Rakki climbed through steep, slippery rain gullies gouged between walls of broken rock, picking his way through tangles of gray, leathery growth, moist from vapors carried by the wind from the swamps below. He moved surely but cautiously, avoiding the thorn thickets and turning aside the limbs of coarse leaves that tried to tear at his arms and legs. His feet were bare. On his body he wore just a loin covering of skin and a vest of some thick, stiff, Oldworld material, open at the chest and with holes for the arms, that he had taken from the body of an enemy dispatched long ago. There was still a blood-blackened patch on one side. Shifting veils of gray formed a permanent canopy overhead, thickening into a black murk above the fire mountains to the east that glowed red at night, where lightning flickered intermittently and nothing lived. Yesterday had seen snowflakes and squalls of wind-driven ice. Yet the rivulets of muddy water running down from the heights above were warm around his feet.
He came up out of the ravine onto a more open slope of scrub and tilted boulders leaning in piles where they had tumbled down. Above him, the slope leveled out into a terrace of broken ground and rock falls along the base of a line of cliffs where the Cavers lived. In front of the openings, connecting surrounding mounds of high ground, they had built a rampart of earth and rocks that closed back to the cliffs on either side to form a walled-in area. The Swamp People had spent many hours watching the Cavers and their movements. The rampart was always guarded. Rakki sniffed the air but could read little from it up here, with the wind. The sound of barking erupted suddenly from above. The dogs had detected him. A barrier blocking a gap between two of the high points of the rampart, fashioned from limbs of dead trees and thorn bush, was raised. Rakki saw the dogs rush out, following them with his eyes in and out among the rocks as they ran down toward him. Human figures followed. He waited.
The dogs emerged from cover—four of them, spreading out to close from all sides. Rakki backed against a boulder and tightened his grip on the edged club that he was carrying—another battle trophy, a length of Oldworld metal topped at one end by a crosspiece sharpened on stone, a grip woven from vine strands at the other. The dogs inched closer, keeping low near the ground, paws stretched ahead, fangs bared, growling and snarling. Five Cavers appeared, following them. Two looked to be no older than Rakki and were carrying spears. Neffers, like him—their minds formed by the things that were, knowing nothing of the world that had existed before the fire and the Long Night came, and the earth was torn asunder. The third was older, scrawny, with wild eyes and tufts of face hair, waving a club cut from root wood. But it was the last two that Rakki found himself staring at, for a moment dulling his normally ceaseless alertness to everything around him. They were larger, with thick hair and deep lines covering faces that had seen many years. Oldworlders!
Rakki had only seen dead Oldworlders before—who had lived as part of the world that had once been. Although his own earliest years must have gone back to those times, he had no real recollections of them, or of parents or anyone else he had been with then. At times there would come odd fragments of things, like a fading dream that no longer meant anything. Neffers did best in the world that now was. Shaped by it and attuned to it, they accepted its uncompromising reality and lived by its harsh rules instinctively. It was those who seemed to live with part of their mind in one world and part in another who tended to be ineffective and erratic, either withdrawing into long silences that could last for days, or sliding the other way toward craziness like the wild-eyed one pointing the spear. And then, Rakki had heard, there were some left from the Old World, usually older still, with a different kind of strength that had enabled them to pull through and carry on functioning.
The two before him now wore coverings of material that was crinkly like his vest, but not as thick, torn and patched, extending over their upper arms and down their legs, with strange sheaths like animal paws around their feet. One of them was peculiarly pink, the color of hand palms. Rakki had heard of light-skinned humans but never seen one. While the others carried spears, the two Oldworlders were holding implements of intricately shaped Oldworld metal—something like Rakki's club, but without any weighted head or edge. Rakki took them to be the weapons that Jemmo had talked about. But on looking them over now, up close, he was puzzled. There was no way he could see that they could make an effective weapon. Yet Jemmo had said they possessed fearsome power.
The two with spears leveled them to keep Rakki against the rock while the light-skin looked him over. His face behind the hair was twisted and sour, the eyes cold and hard. "Watchoo want comin' aroun' heyah, mud rat?" he demanded.
Rakki forced his expression to remain firm, fighting back his fear reflex. He raised an arm in the direction of the caves above. One of the dogs growled a warning at the movement. "Come in. Weary of killing land. Live with Cave People. Work hard. Fight for," Rakki said. The crazy-eyed one emitted a screeching laugh and spat at the ground.
The darker Oldworlder leered, showing spaces among yellow teeth. One of his arms was heavily scarred and hung in an odd, stiff kind of way. "Jus' a kid, Bo. What kind o' work him good for? Mo' food o' ours he eat. Da's all."
"Bettah use for us if make him dawg food instead, maybe," Lightskin said.
"Dog meat! Dog meat!" the crazy-eye screeched, obviously finding it hilarious.
"Juswait! Jusyouwait!" Rakki's chest was pounding. What if he'd misjudged? He felt for the pouch inside his vest. Scar-arm pointed his Oldworld club at him. It made a clicking noise. "Easy now, jus' easy, okay." Rakki's fingers found the four metal fingers that he had brought—yellow-brown at the flat ends, changing to gray where they rounded into points. He brought them out and showed them. "Look, more use than jus' work. Know things and places. Make Cave People strong."
Scar-arm took one of the fingers and examined it, then handed it to Lightskin. "Look like good bullet there, Bo," he said. If that's what it was called, Rakki didn't know what it meant. But he'd been told that Oldworlders valued them highly.
"Wheah you get these heah, mud rat?" Lightskin demanded.
"There's mo' bullet like that, lots mo'."
"Roun' these part? You tell straight, now."
Rakki pointed north and east, where dry heights of unclimbable walls and deep canyons gave way eventually to watery lowlands that connected via a roundabout route to the swamp lands south from the caves, where Rakki was from. "Three days, that way. You see, I know things. Know places. Rakki come live with Cave People. Can tell. Good for Cave People too."
The two Oldworlders looked at each other. "Watch' think, Bo?" Scar-arm asked, eyeing Rakki again dubiously.
Lightskin seemed to turn the proposition over before coming to a decision. "Maybe is so, could be," he said finally. "Take him back up, talk to Mistameg. He know. He say what we do."
The screecher took Rakki's weapon and waved him on as the two Oldworlders turned to lead the way back up to the caves. The two Neffers fell in behind, keeping their spears still leveled, while the dogs stayed close by. The screecher seemed disappointed by the outcome.