Гарри Тертлдав - The Enchanter Completed

“To him!” Aedra shouted. “To my lover! He’ll save you!”

If an ellil alone lacked common sense, together they had the unity of bees. Or maybe her sympathy with them went deeper than he knew. They heard. Somehow, they understood. Even those who were escaping circled to rejoin the swarm. It aimed itself at Ferain and englobed him in light. The lupask came after.

He swung the cutlass. It bit into a wing. Iron seared through Halfworld scales, flesh, bone. Smoke puffed. The lupask yammered, a noise that pierced. Crippled, it fell to earth.

There it writhed into a new shape. A huge lizard crawled against Ferain. Its gape was as wide and sharp as ever. It hissed geyser-loudly.

His weapon hewed.

Sprawled dead, the lupask slowly fumed away. Morning sun would dissolve its skeleton and strew the vapor into the wind. By then the smell should be gone. Meanwhile the moon spread an argent peace.

“Dearest, dearest, dearest!” Aedra toppled into Ferain’s arms.

The impact nearly dumped him onto his aching rear. The battle had left him weak and chilled. His breath shuddered raw. His sweat stank worse than the carcass.

He kept stance, though, and then it was as if warmth and strength poured from her into him. “There, there,” he mumbled, ruffling her hair. “Everything’s well.” Idiotically: “D’you want to start your gramarie afresh?”

Tears glistened on the face she raised to his. “No need,” she gasped. “I’ll be with you wh-wherever you go.” A kind of laughter coughed. “Try to stop me!”

The kiss went on for a while. The ellils flocked back. They danced and chimed approvingly under the moon.

Lucidity lurched into the humans. Aedra laid her head on Ferain’s breast. “I, I fear the lupask caught scent of my magic from afar and sped hither,” she mourned.

“I’d say likelier he winded this many ellils gathered in one place,” he replied. “They should have known better. Well, they’re no intellects, are they?” He glanced at the joy surrounding them. “Grieve not for those lost. They’re not doing so.”

Brief lives at best, he’d heard tell; plentiful offspring to make up for that; natures sprightly but shallow.

Also nevertheless, Rani and Trillia showed anxiety as they drew nigh and hovered. “You saved us,” sang the female. “Broad is the range you’ve freed from fear.”

“And yet the lupasks will return,” worried the male. “Again we’ll fly in dread of them.”

“You will be here to ward us, won’t you?” warbled Trillia.

“I’m sorry, nay,” Aedra answered. “My man and I shall shortly fare off to the New Lands overseas. Refrain from large assemblies, and I can pray you be safe in this neighborhood, at least.”

“It’s so narrow,” complained Trillia.

Rani’s wings quivered. “We’re beings of the air. Roaming means as much as life.”

“Sad am I for you, then,” Aedra sighed. “I can only wish you well—” She tautened. She stepped back from Ferain. It was as if the moonlight blazed in her eyes.

“The New Lands,” she breathed. “Refuge, boundlessness.”

The ellils captured her thought at once. She had talked in this forest about the discoveries yonder. A nightingale chorus burst from them. They soared, swooped, zigzagged, radiance alive. “Oh, aye, oh, aye,” they sang. “Take us with you. We’ll love you forever.”

“I, I know not,” Ferain stammered, astonished. “What’d you do there?”

Trillia laughed, darting before his eyes. “What we’ve always done. Dear Aedra will vouch for us. We live on blossoms and nectar, a nibble of fruit in season, nuts and seeds through the winter. We are love, we are loveliness. Take us with you!” Flying, she opened her arms to him. Her bosom was unutterably shapely.

“Oh, do,” Aedra whispered. “I’d miss them so.”

How could he refuse? “We can’t carry them all—”

“Of course not. Nor should we deprive the motherland of them. A few score. To delight us, our children, our grandchildren in our new homes.”

It would be a nuisance, he thought. Not that they’d require more than a bushel or two of whatever nourished them. But he’d have to dampen superstitious fears in his crew when they flickered like corposants on spars and rigging. No doubt he, or at any rate Aedra, would have to nurse them through storm and salt, and afterward help them get established.

Yet his darling desired it.

Arvel Tarabine blew smoke at the Faerie dancers. “Thus it was,” he ended. “The intent was good. The outcome, though—you see.”

“I’m not sure,” said Olavir. “Everything here’s strange to me. Would you explain?”

“That’s easily done. Too easily. What nobody understood was that in the Old Lands, the lupasks keep the ellils down.

“Here nothing preys on them. They breed. And breed. And breed.

“We learned too late how fond they are of asphodel blooms. Killed that pasturage entirely. The werrows died off or departed, and the streams were clear for the buhas. Those destroyed the nuukai. You’ve heard what else they do.

“The ellils also go after apple blossoms. Our orchards don’t bear. And clover blossoms. We produce no more honey. Feed for our livestock is leaner than aforetime.

“In Baray they’re crowding the quetwa—native Halfworld creatures, which themselves terrify mosquitoes—out of existence. Northward in Ouranique, the fur trade suffers because the ellils find too many nuts and seeds; squirrels decline, which means fox do. Meanwhile they spread west unchecked. I’ve gotten rumors of maddened wendigos and of Irroan medicine men finding spirit flowers gone scarce.

“Oh, few of us lay blame on Ferain and Aedra,” he added. “Who could have foreknown? They’re doing well enough these days.”

Olavir stared into the gathering night at the luminous merriment. “Can naught be done?” he asked.

Arvel shrugged. “Who’d want to try trapping and conveying lupasks? Nor can we say what might come ofthat .”

He too gazed thence while he drained his goblet. “We must needs live with what is,” he said. “And enjoy them, I suppose. But I miss the nuukai and the werrows.”

He was my senior by only about a quarter of a century, but he always seemed to me like a figure out of another age, an unaccountable twentieth-century survivor of that great band of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century British scholar-explorers who went forth into Asia and Africa to uncover the secrets of antiquity and the mysteries of the world’s remaining unexplored regions. Whenever he entered a room—and you could not fail to notice him, for he was a big man, a formidable figure indeed, strikingly handsome, with flashing eyes, imposing eyebrows, a distinguished close-clipped beard, a stentorian voice, square-shouldered military posture—I could easily imagine myself in the presence of someone who had moved on intimate terms with Richard Burton, who had gone to Mecca in disguise, or Austen Henry Layard, who dug up the ruins of Nineveh, or Henry Rawlinson, who deciphered the indecipherable cuneiform inscriptions of Mesopotamia, or the intrepid Dr. Livingstone, who cast so much light on Africa’s dark interior, or Bruce of the Blue Nile, the formidable explorer of Ethiopia.

They were men who had traveled fearlessly into the darkest corners of the world, often under circumstances of the most extreme discomfort. Who were fluent in Arabic or Persian or Swahili or Amharic or Urdu or Turkish or perhaps all of them, along with French and Latin and Greek, of course. Who could quote at will (in the original, naturally) from Aristophanes or Homer or Petronius Arbiter or Michael Psellos or Firdausi or the Koran, as need arose in the conversation. Who had dined on crocodile meat and ostrich eggs and kookaburra tongues. To me, Sprague was one of that number. I often imagined him to have known them, to have marched with them through wilderness and desert and tropical forest, to have swapped gaudy tales of exploration with them by their campfires. It was hard to understand what he was doing in the midst of a gathering of science fiction writers in some hotel room of the America of the 1950s, when by rights he ought to be off in Baluchistan or the Negev or the outer reaches of the Gobi, seeking answers to questions that to others seemed unanswerable.