They Fly at Ciron

They Fly at Çiron

SAMUEL R. DELANY

www.sfgateway.com

I
FIRST
wrote “They Fly at Çiron” as a forty-five-page story in my second-floor flat at the dead end of East 5th Street. From my spiral notebooks I typed the first version on a mechanical typewriter in late spring ‘62. My editor did not buy it, however; nor was I really satisfied with the tale. Sometime toward 1969 I gave the
MS
to my friend James Sallis. Jim reworked the opening. That version appeared as a collaboration under our paired bylines in the June ‘71 issue of
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.
Twenty years later, though, it struck me that the story could still use a pass through the word processor. When I was done, I had a hundred-fifty-page manuscript. For all I’ve added, I’ve kept none of Jim’s inventive amendments. Nevertheless they formed an invaluable critique, defining lacks I’ve now addressed otherwise. As none of Jim’s language remains, I can no longer reprint
They Fly at Çiron
as a proper collaboration. But neither can I publish it—far truer for this than for the ‘71 version—without acknowledging that critique responsible for anything now in it worth the reading. In 1992, equally detailed critiques of the new version came from Randy Byers and Ron Drummond. And, in my sunny Amherst study, I responded here and there to them the best I could—and the manuscript is fifty pages longer. In one sense, this is my second novel—only it has taken me thirty years to write.

—S.R.D.

Among the tribes and villages and hamlets and townships that ornament the world with their variety, many have existed in mutual support, exchange, and friendship. Many others have stayed to themselves, regarding their neighbors with unease, hostility, and suspicion. Some have gone from one state to the other. Some have even gone back. But when the memory of a village is no older than the four or five generations it takes a grave-scroll record to rot, there
is
no history—only myth and song. And the truth is, while a minuscule number of these may echo down the ages, only a handful endure more than a season; and the vast majority from such handfuls linger (listen to the songs and myths about you!) less than a lifetime.

T
HEY
are
dogs.”

“My prince—”

“They are less than dogs. Look: they inch on their stomachs, like maggots.”

“Prince Nactor, they are men—men who fought bravely against us—”

“—and whom we vanquished, Lieutenant Kire.” The prince slipped long fingers through the fence’s diamond-crossed wires—and grasped. “That gives me the right to do anything I want to them.” With his free hand, still in its leather gauntlet, he lifted his powergun from its sling. “Anything.”

“My prince, yours is also the right to be merciful—!”

“Even this, Kire.” Nactor put the barrel end through the wire. “Now watch.” The first time he fired, the two who could still scream started in again. Another—who could move—dragged himself over the dirt, took hold of the
fence wire, and tried to pull himself up. His fingers caught. Silently, he opened his mouth, and closed it, and opened it. Nactor glanced back, grinning through his beard. “Smells like barbecue, doesn’t it?” Turning again, he thrust the barrel between the wires into the prisoner’s eye.

The gun and the fence both jumped at the retort.

Charred neck and bloody hands slid to the ground.

He took out the noisiest two last, some forty seconds apart. During those seconds, while the smoke above the fence settled back down, Nactor began to smile. The one huddling into himself opened his eyes, then squeezed them tight—he was making a sound more between a wheeze and a whine than a scream. Nactor’s beard changed its shape a little as, behind it, his face seemed to grow compassionate. He leaned toward the wire, as though at last he saw something human, something alive, something he could recognize.

Without stopping the sound, the prisoner began to blink.

Nactor lowered the gun.

The man finally let an expression besides terror twitch through the scabs and the mud; he took a breath…

Nactor thrust the gun through—and shot.

The fence jumped.

A hand, charred now, slid through the muck. Something no longer a face splatted down.

Nactor reslung his weapon and turned from the corral, releasing the wire. “I find killing these—” the fence vibrated—“easier than those creatures from their cave-holdings that we exterminated three attacks ago. These at least were human. But
those, with their shaggy pelts and their thickened nails like beast claws—I suppose they reminded me of my dogs at home. There, your requests for clemency, your sour looks and your sulkings, really got on my nerves, Kire. This was worth doing just to keep you quiet.” He glanced where Kire’s hand jerked, now toward, now away from, the sling at his own hip. “That is, if it doesn’t actually cheer you up. Lieutenant?” (Three more jerks, and Kire’s arm, in its black sleeve, straightened.) “Is it really necessary to remind you that the purpose of this expedition is conquest—that Myetra must expand His boundaries, or He will perish? When the time comes for our final encounter with Calvicon, you will… I
trust
you will distinguish yourself in war, in service to Myetra, bringing honor to your superiors, who watch you, and to your men, who trust you.” The prince palmed the powergun’s handle, moving gauntleted fingers on the sling’s silver embossing, worked into Kirke, Myetra’s totemic crow. (The silver came from the Lehryard mines; the guns were smithed in the Tradk Mountains. For both guns and silver, Myetra traded wheat taken by force from the veldt villages of Zeneya. Even Kirke, Kire reflected, had come from a distant county he could no longer name, but which Myetra had long ago laid waste to.) “What is our mission now, Kire? Just so I know you haven’t forgotten: To march our troops across this land in a line as straight as… as what?”

“‘As straight as a blood drop down a new-plastered wall.’” The Lieutenant’s voice was low, measured, but with some roughness in it that might have been a social accent, an emotional timbre, or a simple failure in the machinery of tongue, throat, and larynx. “Shoen, Horvarth, Nutting, and fourteen other hamlets lie devastated behind us. Çiron, Hi-Vator, Requior
and seven more villages lie ahead to be crushed, before we reach Calvicon for our final encounter.”

The prince raised his gloved hand and with his naked forefinger began to tick off one, two, three...: “Yes, it
is
seven. I thought it was eight there, for a moment. You might almost think I wanted to prolong the pleasures of this very pleasant journey we’ve been on almost a year and half now. But you’re right. It’s only seven. The best way to spill blood in war, Kire, is to spill it where all can see. You spill it slowly, Kire—slowly, so that the enemy has time to realize our power and our greatness, the greatness of Myetra. Some locales have a genius for work, for labor, for toiling and suffering. And some have a genius for ruling. Myetra… !” The prince flung up his gauntleted fist in salute. Lowering it, however, a smile moved behind his heavy beard that put all seriousness into question. “There really is no other way.” With his ungloved knuckles, the prince pushed his rough beard hair to shape, now forward from his ears, now back at his chin. “Those who disagree, those who think there is another way, are Myetra’s enemies. You’ve seen how merciful Myetra is to its enemies, eh, Kire—?” Abruptly, Prince Nactor turned and walked toward his tent.

In his black undergarments, black jerkin with black leggings over them, black harness webbing hips and chest, black hood tight around his face (a scimitar of bronze hair had slipped from under the edge), and wearing an officer’s night-colored cape that did not rise anywhere as high as you might expect in the steady, eastern breeze, the tall lieutenant turned too—after a breath—and walked from the corral.

The troops sat at
fires paled to near invisibility by the silvery sun. Some men cleaned their weapons. Others talked of the coming march. One or two still ate. A stack of armor flung a moment’s glare in Kire’s eyes, brighter than the flames.

In only his brown undershorts, cross-legged and hunched over a roasted rabbit haunch, the little soldier, Mrowky, glanced up to call: “Lieutenant Kire, come eat—”

His belly pushing down the waist of his undershorts, the hem of his singlet up, standing by the fire big Uk said: “Hey, Lieutenant—?”

On the ground, Mrowky lifted freckled shoulders. “Sir, we saved some hare—”

But Kire strode on to the horse enclosure, where two guards quickly uncrossed their spears—and flung up their fists. (Kire thought: How little these men know what goes on in their own camp.) He stepped between them and inside, reached to pull down a bridle, bent to heft up a saddle. He cut out his mare, threw the leather over her head, put the saddle over her back, and bent beneath her belly for the cinch. A black boot in the iron stirrup, and moments later he galloped out, calling: “I shall be back before we decamp for Çiron.”

Passing loudly, wind slapped at his face—but could not fill his cape to even the gentlest curve. Hooves hit up dirt and small stones, crackled in furze. Low foliage snapped by. The land spun back beneath.