Virginia Hamilton Read Online Free Page B

So are we still a tightening?
    Be still one.
    You can call me Justice, she traced.
    Justice, thought Duster.
    And call him Thomas, and him Levi, and the last one you can call Dorian.
    Thomas … Levi, Duster thought. Dorian.
    Good! That’s it, traced Justice. Those are our names. We know your names, too. You’re Duster. And that’s Siv and over there is Glass.
    Glass was coming to. At the sound of her name, she got up carefully and took her place at Duster’s left side. In the packen, also, smooth-keeps were up and in their circle.
    Calm settled over trip and packen. Glass and Duster toned quietly to one another. A thoughtful Siv took in every shade of meaning.
    “She be a strong thing,” Glass toned to Duster. “Be not easy, fighting.”
    “You be not fighting. She be a leader,” he toned.
    “Leader be better that one.” She gazed at Thomas.
    “Be more than one leader?” toned Siv, with a trill of apology for intruding. “She be leader and Thomas one be leader?”
    “And three be smooth-keep and one be leggens?” Glass sang out.
    “That be it,” softly Duster toned. “One, two, three, one.”
    Smiling at them, Justice spoke in calm tones. “We are like a trip, but being one, two, three and one, we are called a unit. We can be separate the way Duster is separate from Siv and from Glass. You are a trip. We are a unit. We care to join the packen. Join like a trip, but as a unit. Maybe sometime another one with us. Another one is called Miacis. An animal, Miacis. Having four legs.”
    A clamoring arose in the packen. Glass took her fighting stance. Siv was loose, one foot before the other, ready to run an evasive action on command. Duster was poised in silence, ready to do in an instant what must be done.
    “My mistake, to talk of this golden animal, Miacis,” Justice said in a soothing voice. “We wish to travel with you, O Duster, we of the unit. We can be our own trip with you and the packen.”
    It interested Duster, these tones and levels of pitch the wim out of his dream could tone. And it amused him how terrible her voice could be when it slipped off key. The voice had few pitches that did not, at one time or another, grate on his thinking. Yet he understood her. And now he was silent, wondering about these strange ones who had come from far, yet had walked in from his dreaming.
    An animal, she had said. A beast, part of her unit.
    Duster thought and thought. Recalled a golden thing in his dreaming, streaking across the land. She had said a golden animal. Whatever kind was the golden animal from his dreaming, it was not a kind for the leggens to bring down on a run. That kind, golden, filled Duster with caring for it. Dreaming, he heard it bark what sounded like words from the distance.
    “Who be you four humans?” Duster toned. His voice was strong in its leader’s mode.
    “We are friends from far past,” Justice said.
    “Friends? Be what, friends? I know no past,” toned Duster.
    “Friends are those who support you, come to travel with you,” Justice said. “The far past is our time frame. We come from past—was—to this that is your now.”
    “Friends, nothing,” coldly Duster toned. “Was, nothing.”
    He tested the atmosphere of the four. It did not give off a bad feeling, but he must make certain.
    “You be some kind of Mal, then?” Duster toned.
    The four looked startled. They stared long and hard at one another, but made no sound that Duster could hear. He laughed inwardly, for these had shown that they need not make sound. They could plant thinking within one another, anyone.
    “You be using mindsong,” he toned at them, proud that he’d found a way to describe their private thinking.
    They were startled again, and this made Duster laugh.
    “That’s a good way to put it,” Justice said. “You know of the Mal by name,” she said carefully. “Mal is a friend that supports you?”
    “I know the Mal,” Duster toned easily.
    “The Mal came to our time frame,” she