Reatur kept walking. His color slowly faded. He decided he preferred being bored to being harassed. He had grown so used to being harassed by humans that it had taken some time without them to remind him how things had been not so very long ago.
A drop of water hit him in an eye as he walked out of his castle. Summer was close now, everything was starting to melt. Dealing with humans gave the domain master the same feeling as that splash. They melted all his certainties just as the summer sun worked on his home.
The males working in the fields, he saw, were not working very hard. He started to shout at them, then decided he would be wasting his temper. Stone tools made everyone slow. At least the males were accomplishing more with those than they would have with ice, which grew more frangible day by day.
Some of the males were working in the very shadow of Athena, and not turning so much as a single eyestalk toward the huge, strange structure. They were used to humans, too. Reatur wondered if that was good or bad. Good, he supposed: nothing at all would have gotten done if everyone was still as bemused as at first. But finding a human as normal as an eloc did not seem right, either.
Having.just had that thought, Reatur had to wiggle his eyestalks 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 carded 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 carded 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 counterthrusts, 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 sundried 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 justtalk 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!”