Read Online The Avatar by Poul Anderson - Free Book Online

Terrestrial livestock and, further on, barley fields for humans. To the invaders from space, Demetrian meat and vegetation were often edible, occasionally delicious; she had been plucking moonberries, pearl apples, and dulcifruct ever since she got off the bus at Freidorp. But they lacked the whole complement of vitamins and amino acids, while containing several that were useless. The imported plants were intensely verdant, the cattle that grazed them fantastically red.
    Behind her, the road twisted out of sight around a hill. Ahead, it climbed like a snake. Beyond the next ridge she could see Trollberg, wooded and meadowed to its top. Ghost-faint at its back floated the Phaeacian snowpeaks. Mount Lorn their lord.
    The music sparkles fleet and sweet
.
    She sways there before him
    On eager feet,
    So lithe and blithe, and garlanded
    With roses and starshine
    Around her dear head
.
    Go gladly up and gladly down
.
    The dancing flies outward like laughter
—
    Caitlín halted. From a wilderness thicket had appeared a garm. Gray-furred, round-snouted, bob-tailed, tiger-sized, it flowed along in a gracefulness that brought a gasp of admiration from her. Neither need fear. Demetrian carnivores didn’t like the scent of Terrestrial animals and never attacked them. For their part, human hunters tried to preserve the balance of a nature which provided them skins for the market, and the Upland Folkmeet had declared garms a protected species.
    The beast stopped too, and stared back at her. It saw a young woman. (Her exact age was thirty-four, though being Earth-born she thought of it as twenty-five.) Of medium height, full-bosomed, withy-slender, long in the legs, she bore aloft a curly, bronze-brown mane which fell to her shoulders. Her face was wide in the brow, high in the cheekbones, tapering to the chin; but her mouth was broad and full. Beneath arching dark brows were emerald eyes and a short, tilted nose. Weather had turned afair skin tawny and added a dusting of freckles. Her tunic and trousers had seen rough use. A crios belt, gaudy rainbow sash, encircled them. A backpack carried changes of clothing, sleeping bag, a little dried food, the poems of Yeats, and other travel gear.
    “Glory be to Creation,” she breathed, “you’re beautiful, me bucko!”
    The garm vanished back onto its domain. Caitlín sighed and continued along her route.
    He spurns the turf that once he paced
.
    His arm throws a glowing
    Around her waist,
    And whirled across the world, she sees
    Him light as the wind and
    More tall than the trees
.
    Go gladly up
—
    She broke off. A man had stepped into sight, rounding a huge rock behind the fence ahead of her. Equally surprised, after an instant he raised a hand and cried a greeting. Caitlín jogged toward him. He was young, too, she saw, stocky, blond. Clad in coveralls, he bore a horn made from a tordener’s tusk wherewith to call his cows home.
    “Good day, my girl,” he said in his lilting accent when she reached him. Hereabouts that was courteous. “How goes it for you?”
    “Very well. I thank you, sir, and wish the top of the day to you,” she replied in the soft English of her homeland, which long since had taken unto itself the speech of its conquerors and made that its own.
    “Can I ask where you fare?”
    “To Trollberg for Midsummer.”
    His eyes widened. “Ah. That I guessed. You are Cathleen, true? I’d call you ‘Miz’ like a gentleman ought, but ken not your last name. Nobody seems to use it.”
    She tolerated his pronunciation. Few Sassenachs or squareheads knew any better. “Aye, for I’m only here at the turning of the sun, when all the province is one great shebeen. It’s a fine country you have, and dear people, but there’s too much else of the planet to be traveling in. Who might you be, now?”
    “Elias Daukantas. Of Vilnyus Farm.” He jerked a thumb backward. Above a windbreak of poplars rose what must be chimney smoke. Shyly: “I’ve heard much about you, and