Read They Fly at Ciron for Free Online Page B

edge, disoriented at the incredible sound.
    Qualt had his own house, but slept outside that night with his back against his wagon’s wheel, because the weather was warm and the night was easy.
    We won’t say that, as he lay there, breathing across his large, loose fingers, relaxed before his face, he was actually dreaming of Rimgia. But when, earlier that night, he’d first lain down on this blanket to stretch out beside his garbage wagon, certainly he’d been thinking of her.
    For recently sleep had become an entrance into that part of him that was becoming aware that the shape and limit of his tenderness toward her could only be learned from the thought of her hand in his hands, his face against her belly, her lap against his cheek, his mouth against her neck. Sowhen, later, the noise came, sirening in the dark, it tore him out of something comforting as a good dream—yet without sound or image or idea to it, as dreams have.
    Qualt woke, the sound around his head a solid thing. He rocked back, buttock banging the cart wheel. His hand went off the blanket, into grass and gravel. Scrabbling to sit, then to stand,he looked around the darkness. Gauzy light was cut off sharply by the familiar roof of his shack and two trees, rendered wholly strange. He took five steps, stopped—
    Then something ahead of him and above darkened the light, the sky—where was it? And how huge was it, and what—but before he could ask what it was, it struck him. Hard. And he threw his arms around it, embracing it to keep from falling. And, with it, he fell. It was flapping and huge, smelled and moved like a live thing, and was—as he pushed one hand out—surrounded on both sides by a vast, taut membrane, that suddenly ceased to be taut as he struggled in it. Flailing on the ground, in the dark and that single-note scream filling every crevice of the night (but which came neither from him nor from whatever he struggled with), Qualt had two simultaneous impressions. First was that he’d stumbled into someone else, the two of them had fallen on the ground, and now were rolling together. The second was that some astonishing beast, with a pelt and an animal scent, was covering him like a puma leapt down at him from a roof or the sky, to fight with him there by his garbage cart—though so far, Qualt realized, he’d been neither bitten nor clawed.
    Then the sound stopped—the chattering of twigs and leaves and small stones, because of his ears’ ringing, seemed to Qualt to make their noise now not beneath the two of them, but rather off in some ringing metal pan.
    The arms of the thing he fought—for it had arms—suddenly seized him—held him; restrained him. Qualt grasped it back. Distantly, he heard a breathing that, for a moment, he could not tell whether it was his or this other’s. Then he felt himself go limp, because suddenly that was easier to do than to keep fighting in theblack. Then, a voice that was not like any Qualt had ever heard before, because it seemed like a child’s, high and breathy, said into his ear, only inches away, at the same time as Qualt scented the breath of a man who had been eating wild onions, so that, if anything, Qualt suddenly felt something familiar in all this strangeness and struggle—because Qualt himself had often walked through the lower mountains, munching the wild onion stalks that grew there:
    “Hi-Vator, yes—No! Pwew! Çiron, you—?”
    Rimgia dreamed that somebody, laughing hysterically, thrust a pole into her ear and out the other side of her head, then lifted her by it high into the air, over the glittering stream and she was afraid she would fall in, only it really hurt to have a pole that deep in your ear—
    The pole cracked. She screamed. But before she could fall, she woke in the hut, to that incredible sound. Her father, Kern, was already striding about—she saw his shape pass darkly before the hearth embers. Pushing up quickly, a moment later she knelt at Abrid’s pallet,