C. Cherryh: Cuckoo's Egg

"You've left me with no choice. They fired on you."

"Did they? I don't remember that."

"They called the magistrate. They confessed. They know what they did."

"So." Duun walked away toward the closed door. The medicinal smells offended his nostrils. His ears lay down. He limped. Every muscle he owned was strained. Ellud wore his city clothes, immaculate. Duun wore nothing but a small-kilt. And let the scars show. He might have worn the hatani cloak. He had left it hanging. "I'll talk to them, Ellud. No charges."

"They can't do a thing like that and get away with it-"

"Because I'm sacrosanct?" Duun turned back to him, ears flat. "You promised me anything, Ellud. I'm asking you. No charges. Deed Sheon back to them."

"They tried to kill you!"

"They damn near did. Good for them. They're not bad, for farmers. Do I have to take this on my shoulders too?"

Ellud was silent a moment. His mouth drew down.

"So you get what ought to make you happy," Duun said. "I'm coming in. I trust you'll find a place."

More long silence. "It's about time. It's about time, Duun. I'll have a copter up here. Lift you out."

"He'll walk down," Duun said. "Day after tomorrow. He'll be fit."

"Past them? Gods, hasn't there been enough trouble?"

"He's hatani, Ellud." Duun met the darkness in Ellud's stare and matched it. "Understand that. He'll walk out on his own."

Thorn gained his feet after the meds left. Duun thought he would. "Sit down," Duun said, sitting himself, on one of the risers that rimmed the room. The floor sand was trampled, dotted with darkness. Thorn had bled on it, amply. Thorn hung now in the doorway with his arm slung in a cord about his neck; his skin had an ugly waxen color, excepting the arm, where blood-reddened gels plastered an incision. There would be a scar. A long one. It had missed a major nerve; so the meds said. The bone was chipped but not broken. "You've got a lot of plasm in you for blood, boy. Left most you owned down in that valley. Come sit down."

Thorn came. Duun was polishing his weapons. Thorn sank down on the riser on his knees and sat down carefully, one leg off. There was sweat on his hairless brow. His hair clung to it.

"We're going," Duun said, "to the city. We'll live there now."

"Leave here-"

Duun looked up at him. Sheon was lost. Twice now. There was darkness in his stare; and Thorn stared back at him with alien, clouded eyes, with thoughts going on, and dread. (Why did they shoot, Duun? Is this revenge? Is this against me? Was I wrong, Duun? What did I do, down there?)

"I don't want to go, Duun."

"They'll come later and gather up the things we'll want. These-" Duun polished the blade. "These we take."

"I don't want to go."

"I know that." Duun looked at him. Tears shimmered in Thorn's eyes. "The countryfolk get the land. It'll belong to them now. It'll pay, maybe, for what I had to do. Do you understand me, Thorn? Haras? Do you hear?"

"Yes, Duun-hatani."

"We'll fly out of here. We'll go to a place where the wind stinks and you won't understand a thing you see. You'll ask me your questions in private. There'll be people around us. Always. No more hunting. No more woods. Just steel. Just thousands and thousands of people. A lot of shonun like that life. You'll learn to."

Thorn bowed his head onto his arm, against his knee. Duun was aware of him. Duun looked only at the blade, gently polished the razor steel in small strokes of an oiled cloth. Oil-smell and steel. Steel and oil. His half-hand held the cloth, the whole left hand held the blade.

"Give it away, Thorn. You're hatani. Hatani own nothing. Only the weapons, the cloak on your back. This time it's only a place you lose. When you're what you will be, you'll own nothing at all. I only used this place. You and I. It was a stage. It's gone now."

Thorn's face lifted. He had smeared his face with wiping it. His lashes were wet. "I'm sorry, Duun."

Duun's hands stopped in a long silence. Then he took up the motion again. "You lost a year, perhaps. A year here. Maybe two. Then we'd have gone, all the same. It's not much, two years. Your eyes are running. Do that tomorrow and I'll beat you. Do you hear?"

"Yes," Thorn said.

They started in the dawn: they walked slowly on the winding track and there was no anger evident in Duun. "Joiit," Duun said once, naming a birdsong. Thorn thought then that in the people-teeming place Duun described to him there could be no birds; and the sound from the woods made his heart ache. The very wind in the leaves did that. The silken feel of the dust under his sore feet. His arm ached as he walked. His head was light. They had closed up the house and walked out of the yard. And once Duun had looked back and Thorn did, just when the house was going out of view. It looked no different than it ever had when they left it in their hunting. The light was the same on the brown stone walls, with the hiyi growing here and there in lavender-edged green; all of it was from this distance, in the morning, stained and tinted like the earth. It was like every morning. The house appeared to wait for them. Would go on waiting, through the days. Someone would come, Duun said, to strip the rooms. The countryfolk would come and take it back. The children would explore the rooms, play tag in the yard-

– hunt in the woods. They would know the old tree that was good to lie on in the sun; the hollow rock that overlooked the little pond back in the hills; they would know the tracks and trails where Duun had led him-

Thorn shed no tears. When his heart hurt that much he looked away at the sky, the road, he said something, no matter what, he clenched the fingers of his wounded arm, which made it ache and took his mind away.

He did that when the bird sang. And when the wind blew in the leaves that way; and when he realized he could smell things even scent-blind as he was, like dust, and grass, and the rough-raw scent of lugh-flowers, which was strong when one bruised them, when Thorn-the-child pulled off their heads and found his hands all sticky with sap, all one flavor with the sunlight and the giddy golden blooms-

Everything came flooding in. Sights afflicted him with farewells, all along the road. And Duun was silent for the most part. (Duun was young here too. He knew the old tree, the stone-the paths-he showed them to me. I took them from him. Duun!)

The trees spread away from the road in a purpling-green flood of treetops. Beyond them the valley fell away where countryfolk lived, a pale haze of land beyond that, flat as flat: and vast sky, delirious blued violet, and streamers of cloud like pond-ice, high, high above the plain, going off into milky white.

Terror afflicted Thorn. The sky was all too large beyond the mountain. To fly, Duun said. There were machines; Duun had mentioned them. Now and again when the meds came he had seen one far away, before it went out of sight behind the mountain. Sometimes there were white trails in the sky: planes, Duun said. People fly in them.

(Where, Duun? Where do they go? Why do they go? Can they see us?" Thorn-the-child had waved at such planes, standing dizzily atop the tallest rock he could climb: "Here I am, here, here!")

(Notice me. Give me a sign you see. Here I am, are you like me? Do you see other children where you go? Have they skins like mine? And eyes like mine? And have they five fingers too?)

(Thousands and thousands of shonun in the city. Will there be some like me?)

The road wound down and down, among the trees and out of them. Far away was a sound the wind never made, that grew: machine-sound, thumping in ominous accents that always spoke of meds.

"They're coming in," Duun said. "They'll be early. Waiting for us."

The strangers came up the road to meet them. Not the meds, but others, dressed from neck to foot in blue and gray. Wearing weapons. Thorn hesitated when he saw them, but Duun kept walking, so he knew they were acceptable. "You didn't need to," Duun told them when they met. "We have orders," one of them said; that was all. Thorn stood still in the encounter at a turning of the road. They looked at him, these strangers, and they looked away, as if he had no importance, being only an appendage, Duun's. And the blue-clad folk led off, walking down again, with one of them behind them, another by Duun's side.