sat carefully cleaning and greasing bronze utensils, knifes, bowls, an
ax, a saw. His female directed her young in tidying the single room
while she spread the daises with new straw mats.
Flandry greeted the family. “Is this to be left?” he asked. It seemed
like quite a bit for these impoverished savages.
“In lightness, what else?” the male replied. He didn’t stop his work,
nor appear to notice that Flandry was not a Merseian. In his eyes, the
differences were probably negligible. “The metal is of the Ruadrath, as
is the house. For use we give payment, that they may be well pleased
with us when they come out of the sea.” He did pause then, to make a
sign that might be avertive or might be reverent–or both or neither,
but surely reflected the universal sense of a mortal creature
confronting the unknown. “Such is the law, by which our forebears lived
while others died. Thch ra’a.”
Ruadrath: elves, gods, winter ghosts.
XIV
—
More and more, as the weeks of Flandry’s absence passed, her existence
took on for Djana an unreality. Or was it that she began slowly to enter
a higher truth, which muted the winds outside and made the walls around
her shadowy?
Not that she thought about it in that way, save perhaps when the
magician wove her into a spell. Otherwise she lived in everydayness. She
woke in the chamber that the man had shared with her. She exercised and
groomed herself out of habit, because her living had hitherto depended
on her body. At mess she stood respectfully aside while the Merseians
went through brief rituals religious, familial, and patriotic–oddly
impressive and stirring, those big forms and deep voices, drawn steel
and talking drums–and afterward joined in coarse bread, raw vegetables,
gwydh-msk cheese, and the Terran-descended tea which they raised
throughout the Roidhunate. There followed study, talk, sometimes a
special interview, sometimes recreation for a while; a simple lunch; a
nap in deference to her human circadian rhythm; more study, until
evening’s meat and ale. (Since Merseia rotated at about half the rate of
Talwin, a night had already gone over the land.) Later she might have
further conversation, or attend a concert or recorded show or amateur
performance of something traditional; or she might retire alone with a
tape. In any event, she was early abed.
Talk, like perusal of a textreel or watching of a projection, was via
the linguistic computer. It had plenty of spare channels, and could
throw out a visual translation as easily as a sonic one. However, she
was methodically being given a working knowledge of Eriau, along with an
introduction to Merseian history and culture.
She cooperated willingly. Final disposition of her case lay with
superiors who had not yet been heard from. At worst, though, she wasn’t
likely to suffer harm–given a prince of the blood on her side–and at
best … well, who dared predict? Anyway, her education gave her
something to do. And as it advanced, it started interesting, at last
entrancing her.
Merseia, rival, aggressor, troublemaker, menace lairing out beyond
Betelgeuse; she’d accepted the slogans like everybody else, never
stopping to think about them. Oh, yes, the Merseians were terrible, but
they lived far off and the Navy was supposed to keep them there while
the diplomatic corps maintained an uneasy peace, and she had troubles of
her own.
Here she dwelt among beings who treated her with gruff kindness. Once
you got to know them, she thought, they were … they had homes and kin
the same as people, that they missed the same as people; they had arts,
melodies, sports, games, jokes, minor vices, though of course you had to
learn their conventions, their whole style of thinking, before you could
appreciate it … They didn’t want war with Terra, they only saw the
Empire as a bloated sick monstrosity which had long outlived its
usefulness but with senile cunning contrived to hinder and threaten them
… No, they did not dream of conquering the galaxy, that was absurd on
the face of it, they simply wanted freedom to range and rule without
bound, and “rule” did not mean tyranny over others, it meant just that