Cuckoo's Egg by C. J. Cherryh Read Free Book Online Page B

choice he tries? Knowledge or fool's choice?) (How old is he in his own terms? Not man yet. Not grown. But near.) (Thorn-that-I-carried. Haras, Thorn, that wounds the hand that holds it, the foot that treads it, that tangles paths and bears bitter blooms and poisoned fruit.)

    * * *
The shadows multiplied in the sinking sun. Thorn gasped for air, withheld his hands from their instinctive reach after support on trunk and log and stone as he descended the valley. He sighted on a stone and went to it, for his legs wandered. He sighted on the next and followed that. Such little goals led him now.
    (Get beyond the pale, get to paths strange to both of us. Duun knows the mountain too well— far too well.)
    (Go where Duun would not have me go— make him angry— anger in my enemy is my friend, my friend—)
    He smelled smoke. It was far away in the valley, but he went toward it.
    (Let Duun worry now. Let him come here to find me. Here among the countryfolk. Here among others. Other people.)

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    Cuckoo's Egg

    (Run and run. Stop for wind. Let us play this game in and out of strange places, in among stranger-folk who know nothing of the game.)
    —There must be food, food for taking with hatani tricks. ("They're herders," Duun had said. "Herder-folk. No, little fish, not hatani, nothing like. They respect us too much to come here. That's all. They lived here once.")
    (Where houses are is food, is shelter: he'll have to search, he won't know if they'd lie, these countryfolk, or hide me— Perhaps they would.) There was a trail. There was a stink of habit here even his nose could tell, musty, old dung, the frequent passage of animals.
    Thorn jogged up it. Stink to hide his stink. To confound Duun's nose.
    Tracks to hide his tracks. Let Duun guess. Thorn gathered speed and coursed along the trail. There was the taste of blood in his mouth.
    ("—They never bother anything," Duun said of farmer-folk. "They don't ask to be bothered and we don't go there.") ("Couldn't we see them, Duun-hatani? Couldn't we go and see?") Thorn wondered if they were like the meds and Ellud; if there were—
    (—O gods, if there were some like me.)
    In all the wide world Duun spoke of, there must be more like him.

    * * *
It was what Duun had thought. Fool! he cursed himself. Fool! To maneuver the enemy and not to see it— that was the greatest fool in the world. Scent-blind, sick with livhl, Thorn was seeking a hiding-place, seeking some place rife with scents, with smoke, with tracks and confusion. Cover himself in shonun-scent.
    Thorn was going to the one place forbidden him. Change the rules. Upset the game.

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    Cuckoo's Egg

    Find outsiders and raise it another level still.
    (Duun, what's wrong with me?)
    ( Slick, the infant said, rubbing at his stomach) Faces in the mirror.
    (Duun, will my ears grow?)
    Duun laid his own ears back and put on speed, risking everything now, risking shame, that a minnow might trap him.
    But Thorn already had.

    * * *
There was a house in the twilight— not a large house like theirs up on the mountain, but a ramshackle thing part metal and part wood. There were fences, put together the same way, of bits and pieces. Fences — Thorn guessed that word: fences , Duun said, kept countryfolk cattle from the woods: and cattle Thorn had seen, from high on the mountaintop, white and brown dots moving across the flat in summer-haze. ("City-meat comes from those," Duun told him. And Thorn: "Can't we hunt them?" "There's no hunting them," Duun had said. "They're tame. They're stupid. They stand there to be killed. Staring at you. They trust shonunin.") ("And they kill them, Duun?")
    White animals huddled in their pens. Lights burned near the house on a tall pole in the twilight. Thorn saw the power lines, that led from there two ways, the house, and off across the land— (The power unit's far away then. Can there be other houses near?) He skirted brush, came up nearer, where he had a closer view of the house, the dusty yard