The Ringworld Throne (6 page)

“No, I think it’s safe for tonight and tomorrow night. The vampires have hunted this area out, and they’d smell their own dead. Even so, arm your people and, mmm, send men and women together.”

“Valavirgillin—“

“I know your custom, but if the vampires sing, best your people mate with each other.” Should she be saying this? She surely would not have spoken thus before other Grass Giants.

The Bull snarled, but—“Yes. Yes, and what the Thurl does not see did not happen. So.” The Thurl beckoned at Beedj. He asked Vala, “Will Farsight Trading join us?”

“We should support you. Two species in need will speak louder than one.” Farsight Trading could roll away from most problems, but not
this
. They’d poured most of their fuel into towels.

“Three species, then. Many Gleaners died the night before last. The Gleaners will wait with us. Should we be more yet? Vampires must have hunted among the Reds.”

“Worth a try.”

Beedj came up. The Thurl began talking much faster than Vala could follow. Beedj tried to argue, then acquiesced.

“We should sleep during the day,” Vala said. Her body was crying for sleep.

Something closed on her wrist. “Boss?”

She jerked awake. Her squeak was intended as a scream. She rolled away and sat up and—it was only Kaywerbrimmis.

“Boss, what have you been telling the Bull?”

She was still groggy. She needed a drink and a bath or—that rattle, was it rain? And a flash and boom that was certainly thunder.

She’d pulled off her filthy clothing before she slept. She slid out of the blankets, out of the payload shell, into the cool rain. Kay watched from the gun room as she danced in the rain.

Consequences. Traders didn’t mate. They shared rishathra with the species they met, but mating was something else. You didn’t get a business partner pregnant, and you didn’t engage in sexual dominance games, and you didn’t fall in love.

But in far realms, among strange hominids, you couldn’t shun each other, either.

She beckoned and shouted, “Wash with me. What time is it?”

“Coming on dusk. We slept a long time.” Kay was pulling off his clothes in something like relief. “I thought we’d need this time to arm against vampires.”

“We’ll do that. How’s Barok?”

“Don’t know.”

They drank, washed each other, dried each other, and were reassured: the mating urge could be resisted.

The rain stopped. You could see wind driving the last flurries across the stubble. Swaths of navy-blue sky showed through blowing broken clouds, and a sudden narrow vertical line of blue-white dashes.

Vala gaped. She hadn’t seen the Arch in four rotations.

By glow of Archlight she could see patterns in the grass stubble. An arc of pale rectangles. A tent erected within the arc. Grass Giants moved back and forth, and a handful of much smaller hominids moved with them. On the rectangles ... sheets? They were laying out bodies.

“Did you tell them to do that?”

“No. Not a bad idea, though,” Vala said.

In Anthrantillin’s deserted cruiser they found Barok with a woman twice his size. He seemed abnormally subdued, but he was smiling. “Wemb, my partners Valavirgillin and Kaywerbrimmis. Folk, this is Wemb.”

Kay started to say, “I would have thought—“

Barok’s laugh was not quite sane. “Yes, and you would’ve been right, if you would have thought we slept!”

Wemb cut in. “Sleeping here, together, protects each against intent of the rest, against
yet more rishathra
. We were lucky in each other.”

Groping through his exhausted mind, Barok found another thought. “Forn. You never found Foranayeedli?”

Vala said, “She’s gone.”

Barok’s body rippled, an uncontrollable shudder. His hand closed on Vala’s wrist. “I shouted down at her. ‘Load!’ Nothing. She was gone. I stepped out to look for her, to stop her if she followed the singing. Stepped out and my mind turned off. I was at the foot of the wall and the rain was hammering me into the ground. Someone stumbled into me. Knocked me in the mud. Wemb. We, rishathra isn’t a strong enough word.”

Wemb took him by the shoulder and turned him toward her. “Shared love, or even mated, but we
must
say
rishathra
, Barok. Truly we must.”

“—Tore our clothes away and rished and rished, and our minds seeped back to us with not a heartbeat to spare. A half circle of those pale things was closing on us. The rain must have washed away some of the scent. I saw crossbows lying all around us. Grass Giant warriors have been stumbling down the wall all night long, dropping crossbows and anything else they’re carrying—“

“We picked up crossbows,” the Grass Giant woman cut in. “I saw Makee lying dead with a vampire in his arms and a bolt through both of them, and his quiver dropped beside him. Picked up the quiver and dumped it and pushed a handful of bolts at Barok and shot the nearest vampire. Then the next.”

“At first I couldn’t cock the crossbow.”

“Then the next. Is that why you were screaming? We never talked till after.”

“Scream and pull. Scream for strength,” Barok said. “Your cursed tools aren’t built for tiny little Machine People.”

Vala asked, “You were out there all night?”

Wemb nodded. Barok said, “When the rain started to slack off, I got us towels. There were heaps of towels.” His grip was painful. “Kay, Vala, we saw why.”

“Warriors walked past us,” Wemb said. “I shot Heerst in the leg, but he just kept walking, following the singing. Vampires came up to him and pulled the towel off his face and led him away. He’s my son.”

“If something is covering your face, they pull it off! Heerst was using fuel in his towel. Rain washes it out. We looked for towels that had—Wemb?”

“Pepperleek. Minch.”

“Yes, those kept their scent. They kept us alive, the towels and the rishathra. Any time it was too much for us, we rished. And crossbow bolts. The guards were dropping their swords and crossbows but not their quivers. We had to go looking. Rob the dead.”

“I saw what I didn’t understand,” Wemb said. “I should tell the Thurl. Vampires rished with some of us, then led them away into the high grass and farther. Why keep them alive? Are they still alive?”

Vala said, “The Ghouls might know.”

“Ghouls keep Ghoul secrets,” Wemb said.

The clouds had closed again. In the dark Barok said, “I shot the vampire who was leading Anth away. It took two bolts. Another picked up the song, and I shot her. Anth followed a third woman, and by that time he was out of range. They led him into the grass. I never saw him again. Should I have shot
him
?”

They only looked at him.

“I can’t keep vigil with you,” Barok said. “I can’t face rishathra now. My head is too—I don’t know if I can make you see—“

They squeezed his arms and tried to assure him that they understood. They left him there.

The tent huddled beneath the walk but faced outward into an arc of gray sheets.

The corpses were laid head-to-head, two giants to a sheet, or four vampires. Giants had found Anthrantillin and his crewman Himapertharee and laid them out on one sheet. Taratarafasht and Foranayeedli must be still missing. Another sheet held six tiny Gleaner dead.

The giants had nearly finished making their patterns. Tiny hominids moved about them, not helping much, but carrying food or light loads. All wore sheets with holes in them for the head to poke through.

A Grass Giant could lift a vampire with no difficulty. It took two to carry a dead giant.

But Beedj was carrying a dead Grass Giant woman across his back. He rolled the woman off his shoulders to slump across a sheet, perfectly placed. He took her hand and spoke to her sadly. Vala changed her mind about disturbing him.

Two women finished laying out more vampire dead. One approached. “We rubbed pepperleek along the rims of the sheets. Stop small scavengers,” Moonwa said to the three Machine People. “Big scavengers we can crossbow. Ghouls won’t have to fight for what’s theirs.”

“A polite notion,” Valavirgillin said. Tables would have raised the dead out of a scavenger’s reach; but where would Grass Giants find wood?

“What can I do for you?” Moonwa asked.

“We’ve come to keep vigil with you.”

“The battle cost you too much. No Ghouls come on the first night. Rest.”

Vala said, “But it was my idea, after all.”

“Thurl’s idea,” Moonwa informed her.

Vala nodded and carefully didn’t smile. It was a social convention, as in
Louis Wu helped the Thurl boil a sea
. She waved toward the little hominids. “Who are these?”

Moonwa called, “Perilack, Silack, Manack, Coriack—“ Four small heads lifted. “—these are more allies: Kaywerbrimmis, Valavirgillin, Whandernothtee.”

The Gleaners smiled and bobbed their heads, but they didn’t come up at once. They moved off to where Grass Giants were carefully stripping their sheets off inside out, well away from the dead and the tent, then picking up scythes and crossbows. The Gleaners stripped off their contaminated sheets, then hung slender swords behind their backs.

Beedj approached, sheetless and armed. “Towels under the tent. We rubbed minch on them,” he said. “Welcome to all.”

Gleaners stood armpit-high to Machine People, navel-high to Beedj and Moonwa. Their faces were hairless and pointed; their smiles were wide and toothy, a bit much. They wore tunics of cured smeerpskin with the beige fur left on, lavishly decorated with feathers. On the women, Perilack and Coriack, the feather patterns formed smallish wings. The women had to walk with some care to protect them. Manack and Silack looked much like the women. Their clothing showed greater differences; feathered, but with arms free to swing. Or fight.

Rain spattered down, just enough to send the Machine People into the tent. Vala saw grass piled thickly on the floor. Grass for bedding and to feed the Grass Giants. She stopped her companions until they had taken off their sandals.

Already it was dark enough that Vala could barely see faces. Rishathra was best begun in the night.

But not on a battlefield.

“This is a bad business,” Perilack said.

Whandernothtee asked, “How many have you lost?”

“Nearly two hundred by now.”

“We were only ten. Four are gone. Sopashintay and Chitakumishad we left on guard above us with the cannon. Barok is recovering from a night in hell.”

“Our queen’s man went with the Thurl’s woman to bring other hominids to bargain. If the—“ The little woman’s eyes flickered about her. “—lords of the night do not speak, other voices will join ours tomorrow.”

Legend told that the Ghouls heard any word spoken of them, unless—some said—during broad daylight. The Ghouls might be all about them even now.

Kay asked, “Would your queen’s man truly rish with his traveling companions?”

The four Gleaners tittered. Beedj and Moonwa boomed their laughter. A little woman—Perilack—said to Kay, “If the Grass Giant women would notice. Size matters. But you, you and we might make something happen.”

Perilack and Kaywerbrimmis looked at each other as if both taken by the same notion. The little woman took Kay’s elbow; Kay’s arm brushed the Gleaner’s feathers. He suggested, “I expect you accumulate these faster than you can use them?”

She said, “No, the skins spoil quickly. We can trade a few, not many.”

“What if we could find a way to delay the spoilage?”

From time to time Valavirgillin would catch a foul whiff of battlefield stench and snort it out. But the smells weren’t reaching Kaywerbrimmis. Not him! Kay was into trader mode. His mind was in a place where win and lose were a matter of numbers, where discomfort was an embarrassment one could not afford, where an empire survived because one hominid’s trash was another’s ore bed.

Full night had fallen. But by the faint flash of an arc of daylit Arch, she saw Beedj’s broad grin. She asked the Grass Giant, “Have you watched bargaining sessions?”

“Some. Louis Wu came when I was a child, but agreements were all between him and the old Thurl. The Reds made peace with us thirty falans ago; we parceled up habitats. Twenty-four falans ago we gathered with the Reds and Sea People, shared maps. All peoples have learned things about the new territory. But all find Grass Giants awkwardly large.”

A polite disclaimer would not be believed. Vala reached up to grasp elbows with the Grass Giant. She’d been listening for Ghouls in the night, but the only sound was the rain.

The clouds had closed. It had become full dark.

One of the Gleaner men asked, “Should we only wait? Would they find that more polite?”

Manack, wasn’t it? Hair thicker around the throat, as if he were an alpha male and Silack a beta. In a good many hominid species, one male got most of the action; but Vala didn’t know that about Gleaners.

Vala said, “Manack, we’re
here
. In their habitat. You may even consider that we’ve come to entertain the lords of the night. Will you share rishathra?” To Beedj she quickly added, “Beedj, this is for size, to leave me larger. I expect Whand will go with Moonwa first ...” Though Kay and Perilack, she noticed, were no longer talking business. Philosophies differ.