Then, when the only sound was my own breath, the leaves, and the stream, she nodded, smiling. “Now you’ve mourned properly.”
I looked down. My chest glistened, my stomach wrinkled and smoothed and wrinkled. Dust on the tops of my feet had become tan mud.
“Now you’re almost ready to do what must be done. Go now, hunt, herd goats, play more. Soon Le Dorik will come for you.”
All sound from me stopped. Breath and heart too, I think, a syncopation before the rhythm resumed. “Le Dorik?”
“Go. Enjoy yourself before you begin your journey.”
Frightened, I shook my head, turned, fled from the cave mouth.
Le—
Suddenly the wandering little beast fled, leaving in my lap—O horror—a monster and misshapen maggot with a human head.
“Where is your soul that I may ride it!”
Aloysius Bertrand, “The Dwarf”
Come ALIVE! You’re in the PEPSI generation!
Current catchphrase (Commercial)
—Dorik.
An hour later I was crouching, hidden, by the kage. But the kage-keeper, Le Dorik, wasn’t around. A white thing (I remember when the woman who was Easy’s mother flung it from her womb before dying) had crawled to the electrified fence to slobber. It would probably die soon. Out of sight I heard Griga’s laughter; he had been Lo Griga till he was sixteen. But something—nobody knew if it was genetic or not—rotted his mind inside his head, and laughter began to gush from his gums and lips. He lost his Lo and was placed in the kage. Le Dorik was probably inside now, putting out food, doctoring where doctoring would do some good, killing when there was some person beyond doctoring. So much sadness and horror penned up there; it was hard to remember they were people. They bore no title of purity, but they were people. Even Lo Hawk would get as offended over a joke about the kaged ones as he would about some titled citizen. “You don’t know what they did to them when I was a boy, young Lo man. You never saw them dragged back from the jungle when a few did manage to survive. You didn’t see the barbaric way complete norms acted, their reason shattered bloody by fear. Many people we call Lo and La today would not have been allowed to live had they been born fifty years ago. Be glad you are a child of more civilized times.” Yes, they were people. But this is not the first time I had wondered what it feels like to keep such people—Le Dorik?
I went back to the village.
Lo Hawk looked up from re-thonging his cross-bow. He’d piled the power cartridges on the ground in front of the door to check the caps. “How you be, Lo Lobey?”
I picked a cartridge out with my foot, turned it over. “Catch that bull yet?”
“No.”
I pried the clip back with the tip of my machete. It was good. “Let’s go,” I said.
“Check the rest first.”
While I did, he finished stringing the bow, went in and got a second one for me; then we went down to the river.
Silt stained the water yellow. The current was high and fast, bending ferns and long grass down, combing them from the shore like hair. We kept to the soggy bank for about two miles.
“What killed Friza?” I asked at last.
Lo Hawk squatted to examine a scarred log: tusk marks. “You were there. You saw. La Dire only guesses.”
We turned from the river. Brambles scratched against Lo Hawk’s leggings. I don’t need leggings. My skin is tough and tight. Neither does Easy or Little Jon.
“I didn’t see anything,” I said. “What does she guess?”
An albino hawk burst from a tree and gyred away. Friza hadn’t needed leggings either.
“Something killed Friza that was non-functional, something about her that was non-functional.”
“Friza was functional,” I said. “She was!”
“Keep your voice down, boy.”
“She kept the herd together,” I said more softly. “She could make the animals do what she wanted. She could move the dangerous things away and bring the beautiful ones nearer.”
“Bosh,” said Lo Hawk, stepping over ooze.
“Without a gesture or a word, she could move the animals anywhere she wanted, or I wanted.”
“That’s La Dire’s nonsense you’ve been listening to.”
“No. I saw it. She could move the animals just like the pebble.”
Lo Hawk started to say something else. Then I saw his thoughts backtrack. “What pebble?”
“The pebble she picked up and threw.”
“What pebble, Lobey?”
So I told him the story. “And it was functional,” I concluded. “She kept the herd safe, didn’t she? She could have kept it even without me.”
“Only she couldn’t keep herself alive,” Lo Hawk said. He started walking again.
We kept silent through the whispering growth, while I mulled. Then:
“Yaaaaaa—” on three different tones.
The leaves whipped back and the Bloi triplets scooted out. One of them leaped at me and I had an armful of hysterical, redheaded ten-year-old.
“Hey there now,” I said sagely.
“Lo Hawk, Lobey! Back there—”
“Watch it, will you?” I added, avoiding an elbow.
“—back there! It was stamping, and pawing the rocks—” This from one of them at my hip.
“Back where?” Lo Hawk asked. “What happened?”
“Back there by the—”
“—by the old house near the place where the cave roof falls in—”
“—the bull came up and—”
“—and he was awful big and he stepped—”
“—he stepped on the old house that—”
“—we was playing inside—”
“Hold up,” I said and put 3-Bloi down. “Now where was all this?”
They turned together and pointed through the woods.
Hawk swung down his crossbow. “That’s fine,” he said. “You boys get back up to the village.”
“Say—” I caught 2-Bloi’s shoulder. “Just how big was he?”
Inarticulate blinking now.
“Never mind,” I said. “Just get going.”
They looked at me, at Lo Hawk, at the woods. Then they got.
In silent consensus we turned from the river through the break in the leaves from which the children had tumbled.
A board, shattered at one end, lay on the path just before us as we reached the clearing. We stopped over it, stepped out between the sumac branches.
And there were a lot of other smashed boards scattered across the ground.
A five-foot section of the foundation had been kicked in, and only one of the four supporting beams was upright.
Thatch bits were shucked over the yard. A long time ago Carol had planted a few more flowers in this garden, when, wanting to get away from the it-all of the village, we had moved down here to the old thatched house that used to be so cozy, that used to be . . . she had planted the hedge with the fuzzy orange blooms. You know that kind?
I stopped by one cloven print where petals and leaves had been ground in a dark mandala on the mud. My feet fit inside the print easily. A couple of trees had been uprooted. A couple more had been broken off above my head.
It was easy to see which way he had come into the clearing. Bushes, vines, and leaves had erupted inward. Where he had left, everything sort of sagged out.
Lo Hawk ambled into the clearing swinging his crossbow nonchalantly.
“You’re not really that nonchalant, are you?” I asked. I looked around again at the signs of destruction. “It must be huge.”
Lo Hawk threw me a glance full of quartz and gristle. “You’ve been hunting with me before.”
“True. It can’t have been gone very long if it just scared the kids away,” I added.
Hawk stalked towards the place where things were sagging.
I hurried after.
Ten steps into the woods, we heard seven trees crash somewhere: three—pause—then four more.
“Of
course, if he’s that big he can probably move pretty far pretty fast,” I said.
Another three trees.
Then a roar:
An unmusical sound with much that was metallic in it, neither rage nor pathos, but noise, heaved from lungs bigger than smelting bellows, a long sound, then echoing while the leaves turned up beneath a breeze.
Under green and silver we started again through the cool, dangerous glades.
And step and breathe and step.
Then in the trees to our left—
He came leaping, and that leap rained us with shadow and twigs and bits of leaf.
Turning his haunch with one foreleg over here and a hind- leg way the hell over there, he looked down at us with an eye bloodshot, brown, and thickly oystered in the corners. His eyeball must have been big as my head.
The wet, black nostrils steamed.
He was very noble.
Then he tossed his head, breaking branches, and hunkered with his fists punched into the ground—they were hands with horny hairy fingers thick as my arm where he should have had forehooves—bellowed, reared, and sprang away.
Hawk fired his crossbow. The shaft flapped like a darning needle between the timbers of his flank. He was crashing off.
The bark of the tree I’d slammed against chewed on my back as I came away.
“Come on,” Hawk hollered, as he ran in the general direction the man-handed bull had.
And I followed that crazy old man, running to kill the beast. We clambered through a cleft of broken rock (it hadn’t been broken the last time I’d come wandering down here through the trees—an afternoon full of sun spots and breezes and Friza’s hand in mine, on my shoulder, on my cheek). I jumped down onto a stretch of moss-tongued brick that paved the forest here and there. We ran forward and—
Some things are so small you don’t notice them. Others are so big you run right into them before you know what they are. It was a hole, in the earth and the side of the mountain, that we almost stumbled into. It was a ragged cave entrance some twenty meters across. I didn’t even know it was there till all that sound came out of it.
The bull suddenly roared from the opening in the rock and trees and brick, defining the shape of it with his roaring.
When the echo died, we crept to the crumbled lip and looked over. Below I saw glints of sunlight on hide, turning and turning in the pit. Then he reared, shaking his eyes, his hairy fists.
Hawk jerked back, even though the claws on the brick wall were still fifteen feet below us.
“Doesn’t this tunnel go into the source-cave?” I whispered. Before something that grand, one whispers.
Lo Hawk nodded. “Some of the tunnels, they say, are a hundred feet high. Some are ten. This is one of the bigger arterioles.”
“Can it get out again?” Stupid question.
On the other side of the hole the horned head, the shoulders emerged. The cave-in had been sloped there. He had climbed out. Now he looked at us, crouched there. He bellowed once with a length of tongue like foamy, red canvas.
Then he leaped at us across the hole.
He didn’t make it, but we scurried backward. He caught the lip with the fingers of one hand—I saw black gorges break about those nails—and one arm. The arm slapped around over the earth, searching for a hand-hold.
From behind me I heard Hawk shout (I run faster than he does). I turned to see that hand rise from over him!
He was all crumpled up on the ground. The hand slapped a few more times (Boom—Boom! Boom!) and then arm and fingers slipped, pulling a lot of stone and bushes and three small trees, down, down, down.
Lo Hawk wasn’t dead. (The next day they discovered he had cracked a rib, but that wasn’t till later.) He began to curl up. I thought of an injured bug. I thought of a sick, sick child.
I caught him up by the shoulders just as he started to breathe again. “Hawk! Are you—”
He couldn’t hear me because of the roaring from the pit. But he pulled himself up, blinking. Blood began trickling from his nose. The beast had been slapping with cupped palm. Lo Hawk had thrown himself down, and luckily most of the important parts of him, like his head, had suffered more from air-blast than concussion.
“Let’s get out of here!” and I began to drag him towards the trees.
When we got there, he was shaking his head.
“—no, wait, Lobey—” came over in his hoarse voice during a lull in the roaring.
As I got him propped against a trunk, he grabbed my wrist.
“Hurry, Hawk! Can you walk? We’ve got to get away. Look, I’ll carry you—”
“No!” The breath that had been knocked out of him lurched back.
“Oh, come on, Hawk! Fun is fun. But you’re hurt, and that thing is a lot bigger than either of us figured on. It must have mutated from the radiation in the lower levels of the cave.”
He tugged my wrist again. “We have to stay. We have to kill it.”
“Do you think it will come up and harm the village? It hasn’t gone too far from the cave yet.”
“That—” He coughed. “That has nothing to do with it. I’m a hunter, Lobey.”
“Now, look—”
“And I have to teach you to hunt.” He tried to sit away from the trunk. “Only it looks like you’ll have to learn this lesson by yourself.”
“Huh?”
“La Dire says you have to get ready for your journey.”
“Oh, for goodness—” Then I squinted at him, all the crags and age and assurance and pain in that face. “What I gotta do?”
The bull’s roar thundered up from the caved-in roof of the source-cave.
“Go down there; hunt the beast—and kill it.”
“No!”
“It’s for Friza.”
“How?” I demanded.
He shrugged. “La Dire knows. You must learn to hunt, and hunt well.” Then he repeated that.
“I’m all for testing my manhood and that sort of thing. But—”
“It’s a different reason from that, Lobey.”
“But—”
“Lobey.” His voice nestled down low and firm in his throat. “I’m older than you, and I know more about this whole business than you do. Take your sword and crossbow and go down into the cave, Lobey. Go on.”
I sat there and thought a whole lot of things. Such as: bravery is a very stupid thing. And how surprised I was that so much fear and respect for Lo Hawk had held from my childhood. Also, how many petty things can accompany pith, moment, and enterprise—like fear, confusion, and plain annoyance.
The beast roared again. I pushed the crossbow farther up my arm and settled my machete handle at my hip.
If you’re going to do something stupid—and we all do—it might as well be a brave and foolish thing.
I clapped Lo Hawk’s shoulder and started for the pit.
On this side the break was sharp and the drop deep. I went around to the sagging side, where there were natural ledges of root, earth, and masonry. I circled the chasm and scrambled down.
Sun struck the wall across from me, glistening with moss. I dropped my hand from the moist rock and stepped across an oily rivulet whose rainbow went out under my shadow. Somewhere up the tunnel, hooves clattered on stone.
I started forward. There were many cracks in the high ceiling, here and there lighting on the floor a branch clawing crisped leaves or the rim of a hole that might go down a few inches, a few feet, or drop to the lowest levels of the source-cave that were thousands of feet below.
I came to a fork, started beneath the vault to the left, and ten feet into the darkness tripped and rolled down a flight of shallow steps, once through a puddle (my hand splatting out in the darkness), once over dry leaves (they roared their own roar beneath my side), and landed at the bottom in a shaft of light, knees and palms on gravel.
Clatter!
Clatter!
Much closer: Clatter!
I sprang to my feet and away from the telltale light. Motes c
ycloned in the slanting illumination where I had been. And the motes stilled.
My stomach felt like a loose bag of water sloshing around on top of my gut. Walking towards that sound—he was quiet now and waiting—was no longer a matter of walking in a direction. Rather: pick that foot up, lean forward, put it down. Good. Now, pick up the other one, lean forward—
A hundred yards ahead I suddenly saw another light because something very large suddenly filled it up. Then it emptied.
Clack! Clack! Clack!
Snort!
And three steps could carry him such a long way.
Then a lot of clacks!
I threw myself against the wall, pushing my face into dirt and roots.
But the sound was going off.
I swallowed all the bitter things that had risen into my throat and stepped back from the wall.
With a quick walk that became a slow run I followed him under the crumbling vaults.
His sound came from the right.
So I turned right and into a sloping tunnel so low that ahead of me I heard his horns rasp on the ceiling. Stone and scale and old lichen chittered down at his hulking shoulders, then to the ground.
The gutter on the side of the tunnel had coated the stone with fluorescent slime. The trickle became a stream as the slope increased till the frothing light raced me on the left.
Once his hooves must have crossed a metal floor-plate, because for a half-dozen steps orange sparks glittered where he stepped, lighting him to the waist.
He was only thirty meters ahead of me.
Sparks again as he turned a corner.
I felt stone under the soles of my feet, then cold, smooth metal. I passed some leaves, blown here by what wind, that his hooves had ignited. They writhed with worms of fire, glowing about my toes. And for moments the darkness filled with autumn.
I reached the corner, started around—
Facing me, he bellowed.
His foot struck a meter from my foot, and from this close the sparks lit his raw eyes, his polished nostrils.
His hand came between his eyes and me, falling! I rolled backward, grabbing for my machete.
His palm—flat this time, Hawk—clanged on the metal plate where I had been. Then it fell again toward where I was.