Orion Shall Rise by Poul Anderson

over his, and whispered rapidly: ‘Please don’t think I’m bold or wanton or anything. If you tell me no, well, I know my station in life, and only being in the same room with you this afternoon is something I’ll always remember. But I’ve adored you ever since – Anyway, on week nights the landlord, he’ll tend bar later, the landlord generally closes up about twenty hundred, because the kind of customers we get have to go to work early. I’m sure you’re staying somewhere too fine for the likes of me. But if you felt like it, I do sleep in a room upstairs, and I’d be so honored –’
    Iern consulted his conscience. Faylis? No. After nearly two years of marriage she remained indifferent in bed; she loved the glamour and luxury of being his wife, but when they were alone she was apt to rail at him; she was reading Gaean texts, and he knew she corresponded with Talence Jovain Aurillac, who was a Gaean convert. This wouldn’t be his first romp away from her. Besides, few Clansfolk took such things seriously anymore.
    But Plik. He would like to see Plik again, get to know that curious man better, hear more songs.
    He cast a glance yonder. The poet met it, grinned on the left side of his face, hoisted his goblet in toast, and said: ‘No fears. I’m used to this. Doubtless I’ll pass out before long, and awaken with a headache and stagger off to my lodgings. Besides, my Vineleaf can do no wrong.’

CHAPTER FOUR
    ‘Orion shall rise.’
    Those were the first words that Ronica Birken remembered uttering. Earlier recollections out of childhood stood apart from each other, vaguely perceived, like islands in a fog – her mother singing her to sleep each night; her father (home on leave from the war, he must have been) flinging her in the air and catching her while she laughed for joy; a stately wapiti that hung around the village as a sort of public pet and took lettuce leaves from her fingers; hours of practice at throwing a ball, for she was determined to do it as well as the boys; rain on the windows of a darkened house wherein her mother wept –
    But she remembered how she came home, saw Uncle Emon and another man in the living room with Anneth, was so struck by the grimness on all three that she stopped in the doorway and stood unobserved while the other man (Rikko Torsun? He was the local Lodgemaster of the Wolves then; but his face was unclear in her mind) spoke of winning back freedom, and from her uncle rolled forth the words she did not understand (for the starry Hunter
would
gleam again above snowfields – wouldn’t he?) but that held a deep and shivery magic.
    The very next day, or almost, the stranger came. She did not recall what name he gave himself, but his size and alien features remained always with her, vivid as a scar; and though he talked gently, it was of Daddy’s death he talked, and he was one of the troll Maurai, the first she had ever seen. At last she hurled the magic words at him for a lightning bolt. Nothing happened except that Mother took her away. However, from that hour onward, Ronica’s memories were more and more linked, as if this marked the beginning of her real life.
    In a way it did. Soon after, the family moved to Portanjels on theStrait of Wandy Fuca, where Anneth took a job about which she told her children merely that it was for her Lodge. (A minor harbor, therefore scarcely noticed by the Maurai Inspectorate, the town was an excellent terminal for the seaborne part of the secret traffic with Kenai; and recordkeepers were no less indispensable to the growth of that traffic than were sailors, engineers, or armed guards.) Presently she married Tom Jamis, also of the Wolf Lodge (and also in the secret, as a computerman concerned with procuring hardware). In the course of a few years, the undertaking reached a point where their services were in demand at the volcanoes. The family moved to Kenai, and there – later in the forests behind it, on into the vastness that was