Cuckoo's Egg (2 page)

"Settlers have moved there. Their title's valid by now."

"Move them out. I want the house. The hills. Privacy. Come on, Ellud…

you want me to camp in your office?

Ellud did not. They had been friends. Once. Now Duun saw the guarded lowering of the ears. Like shame. Like a man taking a chance he wanted.

Badly. At any cost.

"You'll get it," Ellud said. Never looking at him. Ellud's claws extended slightly, raked papers aside as he looked distractedly at the desk about him. "I'll do something. I'll see to it."

"Thanks."

That got the eyes up. A wounded look. Appalled like the rest. The agony of friendship.

Of wounded loyalties.

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"Give it up," Ellud asked, against self-interest; against all interests. The loyalty jolted, belated as it was.

"No." For a moment then, eye to eye, no flinching from either side. He remembered Ellud under fire. A calm, cool man. But the gaze finally shifted and something broke.

The last thing.

Duun walked out, freer, because there was nothing left. Not even Ellud.

Just pain. And he wrapped that solitude about him, finding it appropriate.

* * *

He came to Sheon's hills in the morning, in a true morning with the sun coming up rose and gold over the ridge; and the wind that blew at him on this grassy flat was the wind of his childhood, whipping at his cloak, at the gray cloak of the hatani, which he wrapped about him and the infant.

Ellud's aide showed distress, there on the dusty road that led toward the hills, in the momentary stillness of the craft which had brought them there, over in the meadow. The aide's ears lay flat in the wind, which blew his neatly trimmed crest and disarranged the careful folds of his kilt. The wind was cold for a citydweller, for a softhands like him. "It's all right," Duun said. "I told you. There's no way up but this. You don't have to wait here."

The aide turned his face slightly toward the countryfolk who gathered out of the range of hearing, who gathered in knots, families together, uncaring of the cold. The aide looked back again, walked toward the gathered crowd waving his arms. "Go away, go away, the mingi has no need of you. Fools," he said then, turning back, for they gave only a little ground.

He stooped and gathered up from the roadside the little baggage there was, slung the sack from his shoulder. His ears still lay back in distress.

"Hatani, I will walk up with you myself."

It was a wonder. The aide met his eyes with staunch frankness. Ellud chose such young folk, still knowing the best, the most honest. Duun felt for a moment as if the sun had shone on him full; or perhaps it was the 6

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smell of true wind, with the grass-scent and the cleanness. He felt a motion of his heart toward this young man and it ached.

But he grinned, old soldier that he was, and glanced at the uphill road, for this time he was the one to flinch, from the youth's innocence and worship.

"Give me the sack," he said, and stripped the carry-strap from the young man's shoulder and took it to his own, his right. The infant occupied his left arm, warm and moving there, nuzzling wormlike among its swaddlings beneath his cloak.

"But, hatani—"

"You're not going. I don't need you."

He walked away.

"Hatani—"

He did not look back. Did not look at the mountainfolk who lined the road near the copter. Some of them were the displaced, he was sure. Some of them had held Sheon, having gotten it since he was renunciate. Now they were abruptly dispossessed. He felt their eyes, heard their whispers, nothing definite.

"Hatani," he heard. And:
"Alien."
Whisper they need not. He felt their eyes trying to penetrate his cloak. They came to wonder what he was as much as they wondered about what he brought. "Hatani." There was respect in that. "What happened to his face?" a child asked.

"Hush," an adult said. And there was a sudden, embarrassed hush. It was a child. It had not learned what scars were. It was only honesty.

Duun did not look at them. Did not care. He was hatani, renunciate. His weapons were at his side beneath the cloak. He asked one thing of the world. These hills. This place.

A little peace.

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That a hatani dispossessed them— The countryfolk living at Sheon had surely thought their title secure. The land was fallow; the house vacant; ten years renunciate and it was theirs by law.

But it was what he had told Ellud: there was nothing he could not ask and obtain, nothing in all the world

He felt their eyes. Perhaps they expected him to speak. Perhaps they expected him to care, to offer words to reassure them.

But he only walked past them up the road, the dusty road to the heights and the house made of native stone, deep within the hills.

He heard the copter lift. It beat away with small thumps like heartbeats echoing off the mountainside. It had come and gone often here yestereve and three days before, with other craft, seeing to provisions, to special equipment, to all such things as satisfied Ellud and Ellud's ilk.

Nuisance, all of it.

* * *

He prepared himself. He knew that Sheon would have changed. He gathered up his resolve in this as in other things. He needed virtue. He sought it in abnegation. He sought it in lack of caring, when he came, in full noon, to the mountain heights, and discovered the things countryfolk had done to Sheon, which he expected: a sprawl of new rubble-stone building, which destroyed the beauty Sheon had once been, a creation of smooth artistry indistinguishable from the living rock of the mountain wall that flanked it. The house sprawled now, artless and utilitarian, the yard about it cleared and dusty. He was not dismayed.

Only when he came inside and discovered what Ellud and his crews had done— that, that afflicted him. Instead of the country untidiness he had expected (different from the time of his childhood, of stones carefully polished, of spacious halls and a sand-garden where the wind made patterns), the government had worked sterility, lacquered the stone walls, sanded the floors in white, not red, installed a new kitchen, new 8

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furnishings, all at great expense; and the smell of it was new and pungent with fixatives and paint and new-baked sand.

He stood there, in this clean, sterile, unremembered place, with its abundant stores, its furniture new from the city—

For the infant. Of course, for the infant. The meds feared for its health.

They wanted sanitation.

And destroyed— destroyed—

He stood there a long, long time, in pain. The infant squirmed and began to cry. And he was very careful with it in his anger, as careful as he had ever been. He searched the cabinets for new cloths; fround the cradle prepared—

The infant soiled itself. He knew the cry, smelled the stink, which had surrounded him, stronger than the lacquer and dry-dust smell of sand.

He laid it down on the sand; he put off his cloak and laid his weapons down on a riser near the fireplace. He listened to it scream. It had grown.

The voice was louder, hoarser, the face screwed up in rage.

He took cloths and wet them and knelt and cleaned its filth in starkest patience; he heated the formula and fed it till it slept. He walked aimless in the halls afterward, smelling the stink it had left on him, and the stink of new plaster, new lacquer, new furniture.

He had run barefoot in these halls, laughed, played pranks with a dozen sibs and cousins, rolled on the floor-sand, till exasperated elders flung them out into a yard well shaded with old trees.

The trees were gone. The new wing stood where the oldest tree had been.

So much for homecomings.

* * *

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He made a fire. There was that one thing left untouched, the old stones of the hearth he had sat by as a child, and there were scraps of demolished outbuildings and fences, in a towering pile near the rocks. He made a fire of them, burning others' memories of home.

He took the infant outside with him, well wrapped against the cold; he took it about the house with him, in the kitchen, at last before the fire itself; he sat on the clean deep sand before the hearthstones and held the infant in his lap.

He had grown accustomed to it. The flat, round face no longer disturbed him. The smell was his smell, compounded of its sweat and his. Demon eyes looked up at him. The face made grimaces meaningless to both of them in the wavering firelight, the leaping flames.

He took its skull between his hands, the whole and the maimed one, and he was careful as if the skull had been eggshell instead of bone. He smiled, drawing back his lips from his teeth, and gazed into eyes which perhaps saw him, perhaps not.

"Wei-na-ya," he sang to it, "wei-na-mei,"— in a hoarse male voice unapt for lullabies;
little bird, little fish
— the house had heard that song before.

"Hei sa si-lan-nei…."
Do not go. The wind is cold, the water dark, but
here is warm.
"Wei-na-ya, wei-na-mei."

And "Sha-khe'a," he sang, but softly, like the lullaby, which was a hatani song.

It was the deathsong. He sang it like the lullaby. He smiled, grinned into its face.

"Thou art
Haras,
" he said to the awful, demon face, to the slittted eyes with their centers like stormcloud. It was the sadoth he spoke, the language of his hill-dwelling ancestors. "Thou art
Haras. Thorn
is your name."

It gazed solemnly up at him.

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Unafraid.

It waved its hands.
He,
Duun reminded himself, He. Haras. Thorn. The wind howled about the house, skirled in the chimney and set the flames to flickering in the hearth.

He grinned and rocked the child and did a thing which would have chilled the blood of any of the countryfolk who doubtless huddled together in their dispossession; or the meds; or Ellud in his fine city apartment.

He held it as if it were a shonun child and washed its eyes with his tongue (they tasted salt and musty). There was nothing he spared himself, no last repugnance he did not overcome. Such was his patience.

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II

They came from the capital. Copters landed, and meds made the long trek uphill carrying their instruments; and downhill going away. They were not pleased. Perhaps the countryfolk frightened them, gathering in their sullen watchfulness at the foot of the road, where the aircraft landed.

They came and went away again.

Duun held the infant, talked to it as he watched them go, mindless talk, as one did with children.

It. Haras. Thorn.

"Duun," Thorn said, infant babble. "Duun, Duun, Duun."

Thorn made busy chaos on the sand before the hearth. His cries were loud, ear-splitting; shonunin were more reserved. He still soiled himself. When this would cease Duun did not know. How to teach him otherwise he did not know. Thorn's appetite had changed; his sleep was longer, to Duun's relief.

"Duun, Duun, Duun," the infant sang, on his back before the fire. And grinned and laughed when Duun poked him in the belly, squealed, when Duun used a clawtip. Laughed again. Enjoyed his belly rubbed, fat round belly which began to hollow now, the limbs to lengthen. "Duun." Duun leaned forward, nipped at Thorn's neck. Thorn grabbed his ears, and Duun sat back, escaping the infant grip, disheveled. He had let his crest grow; it sheeted raggedly down his back and strayed now in front of his ears.

He went for the throat again on hands and knees and Thorn squealed and kicked. Clawed with small fat hands, with nails which were all the defense he had.

Duun laughed aloud, well-pleased.

* * *

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Thorn ran, ran, ran on tottering legs, out of doors, on the dusty earth where outbuildings had been; naked in the warmth of spring.

Duun knelt. No one nowadays saw Duun's body, the lightning-blasted scars of his right arm, the scars that skeined across his side and leg. But here he wore no more than the small-kilt, in the warmth, with the hiyi flowering by the back door and drifting blossoms down pink as Thorn's smooth skin. Infant hair had gone, come in gold, darkened again in winter metamorphosis. Perhaps it was seasonal; perhaps a phase of Thorn's life.

Duun held out his arms to Thorn and Thorn laughed as he plunged into Duun's arms, all dusty-smelling.

"Again," Duun said, and set him upright, crouching again a little distance off to make Thorn run. Infant legs tried and failed, exhausted. Duun caught him, hugged him, licked his mouth and eyes, which Thorn did to him when Thorn had stopped laughing and gasping, clenching small five-fingered fists into Duun's trailing crest and the shorter hair of his forelock, and digging his face for a sly nip into the hollow of Duun's neck when he got the chance, but Duun ducked his head aside and got in a nip first.

Small unclawed feet drove at his lap, the small body strained and Thorn ducked down to bite him ungently in the chest.

"Ah!" Duun cried, seizing him in both hands, kneeling, lifting him kicking and squealing aloft at arm's length. "Ah! Devious!"

He hugged him again and Thorn bit again. He had gained teeth, and strength, but they were not teeth like Duun's. Duun bit at fingers and Thorn caught Duun's mouth and pushed back his lip to try his fingers on Duun's larger, sharper teeth. Duun nipped and Thorn rescued his hand and squealed.

* * *

There were more visits. "Bye, bye, bye," Thorn bade the meds sullenly from the porch. He squatted down naked as he was and grimaced then. He had bit the chief med, and the med had come within a little of flicking an impudent youngster hard on the nose.

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But the med had stopped himself. Duun was standing there, hatani-cloaked in gray, arms folded.

The meds went away. Thorn made a rude sound and urinated on the step.

Duun went and snapped him soundly on the ear with thumb and forefinger. Thorn wailed.

"Bad," said Duun. The wail went on. Duun went into the house, into the kitchen and got his hand wet in the sink. Thorn followed, naked, holding hands out, wailing all the way and dancing in his distress.