mountain, that they had to climb. Some of the edges were stone. Some were roots, with earth packed behind them. Qualt moved his hands along the stone walls either side and wondered why his companion, behind him now on the stairs, didn’t fly this last length of the ascent—which was apparently not the last length after all, because now they had to climb up another fifty feet of webbing, with the rush and rumble of falling water invisible below among dark rocks.

  Finally they gained a ledge where a dozen Winged Ones waited. Qualt was very confused for a while, since no one seemed to want to speak to them.

  Fires burned in several stone tubs. The cave entrances flickered and resounded with wings going in and out, with mewing retreating and emerging. Finally, Qualt heard someone say beside him, in that high, childish voice they all spoke with: “But you can see, that is not the groundling who was here earlier—that is not the one ‘who saved my life. I took him home. He has not returned. They look alike, yes—but not that much alike. Don’t you see how much smaller he is?

  “And you—” which was addressed to Qualt’s companion, who, on reaching the ledge, had suddenly seemed to become indifferent to the whole enterprise and was now sitting on the rocky rim, hanging his heels in space, with his sails drawn in about him and feigning great interest in the night-breezes and the night clouds and anything that was not the confused converse behind him. “Well,” continued the standing Winged One, who wore some sort of flattened chain around his neck (the only dress or ornament Qualt had seen among them so far), “we certainly didn’t expect to see you here, just now—”