Footfall

“Okay. We’ll take care of him as best we can. If they ask, I’ll say he was burned in a motor accident. They probably won’t. As long as we bring in the crops they pretty well leave us alone.”

“I guess it’s pretty rough for you, too,” Carter said.

“Rough? Yes, you could say that. I’d head for the bush, but what would happen to the wife and kids? Let me tell you, Yank, a man with four small children doesn’t have a lot of choices.”

“Sure.” What would I do?

“Brant! Magtig, commandos—” A tall blond woman rushed into the room. She stopped when she saw Carter. “Magtig! Here, in our house!”

Chisholm spoke briefly in Afrikaans. Despite the lessons he’d taken while aboard Ethan Allen, Carter didn’t understand any of it

“My wife, Katje,” Chisholm said. “Colonel Carter of the United States Army.”

“I see that he is. Colonel, do you understand the danger you cause here?”

“Yes, ma’am. I didn’t have a choice. One of my soldiers is hurt—”

“Where is he?”

Carter waved toward the barn.

“And what do you wish to do?”

“Leave him with you, I guess,” Carter said. “Then we’ll go back in the bush.”

“And what will you do there?”

“Whatever we can to hurt the snouts.”

“Och, I could wish to go with you. That is impossible. Let us bring your soldier into the house, and get your commando away into the bush. Three miles north from here you will find a deep ravine, filled with brush. Go into it and wait. I will send Mvub] You must speak with him.”

“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 cannot hold in your head. When the wind blows from that way or that, it is strongest. Today the smells are faint.”

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 running creatures, and the worms and insects. They do their work, that the Garden will be green. Is it not always so?”

“You sound like a priest,” Fookerteh said.