‘You can smell their fear,’ Elegy whispered. ‘I swear, Ben, you can actually smell it.’
Kretzoi came knuckle walking uncertainly across the clearing toward us, looking less graceful and more chimpish than I had ever seen him. A moment later he was beside us in the Wild, having flushed a bevy of Asadi back into the clearing to avoid contact with him. The grease in his fur was already growing rancid; in fact, the ‘fear’ Elegy smelled was emanating at least as much from Kretzoi as from the stunned Asadi.
‘We’re going back for another piece of meat, Ben. Think you’ll be all right while we’re gone?’
‘Fine. Just remember to have Kretzoi enter from the south next time.’ I cradled the unwieldy camera in my arms and prepared to find another position from which to shoot. ‘Hurry back.’
Off they went. The Wild closed around them like a great green mouth, and beneath braided yellow runners and the gravid pods of a tree called boawort I crept southward along the eastern perimeter of the clearing. Most of the Asadi remained crowded together about the edges of the assembly ground, very near me, quarreling with their eyes and sometimes cuffing one another. I moved so deliberately, to prevent my being discovered, that it took better than twenty minutes to navigate a distance I could have skipped in a tenth the time.
I found a tree on the clearing’s edge: a lattice-sail tree with well-spaced boughs for climbing and billowy, reticulate leaves for concealment. Securing my camera, I climbed to a vantage a good five meters above the ground. With luck I wouldn’t have to move again, not even when Kretzoi and Elegy returned to the Dragonfly for a third packet of meat.
And, yes, Kretzoi was even now reentering the clearing, shouldering aside the puzzled, frightened aliens near the southern end zone. I began filming, with no idea at all where Elegy might be. The Asadi ceased quarreling among themselves – to watch in nervous bafflement as Kretzoi staggered regally into the middle of their field, removed the package from his back, lowered it beside the first, and squatted to arrange the mock-huri astride both slabs together. That done, Kretzoi left the clearing again.
A voice beside me whispered, ‘It’s going well, isn’t it?’
‘Lord, woman, what you doin’?’ Elegy had climbed into the lattice-sail tree as I was filming, and the mild whirr of the camera, along with my own concentration on Kretzoi, had kept me from hearing her. I wrapped an arm around the bole separating us and stared keenly at her dark, grinning face. She gestured at the Asadi pushing and squirming beneath us.
‘We induced the appropriate behavior,’ she said. ‘Two “teams” – north and south, even if they’ve run together a little – and utter milling confusion in both populations.’
‘You let Kretzoi go back to the Dragonfly alone?’
‘He knows the way. Jaafar’ll take care of him, Ben.’
‘And you’re going to keep me company up here?’
‘I think so,’ she whispered. ‘When Kretzoi gets back this time, he’s going to stay. That’s why we’re liable to be up here for a while. If events unfold as they do in my father’s monograph, we may have to sit patient and pretty a good five or six days.’
‘Five or six days?’
‘Don’t you remember?’
‘I remember, Elegy – I helped put that snakebit monograph together. But I’m not about to become a permanent tenant of a lattice-sail tree just so Egan Chaney’s dubious version of history can repeat itself!’
‘Shhh,’ Elegy cautioned. ‘Maybe Kretzoi’s acting will speed things up. I’ve told him to try to get everything done today – everything within reason, that is. Patience, Ben.’
Gazing down, I had the distinct impression that several Asadi had become aware of us. One or two lifted their muzzles and sniffed the wind; three of four others cocked their heads, listening intently – but none looked directly at us or threatened assault.
Elegy and I fell silent. Eventually Kretzoi returned, entering the clearing from the west, a packet of meat on his back and two pieces of nylon rope looped about his neck. What he did then was exactly what Eisen Zwei, according to the witness of Elegy’s father, had done more than six years ago: He lifted the mock-huri to his shoulder, laced lengths of rope through the slabs of meat on the ground, and pulled one slab into the southern end zone, leaving the huri to guard it, and the other slab into the northern end of the field, stepping aside here to act himself as guardian. The aliens clacked their teeth, tugged furiously at their manes, writhed their arms in wordless entreaty. Never had I seen them so agitated. Finally, mercifully, Kretzoi stepped back and made a strangling noise deep in his throat.
At this signal the Asadi all about the clearing, some so far away from Elegy and me it was difficult to distinguish among individuals, sat down and watched Kretzoi hobble back toward the center of the assembly ground. The meat he had brought them occupied most of their attention, but they refrained from falling upon and devouring it.
‘He’s got to fetch the huri before they’ll do anything,’ Elegy whispered. ‘See, he’s coming back this way.’
Indeed, Kretzoi walked the length of the clearing, paused at the offering in the southern half of the field, and bent to retrieve the huri. Once it was astride his shoulder, Kretzoi returned to the center of the clearing and lifted his broken-seeming wrists toward the midday sun. Every Asadi eye was upon him, as was the telephoto lens of my holocamera; the just-perceptible whirring of the film was amplified in my head a thousand times. That no one could hear it but Elegy and me seemed so unlikely that for a brief moment I stopped filming.
‘Don’t stop,’ Elegy said fiercely. ‘This is one of the things we came for, Ben.’
I sighted and began filming again. Kretzoi’s face was turned directly toward Denebola – he probably had his
