Gray granite walled the ancestral seat of the Firstman of Ilion. It stood near the edge of an ancient cape. In tiers and scarps, crags and cliffs, thinly brush-grown or naked rock, the continental shelf dropped down three kilometers to the Antonine Seabed. So did the river, a flash by the castle, a clangor of cataracts.
The portal stood closed, a statement that the occupation troops were considered bandits. Ivar stumbled to press the scanner plate. Chimes echoed emptily.
Weariness was an ache which rose in his marrow and seeped through bones and flesh till blood ran thick with it. His knees shook, his jaws clattered. The dried sweat that he could taste and smell on himself stung the cracks in his lips. Afraid to use roads, he had fled a long and rough way.
He leaned on the high steel door and sucked air through a mummy mouth. A breeze sheathed him in iciness. Yet somehow he had never been as aware of the beauty of this land, now when it was lost to him.
The sky soared crystalline black, wild with stars. Through the thin air they shone steadily, in diamond hues; and the Milky Way was a white torrent, and a kindred cloud in the Ula was our sister galaxy spied across a million and a half light-years. Creusa had set; but slower Lavinia rode aloft in her second quarter. Light fell argent on hoarfrost.
Eastward reached fields, meadows, woodlots, bulks that were sleeping farmsteads, and at last the hills. Ivar’s gaze fared west. There the rich bottomlands ran in orchards, plantations, canals night-frozen into mirrors, the burnished shield of a salt marsh, to the world’s rim. He thought he saw lights move. Were folk abroad already? No, he couldn’t make out lamps over such a distance … lanterns on ghost ships, sailing an ocean that vanished three million years ago….
The portal swung wide. Sergeant Astaff stood behind. In defiance of Imperial decree, his stocky frame bore Ilian uniform. He had left off hood and mask, though. In the unreal luminance, his head was not grizzled, it was as white as the words which puffed from him.
“Firstlin’ Ivar! Where you been? What’s gone on? Your mother’s gnawed fear for you this whole past five-day.” The heir to the house lurched by him. Beyond the gateway, the courtyard was crisscrossed with moon-shadows from towers, battlements, main keep and lesser building. A hound, of the lean heavy-jawed Hesperian breed, was the only other life in sight. Its claws clicked on flagstones, unnaturally loud.
Astaff pushed a button to close the door. For a time he squinted until he said slowly, “Better give me that rifle, Firstlin’. I know places where Terrans won’t poke.”
“Me too,” sighed from Ivar.
“Didn’t do you a lot o’ good, stashed away till you were ready for—whatever you’ve done—hey?” Astaff held out his hand.
“Trouble I’m in, it makes no difference if they catch me with this.” Ivar took hold of the firearm. “Except I’d make them pay for me.”
Something kindled in the old man. He, like his fathers before him, had served the Firstmen of Ilion for a lifetime. Nevertheless, or else for that same reason, pain was in his tone. “Why’d you not ask me for help?”
“You’d have talked me out of it,” Ivar said. “You’d have been right,” he added.
“What did you try?”
“Ambushin’ local patrol. To start stockpilin’ weapons. I don’t know how many of us escaped. Probably most didn’t.”
Astaff regarded him.
Ivar Frederiksen was tall, 185 centimeters, slender save for wide shoulders and the Aenean depth of chest. Exhaustion weighted down his normal agility and hoarsened the tenor voice. Snub-nosed, square-jawed, freckled, his face looked still younger than it was; no noticeable beard had grown during the past hours. His hair, cut short at nape and ears in the nord manner, was yellow, seldom free of a cowlick or a stray lock across the forehead. Beneath dark brows, his eyes were large and green. Under his jacket he wore the high-collared shirt, pouched belt, heavy-bladed sheath knife, thick trousers tucked into half-boots, of ordinary outdoor dress. There was, in truth, little to mark him off from any other upper-class lad of his planet.