him.
Surely the Pantocrator didn’t mind much, and would receive his dear
battered soul into Heaven at the last.
She had never thought of him as a zmay. Not that the word had any
particularly bad overtones. Maybe once it had been a touch contemptuous,
four hundred years ago when the first immigrants arrived from Merseia;
but later it came to mean simply a Dennitzan of such ancestry. (Did the
growth of their original planet into a frightening rival of Terra have
anything to do with that?) However, from him and his family she had
learned Eriau–rather, the archaic and mutated version they spoke–at
the same time as she was learning Serbic from her parents and Anglic
from a governess. When finally prevailed upon to stop scrambling these
three into a private patois, she kept the habit of referring to
Trohdwyr’s people by their own name for themselves, “ychani”: “seekers.”
For he had been close to the center of her child-universe. Father and
Mother were at its very heart, naturally, and so for a while were a doll
named Lutka, worn into shapelessness, and a cat she called Butterfeet.
Uncle Bodin approached them when he and Aunt Draga visited, or the
Vymezals went to Zorkagrad and he took her to the zoo and the merrypark.
Three younger siblings, two brothers and a sister, orbited like comets,
now radiant with love, now off into outer darkness. Trohdwyr never shone
quite as brightly as any of these; but the chief gamekeeper to three
generations of her house moved in an unchangeable path, always there for
her to reach when she needed him.
“Kraich.” Having started dinner cooking, he settled back on the tripod
of clawed feet and massive tail. “You’ve earned a double drink this
evening, Dama. A regular sundowner, and one for killing the dyavo.” He
poured into cups from a flask of shlivovitza. “Though I must skin the
beast and carry the hide,” he added.
The hoarse basso seemed to hold a note of genuine complaint. Startled,
Kossara peered across the fire at him.
To a dweller in the inner Empire, he might have been any Merseian. No
matter how anthropoid a xenosophont was, the basic differences usually
drowned individuality unless you knew the species well. Trohdwyr roughly
resembled a large man–especially in the face, if you overlooked endless
details of its heavy-boned, brow-ridged, wide-nosed, thin-lipped
construction. But he had no external earflaps, only elaborately
contoured holes in the skull. Totally hairless, his skin was pale green
and faintly scaled. A sierra of low triangular spines ran from the top
of his forehead, down his back to the tail’s end. When he stood, he
leaned forward, reducing his effective height to tall-human; when he
walked, it was not on heels and soles but on his toes, in an alien
rhythm. He was warm-blooded; females of his race gave live birth; but he
was no mammal–no kind of animal which Terra had ever brought forth.
By a million signs Kossara knew him for Trohdwyr and nobody else, as she
knew her kinfolk or Mihail. He had grown gaunt, deep furrows lay in his
cheeks, he habitually spurned boots and trousers for a knee-length tunic
with many pockets, he wore the same kind of curve-bladed sheath knife
with knuckleduster handle which he had given her and taught her to use,
years before …
“Why, I’ll abandon it if you want,” she said, thinking, Has time begun
to wear him down? How hurtful to us both.
“Oh, no, no, Dama. No need.” Trohdwyr grew abashed. “Forgive a gaffer if
he’s grumpy. I was–well, today I almost saw you ripped apart. There I
stood, you in my line of fire, and that beast–Dama, don’t do such
things.”
“I’m sorry,” Kossara said. “Though I really don’t believe I was taking
too big a chance. I know my rifle.”
“I too. Didn’t you learn from me?”
“But those were lightweight weapons. Because I was a girl? Today I had a
Tashta, the kind they’ve issued me in the Voyska. I was sure it could
stop him.” Kossara gazed aside, downslope toward the bottom of the
Kazan, which night had already filled. “Besides,” she added softly, “I
needed such a moment. You’re right, I did provoke the dyavo to attack.”