They Fly at Ciron by Samuel R. Delany Read Free Book Online Page A

shirt, reached down, unfastened his sling, and lifted out his powergun—for a moment it seemed he was going to hand it to Kern as a gift.
    Rahm had seen a powergun that morning, but not—really—what it could do.
    Flame shot out and smacked Kern just below his shoulder. Kern slammed backward four feet—without either stepping or falling: upright, his feet just slid back across the grass—the left one was even slightly off the ground. Blood fountained a dozen feet forward. The horse’s flank was splattered and the animal reared twice, then a third time. Rahm was close enough to hear the meat on Kern’s chest bubble and hiss, as he fell, twisting to the side. One of Kern’s arms was gone.
    When it hit the ground, Kern’s remaining hand moved in the grass. Kern’s heavy fingers opened, then closed, with noteven grass blades in them. Kern’s face was gone too—and half Kern’s head.
    The bearded man lowered the powergun from where the retort had jerked the barrel into the air. “Your leader has been killed. So will you all be killed—unless you announce your surrender!”
    Rahm felt a vast and puzzling absence inside him. Nothing in it seemed like any sort of sense he could hold to. Then, something began to grow in that senseless absence. It grew slowly. But he felt it growing. At the same time, something—a strange understanding—began to grow in the face of the bearded man on his horse, who raised his gun overhead.
    Suddenly the man turned sharply in his saddle and barked back at the troops:
    “They refuse to surrender! Attack!”
    Though he had learned far back to fight well, like many big men Uk did not like fighting. Uncountable campaigns ago, he’d also learned that little Mrowky actually gloried in the insult, the attack, the pummeling given and received, the recovery, the re-attack. Mrowky could make as much conversational jollity at losing in a melee as he could at winning.
    Since men—and sometimes women—so often feel obliged to start fights with big men, Uk had grown grateful for Mrowky’s willingness, even eagerness, to jump in, when others, to prove themselves, picked quarrels with him in strange towns and taverns. Since people tended not to start fights with runty men like Mrowky (who enjoyed the fight so much), hanging out with broad-shouldered, beer-belliedUk was a way to guarantee a certain frequency of entertainment—possibly it was the core of their friendship. For both were different enough from one another to preclude close feelings in any situation other than war.
    Uk had an expansive, gentle humor he used largely to mask from his fellows a real range of information and some thoughtful speculation—while Mrowky was, in simple words, a loud, little, stupid man, who’d been called and cursed by just those words enough times by enough people so that, if he did not actually believe they were true, he knew there was
something
to them. Thus the friendship of the big soldier, who was also smart, flattered Mrowky. Both could complain about one another in fiery terms, starred with scatology and muddied with proto-religious blasphemies.
    But they were devoted.
    Perhaps a little of that devotion came from the knowledge both shared, that their time in the Myetran army had taught them: life in the midst of battle was on another plane entirely from that in which relationships could be parsed (a concept Uk would understand) or parceled out (an idea Mrowky might follow), analyzed, or made rational.
    With ten other soldiers, Mrowky and Uk had been stationed just along the turn-off at the common’s south corner. (Other units of a dozen each had been deployed at seven more points around the green.) When the first villagers hurried by, still unsteady from the grating whine of the high speakers and more or less oblivious to the soldiers (basically because they were just not used to seeing soldiers standing quietly in the shadow), light from an opened door spilled over the flags.
    A youngredheaded woman