Fire in the Sky

4

The sun was brilliant, vaguely greenish in a sky whitened by heat haze when Shadith walked through the enclosure gate with Aslan, her Aide Marrin Ola, and Duncan Shears, the University folk a ragged knot with a pair of guards marching ahead of them, another pair behind. Beyond the paved trade ground, the land turned into a field of low ground cover plants, not grass but something like it, pale gray-green spears with ocher strips; it felt crunchy when Shadith walked on it and there were small gray green scuttlings with every step as if each spear had its own miniature ecosystem.

Strewn through the ground cover, small woody plants grew in pentagons, some complete, some partial, always at least three bushes, always the same distance apart no matter what the age of the plant; the ground cover plant didn’t extend to the area within the pentagons, instead there was a scabby growth something like a lichen, pale yellow and grainy. Scattered more irregularly, there were taller plants, clumps with brown fuzzy growths at the end of long stems thick as Shadith’s forefinger, plants that looked like the bulrushes on a world that no longer existed. Shayalin, blown to atoms before the life on this world was more than one bacterium contemplating another with speculation in its nonglance. Shadith sighed. Nostalgia was a disease she didn’t seem to recover from even when she shifted bodies.

On both sides of the river, trees were dark masses set in shallow curves that bent with the brilliant blue of the water.

Half obscured by the haze above the trees, a number of the aerial folk floated like exquisite golden dreams above the forest, the sucking disks on their tendrils glittering diamond bright in the sun. They were singing/speaking. Like an organ miles wide, chords of splendid complexity, cadenzas, single notes as emphasis. She listened, shivering with pleasure. And with an ache growing in her head that told her it wasn’t merely this world’s equivalent to birdsong but speech.

The Goлs Koraka hoeh Dexios and his angry young phora walked ahead of them, Koraka with his hands clasped behind his back, head turning as he scanned the line of trees, watching the fliers. Shadith wrinkled her nose at his back. At it again, oh dear Goлs. Making us markers in your games. Despite his graceful assurances of free inquiry, he was there to set his seal on them in the eyes of the Bйluchar; he didn’t want the locals getting ideas about playing University against Yarakan.

A man moved from the shadow of the trees, a golden flier hovering above him, pulsing and glowing in the sunlight. Maorgan, if Koraka had it right.

“Glois and the Meloach aren’t there,” Maorgan growled. He inspected the guards, then snorted with disgust. “Careful of his hide, our mesuch.” He looked past the Director at the straggling group of strangers. “Those are the ones he wants to foist on us. Which one do you think is teseach?”

Simple-speech came through the tentacle touching his shoulder. *The Yellow-hair. It is to her the mesuch looks when he looks back. I am cast low, sioll, Utelel sang that the harper promised they would be free.*

“Utelel is Meloach. Xe may turn sioll one day, but xe hasn’t seen much more’n a decade of sun-returns. Xe trusts us single-lives too much.”

Rippling laughter from the Eolt. *Sioll Maorgan, you remember the harp and are jealous.*

“T’ck. I’m remembering xe said the harper learned the whistle talk as easy as a rebekii gulps bait.” *But you know how clever harpers are.*

“And how sarcastic Eolt can be. Shall we go to meet them?”

*As before, sioll Maorgan, and keep your temper tight, good friend.*

Maorgan left the shadow of the trees and walked the five kaels into the choa and stopped in the center of an oim korroi pentad with two points dead, the living bushes between him and the others; should flesh guards try laying hands on him, they’d discover the defenses of the oim, it was only the steel ones that made him worry. He swung the harpcase around and set it before him on the scab, wondering as he did so if he’d have a chance to play for the offworld harper and hear what she could do.

The yellow-hair watched him quietly from eyes blue as bits of storm-dark sea-clever eyes, calm eyes, eyes measuring him, lifting to Melech, returning to Maorgan. And the yellow of her hair was more a brown with amber lights. And when she smiled at him, the light spread over her face and leaped but from her and heated him.

He looked away before he fell too deeply into her web, and found himself meeting the eyes of the harper. She was strange in a way he couldn’t comprehend; he touched his finger to Melech’s tentacle. “What is it about her, sioll?” he murmured, keeping his voice low so the mesuchs wouldn’t hear him.

*This xe can’t find her song, sioll Maorgan. The yellow-hair is simple beside her. The others are servants, of no importance.*

“Sfais, despois,” the mesuch with the fur face boomed at him. That was a man sure of his importance, pushing it off on everyone around him.

“Fes,” Maorgan said. It was something the traders said to each other, some kind of greeting; he didn’t care. Made things go easier when you followed the other party’s rules. If you wanted them to go easier.

The Eolt Melech withdrew his tentacle and glided higher, rising and falling, using the layered currents of the air to oscillate in place above Maorgan, song speech flowing through the interstices of the word-exchange between Maorgan and the mesuch.

Telk a telk a telk, the time ticked past as they went over the same ground they’d gone over day after day. Yellow-hair listened, impatience glinting in her sea-storm eyes. The Harper watched Melech except when her eyes glazed over and she shut them tight. And when that happened, the air around her wrinkled with pain and implication.

From the corner of his eyes, while he tried to find a way to shut off the mesuch so he could deal with Yellow-hair, he watched the harper.

She knelt beside the case, opened the catches, and took out an instrument both like and unlike his own. Though it was made and not grown, it had the beauty of its essence and the track of loving hands along its wood. She played a tune on the case with her fingertips and he saw the thing he hadn’t believed when Melech relayed Glois’ tale.

The stuff of the case flowed and folded and in moments was a three-legged stool. She shifted to the stool and began to tune the harp, a pleasant distraction that worked into the mesuch’s notice and brought an instant’s irritation to his fur-masked face.

She plucked a string, and the sound with its brother tones was an insistence.

She sang, her voice rich and true, the words infused with all the fringes that only a near-term Eolt could manage, the silences filled with as much to think on as the sound phrases had, the strangeness of her, age and youth combined, present so powerfully she drew the drifting Eolt like a whirling wind-trap.

She sang:

value fleeting moment understand

necessity/insistence no escape

emptiness will be filled no way to avoid understand

we/sympathy/sorrow we/pride/completeness

knowledge/trade value for value/we/you strength/wisdom

friendship/limited opening of doors

let there be hearing/a coining to touch.

The Chorus of Eolts sang their astonishment and pleasure. The chords grew and blended as they discussed the phrases and intervals, as they debated what to do about the strong warning of complications and pain from the outsiders, a warning that what was done could not be undone, that they were found and must make a choice, that the choice should be grounded on knowledge, a warning that knowledge opened many doors they might want to stay closed, that change was inevitable, that there were ways to mitigate the damage as well as exploit the opening. The combinations and permutations of that short burst of song from the harper held a promise of endless play with meaning and possibility. There was fear and excitement in the chords of the Eolt, yearning and revulsion-and finally decision.

They sang:

It must be done let it be done.

3. The Sorrows of Ard