They Fly at Ciron Read Online Free PDF

first—but a few steps on, as the water reached my thighs and finally my waist, it grew warm. Then, even warmer. And warmer. I woke—” He chuckled—“to find I had pissed myself, the way I used to when I was a boy in bed, a couple of times a week, even unto my fifteenth year—and my mother would become angry and say I made the shack stink.” The chuckle became a laugh. “Then she’d make me go sleep out in the tool cabin. But that, I’m afraid, was all there was of mystic dreaming!”
    “Oh, Rahm—well, you’dbetter not tell Ienbar that.” Naä laughed outright. “Then again, maybe you should. He just might find something in it—if he just doesn’t find it funny, too.” .
    “Then I found a very real, very un-mystic—” Rahm laughed again—“stream and washed myself; and went on my way. And this morning,” he finished, “I was attacked by a wild prairie lion and wrestled with her, to break her neck with my arm. Then I came home here.”
    Naä shook her head. “Rahm, you folk amaze me.”
    He looked at her as they walked, his amber eyes full of questioning.
    “Three months ago, when I first came here, I’d never have believed such people as you existed.” Naä paused a moment, as if searching within for her answer. “Sometimes, I still don’t believe that you do.”
    “Why, Naä?”
    “Rahm, I’ve traveled to lots of places, through lots of lands. I know songs and stories from even more lands and places than I’ve visited—more lands and places than you could imagine. But most of the songs and stories I know are about fights and wars, about love that dies, about death and betrayal and revenge. Yet here there is…” She raised her shoulders, and looked up at the branches whose early summer green had begun to go smoky after the first bright hue of spring. “But I can’t even name it.” She let her shoulders fall. “Here, I go out and sing to Rimgia and to the other women in the fields. I come and exchange songs and tales with Ienbar, or go sit and talk with Hara over her shuttles. Sometimes I eat with you in the evening, or take long walks alone in the foothills of the mountains. If any woman of the village comes around a corner of the path, my heart leaps ashappily as if it were my own sister coming to meet me. If any man of the village crosses my path, we smile and call to each other with the same warmth I’d call to my own brother.” She glanced at him, then glanced away. “Whenever a group of you get together, after work in the evening, or before a council meeting, and everyone turns to me and asks me to sing…well, I’ve never sung better!” Naä looked down at the dust. “The only thing any of you say there is to fear in the whole of this land are the flying creatures from Hi-Vator. And no one can even remember why that is—so even that’s awfully easy to forget; and since I’ve been here, I’ve only once seen what might have been a silhouette of one against some moonshot clouds, anyway.
    “Rahm, the last time I was in my own father’s hut in Calvicon, when I and my four brothers and my sister were all together, it was when my stepmother, who had been so good to us once my real mother died, was so ill. We sat around, with my father, beside my stepmother’s sickbed, talking together about our childhood. And how joyful and wonderful and loving and free it had been, because of him, because of her. And as we sat there, talking softly and laughing quietly in the firelight, I kept thinking,
‘Nobody
has a childhood as wonderful as we’re now all saying we did.
I
certainly didn’t.’ For, like any other parents, however much they loved us, often they had been bored with us, and sometimes they slapped us, and now and again they were sullen and angry that we weren’t interested in the things that concerned them—while they were wholly oblivious to what we felt was so important. Yet we all—my brothers, my sister, and me, too—went on talking about that time as if the