by R. M. Meluch
A clay jug of water stood near the hearth. Hall broke the iced-over surface with a silver ladle and shaved the copper stubble from his face with the straight edge of his dagger, which was still warm from being sheathed against his forearm. He hadn’t taken it off.
Vaslav, like most space travelers from more modern worlds than Hall’s, showed no trace of a beard.
Outside the air was piercing fresh. Painted streaks were spreading in the eastern sky. A few bright stars still glimmered in the indigo west. Then a bright shaft of light spilled over the eastern mountains and splashed across the peaks. The valley below lay still in shadow. The sentinel on the dawn ridge opened his arms in salute to the sun as it climbed over the edge of the world.
There were no clouds anywhere, and Hall could see for miles—mountain after impassable mountain beyond the isolated terraced valley with its waterfall spitting rainbows into the air in the morning light. The day would be fair.
Hall stretched, feeling the mountain cold in his bones. He could see summer far below in the still-shaded village Kaletani Mai, but pride refused to let him go there. The air was only slightly thin to him, coming from Eridani as he did. He could survive up here.
The Aerie stirred. Hall watched the white ranga come out of their caves and turn dark in the sunlight. They were funny, cherubic little people, always cheerful, and a bit stupid. They were of one breed with the tall, slender enigmatic aghara. That’s what Serra said. It was difficult to believe. Polymorphism in the extreme, Hall thought. The majestic aghara were actually the rare children of the chubby gnomes, and the Itiri warrior-priests were what the aghara kind spent their lives training to become.
Hall watched a few warrior-priests summon aghara children from out of the ranga caves. Youthful scarless faces of the uninitiated appeared in answer to their masters’ call, and the young cheelas crossed the bridge to Aerieside to run with their masters over the mountain.
Hall followed one pair for a while, but he couldn’t keep pace. So he dropped out of the running and walked alone along a swift-running brook where black birds with serrate beaks and oily feathers dove into the water seeking crustaceans under the rocks of the streambed. The winds were fast out here beyond the Aerie. Hall’s face was stung red. He unrolled his bandana and tied it on his head to keep the buffeting from his ears.
He strayed from the beaten track through a stand of scrubby, distorted would-be trees that fringed the sun-bleached rocks of the ridge. The hunter in him was drawn by a trail of footprints crushed into moss still exhaling strong fragrance as if recently done. Someone had strayed this way before him—someone who wore shoes. Possibilities were limited.
And in an isolated depression where the air was still, sheltered by a curving rock wall and carpeted with long low-lying grasses, he found Alihahd seated on a rock, his elbows on his knees, his head bowed, his hands trembling. At Hall’s approach he looked up, pale, beads of sweat on his face. Then his watery gaze returned to his feet. Hall jogged down the rocks into the low space and drew closer. He stood a moment in observation. This wasn’t altitude sickness. “Alcoholic, Captain?”
Alihahd looked up in helpless self-surprise. He drew a wavering breath, licked his salty wet upper lip, and tried to steady his hands. “I would have said no.” But his shaking hands held out before him defied him.
Hall watched curiously, weight on one foot, the other foot angled in. “You’re not seeing snakes, are you?”
“No. No snakes.”
Alihahd hung his head and closed his eyes. Hall climbed back out of the sunken area and left him alone with his misery.
• • •
Vaslav stumbled into Serra’s cave late in the morning and squinted at the green breakfast Serra set before him.
A little while later Alihahd showed up, looking wounded and fragile. Serra took a separate kettle from the fire and poured an herbal brew for him. It smelled medicinal. Alihahd looked at Serra dubiously.
“Mr. Hall said you were sick,” Serra said.
Alihahd’s eyes shifted to Hall. “Mr. Hall said that, did he?”
Hall took his empty pipe from between his teeth and gestured with it to the cup of tea on the table. “It’s a mild sedative.”
Alihahd spoke stiffly with an edge in his voice. The words were, “Thank you, Mr. Hall.” The tone said, Back off, Mr. Hall.
“You look pale,” Serra said.
Alihahd’s brows rose over deep-set watery eyes. “I imagine I will look much paler before long,” he murmured.
Alihahd took to bed and stayed there, wretchedly ill. One by one his deadly secrets were beginning to slip away from him into open air for all to see, hard as he tried to lock them down.
He couldn’t stop the Itiri physician from coming to examine him. The Itiri had to know if Alihahd had the plague.
Alihahd crouched back against the wall in drunken fear of the alien and in real fear of the examination—or rather the verdict of the examination. Alihahd had been afraid the alien would step back and declare, “He’s a drunk.” But the aged Itiri merely announced that he had never seen this particular malady before. He rubbed his withered jowls in puzzlement and muttered about inoculations and quarantine.
A low chuckle at the door made him turn.
Harrison Hall rocked back on his heels. His eyes were merry crescents. “Oh, it’s not plague,” Hall said.
From the bed, Alihahd’s liquid eyes fixed accusingly on the tall satanic figure in the doorway, awaiting betrayal.
But Hall said to the physician, “It’s a poison.”
“Will he die?” the physician asked.
“I think not,” Hall said.
“O God, why not?” Alihahd moaned and tried to vomit.
He writhed at night with horrid dreaming and rasping breath, trying to draw in enough oxygen from the air that seared his throat raw as he gasped at it.
The ranga moved a mass of potted bushes and leafy plants into his cave to replenish the oxygen and moisture in the closed air.
Alihahd lost track of day and night. He knew only twilight and darkness and his own agony. Hall had moved out and sought shelter elsewhere.
From a nightmare Alihahd awoke, thrashing and sweating and shivering under the rough blanket. He turned over in the dark to someone there—Vaslav sitting on the edge of the wide bed keeping vigil, his youthful face angelic with devotion in the infinitesimal light.
Alihahd lay on his back, gasping, his hair a matted snarl, perspiration and tears beaded on his haggard face and trickling down its deep furrows. He reached up a feeble hand—he could only lift his arm from his elbow—and touched Vaslav’s cheek with the back of his fingers. In a deep, croaking voice he said, “Vaslav, do you love me?”
The boy’s eyes flew wide. He sputtered, choked, stumbled over an aborted explanation, and stammered out, “Yes.”
Alihahd’s strengthless hand dropped back on the bed. “Then please let me vomit in private.”
Abashed, the boy stuttered a flustered apology and left. Had he a tail, it would have been between his legs.
Alihahd curled up and wrapped his arms around his abdomen.
He woke at late dawn to a cold waft of fresh air in his stuffy chamber. Long slanting sun rays streamed in from the doorway, its hide cover blown slightly agape. The bushes in their trough at the far wall of the shadowy cave leaned toward the light, stretching out their leafy branches. They seemed to be straining.
Then one pulled itself up by its bipartite roots and walked out.
Then all the rest of them, save one, unearthed themselves and pattered out in a herd.
The last one tugged itself free and ran out with a hasty whap whap whap of roots on the floor.
Alihahd pulled the covers over his head, delirious.
At midday, Alihahd woke again, lifted the covers, and peered out.
A trail of dirt was strewn ac
ross the floor from the empty planter at the far wall to the door.
Alihahd pulled the covers back over his head.
He swore the bushes would be back next time he looked.
He looked again when he heard Amerika’s darting footsteps and sweet, scolding commands, “Get! Come back, you little monkey!”
And a stampede of slapping roots.
He lifted the blanket to see Amerika chasing a bunch of errant bushes back into the cave. They fled before her, dodged into the dark place, sank their roots into the trough, and became very still.
Amerika gave a single nod of satisfaction, wiping her hands on her skirts, and went out.
Alihahd laughed till he threw up.
And steadily, as days passed, he grew more pale—almost white—and his eyes became blue, and the roots of his hair emerged blond. When finally he sat up, washed, and dressed, he was perfectly fair.
Hall was surprised—and a little amused. “You’re a nazi!”
“Don’t—” Alihahd began too loudly. He caught himself and finished softly, “—call me that, if you please.”
Hall shrugged his big shoulders. “Isn’t that the Na′id word for your kind?”
“It means more than blond-haired and blue-eyed. Do not call me that.”
Hall shrugged.
The coloring was rare now, but not as rare as the Na′id would like. Still it was far too conspicuous for a man trying to move in Na′id circles without attracting attention. The way Alihahd looked now, he could not pass for a Chesite or a Na′id. The bogus Na′id captain was bogus indeed. “A white Na′id,” Hall chuckled.
“Do not call me that either.”
“Sorry,” Hall said. He was aware of the full implications of that epithet and knew it was a bad one.
Serra stared at the new Alihahd. She didn’t say anything. She sat down on the bed, drew a skinning knife from its sheath in her boot, and proceeded to cut off his hair down to the blond.
Vaslav was thunderstruck by the change. “Are you really Alihahd?” he asked in doubting distress.
A cut lock of black hair fell down Alihahd’s face. He brushed it off his knee. “I am the only Alihahd there ever was,” he said, changing the words slightly. “Alihahd was never quite real.”
The hero the boy believed in, he was not. There was no hero Alihahd.
White and shorn and still very weak, Alihahd ventured outside alone. Everything startled him, as if a filter had been lifted from his senses, and for the first time in over a decade he received the full assault of the world around him, so aware of life that it was painful.
He climbed the path on trembling legs, his hand out to steady himself on the cliff face, bracing himself against the wind’s push.
Even his own hands were strange to him now—pallid great bony things tracked with bulging blue veins. He was frowning at them and at the blond hairs of his white forearms, when suddenly a warrior dropped down from the next level onto the path before him.
A flat and handsome yellow face with smoldering eyes.
Blinding sunlight on a naked blade.
Jinin-Ben-Tairre.
Alihahd didn’t move as the sword turned, the blade gliding in a silken pass from Ben’s massive shoulder and into another ready position. Ben was naked to the waist, and every clearly defined muscle in his arms and broad chest showed flexing and flowing, one with the weapon. Ben made no sound, not even the rustle of clothing. He wore only satiny black trousers and the red rags on his scarred feet. There was a carnelian ring on his left hand, and the black glove over his right hand. The warrior circled slowly.
Alihahd didn’t dare turn. He did not know what laws bound an Itiri, but knew there was nothing to stay this bastard warrior from killing him here and now if he so chose. Alihahd waited for the sword to split his skull from behind, an old chant running through his brain:
Circle circle, dance of death
Once she cries, twice she lays
A wreath about his youthful head
Thrice she flies, for nothing stays.
Full circle, Ben stopped before Alihahd. Alihahd felt naked with his true face exposed. He was more gaunt and drawn than before, his hollow cheeks deepened. Marked crevices were chiseled from his nostrils to the corners of his mouth, and his forceful bone structure showed beneath emaciated flesh. But most revealed were the luminous blue eyes, sunken in their orbits. Their gaze penetrated with a daunting power that had been masked before by the darker pigment.
Ben’s sword changed hands, left to right, and he reached out with his left hand—the ungloved one—to Alihahd’s white face. Alihahd tightened, anticipating pain, but felt only the light brush of short fingers on his chin.
Ben withdrew his hand and left.
Alihahd stood, still frozen in place. Sun tingled his fair skin. The wind was cold on his short-sheared scalp. Finally Harrison White Fox Hall came and took his hand like a child. “Come on, Captain.” Alihahd looked at the dark red hand, then looked at Hall’s laughing face.
“Are you laughing at me?” Alihahd asked.
“Yes,” Hall said.
And since there was no intelligent answer to that, he said, “Oh,” and let Hall guide him back to the cave—laughing.
• • •
Gunshots reported and echoed through the mountains in the early morning.
That will be Mr. Hall.
Alihahd stepped out of his cave. Shadows were very long. He followed the sound, stopping every few hundred feet to rest and breathe in frosty clouds.
The gun’s reports led him to Harrison Hall, poised on a mountain spur with his crazy-looking notch-handled rifle. He was shooting clay pigeons that Vaslav hurled out from a higher ledge.
Alihahd made his way to Hall’s side, his approach loud enough, his tunic red enough that he wouldn’t surprise the gunman. Hall was hitting every bird, some several times when the fragments were large enough to bother with.
At last Vaslav called down, “That’s it.” The boy opened empty arms, having run out of clay birds.
Hall turned his head to Alihahd for comment.
“Impressive,” Alihahd said.
Hall put one foot up on a rock and rested the butt of his gun on his sloping thigh. “Not my usual kind of target, but—” He finished with a shrug.
“What do you usually shoot?”
“Whatever’s blue and glows in the dark.”
Na′id uniforms and Na′id ships were electric blue with glowing red insignias of Human Supremacy/Galactic Dominion.
“I was shooting the real birds this morning,” he told Alihahd. “Our hosts didn’t like it.”
“Do you ever miss?”
“Never.”
Vaslav clambered down from his high ledge and came to them puffing. His cheeks and nose were wind-bitten. He looked healthy. A few days’ primitive life had done him good, shedding him of his spaceship pallor.
Eight days. Alihahd had sensed the days were long here—30.96 standard hours, said Vaslav, who wore a standard chronometer around his wrist. It seemed time for a tentative evaluation.
Alihahd propped his foot up on the same rock as Hall and leaned in, casually conspiratorial, one arm across his knee, a carefully magnetic gesture, and the other two men automatically leaned in for a private conference.
“What do you think of them?” Alihahd asked quietly. “Our hosts.” Himself, he was not sure. He’d been in bed most of the eight days. These two had seen more than he.
“Too passive, if you ask me,” Hall said.
“That is bad?” Alihahd asked.
“They have an army up here. I may be able to shoot the birds, but Roniva catches them in her bare hands without looking at them. I’ve seen their swords cut through tempered steel, and I hear you have to walk through fire to become a warrior. They’re all crack shots, and from what I’ve se
en, it’s not too much to guess that they could totally annihilate the Na′id’s Great Human Army if they put their minds to it.”
Alihahd couldn’t argue, even though he estimated only a thousand warriors on the Aerie by highest count. He wondered if there were many more. He shuddered at the words totally annihilate.
Given the proper technology—which, fortunately, the Itiri lacked—Alihahd didn’t think there was much the Itiri couldn’t do.
“But what do they do?” Hall continued, then answered his own question, “Sit up here and protect the birds.”
He raised his gun and centered a winging swift in his sights. He didn’t pull the trigger, just said, “Bang.” And Alihahd knew the bird had been spared—no luck or maybe about it.
Hall lowered the gun. His tawny eyes glittered with ferocity. His lips curved beneath his gray mustache without a trace of softness.
Alihahd paused. “Whom did you lose?”
The eyes flickered to his, then looked away to the sky.
“Everyone.”
5. Does Jerusalem Stand?
THE DATE WAS THE NINTH DAY of the Red Geese, year of the Ship in the Opal hexadecade. So said Vaslav. It was all mush to Alihahd. But, cast outside the stream of human events and beyond the relevance of human calendars, he ought to get used to it. Layla had been here on the Aerie seven Earth years. Serra had been here fifteen years, Ben seventeen. God knew when Alihahd would ever leave. He could die here. He was convinced that Ben-Tairre meant to kill him, though Amerika said not—it would not be virtuous. Alihahd didn’t place much faith in the human-turned-alien’s virtue. The man hated him.
Alihahd heard the wind brass tapping in the swift gusts outside the cave where the humans had gathered.
“What is the date?” he asked Vaslav. “The real date.”
Vaslav glanced at his wrist chronometer, “Tenthmonth nine. It’s 0935 hours on the meridian.”
The year would have been 5856 CE were anyone still using the Gregorian calendar.
Earth’s civilization had reached its height long ago, in the third Common millennium, with an interstellar technology and human colonies flung across the Milky Way. At its peak the delicate balance had crashed, and civilization itself imploded in a galaxy-wide political and economic collapse that threw humankind into a dark age for two thousand years, a time when no ships would fly. Colonies, cut off from each other and left to their own resources, lost their technology, their ties with Earth, their count of years. Many forgot Earth and each other altogether.