A World of Difference (24 page)

Having just had that thought, Reatur had to wiggle his eye-stalks at himself when he passed the human called Frank, who was on his way back from Ervis Gorge, without even stopping to chat. And this Frank had shown Enoph that rocks, of all the crazy ideas, had ages just like people! That was a notion deserving of days of talk, but Reatur had other things on his mind at the moment. Frank, after all, would be here tomorrow, and the day after, too.

Reatur had watchers posted along the entire stretch of Ervis Gorge that marked the western frontier of his domain, but most of them clustered close to the castle. That was where most of his people lived and also where the bridge across the gorge had been.

Ternat was one of the watchers. He carried three javelins, as if he expected a horde of Skarmer males to come roaring across the gorge at any moment. He widened himself when he saw Reatur approaching.

“Never mind that, eldest,” Reatur said impatiently, and Ternat resumed his normal height. “I’m glad to see you so alert.”

“One day the domain will be mine, clanfather, unless the Skarmer steal it from me. I do not intend to let them.”

“Well said. I came to ask you to spread word to your fellow watchers: use one eyestalk to look at the sky from time to time.”

“The sky, clanfather? No one can go through the sky. No one save humans, I mean,” Ternat amended, as he would not have before
Athena
came down.

“Aye, humans,” Reatur said—no escaping the creatures, not anymore. “I learn there are humans on the western side of Ervis Gorge, too, humans of a different clan from the ones here. Who knows what treacherous tricks they may have taught the Skarmer?”

“The Skarmer need no one to teach them treachery,” Ternat said. “But—more humans?”

“I don’t like the thought any better than you, eldest, but pulling in my eyestalks won’t make it go away. So—look to the sky.”

Ternat let the air sigh out through his breathing-pores. “The sky, clanfather.” He sounded as happy as Reatur felt.

The two males bored in on Fralk. Each of them carried two spears and two light spears, as did he. Each watched him with three eyestalks and used a fourth to see what the other was
doing. The smooth way they moved together told of how often they had done this before—to them, Fralk was just another victim to be dispatched.

He sprang at one of the males, hoping to put him out of action and make the fight even. But, though he shifted his own spears to the hands near the male he had chosen, that warrior blocked his blows with almost bored ease. And Fralk, who needed a shield of his own to protect himself against that male’s counter-thrusts, had but a single shield to withstand the onslaught of the fellow’s comrade.

That sort of fight could not last long. Fralk knew a brief moment of triumph when he managed to deflect a couple of thrusts from the second male, but all too soon one got home. Fralk let out a high-pitched squeal of pain.

“Eldest of eldest, you are as dead as a strip of sun-dried massi meat,” declared the drill-leader, a skinny, cynical male named Juksal. “Or you would be, if we were fighting with spears with real points. And the rest of you,” he called to the crowd of males watching the fight. “What does this teach you?”

“Not to get caught between two males,” his audience chorused.

Juksal feigned deafness. “Did I hear some runnerpests chirping? I asked, what does this teach you?”

“
Not to get caught between two males!
” This time it was a shout.

“All right,” Juksal said grudgingly. “You budlings know what to say, anyhow. Do you know what to do so that won’t happen?”

“
Form circle!
” the males shouted.

Fralk yelled with the rest, but all the while was thinking that what he really wanted to do was kill the accursed drill-leader. Any other time, any other place, Juksal would have widened himself the instant he saw Fralk and stayed widened till the younger male was gone. Not, Fralk added to himself, that Juksal frequented places where he would be likely to see him.

But here on this practice field, because he had managed to live through a few brawls, Juksal had clanfather’s authority over the group of males in which Fralk found himself. He used it, too, and seemed to take special delight in making Fralk the object of his lessons. Fralk ached after every one of them.

He knew he had to learn to fight. As the male in charge of the boats, he would be going across in one of the very first ones. He did not think the Omalo on the other side of the gorge would
greet him with hoots of delight. He even realized that being singled out this way by Juksal might earn him his comrades’ sympathy and make them more inclined to protect him than if they thought of him as a pampered noble. Maybe Juksal thought he was doing him a favor.

Maybe, in fact, Juksal
was
doing him a favor. That did not make him hurt any less, or like the drill leader any more.

“All right,” Juksal suddenly screamed. “You’ve just spotted eighteen eighteens of Omalo, all running toward you! Don’t just talk about your stinking circle—make it, or you’re dead males. Now, now, now!”

Predictably, a good deal of waste motion and rushing to and fro followed. The band of males got into their double ring a lot faster than they had the first time they tried it, though. Then Juksal had been screaming that they should have brought along a tray of relishes so the Omalo would have something to eat them with. Now all he did was turn yellow. Since he seemed to be yellow about half the time, Fralk doubted he was very angry.

“All right.” The drill-leader swept out an arm. “They’re
that
way, and there aren’t as many of them as you thought at first. Matter of fact, there’s more of you. Go poke holes in ’em.”

A few of Fralk’s companions were veterans of border clashes with other Skarmer clans—the two who had set on him were of that sort. More, like he, had never seen action. They shook themselves out into a crescent-shaped skirmish line and rushed in the direction Juksal had shown.

“Yell, curse it!” the drill-leader shouted at his warriors. “Make ’em want to void right where they’re standing!”

Fralk yelled as loud as he could, feeling foolish all the while. Soldiers were necessary things for a clan to have, but as eldest of eldest he had never expected to be one himself. But then, he had never expected Hogram to conceive of planting a new Skarmer subclan east of Ervis Gorge.

Every time he was tempted to imagine himself wilier than the clanfather, he broke a mental fingerclaw on the hard ice of that fact. The Great Gorges had been barriers between great clans as long as there had been great clans. Thinking of one as anything else required a leap of imagination beside which Fralk’s own schemes were as so many tiny runnerpest budlings.

“Come back, the lot of you,” Juksal called, breaking into the younger male’s musings. The band reversed itself. “All right, enough for the day. Fling your spears at the targets and then
knock off.” As if suddenly remembering to be harsh, the drill-leader added, “Try to scare ’em if you can’t hit ’em!”

Neither of Fralk’s casts hit the leaf-stuffed massi-hide target. Neither missed by much, though. He consoled himself with the thought that if the target had been a male caught in a volley, maybe he would have dodged someone else’s spear and been brought down by one of these.

He was also glad none of the humans had been watching. They did watch the Skarmer males drill fairly often; the sound of their picture-makers clicking away had become a familiar part of the exercises. At first Fralk thought they were filled with awe at the might and savagery of the Skarmer forces.

Most of the males still thought that. Juksal certainly did; whenever a human came around, he urged his warriors to show the strange creatures how fierce they were.

But Fralk, unlike his fellows, had learned to read expressions on the humans’ strange, boringly colored features. When the corners of their odd mouths curved up, they were amused. Fralk did not know why the Skarmer drills amused them, but he was sure they did.

Well, he thought, still feeling the ache under one arm, he’d like to see how a human would fare, attacked by four spears at once. Attack a human on the side where he had no eyes and he was yours—he wouldn’t even know he was in trouble until he was dead.

Fralk stopped. A couple of human concepts he had been having trouble with suddenly made sense.
Right
and
left
had given him no problems; they were just opposites of one another, what he thought of as
three arms apart
. But
behind …
behind was the direction where humans had no eyes, the hidden direction. Made as they were, poor strange creatures, no wonder they needed a special word for it.

Behind
 … it even had a weird kind of logic to it, or at least economy, which to Fralk’s mercantile mind was about the same thing. Like those of any reasonable language, Skarmer prepositions classified objects through their relative distance outward from oneself. Sometimes that led to clumsy ways of thinking and of speaking: Juksal, for instance, was
closer-to-Fralk
than the male named Ising, but
farther-from-Fralk
than the one called Kattom.

How much easier to say—and to think—that Juksal was
behind
Kattom. And how much easier to wish the miserable drill-leader
were
behind
Ising, and
behind
a good many more males as well, so he could neither see nor bother Fralk anymore.

Fralk knew what wishes were worth. If wishes were all that mattered, every starving tenant-farmer would become a clanfather overnight. Most times, Fralk knew that too well to need to remind himself of it.

But wishing Juksal would disappear was too pleasant a thought to slap down. Fralk’s eyestalks quivered with guilty pleasure as he walked back toward Hogram’s town.

Reatur had
left a piece of hide with some writing on it in the mates’ quarters. It had been there a few days. Most of the mates paid no attention to it. A couple scribbled on the blank parts. Then Lamra rescued it. She could not read, not really, but she did know that the written signs had sounds that went with them and knew what some of those were.

If you made one sound, and then the next one right after it—why, you’d just said
ice
! That was what those two signs had to mean! Ice! Lamra was so excited at her discovery that she stared at the hide with all six eyes at once, paying no attention to anything going on around her. She might have heard the door to the mates’ chambers opening, but if she did, she ignored that, too.

She was taken by surprise, then, when Reatur asked from right beside her, “What do you have there?”

Three eyestalks jerked up from the hide. Not only was Reatur standing there, but Sarah the human, as well. How had they managed to sneak up on her? Well, no matter. She was glad they were here, Reatur especially. “Look!” Lamra said, pointing to the signs she knew. “This means ‘ice,’ doesn’t it?” None of the mates cared about anything like that.

Reatur bent an eyestalk down to see what she was talking about. “Why, yes, it does,” he said slowly. “How did you know that?” He kept one eyestalk on the word she had figured out and moved another around so he could see what was going on; the remaining four peered straight at Lamra.

“If you say the sounds of these two signs together, they make the word,” she explained. Reatur did not answer. He just kept
looking at her with those four intent eyestalks. She began to worry. “Am I in trouble?” she asked. She had never heard of mates knowing what writing meant. Maybe they weren’t supposed to.

After a long pause that made Lamra worry even more, Reatur said, “No, you’re not in trouble.” She watched herself go from alarmed blue to the green of relief and happiness.

“What?” Sarah asked. The talk had passed her by.

“I know what these two signs say,” Lamra told the human proudly, showing which ones with a fingerclaw. She pronounced them separately, then together. “ ‘Ice!’ Do you understand?”

“Yes. Understand,” Sarah said. She beat her two hands together, again and again. The noise startled Lamra, who pulled her eyestalks in halfway. “No, no,” Sarah said quickly. “With humans, noise means, ‘good for you.’ ”

Humans were very strange, Lamra thought, not for the first time: trust them to scare someone when all they meant was “good for you.” The mate let her eyestalks come out again, though.

She watched Sarah turn her head so her eyes pointed at Reatur. “You see?” the human said. If a person had been talking, Lamra would have thought that was triumph in her voice.

Maybe it was. Reatur’s grunt lay between annoyance and resignation. “I told you once already, did I not?” he said sharply. The human bent her head down—a person would have widened himself instead.

“You see about what, Reatur?” Lamra asked.

“About you,” the domain-master said. Seeing that Lamra did not follow him, he went on. “The human will try to see that you don’t die when your time comes to bud.”

“Oh,” Lamra said, and then, louder, “Oh!” She still did not know what to think about that and was surprised that Reatur would even let Sarah try. “Are you sure?” she asked him.

“No,” he said. “I don’t know if I should be doing this at all. I don’t know if Sarah can keep you alive. But I do know I don’t want you to die. If it turns out you don’t have to, good. If not—the sorrow of the mates.”

If Reatur thought things might turn out all right, Lamra was willing to accept that. The same curiosity that had helped her begin to figure out written signs made her turn a couple of eyestalks on Sarah and ask, “How will you go about keeping my blood inside me? It comes out very quickly.” She had never watched a budding; Reatur didn’t let mates do that. But once or
twice she had seen the chamber afterward, before it was cleaned, and she had picked up ideas from overheard snatches of talk. She more or less knew what happened in there.

Sarah turned her head back to Lamra. “Not know. Try to find out.” Then the human’s head swung toward Reatur again. “Mate knows good questions to ask, yes?”