The music dirged from Spider. I played light piping sounds.
“Lobey.”
I looked back at him.
“Something’s happening, Lobey, something now that’s happened before, before when the others were here. Many of us are worried about it. We have the stories about what went on, what resulted when it happened to the others. It may be very serious. All of us may be hurt.”
“I’m tired of the old stories,” I said, “their stories. We’re not them; we’re new, new to this world, this life. I know the stories of Lo Orpheus and Lo Ringo. Those are the only ones I care about. I’ve got to find Friza.”
“Lobey—”
“This other is no concern of mine.” I let a shrill note. “Wake your herders, Spider. You have dragons to drive.”
I galloped My Mount forward. Spider didn’t call again.
Before the sun hit apogee the edge of the City cleft the horizon. As I swung my whip in the failing heat, I permutated Green-eye’s last words, beating out thoughts in time: if there were no death, how might I gain Friza? That love was enough, if wise and articulate and daring. Or thinking of La Dire, who would have amended it (dragons clawed from the warm sand to the leafy hills), there is no death, only rhythm. When the sand reddened behind us, and the foundering beasts, with firmer footing, hastened, I took out my knife and played.
The City was behind us.
Dragons loped, easy now across the gorse. A stream ribboned the knolly land and the beasts stopped to slosh their heads in the water, scraping their hind feet on the bank, through grass, through sand, to black soil. The water lapped their knees, grew muddy as they tore the water-weeds. A fly bobbed on a branch, preening the crushed prism of his wing (a wing the size of my foot) and thought a linear, arthropod music. I played it for him, and he turned the red bowl of his eye to me and whispered wondering praise. Dragons threw back their heads, gargling.
There is no death.
Only music.
Whanne, as he strod alonge the shakeynge lee,
The roddie levynne glesterrd on hys headde;
Into hys hearte the azure vapoures spreade;
He wrythde arounde yn drearie dernie payne;—
Whanne from his lyfe-bloode the rodde lemes were fed,
He felle an hepe of ashes on the playne.
Thomas Chatterton, “English Metamorphosis”
“Now there’s a quaint taste,” said Durcet. “Well, Curval, what do you think of that one?”
“Marvelous,” the President replied; “there you have an individual who wishes to make himself familiar with the idea of death and hence unafraid of it, and who to that end has found no better means than to associate it with a libertine idea . . .” . . . Supper was served, orgies followed as usual, the household retired to bed.
Le Marquis de Sade, The 120 Days of Sodom
The motion of gathering loops of water
Must either burst or remain in a moment.
The violet colors through the glass
Throw up little swellings that appear
And spatter as soon as another strikes
And is born; so pure are they of colored
Hues, that we feel the absent strength
Of its power. When they begin they gather
Like sand on the beach: each bubble
Contains a complete eye of water.
Samuel Greenberg, “The Glass Bubbles”
Then to the broken land (“This”—Spider halted his dragon in the shaly afternoon—“is the broken land.” He flung a small flint over the edge. It chuckled into the canyon. Around us the dragons were craning curiously at the granite, the veined cliffs, the chasms) slowing our pace now. Clouds dulled the sun. Hot fog flowed around the rocks. I worked one muscle after another against the bone to squeeze out the soreness. Most of the pain (surprise) was gone. We meandered through the fabulous, simple stones.
The dragons made half time here.
Spider said it was perhaps forty kilometers to Branning-at-sea. Wind heated our faces. Glass wound in the rocks. Five dragons began a scuffle on the shale. One was the tumored female. Green-eye and me came at them from opposite sides. Spider was busy at the head of the herd; the scuffle was near the tail. Something had frightened them, and they were plopping up the slope. It didn’t occur to us something was wrong; this was the sort of thing that Spider (and Friza) were supposed to be able to prevent. (Oh, Friza, I’ll find you through the echo of all mourning stones, all praising trees!) We followed.
They dodged through the boulders. I shouted after them. Our whips chattered. We couldn’t outrun them. We hoped they would fall to fighting again. We lost them for a minute, then heard their hissing beyond the rocks, lower down.
Clouds smeared the sky; water varnished the trail ahead. As M. M. crossed the wet rock, he slipped.
I was thrown, scraping hip and shoulder. I heard my blade clatter away on the rock. My whip snarled around my neck. For one moment I thought I’d strangle. I rolled down a slope, trying to flail myself to a halt, got scraped up more. Then I dropped over the edge of something. I grabbed out with both hands and feet. Chest and stomach slapped stone. My breath went off somewhere and wouldn’t go back into my lungs for a long time. When it did, it came roaring down my sucking throat, whirled in my bruised chest. Busted ribs? Just pain. And roar again with another breath. Tears flooded my sight.
I was holding on to a rock with my left hand, a vine with my right; my left foot clutched a sapling none too securely by the roots. My right leg dangled. And I just knew it was a long way down.
I rubbed my eye on my shoulder and looked up:
The lip of the trail above me.
Above that, angry sky.
Sound? Wind through gorse somewhere. No music.
While I was looking it started to rain. Sometimes painful catastrophes happen. Then some little or even pleasant thing follows it, and you cry. Like rain. I cried.
“Lobey.”
I looked again.
Kneeling on a shelf of stone a few feet above me to the right was Kid Death.
“Kid—?”
“Lobey,” he said, shaking wet hair back from his forehead. “I judge you can hold on there twenty-seven minutes before you drop over the edge from exhaustion. So I’m going to wait twenty-six minutes before I do anything about saving your life. O.K.?”
I coughed.
Seeing him close, I guessed he was sixteen or seventeen, or maybe a baby-faced twenty. His skin was wrinkled at his wrists, neck, and under his arms.
Rain kept dribbling in my eyes; my palms stung, and what I was holding on to was getting slippery.
“Ever run into any good westerns?” He shook his head. “Too bad. Nothing I like better than westerns.” He rubbed his forefinger under his nose and sniffed. Rain danced on his shoulders as he leaned over to talk to me.
“What is a ‘western’?” I asked. My chest still hurt. “And you mean you’re really going to make—” I coughed again “—me hang here twenty-six minutes?”
“It’s an art-form the Old Race, the humans, had before we came,” Kid Death said. “And yes, I am. Torture is an art-form too. I want to rescue you at the last minute. While I’m waiting, I want to show you something.” He pointed up to the rim of the road I’d rolled over.
Friza looked down.
I stopped breathing. The pain in my chest exploded, my wide eyes burned with rain. Dark face, slim wet shoulders, then watch her turn her head (gravel sliding under my belly, the whiplash still around my neck and the handle swinging against my thigh) to catch rain in her mouth. She looked back, and I saw (or did I hear?) her wonder at life returned, and confusion at the rain, these twisted rocks, these clouds. Glory beat behind those eyes above me. Articulate, she would have called my name; saw me, now, impulsively reached her hand to me (did I hear her fear?).
“Friza!”
That was a scream.
You and I know the word I shrieked. But nobody else hearing the rough sound my lungs shoved up
would have recognized it.
All this, understand, in the instant it takes to open your eyes in the rain, lick a drop from your lip, then focus on what’s in front of you and realize it’s somebody you love about to die and he tries to scream your name. That’s what Friza did there on the road’s lip.
And I kept screaming.
What Kid Death did between us was giggle.
Friza began to search right and left for a way to get down to me. She rose, disappeared, was back a moment later, bending a sapling over the edge of the road.
“No, Friza!”
But she started to climb down, dirt and tiny stones shooting out beneath her feet. Then, when she was hanging at the very end, the line of her body arching dark on the rock, she grabbed the whip handle—neither with hands nor feet, but rather as she had once thrown a pebble, as Spider had once pushed over a chunk of cement; she grabbed the handle from where it hung against my thigh, pulled it, lifted it, straining till rain glistened on her sides, knotted the handle around the sapling above the first fork. She started to climb back, jerk of an arm, away a moment, jerk, away, jerk, reaching handhold by handhold towards the road. It kept on going through my head, here she wakes from how many days’ death with only a moment to glory before plunging into the rescue of the life running out below her. She was doing it to save me. She wanted me to grab hold of the whip and haul myself to the tree, then by the tree haul myself to the road. I hurt and loved her, held on and didn’t fall.
Kid Death was still chuckling. Then he pointed at the apex of the bent tree. “Break!” he whispered.
It did.
She fell, throwing the branch away from her in one instant; clutching at the stone as she fell, snatched at the length of leather dangling from my neck, then let it go.
She let it go because she knew damn well it would have pulled me from the cliff face.
“Baaa—baaa!” Kid Death said. He was imitating a ewe. Then he giggled again.
I slammed my face against the shale. “Friza!” No, you couldn’t understand what I howled.
Her music crashed out with her brains on the rocks of the canyon floor a hundred feet below.
Rock. Stone. I tried to become the rock I hung against. I tried to be stone. Less blasted by her double death I would have dropped. Had she died in any other act than trying to save me, I would have died with her. But I couldn’t let her fail.
My heart rocked. My heart rolled.
Numb, I dangled for some timeless time, till my hands began to slip.
“All right. Up you go.”
Something seized my wrist and pulled me up, hard. My shoulders rang like gongs of pain under my ears. I was hauled blind over gravel. I blinked and breathed. Somehow Kid Death had pulled me up on the ledge with him.
“Just saved your life,” Kid Death said. “Aren’t you glad you know me?”
I began to shake. I was going to pass out.
“You’re just about to yell at me, ‘You killed her!’ ” Kid Death said. “I killed her again is what really happened. And I may have to do it a third time before you get the idea—”
I lunged, would have gone off and over. But he caught me with one strong, wet hand, and slapped me with the other. The rain had stopped.
Maybe he did more than slap me.
The Kid turned and started scrambling up to the lip of the trail. I started after him.
I climbed.
Dirt ripped under my fingers. It’s good about my nail chewing, because otherwise I wouldn’t have had any nails left. From the ledge it was possible to get back up. Kid Death leaped and bounded. I crawled.
There’s a condition where every action dogs one end. You move/breathe/stop to rest/start again with one thing in mind. That’s how I followed. Mostly on my belly. Mostly with my breath held. I’m not too sure where I went. Things didn’t clear up till I realized there were two figures in front of me: the moist, white redhead. A black thatch of hair, grimy Green-eye.
I lay on a rock, resting, is how it was, in the fog of fatigue and endeavor, when I saw them.
Kid Death stood with his arm around Green-eye’s shoulder at the precipice. The sky in front of them swam violently.
“Look, pardner,” Kid Death was saying; “we’ve got to come to some sort of agreement. I mean, you don’t think I came all the way out here just to rustle five dragons from my friend Spider? That’s just to let him know I’m still in the running. But you. You and I have to get together. Haploid? You’re totally outside my range. I want you. I want you very much, Green-eye.”
The dirty herder shrugged from under the moist fingers.
“Look,” Kid Death said and gestured at the crazy sky.
As I had first seen the Kid’s face in the glittering screen in the source-cave, I saw in the raveling clouds: a plain surrounded by a wire fence (a kage?) but inside a soaring needle wracked with struts and supports. I got some idea how big it was when I realized the stone blocks by the fence were houses, and the dots moving around were men and women.
“Starprobe,” the Kid said. “They’re on the verge of discovering the method the humans used to get from planet to planet, star to star. They’ve been delving in the ruins, tasting the old ideas, licking the bits of metal and wire now for ten years. It’s almost finished.” He waved his hand. Rolling in place of the scene now was water and water: an ocean. On the water, metal pontoons formed a floating station. Boats plied back and forth. Cranes dropped a metal cabinet towards the ocean floor. “Depthgauge,” the Kid explained. “Soon we shall be able to do more than dream across the silt of the ocean floor, but take these bodies to the fond of the world as they did.” Another wave of the hand and we were looking underground. Segmented worms, driven by women with helmets. “Rockdrill, going on now in the place they called Chile.” Then, at a final motion, we were looking at myriad peoples all involved in labor, grinding grain, or toiling with instruments gleaming and baffling and complex. “There,” said Kid Death, “there are the deeds and doings of all the men and women and androgynes on this world to remember the wisdom of the old ones. I can hand you the wealth produced by the hands of them all.” (Green-eye’s green eye widened.) “I can guarantee it. You know I can. All you have to do is join me.”
The white hand had landed on Green-eye’s shoulder. Again he shrugged from under it.
“What power do you have?” Kid Death demanded. “What can you do with your difference! Speak to a few deaf men, dead men, pierce the minds of a few idiots?” I suddenly realized the Kid was very upset. And he wanted Green-eye to agree with him.
Green-eye started to walk away.
“Hey, Green-eye!” Kid Death bellowed. I saw his stomach sink as the air emptied from his chest. His claws knotted.
Green-eye glanced back.
“That rock!” The Kid motioned towards a chunk at the cliff’s edge. “Turn that there rock into something to eat.”
Green-eye rubbed his dirty finger behind his ear.
“You’ve been on this dragon drive now twenty-seven days. You’ve been away from Branning-at-sea a few days short of a year. Turn that log into a bed, like you used to sleep in at your mother’s palace. You’re a Prince at Branning-at-sea and you smell like lizard droppings. That puddle, make it an onyx bath with water any one of five temperatures controlled by a lever with a copper rat’s head on the tip. You’ve got callouses on your palms and your legs are bowing from straddling a dragon’s hump. Where are the dancers who danced for you on the jade tiles of the terrace? Where are the musicians who eased the evenings? Turn this mountain-top into a place worthy of you—”
I think this is when Green-eye looked up and saw me. He started for me, only stopped to pick up my machete that was lying at the foot of the rock, then vaulted up beside me.
On the cliff edge the Kid had gotten furious. He quivered, teeth meshed tight, fists balled against his groin. Suddenly, he whirled and cried something—
Thunder.
It shocked me and I jerked back. Green-eye ignored it
and tried to help me sit up. At the cliff’s edge, Kid Death shook his arms. Lightning flared down the clouds. The leaves bleached from black to lavender. Green-eye didn’t even blink. Thunder again; then someone flung buckets of water.
Herder dirt turned to mud on Green-eye’s shoulder as he helped me down the slope. Something wasn’t right inside me. Things kept going out inside me. The rain was cold. I was shivering. Somehow it was easier just to relax, not to hold on . . .
Green-eye was shaking my shoulder. I opened my eyes to the rain, and the first thing I did was reach out for my blade. Green-eye held it out of reach; he was glaring at me.
“Huh . . . ? Wha . . .” My fingers and toes tingled. “What happened?” Rain stung my ears, my lips.
Green-eye was crying, his lips snarling back from his white teeth. Rain streaked the dirt on his face, sleeked down his hair; he kept shaking my shoulder, desolate and furious.
“What happened?” I asked. “Did I pass out . . . ?”
You died! He stared at me, unbelievingly, angry, and streaming. God damn it, Lobey! Why did you have to die! You just gave up; you just decided it wasn’t worth it, and you let the heart stop and the brain blank! You died, Lobey! You died!
“But I’m not dead now . . .”
No. He helped me forward. The music’s going on again. Come on.
Once more I reached for my blade. He let me have it. There was nothing to hack at. I just felt better holding it. It was raining too hard to play.
We found our mounts moaning in the torrent and flinging their whiskers around happily. Green-eye helped me up. Astride a wet dragon, saddle or no, is as difficult as riding a greasy earthquake. We finally found the herd up ahead, moving slowly through the downpour.
Spider rode up to us. “There you are! I thought we’d lost you! Get over to the other side and keep them out of the prickly pears. Makes them drunk and you can’t handle them.”
So we rode over to the other side and kept them out of the prickly pears. I kept phrasing sentences in my head to tell Spider about what happened. I chewed over the words, but I couldn’t gnaw them into sense. Once, when the pressure of disbelief grew so large I couldn’t hold it, I reined my dragon around and dashed across the muddy slope towards Spider. “Boss, Kid Death is riding with—”