by R. M. Meluch
Tawny eyes slid sideways to Alihahd. The man returned a slow, wan smile.
Alihahd’s thickened brain realized this man was not one of his volunteers. For one, Alihahd would’ve remembered if he’d ever seen him before. For another, he was too tall.
Their eyes met and held. Menace and amusement lurked in the orange-brown tigerlike eyes.
This was the rescue ship’s master. And Alihahd was still wondering: friend or foe?
He was dressed like a civilian but looked old enough to have been retired from military service if he was Na′id. He was obviously a private citizen now, but of where? From his style of clothing he was possibly a native of Eridani. But Eridani was a Na′id possession now, had been for fifteen years. Whose side did that put him on?
Alihahd couldn’t ask him to fly his colors without showing his own first. These were cautious days, and the correct answer to a stranger’s inquiry of “Who are you?” was either “Why?” or “Who are you?”
Alihahd couldn’t know if it was safe to speak his own volatile name. At its very mention that crazy weapon with the notched handle could come whipping out and shoot through his heart.
There were worse fates.
Alihahd couldn’t wait for the man to drop a clue. He needed to know now.
He looked dead into the tiger eyes. “Alihahd,” he introduced himself. “Captain of the late runner ship Liberation.”
“Hall,” said the stranger. “Harrison White Fox Hall of the late ship Nemo.”
And Alihahd knew hardly more than he had before. The name wasn’t Na′id. But if Hall had been a conscript from Eridani rather than a volunteer, he wouldn’t have an honorific name. He hadn’t reacted one way or the other to the name Alihahd.
Then what did the ship’s name signify? “What is Nemo?”
“In Latin it means ‘no one,’” Hall said like a beginning, as if there was more to be said.
Alihahd was already alarmed. He knew what Latin was—a dead Earth language from the First Historical Age, the time before the Collapse. The Na′id were peerless in their knowledge of mankind’s ancient history. A Latin name was a Na′id enough thing. Alihahd braced himself should the second half of Harrison White Fox Hall’s answer be accompanied by the draw of his weapon and arrest in the name of the Na′id Empire.
Hall continued, “In Greek, it means ‘I allot.’”
That was curious. “Allot?” Allot what?
“Nemesis,” Hall said. “What is deserved.” He glanced away toward the horizon. His voice changed pitch, and he tossed the last line away as if unimportant. “Revenge, if you will.”
He looked back to Alihahd, and understanding passed between them. Alihahd knew enough. Nothing more need be said.
“Mr. Hall.” Alihahd finally nodded in greeting.
“Captain.” Harrison White Fox Hall returned the nod, conspicuously avoiding the false name Alihahd.
Alihahd saw Hall taking another hard look at him.
Alihahd cut a fine figure: rangy, thin as though from dissipation, his dark red tunic stuck to his gaunt frame. He spoke and carried himself like aristocracy—profoundly weary aristocracy, at once proud and sorry as a tattered flag.
He knew what it was Hall watched with those long stares and intensity bordering on venom. Alihahd’s “name,” his tunic, and his swarthy coloring were all appropriate to the planet Chesa. But his features were wrong—tall flat forehead, straight Nordic nose, fine hair—they were pure Caucasian. The mixture made him look very very Na′id.
Their gazes had locked again, and they tried to stare each other down. The boy Vaslav, standing over them, looked from one to the other, aware that something was going on beyond what he could see. Neither man was going to break away.
Till an eagle alighted on the aircraft, its great wings and tail fanned in braking, its talons outstretched. It screamed.
Its landing rocked the plane on the water, and Alihahd grabbed a strut to catch himself. As he pitched far over the edge of the pontoon, a whalelike head rose up from the sea, and Alihahd was suddenly face-to-face with a black-and-white sea creature. A barrage of delphine clicks and squeals sounded from its blowhole. When the plane settled, a warrior-priest knelt next to Alihahd on the pontoon, and leaned over to listen to the whale as if its noises were actually intelligible. The Itiri turned his head to Alihahd. “Two, didst thou say?” He held up two nailless fingers. “This many? Thy companions are dead.”
Alihahd hung his head. He had already known. “Very well, then,” he said to the warrior. “We are in your hands.”
The Itiri waved the whale away and stood up. The eagle launched itself with a push that bobbed the plane like a toy on the water. The warriors shouted and whistled to one another, climbing into the fuselage, readying the plane to depart this place.
Eyes downcast, Alihahd became aware of rawhide-booted feet standing at his side. He looked up. Hall had risen and was offering a hand. Alihahd hesitated. He didn’t want it. The unease he’d first felt on meeting the spacesuited stranger returned. He could stand up by himself.
But in some parts of the galaxy to refuse a man’s hand was ground for murder.
Alihahd took the offered hand, and Hall pulled him easily to his feet.
Hall climbed inside the plane with the Itiri. Alihahd started to follow, but noticed Vaslav hanging back, staring forlornly at the waves.
The boy appealed to Alihahd, stammering, “But. . . .”
Neal and Yuko, Alihahd thought. He’d failed to retrieve his dead.
He put a hand on the youth’s shoulder. “It’s as good a resting place as any,” he said with comfort and sureness he didn’t feel.
And to soothe the boy’s mind, he spoke a few words over the souls beneath the waters though he was certain they could find their way to their God without him.
• • •
It was the first of the Red Geese when Alihahd, Harrison White Fox Hall, and Vaslav came to the Aerie. The journey took several hours in the slow way of primitives aboard a noisy vibrating craft kept aloft by propellers and piloted without a computer. The hulking machine lurched into flight and climbed slowly, shuddering. The heat and pressure of the air lessened with altitude, and Alihahd felt better, though he was still plagued with the mistrust of a starman staking his life on an antediluvian transport that felt and sounded as if it would rattle apart.
The Itiri spent the entire journey in a separate compartment, leaving the humans in the cargo hold.
Fine by Alihahd. He had never liked aliens.
Harrison White Fox Hall took off his wet coat and rolled up one of his shirtsleeves. He drew his notch-handled gun and inspected it for saltwater damage.
Alihahd was not going to ask if the notches represented humans or aliens.
Now Hall sat on the deck by a porthole, one elbow resting on one knee. He seemed to be enjoying the view.
A man who decides who lives and who dies. Not even a pretense of regret. When Hall’s ship was in danger, Hall had placed the available parachutes on himself and the other captain, the last people who should have been saved, and he stayed cavalier through the entire harrowing ordeal.
Alihahd felt anger. And envy.
The plane hit an air pocket. The metal box jumped and dipped. Alihahd closed his eyes and waited for the crash he thought was coming.
When it didn’t happen, he opened his eyes. Hall was looking at him.
A ghost of a smile glided beneath the graying mustache. “Not afraid, are you, Captain?”
That was provocation. Hall wanted a fight. And he wanted it with Alihahd. The boy Vaslav didn’t interest him.
Alihahd wouldn’t have it. He would take a fall before he would be baited into defending himself. Self-respect, he had none. Honor was long gone. There was nothing to defend. Hall ought to know that about men without names.
He swallowed the in
sult. “Maybe I am.”
He could tell that Hall wasn’t sure if he’d won the confrontation or not.
Hall distractedly drew his pipe, took it between his teeth and reached into his pocket for tobacco. Finding his pocket empty, he suddenly became conscious of what he was doing and put the pipe away.
• • •
Alihahd had disturbed Hall’s perfect understanding of the universe.
Avoiding a challenge was not a thing to do where Hall was from. It was cowardly. Yet Hall couldn’t call Alihahd a coward—not under the circumstances in which he’d found him.
Alihahd had admitted fear outright. On Eridani, a man did not back down from a challenge like that.
Unless he was very very sure of himself.
And it occurred to Hall that Alihahd just didn’t care what Hall thought of him. The accepted insult wasn’t surrender. It was dismissal. Alihahd’s regard for Hall was so slight as to nullify anything Hall might say to him. Alihahd probably didn’t even realize what he was doing, the insult more complete for being sincere and uncalculated.
Hall had never been so thoroughly put down in his adult life.
Hall was amazed, about to be angry. Then a slow hunter’s smile crept onto his lips. He laughed, a low grumbly sound.
Alihahd looked at him. Hall winked a stalking tiger’s eye.
The captain was an enigma: brave and frightened, strong and weak, assured and uncertain, serene and haunted. Nothing about him was clear or unopposed by some other trait.
And Hall realized it could only be that his elusive captain was two people. And one was not real.
The one without a real name.
• • •
The airplane abandoned the coast and turned inland to cross a mountain range.
“Good,” Hall said. “I can’t swim.”
“I suppose I cannot either,” Alihahd said. “I drowned once before.”
“Only nearly, it looks like,” Hall said.
Alihahd didn’t elaborate. He gazed out a porthole.
The land was stark and impassable save by air. Unable to clear the towering peaks, the plane wove a path between mountains.
Vaslav watched their passage with one hand clapped across his mouth, his eyes round with dread. He hadn’t stopped trembling. He lowered his hand. It fluttered like an indecisive butterfly. “Will we be here the rest of our lives?”
“I do not know,” Alihahd said, his words slow and distinct, for the boy was new to the language. “The natives did not learn Universal in total isolation. That much is certain.”
Vaslav craned back his head, perplexed. “They’re speaking Universal?”
Alihahd smiled. “Of a sort.”
The plane stopped once to refuel on a lonely plateau, then continued over the rugged land on its solitary winding way. They’d lost the eagles long ago.
At last the jagged peaks gave way to a sudden, startling cradle of relative flatness, a wide fertile plain in an open valley ringed by high mountains where eagles flew. Squares of green-and-gold cultivations checkered the fields and crept up the feet of the enclosing mountains on terraced slopes. A long thin veil of a waterfall spilled from one of the massifs and fed a river that twisted through the valley in a lazy course lined with willowlike trees and neat, pretty, little houses built of broad, woody reeds that had been carved and shaped, perched on stilts. The houses were roofed with varicolored reeds upcurved at the eaves.
The plane landed in a warm, dusty meadow of brown grasses. The warrior-priestess named Arilla came back to the humans’ compartment and let them out to the summer village of Kaletani Mai.
Alihahd dropped down from the plane and took a few unsteady steps on the first solid ground he’d trod in a long time. The sky was clear blue. The smell of ripening fields drifted to him on a mild breeze.
The villagers came running out of the fields at the aircraft’s arrival, and Alihahd backed up against the plane in the face of the noisy, barefoot onslaught of short stocky aliens who panted like dogs and chattered in a strange tongue. But it was a benign rush, aimed at the warrior-priests more than the humans, who were a mere curiosity.
The villagers were short and bulky like big gnomes—as draft ponies to racehorses next to the six tall, slender warrior-priests. Their skin was brown or white. The color changed as the aliens stood in full sunlight or shadow. All of them had light red hair and black eyes. Their kind were called ranga. The tall, fair warrior kind were called aghara. They looked like two different breeds.
Looks deceived.
The babbling, smiling ranga surrounded the laconic warrior-priests, who answered them tersely in an incomprehensible language. There was a lot of talk—questions, answers, directions, arrangements, acknowledgments. Vaslav listened closely, as if he might actually pick out patterns in the noise.
Alihahd eased away from the throng and retreated to the far side of the airplane. Under the shade of the wing, he leaned on the pontoon, his head resting on his arms.
Harrison Hall had taken off exploring on his own.
Vaslav came under the plane wing with Alihahd. Alihahd lifted his head and rubbed his brow. “Yes, Vaslav.”
Vaslav’s eyes were darting this way and that, taking in the alien trees and crops, the charming village, the blue sky. He was furtively smiling but unsure if he ought. He looked to his captain for the proper reaction. Alihahd did not look happy.
“Are—are we safe?” Vaslav asked.
“I see no evidence for alarm,” Alihahd said. “Go walk with Mr. Hall. I swallowed too much brine, is all.” He motioned the boy away with a weak wave of his hand.
Vaslav’s smile spread to a beaming grin, and he bounded away to catch up with Harrison Hall.
Alihahd covered his eyes with his hand. It was the mark of a great leader to be a consummate liar. Alihahd was scared to death. But why ruin the boy’s image of an idyll—especially when he just might be right? Alihahd kept the worry to himself. That was what leaders were for.
The complete alienness of the surroundings weighed on him. He felt ill. He needed distance.
He stooped to crawl underneath the body of the plane. He sat down with his head leaning back against the rough treads of the tail wheel, and shut his eyes.
He found comforting familiarity in the sound of wind in leaves, the smell of chlorophyll and dry grain fiber, and the rubberlike tire at his back. He could almost imagine this to be one of Earth’s far-flung colonies, and the alien voices just the chatter of slaves.
Yet darker visions invaded his illusion. He knew what experiments the Na′id performed on live aliens, on parts of them.
And humans were the aliens here.
He bided an indeterminate while beneath the plane, and began to think he’d been forgotten. The day grew hot, and he had no ambition to move. The sun was directly overhead.
He listened to the buzz and chirp of reptilian birds, dozed off and on, studied his sheltering plane with its wheels and pontoons, and decided it was a stupid design for an aircraft.
Harrison White Fox Hall returned from his prowl, his dark red-bronze face burned a deeper red. He eased himself under the plane with Alihahd. Vaslav crawled in after him.
“Didn’t get too far,” Hall said. He took off his bandana, loosed the knot, and retied it around his head. “Some industry behind the hill where the river curves round. Hardly impressive. This seems to be state-of-the-art technology.” He patted the metal belly of the amphibious craft above their heads.
Alihahd groaned, his hopes of ever getting off-world fading. Yet he hadn’t realistically expected more.
Hall stretched out his long legs. “My dear Captain, there are worse places you could be marooned.”
Alihahd turned to look at him directly. “With worse company?” he asked sincerely. He didn’t mean the aliens.
Hall grinned, took Alihahd’s he
ad in his hands, and kissed him on the mouth. “Possibly not,” he said.
“I thought as much,” Alihahd said. Many cultures sent people to the grave with kisses. And as Hall lowered his hands, Alihahd grasped one of his wrists—the one with the sleeve not rolled up. Alihahd’s fingertips touched something hard, the hilt of a hidden dagger strapped to Hall’s forearm.
Both men froze, the same question on their minds. Should they attempt it, which of them could draw and use one of Hall’s weapons first?
Vaslav coughed nervously.
Alihahd turned his head. Vaslav was confused. Vaslav couldn’t see the dagger, couldn’t see Alihahd’s and Hall’s thoughts, which were so transparent to each other. He couldn’t reconcile their actions with any antecedent action, their words with their silken tones. He could only figure he was having a severe translation problem.
“Poor Vaslav,” Alihahd said and let go of Hall’s wrist.
The tall warrior-priestess Arilla came again, bearing thin-skinned fruit, green leafy stalks, and coarse flat bread. She placed them in the grass under the airplane. “For thee and thee and thee.”
She saw their hesitation. “Not to worry,” she said. “It is safe for humankind.” She didn’t say how she knew.
With little appetite, Alihahd took a bite of the bread, then pushed everything away with an unsteady hand.
Arilla told him he was bony. Alihahd could not be persuaded.
Finally Arilla beckoned, her bracelets jingling and sliding up to her elbow. “Come, if thou wilt not eat. We are not home yet. This is only the Lower Aerie.”
Lower Aerie? They were three and a half miles above sea level. “There is an Upper Aerie?” Alihahd asked, climbing from under the plane to join Arilla in the open sunlight.
“There.” She pointed upward.
3. Island in the Sky
HIGH ABOVE THE PLAIN towered the forbidding peaks of a great mountain, its twin summits separated by a deep narrow crevasse, as if a god had taken a cleaver and sliced the single mountain in two. Where the two peaks slanted away from each other in the misty distance, Alihahd could see tiers of stone arches on both sides of the fissure.