Station Of Seers : 16

Orietta allowed Crinomu to ride Paramal and on days when she chose to gallop over the plateau for no purpose other than the joy of wind in her face and sun on her skin he would often accompany her, listening to her accounts of life in the Rider tribe where she had been born and raised. She told him all about Asanka and about the tradition of the marriage journey; how a newly wed couple would visit all the scattered Rider tribes carrying no weapons and receiving the hospitality demanded by custom at each gathering as a token of the bonds of community that held the tribes together.
"We were crossing these downs to reach a small settlement in the Glenning valley but no one had warned us about the alegoyle and because we were on the marriage journey we were travelling very light with nothing to defend ourselves."
Somehow it was easy to talk to Crinomu about these formerly painful things. In return he told her stories from before the Great Forgetting; strange tales of his life as a traveller in the Galactic Compact, for Crinomu was one of the very few beings left alive on Earth who had journeyed beyond the boundaries protected by the lost Guardians Of Earth in a different age when such things had been possible.
"Have you been to the Moon?" she asked him once wistfully, looking at the mottled green and blue orb hanging in the sky.
"I have," he told her. "It is a beautiful world but a sad one; a place of great misty fern forests reaching far into the sky where each step you take is as slow and high as a dream of flight. The seas there are cold with tall gelid waves flecked with white foam that seem to take an eternity to break on the grey shores. Sail ships with their hulls carved from ice ply the ocean of storms and the sea of tranquillity and huge leather winged birds soar over the mountains. It is a doomed world, made by men but now abandoned by those who still have the knowledge to maintain it. That is the price the inhabitants of the Moon have to pay for the Vow of Earth and the Season of Innocence. Without the care and attention that brought it into being, the air will get thinner and thinner and the Moon will slowly dry and pass away to become the lifeless ball of rock it once was."
They shared a moment of melancholy; he remembering his trip to the Moon from so many, many years ago and she giving herself space to wonder anew about what life must be like on that world so different from her own and fated to die such a lingering death.
"No sense brooding," Crinomu laughed at last. "The Moon's still good for a few thousand years yet! Here, catch this!"
They were passing one of Malorye's orchards and reaching up he playfully plucked a ripe apple and tossed it to the smiling young woman.