Authors: Anne Mccaffrey
“Can’t you create a better one? I’m becoming a bit worried about you, sister. Your special talent failed you several times where Pebar and Sileg were concerned, and now you can’t seem to use it to help us again. I think you may be losing your touch.”
“I could make the hill change shapes,”
Ariin replied.
“That might get their attention, but it would spoil the hill’s usefulness as cover.”
“Too bad we don’t have a way to uncloak the ship and cloak it again really fast. That would get their attention.”
Khorii could feel Ariin trying to think of diversions, and she, in turn, tried to imagine how she could use the crono to help release the captives.
She was still pondering when the first soldier clucked to his horse to continue, and the others began filing past.
Suddenly the road ahead vibrated with hoofbeats, and the trumpet sounded again. “Hark! After them!” the lead rider cried out, and with much clanking and clattering, the others bolted after him.
“Lose the nets. They’ll only slow you down,”
Ariin pushed the hindmost riders. As if they had received an order from their leader, the two men turned and almost slashed their horses’ tails in their haste to release their extra burdens.
As the men rode out of sight, Khorii and Ariin left the hill’s shelter to help the former captives extricate themselves from their nets. Pebar and Sileg were both wounded—Pebar’s hand was nearly severed at the wrist, and Sileg bore a deep wound in his side. Ariin healed Pebar first, reattaching his hand, then Sileg. Grimalkin and Pircifir had also sustained stab wounds and slices, but they, too, were soon mended. Khorii stroked Grimalkin’s fur as she would have done to calm Khiindi.
The big cats wasted no time running after the horses.
“Where are they going?” Pebar asked.
“Back into trouble, I’d say,” Sileg answered.
“They’re saving the last of the Ancestors,” Khorii said. “I know it happens, but I don’t know how.”
“What are you two doing in this time?” Ariin asked the men.
“No idea, girlie. No idea at all,” Sileg said. “One minute we was admiring that watch he took off you, and the next thing you know we’re here and there were unicorns. My best guess is this is a dream and actually, we were talking about unicorns and then had bad pasties at the stall, so of course we’re dreaming about them, and you, for that matter.”
“I’m dreaming the same thing,” Pebar said. “So I must have eaten the pasty, and you’re not here at all. You’re in my dream.”
“As handy an explanation as any,” Khorii said. “Just keep dreaming among yourselves while Ariin and I sort this out.”
W
e have to save them,”
Khorii told her sister.
“That’s what you always say. We’re always saving something. Why don’t you think of yourself first for a change?”
“But you know it’s true this time. This is how it happened. This is how the Ancestors came to Vhiliinyar. We brought them there.”
“I’d like to believe that. I’d like to help them. But this is an accident. You can’t possibly know that this is how it was supposed to happen.”
“Not that I think ‘supposed to’ matters where our history and the cronos are concerned, but it makes sense. When Grimalkin and I were searching the time device for you, we saw you and Pircifir leave on the mission to find the tunnels, but you didn’t come back. And yet we knew that you did, and Pircifir brought the aliens back to make the changing houses. That was why we decided to come with you. It was always kind of vague, the story I was told growing up about the Friends hearing the Ancestors’ ‘cries of despair from space as they passed near the planet.’”
Ariin snorted.
“Is that what they told you? I doubt the Friends would recognize cries of despair if they even heard them in the first place.”
“Grimalkin would—or at least Khiindi would have. But more than likely he’d think it was prey ready to fall into his paws. And he certainly wouldn’t recognize it from space. Probably we wouldn’t either. But it makes sense that we’re involved, don’t you see? We share the psychic bond with the Ancestors and the healing, all of that. They just helped us, and I’m sure that they’re counting on us to help them.”
“Let’s call them, then, and they can hide here until the king’s men are gone,”
Ariin agreed, then broadcast,
“Unicorns, Others, come here. We will hide you and take you to safety.”
She listened for a response.
“Nothing. They must be out of range now.”
“There’s a song,”
Khorii said.
“I think it was made up by Linyaari long after the Friends brought the Ancestors to Vhiliinyar, but it is called ‘Gathering the Grandparents.’”
She sang:
“Grandmother, Grandfather, come hither, come here
Find love and protection from death, pain, and fear
Come hither, come hither, come swiftly, come fast
We come from the place where your lineage lasts
Grandfather, Grandmother, come here to this song
On our world your lives will be happy and long
Where there are no hunters to trouble your days
But vast hills and valleys of green fields to graze
We are your grandchildren, from time yet to come
We heard your screams as you ran from the hunt.
Though you are our past, we have come to your aid
We are your future, so be not afraid.”
“It’s just a stupid little song, Khorii. They can’t hear you from here,” Ariin said.
“Maybe they could if you joined in, and we broadcast.”
“They didn’t hear me before. They’re too far away.”
“You weren’t singing. Songs penetrate the consciousness more easily than mere words. It’s a scientific fact.”
Ariin snorted.
“Try at least. For them.”
Reluctantly, Ariin began singing, and, to both girls’ surprise, her voice was in natural harmony with Khorii’s.
They sang it through three times. Pebar and Sileg looked puzzled, since the words were in Linyaari, of course. Pebar complained, “You’re going to draw the soldiers back with all that neighing and snorting.”
“Hush,” Khorii said. “Did you hear that?”
In the distance, another mind was saying to his diminished herd,
“Hush, did you hear that?”
The girls sang the song another three times and felt the herd swerve in flight and double back toward them.
“We’ll need to show ourselves,” Khorii said. “Pebar and Sileg, stay here and be quiet, or we’ll leave you behind for the king’s men.”
“They’d probably be a lot friendlier if we turned you and your friends over to them,” Pebar speculated. “We need a better bargain than that.”
“We’ll give this hill creature back to you when we’re done with it so you can start your act again,” Khorii promised desperately.
“That leaves us half as well-off as we were before we met you, and you ruined our lives,” Pebar said. “How about the tunnel and one of the unicorns?”
“We’ll do better than that,” Ariin promised so quickly and definitely that Khorii knew she was up to something. “Much better. But you have to be quiet and stay out of sight. If you spook the unicorns, they’ll run away and be slaughtered, and I will do my best to see that you are, too.”
“Shut up, Pebar,” Sileg said. “That’s good enough for me.”
He folded a piece of the inside of the hill around them, making a separate room, and Khorii read him, briefly but enough to know that he would keep his word and see that Pebar did as well.
G
rimalkin and Pircifir followed the king’s men as they trailed the unicorns into the forest, but the creatures swiftly eluded their human pursuers. The two Friends hid in the brush while the armed men’s horses snorted and stamped impatiently as their riders tried to decide which direction to take. Finally, they headed back to the road.
“We should change now, too,” Grimalkin told his brother. “Our new friends won’t like wild cats any more than they like human hunters.”
“Change into Others?”
“I’ve done it before,” Grimalkin assured him.
They completed the change and began tracking the herd, but there was no need. Before they had passed back across the loop of the stream the unicorns had jumped in their flight, the herd turned back and charged straight at them. Grimalkin and Pircifir wheeled in their tracks and sprinted off, leading the herd.
“Follow us!” Grimalkin called to them.
“Begone!” the stallion trumpeted. “You trespass in our forest!”
“We came to save you,” Grimalkin announced, because he now knew that was the truth, however accidental the circumstances.
The stallion ignored him and reared on his back legs, slicing the air with his front hooves in a challenge.
“Stop that, Hraffl,” one of the mares told him. When he ignored her, she butted his flank with her head, unbalancing him. “It’s not like there are enough of us left that we can afford to kill anyone over border disputes.”
“They smell funny,” the youngest mare said.
But the third mare galloped past them, then skidded to a stop, listening, “Hark! You males have raised such a commotion the king’s men heard. They are returning. Flee!”
They wheeled again to leap back into the forest but the hindmost mare stopped suddenly, her right forefoot quivering in midair, her ears twisting to hear. “Listen. Do you hear that?”
The others halted. Grimalkin listened. Khorii and Ariin were singing.
“What are they up to?” Pircifir demanded. “This is no time for music!”
But the stallion and his mares turned yet again and trotted out of the glade and down the road, toward the ship and the hill.
“They’ve come!” a mare said, with a quiet sigh. “As it was foretold. We are saved.”
“That’s right,” Grimalkin said, following. “That’s what we were trying to explain to you before your leader attacked us. We are your Friends. We’re here to help.”
They didn’t seem to hear him, but continued following the girls’ summoning song.
“Don’t give them all the credit!” Grimalkin protested. “It’s our ship and cronos, after all.”
“Mine, you mean,” Pircifir corrected him. “But that matters little. They’ll never make it. Look!”
The dust cloud, clattering hooves, and clanking armor were almost upon them once more. The trumpet blared as the hunters spurred their mounts forward.
The unicorns hesitated.
“Cover their flank!” Pircifir commanded.
“They’re armed, and we’re not!” Grimalkin protested, but the men attacked them again.
Pircifir reared, and would have charged, but the king’s men were well prepared this time. Before he could strike, three arrows pierced his white chest, he snorted bloody foam, fell on his side, and lay unmoving. Before Grimalkin could think how to get his brother back to the girls, one of the King’s men leaped from his horse, raised his sword, and severed Pircifir’s head from his body.
Grimalkin saw only the first stroke because he ran away in a hail of arrows, following the unicorns blindly, not thinking of strategy or trickiness or anything else but dodging the deadly darts.
The girls had stopped singing. The ship was cloaked, and there was only the hill. How to enter it? Did it matter? Would they see him? Khorii stepped into his path. Grimalkin swerved to avoid her and stared into the cavelike entrance of the hill. His sides heaved, and his mouth frothed. Two arrows had found their way into his hide—one in his left hindquarter and one in his right side. But all around him the unicorns crowded. He changed to man form, grimacing at the hurt the arrows caused, and Ariin threw him a shipsuit. Before he donned it he pulled the arrows from his flesh. On either side, a unicorn horn touched him lightly, and the pain from the arrows was no more.