Laura hung low in the empty west, deeper, aureate than at midday. The sky was a slowly darkening blue; streaks of high cirrus clouds, which Arinnian thought of as breastfeathers, promised fair weather would continue. A salt breeze whispered and cooled his cheeks.
Air traffic was scant. Severa Ythrians passed by, wings gleaming bronze and amber. A couple of humans made beltflights like Arinnian; distant, they were hardly to be told from a flock of slim leathery draculas which evening had drawn out of some cave. More humans rode in cars, horizontal raindrops that flung back the light with inanimate fierceness. Two or three vans lumbered along and an intercontinental liner was settling toward the airport. But Gray was never wildly busy.
High up, however, paced shapes that had not been seen here since the end of the Troubles: warcraft on patrol.
War against the Terran Empire — Shivering, Arinnian lined out eastward, inland.
Already he could see his destination, far off beyond the coastal range and the central valley, like a cloudbank on worldedge, those peaks which were the highest in Corona, on all Avalon if you didn’t count Oronesia. Men called them the Andromedas, but in his Anglic Arinnian had also taken to using the Planha name, Weather-mother.
Ranchland rolled beneath him. Here around Gray, the mainly Ythrian settlements northward merged with the mainly human south; both ecologies blent with Avalon’s own, and the country became a checkerboard. Man’s grainfields, ripening as summer waned, lay tawny amidst huge green pastures where Ythrians grazed their maukh and mayaw. Stands of timberwood, oak or pine, windnest or hammerbranch, encroached on nearly treeless reaches of berylline native susin where you might still glimpse an occasional barysauroid. The rush of his passage blew away fretfulness. Let the Empire attack the Domain… if it dared! Meanwhile he, Arinnian, was bound for Eyath — for his whole choth, of course, and oneness with it, but chiefly he would see Eyath again.
Across the dignity of the dining hall, a look passed between them. Shall we wander outside and be ourselves?
She asked permission to leave of her father Lythran and her mother Blawsa; although she was their dependent, that was mere ritual, yet rituals mattered greatly. In like fashion Arinnian told the younger persons among whom he was benched that he had the wish of being unaccompanied. He and Eyath left side by side. It caused no break in the slow, silence-punctuated conversation wherein everyone else took part. Their closeness went back to their childhood and, was fully accepted.
The compound stood on a plateau of Mount Farview. At the middle lifted the old stone tower which housed the senior members of the family and their children. Lower wooden structures, on whose sod roofs bloomed amberdragon and starbells, were for the unwed and for retainers and their kin. Further down a slope lay sheds, barns, and mews. The whole could not be seen at once from the ground, because Ythrian trees grew among the buildings: braidbark, copperwood, gaunt lightningrod, jewelleaf which sheened beneath the moon and by day would shimmer iridescent. The flowerbeds held natives, more highly evolved than anything from offplanet — sweet small janie, pungent livewell, graceful trefoil and Buddha’s cup, a harp vine which the breeze brought ever so faintly to singing. Otherwise the night was quiet and, at this altitude, cold. Breath smoked white.
Eyath spread her wings. They were more slender than average, though spanning close to six meters. This naturally forced her to rest on hands and tail. “Br-r-r!” she laughed. “Hoarfrost. Let’s lift.” In a crack and whirl of air, she rose.
“You forgot,” he called. “I’ve taken off my belt”
She settled on a platform built near the top of a copperwood. Ythrians made few redundant noises; obviously he could climb. He thought she overrated his skill, merely because he was better at it than she. A misstep in that murky foliage could bring a nasty fall. But he couldn’t refuse the implicit challenge and keep her respect. He gripped a branch, chinned himself up, and groped and rustled his way.
Ahead, he heard her murmur to the uhoth which had fluttered along behind her. It brought down game with admirable efficiency, but he felt she made too much fuss over it Well, no denying she was husband-high. He didn’t quite like admitting that to himself. (Why?, he wondered fleetingly.)
When he reached the platform, he saw her at rest on feet and alatans, the uhoth on her right wrist while her left hand stroked it. Morgana, almost full, stood dazzling white over the eastward sierra and made the plumes of Eyath glow. Her crest was silhouetted against the Milky Way. Despite the moon, constellations glistered through upland air, Wheel, Swords, Zirraukh, vast sprawling Ship…
He sat down beside her, hugging his knees. She made the small ululation which expressed her gladness at his presence. He responded as best he could. Above the clean curve of her muzzle, the great eyes glimmered.
Abruptly she broke off. He followed her gaze and saw a new star swing into heaven. “A guardian satellite?” she asked. Her tone wavered the least bit.
“What else?” he replied. “I think it must be the latest one they’ve orbited.”
“How many by now?”
“They’re not announcing that,” he reminded her. Ythrians always had trouble grasping the idea of government secrets. Of government in any normal human sense, for that matter. Marchwardens Ferune and Holm had been spending more energy in getting the choths to cooperate than in actual defense preparations. “My father doesn’t believe we can have too many.”
“The wasted wealth—”
“Well, if the Terrans come—”
“Do you expect they will?”
The trouble he heard brought his hand to squeeze her, very gently, on the neck, and afterward run fingers along her crest. Her feathers were warm, smooth and yet infinitely textured. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe they can settle the border question peacefully. Let’s hope.” The last two words were perforce in Anglic rather than Planha. Ythrians had never beseeched the future. She too was bilingual, like every educated colonist.
His look went back skyward. Sol lay… yonder in the Maukh, about where four stars formed the horns… how far? Oh, yes, 205 light-years. He recalled reading that, from there, Quetlan and Laura were in a constellation called the Lupus. None of the three suns had naked-eye visibility across such an abyss. They were mere G-type dwarfs; they merely happened to be circled by some motes which had fermented till there were chemistries that named those motes Terra, Ythri, Avalon, and loved them.
“Lupus,” he mused. “An irony.”
Eyath whistled: “?”
He explained, adding: “The lupus is, or was, a beast of prey on Terra. And to us, Sol lies in the sign of a big, tame herd animal. But who’s attacking whom?”
“I haven’t followed the news much,” she said, low and not quite steadily. “It seemed a fog only, to me or mine. What need we reck if others clashed? Then all of a sudden — Might we have caused some of the trouble, Arinnian? Could folk of ours have been too rash, too rigid?”
Her mood was so uncharacteristic, not just of Ythrian temperament in general but of her usually sunny self, that astonishment jerked his head around. “What’s made you this anxious?” he asked.
Her lips nuzzled the uhoth, as if seeking consolation that he thought he could better give. Its beak preened her. He barely heard: “Vodan.”
“What? Oh! Are you betrothed to Vodan?” His voice had cracked. Why am I shaken? he wondered. He’s a fine fellow. And of this same choth, too; no problems of changed law and custom, culture shock, homesickness — Arinnian’s glance swept over the Storm-gate country. Above valleys steep-walled, dark and fragrant with woods, snowpeaks lifted. Closer was a mountainside down which a waterfall stood pillarlike under the moon. A night-flying bugler sounded its haunting note through stillness. On the Plains of Long Reach, in arctic marshes, halfway around the planet on a scorching New Gaiilan savannah, amidst the uncounted islands that made up most of what dry land Avalon had — how might she come to miss the realm of her choth?