Footfall

“Mvubi?”

“Our Zulu headman. He will help you. Go now. Go and hurt them. But in the name of God, go far from here.”

Mvubi was old, and darker than an American ever gets. Carte guessed him to be sixty. He squatted to make drawings in the dirt “Here. Kambula. White soldiers. They do not speak English o Afrikaans. Jantji says they are Russian. They hide. They wish to fight. They ask Zulu to help them. Some go to join them.”

Russians. They must have come south, through Mozambique Hell of a long way to come. “Do you know any Zulu who wan to fight?”

“Yes.”

“Take me to them.”

Mvubi rocked back and forth on his heels. Finally he stood

“I will.”

The airlock door swung ponderously outward, and the smell of Winterhome hit him in the snout. Fookerteh flinched, then sniffed. Mustiness. Alien plants, quite different from the life of Kansas.

A tastelessness: the buildup of biochemical residues in Message Bearer was missing here. Over all, the smell of the funeral pit.

Lesser ranks waited behind him, but Fookerteh paused at the top of the ramp to examine the spaceport. It was large, with hard, paved strips set within other strips of close-cropped green vegetation.

Strange winged craft, man-built and large enough to hold eightsquared fithp, were parked at one end of the field. Humans were loading them. Other machines guided by humans moved across the field to the digit ship, and a human crew began loading boxes and baggage from the digit ship onto their vehicles.

Orderly and proper. Koothfektil-rusp has not stretched his domain with words. The humans work for us.

There were tall thin columns in the distance. Smoke trailed from their tops. Wind blew much harder than comfort demanded. Water fell in fat drops. The sky was a textured, uneasily shifting gray, vast and far.

And everywhere was the faint but unmistakable smell of the funeral pit.

Fookerteh went down the ramp to where Birithart-yamp waited. They clasped digits. “Your presence wets my back.”

“Welcome to my domain, companion of my youth,” Birithartyamp said formally. Then he lifted his digits. “I am truly glad to see you. When they told me you would come down, I arranged to greet you myself. Come, I will take you to the mudrooms.”

“I thank you.” They walked across the hard surface. Gravity pulled at Fookerteh. The sky was so big, stretching distances he had not seen since he left the war in Kansas. “Can you not-is there no way to bury the dead?”

Birithart-yamp sniffed. “I had nearly forgotten. You will not notice the smell after a few days. Perhaps at night, or when you come from the clean air of the mudrooms. Fookerteh, we have buried the dead within our domain. Beyond—” He swept his digits in a wide arc toward that endlessly distant sky. “The waves drowned numbers you ca

Fookerteh shuddered.

“It will pass. In a season, in two seasons.” They had left the hard-surfaced spaceport. Soft loam sank under their feet, and a new smell was in the air. Spiral plants stood as tall as their knees. Winterfiowers were just visible as loops of vine above the soil. In a year they would be blooming.

“See, death makes the land fertile. The flying scavengers — they are called aasvogel in the dominant language, vultures in English. They do their work, as do the ru

“You sound like a priest,” Fookerteh said.

Birithart-yamp flailed digits across his friend’s shoulder. “Mocker! Here is the mudroom. My officers await us inside, all but one who will join us presently. You know him. Chintithpitmang.”

“Yes.” Chintithpit-mang was a dissident; Fookerteh had avoided him.

“Before we go in-why.are you here?” Birithart-yamp asked urgently.

“It is as you suspect. My mother’s mate wishes to smell through my nostrils and feel through my digits. He trusts Koothfektil-rusp but he wishes another view. I was sent.”

“Good. It is as I hoped. The Herdmaster will sniff your thoughts and believe. We are wi

The mudroom had a random, primitive look. Of course it lacked the curve of spin gravity; but it was shapeless, a mere hole dug in the dirt, filled with water, churned and heated. It was twice the size of Message Bearer’s communal mudroom. On the far side was an endless cascade of water plummeting into a separate pool.

This was the way a mudroom should be! Fookerteh sagged in the warmth, resting muscles strained by Winterhome gravity, eyes half-closed, his s

“They call it elephant,” Birithart-yamp said. “Imagine a tremendous fi’ with only a single digit. These creatures are truly enormous. I will show you one that masses more than eight times your weight.”

Fookerteh snorted incredulity.

“I agree, but it is true.”

“And these are not the dominant species of this planet?”

“They are not. Many humans believe them to be the most intelligent of all species living on the Earth, save for themselves.”

“Of course. Even a single digit may manipulate tools.”

“Yes, but badly. Their digit is primitive compared to ours, and our digits are—”

“Yes?”

“It is not important. They are large and powerful, but the human called Botha said that unless these elephants were protected, they would all be killed.”

“Killed? By what?”

“By the lesser humans, for food. By those we fight in the wild areas. Fookerteh, we win, but you do not yet know the valor of their warriors, and ours.”

Fookerteh let warm mud flow along his sides. A creature that massive should be unstoppable… yet humans killed them. Technology?

He sensed a mass above him, and reached up to clasp digits with Chintithpit-mang.

“Well met, companion of my youth.” There was a strangeness, a distance in Chintithpit-mang’s voice. The fi’ bore new scars. He was armed, and wore the harness of an eight-cubed leader. Infrared night-seeing goggles, and other equipment Fookerteh did not recognize, hung from his harness. He stood like a wall in the gravity — that had — Fookerteh sagging. His look made Fookerteh uneasy.

“Well met,” Fookerteh responded. “Will you not join us?”

Birithart-yamp said, “Chintithpit-mang is one of the elite jungle warriors. Most of them are sleepers. You’ve seen reports—”

“I have. Chintithpit-mang, have you seen these elephants?”

“I have. They are large.”

“And fearsome?”

“Not so fearsome as the humans, who kill elephants and fithp alike.”

Machines speak with as much warmth as you. “The reports say that we have lost many fithp in the jungles. Many more simply refuse to fight there. Why?”

“Death and madness wait in the jungle,” Chintithpit-mang said. “Winterhome is strange enough to fithp who know only the closed spaces of Message Bearer.”

Two young warriors came to take their leader’s weapons, and aid him in removing his harness. Fookerteh recognized members of the Year Zero — fithp. They looked like each other, but not like the Year Zero dissidents that Fookerteh had just left on Thuktun Flishithy.

Chintithpit-mang might not have seen his subordinates. His eyes looked past the walls of the mudroom. “We are warriors, and our enemies find us all too conspicuous in the open. The jungles — you haven’t seen them, Fookerteh, but you’ve seen the spiral plant in the Garden. Picture that as average size, and eight to the eighths of them growing, and smaller plants swarm at their feet—”