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

passed through it, as a young redheaded man—clearly a brother or a cousin—came up beside her. They disappeared, displaced by others rushing to join the villagers gathering on the grass. But Mrowky had given Uk an elbow in the forearm; and, in the darkness, his breathing had increased to a tempo Uk knew meant the little man now had the grin which said, “I like that girl—she’s hot!”
    When the lights had rolled onto the common, Uk and Mrowky had moved up to the edge of the illuminated space, per orders. As, with his microphone, Nactor had ridden out to address the villagers, Uk wondered, as he did so often, just out of sight, whether the populace ever really saw them—or not. Just how aware were the stunned and disoriented peasants of the soldiers in their armor, waiting for the word?
    In two years, Mrowky and Uk had been through this maneuver seventeen times in seventeen villages. It had taken the first half dozen for Uk to realize that it did not matter whether the villagers surrendered or not; the attack came in either case. Over those half dozen times, Uk had listened to Nactor’s amplified address, watched the elimination of the spokesman (that’s how it was referred to: though in a half a dozen villages now, the spokesman had been a woman), and awaited the final order with a growing distaste—till, by the seventh time, he’d begun to block out the whole thing.
    Over the first ten times (which is how many times it had taken Mrowky to learn what Uk had learned in six), Mrowky had watched the process with hypnotic fascination, awed at its duplicity, its daring, its distractionary efficacy.But his attention span would have been strained by any more; so now he too gave no more mind to the details than did the other soldiers.
    When the attack sounded you pulled out your sword, moved forward, and began to swing. You tried not to remember who or what you hit. A lot of blood spurted on your armor, and got in the cracks, so that you got sticky at knees and elbows and shoulders; otherwise it was pretty easy. The villagers were naked—most of them—and scared and not expecting it.
    Among his first encounters, Uk, out of what he’d thought was humanitarianism, had—with some forethought—not always swung and cut to kill. It seemed fitting to give the pathetic creatures at least a chance to live. Three days later, though, he’d seen what happened to the ones who were just badly wounded: the long loud deaths, the maggoty gashes, the bone-breaking fevers, the cracked lips of the dying…After that, from the same humanitarianism, he’d used his skills to become as deadly as he could with each blade swing at the screaming, clamoring folk—who simply had to be decimated.
    That was orders.
    Indeed, there was some skill to it—like avoiding the flesh-burning power beams lancing through the mayhem from the mounted officers. Best thing to do (Uk had explained to Mrowky a long time back, when the little guy’d gotten a burn on his right hip), was to glance up from the carnage now and then and keep Kire’s horse a little before you, not drifting too far to the left or the right of it—since the mounted lieutenants had the sense (most of them) to avoid powergunning down each other.
    You fought.
    And youtried not to remember individual slashes and cuts you dealt out to bare shoulders and ribs and necks. (After the diseases and lingering deaths among the wounded in that first campaign, Uk tried for lots of necks.) Sometimes, though, an incident would tear itself free in the web of perception and refuse to sink back into the reds and blacks and chaotic grays and screams and crashes and howls that were the night.
    When what happened next stopped happening—
    But it was too violent and too painful for Rahm to recall with clarity.
    He remembered walking backward, shouting, then—when Tenuk fell against him, like a bubbling roast left too long on the spit and so hot he burned Rahm’s arms—screaming. He remembered his