Third watch, p.11
Third Watch, page 11
Chapter 11
We have to save them,” Khorii told her sister.
“That’s what you always say. We’re always saving something. Why don’t you think of yourself first for a change?”
“But you know it’s true this time. This is how it happened. This is how the Ancestors came to Vhiliinyar. We brought them there.”
“I’d like to believe that. I’d like to help them. But this is an accident. You can’t possibly know that this is how it was supposed to happen.”
“Not that I think ‘supposed to’ matters where our history and the cronos are concerned, but it makes sense. When Grimalkin and I were searching the time device for you, we saw you and Pircifir leave on the mission to find the tunnels, but you didn’t come back. And yet we knew that you did, and Pircifir brought the aliens back to make the changing houses. That was why we decided to come with you. It was always kind of vague, the story I was told growing up about the Friends hearing the Ancestors’ ‘cries of despair from space as they passed near the planet.’”
Ariin snorted. “Is that what they told you? I doubt the Friends would recognize cries of despair if they even heard them in the first place.”
“Grimalkin would—or at least Khiindi would have. But more than likely he’d think it was prey ready to fall into his paws. And he certainly wouldn’t recognize it from space. Probably we wouldn’t either. But it makes sense that we’re involved, don’t you see? We share the psychic bond with the Ancestors and the healing, all of that. They just helped us, and I’m sure that they’re counting on us to help them.”
“Let’s call them, then, and they can hide here until the king’s men are gone,” Ariin agreed, then broadcast, “Unicorns, Others, come here. We will hide you and take you to safety.” She listened for a response. “Nothing. They must be out of range now.”
“There’s a song,” Khorii said. “I think it was made up by Linyaari long after the Friends brought the Ancestors to Vhiliinyar, but it is called ‘Gathering the Grandparents.’”
She sang:
“Grandmother, Grandfather, come hither, come here
Find love and protection from death, pain, and fear
Come hither, come hither, come swiftly, come fast
We come from the place where your lineage lasts
Grandfather, Grandmother, come here to this song
On our world your lives will be happy and long
Where there are no hunters to trouble your days
But vast hills and valleys of green fields to graze
We are your grandchildren, from time yet to come
We heard your screams as you ran from the hunt.
Though you are our past, we have come to your aid
We are your future, so be not afraid.”
“It’s just a stupid little song, Khorii. They can’t hear you from here,” Ariin said.
“Maybe they could if you joined in, and we broadcast.”
“They didn’t hear me before. They’re too far away.”
“You weren’t singing. Songs penetrate the consciousness more easily than mere words. It’s a scientific fact.”
Ariin snorted.
“Try at least. For them.”
Reluctantly, Ariin began singing, and, to both girls’ surprise, her voice was in natural harmony with Khorii’s.
They sang it through three times. Pebar and Sileg looked puzzled, since the words were in Linyaari, of course. Pebar complained, “You’re going to draw the soldiers back with all that neighing and snorting.”
“Hush,” Khorii said. “Did you hear that?”
In the distance, another mind was saying to his diminished herd, “Hush, did you hear that?”
The girls sang the song another three times and felt the herd swerve in flight and double back toward them.
“We’ll need to show ourselves,” Khorii said. “Pebar and Sileg, stay here and be quiet, or we’ll leave you behind for the king’s men.”
“They’d probably be a lot friendlier if we turned you and your friends over to them,” Pebar speculated. “We need a better bargain than that.”
“We’ll give this hill creature back to you when we’re done with it so you can start your act again,” Khorii promised desperately.
“That leaves us half as well-off as we were before we met you, and you ruined our lives,” Pebar said. “How about the tunnel and one of the unicorns?”
“We’ll do better than that,” Ariin promised so quickly and definitely that Khorii knew she was up to something. “Much better. But you have to be quiet and stay out of sight. If you spook the unicorns, they’ll run away and be slaughtered, and I will do my best to see that you are, too.”
“Shut up, Pebar,” Sileg said. “That’s good enough for me.”
He folded a piece of the inside of the hill around them, making a separate room, and Khorii read him, briefly but enough to know that he would keep his word and see that Pebar did as well.
Grimalkin and Pircifir followed the king’s men as they trailed the unicorns into the forest, but the creatures swiftly eluded their human pursuers. The two Friends hid in the brush while the armed men’s horses snorted and stamped impatiently as their riders tried to decide which direction to take. Finally, they headed back to the road.
“We should change now, too,” Grimalkin told his brother. “Our new friends won’t like wild cats any more than they like human hunters.”
“Change into Others?”
“I’ve done it before,” Grimalkin assured him.
They completed the change and began tracking the herd, but there was no need. Before they had passed back across the loop of the stream the unicorns had jumped in their flight, the herd turned back and charged straight at them. Grimalkin and Pircifir wheeled in their tracks and sprinted off, leading the herd.
“Follow us!” Grimalkin called to them.
“Begone!” the stallion trumpeted. “You trespass in our forest!”
“We came to save you,” Grimalkin announced, because he now knew that was the truth, however accidental the circumstances.
The stallion ignored him and reared on his back legs, slicing the air with his front hooves in a challenge.
“Stop that, Hraffl,” one of the mares told him. When he ignored her, she butted his flank with her head, unbalancing him. “It’s not like there are enough of us left that we can afford to kill anyone over border disputes.”
“They smell funny,” the youngest mare said.
But the third mare galloped past them, then skidded to a stop, listening, “Hark! You males have raised such a commotion the king’s men heard. They are returning. Flee!”
They wheeled again to leap back into the forest but the hindmost mare stopped suddenly, her right forefoot quivering in midair, her ears twisting to hear. “Listen. Do you hear that?”
The others halted. Grimalkin listened. Khorii and Ariin were singing.
“What are they up to?” Pircifir demanded. “This is no time for music!”
But the stallion and his mares turned yet again and trotted out of the glade and down the road, toward the ship and the hill.
“They’ve come!” a mare said, with a quiet sigh. “As it was foretold. We are saved.”
“That’s right,” Grimalkin said, following. “That’s what we were trying to explain to you before your leader attacked us. We are your Friends. We’re here to help.”
They didn’t seem to hear him, but continued following the girls’ summoning song.
“Don’t give them all the credit!” Grimalkin protested. “It’s our ship and cronos, after all.”
“Mine, you mean,” Pircifir corrected him. “But that matters little. They’ll never make it. Look!”
The dust cloud, clattering hooves, and clanking armor were almost upon them once more. The trumpet blared as the hunters spurred their mounts forward.
The unicorns hesitated.
“Cover their flank!” Pircifir commanded.
“They’re armed, and we’re not!” Grimalkin protested, but the men attacked them again.
Pircifir reared, and would have charged, but the king’s men were well prepared this time. Before he could strike, three arrows pierced his white chest, he snorted bloody foam, fell on his side, and lay unmoving. Before Grimalkin could think how to get his brother back to the girls, one of the King’s men leaped from his horse, raised his sword, and severed Pircifir’s head from his body.
Grimalkin saw only the first stroke because he ran away in a hail of arrows, following the unicorns blindly, not thinking of strategy or trickiness or anything else but dodging the deadly darts.
The girls had stopped singing. The ship was cloaked, and there was only the hill. How to enter it? Did it matter? Would they see him? Khorii stepped into his path. Grimalkin swerved to avoid her and stared into the cavelike entrance of the hill. His sides heaved, and his mouth frothed. Two arrows had found their way into his hide—one in his left hindquarter and one in his right side. But all around him the unicorns crowded. He changed to man form, grimacing at the hurt the arrows caused, and Ariin threw him a shipsuit. Before he donned it he pulled the arrows from his flesh. On either side, a unicorn horn touched him lightly, and the pain from the arrows was no more.
“Where’s Pircifir?” Khorii asked. “We need to go now.”
“He’s gone,” Grimalkin said, and was amazed to find his face was wet with more than sweat. “They killed him. Beheaded him. Even we cannot survive that.”
The horsemen thudded up to Khorii and halted, looking puzzled. She tried to look as innocent as possible, keeping her head still so that the hood of her garment covered her horn.
The leader bore a great bloody sack slung across his saddle. “What have we here?” he asked his men, regarding Khorii. “Little maid, we hunt a herd of unicorns. Have they passed this way?”
Trying not to look at the sack, she pointed down the road and said in the most archaic language she could remember from Uncle Joh’s vids, “They went thataway.”
The men clattered away, for the moment taking no more interest in her. She ran back down the road to where Pircifir had fallen. If the men thought to be rewarded for bringing back a unicorn’s head, they might be disappointed. Upon death, presumably after the men took his head, Pircifir had returned to his humanoid shape. There was nothing she could do for him, she knew, but she tenderly removed his crono from his lifeless wrist. She galloped back toward the hill.
The ship reappeared, which meant that someone had deactivated the cloaking device Pircifir had carried in his uniform. The unicorn herd, trembling and wild-eyed, walked out of the hill, followed by Grimalkin in a shipsuit, then Pebar, Sileg, and Ariin.
As the others entered the ship’s open hatch, Khorii compressed the hill as much as she could, handed it up, and climbed in after them. As she did, the king’s men returned, looking up in awe at the ship. A unicorn glared down from the hatch at the men, daring them to hurt Khorii, but they made no move to do so.
“Look! The maiden was a fairy, and she is carrying the beasts into her magic castle.”
With a touch of the crono, the men, the forest, and the castle vanished. Khorii imagined that they had probably decided her magic castle was a vehicle after all, but she didn’t care.
They returned to Sileg’s and Pebar’s time and silently, the two men departed. Before they left, Khorii returned the original alien dwelling to them so they would be able to make a living. The crono was firmly back on Ariin’s wrist, the crono of Grimalkin’s Khorii had kept back on his own. Khorii carried Pircifir’s crono, and was not sure what to do with it. Grimalkin was surely the late captain’s next of kin, but he had no need of the instrument now.
The journey through space was longer and harder than it had been on the way there. Grimalkin said very little and seemed preoccupied. Khorii thought he might be grieving.
“You can return to an earlier time and bring him forward, can’t you?” she asked. “You did that with my grandparents and my uncle, I’m told.”
To her surprise, Grimalkin shook his head. “They were not of our race, and their demise or survival made no difference on many time paths.”
“So Pircifir’s dying was more important than when our relatives died?” Ariin challenged him.
“I’m not sure. But he never returned from this journey. Originally, you didn’t either,” he told Ariin. “But I think, if Pircifir came back, the Others, your ancestors, would not have been saved. I must consult all sorts of archives and ancient time lines to sort it out, but I think that’s the way it goes.”
The sneer faded from Ariin’s face even as she said, “Oh, come on. That can’t be right. You’re immortal, aren’t you?”
“Apparently not,” he said, and spoke no more of the matter for the rest of the trip.
Back on Vhiliinyaar, a flurry of training and building occupied Kubiilikaan and its inhabitants. The unicorns were the second great wonder to emerge from the ship in a very short time. Khorii and Ariin stayed on board the ship this time. “I think seeing the unicorns just now will confuse them enough,” Khorii said. “They can worry about our kind later on.”
To her surprise, this time Ariin agreed with her.
Grimalkin off-loaded the unicorns by himself and arranged for their care and feeding. Then he returned to the ship. “It is time to continue our true mission,” he said.
Chapter 12
Now I want to go home, to our own time. I want to see how Elviiz is and tell our parents what we’ve discovered,” Khorii said. “And Ariin, I think you’ve gathered enough credit, helping to discover the source of the Friends’ shapeshifting houses and rescuing the Ancestors of our race.”
Grimalkin inclined his leonine head, shrank back into his Khiindi body, and hid under Khorii’s chair.
All Ariin said was, “We’d better take this ship. We might need it.”
Before she could change her mind, Khorii concentrated on the quarantine compound where and when they’d left their parents, Elviiz, Maak, and Uncle Joh.
The countryside blurred past the viewport, moving through centuries of time. The unicorns they rescued had meanwhile bred, been born, bred among themselves, and eventually died, and at some point the Linyaari race had somehow been created.
The blurring cleared. Outside it was morning again, and Khorii saw a meadow, with Ancestors ranging around it. In the center was the Condor, Uncle Joh’s patched-together ship. Beside it was the pavilion where her parents lived now. Some distance away sat two other pavilions, their flaps fluttering in the breeze.
She reached down and picked up Khiindi, who mewed mournfully. It was easier than she had expected it would be to forget that her lifelong companion could at times transform himself into a man, a flying tiger, or a unicorn. She petted the stripes between his ears and patted his side consolingly. He hadn’t said much about missing his brother when he was in man form, but now that he was a small cat again, his grief showed in his eyes and his plaintive cry. The crono hung around his furry neck.
“You two took your time!” Elviiz said, sitting up when they stepped into his pavilion. Maak had assembled tools and surgical instruments, chips and diodes, and was methodically laying these on a pallet lying beside Elviiz’s.
“We found a spaceship!” Ariin told him cheerfully.
“Where?” Elviiz asked.
“On the shore when we went to see the LoiLoiKuans.”
“How is it that no one found it before?” Maak asked.
“I don’t know,” Ariin said. Khorii stayed out of it. This was Ariin’s story. Let her talk her way out of it. “It’s very old. I think it might have been buried, and the terraforming dredged it up somehow.”
“Highly improbable,” Maak said.
Ariin shrugged, and said, “Maybe…”
Khorii sighed. “Just tell him we’ll explain later, when the operation is complete, and we can explain to the others as well. We’ll have to tell them. We need to figure out the significance of what we found out about the dwellings and how the information might help us with the plague creatures. Unless you’ve figured it out already?”
“I’m working on it,” Ariin said.
“It is good you have returned,” Maak said. “It is time to neutralize my son’s nerve centers so he will not feel pain. I will need you to heal the incisions I make once I have inserted the necessary modifications.”
“Father,” Elviiz said, “will I still be able to thought-talk once my nonorganic functions are restored?”
“That is one of the few things I do not know, son,” Maak replied.
Just then they heard the sound of a flitter. A moment later, seven tall Linyaari, five in white tunics, two in multicolored clothing, entered the pavilion.
Maak looked up at them from where he knelt beside his instruments. “I am required to warn you that you are in an area bordering a quarantined enclave. I have been declared disease-free but—”
The entrance of the seven had masked the sound of a second flitter. Now they were joined by Neeva, Melireenya, and Khaari.
“It’s all right, Maak,” Neeva said. “These five are esteemed physicians who are deans of the new medical college on narhii-Vhiliinyar. They are Riiri, Kaafri, Naarli, Raarilya, and Hruf. These two are techno-artisan Guild Masters Faari and Hriinye, the most skilled electronics and bionics engineers among our people. They offer you their skill to assist with the repair of Elviiz. Since Melireenya, Khaari, and I performed the initial healing of the organic modifications necessary to preserve Elviiz’s life, we felt our insights into his condition would be helpful as well.”
Neeva introduced Khorii and Ariin to the new team.
A flicker of curiosity showed in Riiri’s eyes as she addressed them. She had no doubt heard of Ariin’s return from the past and Khorii’s work on the plague. In fact, she might have been among the rescue teams Khorii had assisted in the past, but she did not remark on the fact. Instead she said, “Invasive forms of healing are best performed by others whenever possible.”
