Kalava gripped his sword hilt so that it was as if the skin would split across his knuckles. The blood had left Ilyandi’s countenance. She stood ready to be blasted with fire while she asked, “Lord Brannock, how do we know you are of the gods?”
Nothing struck her down. “I am not,” he told her. “I too can die. But they whom I serve, they dwell in the stars.”
The multitude of mystery, seen only when night clouds parted, but skythinkers taught that they circled always around the Axle of the North.… Ilyandi kept her back straight. “Then can you tell me of the stars?”
“You are intelligent as well as brave,” Brannock said. “Listen.”
Kalava could not follow what passed between those two. The sailors cowered.
At the end, with tears upon her cheekbones, Ilyandi stammered, “Yes, he knows the constellations, he knows of the ecliptic and the precession and the returns of the Great Comet, he is from the stars. Trust him. We, we dare not do otherwise.”
Kalava let go his weapon, brought hand to breast in salute, and asked, “How can we poor creatures help you, lord?”
“You are the news I bear,” said Brannock.
“What?”
“I have no time to explain—if I could. The hunters may find me at any instant. But maybe, maybe you could go on for me after they do.”
“Escaping what overpowered you?” Kalava’s laugh rattled. “Well, a man might try.”
“The gamble is desperate. Yet if we win, choose your reward, whatever it may be, and I think you shall have it.”
Ilyandi lowered her head above folded hands. “Enough to have served those who dwell beyond the moon.”
“Humph,” Kalava could not keep from muttering, “if they want to pay for it, why not?” Aloud, almost eagerly, his own head raised into the wind that tossed his whitened mane: “What’d you have us do?”
Brannock’s regard matched his. “I have thought about this. Can one of you come with me? I will carry him, faster than he can go. As for what happens later, we will speak of that along the way.”
The humans stood silent.
“If I but had the woodcraft,” Ilyandi then said. “Ai, but I would! To the stars!”
Kalava shook his head. “No, my lady. You go back with these fellows. Give heart to them at the ship. Make them finish the repairs.” He glanced at Brannock. “How long will this foray take, lord?”
“I can reach the mountaintop in two days and a night,” the other said. “If I am caught and you must go on alone, I think a good man could make the whole distance from here in ten or fifteen days.”
Kalava laughed, more gladly than before. “Courser won’t be seaworthy for quite a bit longer than that. Let’s away.” To Ilyandi: “If I’m not back by the time she’s ready, sail home without me.”
“No—” she faltered.
“Yes. Mourn me not. What a faring!” He paused. “May all be ever well with you, my lady.”
“And with you, forever with you, Kalava,” she answered, not quite steadily, “in this world and afterward, out to the stars.”
IX
From withes and vines torn loose and from strips taken off clothing or sliced from leather belts, Brannock fashioned a sort of carrier for his ally. The man assisted. However excited, he had taken on a matter-of-fact practicality. Brannock, who had also been a sailor, found it weirdly moving to see bowlines and sheet bends grow between deft fingers, amidst all this alienness.
Harnessed to his back, the webwork gave Kalava a seat and something to cling to. Radiation from the nuclear powerplant within Brannock was negligible; it employed quantum-tunneling fusion. He set forth, down the hills and across the valley.
His speed was not very much more than a human could have maintained for a while. If nothing else, the forest impeded him. He did not want to force his way through, leaving an obvious trail. Rather, he parted the brush before him or detoured around the thickest stands. His advantage lay in tirelessness. He could keep going without pause, without need for food, water, or sleep, as long as need be. The heights beyond might prove somewhat trickier. However, Mount Mindhome did not reach above timberline on this oven of an Earth, although growth became more sparse and dry with altitude. Roots should keep most slopes firm, and he would not encounter snow or ice.
Alien, yes. Brannock remembered cedar, spruce, a lake where caribou grazed turf strewn with salmonberries and the wind streamed fresh, driving white clouds over a sky utterly blue. Here every tree, bush, blossom, flitting insect was foreign; grass itself no longer grew, unless it was ancestral to the thick-lobed carpeting of glades; the winged creatures aloft were not birds, and what beast cries he heard were in no tongue known to him.
Wayfarer’s avatar walked on. Darkness fell. After a while, rain roared on the roof of leaves overhead. Such drops as got through to strike him were big and warm. Attuned to both the magnetic field and the rotation of the planet, his directional sense held him on course while an inertial integrator clocked off the kilometers he left behind.
The more the better. Gaia’s mobile sensors were bound to spy on the expedition from Ulonai, as new and potentially troublesome a factor as it represented. Covertly watching, listening with amplification, Brannock had learned of the party lately gone upstream and hurried to intercept it—less likely to be spotted soon. He supposed she would have kept continuous watch on the camp and that a tiny robot or two would have followed Kalava, had not Wayfarer been in rapport with her. Alpha’s emissary might too readily become aware that her attentipn was on something near and urgent, and wonder what.
She could, though, let unseen agents go by from time to time and flash their observations to a peripheral part of her. It would be incredible luck if one of them did not, at some point, hear the crew
