Since the griffin folk have been warned to expect the shuttle, they are
not alarmed when
it appears and lands in the valley that lies at the heart of their land.
The ambassador,
Helena 3, emerges. She has travelled light, for she has not yet had the
chance to
acquire much in the way of possessions, and has only one bag with her. It
contains
a couple of changes of clothing, a hairbrush and comb, some toiletry
items, one of the
new-fangled radios to allow her to communicate with her queen, an equally
new-fangled
electric torch, and not
much else. (Fortunately the Alliance views portable radios and torches as
disposable items - unlike shuttles.)
Helena turns and waves to the shuttle as it takes off. For just a moment, she feels a little lonely. She knows that she could be here for some time, weeks or even months, and it is likely that when she eventually leaves it will have to be by a much slower method. She is familiar enough from her previous life with having no other humans around, though having to be ambassador to a deeply alien race will be a new experience for her. She is looking forward to the challenge that it will undoubtedly represent. Trilling Blackfeather and his mates, Morning Song and Evening Star, are waiting to greet Helena. As Light Trilling watches her approach, in a deeply buried corner of his mind Dark Trilling is thinking: By the gods, it's one of Zerm's 'statues'. Meanwhile Helena finds that she is getting an uneasy feeling. Though she has no magical ability, she has a gift for sensing people's auras, and can generally tell whether they are good or evil. The black griffin, though, seems to emit a confusing and - judging by her previous experience - impossible, mixture of good and evil. Well, perhaps griffins' auras are different from those of humans, she thinks. In any case, I can't afford to prejudge him. I have to remember that he's the leader of his race, a race with whom we'd like to forge an alliance.
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12/5/1999 1:18:38 PM
Extending Enabled
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