The Kar-Chee Reign (6 page)

It was close to noon when old Ren’s wife appeared in her doorway. She looked around, made a gesture of dreadful despair. Her hair hung in witchlocks, sluttishly about her pendulous cheeks. She walked with melting strides toward the tiny cages hanging under the eaves of thatch, one by one flung open the tiny doors. The little birds fluttered, but none fluttered out. She opened her mouth and breathed painfully. Then, as though each gesture cost her infinite effort and infinite agony, she reached her hand into every little pen and closed it around each bewildered creature and drew it out and flung it away from her. “Go,” she muttered. “Go … go….”

When the last of them had been released she looked around her once more, repeated her gesture of horror and hopelessness. For a moment only her expression changed to something approaching bewilderment and she shaded her eyes and peered as though looking for, as though missing something … someone…. The moment did not long last. She melted back into her house. And all therein was silent.

• • •

Duro held his crossbow by the butt. He gazed, slack-mouthed, into space. Then his mouth closed, tightened. He swung forward on his knees and lifted the bow as though he were going to smash it into the ground.

Lors put his hand out. “Don’t.”

“Why not?”

The older brother’s face and hand and head did not move much, nor did his eyes. But Duro knew him well enough to understand that an answer existed and would be presently forthcoming. He sank back and waited.

“Listen,” Lors began after a long while. “When I was on my first overnight hunt, way out in the uplands,” he began, looking straight at his brother, no trace of condescention or rivalry in his voice: equal to equal now; and Duro, for the first time since the trouble began, felt pleasure grow in his heart; “ — you’ve heard me tell of that?”

Duro said he had. “But tell it again,” he said. The story was obviously intended to make a present point; besides, the hearkening to a story makes a pain to be forgotten (so the old proverb went).

• • •

A squall of snow, unseasonal and — peculiarity — driving downward from the middle upper ranges, had driven the hunting party even further up and out of their intended path. And up there in the clefts and rifts of the slope of Tihuaco they had come upon a hamlet of the dying and the dead and of the living-dead as well.

“The sickness had come on them,” Lors said, recollection making his mouth twist, “and it was still on them, so — you can imagine — we didn’t stay. But we stayed long enough for me to get the picture of it in my mind. Later on, hearing the older ones talk about it, I got it all clear and fixed. There’s no cure for the sickness — either you recover or you don’t. But those who were already sick just lay there as though they were already dead, and those who weren’t sick just lay there as though they already were. They could have left, but they didn’t. And not because they didn’t want to risk infecting others, either, because they never opened a mouth to warn us off when they heard and saw us coming. It wasn’t, either, that they stayed there to tend to the others, because we saw them begging for help and no one fetched them water.

“They just stayed and waited to die the way a rabbit does when it’s face to face with a big snake. It trembles but it doesn’t run. Even a rat will run or fight if it’s cornered.”

He paused and took a deep, shuddering breath.

“I saw Mia on my way out before,” he said. “She just lay against the wall and breathed…. Yesterday you said I was in a hurry to get back and get on top of her. Well, I could have gotten on top of her right then and there and she wouldn’t have said
No, Yes
, or
Oh, more
. But it would’ve been like mounting a corpse.

“Is it like this everywhere, Duro? It must be. If even Popa and Moma have given up, then who hasn’t? They’re all just waiting to die. They seem to think they’re already dead.”

Duro’s head bent lower and lower. Then he lifted his hair out of his eyes as though it were very heavy, and said, “Who hasn’t? You haven’t. And I haven’t. Thanks for not letting me smash the bow. If there’s only one bolt left in all the world, then, brother, there’ll be one dead Devil.” And, just as Lors had made no stand of being older and in command, so Duro now made no stand of being younger and defiant. “Tell me what to do and I’ll do it.” Their eyes met in perfect understanding. They had never been so close before. They would never again be as far apart as they had been.

“I don’t know what to tell you to do,” Lors said, softly. “I don’t know what you should do or what I should do. Something happened yesterday and something happened last night and something is happening today and probably they’re all connected.

“But I don’t know….

“And even if they are connected, I still don’t know…. We heard our fill of oldfathers’ tales about Devils’ and big Devils and little Devils. What does it mean? Maybe no more than the ones about Arno Half-Devil — and there are
still
people who’d stake their privates on his changing into a giant cat in the night! What can I tell you to do? I don’t know what’s right or what’s wrong. I only know what
I’m
going to do.”

He got to his feet. Duro did the same. They both knew.

• • •

They hadn’t gone far when someone swung onto the trail beside them. It was Tom-small, but not the placid Tom-small of the day before. They exchanged looks. “You’re going south to see what’s there,” he said. It was a statement.

“Yes.”

“So am I.” That was a statement, too.

• • •

It did not fail to occur to them that if they were capable of smelling the dragon-Devils, the dragon-Devils might be equally capable of smelling them. The thing, then, was to keep the wind in their favor … but this was a figure of speech: they could not of course keep the wind, they had to keep with the wind. At the moment there was none discernable, and this gave them time to reflect on the other part of the equation, which was the matter of where the Devils, thick or thin, might now be.

“Maybe along the beach-coast,” Duro suggested. There they had seen them yesterday, after all. Lors pointed out that it was no mere disinterested desire to find the creatures which alone had brought them, all there, upon the trail.

“There’s a way down to the beach not far from here, at Goat Rock,” he said. “And that’s all the way, either up or down, from here on south, until you get to the caves … which is quite a ways.”

Duro didn’t see what he meant. “It’s no ways at all; we can walk it in an hour …”

“And suppose we get caught half-way? How long would it take us to
run?
We can’t sprout wings and fly, you know. And I wouldn’t want to have to try swimming, either.”

The point was conceded. Here and there, almost automatically, one or the other of them pointed out clumps of hair frayed against a tree; but no move was made or intended to pursue these signs of game. It was not venison that they were after now, descending the forest trails — indeed, none of them was quite sure what they
were
after. A sight of the strange creatures, to be sure … a safe sight, certainly. But then what? And after then, what? Such questions were equally unspoken and unanswered. Now and then, warily crossing open terrain, they felt the sun hot upon their heads and shoulders; but in short moments they were back in the shade once more. It soon became obvious that Lors was not intending to make for the beach by the nearest way, if at all. Duro and Tom-small said nothing; they followed. Few signs of life were observed, but now, so close to noon, when most live things favored rest and shade, was never a propitious time of day for such observations. Now and then a faint taste of the sea came on the light and intermittent breeze, or the familiar smell of sap and grass and rotting leaves; once, a stronger scent, a musky one, of some male creature’s harboring or staling. But these were of only negative significance. The wind — such wind as there was — was still toward them, and it carried no warning on it.

There was no river in the land worthy of the name, but there was a point within sighting from their route where within a short distance a number of streams joined to make what was called, as it ran coursing through the savannah, the Spate. Such was its noise that they were long in hearing the other one, and did not recognize it when they did. They slowed their gait, they moved more cautiously, they frowned in concentration…. Logs, perhaps, thudding against each other or against rocks … logs perhaps escaped from woodcutters in the farther uplands, or perhaps intended by them to be thus moved downward … or trees, it might be, dislodged by the undercutting of some distant embankment by the eternal action of the streams….

Such notions did not long bemuse them, for, the Spate and the savannah coming suddenly and alike into sight, they saw far off and below down the gentle incline three huge black hulks pointing blunt snouts at the silent skies.

They rested there as the three points of a wide-based triangle and it seemed in that second that each one was an eyeless face from which protruded a long and rippling tongue. One rooted up rocks and earth and licked them along, one sucked up water, and one conveyed the mixture into a single black cube from which, it seemed, the rhythmic thudding came. It seemed to them that things moved in the open side of this cube, tall things, thin things, things with other things in their great claw-hands … it seemed … shock and the distance made semblance uncertain. The wind shifted.

The rank and alien odor struck them like a blow, so benumbing them that they looked all around ahead for the source before it occurred to them that it was against the crawling hairs of their napes and the backs of their heads that the breeze now blew. And therefore the dragon was behind them —

To cock and load and aim and fire a crossbow while lying on one’s back is probably not the most difficult thing in the world, but neither does it rank among the easiest. The dead and heavy tree limb still dangling from the breach in the branch was just within bow-shot. Lors’s bolt split the flap of bark; almost the instant the small sound of this reached them they saw the bulk of withered wood fall and saw the dust spiralling in the beam of sunlight, and then they heard the sound of the crash. Hard upon this, forgetful of harsh spikes of grass or roots or stones against their flesh as they embraced the ground, they heard another sound: a hiss, louder than the hiss of the largest serpent they could conjure fantasy of. They heard it so short a time that they might almost have imagined that they had imagined it, but even as the sound vanished in their ears they felt along the whole supine lengths of them the ground shudder (they felt it, did not hear it), saw the great green-black form move so delicately diagonally toward the place where the limb had fallen from the tree that although they could not see they could imagine with dreadful detail and probable truth how the grained webbing between each great toe would fold in as the foot was silently lifted and then expand as each great foot was silently, swiftly set down again.

Oblivious of pain or anything else but flight — instant flight! — they crawled upon their bellies backwards and sideways and vanished into the concealing covert of the thickets. Thorns tore at them and took toll, bushes resisted parting, but they pressed onward and away.

The Devil-dragon must have found the crossbow bolt — they afterward agreed on this — must, in that moment of sight, have understood everything: that there was nothing there of itself to draw a shot and even if there had been they would not have ventured to shoot at it so close to the alien encampment and that therefore the bolt had been loosed for no other reason than to part the heavy branch and use the noise of its fall to draw away pursuit. Upon understanding came rage — at least rage; perhaps more — a signal, an alarm, an appeal —

— From behind came the hiss again, this time not cut short, and, after the air had ceased to quiver from the hiss, came a great burst of gutteral sound, the coughing of a giant; and then noise for which no words existed for them. Roaring? Bellowing? Thundering? They had no need for names or words. They responded by the shrinking of their cullions and the swelling of their hearts and the cold sweat upon their skins. And by pressing on, writhing, sliding, ever away. Long after the noise behind them ceased they still had not dared rise up to run like men: and perhaps they owed to this that they were still live men.

And they did not rise to their feet until Duro saw before him the tumbled, fissured mass of rock like half-melted honeycomb, which he knew ran on and on and on, if not forever, at least for long enough for him to breathe deep and know he would draw at least a several few breaths safely thereafter:

The caves!

T
HE RAFT
as such had ceased to exist by the time Liam was well enough to come on deck, half-expecting to see it bobbing behind. A pile of its timbers were stacked neatly about; a few more were in the process of being split into planks; a few piles of such planks were pointed out to him, as well as a bin of fragments from which an old woman was feeding a fire-box well bedded in sand.

“You seem to have made good use of it,” Liam said.

“ ‘Waste not, want not,”‘ graybeard Gaspar intoned. “A saying of our wise ancients, as true today as the first day it was uttered. I am sure it relieves you to know that you have already payed your own way.”

Liam looked at him just a trifle askance. On the once hand, he was of course grateful and glad for his life; glad for the food and the drink and the care: hence, yes, pleased that Gaspar and his people considered that the raft had paid for all this. On the other hand, he entertained a view of the whole matter which could not be fitted into a frame-work which contained the conception of payment in goods for saving lives. And he wondered what Gaspar the Knower and the others in the Ark might have done if the raft had not been there to serve for payment. But this was like wondering about a two-sided triangle….

And not every life had been saved; small wonder if fresh-baked bread and dried fruit and smoked meat and broth of parched vegetables and cool water and shelter from the burning sun, wonders though they were, did not come in time to make up for the so-long lack of them.