Various people muttered their thanks to her, and within a couple of minutes, the village square was empty. “Shall we?” Lynette said to Koradan, turning down the street towards her house.
“Ann seems to be our most vocal opponent,” Koradan said, as he fell into step beside her.
“She’s the loudest,” Lynette agreed. “But she’s far from the only one with reservations about you. Which is why I thought it best to shut her up, even if it’s only temporary. The more vitriol she spouts, the more the quieter ones will think they’re justified in their opinions. If they only see people praising you and welcoming you, they’ll be forced to rethink their own viewpoints.”
“Forcing her to be quiet won’t change her opinion. In fact, it could do the opposite – just make her more determined to prove her point.”
Lynette shook her head. “Right now, I’m just buying time. If we get those men out of the mine tomorrow, she won’t have a leg to stand on. Her own husband is down there, and Dan’s quite a reasonable character, for all his choice of a tempestuous wife. I can hardly see him putting up with her spouting vicious rumours about the men who saved his life.”
“The men in the mine don’t yet know we’re not human,” Koradan pointed out – a fact that had once again been kept from the miners for their own peace of mind. “I’m not willing to bet on any outcome until the rest of the men come to terms with exactly who saved them.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Half an hour after arriving back at the house, Lynette put a plate of food in front of Koradan. He frowned at the yellow mass sitting in the middle of the plate, but Lynette had already anticipated his apprehension. “It’s called quiche,” she said, sitting down at the table opposite him. “It’s eggs, whipped up and mixed with chopped vegetables and mushrooms, and then baked in the oven. Normally it has a crust around the outside, but I didn’t have time to make one today. And we’ve got carrots, green beans and zucchini to go with it.” She pointed at each vegetable as she named them. After speaking with some of the other families today, she’d discovered that they’d all run into much the same problem; the salases hadn’t known what half the foods they’d been given were, and it had been entirely unclear whether they’d liked what had been on offer. More than one person had noticed they weren’t particularly fond of bread, and at the same time, that they had a distinct love of mushrooms.
“I haven’t had mushrooms in years,” Koradan said, picking up his fork and taking his first bite of the quiche. His eyes closed and he gave an appreciative moan. “Gods, that’s good. We used to grow all kinds of mushrooms in Chalandros. Sadly, most of the cultures have been lost now.”
It wasn’t the first time he’d referred to a lack of food in his homeworld. Lynette considered asking him about it… and then reconsidered… and then pondered the idea all over again. Admitting that the human warriors weren’t the heroes she’d been raised to believe they were had been jarring, but on reflection, not nearly as painful as she’d anticipated. It had left her with a distinct feeling of sorrow, but with less guilt than she’d expected.
But delving further into Koradan’s world and culture opened up a minefield of potential conflicts and conundrums that she wasn’t sure she was ready to deal with. His story about trying to defend his sister-in-law and his nephews had kept her up for hours last night, as she’d tried to picture what a salas child looked like, and how a powerful warrior might go about mourning such a loss. There were so many things about him that she didn’t understand and so many assumptions she’d made that were probably completely wrong.
“Can I ask you something?” she said, pushing pieces of quiche around on her plate.
“Of course,” Koradan said. “Anything you like.”
She stared at him, wondering if she had the courage to ask her next question. She tried to find a good way to phrase the words, frowning as she did so. Then, when she came up with nothing helpful, she decided to just blurt it out. “Why are so many people trying to leave Chalandros? If they know there’s an army of warriors waiting to kill them, why do they risk it?”
She knew immediately, just from the look on his face, that she’d hit a nerve. She wondered if she should apologise. But the question was the crux of so much pain in both of their worlds – Koradan’s people being murdered, and the human warriors constantly risking their lives to ‘defend’ a world that perhaps didn’t actually need defending.
Koradan toyed with his food for a moment, swallowing one more mouthful before he answered. “Our sun is dying. It’s been happening very slowly for hundreds of years, but in the last few decades, it’s got considerably worse. It’s hard to explain. The mages understand it better than most of the rest of us. But basically, as the sun dies, it’s like it’s exploding, but really, really slowly. The mages say that one day, it will swallow the entire planet. In the short term, though, it means that Chalandros is heating up. When I was a kid, it was already happening, but it started small. Each year we’d have less rain and longer droughts. It got harder and harder to grow crops. The land near the equator became too hot to live in. Then the rivers began to dry up. A lot of animals died. And more people started migrating to the gates, to leave Chalandros forever.”
“Gates? As in plural?”
“Yes. According to our mages, there aren’t just our two worlds. There are nine in total, and eleven gates joining the worlds. Or there were, at least. A long time ago, Chalandros had three gates, each leading to a different world. One was in the ocean, but it’s permanently closed now. The oceans began drying up, and when the imbalance between our world and the other one got too great, the gate closed. It hasn’t opened in over ten years. There is another gate, on one of the southern continents of Chalandros, but it’s impossible to get to now. The ground along the equator is permanently on fire. The population was split. The northern half have to try to get through the Gate of Chalandros, while the southern half would have headed for the Gate of Rubellen. We have no idea what happened to them, and no way of finding out.”
Lynette stared at Koradan, her meal forgotten. “I… Gods, I… I don’t know what to say.Ninedifferent worlds? Are you sure?”
Koradan shrugged. “I’ve never been to them, if that’s what you mean. But that’s what everyone in Chalandros believes.”
“So your people are all refugees. They’re not trying to attack us. They’re just trying to leave a dying world, before they die along with it.”
Koradan nodded. “As bad as it is to face the army, the alternative is dying of either starvation or heat stroke.”
“Well, that makes me feel a hell of a lot more guilty than I did before,” Lynette said, cringing at the knowledge of how many innocent people were dying every day. “Have you tried to explain this to anyone? To the army? To any of the warriors?”
“Repeatedly,” Koradan said. “On the few instances when we’ve actually got someone to listen for a few minutes, they’ve just declared that we’re lying and we’re trying to infiltrate your world so we can infect it with our evil. I know we look different from you, but where do humans get the idea that we’re actually demons?”
“Everyone here believes that Chalandros is a literal hellscape. And given the heat that comes rolling through that gate when it opens, I can understand why.”
“The gate is in the middle of a desert,” Koradan tried to explain. “It used to be a fertile plain, but the grass died years ago.”
“I’m not trying to justify it,” Lynette said. “I’m just explaining the reasons why people believe what they do. And add to that the fact that some of the creatures that come through the gate are genuinely terrifying. The unicorns, for example. They’re literally on fire. But they don’t burn up and die from it. They just charge around, stab a few people with their horns, then run off into the forest and set that on fire as well.”
Koradan rubbed his face tiredly. “There are so many misunderstandings in what you just said that I don’t even know where to start. I’m not blaming you,” he added. “If the people here don’t understand what we are or what’s going on back there, they have a good reason to be scared. What bothers me is that no one is stopping to actually think about it, to ask questions or give us a chance to explain any of it. Anything we say is written off before we’ve even said it.”
Lynette fell silent, eating her dinner as she brooded on the problem. “It’s not a lost cause,” she said eventually. “Like you said before, you’ve got through to a few of the people here. And that number is growing by the day. There’s got to be something we can do to start making people change their minds.”
“I would like to believe you. But the risk is that as soon as you start advertising the fact that there are demons and dragons living in your village, there could be plenty of people willing to come and slaughter us, regardless of how much you protest against it. I don’t mean to be judgemental, but literally the only reason you didn’t attack us when we arrived was because your men were all trapped inside a mine and you didn’t have any suitable weapons.”
