Grass (47 page)

When he had gathered together what he could, he picked up Sebastian and those who were ready and drove the aircar directly to the hospital near the Port Hotel. The doctors carried Rigo away; Andrea, her sister, and Father Sandoval went to the port hotel.

Asmir was there. "Where's Eugenie?" Persun asked.

"I don't know. Wasn't she with you?" Asmir asked in return.

"This morning she wanted to come in to Commons."

"She told me she'd changed her mind. I just came to pick up some supplies."

Persun counted his passengers on his fingers and ran to ask them where Eugenie was. No one knew. He flew back to Opal Hill, anxious to use all the daylit hours. In the village the trucks were loading: people, livestock, necessary equipment. Another truck landed as he stood there. Sebastian was driving it.

"I can't find Eugenie," Persun yelled at him.

"His Excellency's woman? Isn't she in Commons? Didn't she go in with Asmir?"

"She didn't, Sebastian. She changed her mind."

"Ask Linea, over there. She took care of Eugenie."

Persun chased the indicated woman and asked. Linea didn't know. She hadn't seen Eugenie since early this morning. She thought Eugenie must be in her own house, or perhaps in the garden.

Persun ran back up the trail to the estancia, to Eugenie's house, cursing under his breath. She wasn't there. Soft pink curtains blew in the spring wind. The house smelled of flowers Persun Pollut had never seen. The woman wasn't there. He went out into the grass garden and searched for her, down this path and that, the mild spring airs moving above him and around him, the perfumes of the fragrant grasses like a drug in his nostrils.

He called, "Eugenie?" It did not seem a dignified thing to do, to walk about the gardens calling her by her first name, but he knew no other name to call her. It was what everyone called her. "Eugenie!"

From the village the trucks rose with a roar of engines. He went there once more, plodding. A few remaining people. A few remaining pigs, chickens, a lonely cow lowing at the sky. The sun, down in the west, burning its hot eye into his own.

"Are they coming back?" he asked. "The trucks?"

"You don't think we planned to stay here with everyone gone, did you?" an old woman snapped at him. "What happened? No one seems to know, except that the Hippae are coming to slaughter us all in our beds."

Persun didn't answer. He was already on his way back to the house to try one last time, He went through the big house, room by room. She wasn't there. To her own house again. She wasn't there.

He did not think to go to the chapel. Why would he? The people of Commons had scant use for chapels. Some of them claimed religions, but they were not of edificial kinds.

He went out to the car, offered the old woman a seat in it, loaded her crate of chickens aboard, and took off once more, flying low as he cross-hatched the grass gardens, looking for Eugenie. Once at commons, he searched for her again, thinking perhaps she had been in one of the trucks.

Darkness came. "I have to go back," he cried to Sebastian, who had just returned from a final trip. "She has to be still out there."

"I'll go with you," the other said. "I've got everyone unloaded. They're all getting settled down in winter quarters."

"Have you heard any news of His Excellency?" Sebastian shook his head. "No one's had time to ask. How was he hurt?"

"His legs were trampled. And he was struck on the head. He was breathing well, but he didn't move his legs at all. I think he may be paralyzed."

"They can fix that kind of injury."

"Some kinds they can fix." They lofted the car once more and headed it away from Commons toward Opal Hill. They had not gone far before they saw the fire, wings and curtains of fire, sweeping across the grasses and towering above the estancia.

"Ah, well then," murmured Persun. "So I was not a hysteric after all. Father said I might be."

"Are you glad of that?" Sebastian asked curiously, turning the car in a long curve so that he could look down on the blaze. "Or would you rather have been called a hysteric and Opal Hill still be whole? I saw the panels you carved in the lady's study. They were the best things I have seen in a long time. No, the best I have ever seen."

"I still have my hands," Persun said, looking at them, turning them over, thinking what might have happened to them if he hadn't been skittish as any old woman. "I can carve more." If Marjorie was safe, he could carve more. If they were for her.

"I thought the gardens were supposed to stop the fires."

"They do. Unless the fires are set and dragged through the gardens and carried into the buildings. As these were, Sebastian. As these were." He peered down at the ruin, biting back an exclamation. "Look! Sebastian. Look at the trail!"

Away from Opal Hill, toward the swamp forest, straight as an arrow, a trail trampled into the grasses as though ten thousand Hippae had marched there in files. The two looked at one another in horrified surmise.

"Do you suppose she's down there?" Sebastian whispered.

Persun nodded. "Yes. She is. Was. Somewhere."

"Shall we – "

"No. See there, in the flames. Hippae. There must be hundreds of them. Some dancing near the flames. Some going down that great trail. How many of them did it take to make that trail? And hounds, too. Every hound on Grass must be down there, all moving toward Commons. No. No, we can't go down. We'll come back tomorrow. When the fire burns out, we'll look. Maybe she got into the winter quarters. I hope she doesn't burn."

Eugenie didn't burn. The hounds that had swept through the place ahead of the flames had seen to that.

Commons was in a considerable uproar, busy with speculation and rumor. The housing of a hundred or so people was no great thing. The winter quarters were large enough to hold the entire population of Commons plus those of the villages, and only the very young among them found these underground halls and rooms at all new and frightening. The caverns had been here when men first came, but they had been enlarged and fitted out for human occupancy, and everyone over one Grassian year of age knew them well. The evacuated animals went into the winter barns. Though this year's cutting of hay had not begun, there was enough of last year's hay and grain to keep them. Feeding the people was no great thing either. They began using the winter kitchens with the ease of long practice.

Despite this ease, this familiarity, there was disquiet and anxiety both among those who had arrived and those who had welcomed them. The burning of an estancia was not a familiar occurrence. It had happened before, but that had been long ago, in their great-grandparents' time It was not something easy to comprehend or accept. When Persun Pollut brought news of the great trail toward the swamp-forest, anxiety deepened. Everyone knew the Hippae couldn't get through the forest, and yet … and yet, people wondered. They were uneasy, wondering if this event betokened mysterious dangers.

The unease spread even to Portside, where those occupied in serving and housing strangers became jittery. Saint Teresa and Ducky Johns were not immune to the common case of nerves. They met at the end of Pleasure Street and walked along Portside Road, Ducky bobbling and jiggling inside her great golden tent of a dress, Saint Teresa stalking beside her like a heron, long-legged and long-nosed to the point of caricature. He wore his usual garments: purple trousers tight at the knee but baggy elsewhere, and a swallow-tailed coat cut of jermot hide, a scaly leather imported through Semling from some desert planet at the end of nowhere. His bare cranium gleamed like steel in the blue lights of the port, and his great hands gestured as he spoke, never still for an instant.

"So … so what does it mean?" he asked. "Burning Opal Hill that way. There was no one there … " His hands circled, illustrating a search from the air, then swooped away, conveying frustration.

"One person," Ducky Johns corrected him. "That fancy woman of the ambassador's is missing."

"One person, then. But the Hippae dragged fire through the gardens and burned it. all of it. It's burning now." His fingers flickered like flames, drawing the scene on the air.

Ducky Johns nodded, the nod setting up wavelike motion which traveled down from her ears through all the waiting flesh below, a tidal jiggle, ending only at her ankles, where her tiny feet served as a check valve. "It's why I wanted to talk with you, Teresa. The things are obviously raging. Furious. Out of all control. You knew the ambassador killed some of them."

"I heard. First time that's ever happened, from what I hear."

"So far as I know, yes. Darenfeld wounded one, years and years ago, before the Darenfeld estancia burned."

"I thought that was a summer fire. Lightning."

"So the bons say, but others say no. The bons pretended it was lightning and began to build grass gardens around themselves, but Roald Few says the Commons
Chronicle
called it what it was. Hippae, going rampageous."

He compressed thin lips into a tight line, more disturbed than he cared to admit. "Well, so! The bons are no concern of ours. If all of them got crisped tomorrow, it wouldn't make a whit of difference to custom, Ducky. They may think they're the pinnacle of creation, but we know different."

"Oh, it's not just them. It's this plague, too. We're hearing more and more of that."

"There's none here."

"So there isn't, which is strange on the face of it. I hear things. Asmir Tanlig has been around, asking this, asking that. Sebastian Mechanic has been around, digging here, digging there. Questions. Who's been sick. Who's died. Both of them work for the ambassador. So he's trying to find out something. I talked to Roald about it. He talked to some others, including some of us here in Portside who've heard what foreigners have to say. Seems there's plague everywhere but here. Hidden, though. Sanctity trying to keep the lid on it, but the word getting out, getting around."

"So? What are you saying, Ducky?"

"I'm saying if everybody dies out there, there'll be no custom here, old crane, old stork. That's what I'm saying. Then how will we live, you and me? To say nothing of it being damned lonely, us here with all the rest of the human population gone and those Hippae out there, being rampageous."

"They can't get in through the forest."

"So we're told. So we're told. And even if that's true, think of all humanity closed in in a space no bigger than Commons. It makes me claustrophobic, Teresa, indeed it does."

They had reached the end of Portside Road, where it ran off into ruts southward across the grazing land, and they turned as if by mutual consent to retrace their steps – more slowly on the return, for Ducky seldom walked such a distance.

Blue lamps cast runnels of luminescence on the ash-glass surface of the port. There were only two ships in, a sleek yacht in the dark shadow of a bulky warehouse and the
Star-Lily,
a fat Semling freighter squatting in a puddle of sapphire lume, its cargo bay gaping like a snoring mouth. In the puddle of light something moved, and Ducky put her hand on her companion's arm. "There," she said. "Teresa, did you see that?"

He had seen that. "No one working there this time of night."

"See to it, Teresa. Do. I can't move fast enough."

She spoke unnecessarily, for the heronlike legs of Saint Teresa had already taken him off in long, ground-eating strides across the cinereous surface of the port, moving like some tall hunting bird toward that flicker of movement. Ducky struggled after him, panting, her flesh bobbling and jiggling as though a thousand small springs inside were heterodyning against one another. Her companion had moved into shadow. She didn't see him, and then she did, one hand striking, head moving like a spearlike beak, the hand coming back with something pale and fishy wriggling in it. He turned and carried the thing toward her.

When he came close enough for her to see, she cried out in surprise. There it was, just like the last one. Another naked girl with no expression in her face, wriggling like a fish on a spear, not saying anything at all.

"Well," he said. "What do you think of that?"

"What's that in her hand?" Ducky asked. "What's she carrying, and what was she doing there?"

"Trying to get aboard," Saint Teresa said, holding the girl tight under one arm as he pried the thing from her tight fingers. He held it out, and Ducky leaned forward to look at it.

"It's a dead bat," she said. "All dried up. What was she carrying that for?"

They looked at the girl, at one another, full of questions and surmise. "You know who it is," Ducky said. "It's Diamante bon Damfels is who it is. The one they called Dimity. The one that vanished first thing this spring. It has to be."

He didn't contradict her. "Now what?" he asked at last.

"Now we'll take her to Roald Few," Ducky said. "As I should have taken the last one. Take her, and it, and ask Jelly to come along, and Jandra, and anybody else with any sense in their heads. I don't know what's happening here, old crane, but I don't like it, whatever it is."

In the Tree City of the Arbai night had come like a polite visitor, announcing itself with diffidence, moving slowly among the bridges and trellises, softly among the wraithlike inhabitants, quietly into each room to carpet every floor with shadow. Night had come gently; darkness had not come at all. Effulgent spheres lined each walkway and hung from each ceiling. They cast an opalescent glow, not enough light to work by and yet enough to see walls and floors and ramps, to know where one went, to see the faces of one's friends, to see the ghosts as they walked in and out.

Among the houses fronting upon the high platform, several were less frequented by phantoms. In one of these Tony and Marjorie had spread their beds and arranged their belongings. The two Brothers, the priest, and Sylvan had selected another. Once that was done, they had assembled on the open platform to eat together, sharing their own rations and the strange fruits Rillibee had garnered from the nearby trees. Several of the foxen had been close by for a brief time. The humans had seen shadows, heard voices reminiscent of the great cry, felt questions in their most intimate minds, tried to answer. Eventually the presences had gone. Now the humans knew they were alone.