Rillibee Chime looked up from his salad, peering deeply into Father Sandoval’s eyes, seeming to see more there than the old priest was comfortable with.
“No,” he said. “My people sinned against no one, and I have never had any chance to be guilty. I think of other things. I think of trees. I remember my parents and how they died. I think of the name they gave me. I wonder why I am here.”
“Is that all?” She smiled.
“No,” he replied, surprising both her and himself. “I wonder what your daughter’s name means, and whether I will see her again.”
“Well,” said Mainoa, lifting his brows and patting his younger colleague on the arm. “He’s young yet. I thought of such things too, long ago.”
A brooding silence fell. Marjorie persisted in moving the conversation away from these troublesome areas. “Brother Mainoa, do you know of an animal here on Grass which looks something like a bat?” She described the creature she had seen in the caverns, dwelling upon its most noteworthy feature, the fringing teeth.
“Not only know it,” the friar answered, “but been bitten by it. Most people have, at least once. It’s a bloodsucker. It comes out of the dusk and hits you right here—” he clamped a work-roughened hand on the back of his neck, just at the base of his skull, “and tries to sink those teeth into you. Since our headbones get in the way, they don’t do much damage to humans. Evidently the Grassian animals have a notch in the skull right there. Miserable-looking things, aren’t they?”
Marjorie nodded.
“Where did you see them?”
She explained, telling the story of the cavern once more. Rillibee and Father James were interested, even though Brother Mainoa was quite unsurprised.
“Then you undoubtedly saw dead ones, also. Their bodies lie around the Hippae caverns like leaves on a forest floor in a Terran fall. I do know about them. I’m among the few who’ve sneaked up on a cavern and gotten away afterward.” He gave her a look which told her that he guessed more of her reasons for going into the grasses than she wanted him to.
“Gotten away?” she repeated faintly.
“I would say it’s a rare thing to get away, Lady Westriding. If you’d been smelled or spotted, they’d have had you.” He had fallen into his colloquial, avuncular manner.
“I was riding. On a horse.”
“Still, I find it amazing. Well, if your horse got you out of there quickly, you may have outrun ’em. Or maybe the wind was just right and you simply weren’t noticed. Or maybe the smell of the horse confused them just long enough. You took your life between your teeth, Lady.” He gave her a concentrated, percipient look. “I’d suggest you not do it again. Certainly not during the lapse.”
“I… I had already decided that.” She cast her eyes down, embarrassed at Tony’s scowl of agreement. Could the man read her mind?
“They don’t like to be spied upon?” Tony asked.
“They won’t tolerate it. That’s why so little’s known about ’em. That’s why so few people that wander off into the grasses ever come home. I can tell you, though. Hippae lay eggs sometime during the winter or early spring. I’ve seen the eggs in the backs of caverns in late spring and I know they weren’t there in the fall. When the sun gets enough warmth in it, the migerers move the eggs into the sun and shift ’em around until the heat hatches ’em. About the same time, some of the peepers and some of the hounds, those that are grown enough, come back to the caverns and change themselves into something new. The Hippae guard ’em while they’re doing it. That’s why the lapse.”
“The bons don’t know,” Marjorie said, a statement rather than a question.
“Right, they don’t know. Don’t know, won’t be told, don’t want to hear. Taboo for ’em.”
“I do have something you may not know,” she said, getting up to fetch the trip recorder and punching up the pattern she had walked over in the cavern. “I have been told that the thunderous noise we sometimes hear is Hippae, dancing. Well, this seems to be what the dancing produces.”
Brother Mainoa stared at it, at first in confusion, then in disbelief.
Marjorie smiled. Good. For all his knowing looks, he wasn’t omniscient, then.
It was Rillibee who said, almost casually, “It looks like the words in the Arbai books, doesn’t it, Brother?”
“The spherical peepers!” Marjorie exclaimed, remembering suddenly where she had seen the rotund peepers and heraldric hounds, carved on the housefronts of the Arbai city. The twining design did look like the words in the Arbai books — or like the vines carved on the housefronts. She mentioned this, occasioning a deep and thoughtful silence from everyone.
Though the conversation later turned to other things, including whether there was or was not unexplained death upon Grass (for Marjorie and Tony remained aware of their duty) the pattern on Marjorie’s recorder was in all their minds. Brother Mainoa, particularly, wanted very much to show it to a friend — so he said as he departed — and Marjorie let him borrow the recorder, believing he meant some friend among the Green Brothers.
It was only after he was gone that she began to wonder how it was that Brother Mainoa had seen the caverns of the Hippae and had escaped to tell them about it.
When Rigo left for the Hunt on the following day, the last Hunt to be held at Klive, Stella, who had been thinking much of Sylvan, demanded to go with him.
“You said you wouldn’t risk the children,” Marjorie reminded him. “Rigo, you promised.” She would not cry. She would not shout. She would merely remind him. Still, the tears hung unshed in her eyes.
He had forgotten he had wanted tears, and tears over the children would never have satisfied him in any case. “I wouldn’t have,” he explained in his most reasonable voice. “I would never have ordered any of you to ride. But she wants to. That’s a different matter.”
“She could die, Rigo.”
“Any of us could die,” he said calmly, gesturing to convey a hostile universe which plotted death against them all. “But Stella won’t.
According to Stavenger bon Damfels, she rode brilliantly.” He said the word as though it had been an accolade. “Stavenger urged me to bring her again.”
“Stavenger,” Marjorie said quietly, the name seething on her tongue. “The man who beat Rowena half to death and attempted to starve her. The man who hasn’t figured out yet that she is gone. That Stavenger. Why would you risk Stella’s life on Stavenger’s say-so?”
“Oh, Mother,” Stella said in a voice very much like her father’s in its obdurate reasonableness. “Stop it! I’m going, and that’s that.”
Marjorie stood on the terrace steps and watched them go, staring into the sky until the car became merely a dot and vanished. As she was about to go in, Persun Pollut came up behind her. “Lady…”
“Yes, Persun.”
“You have had a message on the tell-me. Sylvan bon Damfels asks if you will be attending the Hunt, I told him you would not. He says he wishes to visit you here, this afternoon.”
“He may have word of Rowena,” Marjorie said sadly, still staring at the empty sky where they had gone. “Bring him to my study when he arrives.”
When he came, he did have some word of Rowena. As Marjorie commiserated and exclaimed, he told her that the wounds to Rowena’s flesh were healing. The wounds to her mind were more troublesome. Finding Dimity had become an obsession with her. She could not admit that the girl was gone forever, or if not, that finding her might be more heartbreaking than considering her dead.
None of which was what Sylvan had really come to say. He soon left the subject of Rowena and Dimity, which he found painful, and began to talk of something else. It had been so long since Marjorie had been the object of anyone’s overt romantic intentions that he had managed to get out most of what he had planned to say, however allusively and poetically, before she realized the tenor of his words.