Harry Turtledove: A World of Difference

Fralk was leaning a little himself. He noticed and recovered. At last he said, “This once, the tales are less than truth. I have never seen anything like that.”

“Neither had I when I came across it, nor have I since,” Reatur said, and meant it. He looked at the strange thing almost every day, and it still made no sense to him. With all those sharp angles-more than on any eighteen things he usually came across-it did not seem as though it had any right to exist. Yet there it was.

“How did you find it?” Fralk asked.

The domain master had told the tale many times. Somehow, though, maybe because Fralk was a male who displayed extraordinarily good manners, it came out fresher than it had in years. “I was out hunting nosver.”

“I’ve heard of them,” Fralk said. “We don’t have them in the Skarmer domains.”

“You’re lucky. They’re dreadful pests. By the tracks, a male and his whole band of mates had come down to raid the fields. I trailed them back to the low hills east of the castle. That summer was so hot that when I felt dry, I couldn’t find any ice or snow to pick up and put in my mouth. I had to lie down fiat and dip my head in a puddle of water.”

“Annoying,” Fralk said sympathetically. “That always makes my gut itch.”

“Mine, too. Miserable stuff, water. The nosver, curse ‘em, like it, you know. They splashed along a stream coming off a tongue of ice till I couldn’t smell ‘em anymore, and I wasn’t having any luck finding their prints on the far side, either. You can imagine how happy I was.”

“I don’t blame you a bit,” Fralk said. He really was a fine fellow, Reatur thought.

The domain master went on. “So there I was, grouchy as all get out and with the start of some really fierce indigestion. I came round a boulder and almost bumped right into-that.” He pointed at the strange thing. “I looked at it, and looked at it. And then it moved.”

“It did what?” Fralk said, startled.

“Moved,” Reatur insisted. “An arm came out of its bottom and stuck itself into the ground. I tell you, I almost voided where I stood-I daresay the damned water I’d drunk had something to do with that, too. I never imagined the strange thing could be alive. I didn’t stop to think. I just took a whack at it with the stave I was carrying.”

“I would have done the same thing,” Fralk said. “Or else run.”

“I hit it over and over. What a racket it made! It was hard, harder than anything alive has any right to be. Feel for yourself if you like-it’s like midwinter ice, or even stone. It didn’t fight back, and all I can say is that I’m glad. I only quit hitting it when pieces came off. If it wasn’t dead then, it never would be.”

“Has it moved since?” Fralk asked.

“No; I guess I did kill it. My sons and grandsons and I spent days hauling it back here to the castle.”

“What a job that was,” Ternat said, whistling with remembered strain.

“Yes,” Reatur agreed. “It made me wonder all over again how the strange thing could ever have been alive. It’s as heavy as stone, and as hard to get from place to place. But it did move by itself.”

Fralk turned an extra couple of eyestalks on it again. “You could tell me it sang songs and I would not argue with you. It might do anything; it might do nothing.”

“It’s done nothing since it’s been here,” Ternat said.

“Well, not quite,” Reatur said. “Most travelers I charge food or tools to see it. Over the years, now that I think, it’s earned me a tidy sum.”

“That I do believe,” Fralk said. “It’s worth traveling a long way to see.”

A well-spoken young male indeed, Reatur thought. “Guest with me tonight,” he said expansively. “My ice is yours.”

“I thank you,” Fralk said. Then he proceeded to wreck the fine impression he had made, for he took the old proverb literally. He reached out a couple of arms, used his fingerclaws to scrape a good handful of ice from the wall, and put it in his mouth. “Very nice,” he said.

Reatur saw Ternat turn yellow with anger. The domain master glanced down at himself. He was the same color, and no wonder. “Envoy of the Skarmer domains, you forget yourself,” he said. His voice was stiff as glacier ice in midwinter.

“No, domain master, I do not. For this I was sent here.” Fralk took more ice and put it in his mouth as’ calmly as if he were munching it from the walls of his own castle. Suddenly, his politeness seemed something he had assumed at will, not native to him.

“This is insolence,” Reatur said. “Why should I not send you back to your clanfather without the arms you have used to prove it?”

Fralk spun round in a circle. “Which arms are those?” he asked when he stopped. Yes, he was mocking Reatur. “Any two will do,” the domain master growled.

He had to give Fralk reluctant credit; the Skarmer envoy went neither blue from fear nor an angry yellow. “You would be unwise to take them,” Fralk said. He was the very odor of good manners again. Reatur, whose moods ran fast and deep, began to see why this young male had been chosen ambassador. Like smooth ice reflecting the sun and hiding whatever lay beneath, he did his clanfather’s bidding without revealing himself in the process.

“We come down to it, then,” Reatur said, still trying to provoke a reaction from him. “Why should I not?”

“Because I aim to inherit this domain from you,” Fralk said.

“That is why I treated it as my home to be.”

The chamber with the strange thing had no weapons in it. Reatur knew that. His encircling eyes glanced around it anyway, just in case. One of the things he saw was Ternat’s eyestalks twisting in a similar search. Another was that Fralk had turned blue. He was afraid now.

If he had been standing on Fralk’s claws, Reatur would have been more than afraid. “Shall I think you have gone mad, and set you free on that account?” he said. “I could almost believe it. Why else would you speak so, in the presence of a domain master and his eldest?”

Fralk slowly regained his greenish tint. “Because, the domains that come from the first bud of Skarmer grow straitened in their lands. Just as mates must bud, Skarmer must grow.”

“How?” Reatur thought about what he knew of the lay of the land west of the Ervis Gorge: not much. But one piece of knowledge came to him. “Are not all the domains in the west Skarmer, all the way to the next Great Gorge?”

“They are,” Fralk said. “We will be coming to the east, across the Ervis Gorge.”

“He lies!” Ternat exclaimed. “What will the Skarmer domains do, send one male at a time across the rope bridge? Let them. After we have slain the first warrior, and the second, and if need be the third, they will grow bored with dying and all will be as it has been before.”

“We will be coming,” Fralk said. “We will be coming in force. I do not think you will stop us. You may reckon me witstruck, but a year from now the mastery of these lands will be walking on its eyestalks, of that I assure you.”

“Suppose for the sake of talk you are not witstruck,” Reatur said slowly. “Why come to me to announce what you intend? Why not simply fall on me one night when none of the moons is in the sky?”

“Because your domain lies at the eastern edge of the Ervis Gorge,” Fralk said. “We would have you aid us, if you will. We know you have no great love for either of your neighbors.”

“You know that, do you?” As a matter of fact, Reatur thought, Fralk had a point. As far as he was concerned, Dordal was an idiot and Grebur a maniac, and both of them disgraces to the name of domain master. Still-“Why should I like your clanfather Hogram better, or any other Skarmer? Why do you have the arrogance to claim my domain will be your own? I have an eldest, and he an eldest after him. This domain is ours, and has belonged to great clan Omalo since the first bud. Should I tamely yield it to males sprung from a different bud?”