Free They Fly at Ciron by Samuel R. Delany

of your mouth. My people have keen …” followed by a word that probably meant “hearing,” for the great veined leaves of Vortcir’s ears flicked forward, then back.
    Rahm looked out at the leaves beyond the cave mouth. “Let us wash this blood from ourselves.” His own voice was hoarse. “Is there a stream?”
    “You do not hear where the water is, right up there…?” Vortcir’s wing tip bent down in what first seemed a wholly awkward manner—till Rahm realized he was pointing with it.
    Rahm frowned.
    “Let us go wash.” Vortcir grinned. “And you may tell me what it is that hurts you so deeply.”
    They left the cave. Rahm moved over the rocks with long strides. Vortcir traveled in short-legged jumps, his wings fanning now and again for balance.
    “Vortcir,” Rahm said, as they walked, “my people go naked on the ground. Thy… people go naked in the air.
    Both are easy with the land about them. We fight with our hands and our feet—and then only what attacks. We love our own kind and are at peace with what lies about us. But… this is not true of all creatures…” In a low, quick voice, Rahm began to tell what he had seen happen in the streets of his village last night. As the tale went on, it finally seemed, even to him, simply outrage strung after outrage—so that at last he stopped.
    Rahm looked at Vortcir. His amber eyes seemed somesubstance once molten that had recently set to a shocking hardness.
    “… But what fills me with terror, Vortcir, is that the evil now is in me—too. I am filled with it. Yesterday morning, I killed a lion. This morning I killed the cave creature. And both of them were a kind of sport. But last night, Vortcir, I killed a man—a man like myself; a man as thou. I held his neck in my hands; and I squeezed, and I twisted it till…” As they reached the mountain stream, Rahm stopped. He squatted by the water, let one knee go forward into the mud. “I am not who I was, Vortcir.” As he began to wash, around his arms water darkened; not all the blood was from the fight in the cave. “Who I have become frightens me. I think perhaps I can not, or I should not, go back to my village.”
    Vortcir stepped into the water and squatted in it. One wing unfolded, began to beat against the water and wave about on it. “Why so?”
    Rahm turned his face from the spray and spatter of the Winged One’s washing—and grinned. The grin was at the splashing, not the thought. Still, it felt good to grin again. Rahm said: “Because if I would go down again, Vortcir, I would do the same to the neck of every blade-wielding soldier, of every black-cloaked officer still in the village of Çiron!” Behind his hard, hard eyes, Rahm was wondering what it meant to say what he said as seriously as he said it and still to grin as he was grinning.
    But it felt good—even as it gave him chills.
    Vortcir brushed drops from his face with his shoulder. “I hear you well, Rahm. Your people are good folk—we even watch you, time to time.” Vortcir gave a quick laugh. “Perhaps yours are a finer people than myown. We strive for peace. But sometimes we do not achieve it. We Winged Ones, as you call us—sometimes we kill each other. We know this is wrong. When one of our number kills another, we catch him and mete out punishment.” He shrugged, an immense, sailed shrug. “It does not happen often.” Vortcir turned and splashed about with his other wing.
    Rahm picked up a handful of wet sand and used it to scrub at his arm, at his shoulder. When blood came away from the cut he’d received last night, it stung. He looked at squat Vortcir—who stood, feet wide in the rushing foam. Both wings opened now, Vortcir raised his head. He began to mew.
    Rahm looked up.
    Suddenly and excitedly, Vortcir called: “My aunt nears!” Then, at once, he leapt. Twigs and water drops flew about. Rahm closed his eyes against the rush of leaves and dirt.
    When he opened them, Vortcir was clearing the broken