Sheri Tepper - Grass

“Never mind,” he said in frustration. “Take a few sensible clothes for Marjorie and Stella, their jewelry and treasures, and leave it at that.”

And perhaps it was all mere supposition, mere paranoia. Perhaps the Hippae would do nothing to Opal Hill at all. Perhaps the village would be safe.

And perhaps not. In panic he went back to the tell-me. “Roald Few has borrowed four cargo trucks from the port,” his father said. “They’re on their way. He agrees on the importance of saving the livestock.”

Well then, it was not merely his own fear. Or, if it was, he had been successful in spreading it about. He scurried through the place to Marjorie’s study, intent upon saving anything there that she might ever want again. He came face to face with the panels he had carved for her, a lady moving among the trees of a copse, sometimes clearly seen, sometimes hidden, her lovely face always slightly turned away. Like a dream, just out of reach. There were birds in the trees. He reached out to touch one of them, stroke one of them, wondering foolishly if there were time to cut the panels out and save them. He broke away with an exclamation. No time.

When he had gathered together what he could, he picked up Sebastian and those who were ready and drove the aircar directly to the hospital near the Port Hotel. The doctors carried Rigo away; Andrea, her sister, and Father Sandoval went to the port hotel.

Asmir was there. “Where’s Eugenie?” Persun asked.

“I don’t know. Wasn’t she with you?” Asmir asked in return.

“This morning she wanted to come in to Commons.”

“She told me she’d changed her mind. I just came to pick up some supplies.”

Persun counted his passengers on his fingers and ran to ask them where Eugenie was. No one knew. He flew back to Opal Hill, anxious to use all the daylit hours. In the village the trucks were loading: people, livestock, necessary equipment. Another truck landed as he stood there. Sebastian was driving it.

“I can’t find Eugenie,” Persun yelled at him.

“His Excellency’s woman? Isn’t she in Commons? Didn’t she go in with Asmir?”

“She didn’t, Sebastian. She changed her mind.”

“Ask Linea, over there. She took care of Eugenie.”

Persun chased the indicated woman and asked. Linea didn’t know. She hadn’t seen Eugenie since early this morning. She thought Eugenie must be in her own house, or perhaps in the garden.

Persun ran back up the trail to the estancia, to Eugenie’s house, cursing under his breath. She wasn’t there. Soft pink curtains blew in the spring wind. The house smelled of flowers Persun Pollut had never seen. The woman wasn’t there. He went out into the grass garden and searched for her, down this path and that, the mild spring airs moving above him and around him, the perfumes of the fragrant grasses like a drug in his nostrils.

He called, “Eugenie?” It did not seem a dignified thing to do, to walk about the gardens calling her by her first name, but he knew no other name to call her. It was what everyone called her. “Eugenie!”

From the village the trucks rose with a roar of engines. He went there once more, plodding. A few remaining people. A few remaining pigs, chickens, a lonely cow lowing at the sky. The sun, down in the west, burning its hot eye into his own.

“Are they coming back?” he asked. “The trucks?”

“You don’t think we planned to stay here with everyone gone, did you?” an old woman snapped at him. “What happened? No one seems to know, except that the Hippae are coming to slaughter us all in our beds.”

Persun didn’t answer. He was already on his way back to the house to try one last time, He went through the big house, room by room. She wasn’t there. To her own house again. She wasn’t there.

He did not think to go to the chapel. Why would he? The people of Commons had scant use for chapels. Some of them claimed religions, but they were not of edificial kinds.

He went out to the car, offered the old woman a seat in it, loaded her crate of chickens aboard, and took off once more, flying low as he cross-hatched the grass gardens, looking for Eugenie. Once at commons, he searched for her again, thinking perhaps she had been in one of the trucks.

Darkness came. “I have to go back,” he cried to Sebastian, who had just returned from a final trip. “She has to be still out there.”

“I’ll go with you,” the other said. “I’ve got everyone unloaded. They’re all getting settled down in winter quarters.”

“Have you heard any news of His Excellency?” Sebastian shook his head. “No one’s had time to ask. How was he hurt?”

“His legs were trampled. And he was struck on the head. He was breathing well, but he didn’t move his legs at all. I think he may be paralyzed.”

“They can fix that kind of injury.”

“Some kinds they can fix.” They lofted the car once more and headed it away from Commons toward Opal Hill. They had not gone far before they saw the fire, wings and curtains of fire, sweeping across the grasses and towering above the estancia.

“Ah, well then,” murmured Persun. “So I was not a hysteric after all. Father said I might be.”

“Are you glad of that?” Sebastian asked curiously, turning the car in a long curve so that he could look down on the blaze. “Or would you rather have been called a hysteric and Opal Hill still be whole? I saw the panels you carved in the lady’s study. They were the best things I have seen in a long time. No, the best I have ever seen.”

“I still have my hands,” Persun said, looking at them, turning them over, thinking what might have happened to them if he hadn’t been skittish as any old woman. “I can carve more.” If Marjorie was safe, he could carve more. If they were for her.

“I thought the gardens were supposed to stop the fires.”

“They do. Unless the fires are set and dragged through the gardens and carried into the buildings. As these were, Sebastian. As these were.” He peered down at the ruin, biting back an exclamation. “Look! Sebastian. Look at the trail!”

Away from Opal Hill, toward the swamp forest, straight as an arrow, a trail trampled into the grasses as though ten thousand Hippae had marched there in files. The two looked at one another in horrified surmise.

“Do you suppose she’s down there?” Sebastian whispered.

Persun nodded. “Yes. She is. Was. Somewhere.”

“Shall we—”

“No. See there, in the flames. Hippae. There must be hundreds of them. Some dancing near the flames. Some going down that great trail. How many of them did it take to make that trail? And hounds, too. Every hound on Grass must be down there, all moving toward Commons. No. No, we can’t go down. We’ll come back tomorrow. When the fire burns out, we’ll look. Maybe she got into the winter quarters. I hope she doesn’t burn.”

Eugenie didn’t burn. The hounds that had swept through the place ahead of the flames had seen to that.

Commons was in a considerable uproar, busy with speculation and rumor. The housing of a hundred or so people was no great thing. The winter quarters were large enough to hold the entire population of Commons plus those of the villages, and only the very young among them found these underground halls and rooms at all new and frightening. The caverns had been here when men first came, but they had been enlarged and fitted out for human occupancy, and everyone over one Grassian year of age knew them well. The evacuated animals went into the winter barns. Though this year’s cutting of hay had not begun, there was enough of last year’s hay and grain to keep them. Feeding the people was no great thing either. They began using the winter kitchens with the ease of long practice.