Trullion: Alastor 2262 Read Online Free PDF Page A

festive evenings, the starwatchings. He recalled his good friends and their quaint habits; he remembered the look of Rabendary Forest-the menas looming over russet pomanders silver-green birches, dark-green prick-lenuts. He thought of the shimmer that hung above the water and softened the outline of far shores; he thought of the ramshackle old family home, and discovered himself to be profoundly homesick.
    Two months later, at the end of ten years service, he resigned his commission and returned to Trulllion.

Chapter 4

    Glinnes had sent a letter announcing his arrival, but when he debarked at Port Maheul in Staveny Prefecture, none of his family was on hand to greet him, which he thought strange.
    He loaded his baggage onto the ferry and took a seat on the top deck, to watch the scenery go by. How easy and gay were the country folk in their parays of dull scarlet, blue, ocher! Glinnes semi-military garments-black jacket, beige breeches tucked into black ankleboots felt stiff and constricted. He’d probably never wear them again!
    The boat presently slid into the dock at Welgen. A delectable odor wafted past Glinnes nose, which he traced to a nearby fried-fish booth. Glinnes went ashore and bought a packet of steamed reed-pods and a length of barbecued eel. He looked about for Shira or Glay or Marucha, though he hardly expected to find them here. A group of offworlders attracted his attention: three young men, wearing what seemed to be a uniform-neat gray one-piece garments belted at the waist, highly polished tight black shoes-and three young women, in rather austere gowns of durable white duck. Both men and women wore their hair cropped short, in not-unbecoming style, and wore small medallions on their left shoulders. They passed close to Glinnes and he realized that they were not offworlders after all, but Trills … Students at a doctrinaire academy? Members of a religious order? Either case was possible, for they carried books, calculators, and seemed to be engaged in earnest discussion. Glumes gave the girls a second appraisal. There was, he thought, something unappealing about them, which at first he could not define. The ordinary Trill girl dressed herself in almost anything at hand, without over-anxiety that it might be rumpled or threadbare or soiled, and then made herself gay with flowers These girls looked not only clean, but fastidious as well.
    Too clean, too fastidious … Glinnes shrugged and returned to the ferry.
    The ferry moved on into the heart of the fens, along waterways dank with the scent of still water, decaying reedstalks, and occasionally a hint of a rich fetor, suggesting the presence of merrling. Ripil Broad appeared ahead, and a cluster of shacks that was Saurkash, the end of the line for Glinnes; here the ferry veered north for the villages along Great Vole Island. Glinnes unloaded his cases onto the dock, and for a moment stood looking around the village. The most prominent feature was the hussade field and its dilapidated old bleachers, once the home-field of the Saurkash Serpents. Almost adjacent was The Magic Tench, the most pleasant of Saurkash’s three taverns. He walked down the dock to the office where ten years before Milo Harrad had rented boats and operated a water-taxi.
    Harrad was nowhere to be seen. A young man whom Glinnes did not know sat dozing in the shade.
    “Good day, friend,” said Glinnes, and the young man, awaking, turned toward Glinnes a look of mild reproach. “Can you take me out to Rabendary Island?”
    “Whenever you like.” The young man looked Glinnes slowly up and down and lurched to his feet “You’d be Glinnes Hulden, unless I’m mistaken.”
    “Quite right. But I don’t remember you.”
    “You’d have no reason to do so. I’m old Harrad’s nephew from Voulash. They call me Young Harrad, and I expect that’s what I’ll be the rest of my life. I mind when you played for the Serpents.”
    “That’s some time ago. You’ve got an accurate