In winter, that water would freeze across the whole top of the fissure, leaving a natural ice bridge spanning the top of the valley. It was a favorite spot for males to taunt one another for their bravery. Walk the ice bridge . . . the males goaded, gulping down fermented yacto juice to heat their blood and dull cautionary reason. If you’re really a man, you’ll walk the ice bridge . . .
Nor was it just the appalling ease of falling to one’s death that made this place so deadly. An insane, whipping whirl of wind blasted down off the glacier to meet the warmer, moister air rising from the forest, particularly from the lush growth down in the protected gorge itself, creating dangerous twist-winds. Even after the forest had dropped its leaves, there would still be heat to stir up the troubled air, for a ring of fire mountains girdled this whole area, active volcanoes that spewed plumes of heat and smoke into the air and set the hot springs simmering like so many cookpots.
Weather in this gorge, when winter set cruel fangs into the land, was without doubt the most interesting anywhere in the whole of Icewing Clan’s vast range. She wondered why the humans, who showed such sharp intelligence in other ways, had chosen so dreadfully in building their new nest? Maybe they were an afflicted species of devils, as the Ones Above insisted. Whatever the reason for it, unless they possessed tools of tremendous power indeed, they were likely to find their first winter here full of lethal surprises.
Sooleawa whispered, “Is this valley taboo, Mother? Is that why you stare so strangely?”
Chilaili roused herself with difficulty. “No . . .” She sighed. “No, it is not taboo. Perhaps it should be. I’ve helped bury too many fools who fell from the ice bridge that forms each winter, there at the foot of the glacier.” A hideous task it was, too, scraping up the spattered mess that was left after falling more than two hundred feet onto a jagged ice field. She’d also treated shattered limbs and deep puncture wounds sustained by those who’d managed to stop the fatal slide off the edge, but only at the sacrifice of crushed arms, shattered legs, and splintered ribs that drove spikes of bone through lung tissue. She wasn’t sure which was worse, fast and messy death below the ice bridge or slow death from choking on blood and the pneumonia sickness. . . .
The most surprising thing Chilaili saw, however, more shocking than the hard-walled structures of the alien nest, was a gently sloping stone incline which rose from the valley floor to the very spot where the three of them had emerged from the forest. The incline looped back on itself multiple times as it climbed up more than two hundred feet of cliff face. The rock looked as though it had been shaped, cut by some immense knife. Chilaili shivered involuntarily. Given what she’d seen of this human’s miraculous belt knife, these creatures might use machines to cut solid stone as easily as Chilaili could split a softened, overripe fruit.
Down in the valley, itself, the humans had cleared a wide swath of trees, providing a broad, flattened area for the hard-walled nest. Part of that flattened area glinted whitely in the sunlight. The humans had laid down a slab of something hard, for an unfathomable reason. A collection of strangely shaped huts, made from some other hard substance, sat nearby. Chilaili hoped those huts were as strong as they looked. They were too small and too few in number to house very many of the humans. Strange objects sat beside the huts, while larger objects rested on the edges of the flat, white thing, their uses well beyond Chilaili’s ability to determine.
When she spotted other humans in the distance, perhaps a dozen of them, Chilaili realized in some surprise that they came in two startlingly different shapes. There were several smallish ones like Bessany Weyman, with flared hips and chest bulges, but there were taller, broader ones as well, with flat chests and hips that did not flare at all, but dropped straight from their long torsos. Males and females, Chilaili guessed, trying to puzzle out which were which through the aliens’ behavior toward one another. She could discern no apparent system of rankings or subservience, however, which frustrated her. If they followed the Tersae’s pattern, the males would be larger and heavier, but with creatures from the stars, who could say whether or not that pattern would hold true?
As they watched, a dark shape in the air, tiny with distance, came arrowing in rapidly. As it came racing nearer, Chilaili realized it was too large and moved too swiftly to be any kind of bird. It approached the human nest, slowed, then settled gently down to land on the broad, white slab. It came to a rolling halt near one edge. A shiny door made of some type of metal opened in its side and a human climbed out, closing the door behind itself before jogging across the ground to join the other humans. The flying machine sat near others very similar to it, five of them, in total.
Chilaili’s fur prickled, gazing down at them. How far could a human travel in such a device? Given that thing’s speed, it could probably reach the hunting grounds of even the most distant clans with ease—and probably could find her summer nest within a few hours. Chilaili repressed a shiver and glanced at her daughter, who was staring in rapt fascination at the human nest and its multiple wonders. When Bessany Weyman tried to urge Chilaili and Sooleawa out into the open, to follow the alien down the sloping incline to the human nest, Chilaili quietly refused.
“No,” she said firmly, using the human word. “Chilaili, Sooleawa no walk.”
The human tilted its head to look up into Chilaili’s nearest eye. “Home?” it asked, glancing toward the forest.
“Home,” Chilaili agreed.
“I come?” it asked.
Chilaili hesitated.
“I come cave? You come cave? We talk?”
Chilaili nodded. “Yes. Cave. We talk.” She pointed to the sun, made an arc over her head to symbolize the sun’s path across the sky, then made four more arcs to represent five days. “You come, I come, Sooleawa come. Five sun.”
Bessany Weyman sketched five arcs across the sky. “Five suns? Five days?”
“Yes. Five suns. Five days. Cave. You, not humans.” She pointed toward the human nest.
Bessany Weyman nodded, although the human did not look happy about the stipulation to come alone. Those luminous blue eyes studied Chilaili and Sooleawa in turn, then the human said a word that must have been a farewell, for it turned away immediately afterward, hiking down toward its nest. It moved quickly, clearly eager to be among its own kind, again. They watched the human reach the valley floor, watched it disappear into the trees between the stone incline and the hard-walled nest, watched curiously as Bessany Weyman emerged on the other side of the trees and rejoined her own kind. The excited welcome spread as other humans came running from the hard-walled huts. From the way the others treated Bessany Weyman, it was clear that their human was held in high esteem by its fellow creatures.
“It is tiponi, among them,” Sooleawa murmured.
Child of importance.
True, the human was scarcely larger than a half-grown child, although clearly an adult among its own kind. The word tiponi was usually reserved for the heirs of a clan’s leaders, yet it seemed to fit this alien who was treated with obvious respect and deference by its fellows. “Yes, perhaps it is,” Chilaili agreed softly. “Come, Sooleawa, they have turned their attention toward us.”
The humans were staring up toward the treeline where Chilaili and Sooleawa stood. While Chilaili and her daughter had been careful to hide in the shadows of the nearest trees, they might well be visible to whatever powerful tools such creatures could make. So they melted back into the forest, moving swiftly, now, and put a great deal of distance between themselves and the human nest. Chilaili led the way, taking them along a circuitous, snaking path that would add a hand of days to their journey home, but might serve to confuse any human who tried to follow.
Chilaili later determined that no human had attempted to trail them.
And five days after they left the human at her home nest, Bessany Weyman had come alone to the little cave, as promised. For three full cycles of the moons, Chilaili and Sooleawa had met secretly with the human, determined to learn more of the strangers from the stars. Unlike the Ones Above, who had never actually shown their faces to Chilaili’s little clan, sending only flat likenesses to be revered and speaking only through the Oracles, Tiponi Weyman had walked freely with them, trying to understand Chilaili’s language, trying to understand what they believed and why they did things in the ways they did them.