III
Raven spent much of the day prowling about Instar, observing and occasionally, querying. But in the evening he left the town and wandered along the road which followed the river toward the sea dikes. A pair of his men accompanied him, two paces behind, in the byrnies and conical helmets of battle gear. Rifles were slung on their shoulders. At their backs the western hills lifted black against a sky which blazed and smouldered with gold. The river was like running metal in that light, which saturated the air and soaked into each separate grass blade. Ahead, beyond a line of trees, the eastern sky had become imperially violet and the first stars trembled.
Raven moved unhurriedly. He had no fear of being caught in the dark, on a planet with an 83-hour rotation period. When he came to a wharf that jutted into the stream, he halted for a closer look. The wooden sheds on the bank were as solidly built as any residential house, and as handsome of outline. The double-ended fishing craft tied at the pier were graceful things, riotously decorated. They rocked a little as the water purled past them. A clean odor of their catches, and of tar and paint, drifted about.
“Ketch rigged,” Raven observed. “They have small auxiliary engines, but I dare say those are used only when it is absolutely necessary.”
“And otherwise they sail?” Kors, long and gaunt, spat between his front teeth. “Now why do such a fool thing, Commandant?”
“It’s aesthetically more pleasing,” said Raven.
“More work, though, sir,” offered young Wildenvey. “I sailed a bit myself, during the Ans campaign. Just keeping those damn ropes untangled—”
Raven grinned. “Oh, I agree. Quite. But you see, as far as I can gather, from the first expedition’s reports and from talking to people today, the Gwydiona don’t think that way.”
He continued, ruminatively, more to himself than anyone else, “They don’t think like either party of visitors. Their attitude toward life is different. A Namerican is concerned only with getting his work done, regardless of whether it’s something that really ought to be accomplished, and then with getting his recreation done—both with maximum bustle. A Lochlanna tries to make his work and his games approach some abstract ideal; and when he fails, he’s apt to give up completely and jump over into brutishness.
“But they don’t seem to make such distinctions here. They say, ‘Man goes where God is,’ and it seems to mean that work and play and art and private life and everything else aren’t divided up; no distinction is made between them, it’s all one harmonious whole. So they fish from sailboats with elaborately carved figureheads and painted designs, each element in the pattern having a dozen different symbolic overtones. And they take musicians along. And they claim that the total effect, food gathering plus pleasure plus artistic accomplishment plus I don’t know what, is more efficiently achieved than if those things were in neat little compartments.”
He shrugged and resumed his walk. “They may be right,” he finished.
“I don’t know why you’re so worried about them, sir,” said Kors. “They’re as harmless a pack of loonies as I ever met. I swear they haven’t any machine more powerful than a light tractor or a scoop shovel, and no weapon more dangerous than a bow and arrow.”
“The first expedition said they don’t even go hunting, except once in a while for food or to protect their crops,” Raven nodded. He went on for a while, unspeaking. Only the scuff of boots, chuckling river, murmur in the leaves overhead and slowly rising thunders beyond the dike, stirred that silence. The young five-pointed leaves of a bush which grew everywhere around gave a faint green fragrance to the air. Then, far off and winding down the slopes, a bronze horn blew, calling antlered cattle home.
“That’s what makes me afraid,” said Raven.
Thereafter the men did not venture to break his wordlessness. Once or twice they passed a Gwydiona, who hailed them gravely, but they didn’t stop. When they reached the dike, Raven led the way up a staircase to the top. The wall stretched for kilometers, set at intervals with towers. It was high and massive, but the long curve of it and the facing of undressed stone made it pleasing to behold. The river poured through a gap, across a pebbled beach, into a dredged channel and so to the crescent-shaped bay, whose waters tumbled and roared, molten in the sunset light. Raven drew his surcoat close about him; up here, above the wall’s protection, the wind blew chill and wet and smelling of salt. There were many gray sea birds in the sky.
“Why did they build this?” wondered Kors.
“Close moon. Big tides. Storms make floods,” said Wildenvey.
“They could have settled higher ground. They’ve room enough, for hellfire’s sake. Ten million people on a whole planet!”
Raven gestured at the towers. “I inquired,” he said. “Tidepower generators in those. Furnish most of the local electricity. Shut up.”
He stood staring out to the eastern horizon, where night was growing. The waves ramped and the sea birds mewed. His eyes were bleak with thought. Finally he sat down, took a wooden flute from his sleeve, and began to play, absentmindedly, as something to do with his hands. The minor key grieved beneath the wind.
Kors’ bark recalled him to the world. “Halt!”
“Be still, you oaf,” said Raven. “It’s her planet, not yours.” But his palm rested casually on the butt of his pistol as he rose.
The girl came walking at an easy pace over the velvet-like pseudomoss which carpeted the diketop. She was some 23 or 24 standard years old, her slim shape dressed in a white tunic and wildly fluttering blue cloak. Her hair was looped in thick yellow braids, pulled back from her forehead to show a conventionalized bird tattoo. Beneath dark brows, her eyes were a blue that was almost indigo, set widely apart. The mouth and the heart-shaped face were solemn, but the nose tiptilted and faintly dusted with freckles. She led by the hand a boy of perhaps four, a little male version of herself, who had been skipping but who sobered when he saw the Lochlanna. Both were barefoot.
“At the crossroads of the elements, greeting,” she said. Her husky voice sang the language, even more than most Gwydiona voices.
“Salute, peacemaker.” Raven found it simpler to translate the formal phrases of his own world than hunt around in the local vocabulary.
“I came to dance for the sea,” she told him, “but heard a music that called.”
“Are you a shooting man?” asked the boy.
“Byord, hush!” The girl colored with embarrassment.
“Yes,” laughed Raven, “you might call me a shooting man.”
“But what do you shoot?” asked Byord. “Targets? Gol! Can I shoot a target?”
“Perhaps later,” said Raven. “We have no targets with us at the moment.”
“Mother, he says I can shoot a target! Pow! Pow! Pow!”
Raven lifted one brow. “I thought chemical weapons were unknown on Gwydion, milady,” he said, as offhand as possible.
She answered with a hint of distress, “That other ship, which came in winter. The men aboard it also had—what did they name them—guns. They explained and demonstrated. Since then, probably every small boy on the planet has imagined—Well. No harm done, Isure.” She smiled and ruffled Byord’s hair.
“Ah—I hight Raven, a Commandant of the Oakenshaw Ethnos, Windhome Mountains, Lochlann.”
“And you other souls?” asked the girl.
Raven waved them back. “Followers. Sons of yeomen on my father’s estate.”
She was puzzled that he excluded them from the conversation, but accepted it as an alien custom. “I am Elfavy,” she said, accenting the first syllable. She flashed a grin. “My son Byord you already know! His surname is Varstan, mine is Simmon.”
“What?—Oh, yes, I remember. Gwydiona wives retain their family name, sons take the father’s, daughters the mother’s. Am I correct? Your husband—”
She looked outward. “He drowned there, during a storm last fall,” she answered quietly.
Raven did not say he was sorry, for his culture had its own attitudes toward death. He couldn’t help wondering aloud, tactless, “But you said you danced for the sea.”
“He is of the sea now, is he not?” She continued regarding the waves, where they swirled and shook foam loose from their crests. “How beautiful it is tonight.”
Then, swinging back to him, altogether at ease. “I have just had a long talk with one of your party, a Miguel Tolteca. He is staying at my father’s house, where Byord and I now live.”
“Not precisely one of mine,” said Raven, suppressing offendedness.
“Oh? Wait . . . yes, he did mention having some men along from a different planet.”
“Lochlann,” said Raven. “Our sun lies near theirs, both about 50 light-years hence in that direction.” He pointed past the evening star to the Hercules region.
“Is your home like his Nuevamerica?”
“Hardly.” For a moment Raven wanted to speak of Lochlann—of mountains which rose sheer into a red-sun sky, trees dwarfed and gnarled by incessant winds, moorlands, ice plains, oceans too dense and bitter with salt for a man to sink. He remembered a peasant’s house, its roof held down by ropes lest a gale blow it away, and he remembered his father’s castle gaunt above a glacier, hoofs ringing in the courtyard, and he remembered bandits and burned villages and dead men gaping around a smashed cannon.
But she would not understand. Would she?
“Why do you have so many shooting things?” exploded from Byord. “Are there bad animals around your farms?”
“No,” said Raven. “Not many wild animals at all. The land is too poor for them.”
“I have heard . . . that first expedition—” Elfavy grew troubled again. “They said something about men fighting other men.”
“My profession,” said Raven. She looked blankly at him. Wrong word then. “My calling,” he said, though that wasn’t right either.
“But killing men!” she cried.
“Bad men?” asked Byord, round-eyed.
“Hush,” said his mother. “‘Bad’ means when something goes wrong, like the cynwyr swarming down and eating the grain. How can men go wrong?”
“They get sick,” Byord said.
“Yes, and then your grandfather heals them.”
“Imagine a situation where men often get so sick they want to hurt their own kind,” said Raven.
“But horrible!” Elfavy traced a cross in the air. “What germ causes that?”
Raven sighed. If she couldn’t even visualize homicidal mania, how explain to her that sane, honorable men found sane, honorable reasons for hunting each other?
He heard Kors mutter to Wildenvey, “What I said. Guts of sugar candy.”
If that were only so, thought Raven, he could forget his own unease. But they were no weaklings on Gwydion. Not when they took open sailboats onto oceans whose weakest tides rose fifteen meters. Not when this girl could visibly push away her own shock, face him, and ask with friendly curiosity—as if he, Raven, should address questions to the sudden apparition of a sabertoothed weaselcat.
“Is that the reason why your people and the Namericans seem to talk so little to each other? I thought I noticed it in the town, but didn’t know then who came from which group.”
“Oh, they’ve done their share of fighting on Nuevamerica,” said Raven dryly, “As when they expelled us. We had invaded their planet and divided it into fiefs, over a century ago. Their revolution was aided by the fact that Lochlann was simultaneously fighting the Grand Alliance—but still, it was well done of them.”
“I cannot see why—Well, no matter. We will have time enough to discuss things. You are going into the hills with us, are you not?”
“Why, yes, if—What did you say? You too?”
Elfavy nodded. Her mouth quirked upward. “Don’t be so aghast, far-friend. I will leave Byord with his aunt and uncle, even if they do spoil him terribly.” She gave the boy a brief hug. “But the group does need a dancer, which is my calling.”
“Dancer?” choked Kors.
“Not the Dancer. He is always a man.”
“But—” Raven relaxed. He even smiled. “In what way does an expedition into the wilderness require a dancer?”
“To dance for it,” said Elfavy. “What else?”
“Oh . . . nothing. Do you know precisely what this journey is for?”
“You have not heard? I listened while my father and Miguel talked it over.”
“Yes, naturally I know. But possibly you have misunderstood something. That’s easy to do, even for an intelligent person, when separate cultures meet. Why don’t you explain it to me in your own words, so that I can correct you if need be?” Raven’s ulterior motive was simply that he enjoyed her presence and wanted to keep her here a while longer.
“Thank you, that is a good idea,” she said. “Well, then, planets where men can live without special equipment are rare and far between. The Nuevamericans, who are exploring this galactic sector, would like a base on Gwydion, to refuel their ships, make any necessary repairs, and rest their crews in greenwoods.” She gave Kors and Wildenvey a surprised look, not knowing why they both laughed aloud. Raven himself would not have interrupted her naive recital for money.
She brushed the blown fair hair off her brow and resumed, “Of course, our people must decide whether they wish this or not. But meanwhile it can do no harm to look at possible sites for such a base, can it? Father proposed an uninhabited valley some days’ march inland, beyond Mount Granis. To journey there afoot will be more pleasant than by air; much can be shown you and discussed en route; and we would still return before Bale time.”
She frowned the faintest bit. “I am not certain it is wise to have a foreign base so near the Holy City. But that can always be argued later.” Her laughter trilled forth. “Oh dear, I do ramble, don’t I?” She caught Raven’s arm, impulsively, and tucked her own under it. “But you have seen so many worlds, you can’t imagine how we here have been looking forward to meeting you. The wonder of it! The stories you can tell us, the songs you can sing us!”
She dropped her free hand to Byord’s shoulder. “Wait till this little chatterbird gets over his shyness with you, far-friend. If we could only harness his questions to a generator, we could illuminate the whole of Instar!”
“Awww,” said the boy, wriggling free.
They began to walk along the diketop, almost aimlessly. The two soldiers followed. The rifles on their backs stood black against a cloud like roses. Elfavy’s fingers slipped down from Raven’s awkwardly held arm—men and women did not go together thus on Lochlann—and closed on the flute in his sleeve. “What is this?” she asked.
He drew it forth. It was a long piece of darvawood, carved and polished to bring out the grain. “I am not a very good player,” he said. “A man of rank is expected to have some artistic skills. But I am only a younger son, which is why I wander about seeking work for my guns, and I have not had much musical instruction.”
“The sounds I heard were—” Elfavy searched after a word. “They spoke to me,” she said finally, “but not in a language I knew. Will you play that melody again?”
He set the flute to his lips and piped the notes, which were cold and sad. Elfavy shivered, catching her mantle to her and touching the gold-and-black locket at her throat. “There is more than music here,” she said. “That song comes from the Night Faces. It is a song, is it not?”
“Yes. Very ancient. From Old Earth, they say, centuries before men had reached even their own sun’s planets. We still sing it on Lochlann.”
“Can you put it into Gwydiona for me?”
“Perhaps. Let me think.” He walked for a while more, turning phrases in his head. A military officer must also be adept in the use of words, and the two languages were close kin. Finally he sounded a few bars, lowered the flute, and began.
“The wind doth blow today my love,
And a few small drops of rain.
I never had but one true love,
And she in her grave was lain.
“I’ll do as much for my true love
As any young man may;
I’ll sit and mourn all at her grave
For a twelvemonth and a day. . . .
“The twelvemonth and a day being up,
The dead began to speak:
‘Oh who sits weeping on my grave
And will not let me sleep?’”
He felt her grow stiff, and halted his voice. She said, through an unsteady mouth, so low he could scarce hear, “No. Please.”
“Forgive me,” he said in puzzlement, “if I have—” What?
“You couldn’t know. I couldn’t.” She glanced after Byord. The boy had frisked back to the soldiers. “He was out of earshot. It doesn’t matter, then, much.”
“Can you tell me what is wrong?” he asked, hopeful of a clue to the source of his own doubts.
“No.” She shook her head. “I don’t know what. It just frightens me somehow. Horribly. How can you live with such a song?”
“On Lochlann we think it quite a beautiful little thing.”
“But the dead don’t speak. They are dead!”
“Of course. It was only a fantasy. Don’t you have myths?”
“Not like that. The dead go into the Night, and the Night becomes the Day, is the Day. Like Ragan, who was caught in the Burning Wheel, and rose to heaven and was cast down again, and was wept over by the Mother—those are Aspects of God, they mean the rainy season that brings dry earth to life and they also mean dreams and the waking from dreams, and loss-remembrance-recreation, and the transformations of physical energy, and—Oh, don’t you see, it’s all one! It isn’t two people separate, becoming nothing, desiring to be nothing, even. It mustn’t be!”
Raven put away his flute. They walked on until Elfavy broke from him, danced a few steps, a slow and stately dance which suddenly became a leap. She ran back smiling and took his arm again.
“I’ll forget it,” she said. “Your home is very distant. This is Gwydion, and too near Bale time to be unhappy.”
“What is this Bale time?”
“When we go to the Holy City,” she said. “Once each year. Each Gwydiona year, that is, which I believe makes about five of Old Earth’s. Everybody, all over the planet, goes to the Holy City maintained by his own district. It may be a dull wait for you people, unless you can join us. . . . Perhaps you can!” she exclaimed, and eagerness washed out the last terror.
“What happens?” Raven asked.
“God comes to us.”
“Oh.” He thought of dionysiac rites among various backward peoples and asked with great care, “Do you see God, or feel Vwi?” The last word was a pronoun; Gwydiona employed an extra gender, the universal.
“Oh, no,” said Elfavy. “We are God.”