An ariel came wandering between Scar’s thick‑clawed feet, and set a stone between them, a single pebble. Scar ignored it.
“MaGee,” said Elai, “what does it say?”
“That I should be careful.”
Laughter then, laughter startling on that thin face, an echo of the child. “Yes. You should.” It died then into a frown as if the laughter had been surprised out of her, but a trace of it remained, a liveliness in the eyes. Elai waved a thin arm at all about her. “Out! Out, now! Let me talk to this old friend.”
They moved, some more reluctantly than others. Perhaps it was ominous that many of the calibans stayed. Silence fell in the retreat of steps down the well in the center of the floor, the shifting of scaly bodies. Scar continued to dominate the hall, still curled round the chair. But he settled, flicking his collar‑crest, running his thick dark tongue round his jaws.
“Ellai is dead,” said Elai again, with all that implied.
“So everything is changed.”
Elai gathered herself up. The laprobe fell aside. She was stick‑thin. She limped like an old woman in the few steps she took away from the chair. An ariel retreated from her feet. For a moment Elai gazed off into nothing, somewhere off into the shadows, and it was a deathshead that stared so, as if she had forgotten the focus of her thoughts, or gathered them from some far place.
“Sixteen years, MaGee.”
“A long time for me too.”
Elai turned and looked at her. “You look tired, MaGee.”
The observation surprised her, coming from what Elai had become. As if a little weathering counted on her side, a fraying of herself in the sun and wind and mists. “Not used to riding,” she said, turning it all away.
Elai stared, with an irony the child could never have achieved. It went to sour laughter. She walked over and patted Scar on his side. The lamplike eyes blinked, one and then the other.
“I’m Elai‑eldest,” she said, a hoarse, weary voice. “You mustn’t forget that. If you forget that you might die, and I’d be sorry, MaGee.”
“What do I call you?”
“Elai. Should that change?”
“I wouldn’t know. Can I ask things?”
“Like what?”
Her pulse sped with fear. She thought about it a moment more, then shrugged. “Like if there’s anything I can do to help you. Can I ask that?”
The stare was cold. Laughter came out, as suddenly as the first time. “Meaning can you notice what you see? No, MaGee my friend. You can not. My heir is six. My oldest. They have nearly killed me, those boys. The last died. Did you hear?”
“I heard. I didn’t report it. I figured that Jin knows enough.”
“Oh, he’ll know, that one. The calibans will say.”
McGee looked at her. Calibans, she thought. Her skin felt cold, but she felt the heat in the room. Sweat ran at her temples. “Mind if I shed the jacket? Am I staying that long?”
“You’re staying.”
She started to unzip. She looked up again as the tone got through in its finality. “How long?”
Elai opened her hand, fingers stiff and wide, a deliberate, chilling gesture. “Did I teach you that one, MaGee?”
All stones dropped. An end of talk. “Look,” McGee said. “You’d better listen. They’ll want me back.”
“Go down. They know a place for you. I told them.”
“Elai, listen to me. There could be trouble over this. At least let me send a message to them. Let one of your riders take it back to the hut. They’ll look there. I don’t mind staying. Look, I wantto be here. But they have to know.”
“Why? The stone towers aren’t where you live.”
“I work for them.”
“You don’t now. Go down, MaGee. You can’t tell me no. I’m Eldest now. You have to remember that.”
“I need things. Elai–”
Elai hissed between her teeth. Scar rose up to his full height.
“All right,” McGee said. “I’m going down.”
It was a small room on the outer face of the tower. It was even, McGee decided, more comfortable than the hut–less drafty, with opaque shutters of some dried membrane in woodset panes. They opened, giving a view of the settlement; and a draft, and McGee chose the warmth.
Dry, clay walls, formed by some logic that knew no straight lines; a sloping access that led to the hall, with a crook in it that served for privacy instead of a door; a box of sand for a chamberpot–she had asked those that brought her.
They would bring food, she decided. And water. She checked her pockets for the c‑rations she always carried, about the fields, when a turned ankle could mean a slow trip home. There was that, if they forgot; but she kept it as an option.
Mostly she tucked herself up crosslegged on what must be a sleeping ledge, or a table, or whatever the inhabitant wanted it to be–tucked herself up in her coat and her good boots and was warm.
She had had to ask about the sand; she had no idea now whether she was to sit on the ledge or eat on it. She was the barbarian here, and knew it, asea in more waves than Elai had been that day, that sunny faraway day when Elai tried for islands and boundaries.
But she was free, that was what. Free. She had seen enough with her trained eye to sit and think about for days, for months; and facts poured about her, instead of the years’ thin seepage of this and that detail. It was perhaps mad to be so well content. There was much to disturb her; and disturb her it would, come dark, with a door that was only a crookedness in the hall, in a room already scored with caliban claws. A Tower shaped by calibans.
The room acquired its ariel while she sat. She was not surprised at that. One had come sometimes to the hut, as they came everywhere outside the wire, insolent and frivolous.
This one dived out and in a little time a larger visitor came, a gray, putting his blunt head carefully around the bend of the accessway, a creature twice man‑sized. It came serpentining its furtive way up to look at her.
Browns, next, McGee thought, staying very still and tucked up as she was. O Elai, you’re cruel. Or aren’t we– who take our machines for granted?
It opened its jaws and deposited a stone on the floor, wet and shiny. It sat there contentedly, having done that.
The grays had no sense, Elai had told her once. It stayed there a while and then forgot or lost interest or had something else to do: it turned about and left with a whisk of its dragon tail.
The stone stayed. Like a gift. Or a barrier. She was not sure.
She heard someone or something in the doorway, a faint sound. Perhaps the caliban had set itself there. Perhaps it was something else. She did not go to see.
But the slithering was still outside when they brought her food, a plate of boiled fish and a slice of something that proved to be mush; and water to drink. Two old women brought these things. McGee nodded courteously to them and set the bowls beside her on the shelf.
No deference. Nothing cowed about these two sharp‑eyed old women. They looked at her with quick narrow glances and left, barefoot padding down the slope and out the crook of the entry in the gathering dark.
McGee ate and drank. The light faded rapidly once it had begun to go. After that she sat in her corner of the dark and listened to strange movings and slitherings that were part of the tower.
She kept telling herself that should some dragon come upon her in the dark, should some monster come through the doorway and nudge her with its jaws–that she should take it calmly, that Elairuled here; and Scar; and no caliban would harm Elai’s guest.
If that was what she was.