Six Moon Dance (52 page)

Away along the road something roared. The ground trembled. Bane sat up. Ashes was snoring. Bane poked Dyre, who sat up as well, clutching the blanket around his shoulders. The earth trembled again, and again, and constantly as the roaring grew louder. In the moonlight they saw something galloping toward them, huge and many-legged, rumbling like a string of freight carts on a cobbled street, continuing this horrid thumping as it rushed past and off into the west, toward the chasm.

“What was that?” cried Dyre, trembling.

“Legger,” mumbled Ashes from under his blankets. “Sort of like the kind that carried us off, that time before. They go by here all the time. Go to sleep.”

They lay back down. After a time they slept, to be roused again and again by the sound of leggers going past, in both directions, to and from the chasm, and once by the sound of something more ponderous than leggers, rolling. That time Ashes awoke and, telling them not to move from where they were, went up to the road. They heard him shouting, then the heavy rolling stopped.

“Ashes,” said a thick, gurgling voice, like rocks rolling around in thick syrup.

“Where you going, Hughy Huge?” Ashes asked.

“Roll ‘em over,” gargled the voice. “Roll ‘em over.”

“Who told you?”

“Wings.” The thing breathed, like a wind, heaving. “Wings said it was time to roll ‘em over. Wings, he’s comin’ along. The rest of ‘em, they’re comin’ along. S’long Ash.”

The rolling started again, at first slowly, then faster.

“Who was that?” asked Bane, when Ashes returned.

“Hughy Huge,” mumbled Ashes.

Bane judged it a good time for a sensitive question. “I thought Web said he was going back to camp.”

“Oh, that’s just Web,” said Ashes. “Just Web. He’s here. Of course he is. We have to … we have to be here.”

“Why?” whispered Bane. “Why do we have to be here?”

Ashes sat down by the fire, stirred up some glowing coals and put a few sticks on them, blowing into the embers until they burst into flame, talking sleepily, half to himself.

“Some of us … we didn’t like what that pond done to us. Some of us didn’t know what to think. Web, one day he’s mad, the next day he likes being able to fly, next day he’s mad again. Lately, he’s been mad more of the time. It’s like he’s bored. Web was always smart, like Bunny. Him and Bunny was close. Since Bunny’s been gone, Web’s kinda … like I said, bored. I think he just wants to make something happen.”

Bane said offhandedly, making little of it, “How come nobody knows about you all? Back there, in town, they think Wilderneers are just a story.”

Ashes ruminated a long time on this. “Well, we hid. One here, one there. After that time when they killed us, we hid. This whole world it’s just full of places to hide….”

“But the camp’s right out in the open.”

“Lately,” Ashes agreed. “Haven’t been there but a little while. A couple years. Most of us’re still hid. Me ‘n Mooly, we started the camp. It’s a place to get together. Him and me, we go around, talk to this one and that one, bring ‘em into camp, so we’ll be ready, when the time comes….”

“Look, you Wilderneers got a plan about the cities, right?”

Ashes nodded, like a man in a trance, not taking his eyes from the fire.

Still distantly, as though it were unimportant: “So, if you’re here when the cities fall, the plan won’t work, right? So why’re you here?”

Ashes nodded again, distantly. “There’s time. World’s not going to blow up yet.”

“How do you know?”

Ashes shrugged again, yawning, staring sleepily at the fire.

Bane turned away, outwardly calm, inwardly seething. The Wilderneers had a plan, but nothing came of the plan. They found themselves a new planet, but they had done nothing with it. They planned to get themselves some women, but nothing happened. Hundreds of years and nothing had changed with them, except that they’d grown bigger and stranger. They—or more properly, Ashes—had succeeded only once at reproduction. Their town was a shabby collection of huts and hovels, not fit to live in. Their food was offal. Some of them had only one emotion, and that was a kind of unfocused belligerence. Ashes and Webwings had retained some quality of irritability, but aside from being irritated, what did either of them do?

Bane surprised himself at these thoughts, at the words he used to form them, words he had never had until he went to House Genevois, words he had learned from the conversation mistress but had rejected using in favor of the rude and impoverished blatting of his fosterage. He used them now, nonetheless. Well, Madame herself had said words were tools. A tool was a tool. A man didn’t need to carry a tool. He could pick it up when he liked and put it down when he liked.

Still seething, Bane curled into his blankets once more, peering through slitted lids at his father’s firelit face, brooding over the coals. What was he thinking? Was he thinking? He, Bane, wasn’t at all sure Ashes could think, not straight. So, maybe … maybe he’d better concentrate on this business of getting away.

He remembered something Madame had said: “There is a class of person who cannot lead and will not be led. Such persons go their own way, uncorrupted by insight, unmitigated by experience. They do what they do, and usually they die of it, but they would rather die than cooperate with anyone else.”

Bane had always made a point of ostentatiously not listening during Madame’s lectures, so it surprised him how much of what she said he remembered. He remembered that bit, because it had made him think of Ashes at the time, wondering if he was one who couldn’t lead and wouldn’t be led. Now he was sure: nobody could lead that batch of weirds, anyhow. And none of them would be led. So if all of them were getting together, now, it meant something big was happening, something maybe they had no control over at all!

Brooding on this, Bane fell asleep. Ashes, too, returned to his blankets. The fire burned down to dying embers once more. They were not wakened by the quakes that came in the early hours, snapping the ground beneath them, but gently, like a laundress shaking out sheets. They were not wakened by certain other things that came quietly and stood looking at them for a time before going forward on business of their own, though when Bane and Dyre and Ashes woke in the morning, they saw the sinuous tracks of those beings all around them.

“What?” Dyre asked, pointing to the deep depressions.

Ashes yawned, shook himself, and said in an uninterested voice, “Joggiwagga, maybe. Something like that. On their way to the chasm.”

“Why are we going there?” Bane demanded. “All kinds of things are going there, and they’re all bigger than us.”

“I guess that’s why,” said Ashes, moving about his morning tasks almost unconsciously. “Something going on. You can’t gain ground without knowing what’s going on, boys.”

“I thought you was gonna take the cities,” Dyre cried petulantly. “You can’t take the cities if you’re here and they’re there. What if they fall down while you’re gone? You can’t get anywhere doin’ that.”

The whip was out and moving before Bane could take a breath; it moved of itself, without Ashes using his hands, like a prehensile tail, an autonomous appendage, snaking out from the front of Ashes’s jacket, cracking with that all too familiar electrical sound, leaving Dyre writhing on the ground, spittle running down his chin, eyes unfocused.

“You,” snarled Ashes. “You keep your mouth shut. I told you, and I won’t tell you again. You do what you’re told. And what you’re told is, we’re going to that chasm to see what’s going on. We’re gonna talk to old Pete. Talk to some of the others.”

He picked up his saddle and threw it onto his horse, still growling to himself. “Talk to some of them. That’s what. Talk to them and find out what’s going on.”

Bane lifted his brother from the ground, muttering, “You don’t have good sense, you know that?”

Dyre cried, “I heard you say the same thing about the cities, about his plan.”

“At night, when he was sleepy. And in a tone of voice like it wasn’t important. Not pushing it up his nose! That’s bound to jerk him up! Keep it shut, brother. I’ll figure it out. You just keep it shut and come along.”

O
n the third day of their voyage, while Questioner brooded on deck and all except the Corojum slept, the ship finished its voyage and was hauled ashore. The Corojum alone had been on watch as they passed the last two pillars, and he alone had sung the last lines, in his own language, while two of the Timmys manned the sails. When the keel of the ship grated on the bottom, the Corojum wakened the others, the Timmys gathered at the rail, the ship extruded its gangway, and they disembarked. The ship turned, of itself, and sailed out beyond the nearest pillars where, said the Corojum, it would come to no harm.

“Now what?” asked Mouche, wiping the sleep from the corners of his eyes.

“Tunneler,” said the Corojum. “The Fauxi-dizalonz isn’t far from here, and we could walk, but most everyone is there by now. There’s just us left, and some of the jongau and some people from Sendoph.”

“People from Sendoph?” asked Questioner. “Who might that be?”

“Two Hags,” the Corojum said. “And Madame from House Genevois. And Simon, and a Man of Business.”

“Madame?” cried Mouche. “Did she come after me?”

“Whether she did or not, how do you know all these things?” demanded Questioner.

Corojum looked surprised. “Swoopers and swivelers come through the walls, up out of the sea, through the air, like moths. They carry messages.”

“Luminous things. Like flying kites or diamonds?” asked Mouche.

“Like that. How could we all work together if we did not know what was going on? The Man of Business is not a bad one. Calvy is a good mankind, and so is Simon, more or less.”

“How do you know so much about them?” asked Questioner. “Do you spend a lot of time watching them?”

“The Timmys do. At first, we needed badly to understand
them
, those first ones. Then, after we took them to the Fauxi-dizalonz, we thought we
did
understand them. They were jong, gau, useless. Then you new ones came and we weren’t sure. In some ways, your culture is like our own. You have supernumes, we have Timmys. You have actors and musicians, we have Corojumi. Had Corojumi. You have Hags, we have Bofusdiaga. You have Hagions, we have Kaorugi.”

“The Hags are like Bofusdiaga?” Questioner regarded him with delight. “That is a new idea.”

“Bofusdiaga balances things to keep all the parts functioning. The Hags balance things to keep all the parts functioning. We do not have anything like the Men of Business, though. It seems to us odd to churn one’s needs in that way. Buy everything, churn it around, increase the price, then sell it back to people who made it. To us it seems sensible to make what everyone needs and let everyone use what he needs, but then we do not have five brains inside, rattling away. The ape brain you all have is very acquisitive, so our way would not work for you.”

“How do you know it is the ape brain?” asked Mouche, yawning.

“I think you give five apes five bananas, biggest ape will take them all,” said the Corojum. “Unless other four gang up on it, or, unless it is mother with child. So say the Hags.”

“When will we finish this journey?” asked Ornery. “Can you tell me?”

“When we are finished,” said the Corojum.

“When we come from underground,” said Questioner, “I hope I will be able to reach my ship. I have not been able, up until now.”

The Corojum did not meet her eyes. “Maybe that is Kaorugi. Maybe Kaorugi does not want you talking.”

Questioner fixed him with a stare, but before she could say anything, the Corojum cried, “And here is our tunneler. This is as you say, last lap. It will not be long.”

T
he tunneler bearing Questioner, Mouche, Ornery, and the Corojum traveled with a muffled roar interspersed with periods of almost silence that Questioner interpreted as movement through something more yielding than rock. Soil, perhaps. Or even predrilled tunnels. These relatively silent periods grew more frequent as they progressed, and the last part of their journey was accomplished in relative quiet. The tunneler stopped moving; the mouth end gaped large; and from the complicated structures beside the creature’s mouth, its voice said, “We have arrived near the Fauxi-dizalonz. Others will be coming soon. Some are already here.”

Almost drowsily, as though they had been long hypnotized by the motion and the sound, the three followed the Corojum out of the creature’s mouth to find themselves on a high, wide ledge with sky and air everywhere but behind them. There the mouths of highly polished tunnels gaped, explaining the silence of their arrival. These ways had been cut long since, and among them were several smooth-walled caves, in one of which the Corojum suggested Mouche and Ornery deposit the packs before coming to stand beside itself and Questioner at the rim of the world.

They stood at the top of a sheer cliff that swooped in an unbroken wall to the bottom of the caldera where the jewel-green disk of a largish lake shone brightly in the morning sun.

“The Fauxi-dizalonz,” said the Corojum, pointing at the lake below. “Your people are there, and I will collect them for you.”

“Don’t hurry on my account,” said Questioner, moving a little back from the rim. “I’m really most concerned about Ellin and Bao, the two dancers. Have you done anything to them?”

The Corojum shook his head. “After what happened with the jongau, Bofusdiaga is reluctant to try it again. When you come, Bofusdiaga thinks we may arrive at a better way.”

“One would hope,” she murmured.

The Corojum went to the rim of the ledge, whistled, and was answered from the air. Within moments, a huge, four-eyed bird dropped from the sky, plucked up the Corojum in its talons, and plunged toward the distant pond.

“An interesting mode of travel,” Questioner began, interrupted by a slithering
shush
that proved to be another tunneler, emerging from another portal onto the same ledge. When it opened its mouth, five disheveled persons staggered out: Madame, the two Hags, Calvy, and Simon.