Free Fire Time by Poul Anderson Page A

were pleased to give him that hospitality, in the hope of strong children born into their houses. Above the fame and power he had won, there was himself, huge, soft-footed, eyes as vividly green in the black face as teeth were white, the worst of the wounds he had gotten in a gale-driven life all healed without a scar.
    What he did say, gravely, was: ‘Aye, some are raiding at sea, some bear my messages across land. But most are at home doing their work, by my orders. I never forget how thin an edge we must live on till we’ve won new homes in better countries. Even a victory like today’s means less than the garnering of what food and goods we can.’
    ‘Ng-ng-ng … you speak like a Gathering dweller,’ Kusarat murmured.
    ‘Which I have been. Since then I’ve dealt with them here in Valennen, watched them, listened to them, always trying to learn. Why do you suppose they wield power across the whole known world? Aye, they’ve more skills than us, their heartland is more wealthy and populous than ours, true, true. But mainly, I do believe, mainly they have this habit of thinking ahead.’
    ‘You’d make us into their image?’ Kusarat asked warily.
    ‘As far as we can gain thereby, and are able,’ Arnanak said.
    Kusarat regarded him for a silent while, by the flicker of spitting, shadow-weaving flames, before he replied: ‘And yet you deal with the dauri … who knows with what witchcraft?’
    ‘That question is often shot at me,’ Arnanak said. ‘The best answer I can give is the truth.’
    Kusarat erected his ears and switched tail against flank. ‘I listen.’
    ‘I first met them,
kyai-ai,
maybe two hundred years ago when I was a youth, hardly out of cubhood, and the world not troubled by the Torchbearer. Already then its brightness cast shadows by night, and we knew it was on the way back to us. But the young do not fear a distant tomorrow and the old have no reason to. We lived well in those days – do you remember?
    ‘My parents dwelt in Evisakuk, where Mekusak was Overling. My father was a full freeholder and had given no oath. Their house lay in the woods on Mount Fang, without close neighbors. Nevertheless my parents thought Mekusak must have sired me, an eventide when he chanced by and got shelter from them. For I grew to be like him in size and short temper and hating to scratch the soil. We kept a niggard plot where we raised a few herbs. Mainly my father and we lads were hunters. When sent out alone, I often stayed away for days on end, and afterward lied about having had along chase. They doubted me, since they had seen what I could do when we fared together. Thus year by year I grew more estranged, and chafed more.
    ‘Then once by myself, on the western side of the mountain and high enough that I could see a gleam where the ocean was, I found a daur. I had glimpsed a few dauri before, though barely. They came to our parts less seldom than to most of South Valennen. Maybe it was because here was wilderness, thinly peopled by mortals; maybe because here were more of the plants they live on though we cannot; maybe they had a land-magic to work here. Who knows? I don’t, not to this day.
    ‘But there the small uncanny thing was, trapped beneath a tree which had blown over in a storm the night before. Its arms and legs moved feebly, in ripples under a skin which, at hot noontide, had gone from purple to white. The petals on the branch – the branch where a head should have grown – the petals clenched and unclenched, as if they gasped, and the tendrils below them writhed. From the belly three eyes stared, dark as holes. But the hole itself had been punched by a sharp-ended bough; thin ichor trickled out.
    ‘For a two-pulse beat I wanted to flee, and for another I wanted to stay. However, I held fast. And a thought came to me: We fear them, and sometimes set out offerings, because they are unknown to us. Not because they are evil; there are few stories about their doing harm, which may all