Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (41 page)

‘We’ve enjoyed it. Do you know the area well?’

‘I’ve hunted in it on and off for twenty years.’

The women looked at each other and made their respective racial signs for relieved amusement.

Shalleme stepped up beside her companion. ‘Perhaps then you know the way to Morgre complex? We’ve been hunting down along the whole length of the Fayne for six weeks now. But it’s not too well marked around here.’

‘Certainly,’ I said. ‘None of the local hunters you ran into could help you? I’ve known the one who presided here for years. I’m sure she would have given you directions.’

Ollivet’t said, ‘I have not hunted in her territory for
more than thirty. So I did not feel I knew her well enough to interrupt the proceedings.’

I nodded. ‘I see. And there was no other Old Hunter that you encountered locally?’

‘We ran into one,’ Ollivet’t said. ‘She had wonderful songs, a great store and fund of lore –’

‘But she hadn’t the faintest idea where the urban complex was,’ Shalleme finished up. ‘Well, that’s hunters for you. We were hoping we might follow someone in. Our scooters are only about a kilometre away …’

I glanced at Rat: odd how I was slowly learning to read approval in his silver eyes, though they, of course, were what actually remained unchanged in the still face around them.

‘Your song,’ he said, suddenly and surprisingly to the woman, ‘was wonderful.’

Shalleme looked at his alien eyes with her human ones. ‘So was yours, Yellow Dragon’s Daughter.’

I said: ‘I don’t see why we couldn’t –’

We’d come with one scooter and small daykits. They’d come down, they told us, with two; and daykit enough for weeks.

They went off to get them.

Rat leaned against our tandem. ‘Will they have trouble finding us?’

‘The radar-bows.’ I joggled mine, so that it slid fully down into its holder ‘They put out a homing beacon in case you get lost. Or in case someone else wants to find you.’

Two scooters turned round a distant dune, both riders now crimson in tourist coveralls. Ollivet’t hailed me with a red-draped wing over her bow sails.

‘Come on.’ As I straddled the saddle, Rat pushed the brace closed around his own bow, and straddled behind me, hand on my shoulder, hand on my flank.

I stamped stirrups.

Moustache tickled back at my upper lip; beard flattened to my chin. The wind put her three cool paw-pads on my chest and knees.

We skimmed warm sand and mica.

2.

As you come in from the hunting grounds at daytime, Morgre looks very different from my room’s night-time view. Thin sculptures designating the old travel guide, from the pre-human days when neuter and female evelmi
who could fly did a lot, leaned beside the human-built highway: pedestals and ten-metre clear display walls preserved by the evelm-human organizations who concern themselves with such. Bowsail shadows shivered on pitted topping.

Overhead a propeller platform moved above clouds.

Right, humping above a shoulder of blue needles, tolgoth hid the -wr and its fumes. In the distance, Morgre was smudges behind girder-work, with a few towering stone supports walling its north end.

The webwork of feed-paths on our left stretched away to the child’s red toys of the Myaluths, interrupted here by a weather tower, there by the verdigrised dome of one of the forty-thousand-cubic-metre water pumps that sucked the lower wet-sands dry, worked by a convocation of huge, flapping thermofoils taking power from Iiriani. At this range they looked like miniature radar-bows dancing beside the greeny globes, over the orange sand.

I don’t recall when I noticed the half-dozen scooters zagging the narrow paths laid along the ancient runways. I first thought they were another hunting party – only no bows glinted and flopped on their racks.

I had been aware of them for five or six minutes when I realized, for all their swerving back and forth, how closely they paralleled us.

I thought of speaking over my shoulder to Rat. But air chattered by my ears. Then a moment of heat at my right cheek: Rat’s mouth brushed it as he leaned close to shout: ‘They’re following us, Marq …’ which was neither about our northerners in reds behind us, I realized, nor the group of six. As I glanced back (his mouth still closing over my name), I saw, behind and beyond them, another twenty – no, forty, or even fifty – scooters gliding along the sandy strips that lay like gold ribbons in an orange sandscape that would go copper at Iirianiset.

Negotiating the interwoven paths, lingering scooters joined the lead group. And I looked up – our scooter lurched a little – because the creatures labouring maybe a hundred metres above in the air were not small dragons, but some dozen evelm women.

The sky was streaked with the clouds we call fireneedles here and which, only fifty k’s to the east, are called ’manshair: nobbly filaments of darkness like wires across Iiriani.

But do you know how rare it is to see evelmi fly?

They flocked.

Among the riders were more humans than one would have expected with a random gathering; almost forty per cent.

Flyers and riders flocked nearer.

I looked back over Rat’s arm at the two red figures following.

Ahead, three or five feed-paths fed on to the highway – and a hundred metres further, three or five more.

Six, a dozen, twenty scooters splatted noise and shadow on to the road. Sound around us trebled. Bony faces passed, staring – too many without scales. (When humans mass in too great numbers on Velm, though I am one, I think of the dangerous north.)
Zub
and
zub zub zub
and
zub zub
, in the welter and rumble passing. Glancing right, I saw a dark face: her gum bluish, her black eyes narrowed in the wind, watching, her blue-black claws clamping her machine’s guide bar. Then she dropped away among and behind others. Skimmers pulled ahead and fell behind. Their draughts slapped us like dragon wings.

I wanted to call out and could think of nothing to call. I mauled my guide bar with my hands and marvelled Korga’s hands did not maul me. We grumbled up on
another sand-spilled junction. And, as the scooters had come, they went.

Scooters growled away along feed-paths, out across the plane.

We moved down the raw highway in our own quiet roar; I glanced aside to watch scooters dispersing over the sandy web, under the unsettling flights of the women.

On my left, sound increased. I shifted my shoulders under Rat’s hands, and turned to see first Ollivet’t’s, then Shalleme’s scooter pull abreast. Ollivet’t said with three tongues at once, loud enough to cover it:

I shouted, loud as I could (it doesn’t compete): ‘I’LL TELL YOU LATER.’ Then as an afterthought: ‘YOU WOULDN’T BELIEVE ME IF I DID,’ and hoped Shalleme could read my lips. It’s a talent many of us humans have been developing as a sort of racial compensation.

Their scooters fell behind, and I watched them to detect some reason in their passage – saw only their intent at driving.

Morgre’s stone walls – we were coming in at the Broidwey Tunnel – loomed, blotched high as the wingspread of a neuter dragon with the rock-algae that gives the stony Fayne (but not the Vyalou) its characteristic purple. We dived in.

3.

I’d never seen this many people in an industrial rotunda. Vaulted mosaics hung thirty metres above the covered catwalks, crane housings, and grapples. Guide patterns
flickered and faded in clear flooring, dark as Korga’s eyes, beneath myriad clawed and nailed feet. I pulled to a stop before a dozen parked scooters, beside the ambling crowds. Fifty metres away behind a wire-mesh wall, a roller ribbon hauled its load of cartons to rotundas further on.

Ollivet’t and Shalleme pulled up beside me. The rotunda roared. More scooters echoed in behind us.

‘What’s happening? Shalleme asked.

With wavering wings, Ollivet’t pulled scaly claws free of her foot holders and came to four feet beside her machine, searching among the crowd. Turning to Shahleme, she showed the tongue configuration (one larger and two smaller) that means the unimportant questioning one could ignore.

Shalleme ignored it. ‘Is there something wrong?’ she asked Rat – at least the question began at him. It finished at me, probably because he wasn’t looking at her.

‘No,’ I said, realizing I didn’t know how to explain what I suspected. ‘No, there’s nothing wrong. At least I don’t think –’ Then I looked at Rat.

He was watching my foot – I’d been kicking at the stand to get it down.

Rat said: ‘No. No, there’s nothing wrong.’

Shalleme looked around again.

And Ollivet’t’s wings were moving.

I still hadn’t gotten the stand down right.

‘Marq?’ Rat asked.

‘What?’ I got it.

‘I think most of these people are here because I –’

‘Skinura Marq!’ The voice, at initial and final consonant, singsonged.

All ivory today, she strolled up through the gathered women. Most were facing away, the evelmi now and again rearing to see over those before them, the humans
now and again jumping. She was tall, closer to Rat’s height than mine. Her white body mask was shot with silver. I recognized her as the woman who had come up around my room with the students, as the white peeled away from her red skullcap, from her brown round face with its epicanthiced eyes, this time her amber irises filigreed with black. ‘Ah,’ she declared, ‘by my ancestors on Eurd, so it really is Skepta Marq. I do not need to inquire after the identity of your friend. I already know of Rat by legend and report.’ She turned to our hunting companions, as the body mask fell away from her lean neck. The gold bar with its ruby-tipped wires dropped on its chain across her sharp shoulders, down her long flat breasts. ‘But these …?’

Ollivet’t said: ‘This is my companion, Shalleme Doru,’ with one tongue and, ‘I’m Ollivet’t Doru,’ with another.

‘Ah, it’s Skalla Ollivet’t and Skri Shalleme? Well, I’m delighted. But really – ’ The petals collapsed from her waist to suggest, below her breasts and belly, an oddly panelled skirt. She made the awkward bow of the very tall. ‘Enchanted. Now you must all come with me.’

‘There!’ someone called.

I looked sharply around.

‘Over there?’ and, ‘I think it’s …’ echoed under the rotunda ceiling. But the surge of people moved somewhere to the right. Fifty of them? A hundred-fifty? When you are simply unused to crowds, it’s difficult to evaluate their number. I only know that there were more people around than could fit in the Dyethshome amphitheatre.

‘Really,’ the tall woman said, ‘I think all you honourable Skryonchatyn should come with me. If they recognize you …’ She inclined her head towards Rat.

‘I don’t under – ’ Ollivet’t began with one tongue. ‘I mean,’ another continued, ‘we were only coming into the city here to –’

‘All of you,’ the woman said. ‘You
must
agree with me, no? It would be safer.’

‘But what about the scooters?’ Shalleme asked. ‘We were going to park them at the local hunting union before we – ’

‘You can see – or does it require a logical leap not usual in your culture? You can not get anywhere near the union’s port. If you like, we will leave you here to try—’

‘Look,’ I said. ‘I’ll disc the scooters, and you two can pick them up at Dyethshome later.’ I pushed a hand under the rough flap of our daykit and grubbed in twine, cloth, and small containers for the plastic-covered circles. I drew out a handful. ‘Here.’ I pressed the adhesive side of the green discs against the fork of our tandem, then turned to press two more against the forks of the other women’s. ‘They’ll be at Dyethshome in half an hour, waiting for you. It’s very easy to find: the largest out-city co-op to the oest. Just ask for Whitefalls. Anyone can set you on the proper roller.’

‘Dyethshome,’ Shalleme said, turning to Ollivet’t. ‘Wasn’t that where Kessell and Via-pr’d went to study
₂
about six or seven years back …?’

In the dim light, Rat, his eyes flickering between green and clear, said: ‘Who are you?’

The tall woman, her hands at her side, her chin raising just a trifle, said: ‘My name is JoBonnot. Remember that name, Rat Korga. No one likes advice. I give you some anyway. Remember that name. Please.’ She glanced at me.

I turned from the foreigners, wondering what status accrued in that honorific-clotted home tongue to those free of all of them; and someone else shouted: ‘There! Just over there.’

The black floor beneath us flared. Six inches down in the clear plastic, three-metre arrows suddenly mapped
lapped paths about the rotunda. I realized as I looked around us that Rat, in a fuzzy glow of red, was the centre of them all.

‘Come with me!’ JoBonnot barked. ‘Now they really
have
seen you!’

I began: ‘But where –?’

‘We have supper with your sister tonight, Marq,’ Rat said, which, in the circumstances, seemed the oddest thing to remind me of.

But JoBonnot grinned at me with perfectly insistent delight. ‘Ah, yes. A message from your sister, the prudent and insightful Skern Black-lars,’ which was the way she pronounced it: not Black Lars, but Black-lars. ‘Her informal supper for the evening has been cancelled. If you do not believe me, check the first time we reach a call station. Now come!’