Dalmas, John – Yngling 02 – Homecoming

Nils stood and gestured her into his tent.

“Sorry,” she said. “We have biting insects a lot like these on my world, but I’m not used to so many of them.”

“I’ll light a fire,” he said. “They don’t like smoke.” He smiled. “You’ll get used to them though, and they take very small bites. On warm still nights they were worse than this in the homeland.” With flint and steel he quickly had a small wad of tinder glowing, blew it into a tiny fire and built it up with birchbark and branchwood.

“Will your people learn to like this land as much as the old?” Nikko asked.

“Most already like it better. It’s a richer land, easier to live in, and very beautiful. We call the old land ‘homeland’ because of the memories and—” he groped momentarily—“traditions, but we are glad to be here.”

The fire flamed briskly and Nils piled leafy twigs on it. The burning slowed and smoke billowed. He took two bundles of furs from the grassy bed opposite the entrance and set them near one another for seats.

“What would you like to hear about first?” he asked.

“One thing we’d especially like to know is what happened long ago that cut off travel from this world to ours, and why there are so few people on Earth today.”

“Ah, the Plague. The tribes have only the word for it, and a few vague stories, but the Kinfolk— the Alliance—speak of it in detail and certainty.”

Nils told her of an epidemic that had hit suddenly, that the ancient healers could do nothing about and which spared only a scattered few. When someone sickened with it he was taken with a terrible urge to make fire, to burn things, and soon died. The cities reeked with smoke and rotting flesh, and before many days it was over. The few who survived could search for a day or more before finding someone else alive. Soon the little moons that circled above the sky died because there was no one to take care of them, and when the little moons died, the machines died that had made life easy for men.

As he talked, her eyes searched his face, and whether he told of death and burning or of the gradual gathering and regrowth of mankind, his expression and voice remained casual. Yet he didn’t seem uncaring, and his calm was due to more than remoteness of the events in time. It reflected something in him that she had never known before.

“Are others of your people like you?” she asked. “Or other telepaths? Who think like you and look at things the way you do?”

“No,” he said. “I do not know of any other who sees as I do, although Ilse is coming to.”

“When did you become like you are?”

“Somewhat, I have always been. Then I killed the troll and was almost killed by it. When I woke up afterward, I knew.”

“When you killed the troll?”

He nodded, and for a moment she was shaken, wondering if, after all, the difference in him was that he was insane. He laughed, she blushed, and he began to tell a story. It began with a boy, a sword apprentice in his eighteenth summer, who killed a man with a fist blow, was dubbed Ironhand, and exiled. A boy-man, naive, ignorant, but almost unmatched with the sword. At first things happened to him. Before long he happened to them. And there were trolls, which the chief of the Psi Alliance believed had been brought in ancient times from the stars.

She stared as he talked, her eyes growing full of him, exploring him, his smooth skin molded over muscles that were tiger-like in their power and grace, relaxed but explosive and possessed of more than human strength, ruddied by the settling fire. He turned his eyes to her, and suddenly her desire for him flashed into intense consciousness. She had shifted closer to him, unaware, and found herself leaning toward him. The realization jerked her upright, confused and frightened. Scrambling to her feet she scurried crouching through the low entrance into the night. She actually ran for a few meters, fought back the edge of panic and slowed to a walk, then stopped and looked around. It was dark and she could see no one. Her tent was over there, and she walked toward it, heart hammering. Had he hypnotized her? No. It had come from inside her, from within herself, an expression and surfacing of some deep inner response to him. She was still shaky, her pulse rapid from the shock and unexpectedness of it. She’d never imagined anything like that.

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