“Duun-”
“Sheon belongs to Duun, doesn’t it? I tell you that it does.”
“Security at Sheon-”
“I stink. I smell. Notice it, Ellud?”
Long pause. “The estate-
“You offered me anything. Wasn’t that what you said? Any cooperation? Would any shonun in the world prevent me anything-if I want a woman; if I want a man; if I want money or your next of kin, Ellud-if I want the president turned out naked and the treasury to walk in-
“You’re hatani. You wouldn’t.”
Duun looked again at the false spring bubbling up in its wintry vapors. “Gods! but you do trust me.”
“You’re hatani.”
He looked back with the first clear-eyed stare he had used in years. But not even that could hold Ellud’s gaze to his. “I’m begging you, Ellud. Do I have to beg? Give me Sheon.”
“Settlers have moved there. Their title’s valid by now.”
“Move them out. I want the house. The hills. Privacy. Come on, Ellud… you want me to camp in your office?
Ellud did not. They had been friends. Once.
Now Duun saw the guarded lowering of the ears. Like shame. Like a man taking a chance he wanted. Badly. At any cost.
“You’ll get it,” Ellud said. Never looking at him. Ellud’s claws extended slightly, raked papers aside as he looked distractedly at the desk about him. “I’ll do something. I’ll see to it.”
“Thanks.”
That got the eyes up. A wounded look. Appalled like the rest. The agony of friendship.
Of wounded loyalties.
“Give it up,” Ellud asked, against self-interest; against all interests. The loyalty jolted, belated as it was.
“No.” For a moment then, eye to eye, no flinching from either side. He remembered Ellud under fire. A calm, cool man. But the gaze finally shifted and something broke.
The last thing.
Duun walked out, freer, because there was nothing left. Not even Ellud. Just pain. And he wrapped that solitude about him, finding it appropriate.
He came to Sheon’s hills in the morning, in a true morning with the sun coming up rose and gold over the ridge; and the wind that blew at him on this grassy flat was the wind of his childhood, whipping at his cloak, at the gray cloak of the hatani, which he wrapped about him and the infant. Ellud’s aide showed distress, there on the dusty road that led toward the hills, in the momentary stillness of the craft which had brought them there, over in the meadow. The aide’s ears lay flat in the wind, which blew his neatly trimmed crest and disarranged the careful folds of his kilt. The wind was cold for a citydweller, for a softhands like him. “It’s all right,” Duun said. “I told you. There’s no way up but this. You don’t have to wait here.”
The aide turned his face slightly toward the countryfolk who gathered out of the range of hearing, who gathered in knots, families together, uncaring of the cold. The aide looked back again, walked toward the gathered crowd waving his arms. “Go away, go away, the mingi has no need of you. Fools,” he said then, turning back, for they gave only a little ground. He stooped and gathered up from the roadside the little baggage there was, slung the sack from his shoulder. His ears still lay back in distress. “Hatani, I will walk up with you myself.”
It was a wonder. The aide met his eyes with staunch frankness. Ellud chose such young folk, still knowing the best, the most honest. Duun felt for a moment as if the sun had shone on him full; or perhaps it was the smell of true wind, with the grass-scent and the cleanness.
He felt a motion of his heart toward this young man and it ached.
But he grinned, old soldier that he was, and glanced at the uphill road, for this time he was the one to flinch, from the youth’s innocence and worship. “Give me the sack,” he said, and stripped the carry-strap from the young man’s shoulder and took it to his own, his right. The infant occupied his left arm, warm and moving there, nuzzling wormlike among its swaddlings beneath his cloak.