Fire Time

ELEVEN

As Larreka and his escort neared the headquarters of Yakulen Ranch, a storm drove ponderously out of the west. Wind sighed cold through the heat which had brooded earlier, like a sword through flesh, and sunscorched lia rippled and rustled across yellow-brown kilometers of range. Far off, a herder and his wo were bringing in a flock of owas; they seemed lost in that hugeness. Single trees tossed, brawled, threw splashes of russet at flying murky clouds. Between land and low heaven swept a hundred fleetwings; their rices creaked faintly in the whine and boom around. Where light-spears, fire or brass color, struck, they changed the took of the world. Westward stood a purple-black cliff down which lightnings torrented. The noise of those streams rolled steadily louder.

The trooper from Foss Island said, “If I was home and saw that weather coming at me, I’d haul my boat as high ashore as she’d go and cable her fast.” Larreka could barely hear him.

“Well, it’s not a twister, but I’d sure appreciate a roof over me when it gets here,” the commandant agreed. “On the double!” He flogged his tired body into a smart trot.

The familiar buildings made a clustered darkness to the north. He saw that the sails were off the windmill and the flag was descending a pole whose horned bronze finial swayed in arcs above the hall. Letters from here, to him and Meroa in Valennen, had told how nobody took a chance any longer on a gale not turning into a hurricane.

The first raindrops lashed nearly level when he entered the courtyard. Long, low, half-timbered, peak-roofed in tile, the lesser structures of the ranch walled in its paved rectangle—barns, stables, kennels, mews, storehouses, granaries, workshops, bakery, brewery, cookhouse, laundry, surgery, school, ateliers, observatory, library—not everything a civilized community needed, but ample when it could trade with other ranches and the towns. Yakulen’s publishing linked to Nelek’s ropewalk and Sorku’s iron smelter and thus outward over South Beronnen and the whole Gathering. Folk scurried about, battening down. Just before a hireling closed the door, Larreka glimpsed a small flyer parked in a shed. Ng-ng, we’ve got a human visitor, he thought. I wonder who.

Hail whitened the wind, danced across flagstones, rattled on walls, bit at skin. He shielded his eyes with an arm and slogged to the hall.

It rose enormous at the middle of the court, stone, brick, and phoenix, many-windowed, many-balconied, gargoyles time-worn but mosaics still bright after ten sixty-four-years. That was at the east end, the oldest. As the Yakuten family grew in wealth, numbers, retainers, and guests, they added new units, each enclosing its own patio. Changing styles (the latest incorporated heraklite and armor glass from Primavera) flowed together as do bluff, crag, and canyon.

Somebody must have been watching out of the warm windowglow, for Larreka and his males had scarcely loped onto the verandah when the Founders’ Door swung wide for them. Beyond its copper-sheathed massiveness waited an entryful of servants who took their baggage and toweled them dry. Larreka hung onto his Haelen blade. It was a trademark; the soldiers said One-Ear slept with it. The rest, such as fire-crackle profanity in a score of languages, he needn’t keep up here among his kindred. The heroic capacity for drink—welt, he’d take as much tonight as he felt like, and no more; he was getting along in years, after all.

At the head of his six legionaires, he walked down a corridor to the main room. It was brick, carpeted in deep-blue Primavera neolon, wainscoted in woods of several hues and grains. Flames leaped and sang in four hearths, bracketed lanterns shone along the walls. Between them hung pictures, trophies, ancestral shields; high overhead, the rafters bore banners which had flown over battles or rescues. At the far end of the chamber, half hidden among unrestful shadows, was a shrine of She and He. (Few of the household attended it; most of the family were Triadists, while their help were drawn from a wide reach holding many different cults. But if nothing else, respect for tradition demanded it be kept.) The room was chiefly floor space, a long table, mattresses strewn about, some chairs for occasional humans. The warm air smelled of woodsmoke and bodies. Windows on two sides, closed against the storm which dashed itself on them, muffled its noise.

About sixteen persons were there, talking, reading, thinking, idling, doing minor chores. The chamber dwarfed them. Most of the hundreds who dwelt in the hall were at work, or in their private apartments. His wife came to meet him.

Meroa was a large female, which made her the size of her short husband. She had the Yakulen features, big gray eyes, curved muzzle, pointed chin. Age showed in dried and darkened complexion, the thinning down of hump and haunches that had once been rounded enough to make a male bay at the moons. But the embrace she gave him wasn’t the dignified gesture of her relatives, it was the hug of a soldier’s wench.

From across two and a half centuries, flashed through him the awe of miracle when she agreed to marry him. He’d been brash toward her, and they’d had fun together.

However, she’d turned down two earlier proposals of his (following a proposition—which she’d had the sense not to be offended by, recognizing that a legionary was almost expected to make a pass at every attractive female). He’d never dared imagine she found more in him than the yams he could spin about his fifty footloose years prior to enlistment.

Her yes turned out to be only the gold before the dawn. He had sworn, “I, I’m not a fortune hunter, believe me I’m not. I could almost wish you were poor.”

She had widened those beautiful eyes, where she nestled against him so close that they felt the tendrils of each other’s manes. “What do you mean? I’m not rich.”

“Your kin—the Yakulens have one of the biggest ranches in the country—”

“Chu-ha! I see.” She laughed, “Silly, you’ve forgotten you’re not back in Haelen. A ranch isn’t a wretched little stead that a single houshold owns. It belongs to the family—the land, the waters. But members work for themselves.”

“Yai. I had forgotten. You make me forget everything except you.” Larreka braced his will. “My term in the legion has another three years to run, you know, and next year we’re due for an overseas post. Well, I’ll be back, and… and by the Thunderer”—he had not yet taken the Triadic faith, though he invoked the gods of his youth out of habit rather than belief—“I’ll make us a fortune!”

She drew away from him. “What is this nonsense? Do you suppose I want you nailed down here? No, you’re going to re-up, and I’ll be there to watch.”

That was when the Sun sprang over the world-rim.

Today she whispered a lusty suggestion in his ear, adding. “We’ll have to wait a while, confound it. Still, I’ll have you here a tad longer than you figured.”

“What?” He decided she’d explain when she was ready. They disengaged and he exchanged proper greetings with the others. Presently he was sprawled on a mattress beside Meroa, his pipe alight, a mug of hot spiced jackfruit cider to hand. A couple of family elders lay nearby. The rest of the folk gathered around his troopers in different parts of the room, since these would have things to relate from Sehala less depressing than Larreka’s word. He had, of course, used his walkie-talkie, via radio relays to keep his wife informed; and she had passed the news on—

(They had already settled it between them: When he returned to Valennen, she would stay behind. It would not be the first time; they had erstwhile many reasons, like undue hazard or shortage of transport or a small child, why she could not accompany him. She had protested: “The youngsters are grown. And if the barbarians do overrun you, I want them to know they’ve been in a fight with me, too.”

(He answered starkly, “I can’t be both places. Foul years are coming to South Beronnen also, and nobody else around the ranch has the kind of military knowledge you’ve picked up. For the family—the whole futtering future—we’d better get the spread property organized. You’re tapped, soldier.”)

“Who’s our human guest?” he asked.

“Jill Conway,” Meroa said. “She grew restless and went out with Rafik. They’ll doubtless draggle in pretty soon.”

“Gr’m.” Larreka told himself not to worry. His youngest son should be able to last out even as vicious a storm as howled and drummed outside. But Jill—

Well, they died, they died, the poor all-powerful starfarers. If you started caring for them, you had to make it a bond to a bloodline more than to a single person. And thus it had been between him and the Conways. Yet there had always been something special about Jill, maybe because she used to stump across the yard before she could talk, laughing for joy, whenever he called. Chaos! Why hadn’t she bred and given him a new little girl to uncle?

Meroa chuckled and patted his hand. “Stop fretting,” she said, “Your pet’s an adult. She knows what to do in worse weathers than this.” Businesslike: “It’s due to her that you won’t simply overnight here, you’ll stay a few days.”

Larreka sucked smoke and waited.

“She heard about the vote against you, and called me, since you’d left Sehala,” his wife said. “She was either bleeding or snorting live steam on your account—I’m not sure which; I don’t know humans that well—and she wanted to help. It seems that new boss or whatever he is in Primavera won’t let her fly you north. Sometime you must explain to me why in destruction’s name they listen to such a creature. Anyhow, I had an idea. You know those dried rations humans carry in the field, the food they must have that natural soil doesn’t bear. I asked if she could make the same kind of thing for you. Meat, that is. You can forage along the way all right, but you need meat for the strength to move fast. If instead of hunting, you stir powder into a dish of water—You see?”

“I blazing well do!” Larreka slapped her rump almost as loudly as the thunder went. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

“You doubtless did in the past, but never felt this urgency before,” said an in-law. “And of late you’ve had a great deal else on your mind.”

Larreka scarcely heard. His attention clung to Meroa. By the Three, he rejoiced, I’ve got a soldier’s wife, if ever a male did. The sixty-fours of females he had mounted when she wasn’t around were as if they had never been. (They’d always been incidental, maybe more of a habit than a need. Noncoms in the legions seldom married. Meroa used to purr when he happened to mention an encounter and tell her how much better she was.) He couldn’t think of words, but, catching her eye, he snapped his tail in salute.

“Jill put the apparatus together—she wheedled a friend out of it—and brought it here,” Meroa went on. “It’ll take two or three days to make an ample supply, she says. You’ll save more than that on the trail.”

And I will have you meanwhile, said her look.

This was the thing that humans might come to know about, but never to know: What it meant when someone who had been a part of you for two or three hundred years was gone. Larreka and Meroa would bid each other farewell, and though the blessed radio carry their words after he reached Port Rua, they could not be sure they would ever touch again.

Well, she was a soldier’s wife; and he was a soldier’s husband.

(It wasn’t that simple. The legions had learned to do everything possible which made for lessened sorrow. They did not accept enlistments of close kin into the same one of them; rather, they kept the companies and regiments wildly diverse, a practice that Hanshaw had remarked would be unthinkable for his race. They discouraged marriage and, through their traditional standards of maleness, encouraged promiscuity; but the very camp followers were made to shift among them from time to time. They exchanged stations every octad, and two successive stations were always far apart. And even so, even so, there had to be rituals, customs, tokens, help, to keep a trooper going after his long-term sword brother was dead… Larreka dismissed the passing thought. He and Meroa had the Triad and their work; the survivor would survive.

(He had decided in these latter years that the work would be more use to him than the Triad.)

“I’d better let Jill tell the rest herself,” Meroa added. Her glance flickered around the group. “No insult. What you don’t know, you can’t be guilty of concealing from that Primavera boss; and Yakulen may have sore need of his good will.”

They signified assent.

“What we can discuss openly,” Meroa said to Larreka, “is Rafik. He wants to enlist—in the Yissek, because of your ideas about the Fiery Sea coming under attack soon, where they are.” Dryly: “Also, I suspect, because of what he’s heard about balmy tropical paradises and eager dusky maidens.”

“No,” Larreka replied. “Not if I can talk him out of it, Can’t he see, his best service is right here? If we can hold Valennen, a few raids on the Fieries won’t matter. If we can’t, then we’ve lost the Fieries too, and Beronnen is next in line.”

“Chu, do talk to him. Bear in mind, he probably doesn’t care for the idea of his mother being his military chief.”

“He’d care for those islands less. Already the Rover’s made them the opposite of paradise. The Yissek’s fighting typhoons and flood tides and famines oftener than it’s fighting barbarians. The dusky maidens are too busy staying alive to be particularly eager any more.”

“I tried to tell him that, but it only fanned his idealism. Service where service is needed, no matter the risk!”

“Then I’ll tell him that a soldier who willingly takes risks is a soldier the legion is better off without—Speak of a rammer and he’ll stave in your boat.”

The noise from the entry was immensely relieving, foot-stamp, servants busy, Rafik’s deep young tones and Jill’s bugle clarity. He heard the girl say,” —we thought of taking shelter, but no tree would be safe with all that lightning blatting around, so he took me on his back and galumphed his hardest—”

His son staggered in, soaked despite a rubdown, hailed them, and collapsed onto a mattress. That must have been a real fiend’s race he ran. Well, Meroa had birthed him on a vessel beating through Ripship Straits in the teeth of an easterly, and a tinge of that had remained with the lad. I’m proud of you, of you and all the rest. I’m no Yakulen—only by marriage—I’m not in the way of seeing my family as octads of cousins sharing the same land. I’m an old Haelener, whose world has his wife and kids at its core.

Jill followed. She had shed her clothes. Her skin glowed from toweling. The hair stayed as wet as Rafik’s foliage, trailing firelight shimmers. Having been carried, she was not exhausted, and sped to hug Larreka. “Sugar Uncle! Hello!”

Watching her come, he thought how oddly lovely she was. Once in her adolescence, when they’d been for a swim, she had commented on that. “Tell me for honest, won’t you? How horrible do I seem to you? Sure, you like me, but how do I look? Four-limbed, a torso tottering along, no whiskers, no hump, no tail, no plants, bald except for ridiculous little patches, breasts dangling on top and… and genitalia right out in front too, in sight of the world and everybody—”

“How do you think I look?” he had replied.

“You’re beautiful. The way a cat is beautiful.”

“Okay, you remind me of a saru in flight, or a swordleaf in a high wind, or whatever. Now shut up and break out our lunch.”

For a blink of time, while she dashed across the floor, he wished he could spend an hour being her human lover. To gaze into those curious half-white eyes, rub beak against beak and taste thick pink lips, send fingers down the long slim blue-veined throat, across the softnesses beneath to their sunrise-colored tips and on over a many-curved slope till they rested between her thighs… Did humans ever have such wonderings about Ishtarians? Unlikely; humans were too frail. His was the merest flicker of sadness that he could never be closer than now to her. Damn! When would she grab herself a mate and start whelping?

She cast herself onto her knees and into his arms. Her nails dug through the leaves of his mane.

Larreka bellowed for more cider. Jill liked it, too. “I brought you a kilo of tobacco,” she said.

“You brought more than that, I hear,” he answered. “Freeze-dried rations—You’re grand.”

She switched to English. He saw and felt the bleakness upon her. “You know about the ban on transport, don’t you? Instead of battering my skull against that wall, I kept quiet and… went around collecting firearms and ammunition. You’ve got mighty little in Valennen. I couldn’t be very bold, in case that Dejerine bastard got wind of it. But I bought, begged, borrowed, a couple of times I stole—about twenty rifles and pistols, plus a few thousand rounds for them.”

“Jill, you’re a laren!”

“The least I could do, Uncle. Let’s be practical, though. First, you’ll have to arrange for porters while you’re here, to help lug that stuff to the north coast.”

“Couldn’t you just flit it to Port Rua in a small vehicle?”

“Uh-uh. Too obvious. Dejerine could wonder why Miss Conway took a junket. He could check back and confiscate what he found. Whereas if I go off overland on a field trip, and the weapons aren’t really missed for weeks—You see?

“Another thing. Several thousand rounds aren’t that flinkin’ many. You know how ninety-nine percent are bound to miss in action, no matter how skilled the marksmen; and you have maybe ten skilled marksmen in Valennen, right? You’ll want an instructor who can spend a minimum of ammo on training more. And it’ll help if, come combat, that instructor is there in the line, firing shots that go where they’re supposed to.”

He understood before she had finished. “You don’t mean you aim to come along with me?” he exclaimed.

She nodded. She had drawn knees close to chin and folded arms around them; the ends of her wet hair stroked her breasts and left gleaming streaks. “I mean exactly that, Uncle.”