They stayed because they must; any desertion would be noted from the sky. They
had elected sanctuary, and there was nothing left to do but to sit and think of
the others. Thinking. Measuring themselves.
Dreaming, the hisa called it. It was what hisa came to do.
Use sense, Miliko had told them in the first days, when they were most restless,
talking wildly about action. We’re to wait.
Wait on what? Cox had asked, and that began to haunt her own dreams.
This night, hisa were coming down the slope who had been sent for… days before.
This night she sat with the others and watched them come, hands in her lap,
watched small, distant bodies moving in the starless dark of the plain, sat with
a curious tautness in her gut, and a tightness in her throat. Hisa… to fill up
the number of humans, so that those who scanned the camp would find it
undiminished. She carried the gun in a waterproof pocket; dressed warmly; still
shivered in the uncertainty of things. Care for the hisa: that was what she was
left to do; but go, the hisa themselves had told her. You heart hurt. You eyes
cold like they.
Go or lose the people she commanded. She could no longer hold them otherwise.
Are you afraid to be left? she had asked the humans who would remain, the quiet,
retiring ones, the old, the children, those men and women unlike those who sat
outside—families and people with loved ones and those who were, perhaps, saner.
She felt guilt for them. She was supposed to protect them and she could not;
could not really even lead that band outside—she simply ran ahead of their
madness. Many of these who would remain were Q, refugees, who had seen too much
of horror, and were too tired, and had never asked to be down here at all. She
imagined they must be afraid. The hisa elders could be perversely strange, and
while Pell folk were used to hisa, they were still alien to these people. No,
one old woman had said. For the first time since Mariner I’m not afraid. We’re
safe here. Not from the guns, maybe, but from being afraid. And other heads had
nodded, and eyes stared at her with the patience of the hisa images.
Now hisa moved near them where they sat… a small group of hisa, who came first
to her and to Ito, and they stood up, looked back on the others who waited.
“See you,” Miliko said, and heads nodded, in silence.
Several more were chosen, the hisa taking those they would, and slowly, in the
dark, they walked that track across and up the slope, as others would come down,
in small groups. One hundred twenty-three humans would go this night; and as
many hisa come to join the camp in their place. She hoped that the hisa
understood. They had seemed to, finally, eyes lighting with merriment at the
joke on the humans who looked down to spy on them.
They went by the quickest route, passed other hisa on the way down, who called
out cheerfully to them… and she walked at a human’s best pace, panting, dizzy,
resolved not to rest, for a hisa would not rest; and so they had all agreed to
do it. She staggered as they made the final climb into the forest margin helped
by the young hisa females who hovered about them… She-walks-far was one, and
Wind-in-trees another, and more whose names she could not quite fathom nor the
hisa say. Quickfoot, she had named the one and Whisper the other, for they set
great store by human names. She had tried the names they called themselves, to
please them as they walked, but her tongue could not master them and her
attempts sent the hisa into nose-wrinkling gales of laughter.
They rested until the sun came up, in the trees and the bracken, and under a
rocky ledge. By daylight they set out again, she and Ito and Ernst and the hisa
who guided them, as other hisa had led others of them into the forest now,
elsewhere. The hisa moved as if there were no enemies in all the world, with