They Fly at Çiron: A Novel

  They Fly at Çiron

  SAMUEL R. DELANY

  www.sfgateway.com

  Enter the SF Gateway …

  In the last years of the twentieth century (as Wells might have put it), Gollancz, Britain’s oldest and most distinguished science fiction imprint, created the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series. Dedicated to re-publishing the English language’s finest works of SF and Fantasy, most of which were languishing out of print at the time, they were – and remain – landmark lists, consummately fulfilling the original mission statement:

  ‘SF MASTERWORKS is a library of the greatest SF ever written, chosen with the help of today’s leading SF writers and editors. These books show that genuinely innovative SF is as exciting today as when it was first written.’

  Now, as we move inexorably into the twenty-first century, we are delighted to be widening our remit even more. The realities of commercial publishing are such that vast troves of classic SF & Fantasy are almost certainly destined never again to see print. Until very recently, this meant that anyone interested in reading any of these books would have been confined to scouring second-hand bookshops. The advent of digital publishing has changed that paradigm for ever.

  The technology now exists to enable us to make available, for the first time, the entire backlists of an incredibly wide range of classic and modern SF and fantasy authors. Our plan is, at its simplest, to use this technology to build on the success of the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series and to go even further.

  Welcome to the new home of Science Fiction & Fantasy. Welcome to the most comprehensive electronic library of classic SFF titles ever assembled.

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Gateway Introduction

  Note

  Contents

  Proem

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Ruins

  Return To Çiron

  Website

  Also By Samuel R Delany

  Dedication

  Author Bio

  Copyright

  NOTE

  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.

  PROEM

  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.

  CHAPTER I

  THEY 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 co
uld 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.

  Dim and distant, the Çironian mountains lapped the horizon. Kire turned the horse into a leafy copse. A branch raked at him from the right. Twigs with small leaves brushed his left cheek as he pulled—in passing—away. The mare stepped about; behind them brush and branches rushed back into place. At a stream, Kire jabbed his heels into the mare’s flanks, shook the reins—

  —an instant later, with four near-simultaneous clops, hooves hit the rockier shore. Pebbles spattered back into the water. Kire rode forward, to mount a rise and halt there, bending to run a black glove on the flat neck. He was about to canter down among the trees, when a long and inhuman Screeeeee made the horse rear. Kire reined hard and tightened his black leggings against her flanks.

  Raucous and cutting, the Screee came again. The mare danced sideways.

  Dismounting, Kire dropped the reins to the ground. Snorting twice, the mare stilled.

  Upper leg bending and lower leg out, Kire crabbed down the slope, coming in a sideways slide around a boulder.

  The Screeeeee, startlingly closer, sliced low leaves.

  Kire stepped around broken stone, stopped—and breathed in:

  A man and a beast—

  Yellow claws slashed at a brown shoulder. The shoulder jerked—the head ducked; black hair flung up and forward. Bodies locked. Braced on the ground, a bare foot gouged a rut through pine needles.

  Canines snapped toward a wrist that snatched away to lash around behind the puma’s neck. This time, as the Screeeee whined between black gums and gray, gray teeth, something… cracked!

  A broad paw clapped the man’s side—but the sound failed. The claws had retracted.

  Kire let his air out as puma and man, one dead, one exhausted, toppled onto their shadows.

  Before Kire got in another breath, another shadow slid across them. On the ground, the man raised himself to one arm, and shook back long hair. Kire stepped forward—to see the shadow around them get smaller and darker. He reached for the man’s shoulder. At the same time, he looked up.

  The flying thing—sun behind it burned on one wing’s edge: Kire could see only its size—dropped. Kire’s gunbarrel cleared the sling. The retort ripped the air… though the shot went wild.

  Above, it averted, wings glinting like chipped quartz, then flapped up to soar away.

  At Kire’s feet, the naked man rocked on all fours by the beast.

  “It’s gone, now,” Kire rasped. “Get up.”

  The man pushed himself back on his knees, taking in great breaths through lips pulled up from large, yellow teeth. Then he stood.

  He was taller than Kire by a hand. A good six years younger too, the lieutenant decided, looking at the wide, brown face, the hair sweated in black blades to a cheek and a forehead still wrinkled with gasps from the fight. The eyes were molten amber—wet and hot.

  (The lieutenant’s eyes were a cool, startling green.)

  Pulling up his cape and throwing it over his arm, Kire reslung his gun. “Who are you?”

  “Rahm.” Still breathing hard, he reached up with wide fingers to brush dirt and puma hair from his heaving chest and rigid belly. “Rahm of Çiron.” The lips settled to a smile. “I thank thee for frightening away the Winged One with thy…” He motioned toward Kire’s black waist-cinch.

  “This is my powergun.” The tall youngster’s dialect, Kire noted, was close to Myetra’s. “Rahm …” The Lieutenant snorted; it sounded like a continuation of whatever roughened his voice. “Of Çiron, ’ey?”

  The Çironian’s smile opened up. “That is a… power-gun? It’s a frightening thing, the… powergun.” He moved his head: from where it clawed and clutched his shoulder, black hair slid away. “And who art thou, that hast become Rahm’s friend?”

  “I am Kire.” He did not give his origin, though with Kirke on left breast, cloak, and sling, he could not imagine the need.

  “Thou art a stranger in these lands,” Rahm said. “Whither dost thou travel?”

  “Soon to the Çironian mountains. But for now, I am merely a wanderer, looking at the land about me, to learn what I can of it.”

  “So am I—or so I have been. But now I am returning to Çiron.” Suddenly the black-haired youth bent, grabbed the puma’s yellow foreleg, and tugged. “Here.” He thrust one dark foot against pale stomach-fur to shove the beast over the pine needles. With its closed eyes, the puma’s head rolled aside, as if for the moment it wished to avoid the bright, brown gaze of its murderer. “Thou shouldst have the lion, for saving me from the Winged One. I had thought to carry it home—it’s no more than three
hours’ walk. But thou hast a horse.” He nodded up the slope. “’Tis thine.”

  Kire felt a smile nudge among his features. “Thank you.” A smile was not the expression he’d thought to use with this Çironian youth. So he stepped back, to lean against the boulder. “Rahm …?” Kire glanced at the sky, then back. “How is it you travel the land naked and without a weapon?”

  Rahm shrugged. “The weather is warm. My arms are strong.” Here he frowned. “A weapon …?”

  “You don’t know what a weapon is …”

  Rahm shook his head.

  “Suppose you had not been able to kill the puma with your bare hands… ?”

  “Eventually she would have gotten frightened and fled—once I’d hurt her enough.” The youth laughed. “Or she would have killed me. But that could not happen. I am stronger than any animal in this land—except, perhaps, the Winged Ones.”

  “And what are they?”

  “They live in the mountains of Çiron, at Hi-Vator. Their nests are far up the rocks, in the caves among the crags and peaks.”

  “Çiron,” the Lieutenant repeated. “And Hi-Vator… But Çiron is at the mountains’ foot.”

  Rahm nodded. Through the remnants of his own smile, Rahm found himself looking into a face not smiling at all.

  “Do all Çironians go about so?” Kire asked. “Are you all so peaceful? Perhaps, you, boy, are just simple-minded—”

  “We are peaceful, yes. We have no guns, if that is what thou meanst. Many of us go naked—though not all.”

  Black cloth hanging close around, the Lieutenant chuckled.

  And Rahm laughed with him, putting his feet wide and taking a great breath to support his laughter, throwing back black hair—so that he seemed to overflow the space which was naturally and generously his. “But thou art the first ever to think me simple!”