How long before he was able to associate that in his mind with pain? Some creature trapped in the snarl of wind-tossed wood, pinned between trunk and earth, or mangled and left to suffer? Naill sat up, hunched together, his head turning southward as hearing traced that sound. Sometimes it sank until it was scarcely audible; again its keening wail rose, broke, until he was sure he could almost distinguish words! A lost settler?
Naill crawled to the outer opening of his burrow, tried to shade his eyes well enough to see through the shattering brightness of the sun. He could just make out a mass of green several hundred yards away that the destructive path of the whirlwind had spared rather than flattened.
From there . . . or from beyond? Out in the open he would be as good as blind. But if he could work his way on to that other strip of standing wood, he might be able to make some progress. And the call—if call it was—pulled him, would not let him settle back into his hole.
Naill pursed his lips, imitated Hoorurr’s hoot as he had learned to do in summons. The answering beak snap came from where the quarrin roosted in the upturned root mass over Naill’s head.
“See—what—calls.” The man thought that out, aimed the order at the bird. “See what calls.”
Hoorurr snapped angrily, protesting. But he gave a hop to the next tree trunk and walked along it. His gray-white feathers made a blinding dazzle in the sun as he took off with a flap of wings. The quarrin preferred the night, but he could move better than Naill by day.
Naill tried to mark the shortest distance across that open space to the trees beyond. And always came that crying.
He shouldered his pack and moved out, squinting as he tried to avoid pitfalls underfoot. With one twist of his ankle that wrenched a half-healed wound the kalcrok had dealt and that left him limping, he made it across the open.
That crying—it did hold words, slurred together, undistinguishable, but words. And it came from a point that could not be too far from the garth fields. What had happened? Had the holding been swept by one of the devastating winds, its people driven into the forest they dreaded?
“One . . . alone . . . not right . . .”
Hoorurr’s message came from up ahead. One alone—but what “not right” meant was a puzzle. Hurt—trapped? Naill plunged on. He came to the edge of a glade—and understood.
The broken and forsaken hut Kosburg had shown the newcomers as a warning, its moldering ruins shunned by everyone on the garth—here was another such, hardly more than a lean-to of brush. Hoorurr perched on the highest point of its flimsy roof.
Naill made a second rush across the open and stooped to enter the place. The voice had fallen to a muttering. He smelled the fetid odor of sickness, and his foot struck against an earthen water jar, which rolled away empty.
She had no mask, no hood now, and her sack robe was torn so that her restlessly moving hands and her arms were bare. The pallid skin was splotched with great blotches of green, and masses of loose hair had fallen away from her ever-turning head. Her eyes were open, fixed on the brush of the roof covering, but they did not see that—or anything about her, Naill judged.
He slipped his arm under her, raising her rolling head, steadying it against his own shoulder while he moistened her cracked lips from the water bottle he had filled at the river.
She licked her lips and made a faint sucking sound, so he let her drink more. Under his touch her skin was fire-hot, and she was plainly deep in the fever of the Green Sick. He settled her down once more and looked about the hut. The girl lay on a pile of torn and earth-stained bags, which must have been used for the storing of grain earlier. A plate was by the door, with some crusts on it and a mash of bruised fruit over which insects now crawled. Naill sent that spinning out with a grim ejaculation. Food—water—a bed of sorts! But what more could a sinner hope for?
In spite of the changes of the sickness, he knew her for Ashla. And Ashla must be a proven sinner by the rules of her own people.
Naill’s expression was a half snarl as he glanced momentarily in the direction of the garth from which she must have been expelled as soon as they recognized the illness that had struck her down. But he had survived and, he suspected, so had others—perhaps many of them. There was no reason to believe it would be different for Ashla.
“Water—” Her hands groped out as if searching for the container she had long since emptied.
Naill helped her drink for the second time, and then wiped her face and hands with moistened grass. She sighed.
“Green—green fire . . .”
At first he thought she spoke of her illness, remembering his own delirium. Then Naill saw her hands were spanning apart, and he recalled how she had stood that day holding the beauty of the alien necklace before her in just the same fashion.
“Cool green of Iftcan . . .”
He caught those words eagerly. Iftcan! Did Ashla, deep in the clutch of the fever, now also house a changeling memory, know what had never been a part of the garth or of her own settler history?
On impulse Naill took her two hot hands into his, holding them tightly against her small attempts to pull free.
“Iftcan,” he repeated softly. “In the forest—cool forest. . . . Iftcan stands—in the forest.”
The restless turning of Ashla’s head slowed. Her eyes were closed, and suddenly from beneath those lids tears gathered, made silken tracks down her sunken, splotched cheeks.
“Iftcan is dead!” Her voice was firmer, held an authority that surprised him.
“It is not—not all of it,” he assured her softly. “Iftsiga stands, living still. Cool—green—the forest lives. Think of the forest, Ashla!”
Frown lines appeared over her closed eyes. The heavy brows that had given her face harshness were gone now, as was most of her hair. Naill wondered how close she was to the complete change. Her ears—yes, they were definitely pointed, larger than natural for the human kind.
Now her hands tightened on his, rather than trying to pull free.
“The forest—but I am not Ashla.” Again that note of firmness, of decision. “I am Illylle—Illylle!” Some of that confidence trailed away.
“Illylle,” Naill repeated. “And I am Ayyar—of the Iftin.”
But if she could still hear his voice, his words meant nothing to her now. More of the tears ran down her cheeks from beneath her lowered eyelids. And her lips shaped a small, soft moaning, not unlike the crying that had drawn him there.
Water—he needed more water. But to return to the river . . . the journey was too long to be made in daylight. Naill shaped a thought for Hoorurr, hoping the bird might guide him to some forest spring.
“In the leaves—above,” came an answer Naill did not understand until he freed himself from Ashla’s hold and crawled into the glade about the hut. The quarrin fluttered from the roof, reached a tree branch well overhead, and moved along it toward a cluster of differently shaped leaves the man had not noticed before—some form of parasite growing there.
The center portion of those drifting stem-branches was a large rounded growth, not unlike a bowl fastened levelly on the branch of the supporting tree. Naill climbed, worked his way out, and did indeed find a source of water—two full cups or more held in that tough fiber basin—and he filled his water bottle from its bounty.
He was in the hut again sponging Ashla’s face, when a sharp gasp brought him half around to see a figure in the doorway. Masked and hooded, but small—small as one of the girl children who had accompanied Ashla to pick berries days earlier. The newcomer held a basket before her, and now she backed away—raising that as if to use it as a frail barrier against some expected attack.
“No—no—please!” It was a shrill, frightened wail, rising fast to a scream that held no words at all. “Go—go away!”
She flung the basket at him, a water bottle spinning from it to strike against his arm. Then she stooped and caught up a clod of earth, letting fly without aim.
“Let Ashla be—let her be!” Once more she screamed.
Behind Naill, Ashla herself stirred. A hand caught at his shoulder, as, without apparently seeing him, she dragged herself up on the bed of sacking.
“Samera—” Her voice was a hoarse croak, but in it was recognition, a sane awareness.
The child froze, the eyes frantic where they were framed by the mask holes. Then she screamed again, this time touching a terror that was beyond words.