He’s old, Elai thought. Her fists were clenched. That Thorn got him in the belly. She saw Scar bowl a rival over and get him belly up, after which the rival ran away, but others worried at him: he swept them with his tail, whirled and snapped. It went on.
“Is he all right out there?” MaGee asked.
“Of course he’s all right.” Elai whistled again. Others called their mounts, and some of the quarrelling quieted. But there was no recalling them, not yet. She turned, motioned with her spear downriver, and others gained their feet, of the elders.
“What now?” MaGee asked.
“Nothing now,” Elai said, looking at her in bewilderment. “Don’t you know? That’s Jin down there. We’ve won.”
lv
Message: Gehenna Station to Base Director
Survey notes two movements this morning–one on a broad front toward the Styx and a second, smaller and more compact movement up the Cloud. The Styxward movement is of greater speed. Survey suggests contrary to expectations that the invasion may have been routed…
lvi
205 CR, day 215
Cloudside
Someone whistled, to the rear of the column, and heads turned: McGee looked, the while she limped beside Elai over the sand beside the Cloud: the calibans had come, swimming effortlessly down the current.
“Do we ride?” McGee asked. It seemed madness that they had left the calibans behind; or not madness: for her own part she had taken one fall, and that was enough for her bones. One fall; one nightmare of Brown trampling down a man. But no one said anything; they had left the calibans behind and walked at Elai’s order, as if it were sane; and she was not sure of that, was sure of nothing now.
Still the silence. Elai said little on the walk, nothing but monosyllables, stayed lost in her own thoughts, unlike a woman who had just won the world entire, who held all Gehenna in her hands.
The calibans paced them in the river, that was all.
“No,” Maeri answered her question, Dain’s sister of First Tower. “Don’t think so.”
They walked further. The calibans dived and surfaced, not coming in, but at last Scar did, strode out on the shore ahead of them.
Riverweed, McGee thought at first. But it was his skin, hanging in rags about his belly, about his limbs. He walked with his collar down, his tail inscribing a serpentine in the sand.
Elai whistled then; and Scar stopped. He’s hurt, McGee opened her mouth to ask, to protest; but she stood still, watched with dismay as Elai approached him, touched him, climbed up to her place despite the hanging skin.
They began to walk again, in Scar’s tracks on the shore, at Elai’s back, no more cheerful than Scar himself, while the calibans sported in the river.
They would know, back in Cloud Towers, who had won, McGee reckoned; the calibans would get there before them: ariels would pattern it, grays would build it for the people to see, out beyond the rows of dry fishnets.
But she looked at Elai riding ahead of them, at bowed shoulders, both rider and caliban hurting.
She was afraid then, the way she had been afraid before the battle; in a way that wiped out nightmares of what had been.
What’s happening? she wondered. She stalked Dain, walked beside him in hope of answers, but he had none, only trudged along like the rest.
They camped early; more calibans became tractable and came in, seeking out their riders. Scar sulked alone, down by the riverside, and Elai huddled by the fire.
“Is everything all right?” McGee asked at last, crouching there.
“Jin’s dead,” said Elai tonelessly. “Styx towers will fall now.”
“You mean that’s where the others went.” McGee pursued the matter, knowing it was fragile ground. Elai held out her hand and opened the fingers. End of the matter. McGee sat and hugged her knees against her chest, in the fire warmth, surer and surer that something had been lost.
Scar, she kept thinking in growing chill, and restrained herself from a glance toward the river; she knew what she would see: an old caliban on the last of his strength, a caliban who had done well to survive his last battle. Some other caliban could take him now. Any other. If one were inclined to try.
Paeia–off hunting still. Paeia would come. Maybe others.
She lowered her head against her arms, feeling all her aches, a nagging sense that all the ground she relied on was undermined.
Other riders came before the dawn, quietly, bringing Styxsider prisoners who came and sat down across the fire, a handful of youths, sober and terrified. Elai thought about them a long time.
Speak up for them, McGee thought; it was outsider‑instinct. And then she clenched her fist in front of her mouth as she sat there and pressed her fist against her lips to hold herself from talking. I could get Elai killed with wrong advice.
But it was Elai let the boys live after all, with a gesture of her hand, and they sat there and shivered, all tucked up looking lost and scared and knowing that (if Elai told truth) there was nothing left to run to.
So other riders brought other prisoners. One ran: Parm was his name, at whose name the riders hissed…he took off running and the Calibans got him, down by the river in the dark.
McGee sat there and shivered, the same way she had sat through the rest, as if some vital link had been severed. She betrayed nothing, had no horror left.
It’s cold, she told herself. That’s all.
She had learned to be practical about death, in these days, to deal it out, to watch it. It was like any other thing, to listen to a man die, a little sound, a little unpleasantness. A small, lost sound, compared to the battle on the shore, the earth shaking to the fall of the great browns. The air filled with their hisses. Soon done. Forgettable.
But they brought Mannin in, and that was different… “Found one of the starmen,” Paeia said, who had come with that group. And what they brought was a leather‑clad, draggled man who did nothing but cough and shiver and tucked himself up like the teenaged boys. This thing–this wretched thing–she stared at him: it was only the dark hair, the height, that told her which it was.
“Let him live,” she said to Elai, in a voice gone hoarse and hard. So she discovered the measure of herself, that she could bear the death of natives, but not of her own kind. She was ashamed of that.
“He’s yours,” Elai said.
“Give him food and water,” McGee said, never moving from where she sat, never moving her fist from her chin, her limbs from the tightness that kept them warm. She never looked closely at Mannin, not being interested any longer. It was a horror she did not want, at the moment, to consider, how she had come to sit here passing life and death judgments, in the mud and the stink and the Calibans milling about ready for the kill.
It did not seem likely then that she could ever go back to white, clean walls, that she could unlearn what she knew, or be other than MaGee. MaGee. Healer. Killer. Dragon‑rider left afoot. She saw the sunlit beach, there in the night, herself young, Elai a child, old Scar in his prime again, his hide throwing back the daylight.
Here was dark, and fire, and they collected the leavings of the war.
Perhaps they would find the rest, Genley; Kim.
“Ask him,” she asked one of the riders at last, “where the other star‑men are.”
“He says,” that rider reported back to her, “that this Jin killed the rest.”
“Huh,” she said, and the dried fish she was eating went dryer yet in her mouth and unpalatable. She found another depth of herself, that she could still harbor a resentment toward the dead. But she did. She wished in a curious division of her thoughts that even Mannin would try to run; that the whole matter might be tidy. And that horrified her.
“Someone should take Mannin to the Wire,” she said, for Elai’s hearing.