Stunned recognition accompanied waves of stinging misery, worse than any fleshy woe or galling numbness.
Shame had nearly overwhelmed him then. For no injury short of death could ever excuse his forgetting—
Creideiki …
Terra …
The dolphins …
Hannes …
Gillian …
How could they have slipped his mind during the months he wandered this barbarian world, by boat, barge, and caravan?
Guilt might have engulfed him during that instant of recollection … except that his new friends urgently needed him to act, to seize the brief advantage offered by the explosion, to overcome their captors and take them prisoner. As dusk fell across the shredded tent and torn bodies, he had helped Sara and Kurt tie up their surviving foes — both urrish and human — although Sara seemed to think their reprieve temporary.
More fanatic reinforcements were expected soon.
Emerson knew what the rebels wanted. They wanted him. It was no secret that he came from the stars. The rebels would trade him to sky hunters, hoping to exchange his battered carcass for guaranteed survival.
As if anything could save Jijo’s castaway races, now that the Five Galaxies had found them.
Huddled round a wan fire, lacking any shelter but tent rags, Sara and the others watched as terrifying portents crossed bitter-cold constellations.
First came a mighty titan of space, growling as it plunged toward nearby mountains, bent on awful vengeance.
Later, following the very same path, there came a second behemoth, this one so enormous that Jijo’s pull seemed to lighten as it passed overhead, filling everyone with deep foreboding.
Not long after that, golden lightning flickered amid the mountain peaks — a bickering of giants. But Emerson did not care who won. He could tell that neither vessel was his ship, the home in space he yearned for … and prayed he would never see again.
With luck, Streaker was far away from this doomed world, bearing in its hold a trove of ancient mysteries — perhaps the key to a new galactic era.
Had not all his sacrifices been aimed at helping her escape?
After the leviathans passed, there remained only stars and a chill wind, blowing through the dry steppe grass, while Emerson went off searching for the caravan’s scattered pack animals. With donkeys, his friends just might yet escape before more fanatics arrived.…
Then came a rumbling noise, jarring the ground beneath his feet. A rhythmic cadence that seemed to go—
taranta taranta
taranta taranta
The galloping racket could only be urrish hoofbeats, the expected rebel reinforcements, come to make them prisoners once again.
Only, miraculously, the darkness instead poured forth allies — unexpected rescuers, both urrish and human — who brought with them astonishing beasts.
Horses.
Saddled horses, clearly as much a surprise to Sara as they were to him. Emerson had thought the creatures were extinct on this world, yet here they were, emerging from the night as if from a dream.
So began the next phase of his odyssey. Riding southward, fleeing the shadow of these vengeful ships, hurrying toward the outline of an uneasy volcano.
Now he wonders within his battered brain — is there a plan? A destination?
Old Kurt apparently has faith in these surprising saviors, but there must be more to it than that.
Emerson is tired of just running away.
He would much rather be running toward.
While his steed bounds ahead, new aches join the background music of his life — raw, chafed thighs and a bruised spine that jars with each pounding hoofbeat.
taranta, taranta, taranta-tara
taranta, taranta, taranta-tara
Guilt nags him with a sense of duties unfulfilled, and he grieves over the likely fate of his new friends on Jijo, now that their hidden colony has been discovered.
And yet …
In time Emerson recalls how to ease along with the sway of the saddle. And as sunrise lifts dew off fan- fringed trees near a riverbank, swarms of bright bugs whir through the slanted light, dancing as they pollinate a field of purple blooms. When Sara glances back from her own steed, sharing a rare smile, his pangs seem to matter less. Even fear of those terrible starships, splitting the sky with their angry engine arrogance, cannot erase a growing elation as the fugitive band gallops on to dangers yet unknown.
Emerson cannot help himself. It is his nature to seize any possible excuse for hope. As the horses pound Jijo’s ancient turf, their cadence draws him down a thread of familiarity, recalling rhythmic music quite apart from the persistent dirge of woe.
tarantara, tarantara
tarantara, tarantara
Under insistent stroking by that throbbing sound, something abruptly clicks inside. His body reacts involuntarily as unexpected words surge from some dammed-up corner of his brain, attended by a melody that stirs the heart. Lyrics pour reflexively, an undivided stream, through lungs and throat before he even knows that he is singing.
“Though in body and in mind, {tarantara, tarantara}
We are timidly inclined, {tarantara!}
And anything but blind, {tarantara, tarantara}
To the danger that’s behind— {tarantara!}
His friends grin — this has happened before.
“Yet, when the danger’s near, {tarantara, tarantara}
We manage to appear, {tarantara!}
As insensible to fear,
As anybody here,
As an-y-bo-dy here!”
Sara laughs, joining the refrain, and even the dour urrish escorts stretch their long necks to lisp along.
