The People’s trail was marked with dead, the old, the fragile, the young: all that was gentle, he thought, everything.
He heard a sound of thunder, looked up and saw a flash, a mote of light. Something operating in-atmosphere. He expected, even while he ran with all the speed that was in him, the white flash that would kill him, as he left the protective zone.
But it went over the horizon. The sound died.
Beyond the city, beyond the pitiful ruin, there stretched a line of figures, alive and moving. He made haste to follow, desperate, exhausted. The dus moved with him, blood-feelings stirred in it, that caught up his rage and fear and cast it back amplified.
He overtook the last of the column finally, his throat dry, his lungs wracked with coughing. Blood poured from his nose and tasted salt-coppery in his mouth.
“The kel’anth?” he asked. A narrow-eyed kel’e’en pointed toward the head of the column. “The she’pan?” he asked again. “Is she well?”
“Yes,” one said, as if to answer him at all were contamination.
He kept moving at more than their pace, seeking the column’s head, passed kel’ein that carried kath-children, and kath’ein that carried infants, and kel’ein that supported old ones of any caste, though few enough of the old were left them.
They went toward the mountains, that promised concealment, as they were pitifully exposed on this bare, naked sand. He saw the line extended over the roll of the land, and it seemed yet impossibly far, beyond his strength at the pace he tried. He paused, cut a bit of pipe that was left as a stub from someone else’s cutting, a prize that was seen by others too, and he offered them of his, but none would deign to touch it. Leaving the rest to them, he sucked the water from a sliver and managed simply to keep his feet under him and to stay with the middle of the column outside it, for he felt their hatred, the looks that the Sen cast him.
He had betrayed himself before the Sen; they knew, they had seen the nature of him, and whence he was they guessed… if not what. They could not know the reason that they were attacked, but that they were mri, and that the tsi’mri invaded, and they were dying at such hands as his.
No attack came on them. He was not amazed by it, for there was little inclination for a large orbiting craft to waste its energies on so small a target as they made. But the city came under periodic fire. They could look back and see it, the shields flaring rainbow colors under the rainless sun, and the whole of the city settling into increasing ruin. The city that had stood dreamlike against the setting sun itself glowed and died like embers, and the towers were down, and ugliness settled over it.
“A-ei,” mourned an old kath’en. “A-ei.”
And the children wept fretfully, and were hushed. The Sen shook their heads, and there were tears on the faces of the old ones.
From the Kel there were no tears, only looks that burned, that raged. Duncan turned his face from them, and kept moving at such times as the column rested, until at last he had sight of Melein’s white robes, and he knew the tall kel’en by her, with the dus.
They were well; that was enough to know, to take from him some of the anguish. He kept them in sight for the rest of that day, and when they at last paused at evenfall, he came to them.
Niun knew his presence. The dus went first, and Niun turned,, looking for his approach. Duncan settled quietly near them. “You are all right?” Niun asked him. He nodded.
Melein turned her face from him. “Doubtless,” she said finally, “your wish was good, Duncan; I believe that. But it was useless.”
“She’pan,” he murmured with a gesture of reverence, grateful even for that; he forbore to argue with her: among so many dead, argument had no place.
Niun offered him a bit of pipe. He showed his, and declined, and with his av-tlen, cut off a bit of it that was sickly sweet in his mouth. There was a knot at his stomach that would not go away.