Skeen's Return by Jo Clayton Read Free Book Online

He found an ivory carver and a clipclap singer and a weaver and five beautiful women ranging from one joyous creature who’d just become a woman to the mother of five children who was radiantly female in so powerful a way that it reached even him though he didn’t like women at all. He marked these and some others and took the monorail inland to a deep woodland village where he marked a pair of twins in their fifth year of life, and two woodcarvers and a viol maker and a blind herbalist who made wonderful perfumes, and three more women all very young, just emerging from their baby fat. All this he did in a single day and in the dark he took the monorail again to a steep walled cleft high in the mountains where miners and metalworkers lived. Tinkle’s Thwart it was called.
    He slept on the journey and had bad dreams, dreams of choking, of flying and falling, of endless pursuit by something he never quite saw. He woke in the gray light of dawn as the train slowed for the station at Tinkle’s Thwart. He was sweating and more tired on waking that he was when he sank into that heavy sleep. He was afraid. As he hauled his sample cases onto the station platform and programmed them to walk beside him, he wanted terribly to get back on the train and race to the coast; he wanted to leap into his ship and get away from here. He hesitated too long, the train slipped away; he thought of the heaps and heaps of gold his cargo would bring in and told himself he was a superstitious fool to take dream warnings seriously. They probably were born in something he ate; though he was careful about his food and tested everything before he ate it whenever he was in a strange place, there was always the chance something sly slipped through. Only something I ate, he said to himself. Still, there was an oddness about the way these Crowmese looked at him after they’d been round him a while; their smiles retreated to the tips of their teeth. Ah, well, I am a stranger and they’ve had few of those round here. This has happened to me before. Forget it, old man, you’re not going to be here long enough for that feeling to cause trouble.
    Tinkle’s Thwart was one of the oval settlements, a ring of houses and shops, a broad brick roadway, a central common; this was a carefully tended garden with velveteen lawns, clumps of lace trees, splashes of primary colors from the flower beds and a small noisy stream meandering through the middle of it all, singing its way over several short drops. A pleasant place just coming to life, high enough to be cold in the early morning in spite of the bright summer weather. There was a cook shop next to the platform and he ate his breakfast amid a bustle of young Thwarters going to work in the village food fields in a valley lower down; they were catching a last hot meal before the fieldwork began. He paid for his meal with a handful of local coins, then herded his sample cases out of the shop, ignoring the laughter that followed him as the Thwarters noted for the first time the hippity-hoppity progress of the cases on their dozens of short skinny legs and stubby feet.
    A tall girl danced a silent circle about him, her hair hanging loose, so pale it was almost white, the ends frizzed and shifting in the slow breeze; she was all length and awkward elasticity, but her too-visible bones had a promise of everlasting elegance. Her eyes held a touch of blue, huge bright eyes that judged him coolly and found him wanting. “Hello,” he said. “Lady, I thank you for your greeting.” He bowed.
    Her lips parted in an enigmatic smile, baring small chisel teeth and canines that dropped lower into dagger points. She said nothing but continued to stare at him for a long uncomfortable moment, then she darted away.
    He wiped the sweat off his face, promised himself he’d mark her the moment he got a chance; let her learn lessons of humility from better teachers than him. He tucked his kerchief