Earthblood (2 page)

Raff reached, groping. His hand fell on the power pistol. He tried to sit up, coiled away from agony like a worm on a hook. He dragged the gun around, leveled it on the yellow cloak, and fired. The cloak crumpled. Another caught at Bella, whirled her around as a shield.

"You will kill your woman," a thin voice said flatly. "Give us what we seek and go your way. We are stronger than you."

Raff was watching Bella. She hung in the grip of the alien, small, limp. He saw her hand move—

"Why do you struggle so, foolish one?" the alien grated. Bella's hand was at her girdle. Light glinted on steel. Raff saw the thin arm grope, finding the vulnerable spot between plates of scale-armor . . . and then sudden movement—

There was a grunt from the creature who held Bella. He leaned, fell stiffly, the handle of Bella's rattail poniard against his side. Behind her, a dark shape moved. Raff fired, a near miss. But the alien halted, called out in a strange tongue. Raff blinked gummed eyes, aiming . . .

"Wait, Raff," Bella called. She spoke rapidly, incomprehensibly. The alien answered. Raff held the gun aimed at the voice.

Bella was beside him. "Raff, this one's a Yill—like me. He gave me his parole."

"Parole, hell!" Raff croaked.

"Raff, if we spare his life, he'll be our slave. It's true, Raff. It's the Yill law. And we need him . . . "

The gun fell from Raff's hand. He tried to reach for it, to curse the weakness, but only a thin moan came.

There was a babble of alien talk, Bella's voice a thin thread against the rumble of the other. Raff tried again.

" . . . Bella . . . "

"Yes, Raff. It'll be all right now. T'hoy hoy will take us to a place . . . "

"Use the gun," Raff gasped out. "Make sure of the rest of 'em—all of 'em."

"Raff—if we just go now—"

"No good, Bella. No law in this place. Taking no chances. There'll be no wounded devils tracking us . . . "

Afterward, there was a confused memory of strong arms that carried him, and pain like a blanket of fire, and the bite of the night wind, suddenly cold; and later, voices, the clink of keys, and at last a nest of moldering furs, and Bella's hands, and her warm breath against his face.

"Raff . . . poor Raff . . . "

He tried to speak, gasped, tried again. "Our boy," he said. It was important to explain it to Bella, so she'd see how it was. "Our boy: bought with money and bought with blood. He's our boy now, Bella . . . "

* * *

Leaning heavily on his cane, Raff looked down at his wife and his newborn son while the slave T'hoy hoy washed out rags in the tin tub by the door.

"This ain't the way I meant it to be," Raff said. "Here in this fallen-down shack in the ghetto. Gee, Bella . . . "

"When you get more able you can paint it. Pretty and white. And it's on the other side of Tambool from the bazaar. They won't look for him here. Roan."

"My son," Raff said, touching one tiny, curled fist. "In fifty years, maybe, he'll be a full-grown human Man."

Roan was bored watching his mother wash dishes.

"No," she said. "I can't take you outside now. After I do the dishes I got to grind the grits and then shell some snails and clean your daddy's brushes so's he can do some spring painting when he gets back from that job in town. And then . . . stop that!" Bella cried.

Roan tried to stick the paper back on the wall but it wouldn't stay.

"Daddy fix," he said. His nose was running and he wiped it on the end of the curtain.

"Not on the curtain," Bella said. "I just washed them and I didn't make no more soap yet."

Roan reached for the salt cup. Salt was a nice thing to taste, a little at a time. Only it all came over on him.

"The salt!" Bella screeched. "Now that's the end! Raff worked all day one day just to get that salt for you and there it's all over the floor and how'm I going to wash salt?"

Roan began to wail again. Everything he did was bad.

"All right," Bella said. "All right. I guess maybe you could go out in the back. You stay right near the house. And don't get into no trouble, and leave them chunck flowers alone. That juice don't wash out." Roan ran out into the sunshine with a whoop of joy. He could taste the sun all over him except where his clothes were.

Oh, what lovely chunck flowers! Purpler than purplefruit, redder than blood, greener than grass.

Mustn't pick the chunck flowers.

He wandered to the other side of the yard where it trailed off into a dusty lot beyond the careful picket fence that Daddy was going to paint again soon. Roan liked to pick the flakes of old paint off it, but today something more interesting was there.

On the other side of the fence were a bunch of wiry, leathery little gracyl children, and oh, what fun they were having!

"Hello!" Roan called. "Hey! Hi! Come play!" Some of them looked up.

"You're not a gracyl three," one of them said.

"Here is where the three years gracyls dig, not there."

"I can help," Roan said. "Help dig."

He began to clamber over the fence. It was hard work and he tore a long strip off his shirt on the top of a picket.

Then, once over, he was suddenly shy and stood and watched the gracyl threes burrowing into the ground, their sharp claws working quickly.

"Me, too!" he cried then, and started in on a gracyl's burrow. The gracyl kicked him disinterestedly and kept on burrowing, and Roan burst into bears and went to help another, and got kicked again.

"Dig your own burrow," one of them finally said, not unkindly. Roan could see he was a little different from the others. One embryonic wing had failed to develop.

"You don't got a wing bone," Roan said. "Where's you wing bone?" The gracyl stretched out his one good wing into an infant fan. "They grow later," he said. "You don't have any wings." Roan tried to feel beneath his arms but he couldn't find anything.

"I'm going to grow my wings later," he said excitedly. "Then I'll fly. I'm Roan."

"I'm Clanth," his new friend said, and then noticed the others had already burrowed ahead of him. "Shut up and dig."

Roan began to dig and found out almost immediately it wasn't as easy as it looked. The dirt at the top was loose, and came right out, but underneath the ground got damp and harder.

"Mama cutted my fingernails," Roan said bitterly. He knew she shouldn't have cut his fingernails and now look—he couldn't dig like everybody else. Roan went and found a sharp stick and began to do a little better. He hit hard with it and suddenly a hole opened up all by itself. A nice, big hole and Roan crawled into it and a gracyl came up and punched him and said,

"Dig your own burrow, you freak."

Roan took his stick and began digging down some more.

"You're doing it wrong," the gracyl said, and went on lengthening his burrow.

But as Roan gouged at the earth, it fell in again, and he was in another burrow and it was quite dark and a little cold, but Roan crawled further along into the burrow and then he ran into something furry that he couldn't see in the dark.

"That's funny," Roan said aloud and laughed, because something was tickling the inside of his mind.

"Here it is lovely and cool and dark and no winds blow. Here live we Seez and who are you?"

"I'm Roan," Roan said aloud.

The See put out a soft claw and felt Roan. "You do not feel like you look in your mind," it said. "There are no wings and no digging claws. Tell me again what you are."

"I'm Roan," Roan said, and laughed again. And then there was a silence in Roan's mind while the creature felt around in it, and he waited, feeling the strange sensation.

"There's something amiss with you," the See said. Roan felt him backing off. "You can't tell me who you are. And some terrible power lurks there in your mind. And such enormous puzzles, and things that are strange . . . " Roan could feel a shudder from the creature's mind and then it was gone and he was alone. Alone in the dark cold, with all those strange things the See said were in his mind. And the ground smelled dead and damp and wormy and there might be Charons crawling through the burrows to eat dead things and suppose they thought he was dead?

Roan started to back out and found he was scared and all he wanted was Daddy or Mama and his own bed. He sat down and opened his mouth and howled.

The tears poured out of his eyes and he felt dirt in his mouth and he screamed with all of his body and he was wet, now, too, and that made everything worse.

Then he felt Raff's strong hands on him and even though he knew it was Raff he had to go on screaming to show how scared he had been.

"Boy," Raff said when he got him out and the screams quieted to sobs.

"Boy, I been looking all over for you." Daddy sounded funny. Daddy was scared, too.

"And I'm going to do something I never done before. I'm going to give you a good lickin'."

And he turned Roan over his knee, but Roan didn't mind the licking. By the time it was over he'd stopped crying altogether and he got up and looked solemnly at his father and Bella, who was hysterical and hollering for Raff to bring Roan in for a bath.

Roan wiped his nose on the back of his hand and said, "What am I?"

"You," Raff said, "are a human boy. And some day you'll be a human Man. Pure Terran you are, boy."

"But I got funny ears," Roan said, feeling one ear, because suddenly it seemed as though it was mostly his ears, his funny, rounded ears on the side of his head, that might be causing all the trouble.

"What's Terran?" Roan asked T'hoy hoy, as the Yill slave carefully washed him in a big wooden tub of hot water, while Bella hovered, checking.

"Terran?" T'hoy hoy echoed. "Well, a Terran is from Terra."

"Unca T'hoy hoy know a song about Terra?" Roan asked hopefully. Roan knew from his voice that he did. T'hoy hoy had a special way of pronouncing things he knew stories about. Sort of singsong, like he said the stories, speaking the ancient, melodic language of the Yill.

"Yes. And if you stand still while I wash you and then eat all your dinner and go right to bed, I'll be telling you the story."

"Oh yes!" Roan said. "Yes and yes and yes and yes!" And he made a big splash in the water, but then he really was still and T'hoy hoy began his story.

"Once upon a time, longer ago than the oldest creature in the oldest world can remember now, there was a world called Terra."

"Is it still there?"

"We'll get to that later. A long time ago, and so far away you can't even see its sun in the sky from Tambool, there lived people on the world named Terra, and these people all looked just like you."

"Like me!" Roan's eyes grew wide, and he stood even stiller than he needed to. "With funny ears?"

"Your ears aren't funny," T'hoy hoy said. "Not to a Terry. Now, one day these Terrans built the first spaceships that ever were. A whole new kind of thing that had never been built before. Only Terrans could do that. Then the Terrans went to other worlds in their spaceships and after thousands of years, creatures all over the universe learned that those twinkles in the sky were stars with worlds around them. Because previously each world had thought it was the only one. And each thought it had the only God, whereas there are actually nine Gods.

"And Terrans learned to live on those many worlds, but some of them changed, and on many worlds they met other beings, not human, but not too different, so that they could think some of the things Terrans think, but not all of the things."

Roan sat down in the warm bath because he was getting goose bumps standing in the cold air. "You not a Terran," he said, touching T'hoy hoy's Yill ear.

"No, I'm all Yill, as far as I know. But these people began to build things of their own and do many Terran things. And since these worlds sold things to one another, and visited each other, pretty soon they also began to have wars, because each wanted to be the strongest. So the men of Terra decided to rule the universe and keep the peace."

"I got soap in my mouth," Roan said. "Tase's terrible." T'hoy hoy carefully wiped the inside of Roan's mouth with a damp cloth.

"Then something very unhappy happened. Strange people came, from far away—on the other side of the Galaxy—or maybe even from another Galaxy—and their weapons were strange but powerful and they challenged Terra for the overlordship of the universe. And they fought a great war that lasted for a thousand years."

"Naughty," Roan said. He could tell from the tone of Uncle T'hoy hoy's voice. "Very naughty."

"Yes, indeed," T'hoy hoy said. "These bad people were called the Niss, and such was their power that even great Terra couldn't defeat them."

"Did they kill the Terran dead?"

"No. They put a circle of armed Niss spaceships around the planet Terra. And after that no one could get to Terra and the Terrans couldn't go anywhere. So nobody has been to Terra in five thousand years."

"What's five thousand years?" Roan asked, jumping from the tub into the drying cloth T'hoy hoy held for him. Roan loved to be dried off in the lovely, warm cloth and he liked to wear it wrapped around him while T'hoy hoy got his clothes together.

"A long, long time. I'm not even sure how long. But the story says five thousand years, so that's what I say."

At dinner Roan crammed food into his mouth with both hands and Raff and Bella were too exhausted to make him try to use his spoon.

"This how Terrans eat," Roan said, to excuse himself. "Terrans do this." And he filled his mouth so full his cheeks bulged out.

"Terrans do not do that," Raff said. "And beginning tomorrow night you'll always eat like a Terran."

And T'hoy hoy began to tell Roan how Terrans eat and what Terrans eat, but Roan was asleep before T'hoy hoy could get past the hors d'oeuvres.

Roan's turn came.

The others were already across. Except the gracyl who'd fallen, and was probably dead by now.

Everybody's wings had worked, the young, pink membranes fanning out along their torsos, along under their arms—all but Clanth's. He hadn't even tried. He had looked down into the ravine and then gone home alone. They were all laughing, on the other side of the ravine. First at themselves, because it was so much fun, and then at Roan, because he was hesitating. It had been easy. They were proud of their wings, amused because that one gracyl had managed his wings badly and fallen. He hadn't been clever. Now they watched Roan, the only one not over.