Being a Green Mother (17 page)

The rapids? Now Orb heard the sound of spuming water. Already her breath was rasping, and her side was developing a stitch. She stumbled, and the guitarist caught her and helped her along. “How’d we get into this?” he gasped.

“They must,” she gasped, “have stolen a horse or a girl. Now they’re scattering. But we—”

“Behind the eight-ball!” he finished. “But we’re not Gypsies!”

“I think one of us will get raped and the other killed before they find out,” she puffed. She was not at all certain that her amulet would protect her from this; it had never been tested against more than one person at a time.

He heaved out a laugh. “Wonder which’ll get which?”

Then they came up against the rapids. The water charged past like an express train, throwing out spray. The bank dropped steeply to it, beset by rocks and boulders. There was no safe way across.

“The carpet!” Orb cried, wriggling out of her knapsack and dumping it on the ground. The little carpet unrolled immediately. “Get on!”

“I can’t get on that!” he protested. “I can’t fly!”

Now the pursuing men crested the hill. “There they are!”

The guitarist stood frozen, petrified by both alternatives. The men charged down the slope.

Orb grabbed her companion by the shoulders and shoved him onto the carpet. “Sit down!” she cried in his ear.

Numbed, he obeyed, holding his cased guitar in his arms before him. She jumped on behind him, spreading her legs to circle his body, putting her arms around him. She willed the carpet aloft.

It lifted as the first man arrived. “Hey!” the man cried as the carpet with its burden almost banged into him. Then he grabbed for it.

Orb swung out with her left arm, cracking him on the neck. She did it without thinking and was appalled at herself even as the shock ran up her arm. Then she willed the carpet out toward the river, gaining effective elevation in a hurry as the land dropped away.

The guitarist stared down. “Geez!” he exclaimed, and tried to scramble off the carpet.

“Stop it!” Orb hissed into the back of his head. “You’ll overbalance it!” Indeed, the carpet, overloaded, was already tilting scarily.

The guitarist tried to shrink into himself. “Worse’n a bad trip!” He shuddered.

“Just shut your eyes and keep still!” Now they were over the turbulent water, sinking slowly. The carpet was doing its best, but double weight was too much for it.

“Don’t let ’em get away!” a man cried.

Orb didn’t dare look back. She urged the carpet on across. It obeyed unsteadily.

There was a bang. They were shooting! Orb did what she had to do—she guided the carpet slightly down and forward, so that it could gain velocity in the descent.

“Aaaahh!” the guitarist cried as the bottom seemed to drop out. “Geez Keerist!”

Orb clapped her hands over his eyes, as if shielding a baby from a bright light. “Relax, it’s all right, relax,” she said. She felt moisture on her fingers: he was crying. Then she hugged him.

It worked. He relaxed slightly, feeling somewhat secure in her embrace.

Another shot sounded. Then the carpet cut through the spume at the water’s verge, seemed virtually to skip the surface, and plowed into the far bank. They tumbled off, brought up short by the slope.

A third shot sounded, and there was the thud of something striking the bank nearby. At least they weren’t good marksmen!

“Go there!” Orb cried, hauling on the man, shoving him in the right direction. He scrambled as directed, and they dived behind a great spray of water from a boulder in the
river, finding cover from the party on the other side. They were safe for the moment.

The guitarist stared at the river. “You should have left me,” he husked. “I almost got you killed.”

“I couldn’t do that!” Orb exclaimed indignantly.

“You know I’m worthless, hooked on H. Wouldn’t have been much loss.”

“Now stop that!” she snapped. “You—” But there wasn’t much encouragement she could make, because he really did not have much to recommend him. “You’re a fine musician.”

“I’m a zilch musician! Only time I play well is when you’re spreading your magic. That’s
you
, not me.” He pondered a moment. “But I’ll make it up to you somehow, I swear! What little I am, I owe to you, and my life, too.”

“I’ll be satisfied if you just get off the H.”

He rolled over and put his face in the ground. “God! If only I could!”

“You can’t just stop?”

“You don’t know what it’s like!”

“You’re right, I don’t. If I wanted to stop a thing, I would simply stop it, I think.”

He lifted his face to stare at her. Dirt crusted it; he looked almost like a zombie. Then, with a convulsive movement, he reached into a pocket and brought out a packet. “Then take it! It’s all I’ve got! Don’t let me have it!”

Orb took the packet with a certain revulsion. “Your life is ruined for this?”

“You got it, sister.”

Orb tucked the packet away. “Then I will hold it for you. I will be pleased if you never ask for it back.”

He did not reply. He simply set his face back in the dirt.

After a time the pursuers gave up, as they were unable to cross the river. Orb heard their truck departing. However, she had not spent time with the gypsies without learning a trick or two. “I think we had better not cross back,” she said. “Someone could be lurking.”

“Right,” the guitarist said, relieved. He did not want to be airborne again. He recovered his instrument and shouldered the strap.

Orb considered. “I think I might climb this bank, but I would prefer to use my carpet. If you prefer to climb—”

“Gotcha,” he said, and began to scramble up.

Orb settled on the carpet with her harp and his guitar and willed herself aloft. Now the carpet responded alertly, having recovered from its prior overload. Soon she was at the top, watching the guitarist catch up.

“Now I am not sure just where we are,” she said. “But it would be foolhardy to try to return to our taxi, even if it weren’t for the river, and I rather suspect that the nearby town would not be safe for us either. I think we would do best to go in an unexpected direction.”

“Like what?”

“Like Clover Mountain. It must be near here. To find the fish.”

“I’m game,” he said.

“Why don’t I continue carrying your guitar on the carpet, leaving you free to walk?” she suggested.

He was glad to agree; he did not want to get on the carpet again. He dusted himself off, and she floated up to about head height. “The mountain, slowly,” she said to the carpet, speaking aloud for the guitarist’s benefit.

The carpet quivered, reorienting. Then it set off roughly north. Orb was relieved that this was not toward the river.

“It knows?” the guitarist asked. “Just like that?”

“It can follow simple directives, yes,” she said. “I don’t know where the Clover Mountain is, but it can zero in on any identified location. It’s very handy that way.”

“Magic is nice,” he agreed.

She floated at a walking pace, and he walked. The terrain was uneven but not rugged, now that they were away from the river. They made decent progress and in an hour reached the foot of the mountain. It was now late afternoon; there would be time to verify whether the fish was here. Orb really did not know what to expect.

“I suppose I should just call him,” she said. “Then, if he appears, I’ll have to, er, dance.”

“What’s so bad about dancing?”

“It is a rather special sort of dance.” She nerved herself, then put her hands to her mouth and called “Jonah!”

There was a vibration in the mountain. For a moment Orb was afraid that a tremor or earthquake was starting. Then something brownish and monstrous swam out of the slope and into the air.

The two of them stared. It was a giant fish—swimming through rock and air as if both were water. The Gypsy woman had spoken truly!

The fish slowly circled in the air, then came to hover before Orb. It waited.

Orb was suddenly abashed. “I never really thought—what can I do now?”

“Dance,” the guitarist said, his voice rough.

She looked at him—and was surprised. He looked haggard. “What happened to you? If I had realized the walk was so hard on you—”

“ ’Snot that. I’m outta condition, but—” he shrugged.

She caught on. “The H! You’re suffering withdrawal!”

“You got it, sister.”

“You look awful!”

“I feel awful. But there’s no way to do it but to do it. You better get dancing before that fish gets mad.”

“Oh. Yes. But—”

“You need music,” he said. “And you can’t play your harp, ’cause you’re dancing. That’s where I come in.” He was taking out his guitar.

He started to play, but his hands were trembling so badly that the notes were horrors of discordance. He concentrated, but still could not do it. His face was ashen.

“How can you be so far gone, so quickly?” Orb asked, appalled.

“S-spelled H is fast,” he said, his teeth chattering.

It sounded like a stutter, and that did something to Orb. She had loved a stutterer! “Take it!” she cried, flinging the packet at him. Her endurance had been less than his, and she hadn’t even been the one experiencing it!

He pounced on it. “Geez, I tried, I tried!” he muttered. “But H just don’t let go!” He took a pinch of the powder in the packet and brought it to his nose and sniffed.

The effect was remarkable. In a few seconds his countenance cleared, and his breathing subsided. He took up the guitar and strummed, and the chord was perfect. “What song?”

“Any song,” Orb said. “What I’m about to do is almost as hard for me as staying off the H was for you.”

“Yeh.” He played, and the sound was good, though not with the magic Orb had.

Yet she needed magic! She knew that she had to do a dance that would convince the big fish she was a Gypsy, and her natural resistance to the appalling suggestiveness of the dance would destroy the effect, for true Gypsies were uninhibited about sexual matters. Magic could enable her to do it.

“Magic!” she said urgently to the guitarist.

He shook his head. “I told you, I’m nothing by myself. When you’re singing and playing, it comes, but—”

“Let it come!” she hissed, taking hold of his shoulder and shaking it.

Suddenly there was magic in his playing. Her touch had done it. The notes of the guitar made the very ground resonate, and the grass of the slope and the leaves of the nearby trees swayed to the beat. The monstrous body of the fish quivered, responding to it.

She removed her hand. There seemed almost to be a band of electricity connecting them, and the magic continued. Only one guitar was playing, physically, but it seemed like a thousand. “Geez,” the guitarist murmured under his breath.

The fish still hovered, watching. Orb arranged her clothing, hitching up her skirt and tightening her blouse, making her body more salacious than she cared to. But this was the way of the
tanana
, and she had to do it.

Then she went into the dance, treating the fish as a partner, imagining it to be a dark Gypsy man who matched her moves with his own. She expected to be stiff, for she was tired and this was a dance she had never expected to do before any audience whatever, but the rhythm of it caught her up, and she found herself performing. She was a Gypsy lass, dancing to provoke a man to passion!

She thrust out her hip, turned, and shot a sidelong glance at him, inhaled, whirled, and moved her hips again. Body and glance, leap and pose, breast and buttock and whirling hair—the
tanana
was taking her where it would, inciting the erotic response. She had never before felt so completely wanton, not even when in the act of love itself; the suggestion was more potent than the reality. She became shameless, inviting, lascivious, assuming poses that would have completely alienated her if performed by another. It was the
tanana
!

At last, exhausted and exilarated, she finished. She had done her best and her worst; let the fish make of it what it might. The guitarist let the last note fade, his eyes locked on Orb, his jaw slack; he seemed mesmerized.

“And we want to find the Llano,” she gasped as she stopped.

The fish considered. Then it descended slowly to the level of the ground, and slightly below it, so that its mouth was flush with the earth. Its body overlapped without seeming resistance; there seemed to be no reality of soil for it, just the psychic water in which it swam.

It opened its mouth. Its throat was a vast long cave, dry and bright.

“We’re supposed—to go in?” Orb asked, amazed. “To be swallowed by the fish?”

Jonah merely waited. “Better do it,” the guitarist said. “The thing could snap us up quickly enough any time it wanted to.” He seemed much less affected by this than by the spectacle of the dance.

They entered the monstrous mouth, carrying their instruments and the carpet. They walked down the cave.

Deep within, it opened into a lighted chamber. There were projections that resembled chairs and tables and even couches.

The guitarist plumped down in one. “Home, James!” he said.

The fish moved. Orb hastily took a seat by the wall. The scales here were translucent; she could see out.

The landscape outside was moving. Rather, Jonah was moving, swimming through air, smoothly traversing the route.

“We’re flying,” Orb said. “Doesn’t that bother you?”

“We’re
swimming,
” the guitarist said. “That doesn’t bother me. I feel safe, here.”

Surprisingly quickly, they arrived at the city. Orb peered out, looking at the people, but the people seemed to be unaware of the huge fish. As with Mortis the horse, it was in effect invisible to ordinary folk.

Jonah nudged up to Luna’s estate and stopped. The two griffins flew up, squawking alarm. The fish ignored them; to it they were like flies, beneath notice.

Orb walked up the hallway that was the throat. The mouth
opened, and she stood looking down on the grounds. “It’s all right!” she called.

The griffins recognized her, doing twin double-takes, then settled down.

The guitarist approached, took one look out the mouth, and backed away. “Maybe you can have it go down,” he said.