His resources were few, a miserable and war-torn world where earth-hungry amaut plundered a dying human population, a human species that had gone mad and that now furnished mercenary troops to the brutish amaut for the final pillage of their own world. Such madness, he reflected, would have been understandable had it been a matter of nasul-loyalty among these humans, but it was not. They knew no loyalties, committed arrhei-nasul at the simple exchange of goods or silver, engaged in katasakke and then slaughtered the females, who were pathetic and ineffectual creatures. They gathered no young in this fashion, and indeed slaughtered what young they did find—comprehensible, at least, if there had been nasithi-tak in these human warbands. There were not, and the ultimate result seemed to be suicide for the entire species. Tejef had long since ceased to be amazed by the final madness of this furious people: perhaps this savagery was an instinct no longer positive for survival—it was one that the amaut had certainly turned to their own advantage. Now perhaps there was a way to turn it to the advantage of Tejef sra-Sogdrieni, a means to vaikka upon Ashanome, one that would deserve their respect when they killed him.
The night was warm. A slight breeze blew in through the protective grille of the window and rippled through.the drapery behind the bed. The moonlight cast restless shadows of branches on the wall.
One of the dogs began to bark, joined by the others, and the child in the bed stirred, sat upright, eyes wide. She listened a moment, then turned on her knees so that she could lean against the headboard and the sill and look out into the dark. Now the dogs were off at the distance, perhaps chasing some night-wandering bounder through the fields. Their cries echoed among the rocks in which the house was set, secure behind its stone wall and steel gate, with the cliffs towering up on either side.
In Arle’s estimation this house was an impenetrable fortress. It had not always needed to be so. The wall and the gate were new, and when she was nine the men had not gone with guns to work the fields, and there had been no guards on the heights. But the world had changed. She was ten now, and thought it settled that she would never again walk to the neighbors’ house to play, or even go out the gates to the fields and the orchard without one of her brothers to attend her, rifle over his arm, checking with each of the sentry stations along the way. The family had not been to church in the valley in months, nor valley market, and no one mentioned school starting. This was the way the world had become. And they were fortunate—for there were rumors of burnings downland at the mouth of the Weiss, that very same sleepy river that rolled through their valley and made the crops grow, and made Upweiss the best and richest land on all Priamos.
Arle knew something of the outside, knew that they were from the Esliph, which was very far, and green and beautiful, but she was not sure in her mind whether that were real or not, or only one of the old stories her parents had told her, like faery princesses and heroes. She knew also that they were all once upon a time from a world called Earth, every human that breathed, but it was hard to imagine all the populations of all the worlds she knew of crowded onto one globe. This was too difficult a thought, and she was not sure which stories were about Earth and which were about the Esliph, or whether they were one and the same. She kept it stored up as one of those things she would understand when she was older, which was what her parents answered when her questions ran ahead of her understanding. She was content to let this be, although it seemed that there were many things of late, which she was not old enough to know, while her parents talked in secret councils with her grown brothers and with the neighbors and the younger children were sent off to play with guns to guard them.