Cuckoo's Egg (6 page)

Turned and left then. Running, feet thumping down porch steps.

Duun sipped at his tea and set it down at his knee. Thorn expected a little start. Such things he took for granted.

Duun got up, gathered up his own weapons, and his cloak.

No quarter then.

* * *

Thorn ran, ran, knowing that there was no time. There was no time to rue the attack, no time for any regret, only the running and the land—

("Wind and land, wei-na-ya: wind and land.") ("Scent-blind: but my knee aches when it rains—") 42

Cuckoo's Egg

Turn and turn and turn: a fool's need rules his wit; a wise man's wit governs need.

("A hatani dictates what another's need will be.") Fool, to do what a hatani said to do!

Thorn caught his breath and sprang for the rocks, bare feet doing what claws might do, shaping themselves to stone as Duun's could not, clinging with their softness: bare hands clinging where Duun's hands might not—swinging on a branch that gave a shortcut round the cliffside, dropping to a slant where Duun's feet would skid, where Duun's leg might fail—

The wind, O fool, the wind is at your face; Duun had checked the wind this morning. There was no corner Duun-hatani did not see around before his quarry even saw the turn—

The pebble in the tea—

Upland or downland? Do what Duun said and surprise him with obedience? Or do the opposite?

Run and run: he was quicker than Duun, that was all he was. He had grown up in these hills; and so had Duun. Thorn was more agile. He could take the high slope on his bare feet at greater speed than Duun—

—but Duun knew that.

Wild choice, then. Logic-less. He darted downslope.

Wind in his face, wind carrying his scent; and he had to get around that bend first, around the mountain shoulder.

Duun was at his back. It was not the pain Thorn dreaded, though pain there would be. It was Duun. Duun himself.

* * *

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Cuckoo's Egg

The wind carried scent and Duun breathed it—
fool,
Duun thought, at the edge of the rocks;
but twice a fool is a hunter too secure.
There was the easy temptation— to win at once, to take the rash chance, the wide chance.

But it was hatani he hunted. No more minnow, but fish in dark water.

He smelled the wind and knew Thorn's direction and his distance; he knew the branch of the trail that gave access to the cliff and knew the way Thorn could take that he could not— he knew every track in the hills.

Thorn knew he knew. That was the conundrum: how well he had taught the fish.

And what kind it was, how native-adept, what skill was bred into its bone and blood… what intelligence, what instincts.

Five-fingered hands; a surer grip; a talent at climbing: these it had. It had youth: strong legs, that felt no pain.

It knew— if it used its wits— how a once-maimed shonun had to compensate for these things.

And it would, being hatani, try to predict; try then to seize events and turn them.

It smelled of fear and sweat, even when the wind had cleaned the scent. It stank of something else, a bitter, acrid taint.

* * *

Run and run: it was speed Thorn had first for advantage. It was agility—

Duun's was greatest, hand to hand. But Thorn's was more in distance, in the rocks, in the quick scaling of a tilted tree across a crack—

(Fool! he'll know—)

(But it will cost him time.)

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And Thorn had gotten the mountain between him and Duun, gotten stone between them, to confuse the scent.

But Duun could smell where a hand had been, if he got his nose down to it. So Duun claimed.

(Run, minnow. I'm coming, little fish….)

Downland. The opposite of what Duun had said he ought to do: should he confound the choice? What was there to do that he had never done?

(Gods, his gut, his bowels ached. Fear? The chase? The jolts from rock to rock?)

(Something in the food?)

* * *

Duun tripped the support. The log rolled down the gravel slope. Hastily done. Rife with scent. He spotted the second trap too, the limb drawn back, and drew back his hand in time.

Double-snared.

(Good, fish. Well done, that. But not good enough.) Thorn knelt on hands and knees. He had reached the road and crossed it, leaving tracks; he paused to set a rock up on a twig, on a slope where haste might set a foot, then hurled himself downslope, leaving further tracks, leaving a bit of skin on the stones below.

He miscalculated further, sprawled. His face stung with shame. He gathered himself up again, doubled over a little farther on sweating and resisting the easy support of a tree.

(Touch nothing, leave no trace—)

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Duun would hurt him. That was nothing. It was the look in Duun's gray eyes. The stare. The scorn.

Thorn bent and caught his breath; and wits began to work. He looked up at the slope he had left.

(Take me now, face to face.)

(The walls are down, minnow. What will you do?)

(Did Duun sleep? Could Duun sleep more than he did these last nights in the house?)

Was Duun-hatani lying awake each night— thinking a minnow might try him? Expecting it?

Was Duun as tired as he?

(Fix the breakfast, minnow. Hear?)

Hatani tricks. A hatani decides what his enemy will do.

A pebble in the tea. (Fix the breakfast, minnow.) And what his enemy believes.

Anger came into him. He purged it.

(Wield anger; it has no place, else.)

(Is there a use for fear?)

* * *

Duun stopped, not yet in the open. There was the land below. There were the treetops black and green downslope. There was, beyond the trees, the great flat plain, the river-plain, the valley of the Oun, which watered it, narrow in its folds.

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Cuckoo's Egg

And a sudden bleak thought came to him.

Predictive. His heart doubled its beats. He had chosen the hunter's part. It was that part habitual with him; Thorn seldom turned, only tried to disarm his attacks, to defend— to set snares. It was wise in Thorn (Face to face with me— Thorn challenged, and: no, said Thorn, when I offered him a fight.)

It was constantly the running tactic. The evasion.

(Find me, Duun-hatani. Find me if you can. Find me where I choose.) In a different place, a change of grounds.

Duun dared not run. That was always the pursuer's hazard. Thorn's traps were halfhearted, token; but there was no tokenness in a downslope fall.

Thorn supposed in him a certain degree of care.

And Thorn was quicker. Younger. Sound of wind.

Duun set out quickly. Anger rose in him and died a quick death.

(Well-done, minnow, if this was your plan. I am not ashamed. Not of you.) Duun saw his hazard. And being hatani-trained, perhaps the young fool knew what he did.

Perhaps.

* * *

Thorn ached still. The first cramps had bent him double. (O gods, gods, gods, his guts.) He heaved himself down at a streamside he had never hunted yet, bathed his face. Livhl-root. He knew the herb. He knew others and chewed the leaves, a foul taste, but it stopped the spasms in his bowels. He had left sign. He had made mistakes when the pain drove him.

He chewed the sour leaves he found and swallowed, splashed his face with 47

Cuckoo's Egg

icy water from the spring. His hands were white with the chills that racked him.

Fool, to challenge Duun. To have offered quarter. To have changed the game. Nothing was safe. He flung himself up again and ran down the stream—

—Old trick. Ancient trick, Duun would say. Do something original.

He had no strength left. His knees ached with the struggle with the water and the rocks, his bones ached with the chill: his joints grew loose and ached and strained with the sudden turn of river stones. The cold got into his bones and set him shivering.

(Can one die of livhl?
Was
it livhl?)

His ankle turned; he saved himself from a plunge in icy water, waded to the shore, his arms and the legs under him jerking with shivers like drugged spasms. (O Duun, unfair.)

No quarter. None.

Downhill again.

* * *

The sun went past zenith. The drug had worked. Duun caught the livhl-stink, though Thorn had been wary, and fouled the brook to kill it. It was in his sweat, on the things his hands had touched. He had taken to the stream and followed that— no craft at all to conceal his exit-point. A snare was possible, if Thorn's wits were not addled. Duun went around the place, picked the trail up without difficulty, though water had killed the scent somewhat. (Well-thought, minnow; the brush is thick, the chance for ambush all too great. Am I to follow you into a thrown rock, a deadfall?) (Where's the breaking-point, Thorn? The killing-point? The point you turn?)

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(Or do you fall first? How long, Thorn?)

Duun hastened. His limp betrayed him. There was a pain within his side.

(Old man, old man— they put you back together; you should have let them replace the knee, regrow the hand— now you rue it, late.) He found another way— he guessed which way Thorn must head and guessed amiss.

(So. He learned that lesson all too well. Does he read me? Does he know?

Or is it random choice he tries? Knowledge or fool's choice?) (How old is he in his own terms? Not man yet. Not grown. But near.) (Thorn-that-I-carried.
Haras,
Thorn, that wounds the hand that holds it, the foot that treads it, that tangles paths and bears bitter blooms and poisoned fruit.)

* * *

The shadows multiplied in the sinking sun. Thorn gasped for air, withheld his hands from their instinctive reach after support on trunk and log and stone as he descended the valley. He sighted on a stone and went to it, for his legs wandered. He sighted on the next and followed that. Such little goals led him now.

(Get beyond the pale, get to paths strange to both of us. Duun knows the mountain too well— far too well.)

(Go where Duun would not have me go— make him angry— anger in my enemy is my friend, my friend—)

He smelled smoke. It was far away in the valley, but he went toward it.

(Let Duun worry now. Let him come here to find me. Here among the countryfolk. Here among others. Other people.)

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Cuckoo's Egg

(Run and run. Stop for wind. Let us play this game in and out of strange places, in among stranger-folk who know nothing of the game.)

—There must be food, food for taking with hatani tricks. ("They're herders," Duun had said. "Herder-folk. No, little fish, not hatani, nothing like. They respect us too much to come here. That's all. They lived here once.")

(Where houses are is food, is shelter: he'll have to search, he won't know if they'd lie, these countryfolk, or hide me— Perhaps they would.) There was a trail. There was a stink of habit here even his nose could tell, musty, old dung, the frequent passage of animals.

Thorn jogged up it. Stink to hide his stink. To confound Duun's nose.

Tracks to hide his tracks. Let Duun guess. Thorn gathered speed and coursed along the trail. There was the taste of blood in his mouth.

("—They never bother anything," Duun said of farmer-folk. "They don't ask to be bothered and we don't go there.") ("Couldn't we see them, Duun-hatani? Couldn't we go and see?") Thorn wondered if they were like the meds and Ellud; if there were—

(—O gods, if there were some like me.)

In all the wide world Duun spoke of, there must be more like him.

* * *

It was what Duun had thought. Fool! he cursed himself. Fool! To maneuver the enemy and not to see it— that was the greatest fool in the world. Scent-blind, sick with livhl, Thorn was seeking a hiding-place, seeking some place rife with scents, with smoke, with tracks and confusion. Cover himself in shonun-scent.

Thorn was going to the one place forbidden him. Change the rules. Upset the game.

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Find outsiders and raise it another level still.

(Duun, what's
wrong
with me?)

(
Slick,
the infant said, rubbing at his stomach) Faces in the mirror.

(Duun, will my ears grow?)

Duun laid his own ears back and put on speed, risking everything now, risking shame, that a minnow might trap him.

But Thorn already had.

* * *

There was a house in the twilight— not a large house like theirs up on the mountain, but a ramshackle thing part metal and part wood. There were fences, put together the same way, of bits and pieces.
Fences
— Thorn guessed that word:
fences
, Duun said, kept countryfolk cattle from the woods: and
cattle
Thorn had seen, from high on the mountaintop, white and brown dots moving across the flat in summer-haze. ("City-meat comes from those," Duun told him. And Thorn: "Can't we hunt them?" "There's no hunting them," Duun had said. "They're tame. They're stupid. They stand there to be killed. Staring at you. They trust shonunin.") ("And they
kill
them, Duun?")

White animals huddled in their pens. Lights burned near the house on a tall pole in the twilight. Thorn saw the power lines, that led from there two ways, the house, and off across the land— (The power unit's far away then. Can there be other houses near?) He skirted brush, came up nearer, where he had a closer view of the house, the dusty yard beyond its fence.

Hiyi grew there, along the row, all in leaf in this season, flowerless. He heard high voices, the closing of some door. "I'll get you," someone shrilled, but there was laughter in the voice. "I'll get you, Mon!"

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More shrieks. Thorn came closer, taking to the road. Beneath the lights, in front of the porch, two small figures ran and raced and played chase.

"Come in here!" a voice called from the open door. "Come in, it's time to eat."

They were children. They ran and shrieked and yelled—

Duun's kind. Thorn's heart stopped. He stood there in the road and looked beyond the fence and likewise the children stopped their game and stared, they on their side, he on his.