He came up out of the ravine onto a more open slope of scrub and tilted boulders leaning in piles where they had tumbled down. Above him, the slope leveled out into a terrace of broken ground and rock falls along the base of a line of cliffs where the Cavers lived. In front of the openings, connecting surrounding mounds of high ground, they had built a rampart of earth and rocks that closed back to the cliffs on either side to form a walled-in area. The Swamp People had spent many hours watching the Cavers and their movements. The rampart was always guarded. Rakki sniffed the air but could read little from it up here, with the wind. The sound of barking erupted suddenly from above. The dogs had detected him. A barrier blocking a gap between two of the high points of the rampart, fashioned from limbs of dead trees and thorn bush, was raised. Rakki saw the dogs rush out, following them with his eyes in and out among the rocks as they ran down toward him. Human figures followed. He waited.
The dogs emerged from cover—four of them, spreading out to close from all sides. Rakki backed against a boulder and tightened his grip on the edged club that he was carrying—another battle trophy, a length of Oldworld metal topped at one end by a crosspiece sharpened on stone, a grip woven from vine strands at the other. The dogs inched closer, keeping low near the ground, paws stretched ahead, fangs bared, growling and snarling. Five Cavers appeared, following them. Two looked to be no older than Rakki and were carrying spears. Neffers, like him—their minds formed by the things that were, knowing nothing of the world that had existed before the fire and the Long Night came, and the earth was torn asunder. The third was older, scrawny, with wild eyes and tufts of face hair, waving a club cut from root wood. But it was the last two that Rakki found himself staring at, for a moment dulling his normally ceaseless alertness to everything around him. They were larger, with thick hair and deep lines covering faces that had seen many years. Oldworlders!
Rakki had only seen dead Oldworlders before—who had lived as part of the world that had once been. Although his own earliest years must have gone back to those times, he had no real recollections of them, or of parents or anyone else he had been with then. At times there would come odd fragments of things, like a fading dream that no longer meant anything. Neffers did best in the world that now was. Shaped by it and attuned to it, they accepted its uncompromising reality and lived by its harsh rules instinctively. It was those who seemed to live with part of their mind in one world and part in another who tended to be ineffective and erratic, either withdrawing into long silences that could last for days, or sliding the other way toward craziness like the wild-eyed one pointing the spear. And then, Rakki had heard, there were some left from the Old World, usually older still, with a different kind of strength that had enabled them to pull through and carry on functioning.
The two before him now wore coverings of material that was crinkly like his vest, but not as thick, torn and patched, extending over their upper arms and down their legs, with strange sheaths like animal paws around their feet. One of them was peculiarly pink, the color of hand palms. Rakki had heard of light-skinned humans but never seen one. While the others carried spears, the two Oldworlders were holding implements of intricately shaped Oldworld metal—something like Rakki’s club, but without any weighted head or edge. Rakki took them to be the weapons that Jemmo had talked about. But on looking them over now, up close, he was puzzled. There was no way he could see that they could make an effective weapon. Yet Jemmo had said they possessed fearsome power.
The two with spears leveled them to keep Rakki against the rock while the light-skin looked him over. His face behind the hair was twisted and sour, the eyes cold and hard. “Watchoo want comin’ aroun’ heyah, mud rat?” he demanded.