THIS is my report, the report of Meirax Andros, alone. Michael is not with me; Michael may be dead.
On 11J89 we chose this site, landed, and set up camp. Here a good-sized stream enters a lake of some six thousand hectares. Undesignated mountains rise to the east. To the west are steep slopes, covered in many places with needle-trees and brush. It seemed to both of us a promising location. Its elevation is four hundred ninety-two meters, its coordinates are fifty point eight and fifty-three point four.
For five days we scouted for signs. (Reference previous report, ASP ninety-six six.) Such signs as we found were stale. There was no indication of Small Folk, and I told Michael we had better move on.
He disagreed.
“They shift their hunting grounds,” he said; he was sitting on a boulder, searching the valley with his eyes. “Someday soon they’ll be back. There’s a lot of game.” Meirax shook her head. “Our orders were to find them.”
He would not look at her. “Our orders were more extensive than that. They’ll come back soon, and when they come we’ll be here, familiar with the country, knowing where to find water, where the game trails run.”
That night as she lay drowsy in her bag, she heard his bag open—the soft, stealthy noise of the slider. She believed that he was coming for her and wondered for a moment how she should receive him. Surprised? Outraged? With eagerness? She inched her own slider down, readied her arms to embrace him.
He did not come. For a long while she waited in the dark. When she rose, his bag was no longer warm. She went out, where the strange, wide moon gave her a shadow like a ghost. The day had been warm and sunny, but the night wind was keen with cold. The needle-trees sighed to see her, and the brook laughed at her. When she returned to her bag, she wept.
Next morning she expected to find him in his bag; he would deny having left it, tell her she had dreamed. But his bag was empty, his clothing gone, his boots and dragonette gone too. She ran a square search pattern that by afternoon stretched two kilometers in all directions.
At sunset she found him, wearily returning to their camp. “Were you lost?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said. “For a while.”
“You went out last night,” she said.
He nodded. “I heard something—something prowling around the tent, I thought. And then there was something farther on. It seemed worth investigating.”
“You should have awakened me, Michael.”
“You were already awake. You said you heard me.”
Back at the camp he washed in the brook, ate a little, then crawled into his bag and slept, though it was scarcely dark. She was tired as well, yet she remained awake watching the valley and thinking of various things she had observed in her search and the direction from which he had come, west by northwest.
That night he was gone when she woke. She got up, dressed in the dark, and went outside. The uncanny moon rode high, but it was nearly dawn. She went to the brook for a drink and sat beside it a while, wondering what else might have come to drink there. The brook water tasted better than lake water, to her at least. When she returned to the tent, the first pale shards of day had streaked the sky. She did not search for him, but busied herself about the camp, pitching the tent and weaving mattresses of boughs.
As she had expected, Michael returned late that afternoon. She had resolved not to question him and did not; but he said, “They’re back.”
It startled her; she had convinced herself that this had nothing to do with the mission. She asked, “You’ve seen them?”
“No, but I’ve seen fresh signs.” He hesitated, reluctance so clear she grew certain he would not speak again. At least he added, “And I’ve heard them.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Listen, Meirax, and tell me what you think.” He took the smallest recorder from a pocket. She had not been aware that it was gone; she switched it on, held it to her ear, and closed her eyes.
The needle-trees wrapped her in their impalpable sorrow. It was dark and far colder than she had expected; a light rain fell. A voice—not a human voice—moaned far away: “Uo-o-o-o, ou-o-o, o-o-o-o-o.” Suddenly, she was terribly afraid. She opened her eyes and groped for her dragonette, but it was back in the tent. Michael was no longer with her, but down at the brook, washing.
Finished washing himself, he washed his clothes and spread them on the rocks to dry. She said, “You don’t have to sit up. I’ll bring them in for you. I’ll fold them, and lay them beside your bag.”
“Thank you,” he said. “What do you think of the recording? It’s them, isn’t it?”
She shrugged. “You shouldn’t go out alone.”
When the last bright fleck of sun had vanished behind the trees, she went to the rocks and got his clothes as she had said she would. His shirt was still a little damp at the collar, but she folded it as she had promised and carried everything back to the tent.
As she lifted the tent flap, she took a last look at the mountain slopes, stony and dotted here and there with needle-trees and patches of brush. Near her, night had come already; but higher up, the black mountain rocks still captured light. For an instant she glimpsed the eyes of one of the Small Folk near the shadow’s edge. Then they were gone, and she could not be sure she had not imagined them.
Once in the tent, she removed only her boots; and she took her dragonette with her into her bag. Hours later when Michael had left the tent, she rose too, put on her boots, and followed him.
The moon was rising, a moon no longer quite so circular as it had been. This is when he leaves, she thought, when the moon rises above the mountains.
She saw him three hundred meters down the valley, walking fast, not looking back. She hurried after him, but he passed into the shadow of a tall needle-tree and was gone.
For most of the rest of the night, she was certain she was following him still. Twice she heard him cough, and once she glimpsed him as he crossed a moonlit clearing. Day came, and she held back, afraid that he might see her. That was when she lost him, or so she decided later.
For most of that day she pressed forward, stopping only to drink at a freshet that could not have been their stream. She was very tired by then, and she knew that she was no longer so strong as she had been.
That hour came when the sun was half down the western sky—the hour at which Michael had returned before. She decided that she would return to camp as well. It was pointless to hunt him among the rocks and trees when he was asleep in camp.
Her director pointed the way, but she found herself blocked again and again by fallen trees, gorges, or cliffs or banks too steep to climb.
Night came. She knew it would be wiser to stop and sleep if she could; but she was hungry and felt that camp could be no more than a kilometer off at most. She blamed herself for not taking rations, not taking a light, though she had feared that he might look behind him and see a light. She imagined herself back at the school, an instructor at the school now, dressing down some cadet who was also herself for not bringing a light, not taking rations.
Then she fell. For a moment it seemed that she would never land before the ground struck her like a blow.
She felt she had been unconscious, perhaps not for long. It was night still, though her head ached and her bruised limbs were stiff with cold. For a long time she groped among stones for the director; but her fingers could not find it, and its green glow was nowhere to be seen.
She decided to make herself as comfortable as she could and wait for sunrise—in daylight she could surely find the director and make her way back to camp. She took three steps, hoping to come upon a place sheltered from the wind, and fell again.
When she recovered consciousness for the second time she was warmer, but it was very dark. She sat up and found that she had lain on a bed of fern, and that though she still wore her jacket, a jacket had been spread over her legs.
Michael’s voice asked, “Are you all right?”
“Where are we?”
For a second or two, no answer came. “Lukora’s house.”
“Lukora?”
“This woman,” Michael said.
By then she had noticed the tall white figure. She asked, “Did you find me, or was it Michael? In either case, thank you for taking care of me.”
The white figure approached, fractioned into three. Like a hand, Meirax thought, with three fingers held up. It bent across the crouching bulk that was Michael. Hair brushed her cheek, and she realized that the divisions of the white figure were no more than dark hair, hair that hung before its owner’s shoulders and nearly to her waist.
Aloud she said thank you again. A chill hand caressed her forehead, and gentle fingers explored the aching lump above her left temple; with them came a deep inhalation like the soughing of needle-trees.
Michael said, “She is sorry that you’re hurt.”
“Can’t she talk? How do you know her name?”
“She can,” Michael told her. “She doesn’t speak often. Do you think you can stand?”
“I’ll try.” She got her legs beneath her, but they were without strength.
A fourth person entered silently, so that for a moment the darkness grew darker still. She heard something soft and heavy laid upon a table, or perhaps upon the floor.
Michael muttered something unintelligible.
“Who is that?”
“It doesn’t matter. Would you like to lie down and rest for a while?”
Lukora said, “They are abroad.” It was not really a deep voice, Meirax thought, yet it possessed the husky quality some women thought passionate … .
She was again supine. “Why is it so dark here, Michael?”
“So that you can sleep.” There was an odor of musk, heavy and ensorceling, as warm as breath.
When she woke again Michael gave her something oily to eat, and she asked what it was.
“Flesh softened by fire. We used to do it too. It’s very strengthening.”
“I think I could walk back to camp now,” she said, knowing it was what he wished to hear.
“Then we’ll go.”
Her heart leaped for joy. “You’re coming with me?”
“I must. There’s danger from the Small Folk.”
He helped her stand and held her arm so that she would not trip on the uneven stone floor. “I feel as if the ceiling were right over my head,” she told him.
“It’s low in some places, high in others.”
He led her through a chamber where a small, bright light shone far above without illuminating the walls, then along a twisting corridor. “There’s the door,” he said; it was a vague circle of pale light.
“It’s day outside, isn’t it?”
“It’s almost evening,” Michael told her. “Lukora would not like us leaving so late.” He hesitated. “It might be better if I go first.”
“Go ahead, then.”
“You’ll follow me? At once?”
“Certainly,” Meirax told him.
Metal rang against rock. The doorway darkened as Michael’s body filled it, then opened again.
“Hurry,” he said, and extended an arm to her.
She climbed through the doorway, blinking watering eyes at the brightness of daylight. It was like a new scene in a show, she thought: Lukora’s house was suddenly gone, and Michael was pushing through thick brush instead. Brush scratched her hands and cheeks, and sent up clouds of insects like missiles.
At last they burst into the clearing under a big needle-tree. “What’s that?” she asked.
“A sword.” He showed it to her. It was old and rusted, its bronze hilt grass-green with verdigris; but its edges were newly ground and looked sharp.
“Couldn’t you have used it to cut through the brush?” she asked him.
He shook his head. “That would have been foolish.”
Though her director was gone, the setting sun soon restored her sense of direction—she knew that Michael led her southeast. Together they mounted slope after slope, swinging due south and even due north at times as Michael traced a path that he alone could see.
And some third thing came with them, noiseless but always present.
They saw the Small Folk, she thought, before the Small Folk saw them. They were waiting on the ridge line, a ragged cluster of a score or more, thin limbed and wild haired, mean statues of gold in the last light.
“We’d better turn aside,” she told Michael.
“Then they would know we’re afraid of them. They’d hunt us down.”
She took out her dragonette and loosed its safety catch. “I don’t think they know we’re here.”
“Of course they do.”
It was dark by the time they had mounted the ridge, and the strange moon was not yet above the mountains; the suns of half a billion worlds gleamed like so many holes pricked in black film. “Stand out of our path,” Michael ordered the Small Folk.
A champion rose before him, lean but nearly as tall as he. The champion held some weapon—a toothed club, as well as Meirax could judge it by starlight. “Shoot him,” she breathed. “Kill him now, Michael—or I will.”
He handed her his dragonette. “What chance would we have against them at night? We’d kill half a dozen, perhaps; then they would kill us both.”
The ancient steel gleamed under the stars, as though night had washed away all rust. She heard the thud as blade met hard wood, the whistle and whisper of the champion’s club swung in a blow too high, the champion’s wild shriek.
Hands like claws tore Michael’s dragonette from her. She fired her own, and two of the Small Folk burst into flame.
Then she was down, fingers at her throat, the dragonette gone. Her own hands tore away those that held her. For an instant, she glimpsed a dark bludgeon against the stars. She twisted frantically out of the way.
The Small Folk cried out in terror, all together like the chorus at a play. White things leaped above her with flashing fangs. Her whole world was a cacophony of snarls and screams, her hair wet with blood that was not her own.
As you hear, I have returned to camp. Lukora’s brother has come with me; I do not know his name. He waits me now, sniffing the wind, pacing to and fro before our door. The sun will rise at 05:33.8 today, and already the horned lords bugle from their hilltops. We hunt now; but I will speak to you again very soon.
