The Avatar (7 page)

The folk who bore it had evolved a whole ethos. In their homes, many of them continued to speak the original languages; but given that variety, English was the common tongue, in a new dialect. Traditions blended together, mutated, or sprang spontaneously into being. For instance, at winter solstice—cold, murk, snow, in this part of the continent which humans called Ionia—they celebrated Yule (not Christmas, which still went by the Terrestrial calendar) with feasting, mirth, decorations, gifts, and reunions. Halfway around the Demetrian year they found a different occasion for gatherings, more frankly bacchanalian. Then bonfire signalled to bonfire across rugged distances, while around them went dancing drinking, eating, singing, japing, gaming, sporting, lovemaking from sundown to sunrise.

For the past three years, Margaret Mulryan had given music at that season to those who met on Trollberg, when she wasn’t busy with associated pleasures. She was again on her
way, afoot along a dirt road, since the journey was part of the fun. As she went, she practiced the latest song she had made for the festival, skipping to its waltz time while her clear soprano lifted.

Fingers bounced across the control board of the sonador she held in the crook of her left arm. Programmed to imitate a flute, though louder, the mahogany-colored box piped beneath her chorus.

Dust puffed from under her shoes. Around her, the heights dreamed beneath the amber glow of a Phoebus declining westward, close to its northernmost point in a sky where a few clouds drifted white. The road followed the Astrid River, which rippled and gurgled, green with glacial flour, on her right, downward bound to Aguabranca where it would enter the mighty Europa. Beyond the stream lay untouched native ground, steeply falling into a dale already full of dusk, clothed in bluish-green growth wherever boulders did not thrust forth—lodix like a kind of trilobate grass or clover, gemmed with petals of arrowhead and sunbloom, between coppices of tall redlance and supple daphne. Insectoids swarmed, gorgeously hued flamewings, leaping hopshrubs, multitudinous humbugs. A bright-plumed frailie cruised among them, a minstrel warbled from a bough, a couple of bucearos swooped overhead, and a draque hovered lean, far above—not birds, these, but hypersauroids, like every well-developed vertebrate which Demeter had brought forth. Pungencies that roused memories of resin and cinnamon drifted on a south breeze which was rapidly cooling off the afternoon.

On Caitlín’s left ran a rail fence. Somewhat level, till it met a scarp three or four kilometers off, the soil thus demarked had been converted to pasture for Terrestrial livestock and, further on, barley fields for humans. To the invaders from space, Demetrian meat and vegetation were often edible, occasionally delicious; she had been plucking moonberries, pearl apples, and dulcifruct ever since she got off the bus at Freidorp. But they lacked the whole complement of vitamins and amino acids, while containing several that were useless. The imported plants were intensely verdant, the cattle that grazed them fantastically red.

Behind her, the road twisted out of sight around a hill. Ahead, it climbed like a snake. Beyond the next ridge she could see Trollberg, wooded and meadowed to its top. Ghost-faint at its back floated the Phaeacian snowpeaks. Mount Lorn their lord.

Caitlín halted. From a wilderness thicket had appeared a garm. Gray-furred, round-snouted, bob-tailed, tiger-sized, it flowed along in a gracefulness that brought a gasp of admiration from her. Neither need fear. Demetrian carnivores didn’t like the scent of Terrestrial animals and never attacked them. For their part, human hunters tried to preserve the balance of a nature which provided them skins for the market, and the Upland Folkmeet had declared garms a protected species.

The beast stopped too, and stared back at her. It saw a young woman. (Her exact age was thirty-four, though being Earth-born she thought of it as twenty-five.) Of medium height, full-bosomed, withy-slender, long in the legs, she bore aloft a curly, bronze-brown mane which fell to her shoulders. Her face was wide in the brow, high in the cheekbones, tapering to the chin; but her mouth was broad and full. Beneath arching dark brows were emerald eyes and a short, tilted nose. Weather had turned a
fair skin tawny and added a dusting of freckles. Her tunic and trousers had seen rough use. A crios belt, gaudy rainbow sash, encircled them. A backpack carried changes of clothing, sleeping bag, a little dried food, the poems of Yeats, and other travel gear.

“Glory be to Creation,” she breathed, “you’re beautiful, me bucko!”

The garm vanished back onto its domain. Caitlín sighed and continued along her route.

She broke off. A man had stepped into sight, rounding a huge rock behind the fence ahead of her. Equally surprised, after an instant he raised a hand and cried a greeting. Caitlín jogged toward him. He was young, too, she saw, stocky, blond. Clad in coveralls, he bore a horn made from a tordener’s tusk wherewith to call his cows home.

“Good day, my girl,” he said in his lilting accent when she reached him. Hereabouts that was courteous. “How goes it for you?”

“Very well. I thank you, sir, and wish the top of the day to you,” she replied in the soft English of her homeland, which long since had taken unto itself the speech of its conquerors and made that its own.

“Can I ask where you fare?”

“To Trollberg for Midsummer.”

His eyes widened. “Ah. That I guessed. You are Cathleen, true? I’d call you ‘Miz’ like a gentleman ought, but ken not your last name. Nobody seems to use it.”

She tolerated his pronunciation. Few Sassenachs or squareheads knew any better. “Aye, for I’m only here at the turning of the sun, when all the province is one great shebeen. It’s a fine country you have, and dear people, but there’s too much else of the planet to be traveling in. Who might you be, now?”

“Elias Daukantas. Of Vilnyus Farm.” He jerked a thumb backward. Above a windbreak of poplars rose what must be chimney smoke. Shyly: “I’ve heard much about you, and wish Trollberg was in my neighborhood. Or, leastwise, that I’d had hap to see you come by afore. Uh… walk you always?”

She nodded. “What for would I be driving, and never knowing through what I passed?”

“But where stay you the nights over? I’ve heard nil talk of your visiting our scant inns, though more than two landlords tell how they’d pay you well for an evening’s entertainment.”

She smiled to show she took no offense as she replied, “Bards sing not for gain, Freeholder Daukantas, and a bard I reckon myself to be, if scarcely any Brian Merriman. We may receive gifts, but we sing for love or hospitality. I stay where they give me welcome, else spread my sack on the lodix.”

In his awkwardness he exclaimed, “But what live you on?” and then burned in the cheeks at his gaucherie.

“Are you embarrassed, now?” she said cheerfully, with a pat for his hand where it clenched the rail. “Why, they all ask me that.” She shifted on purpose into flat Eopolitan. “I’m medically trained, though no physician. Winters, I work in the city and its hinterland, out of St. Enoch Hospital. The doctor shortage pretty well lets me set whatever terms I want. Of course, were I a decent person, I’d work full time. But when my lifespan won’t reach to exploring Demeter—” She tautened. “And when I have to see people hurting—” She broke off, shivered the tension out, and laughed. “Mercy alive, but I’ve talked about myself, right enough! Shall we be speaking of you?”

“There’s naught to tell, my lady. This is my father’s stead, and I his third son.”

She cocked her head. “You’re a bachelor, then?”

He nodded. “Tja, you know our custom in the uplands. When I am married, we can stay in the big house as partners, or we can get help to clear land and raise a dwelling for ourselves. I, I think I’ll pick that. The new start.”

“And you’ve no girl to tell you her wishes in the matter?”

“No. Someday—But this is a scoopful about me, uh, uh, Cathleen,” he said in a rush. “Will you spend the night with us? I promise the whole gang will be delighted.”

She glanced west. Though shadows were getting long and the mountains turning purple, Phoebus had an hour or better before the horizon captured it. “I thank you and I thank your kin,” she answered. “But I should be at Trollberg inside three days, and
my plan was for keeping on past sunset, since Persephone will be rising full, big and bright as Luna over Earth.” Erion, half that apparent size, was already up, its curve ivory upon indigo.

“I’ll drive you tomorrow, as far as you like,” he offered. Her expression betokened reluctance. He grew clever. “Yes, you want to be near the land. Well, here’s a family in it you’ve nay met. Our home, our manners, they should interest you, they’re unusual, I swear; we’re no Swedes or British or—Please! You’d make us hurrah. We’d never forget.”

“We-ell….” She eased, smiled, moved closer, fluttered her lashes the least bit. “It’s too kind you are, Elias Daukantas, and sure I’d be of a good evening, stayed I there. So if you are certain that himself will not object—”

A whirr loudened. Turning, they saw a small car approach. Its air cushion threw dust right and left like the foam at the bow of a speeding boat. It reached them and braked in a roar. Tripods slammed down. The bubble top dilated. A big man tumbled out. “Caitlín!” he bawled.

She dropped her sonador. “Dan, oh, Dan!” She sped to him.

They grabbed each other. After a while his mouth left hers and sought her ear. “Listen, macushla,” he whispered. “I’m on the run. Hunted. My name is Dan Smith. Okay?”

“Okay,” she breathed back. He felt the elastic slimness of her, smelled sunlight odors of hair and warmer odors of flesh. “What is your wish, my heart?”

“Get the devil out of here, to some safe hiding place. Then we’ll talk.” Brodersen had all he could do to stay wary, rather than cast her down and him above.

The same effort shuddered in her, stronger than his. She pulled free, wrenched herself around, and said waveringly to the gaping farmer: “Elias, dear, it’s a grand surprise I’ve had. Here is my own fiance, Daniel Smith. We’d looked not to meet before the festival; he’s been upon the road. But since the gods are so kind—Can you pardon me at all, at all? I’ll be back, the Powers willing, and then I’ll sing for you.”

He and he shook hands and uttered clumsy politeness. Caitlín snatched up her instrument and tugged on Brodersen’s sleeve. He and she scrambled into the car. It leaped onward. Daukantas stood for a long while staring the way it had gone, before he raised his horn and summoned the cattle.

A moon and a half shining. Phoebus not far out of sight, the sky was violet more than black and showed few stars. Of the constellations, only Medea and Ariadne appeared complete. Aphrodite and Zeus., sister planets, stood candle-bright. Three small clouds glowed. Silver washed across treetops and splashed on the ground beneath, which lay in a translucent dusk. Through a break in the forest shimmered Mount Lorn. Torchflies flitted about like tiny lanterns. Choristers trilled in their tens of thousands, calling from among stalks and leaves for their mates; a starlark chanted; near the cave, a spring flowed forth in crystalline clinking.

Caitlín had guided Brodersen here, down a game trail after he parked the car. He had brought outdoor kit of his own, including a fuel-cell heater which gave the shelter a welcome warmth. Sleeping bags on mollite pads made the floor comfortable. But they two did not sleep. After a while, amidst tender jesting, they cooked and ate dinner. When that was done, they did not sleep either.

Toward dawn, she raised herself on an elbow, the better to regard him. The cave faced west, and Persephone’s beams were now streaming straight in, so eerily bright that against the whiteness of her he thought he could see how rosy were her nipples. He reached up to cup a heavy softness; it pressed itself around his hand as she leaned down to kiss him, a kiss which lingered.

“My love, my darling, my life,” she nearly sang, “had I words to tell the wonder of you, humans would remember me when Sappho and Catullus lie forgotten. But not Brigit herself commands that magic.”

“Oh, Christ, how I love you,” he said, hoarse from the power of it. “How long for us? Three years?”

“A snippet more. I count months as well, from when first I knew what you were doing to my soul, till the chance came for me to be seizing you.”

“And I thought it was only another romp. How fast you proved me wrong! You, not just a delicious body and hell on wheels in bed, but everything that’s
you.”

“Were it not trouble that brought you on my trail, I would be in isotopically pure bliss, Dan, my Dan. And as is, I praise your enemies for that much while scheming how to cut the guts out of them. I’d no idea I’d see you before fall.”

“If you stayed in Eopolis—”

The lustrous locks moved, shadowing her features, as she
shook her head. “No.” She became altogether serious. “Haven’t we worn this question bare yet? It would not be fair to Lis. Or you. You love her too, as well you should. I do myself, and would never cause her more sorrow than I must, and hope the friendship she gives me is not from duty alone—for sure it is she knows what’s between us, though she’s never spoken aloud of it to me.”