The Day of Their Return

XIV

Jade Gate had Hearty reached the Linn when the Terrans came.

The Cimmerian Mountains form the southern marge of Ilion. The further south the Flone goes through them, until its final incredible plunge off the continental rim, the steeper and deeper is the gorge it has cut for itself. In winter it runs quiet between those walls, under a sheath of ice. But by midsummer, swollen with melt off the polar cap, it is a race, and they must have skillful pilots who would venture along that violence.

At the port rail of the main deck, Ivar and Jao watched. Water brawled, foamed, spouted off rocks, filled air with an ongoing cannonade and made the vessel rock and shudder. Here the stream had narrowed to a bare 300 meters between heaped boulders and talus. Behind, cliffs rose for a pair of kilometers. The rock was gloomy-hued and there was only a strip of sky to see, from which Virgil had already sunk. The brighter stars gleamed in its duskiness. Down under the full weight of shadow, it was cold. Spray dashed into faces and across garments. Forward, the canyon dimmed out in mist. Nevertheless he spied three ships in that direction, and four aft. More than these were rendezvous-bound.

As the deck pitched beneath her, the girl caught his arm. “What was that?” he shouted through the noise, and barely heard her reply:

“Swerve around one obstacle, I’m sure. Nothing here is ever twice the same.”

“Have you had any wrecks?”

“Some few per century. Most lives are saved.”

“God! You’ll take such risk, year after year, for … ritual?”

“The danger is part of the ritual, Rolf. We are never so one with the world as when—Ai-ah!”

His gaze followed hers aloft, and his heart lurched. Downward came slanting the torpedo shape of a large flyer. Upon its armored flank shone the sunburst of Empire.

“Who is that?” she cried innocently.

“A marine troop. After me. Who else?” He didn’t rasp it loud enough for her to hear. When he wrenched free and ran, she stared in hurt amazement.

He pounded up the ladder to the bridge, where he knew Mea stood by the pilot. She came out to meet him. Grimness bestrode her countenance. She had bitten her cigar across. “Let’s get you below,” she snapped, and shoved at him.

He stumbled before her, among crewfolk who boiled with excitement. The aircraft whined toward the lead end of the line. “Chao yu li!” Mea exclaimed. “We’ve that much luck, at least. They don’t know which vessel is ours.”

“They might know its name,” he replied. “Whoever gave me away—”

“Aye. Here, this way … Hold.” Erannath had emerged from his cabin. “You!” She pointed at the next deckhouse. “Into that door!”

The Ythrian halted, lifted his talons. “Move!” the captain bawled. “Or I’ll have you shot!”

For an instant his crest stood stiff. Then he obeyed. The three of them entered a narrow, throbbing corridor. Mea bowed to Erannath. “I am sorry, honored passenger,” she said. Partly muffled by bulkheads, the air was less thunderous here. “Time lacked for requesting your help courteously. You are most good that you obliged regardless. Please to come.”

She trotted on. Ivar and Erannath followed, the Ythrian rocking clumsily along on his whig-feet while he asked, “What has happened?”

“Impies,” the young man groaned. “We had to get out of sight from above. If either of us got glimpsed, that’d’ve ended this game. Not that I see how it can go on much longer.”

Erannath’s eyes smoldered golden upon him. “What game do you speak of?”

“I’m fugitive from Terrans.”

“And worth the captain’s protection? A-a-a-ah … ”

Mea stopped at an intercom unit, punched a number, spoke rapid-fire for a minute. When she turned back to her companions, she was the barest bit relaxed.

“I raised our radioman in time,” she said. “Likely the enemy will call, asking which of us is Jade Gate. My man is alerting the others in our own language, which surely the Terrans don’t understand. We Riverfolk stick together. Everybody will act stupid, claim they don’t know, garble things as if they had one poor command of Anglic.” Her grin flashed. “To act stupid is one skill of our people.”

“Were I the Terran commander,” Erannath said, “I would thereupon beam to each ship individually, requiring its name. And were I the captain of any, I would not court punishment by lying, in a cause which has not been explained to me.”

Mea barked laughter. “Right. But I suggested Portal of Virtue and Way to Fortune both answer they are Jade Gate, as well as this one. The real names could reasonably translate to the same as ours. They can safely give the Terrans that stab.”

She turned bleak again: “At best, though, we buy short time to smuggle you off, Ivar Frederiksen, and you, Erannath, spy from Ythri. I dare not give you any firearms. That would prove our role, should you get caught.” The man felt the knife he had kept on his belt since he left Windhome. The nonhuman wasn’t wearing his apron, thus had no weapons. The woman continued: “When the marines flit down to us, we’ll admit you were here, but claim we had no idea you were wanted. True enough, for everybody except three of us; and we can behave plenty innocent. We’ll say you must have seen the airboat and fled, we know not where.”

Ivar thought of the starkness that walled them in and pleaded, “Where, for real?”

Mea led them to a companionway and downward. As she hastened, she said across her shoulder: “Some Orcans always climb the Shelf to trade with us after our ceremonies are done. You may meet them at the site, otherwise on their way to it. Or if not, you can probably reach the Tien Hu by yourselves, and get help. I feel sure they will help. Theirs is the seer they’ve told us of.”

“Won’t Impies think of that?” Ivar protested.

“No doubt. Still, I bet it’s one impossible country to ransack.” Mea stopped at a point in another corridor, glanced about, and rapped, “Aye, you may be caught. But you will be caught if you stay aboard. You may drown crossing to shore, or break your neck off one cliff, or thousand other griefs. Well, are you our Firstling or not?”

She flung open a door and ushered them through. The room beyond was a storage space for kayaks, and also held a small crane for their launching. “Get in,” she ordered Ivar. “You should be able to reach the bank. Just work at not capsizing and not hitting anything, and make what shoreward way you can whenever you find one stretch not too rough. Once afoot, send the boat off again. No sense leaving any clue to where you landed. Afterward, rocks and mist should hide you from overhead, if you go carefully … Erannath, you fly across, right above the surface.”

Half terrified and half carried beyond himself, Ivar settled into the frail craft, secured the cover around his waist, gripped the paddle. Riho Mea leaned toward him. He had never before seen tears in her eyes. “All luck sail with you, Firstling,” she said unsteadily, “for all our hopes do.” Her lips touched his.

She opened a hatch in the hull and stood to the controls of the crane. Its motor whirred, its arm descended to lay hold with clamps to rings fore and aft, it lifted Ivar outward and lowered him alongside.

The river boomed and brawled. The world was a cold wet grayness of spray blown backward from the falls. Phantom cliffs showed through. Ivar and Erannath rested among house-sized boulders.

Despite his shoes, the stones along the bank had been cruel to the human. He ached from bruises where he had tripped and slashes where sharp edges had caught him. Weariness filled every bone like a lead casting. The Ythrian, who could flutter above obstacles, was in better shape, though prolonged land travel was always hard on his race.

By some trick of echo in their shelter, talk was possible at less than the top of a voice. “No doubt a trail goes down the Shelf to the seabed,” Erannath said. “We must presume the Terrans are not fools. When they don’t find us aboard any ship, they will suppose us bound for Orcus, and call Nova Roma for a stat of the most detailed geodetic survey map available. They will then cruise above that trail. We must take a roundabout way.”

“That’ll likely be dangerous to me,” Ivar said dully.

“I will help you as best I can,” Erannath promised. Perhaps the set of his feathers added: If God the Hunter hurls you to your death, cry defiance as you fall.

“Why are you interested in me, anyhow?” Ivar demanded.

The Ythrian trilled what corresponded to a chuckle. “You and your fellows have taken for granted I’m a secret agent of the Domain. Let’s say, first, that I wondered if you truly were plain Rolf Mariner, and accompanied you to try to find out. Second, I have no desire myself to be taken prisoner. Our interests in escape coincide.”

“Do they, now? You need only fly elsewhere.”

“But you are the Firstling of Ilion. Alone, you’d perish or be captured. Captain Riho doesn’t understand how different this kind of country is from what you are used to. With my help, you have a fair chance.”

Ivar was too worn and sore to exult. Yet underneath, a low fire awoke. He is interested in my success! So interested he’ll gamble his whole mission, everything he might have brought home, to see me through. Maybe we really can get help from Ythri, when we break Sector Alpha Crucis free.

This moment was premature to voice such things aloud. Presently the two of them resumed their crawling journey.

For a short stretch, the river again broadened until a fleet could lie to, heavily anchored and with engineers standing by to supply power on a whistle’s notice. The right bank widened also, in a few level hectares which had been cleared of detritus. There stood an altar flanked by stone guardians, eroded almost shapeless. There too lay traces of campfires; but no Orcans had yet arrived. Here the rush of current was lost under the world-shivering steady roar of the Linn, only seven kilometers distant. Its edge was never visible through the spray flung aloft.

Tonight the wind had shifted, driving the perpetual fog south till it hung as a moon-whitened curtain between vast black walls. The water glistened. Darkling upon it rested those vessels which had arrived. Somehow their riding lights and the colored lanterns strung throughout their rigging lacked cheeriness, when the Terran warcraft hung above on its negafield and watched. The air was cold; ice crackled in Ivar’s clothes and Erannath’s feathers.

Humans have better night vision than Ythrians. Ivar was the first to see. “Hsssh!” He drew his companion back, while sickness caught his throat. Then Erannath identified those shimmers and shadows ahead. Three marines kept watch on the open ground.

No way existed to circle them unnoticed; the bank lay bare and moonlit to the bottom of an unscalable precipice. Ivar shrank behind a rock, thought wildly of swimming and knew that here he couldn’t, of weeping and found that now he couldn’t.

Unheard through the noise, Erannath lifted. Moon-glow tinged him. But sight was tricky for men who sat high in a hull. Otherwise they need not have placed sentries.

Ivar choked on a breath. He saw the great wings scythe back down. One man tumbled, a second, a third, in as many pulsebeats. Erannath landed among them where they sprawled and beckoned the Firstling.

Ivar ran. Strangely, what broke from him was, “Are they dead?”

“No. Stunned. I hold a Third Echelon in hyai-lu. I used its triple blow, both alatan bones and a … do you say rabbit punch?” Erannath was busy. He stripped the twoways off wrists, grav units off torsos, rifles off shoulders, gave one of each to Ivar and tossed the rest in the Flone. When they awoke, the marines would be unable to radio, rise, or fire signals, and must wait till their regular relief descended.

If they awoke. The bodies looked ghastly limp to Ivar. He thrust that question aside, unsure why it should bother him when they were the enemy and when in joyous fact he and his ally had lucked out, had won a virtually certain means of getting to their goal.

They did not hazard immediate flight. On the further side of the meeting ground the Orcan trail began. Though narrow, twisting, and vague, often told only by cairns, it was better going than the shoreline had been. Anything would be. Ivar limped and Erannath hobbled as if unchained.

When they entered the concealing mists, they dared rise. And that was like becoming a freed spirit. Ivar wondered if the transcendence of humanness which the prophet promised could feel this miraculous. The twin cylinders he wore drove him through roaring wet smoke till he burst forth and beheld the side of a continent.

It toppled enormously, more steep and barren than anywhere in the west, four kilometers of palisades, headlands, ravines, raw slopes of old landslides, down and down to the dead ocean floor. Those were murky heights beneath stars and moons; but over them cascaded the Linn. It fell almost half the distance in a single straight leap, unhidden by spume, agleam like a drawn sword. The querning of it toned through heaven.

Below sheened the Orcan Sea, surrounded by hills which cultivation mottled. Beyond, desert glimmered deathwhite.

Erannath swept near. “Quick!” he commanded. “To ground before the Terrans come and spot us.”

Ivar nodded, took his bearings from the constellations, and aimed southwest, to where Mount Cronos raised its dim bulk. They might as well reduce the way they had left to go.

Air skirled frigid around him. His teeth clattered till he forced them together. This was not like the part of the Antonine Seabed under Windhome. There it was often warm of summer nights, and never too hot by day. But there it was tempered by plenteous green life.

Yonder so-called Sea of Orcus was no more than a huge lake, dense and bitter with salts leached into it. Mists and lesser streams off the Linn gave fresh water to the rim of its bowl. And that was all. Nothing ran far on southward. Winds bending up from the equator sucked every moisture into themselves and scattered it across immensities. That land lay bare because those same winds had long ago blown away the rich bottom soil which elsewhere was the heritage left Aeneas by its oceans.

Here was the sternest country where men dwelt upon this planet. Ivar knew it had shaped their tribe, their souls. He knew little more. No outsider did.

Aliens—He squinted at Erannath. The Ythrian descended as if upon prey, magnificent as the downward-rushing falls. I thought for a moment you must’ve been one who betrayed me, passed through Ivar. Can’t be, I reckon. Then: who did?