Barrier Bay. Supplies could not be left closer to the shelf or the pack,
witless on emergence, might ruin everything.
After three days’ hard travel, a shimmer in the air ahead identified
those piled bergs. Rrinn consulted Cuwarra. Females were supposed to be
inferior, but he had learned to rely on her sense of direction. She
pointed him with such accuracy that next morning, when he topped a hill,
he looked straight across to his goal.
The building stood on another height, constructed of stone, a low shape
whose sod roof bore a cap of white. Beyond it, in jagged shapes and
fantastic rainbows, reached the bay. Northward wound the Golden River,
frozen and snowed on and frozen again until it was no more than a
blue-shadowed valley among the bluffs. The air was diamond-clear beneath
azure heaven.
“Go!” shouted Rrinn exuberantly. Not just equipment, but smoked meat lay
ahead. He cast himself on his belly and tobogganed downslope. The pack
whooped after. At the bottom they picked themselves up and ran. The snow
crunched, without giving, under their feet.
But when they neared the building, its door opened. Rrinn stopped.
Hissing dismay, he waved his followers back. The fur stood straight on
him. An animal–
No, a Merseian. What was a Merseian doing in the cache house? They’d
been shown around, it had been explained to them that the stuff kept
there must never be disturbed, they’d agreed and–
Not a Merseian! Too erect. No tail. Face yellowish-brown where it was
not covered with hair–
Snarling in the rage of territory violation, Rrinn gathered himself and
plunged forward at the head of his warriors.
After dark the sky grew majestic with stars. But it was as if their
light froze on the way down and shattered on the dimly seen ice of
Talwin. A vast silence overlay the world; sound itself appeared to have
died of cold. To Flandry, the breath in his nostrils felt liquid.
And this was the threshold of winter!
The Ruadrath were gathered before him in a semicircle ten or twelve
deep. He saw them as a shadowy mass, occasionally a glitter when eyes
caught stray luminance from the doorway where he stood. Rrinn, who
confronted him directly, was clearer in his view.
Flandry was not too uncomfortable. The dryness of the air made its chill
actually less hard to take than the higher temperatures of foggy autumn.
From the bus he had lifted ample clothing, among divers other items, and
bundled it around himself. Given a glower, the structure where he had
taken refuge was cozy. Warmth radiated over his back.
(However, the glower’s energy cells had gotten low in the three weeks
that he waited. Likewise had his food. Not daring to tamper with the
natives’ stockpile, he had gone hunting–lots of guns and ammo in the
bus–but, ignorant of local game, hadn’t bagged much. And what he did
get required supplementation from a dwindling stock of capsules. Nor
could he find firewood. If you don’t convince this gentlebeing, he told
himself, you’re dead.
Rrinn said into a vocalizer from the cache house: “How foresaw you, new
skyswimmer, that any among us would know Eriau?” The transponder turned
his purring, trilling vocables into Merseian noises; but since he had
never quite mastered a grammar and syntax based on a worldview unlike
his own, the sentences emerged peculiar.
Flandry was used to that kind of situation. “Before leaving the Merseian
base,” he answered, “I studied what they had learned about these parts.
They had plenty of material on you Ruadrath, among them you of Wirrda’s.
Mention was made of your depot and a map showed it. I knew you would
arrive in due course.” I knew besides that it was unlikely the
gatortails would check here for me, this close to their camp. “Now you
have been in contact with them since first they came–more than the
Domrath, both because you are awake more and because they think more
highly of you. Your interest in their works was often … depicted.” (He
had recalled that the winter folk used no alphabet, just mnemonic
drawings and carvings.) “It was reasonable that a few would have learned