Red ClaudiThe Everyday PoetryContents:
1 Reading Aloud 2 After The Fall 3 At Home In The Great Outdoors 4 Everyday Poetry 5 Up-Hill All The Way 6 Little Friends 7 Community Support 8 Making A Warm-Spot 9 Dramatics 10 Downhill Tranquility 11 Civilization And Its Discontents 12 Four’s Company 13 Time/Dust/Space Travel 14 Extending Family 15 Street-Smarts 16 Mixed Blessing 17 Women’s Mercy 18 Defending the Citadel 19 Climbing Down 20 Last Resort 21 Queen Of The Sea 22 Queen’s Gambit |
1
Reading Aloud “There!” Claudia made a dripping and stuck her fifth black candle neatly at the apex of the home-plate pattern she had chalked-in around herself on the flooring of her bed-sitter. She peered into the illegible old book and the crib-sheet she had prepared, each holding the other in place near her curling toes on the linoleum-block parquet. “Oka-a-ay, then,” she uttered, wrinkling her nose. Carefully, she sprinkled some of that awful powder onto the coals in the brazier she had contrived out of the landlord’s brass compote. The smoke was not thick, about like an incense stick, but it disgusted her, at least in part because she knew what she had put into it. She straightened and removed her only garment, a purple velour bathrobe, which she tossed onto a straight-backed chair beyond the inscribed area, allowing herself a quiet, “Brrrr!” Excited and chilly in the quaint, British absence of central heating, she stood erect, as the instructions directed, and began again to chant softly. “You know, I catch myself all the time, apologizing sub-vocally for being American,” she told Eileen, another American visiting student as they sat in the café.” So far, my year abroad has been fairly divided between truly marvelous educational opportunities and fascination with the quirky civility of British living.” She didn’t know Eileen very well, but they were both starved for company and accommodated each other’s stilted attempts to force a friendship on no particular basis. And it was true, Claudia was intensely taken by the depth of culture everywhere about her in this viridian kingdom. “What this place lacks in size, it more than makes up in resonance,” said Eileen, ponderously. She was a History of Religion candidate. That was true, too, though. Claudia fanned the conversational spark and came back with, “I mean, you just look at a row of Cambridge town homes and compare it with the building materials of the equivalent row in Paddington, where you disembark the bus on trips to ‘Town.’ You can practically hear history echoing back and forth,” she added, to follow up on the metaphor. “The real marvel’s that all this distinction’s been preserved down through the years with such veracity” she went on, Eileen sipping her cappuccino and nodding just enough to show she was listening. “Doubtless I’ll have my daffy degree in literature when the time’s right but honest to Ethelred the Unready, if I should perish crossing the common from library to pub I think I think my life would have achieved some kind of, I don’t know, peak, don’t cha know.” She glanced surreptitiously at the near tables, where they were drinking tea. It was always hard to gage the risk of impropriety when making light in England of English mannerisms. After all the little boroughs, the waddling bus had finally sighed to rest in the Paddington terminus. “Dear bear,” she thought. Echoes, echoes. She was a dab-hand now at making her way about London. The ‘chube’ brought her to Piccadilly and stout American cross-trainers took her easily over the damp streets to Leicester Square. She stood meekly aloof in a queue of tourists to get a half-price ticket to a revival of Miss Saigon for that evening. ‘Remainders.’ No one recognized her for an American in her new heather-colored wool, not so long as she kept her mouth closed. She enjoyed the rascally feel of covert operation. One of a couple ahead of Claudia commented as they carried their tickets away from the window, “’Ere, love, we’re right down front...wi’ th’ Americans.” Claudia turned toward the little streets – still cobbled – where there were used-book dealers. In her bag nestled a list of titles she hoped to come upon–nothing remarkable, not the Gutenberg Bible or Perrault’s Mother Goose, just possible cherishables – a Meason’s Landscape Architecture of the Great Painters of Italy, an early Wee Willie Winkie, if possible, or the like. She knew she could kill a few hours rummaging through their shelves and still, before the curtain rose on her show, take in a dish of curry at one of the village of Pakistani hotals – restaurants – which infested the area so fragrantly. But for the time being, Claudia walked firmly past bed-&-breakfasts, lunch-rooms, tea-rooms, pubs and restaurants. “Breakfasts here excellent!” she had IM-ed, Ellen, an old schoolmate, “featuring griddle-scones as the last remnant of pre-yeast, pre-oven bread still commonly found in Europe.” Ellen had replied, “’Strewth! You make Elevenses sound like a deadly habit. Cigarette smoking’s practically a sensible, low-cholesterol treat by comp.” Lunch, with the delicately cut rounds of fine cheeses on fresh bread, was so easy to wash down with a half of brown ale. “CalorEz all!” she had concluded her message, feeling plump as a soaked raisin. Tea would interrupt the afternoons pleasantly with cakes, usually leaving her cozy and somnolent in her new tweeds. Then came the evening meal, with its curiosities of pies and galantines, peas on the back of the fork, frightening Toad-in-the-Hole, sociable Bubble-and-Squeak, naughty Bangers-and-Mash. She could hardly resist the tasty quaintness of it all. Well, actually, she didn’t resist it. Crusty Scotch eggs. Runny, zippy brown-sauce on flaky, chewy sausage roll, bacon butties. She lacked only for comforting with apricots, at which she sighed. An interestingly un-assimilated Chinese place sent tendrils of steam into the street to mingle about her head with evaporating rain showers. Claudia put steel in her spine and marched on, taking note of it for later. “The trouble is that all you book-shop owners understand exactly what your dusty old volumes are worth,” Claudia joked just for the pleasure of talking to someone, as she left one emporium, pausing out on the pavement to brush off a sleeve. She spent time like a miser, insisting on getting the most out of it, because she had even less to spend of money. With diligence, she got down on her knees for bottom shelves and climbed tiptoe on creaky stools to ascertain what might otherwise be left for giraffes. The first three used-book vendors proved interesting, but she found nothing worth diminishing her small kitty for. There had been a moment when she had almost bought three children’s novellas of the nineteen twenties, mostly because they featured such a scamp on the cover. They were housed in a handsome leather box with swing-out handle for pulling it off the shelf, what she thought used to be called a biscuit tin. But a naturally un-impulsive nature saved her. Out on the sidewalk again, she cast about, exhaling softly, “For the next adventure.” Lights came on above a window display of mint-condition comic books or, rather – she corrected her carelessly bourgeois thoughts – graphic novels, at the only other book dealer in view. Beyond, macadam street-metal wound vacantly away. But the Taj Mahal had sprung up in restaurant avatar just across the lane, to lure her from her true quest. To the comic shop, Claudia murmured, “Don’t go away. I might get back to you.” Then, when she wandered up to examine the menu in the window of a Pakistani chop house, her eye caught a dull glimpse of painted sign board down the dank crevice between buildings. Days were getting longer, this time of year, late spring, but even so, the light was not good enough for her to tell what might be offered. The alleyway did seem clear of anyone or anything scaley she might step into, so Claudia made her way along it, careful not to brush the brickwork of the narrow way to the interior, thinking, “Good old Basho.” The half-glazed shop door stood open to the lane, its wooden threshold worn hollow and smooth. “Hello?” Inside all was dim and tenantless. She made her way hesitatingly toward the first shelves. By the time she had worked to the back of the shop, Claudia had really forgotten that there seemed to be no staff. She knew bookstores were home to the world’s dust, but this place was worse. She wore her hair in a no-nonsense helmet of dark curls, but when she brushed at the top of her head, a suspect cloud descended. She could not decide if it was her dirty hand or whether her hair was acquiring periwig gray. Everything about the bookstore was disorganized – many volumes un-priced, unsorted and left in splitting cartons on the gritty floor. “Veddy well,” she told herself (since she was alone) in what she hoped was the spirit and accent of Empire, “as much as possible, we will try to use our fingertips. However, if we are to see what lies wedged (uhh!) in these various and diverse cartons, there will be no avoiding dirt.” A bottom shelf was missing in the right-angled bookcase, which closed off a back aisle. More-or-less jammed into the space, were several buckled cartons. Methodically, she tugged them out, careful not to rip the brittle cardboard. The first held disconnected Great Books of the Victorian period, the kind of thing printed up in multi-volume sets of collected works: Bulwer-Lytton, of, “It was a dark and stormy night...,” renown; Victoria’s catty biographer, Lytton Strachey; Carlyle, on the recent, unfortunate developments in France; the novels of F. Marion Crawford and Mrs. Oliphant... Restauranteurs with pretensions to ambiance would buy these up by the stone's-weight to set about a dining room. She worked the last carton out just far enough to fold up one of the torn lid-flaps. Massive bindings. Curiously, she dragged the box toward her and hefted one into the air. “Of course, family Bibles,” she identified them. The flyleaf in her hand bore genealogical intricacies in faded penmanship. “Well,” she reflected aloud, crouching over the dusty floor, “interesting, but not very practical for a girl who has to get back to Cambridge by the last bus.” That was the thing about most of this stuff – interesting, but not very. Where had so many Bibles been assembled from? She could not think. Mostly, they were dry-rotting to flaky bits. One bindingless back stood on edge. She hesitated but decided that it would serve as a penance to derrick the thing out, justifying her in setting off to one of those spicy dining rooms in the Bloomsbury streets outside. Instantly, as she laid her fingertips to it, Claudia knew this was something different. “Vellum!” she breathed—calf-skin parchment. She raised the cover-less block of pages and laid it across her knees. “By Cthulhu, hand lettering..., Latin!” It struck her that what she had was a tome, a section cut with a blade from a greater volume. It was possibly even medieval. Well, it might be! Shaking with success, she rose, clutching the pages in both hands. From dust-veiled panes of glazing high in the back wall, faint light allowed Claudia to make out words. Her Latin was worse than spotty. “...old man of the magi...” Dizzy with it, she contemplated the possibility that this might even be the work of an alchemical hand. Claudia almost staggered toward the front of the shop. The counter was manned now, by a young chap who had his feet up on it. “’Ere,” he exclaimed, when he set eyes on Claudia, “’ow long was you back ’ere?” His sneaks thumped to the floorboards brogueishly. Clutching her find, she was too flustered to reply. The shop-lad pinched a greasy chips wrapper and let it drop out of view behind the counter. “I was wondering, nothing seems marked. How much is this?” she asked. The fellow, who seemed even younger now, looked a bit alert at the gasping quality of her voice. He examined the volume she placed on his counter. “Where’d you get this then, love?” he queried. “Old Spanniker’s been ill quite a while now. Not a lot of organization going on about the shop.” “In a carton with a lot of giant Bibles,” she waved towards the back of the dim premises. “Back ‘ere, ’ey?” he answered airily. “’Ow’s ten Sterling sound for an old Bible, then? Two five-quid takes it off.” Claudia’s fingers were clumsy in spite of her effort to appear casual as she searched out notes. The young fellow made a parcel of her purchase with string and brown paper and, clutching that, she all but fell through the open doorway into night. Tandoor-baked chicken and paratha were the things on the menu least likely to drip on her prize. In her solitary booth, she pored over textured parchment, holding the netted candle-globe with her left hand and not quite touching the page with the other. How her fingers itched for a church-Latin dictionary and grammar. Quickly leafing through the work, one thing was obvious—rough handling had been part of its past. Certain pages had been slashed and others were stained or burned. Wine, blood, rust, oxidation, hot pokers, chemical malfeasance or any combination of these privatim et seriatim...the book drew her into its mysterious nature. Chicken masala would have been right at home. The waiter raised his black eyebrows at her absorption when he stopped by to inquire, “All good? More water? Paratha, you are liking?” She simply waved, papally, with the back of her hand, without raising her eyes. In the theater, she stared distractedly in the direction of the proscenium arch, delicately balancing the re-wrapped package on her knees like the treasure she was sure it was. Whatever became of the poor girl on stage, she was sorry later never to know. Afterwards, the bus ride back to Cambridge was taken up with plotting her assault on the reference materials at the university. Who was a Latin scholar she could access? What were the standard histories of alchemy? She knew she was out of her depth, out of her area. Later, in her narrow bed, she was so excited she could hardly sleep for visions of ornate black-letter verses and sixteen-line, hand-drawn initials. Her constant turning played the squealing metal bedsprings like a bagpipe. She felt she might have just found her career, met her fate, as it were. Jorgenson was very grave when she approached him with the tome. Grimacing a maze of parentheses around the inverse question mark of his pipe stem, he proved unwilling to make allowances. “A find – it is a find, of its kind – but in very bad condition and quite incapable of casting light on the social context of the era – thirteenth century, at a guess – of which it is a derivative.” Claudia thought that a certain deepening of the diacritical marks in his constitutionally grave countenance signified humor – the risibility of academe. “But these old grammars, I don’t care for them. There’s bad air about them. Give me a battle saga; one knows where one is.” The creased scholar removed his briar to point at her with its discolored stem. “This sort of cook-book...objectively, it hardly matters, you know, what one makes of it. But let me just say, there was ill intent when parts of some of these things were being composed.” She guessed this was by way of being a charitable display of fellow feeling on his part. Thereafter, Claudia threaded the university’s maze of courtyards and corridors to bring the elderly scholar only hand-copied words or phrases; photocopying would have been too harsh on the antique pigments and she was glad not to expose them to his actinic glare as well. Jorgenson had been right in calling the work a cookbook, though, in his manner of speaking. It proved to have no organizing theme and little coherent explanation. Many of the pages had been literally scratched out and overwritten repeatedly in palimpsest style. By the present age, they were reduced to patches of obsolete black-letter and corrupt Latin, a great deal more vulgar than the Vulgate. Nouns suffered from more than one level of obscurity. Time had simply changed the names for many things in the world. Then, the transformation into Latin forms from a range of other languages – medieval French, Gael dialects, the Teuton family, including Briton, and very possibly Hebrew, medieval Arabic, Old Persian and other linguistic sources – had rendered each word a phonemic crossword puzzle. And finally, the alchemical point of view dubbed things according to a strange light. Secret knowledge was not to be set down in clear speech. “Sugar of Saturn!” Jorgenson crowed, “Saccharum plumbus, good old sugar of lead, when it’s at home.” He shook his head in merry rue. "Thought to be good as a rubefacient – to give that glow to a cheek grown wan. Wouldn’t want to have been the Johnnie who took on the job of tasting that. Brain damage, you see, organic madness.” He gazed penetratingly over the tops of his half-spectacles at Claudia, where she sat five feet away, across his littered worktable. “You’re not to be trying any of this, now. Half these things are poisons, sometimes mistaken for medicines. The other half probably blow up. You would be very fortunate to come upon a recipe in that manuscript for something which just sat quietly and stared back at you.” Then he pulled at his pipe, softening a degree, and added, “Given the equipment and knowledge they had to work with at the time, the old taste-test must sometimes have been the best they could do. Amazingly subtle organ, the tongue. We owe those old natural philosophers quite a debt, in fact.” His eyes stabbed quickly at her over the tops of his lenses. “Just don’t let me hear of you trying any of it.” Claudia’s eyes gradually widened in the slow-dawning surprise of innocence accused. By five candles’ light in her bed-sitter, Claudia tried not to take too deep a breath of air, which the incense was making noxious; but the chant required each hemistich to be voiced without pause, or even variation of tone. That had been one of the problems the other time. She had felt something faintly stirring in a previously un-accessed appendix of her personal world. Then she had let it get away by breaking the smoothness of her words’ flow. Much practice without the benefit of darkness, candles, diagrams or stink-powder had revealed that this chant demanded half-song, like the Mass. And from a collateral reference she had picked up on the notion of fasting prior to this attempt. It seemed a helpful notion. As she had never been told she was a beauty queen, the sexual abstinence part was entirely too easy with which to comply. She had scarce attention to reflect on the manner in which the thin fume from her charcoal brazier-cum-fruit bowl seemed increasingly reluctant to violate the bounds of the phone-booth-sized box she had chalked-in on the floor. Erect in the five-sided haze, Claudia felt it drawing about her, felt an arrival in the offing prickle in her thumbs and raise goose bumps on her arms. She could tell, with some new part of herself, that she was engaging in a process which had always been a possibility, like sex, newly discovered. She quelled her of respiratory reflexes to breathe with dogged regularity through the unhappy organic chemistry which thickened the surrounding air. Fascinated curiosity, which had taken her thus far, gave way to solid expectation, which was a mystery in itself. As she repeated the chant from her parchment tome, the air grew increasingly opaque in a pentacle, of which she remained the central column. The tidy, shabby bedroom faded and something else grew. At once, with wild joy, she cried, “I’m flying!” |
2
After The Fall She was flying!
Tremendous, arctic wind was flaying Claudia’s unclothed body. But insulated by shock from her immediate surroundings, the observer within her mind exulted. Uvan knew his time had come. Because few could, he went...went to high places where the world may be entered from whatever other place exists beyond. Higher and higher, he strained his chest muscles and worked his back to harness the force of the thin gale with his wings. Alone, mentally elevated by fasting and meditation, stimulated by disciplines and artifacts, he had long sensed potential building for a great arrival. Once, not long before, he had been elated by the touch an expanding cloud of awareness, but the contact had been faint; it could not be sustained, and he had rested on his wings, dropping to warmer, quieter air to wait, listening. If no one were to ascend to the thin wind, his kind would have no hope of finding the wonderful and powerful beings who bore hope inside them. His was a small people, few in the empty air. If food had been the material in shortest supply, he would have devoted his life to getting food for his people. It would not have been an unworthy task. The same skills – study and application – would have been called for. But the ability to generate young was what they most lacked, and so that was what he most studied and sought and this was the place where hope felt greatest. It was of no matter that the place was difficult to come to, as long as it was possible. There might be others who had sensed the event. He knew for a certainty that there were those, of various sorts, who would try, if they could, to prevent him from being the one who brought this new presence through...or who would attempt to prevent him from holding what he might obtain. In fact, it was some advantage that he was one of the few who could ascend to the level where contact might be made and breakthrough could occur. Though it was difficult for him, among other races, none could do it at all. Of his people, few could master the mental and spiritual disciplines which this sort of hunting demanded. Of those who could, fewer yet were also able to develop the endurance to fly so high. In any generation, they were only a scattering, and the span during which strength joined mastery was never more than brief. And he knew to guard himself against debilitating pride, vain confidence. Beating now at the limit of even his strength, expanding all lifting surfaces for maximum support, straining mind and spirit to reach beyond their grasp, he sustained the contact. What he could do from his side was little enough – offer a beacon for the questing soul and make a tiny wound with his own slender force in the massive boundary between this world and the world of spirit. He felt the being’s appearance even before he located it by means of the echoes of his voice. Flying! Claudia raised tingling arms wide in the limitless, airy sphere, and rotated into the oceanic wind. With her motion, a tear-blurred earth swung into place far, far below, stretching to a jagged horizon. In that instant of sudden familiarity, Claudia was not flying any more, but falling faster and faster from great height through thinnest air. The floor of her room had opened on the stratosphere and all sense was blown away with it. Terror made its claim, and she recognized it... distantly. She maintained a degree of detached perspective on her condition, though. The abrupt change was too great to have been processed through. A pair of dark wings appeared below, seeming at a distance. It was impossible for her to know if they were enormous and distant or tiny and close as they labored nearer in roaring wind. Through squinting eyes, Claudia hardly noted the rapid half-stroking, caused by thinness of the atmosphere, before they flipped out of sight. Her mind had still not absorbed the implication of her tumbling fall. To Claudia, it seemed that a world of wind was rolling around her. In fact, lack of oxygen and the un-breathable gale were numbing her into unconsciousness. She clutched her freezing, wind-whipped bosom and drew up her legs. The wings Claudia had lost sight of folded without warning about her and she was seized, not by claws, but by strong arms and legs. She threw her own desperate arms about a human neck and wrapped her legs while a series of quick motions cinched a harness at her back. Then the inhuman wings spread again and terrible wind resumed cutting at her. To her astonishment, the fur-covered body she clung to was gratefully warm. Heat radiated from sliding muscles as they surged and locked against their fall. Claudia was not thinking clearly, and her eyes remained closed. She could tell though, that however large the wings were, the body of the raptor was scarcely as big as her own. It seemed hardly possible that the creature could bear them both without snapping its bones and sinews. She buried her face and contracted to frozen, iron-hard grips. She was not even aware of the relaxation of the flight pattern from desperate plummet on raked wings, to long gliding, interrupted with deep strokes of the wings. The whole of the journey, attached by a single rope at her back and her own limbs, was a simple, seamless, cataleptic blank. Claudia remained locked in an unbreakable cramp, even as her shoulders touched the ground in a storm of wings. Only her upper spine pressed the stones and, after the thrashings of their whirling flight, Claudia was not aware of the creature's legs coming forward as the vast wings folded backward in an uncontrollable paroxysm of beating. But she was sharply aware of being penetrated by its trembling organ of sex and set on the ground. After either a brief time in torment – or forever – she was able to release her hold and her wing-draped savior, raptor, rapist arose, much like a man in a raincoat. Claudia curled into a ball on her side and shivered with the cold and violation. Tears sealed all the crevices light found, but she was too frightened to cry out. Drained and near collapse, exhaustion set in every muscle as Uvan rose and stumbled a pace back from her almost incomprehensible form. But his thoughts surged like the gale they had dropped from. Here was fortune, cascading into his grasp, good beyond jubilation, great almost beyond his ability to receive it. He knew the empty air at that high entry point could have disgorged almost anything, wonderful or terrible. Of course, he had understood that what was making its appearance was a living presence and a figure of power, for had it not initiated entry into the world? Long apprenticeship and calculation based on ancient lore projected that this was one of the most likely points of origin for the fantastic creatures, who were prized beyond any setting of price for their unworldly beauty...and by their sheer indomitable power to stir the blood of his own winged people to passion. He tried to recall – how many generations had it been since such a being had appeared? It was uncertain, but for his own line of descent, it might approach twenty generations since they had received one in their midst. Over time, depictions and descriptions had grown fantastic, but sheer wonder revealed to the eyes out-shouted the most exaggerated account. Time’s passage had caused their point of entry into the world to drift higher and higher through the thinning winds, limiting access to beings capable of flight, at least, on this side. He turned to stare at her again, Uvan did. This ethereal being was wingless, as the beautiful ones were, and clearly unable to fly by any other means. If he had not succeeded in catching her, he must assume she would have plummeted to her death and his ruin. What new age of splendor was about to begin, he wondered? Of course, of course, without Uvan’s life-long hunt through the layers of dark and the guidance of his own spiritual beacon, it may well have been that she could not have found entry into the world. The assistance he offered in the final break-through may have been essential, very probably so, he thought. But whether the force of her powers had brought him to the meeting, or whether his attainments had brought her, the fact of her presence was supreme...and overwhelming. His breath trembled as his eyes strayed over her exaggerated proportions. In his innocence, he had taken lightly accounts of the powerful sexual exploits of which they were capable. But the instant he had made to seize her, before he fully realized what he had encountered, she had writhed into mating position with a grip of unbreakable force. The winds were too thin to support their great weight and even his wings were too small for the height. Incensed by her touch and by her fragrance, still, he had to navigate their way to safety, bearing her weight as best as could be, trying to turn their fall into a canny, slipping glide toward rest. Uvan was one of the great fliers, or where he was, he could not have been. But it heavily taxed his physical limits and powers of strategy. Inevitably, the backbeats of landing had involuntarily turned into the six heartbeats of mating frenzy, his wings a blur. Weariness dropped him to his heels and he wrapped himself in folds of dark and encompassing wing. And, in a personal way, he felt fallen. For a time, plummeting exhaustion obscured everything. What drew Uvan’s attention, when he had attention to give, was the sound of her teeth striking one another. He could only suppose that she originated in some warmer place, for her pelt was almost bare and cold was shaking her. And she shed tears, which only the most extreme grief could call forth, at least in one of Uvan’s own people. Spent, now, of the peak of his passion, it was easy to see the alien, frightening cast of her features, but suffering was something common across many boundaries. Pity, he felt weak pity for her in her helpless state. She was torn from her world, her kin..., perhaps she had a mate somewhere, whom she would not see again. Clearly, she required protection and comfort and, indeed, Uvan would have been inexcusably careless to allow such a treasure to drift away through neglect. He lifted and enfolded her as one warms a child. It seemed to offer her some comfort. They both slept again in their mutual exhaustion. For Claudia, the scene seemed to sink, along with her, into frozen weariness until heat-loss and every other loss set up involuntary shaking in her perishing body. She was beyond even trying to control her spasms of fear and anger, cold, self-revulsion and nausea. In fact, they attracted the unwelcome attention of the bat..., demon..., monster. His eyes opened at the sound of her teeth striking together. Hampered in his steps by evident weariness and the contracted membranes which joined even his out-turned ankles, he rose from his squat and shuffled back to Claudia. She gasped in wordless fear. With that same powerful grasp, which had taken her from the air, he bent forward and lifted her by the upper arms to draw her into his enfolding lap. The warmth of his body was fueled by great slow breaths, which formed a sort of cradle rhythm for Claudia. She succumbed to the gradual return of her own body’s heat and the wildness of the last – she was drearily astonished to think it – the last few minutes. With just the black curls on top of her head exposed between folds of great, brown wing-membranes, they sat on a stone and both slept while some strange form of time passed. Uvan woke suddenly, as had been his habit since youth, drew a chest-full of air, and knew it was time to seek safety. Recovered now from the immediate drain of great weariness brought on by vigilant austerities, long struggle at the heights and unexpectedly being taken in mating, his heart heaved like a tree in the wind. So many as wise and skilled as he had gone their lifetimes without substantial reward. They had sacrificed themselves, as he always had been willing to sacrifice himself, to the labor of searching through to the other world, for the good of the people as much as for the glory and power which would follow on success. Other forms of creature had their own methods and other entrances, it was common knowledge, but for the glorious, soft beings, the marvelously adaptable creatures who could parent more vital lines of descent for his people, there was no other or easier place in which to search. And a female! The most perilous type, said in legend to assure the death of any mate. But he expanded wing and spirit in the atmosphere to revel a moment in glory. Fragments of the dream of sleeping in a high-backed, leather chair were dispersed with her first movement, as the chair stood, placing Claudia on her shoeless feet. The air still nipped her bare flanks, but she endured it as the...well, batman, was the term which came to her...as he moved awkwardly about the bare mountain top. He made a wide fanning motion with his wings, as if to stretch them after sleep. Generally, however, he folded himself about himself. Jack the Ripper’s Ulster, suggested itself. He wasted little time on the stupendous view. Rugged, yellow-and-red hill country spread to endless distance far below the nest of peaks, among which they were perched. The batman retrieved the braided ropes and catches which had served to support Claudia’s body while his hands were otherwise occupied in flight. She was fascinated in spite of her apprehension to observe how his wings and his hands were one and the same. He had a thumb and two fingers at the upper bend of each wing and another, much heavier three fingers, which folded down to form long umbrella spokes for the wings. “Six fingers,” she exclaimed aloud. She was given no chance for counting toes. Stepping and shrugging into the harness ropes, he turned to Claudia and gestured unmistakably, an in-sweeping with his wingtips. She glanced beyond the edge of the precipice and considered that she was still young; death would always be an available solution. Her ancestors had survived wars, abductions, enslavements, rapes..., things worse than this, and they went on to produce her. The batman made some whining sounds. “Is that speech, possibly?” Claudi asked, mostly for the reassurance of hearing her own voice. “But it’s lost on me, except I bet you’re ready to take off, again.” With steps, which she knew were taking her to some sort of doom, she moved slowly closer and reached about his thick neck as the batman cinched her only garment, a light cord, at the center of her spine. She equaled death’s grip with both arms and legs but taking off from the edge of the abyss was not the dramatic fall Claudia had experienced the first time. This sensation of swinging climb was familiar from the cable-car at a summer-bound ski resort she had once visited. Great muscles of the creature’s chest and shoulders swelled and moved them in paces through the steady air. She drew warmth from his body with her front, aware that the cold wind was less deadly than it had been at higher altitude. Claudia even risked opening her eyes, but just then they turned at an angle which caused her to shut them again for the rest of the swooping journey. Landing was less traumatic, as well. They alighted, bouncing, with a huge backstroke, on the flier’s feet and Claudia was hastily able to un-wrap her legs to stand, stiffly, on her own, while he unhooked the harness. She stepped free and sank sideways to the earth, sullenly rubbing the spot where the cord had cut into her back. They seemed to have been expected. A knotted net sheltered in one of the crevices of jumbled stone blocks, which she guessed must have fallen from overbearing cliffs, the color of parchment. Below, in the shadowed overhang of one of the walls of arid stone, water had collected in a palm-sized pocket. The warm liquid was not less welcome to her parched mouth for being brackish. His own thirst quenched in delicate sips, the batman extracted the net from among angles of rock. To demonstrate that it contained good food, he took a chunk of each kind and offered it to her, biting avidly into a piece on his own account as proof. She did not know what to make of the whining speech which accompanied the food – dried vegetables, maybe, and meat – but he seemed satisfied that she took it and chewed experimentally on one of the leathery bits in a resigned attempt to derive sustenance. Claudia watched as the flier himself ate ravenously enough to finish the entire supply in about fifteen minutes. He returned for another sipping drink; the drip-spring did not allow large drafts. Then with no effort to hide his weariness, he carefully folded back the thick web of his right wing and stretched himself on his side to sleep once again. Sitting on a smooth patch of dust in the bright warmth, Claudia reflected that the batman had been working hard since he had snatched her out of the upper reaches. She was unable to formulate her own sensations – whether she was grateful or terrified of him, terrified or so angry that she had no other experience to compare it with. Gratitude did not seem to make a very strong claim, despite all the dread which memory of her first falling moments brought back to her. Tentatively, she tried to lighten her mood. Maybe, in this stretch of the desert, sexual intercourse was considered a polite way of announcing that the flight had landed. Maybe it was an involuntary reaction, but then, she frowned, that was no excuse; it too much resembled millennia of aggression, male against female. Anyway, she had been spared the painful experience on this last flight. And what was she to do next, she wondered, glancing around, escape into the barren wilderness? Here at the cliff-base, the country was a close enough approximation to flat that she could probably scramble about, sort of, bare bottomed and, most importantly, bare-footed. Or should she attack the unconscious batman? Trying to be noiseless, she moved one hand to pick up a pointy piece of rock. “He’s ugly enough. Well..., no,” she reflected. He was bizarre enough to stand out on Walpurgis Night, but not really unpleasant to the eye. She had never thought that pug features on a bat were exactly ugly. “I never thought to have sex with a bat either, on the other hand,” she murmured to herself. But without him, it seemed likely that she would have her pick of either hunger, thirst or exposure of which to die. She thought of that woman in the Bible, driving a tent peg through the temple of a sleeping enemy. She did not think she had it in her. “She must have been a hard woman,” Claudia commented aloud. In bitter acknowledgment of her own incapacity, she placed the stone quietly back on the earth. Thought of the Bible brought the old, alchemical tome back to her mind. Some mental faculty she never suspected was working, returned from her memory a brief glimpse of the book and her pot of incense dropping out of her life as the floor disappeared from beneath all of them. “The floor went and dropped away in every sense,” she grieved to herself. That thought stayed with her for the hours the batman slept, until she dropped into her own uneasy trance. Claudia’s eyes opened at a touch and traveled about the rough stones of the sloping terrain. The winged man stood over her, a dark, furry form. As she sat up, he made a series of squeaks, “Which I take for words?” Claudi asked. His lips, though full, moved little. All sound seemed to be produced by the working she could see of his muscular throat. Uvan signaled by gesture several times, interrogatively. The beautiful ones were deaf, so they said, who spoke carelessly. Not deaf, but able only to hear sounds below the speaking range of a normal voice. Two stones striking together would be perfectly audible. Her own voice was an indistinct burring to him, though he did not doubt her speech was of a sort which sufficed for her own kind. He was fairly certain that she had no ability to see the world with her voice. Old accounts supported him in this. For creatures who spend their time slowly treading amongst stones, that sufficed, he supposed. Language would be a difficulty, to be sure, Uvan realized. Though he spoke to her often, he was not certain how much she was able to hear of what he said. He felt some pride in his ability to communicate basic thoughts through signs made with finger and wing. He would overcome this obstacle in time. Communication would be no insurmountable difficulty, not in comparison to obstacles which he already had overcome. It had been so long since his people had an infusion of fresh blood, that the practicalities had been nearly lost to the hazards of time. Uvan would cope. Finally, Claudia’s feelings burst out, “What do you want? I don’t know what you want!” Whatever range of gestures a race with wings could have developed to explain its intentions, served poorly to make Claudia know what was expected of her, if anything. It seemed likely to her that cocking and tossing of the head might well have taken on greater significance, given that wings would often be occupied with the business of staying aloft. But those motions he made with his fingers or wing tips, minute or sweeping, were equally lost on Claudia. She sat clutching her scratched bosom and rocking with apprehension as the batman showed increasing signs of his own frustration. “Oh, help!” Her voice broke as she gasped the words. Finally, he shuffled off to gather up one of the cords, which had closed the net bag of food stuff. With his irresistible strength he bound Claudia’s wrists behind her and made her ankles tightly fast. She was too frightened to struggle, or even to allow tears freedom to show on her face. With a final survey of his work, the batman made a sudden crouch and sprang into the sky. In heartbeats he had climbed the invisible air in a spiral above Claudia’s prone form. Projecting cliff-tops rapidly hid him from her view. Despite all his efforts, Uvan could not communicate to her that she must stay in the vicinity of the small spring. The area was too dangerous for her to be left wandering alone in it, and it would be an easy thing for her to hide from him in one of the dark places beneath the stones. He was at a loss for how to protect her in his absence, but he simply must go for help. Her weight was too much for his strength to carry upward for the necessary distance. In final exasperation, he resorted to binding her limbs, though he knew she would count it against him – another obstacle to overcome. It was not a good solution to a bad problem, but he could not think of another one. Rapidly, he rose, seeking altitude from which to survey the area. Help was not near, that much was given. Left alone, bound hand and foot and unclothed in the wilderness, Claudia could not have felt more defiled and desolate. Tears followed each other’s courses down her grimy cheeks at last. So, it was quite a few moments before she noticed that the bindings of her wrists were not as tight as they could be. Leaving tears to look after themselves, she twisted her arms a bit and found the knot with her fingers. There seemed no good reason to free herself, as she had no notion what to do when loose. She was frightened to be bound, though, and the cords were painful; besides, if he wanted her bound, that was reason enough to set herself the task of being rid of the ties. She was grateful that she had never let her nails grow inconveniently long. Actually it was not so hard to pick the twists apart. As she struggled, her lower lip in her teeth, Claudia reflected that the batman was not so good at knots. Probably that thumb and two thick fingers he had free from holding out wing-membranes, lacked the monkey-dexterity of her own. In a minute she shook her hands to drop the cords and reached for those on her ankles. The bindings had served to distract Claudia from what might be happening in her surroundings. As she rose to her feet, her eyes were jerked upward again by a hoarse cry. Something huge was streaking down at her. Its too-long beak and leathery wingspan wore a pre-historic look. Claudia almost welcomed back the terror, her only familiar companion now. Not even a layer of clothing stood between her soft skin and the flying spear head. It shrieked in wicked exultation as it slid down the still air upon her. |
3
At Home In The Great Outdoors Even before it gave its malicious cry of triumph-at-hand, Uvan was acutely alert to the appearance of the flying menace.
The creature was stupid, barely above the animal level, not capable of having spied on his efforts. Briefly, he contemplated the matter of what enemy might have sent the creature. It would not have intruded, had there been more of his people present. But the beast was a terrible opponent to confront alone and without weapons. Fear existed, but under the rule of fear, nothing was possible. And most things which he had attempted, he had not expected to accomplish. Far up, above the rocky tops of the bluffs, the batman soared into her view and folded his wings. He fell like a stone after the reptilian fright; but Claudia saw that he was much too distant to reach her before she was skewered like a mouse on a stork’s beak. And, in the remaining instants, it became apparent that this fell creature was big, much bigger than the batman. She thought of her mother, who had died what seemed like an eternity ago. She had borne life’s crippling slights and blows in stoic silence. But Claudia recalled the angry intolerance her mother had freely vented at any threat to her only daughter. As if by magic, Claudia’s hands launched half-a-dozen fist-sized stones into the face of the attacking nightmare. She threw herself aside, ignoring that several could be heard to strike the predator’s head and one of its wings with the force of its own violent momentum. The effect was greater than any strength Claudia’s own muscles could command. With bright marks, not the true red of blood, showing in two places, the creature winced away and missed with the stab of its beak as it flicked a wing and dodged upward. Claudia never even suspected how close it had come to the smooth skin of her back. Scrambling to her bare feet, she spun in all directions, looking for where her attacker might be coming at her again out of the sky. At this instant the Uvan struck squarely on the reptilian back of the predator, rising from its missed strike. It screamed in rage and made a quick half-roll, buckling a wing in its effort to be free. But the Uvan stuck, clinging with hands and feet and making no effort himself to fly. He may have been attempting to damage the larger flier with his own nails or teeth. But from Claudia’s vantage point down below, all that could be seen was desperate flapping and diving on the part of the huge reptile. She stood, frozen in apprehension, as the batman hung on. It was amazing, how fast the thing was. Its dives in particular seemed of jet-plane speed and its rolls were more than any machine could have managed. The furious noises it set loose on the air were more terrible than engines could be, because of the rage they so clearly conveyed. With its long beak and short neck, it turned out to be poorly adapted to snatching at its own back, though. The pair rose high above the cliffs with the deep beating of the creature’s pointed wings. The bony-faced nightmare strove for more height to dive yet again in the effort to shake free of the batman’s hold. If Claudia’s first winged captor was harming his enemy in any way, that showed itself not at all to her as they rapidly diminished upward and almost out of her sight. At the peak of one of its strokes, the predator began to spiral and descend, its wings fixed in a V-figure above its back. As Claudia watched, the rate of descent increased and the width of the spiral grew. It seemed to her that the creature’s wings were yet higher above its keel, as if it were about to land on an unseen perch in the middle of the air. But it drifted more quickly earthward, tearing air with its breast and voice together. Claudia glimpsed suddenly what was happening in the strange battle. Leaping to his feet on the reptilian back, the batman had caught its raised wings in his grip and was bowed with the effort to hold them back. The predator, for its part, did not cease to strain with the trembling down-stroke, which would return it to command of the air. It was using what control remained to it to lengthen the fall by ruddering into a spiral. Its every instinct caused it to avoid the cliff tops and fall with increasing speed below them. Standing like the figure of slavery-in-chains, bent and shuddering with the beast’s heaving, Uvan rode its back as the pair of them moved from drifting to plunging past the face of rock. Where she stood, the mesa’s foot was rugged with blocks of stone, and Claudia was suddenly desperately afraid that she would not see whatever end would be. Dropping at a very rapid rate now, the pair was about to crash into the boulders of the sloping terrain, about double a stone’s throw from where Claudia waited with her hands over her mouth, her eyes riveted to the drama. It seemed that the batman was going to succeed in destroying his enemy..., their enemy..., but only at the cost of smashing himself, along with the beaked saurian. Their forward velocity was still tremendous. It gave a swooping gracefulness to the disaster. Racing ahead in the final force of their flight, the pair was taken from the air by a plucking slab of stone. But the eye was slow to interpret what it saw. At the very last moment, Uvan released his hold on the long wings of the creature he rode. The monster instantly took advantage of the chance to bring its wings down in a powerful stroke. It was at this point that a stub finger of rock poked it into oblivion. More nimble, Uvan had succeeded in completing three frantic, fluttering, backwards strokes before his momentum carried him forwards, over the fatal slab embraced by the wings of his mount of the moment before. On, over the obstacle he shot, to strike and roll among broken rocks of the dusty landscape. He was still thrashing to an inert ball, brought up by some smaller obstacles of stone, as Claudia scrambled over the rough ground toward him, careless of her tender feet. She was hardly able to know whether she wanted him alive or dead. How carefully she approached the dark rag that remained. With her fingertips, she unfolded his wings and straightened his twisted legs. Surprised again, she distinctly felt relief to detect breathing, as she eased him onto his back. His blood was red, at least, and flowing from scores of bruised abrasions. She wiped it away from his eyes with the edge of her finger. But, bare handed, without even a vessel to carry water, there was practically nothing she could do. He seemed not quite unconscious but befuddled by the force of the crash. “Are you alright?” she asked, not hoping for an answer. The sound of her own question comforted Claudia, and it seemed to focus the attention of the broken winged-man. “Look,” she said again, “it’s alright.” The accuracy of the statement was shaky and so was her voice, but she went on. “The thing is dead.” she told him. Even as she said it, she wondered if it were true, and glanced over her shoulder. She thought she would hear, if it came hopping among the rocks or took to the air again. It had been a noisy creature. “You’re going to be okay. You’re going to be okay. Oh, please! Just relax and rest up a bit. I’ll be here. I’ll take care of things. You’re going to be okay.” The sound of her voice seemed to settle him, or it was the feel of her hands softly picking grit from his wounds and straightening his limbs and membranes. With the calming, he seemed to drift away into true unconsciousness, toward death, leaving Claudia in charge of them both. The sky was blue at zenith, yellow with dust lower, toward the horizon. Claudia sat a long time, occasionally placing a hand on the unconscious batman to detect life, before she noticed that there seemed to be no sun. Probably, she thought, it must be hidden behind the mesa top, but there were no stretching shadows either, just the little noon-time ones that hid under rocks. The whole sky seemed bright and hot; light eating in from the sides devoured the shadow of her palm just half a foot from the dust-whitened ground. It made time seem slower. In that field of baking rocks, her own thirst eventually served notice that hours were passing in the old, familiar way. Hesitatingly, Claudia rose to her feet. They hurt from scrambling over stone. She had cuts on each foot, which made her limp on her way back toward the small spring. She had lost it in the trackless waste, and wandered a considerable time, before coming upon the loose net bag, which once contained the batman’s food supplies. The spot seemed no more familiar than any other, but she gasped with relief when she was able to locate their tiny pool hidden in the dark recess scooped out beneath a jutting wall of stone. It was a drip-spring, nothing to water a flock. It had just life enough to fill a sterile basin the size of her cupped hands. The salt content, she hoped, killed germs and prevented other forms of life from prospering in the moisture. Claudia had to lie on her sore bosom to get anything at all. She tried to raise the water in her palm, but the quantity was so slight, she was forced at last to put her face to the surface and sip it directly. It would make one good swallow or two small mouthfuls. She thought she could probably use the salt, anyway. Keeping her eyes closed, she wondered if she could simply wait with her head in the slight shade of the little cavern until the spring was filled again and drown herself. She was too thirsty to prevent herself from drinking what had collected in the basin now. Her mouth half-full with the last of the precious fluid, she thought of the batman, parching in the sun, or in the light, anyway. Without her, he might die. She was still intensely angry at him; whatever the act had meant to him, it felt like rape to her. Something important would never be right for Claudia again, but just now so many things did not look like they were ever going to be right that she made a conscious decision to shut the matter up within her. She wondered at how large the heart must be, that it could fold inside it so much jaggedness and still beat. He might die anyway, of course. But she scooted backwards and rose, carrying her mouthful of water carefully over the geological rubble to where he lay on his back, one wing drawn over his legs, the other thrown limply out. Claudia was careful not to tread on his wrinkled wing as she stepped close to him. His eyes were shut and his face was caked with mixed dirt and blood. With a coolness she gasped at inwardly, Claudia placed her lips on his slightly open mouth and allowed the water to trickle slowly into his throat. “Well,” she thought, “he’s a lover, after all. Sort of.” Reflexively, he made swallowing motions and finally some coughing, which seemed to hurt him, without bringing him around to consciousness. She performed this act three more times, over how many hours, before he began to stir and gasp. With an obviously painful effort, which Claudia was afraid to try to assist, he struggled blindly to his side. Dust covered his back and all the wounds, big and little. “I never had any medical training, but I’m sure you have to have any number of infections. And I don’t even have a piece of cloth to wet, so I could wipe the dirt away,” she said softly as she watched him struggle. Again, he fought to move, and this time she thought she might help, as the batman strained to pull his good wing from under his body. She reflected, “The ability to soar like a bird costs something in comfort and general dexterity, I guess.” While he slept again, she sat, in and out of her own body, as if it were a dream. Time danced like static in the bright air, until her eyes fell in with the charade. Almost with shock she exclaimed, “You’re actually there!” to the waltzing spots above her head. A cloud of creatures was hovering and bouncing on small wings. Their hummingbird or insect motion was too quick for her to catch shape in any detail. They were a haze of noiseless dots in the air above her for the space of a tennis court. At no point did any one of the little fliers come lower than head-height. She sat mesmerized by the complex swarming until it struck her attention that there were not so many of them as there seemed to have been. Gradually, the density of the flock diminished, until the last few flitted away in no particular direction. In her mind, the process gave life to the air and she looked with more sympathetic eyes at the stones and dry soil, suddenly alert to how they hid complicated processes within them. In fact, they were mysterious and complex engagements of forces themselves. This new, strange land into which she had tumbled seemed less hard and lifeless, not quite as hostile to her sort of life and to the possibility of her living. And Claudia, saying, “Well!” sat alone again, grateful to have been distracted from her troubles and feeling vaguely wiser for the experience. Tranquilly, it occurred to her that the worst which might happen would only be for her to die; her body would add a few bones to the rocky floor of this world she had entered so strangely. She didn’t really believe in heaven, though hell was looking more likely, but the atoms of her body would unite this world with the one she had left, to which her parents had returned their substance. “It makes sense,” she murmured after thinking for a while, “winged things would be in great numbers. If people drop into this world from above, it’s the fliers of the universe that would be most likely to live to tell the tale.” Claudia brought her fallen batman a mouthful that tasted like tears one more time before he actually seemed to regain even misty consciousness. His gashed brow wrinkled and the folds of his eyelids deepened as he struggled with awareness of pain. Uvan rose out of un-healing dream to awareness of his plight. Great pain throbbed almost visibly through all his body. “There you are. Don’t worry. I’m here.” she soothed him, stroking the side of his forehead, where a patch of warm moleskin had escaped injury. He winced slightly at her touch. “It might be that you’re afraid of me!” Claudia said softly at that point. “After all, I must be as bizarre to you as you are to me. You’ll just have to get over it, then,” she told his uncomprehending form. “If I can go on, you’ll have to.” That was assuming he lived through his injuries at all, but she didn’t say that. Gradually, she saw, he returned to the harsh world of awareness and the lids of his eyes drew slightly apart. A third membrane slid in toward his nose, as the batman stared into Claudia’s face. Recognition was hard to detect; his features were too alien for her to readily interpret. The most mobile part of his face was, in fact, his beautiful mouth; full lips turned sinuously as he came into control of them. Claudia saw his chest swell with a deeper breath and the muscles of his neck moved as a high voice fell all about her. “Oh, I’m so glad.” she said, more to herself than to him. After a period of gathering his strength, the batman rolled slowly to squat on his feet and arranged the trailing tips of his wings behind him. “You poor thing,” she breathed as he did it. Despite all alien-ness, it was clear the effort cost him dearly in pain. After settling into this new position, he raised his wings slowly above him. The left wing stretched tightly, brown sail cloth over thin spars. But the other would not expand, an umbrella that would not open. Probably the bones of his support fingers were broken. With exaggerated care he refolded his vanes and closed his eyes for a long while. Finally, it was Claudia who impatiently rose to her cut and bruised feet. “Well, come on then! We can’t sit here forever. They could of course, she admitted to herself. She approached the unresponsive form and touched his shoulder gently. “Come on. Wake up.” His eyes opened and then his mouth, though she heard no sound. “Can I help you to stand?” she asked, reaching into the folds of his body to lift carefully under his shoulders. She felt his muscles come into play gradually. Claudia really did have to help him to his feet, and lightly built though he was, she was barely equal to the task. But he steadied after a moment and twisted his lips in a way she guessed must have been a smile and a grimace combined. He half spread his wings again and examined the one which was so badly damaged. Claudia had no notion of whether he would ever fly again, but she decided that he must be kept from dwelling on the thought. Clearly, he had originally had some plan for them before the great predator attacked. He had rescued her from an enormous height, and that, she suddenly realized, might be more than coincidence. He had cached food for them. He had tied her to assure that she did not wander off while he went somewhere for something. Wherever he had envisioned taking them when he could fly, they would just have to walk. It seemed a simple enough thing. She pointed at his feet, to show what she meant, and reached as if to pull him toward her. “I guess you’ll just have to walk, like everyone else around here.” she told him in encouraging tones. “Come on, let’s try.” He took a small step with his short, bowed legs, so she exclaimed, “That’s the way. Come on!” With hand gestures and much falsely cheerful crooning, Claudia got him moving. She was good, but it was bad. When the dull light thrown by glowing pain revealed what an empty catch he had made with his survival of the impact, Uvan wanted only to sail back into the dark. But she turned his course to the world again. Bravery, as he had often been told, was the first quality to cultivate. He gathered strength to hope for life and to think how to provide for a future. There were certain steps which might be taken. Much was lost, but perhaps something could be saved. The batman shuffled slowly, but now he seemed to have an idea of his own and Claudia allowed him to direct their slow movement back along the path of his crashing flight toward where the body of the dragon-monster lay in a twisted heap, still wrapped against the fatal crag. As they moved into sight of the wreck, Claudia heard a bustle of croak, flap and squeak. It came from the carcass, indeed. Scavengers were at work. They were on the small side, about two feet in length; crow-dark but furred, not feathered; beaked and broadly bat-winged. But their resemblance to Claudia’s batman was not great. “They don’t seem like men, the way you do,” Claudi told him, though he seemed to ignore her. Clearly, they were animals, not even related to him. If the batman had not shambled steadily onward, she would have been afraid. There were half a dozen or so of them, and they could probably have attacked her. But rather than showing hostility, the little creatures left off their efforts to tear through the tough hide of their enormous meal. They scrambled to the top of the carcass and turned watchfully as Claudia limped behind the stumbling batman. A dialog followed. For a change, Claudia could hear more than the occasional squeak of it, for these smaller creatures seemed to communicate in screams all too well within her range of hearing. The batman’s voice remained too high for Claudia to hear, but the scavengers seemed able to understand him well enough. They tossed their heads, postured and waved their wings abruptly to accompany their cries. The batman was clearly angry, and climbed slowly up onto the mound of meat, which had been his former enemy. The little scavengers flapped nimbly onto the high points of boulders round about them. As far as Claudia could make out, the batman wanted something they did not want to give and he was denying them scavenging rights. She imagined that the little creatures were evaluating his chances of survival. It must have been that they knew the batman, or at least were familiar with his kind, because they maintained a wary respect for him despite the difficulty with which he moved. Considering his wounds and battered condition, Claudia thought he was handling the apparent negotiations well, though of course she was consumed with curiosity and concern for just what he might be negotiating. She was certain he was trying to better their situation in some way. She surely hoped he was. After an interminable time, two of the small scavengers alighted back on the dead monster’s tail, as far as they could get from the batman. Their quick stabs at the scaled hide ended with a high scream when a hail of pebbles struck them. They took to the air and resumed perches at a greater distance, craning and glaring at Claudia, who had pelted them. Apparently, this throwing of stones was outside their range of experience. The batman gave her a quick glance, which Claudia took for approval, but it might equally well have been surprise. The negotiations continued as occasional squawks and squeals. But she kept a diplomatic handful of small rocks warm in her grasp. However, a significant part of the process seemed to be for each side to stare at the other, the small scavengers twisting about on their perches like puzzled jackdaws and the batman, squatting immobile, moving only to face a certain one of the scavengers when it shifted position restlessly. Claudia figured that must be the leader, den-mother, pack-chief or whatever. Finally, long after Claudia herself had sat down and placed her stones by her knee, there was another brief session of waving and hopping; then two of the dark forms flopped off into the sky. The batman started to climb stiffly backwards off the mounded carcass, able to use only his three functioning limbs. Immediately the remaining handful of scavengers leaped through the air to resume their picking on its ribs, even while Claudia still helped the batman to climb down and stand erect. He led them slowly back to their old spot by the drip spring and settled down on his heels again. Along the way, he stopped twice to make Claudia pick up stones, first one the size of a brick and after a bit, another the size of his fist. After a period of rest, he beckoned Claudi with his fingertips. Scooting forward, she accepted instruction as to how she ought to position her hand to hold the larger stone on his thigh, while he clipped it smartly on the edge with the cobble she had gathered. Using his leg as an anvil, he smote the stone several times with sharp, precise, one-handed blows, repositioning it in Claudi’s grip between each. To Claudi’s interested surprise, the fracturing stone separated in smooth, caramel-colored flakes, each of which was carefully set aside. Claudia winced and her eyes teared to see how his body sagged after each painful movement, but she was fascinated, watching intently. “I wonder if I can guess what you’re about.” The batman set his hammer down and picked up one of the two-inch flakes of colored stone. Raising his head, he looked to Claudia. The flake he was holding was a single-sided, Paleolithic razor blade of stone. She took it when offered and fingered the glassy edge. Clearly it would cut, but she could not think that the blade would serve very well as a weapon. For a moment, Uvan watched her intently, and then began laboring to his feet. She appeared to have accepted him as an ally and was willing to help, even though he could not make more than the simplest instructions clear to her. In truth, his plan was simple enough—first, survival, then, help. First must come first. Claudia rushed to help him rise and then assisted him back again toward the carcass, where riot was being carried out by the scavengers. She had her little flinders of stone in her hand and some doleful suspicions in her head. The jackdaws had torn a hole in the gut of the great beast, she saw with distaste. They were clustered on the edge of this gory pit, ripping and jerking at hot innards. Claudia reflected aloud, “See, even monsters are tender inside,” hoping she might hit on some great and useful truth. The daws kept intermittent look-out, hopping to high points with their gobbets and ribbons and bobbling their heads about in wary watch, as they tossed back prize bits. The batman may have said something she could not hear. In any event, the gory crew withdrew, half sated, as Claudia and the batman shuffled near. Uvan was not capable of much further exertion, but he made a sweeping downward motion with his good arm, which conveyed well enough that she was to get up to the opening in the dragon’s belly and slice away. “I was afraid of this,” she told him. Uvan sank to his heels upon a rock, watching her approach the job. The two-foot, circular tear in the hide gave access to nameless shredded organs. She tried not to wince away from examining them, because she fairly well knew that either she dealt with this business, or they would not eat again. Claudia shrugged and gave a big sigh. “At least we’ve progressed to the point that we know where our next meal is coming from. I won’t risk the strength of this glassy, little razor by trying to cut away that scaly hide,” Claudi grunted, reaching, “not when I see a lovely wall of...uh...! solid meat at the top of this opening here, which ought to provide nice, easy steaks and roasts, and short ribs of dragon.” It came out in haggled chunks, but the stone knives proved handy enough tools. “I wouldn’t...,” she gasped, “have minded a good handle, though, on the things.” First, Claudia told herself, she would be very careful and get no more than her fingertips involved in this oceanic gore. Then she thought she’d surrender to the wrists. A sirloin-pot-roast-of-beast settled her qualms by sliding abruptly down her forearms to nuzzle wetly into her bosom. By the time she had satisfied the ambitions of the supervising batman, she was ichored and slimed from eyebrows to heels and had cut her fingers twice or, she was not certain, more. Her once-clean hair twisted in dark, pointed, dread-locks, which poked her shoulders. Claudia dutifully piled the meat she had looted from the dragon’s side on a sort-of-clean rock. Taking instruction, she toted the pile, by installments, back to the vicinity of their drip-spring and began to slice it to ribbons. These she spread round about on the sloping boulders to dry. “Creamed, chipped beast.” she murmured to herself. “Light on the cream, heavy, heavy on the beast.” The batman seemed innocent of cookery, “And I’m not up on fire-making without matches,” she told him. Nonetheless, while he chewed listlessly on a string of meat, she rounded up what she hoped were the makings of a fire. Fractured remnants of the batman’s broken stone, she had noticed, would make a spark, if struck together just right. She prepared a ball of softest fluff from the bark of dried-to-death little bushes and gathered a fair pile of twigs. After working for quite some time–actually, it seemed like forever – Claudi looked up in frustration at the drowsy batman, “Y’know, getting a spark to light on the fluff and begin burning isn’t impossible – nearly, though.” She hit her thumb with the striking stones more times than she cared to think about, but she didn’t dare let herself begin to cry. The few sparks she made went just anywhere, up down and sideways. When, finally, one did land on her precious fluff-ball it winked out in an instant, before Claudia could think to do anything about it. With a single desperate breath she blew out the next tiny spark that did land where she wanted it. It was at long last, indeed, that a spark settled into the recesses of the tinder and survived while Claudia dropped her implements and crouched, breathing delicately to give it life. It glowed; it grew and became a spot, then a coal in the webby bark-duff. Compressing the ball of shreds, Claudia blew more boldly and finally a single blade of flame sprouted into being. She gave a cry of victory, “Bejaysus!” adding after a moment’s thought, “Scha-batta-creppy-crotty-grad-dagh-p-kon and p-kot!” The littlest twigs fed her tender flame until it grew energetic. What had seemed a substantial heap of branches disappeared in no time. Claudia raced back with an entire dead shrub, on which she stood, without mercy for her sore feet, and broke for the benefit of her prized flame. She had saved out a long silver twig. “It looks clean,” she said with a shrug. With it, Claudia sat sideways, at a professional arm’s length to the heat of the fire and held kebabs over the coals. Her experience in Brownies came back to her for the occasion. “I am perfectly well aware, in the back of my mind,” she told the interested batman, “that the cooking process serves as a distraction. But distraction is perfectly welcome. The last thing I need is to get all introspective and weepy at this point. Besides, I’m hungry. A girl has to eat, between butchering dragons, being sexually abused and flying through the air in the clutches of a man with wings, such as yourself.” She smiled firmly and pushed the thoughts away. She sliced a bite from her oversize kabob with one of the stone razors, regarding him as he dozed. It tasted about like what she imagined alligator ought to taste like, and alligator tasted a lot like rattlesnake, she guessed, which she’d heard tasted a lot like frog and everybody said that tasted like chicken. So, she shrugged and sighed as she chewed powerfully, it really tasted like coq au vin, without the vin. “Coq St. George, perhaps?” she mumbled around a tough bit of gristle. Squatting on his heels was a natural position of rest for Uvan. At the upper crook of his wings, his hands rested lightly on his temples and the long fingers, which made the tips of his wings, trailed back to meet each other on the ground behind his lean buttocks. It kept his wings free and would allow for easy launching into flight…, or once, he mused, it would have. “At least it seems to be only a sleep, this time, not unconsciousness,” Claudia breathed softly, just to hear her own voice. Under the circumstances, Claudia decided she had better keep watch, digging her nails into the skin of her thigh off and on to stay awake. If another giant reptile showed up, she did not see how they could escape, but something more than little jackdaw scavengers might be drawn to the carcass. It seemed the prudent thing, to stay alert. She gathered enough dead wood to guarantee a fire for several hours and experimented with chewing a few leaves, to see if there might be anything flavorful or nutritious to be had. None of them actually killed her; though, some sooner, some later, she spit out these experiments in herbology. She eventually lapsed into dull lethargy. The relative peace of their camp life was broken by flapping and harsh screams as a pair of the scavenger jackdaws settled out of the air onto nearby boulders. Claudia snatched up a pebble and made ready to defend her dragon jerky. Uvan woke blearily and slowly, but he eventually assumed command of the situation. “Are these the two that flapped off back when?” Claudia had taken up talking to the batman for the comfort of hearing her own voice. It was uncertain in her mind how much time had passed in this eternally broad but sunless day. However, the daws seemed interested to report something in the screeching argot they used. The batman, if Claudia was any good at all in reading his emotions, seemed either very ill or depressed at their news. Both, in all likelihood, she thought. “And what you do not find pleasing, I cannot find reassuring,” she said to his deaf back. She and the batman rose and all but staggered back to the carcass site, to find that the little eaters had done great damage to the remains. There were many more of the flapping daws now. Another argument followed, with Claudia saucily tossing a stone from hand to hand in support of her side, whatever it was. All the scavengers fled to boulder tops, from behind which they peered evilly at her. She tried not to show that she was uneasy in the role of enforcer. At home, she had not thought of herself as very assertive at all. Half a dozen of the more sated scavengers finally flew heavily toward the horizon and Claudia followed the batman back to camp. When they got there, she had suspicions that the strips of meat she had been drying on some slanted boulders were fewer than they had been before they started off for their last round of diplomatic negotiations. The first thing Uvan wished was that they would have done was to keep their parasites to themselves. Even that was too much to hope. He demanded that they fetch him one of his own people. He hoped, at least, to pass his prize on to his own posterity. It might even be that his child rode within her. Well, it was a possibility. But they were a forlorn hope, the little barbarians. They never thought past a full belly or risked anything to improve their future. Low-flying, selfish, dirty little beasts, they were and would remain, but they knew to obey. Whether any of them had ever encountered his kind or not, they knew better than to ignore Uvan’s demands. And so, undivided days passed, and he dozed in the grip of his wounds and fevers. The prize he had snatched from the air fussed about her fire with an eye on their leathery food supply. She drank and shared water with him from the little spring and busied herself with such tasks as she could find. At first, only the strange, the monstrous and the threatening were apparent in what was new. That must always be so, he acknowledged. He knew she was frightened of her new circumstances, of all that had happened...and of him. Self-interest was obvious in her efforts to care for him. But they had mated. That mattered...a great deal. They had taken the first, great dive together, which would have risen to a lifetime of partnership. That must have helped her to feel for him in his weakness. Setting all that aside as his eye followed her, he knew..., he could tell it, that a great deal of kindness dwelt within her. Whatever sort of being she might be, she was good. Uvan watched as she wove a clumsy basket from flexible twigs, in which she stored her stone blades, swaddled in some fluffy kindling and the two stones she had used to strike fire. Another twig made it a handle. This seemed a pitiful total for all her worldly goods. He would have liked to have given her more. Claudi looked up from her basketry. “Some clothing would have been nice,” she told the uncomprehending batman, “but I get discouraged at the thought of wicker-work undies.” He widened his good eye and regarded Claudia. On the other hand, basketry in the right place might just come in handy after all, if the batman overcame his wounds and decided to end any future flights with a sudden sexual exploit. Unless, of course, she were to spend the rest of her life with him as her mate, in which case they would doubtless have to establish some normal sexual relations – routine ones, anyway. And she was getting dissatisfied with calling him the batman to herself. As she stood in need of a more proper name for him, she announced, “I’m going to call you Robin. I could live with Robin.” They were close, she thought. Robin could hardly rise now, much less struggle on his stomach under the overhang to get a drink from their little pool, so she brought him all his drinks by the mouthful. It seemed right. Claudia found herself worrying quite a bit about his health. Of course, her own welfare was tied to his, but she thought less and less about that. What concerned her was that he seemed to be sicker as time went on. The great abrasions on his chest and back were oozing and his broken wing was thick with swelling. He rose from his crouch rarely, and Claudia had to help him to the area they used as a latrine. She worried about his appetite. When she wished for some soup to feed him, the knowledge came to her from some desultory reading long ago, that a basket lined with clay could be used to hold water. By dropping heated rocks in the water, it could be brought to the boil without burning the wicker. However, the local soil was a gritty dust rather than clay. “And just what the water in a mud-lined basket would resemble after dropping ashy rocks in it, I’m disinclined to think,” she told her ailing companion. “Volcano soup.” Rather than full of worry, she tried to keep her mind full of her experiments, such as chewing various leaves for possible inclusion in a pemmican preparation she once read about; so Claudia was almost startled to be interrupted after so long by the flapping arrival of a handful of jackdaws. “Robin!” She went over and touched Robin, but gently, to wake him. For a while he had trouble orienting himself to what was going on. After a couple of exchanges, he drew himself to his feet by means of a grip on her upper arm, so tight, she not quite bit back an exclamation of pain. He turned to face the direction in which all the jackdaws were looking and gave a phlegmy grunt. The two of them stood expectantly – or in Claudia’s case, apprehensively for..., well, it seemed like a long time to her. Claudia wished Robin were not supporting himself so heavily on her shoulder or she could have scooped up a handful of throwing-sized stones. Several of the daws shifted position to higher boulders and then Claudia heard rattling sounds and squealing, very much like a squeaky wheel. It approached from the distance and, before it ever came very close, stopped. There was a period of tense waiting, then the tiny sound of a twig snapping brought everyone’s heads around to the right. The landscape was piled about with stone and brush so as to obscure her sight of what was moving in their direction, though the daws, on their perches, peered intently at something. Robin stood steadily, but she felt the tension in his grip on her shoulder. Robin, she called him. Treachery or ill luck, equally bitter. While they waited for what was approaching so slowly and too fast, emotion made the blood throb in his broken wing and in the swollen wounds on his back and chest. His mouth twisted with unspeakable thought. The little tribals were to be trusted only by greater fools than he had been for half a lifetime...or by someone in desperate need. And now they brought him salvation in the form of ruin. Rather than finding his own people, they had brought wanderers of a pedestrian tribe. The little ones claimed they could find no other help in this wilderness they called home. It could be, were he stronger or looked as if he might grow stronger, they would have been less impudent to bring such news. But if he looked more certain of death, they might have done less of his bidding. A wise man understood how to take the good from compromise. Uvan knew these pedestrian wanderers or their kind...vaguely – one of the very distant kin, a people indirectly related to his own through such heavenly visitors as this one he had rescued in the high winds. Lore recounted how his people arrived in this world. It might be supposed that these had their own tale of arrival. Something there was about the world which suited them both ill. They could live, but the air did not freshen their lungs in the right way. Exactly, it was not understood, but the result was clear – they had but few young. This same was true for certain other races – those whose ancestors found their way here by ancient and arcane paths. The great virtue of her kind was that they could increase their numbers even here. All this was true for these walkers, too. Since both his and their peoples shared the beautiful ones as ancestors, it could be said that they were, in some distant way, kin. In this strange world of beings from far places, that relationship was something, although he had never thought to be such a benefactor of their race. Bitter, bitter to stare at approaching death, but more bitter still to know his own people would not share in the treasure of birth, which he had been the chief instrument in bring forth. Uvan trembled with hate and shivered with the hope that they would have the strength to protect his great prize, if he could not benefit from her himself. Without bothering to turn, he followed the sound of their approaching feet. Claudia was looking in the wrong direction after all, so the figure appeared, motionless and startling, beside one of the slanted stones she was using to dry their supply of meat. Having had only Robin to look at for such a long time, the new form seemed big. And it was wearing clothing, a light-colored robe, the first garment Claudia had seen in this desert world. Suddenly her embarrassment at standing uncovered renewed itself. She drew the arm, to which Robin was not clinging, across her breasts. Conscious of how inadequate a gesture it was, she said, “Heck!” almost inaudibly, and dropped her arm at her side again. The head of a second figure bobbed out from behind the first and then out stepped a smaller sort of being, but dressed in similar fashion, with a wrapped head-dress. What various species these two might represent, Claudia could not guess. They stood erect, and seemed wingless, but the big one was hulking, with a massive head swollen with bosses and bones, all the features of man pulled too long, top to bottom, with inappropriate-looking lumps and discolorations. Whether it was healthy or not seemed questionable. On its fingers and toes it bore blunt claws. However, the little one – which was of different sort altogether, sharper of feature and quick of movement—trotted forward to where Claudia stood with Robin. It stopped a few feet off and peered at them with green eyes out of the shadow of its loose turban. Then the big one spoke. The sound of it started within Claudia’s range, but rapidly swooped up and out of her hearing. She knew that Robin answered, without even looking; she could feel his chest contract against her shoulder and his breathing alter. The large stranger stalked toward them, covering the distance with heavy strides. It spoke to Robin but seemed interested entirely in her. Its smaller companion stepped close and took Claudia by the wrist, raising her arm before Claudia could snatch her hand free. Uvan released her shoulder and stepped away to stand, swaying weakly, without support. The large creature raised a heavy, clawed hand and slapped the back of the other into its palm. Dust rose. She had been so interested in the finality of this exchange that Claudia leaped when the smaller of the robed pair actually touched her breast with its taloned grasp. She hurried around to hide behind Robin. He was very weak, but Claudia felt safer under the protection of even his broken wing. Adroitly enough, for all the thickness of claws it bore on its long fingers, the more ponderous stranger untucked the cloth band, which made a cummerbund for its robe, and opened the brown fabric out on the ground between Robin and itself. Onto this wrinkled surface it dropped a small pouch covered in scales and, reaching again into its robes, withdrew another. Bending its height, the being dumped the contents of first one pouch, then the other onto the narrow spread of cloth. There were coins of gold and silver, and some other material in the first pouch. The second, contained crystals, grown in glittering shapes or polished round as smokey marbles. Claudia held her breath as she saw that one of the gems was carved as a small figure. From yet another inner resource, the big fellow produced a wallet of gray leather. Opened, this proved to contain zig-zag writing on heavy paper or parchment. As these were laid beside the coins and gems, the scholar in Claudia squirmed with interest. The little one stepped forward and contributed a bright bangle right off its wrist. It might have been strangely brilliant gold or just newly polished brass. The other wrist provided two similar bracelets, while a silver-looking horse-shoe came from its sleeve, probably somewhere up above the elbow, Claudia figured, if it had an elbow up there. In other circumstances she would have taken pleasure in examining the necklaces of silver and stone, which now joined this collection from hiding places under its robe. Reaching below its turban, the gnome, which Claudia now suspected of female status, began to extract studs from first one ear, then the other. The pile of jewelry was impressive. All the while, none of the four figures standing about the scene moved, except for the two disgorging their treasures, nor did they speak a word that Claudia could hear. She glanced at Robin to see what his reaction might be to this strange offering of wealth. He stood as if painted on canvas, with a breeze to make the canvas wobble. With an abrupt movement, Uvan weakly kicked at the cloth, scattering part of the hoard onto a bit of bare earth. They would have to pay a high price. This would be the last and most important trade of Uvan’s life, he knew. The reaction of the larger creature to Robin’s feeble displeasure was strange. It struck itself twice on the bulging domes of its forehead with the thumb-end of its fist, not lightly, and turning on its heel, strode away between the boulders and scrub. She could only wait to satisfy her curiosity, but the smaller of the pair stayed, so Claudia supposed the other would return at some point. In the distance, from which the strangers had so strangely appeared, she could hear the sound of hammering. Finally, after Robin had been forced to fold himself, with Claudia’s help, into his resting position, the larger creature hulked back into sight. It had a long, narrow box made of heavy wood in its arms. She could see what must be rough tool-marks on its unfinished sides. She tended to take her lead from Robin, who struggled erect again, to stand silent and impassive. Since she lacked any words the newcomers might have understood anyway, Claudia could do no more than wait, squeezing hard on her impulse to peer eagerly. The big one thumped its burden down heavily before them and brought out a short, club-shaped mallet and wooden wedge from its belt to tackle the task of removing the lid from the box. The cover had been fastened to the sides with wooden dowels and, apparently, some sort of glue. Splinters broke free and there were popping sounds as the seal was broken and pegs were torn loose or snapped off. When the lid of the box was finally tossed aside, Claudia watched as its contents were tipped out. “Oh, my!” was all she could think to say, even after so long a silence. There was pouch after purse of coin and bauble. A bar of silver large as a brick slid out of its leather covering, to be displayed on the side of the pile. “Are those actual nuggets of rough gold,” Claudia wondered aloud, though she really knew nothing about it. To her eyes it was a fabulous treasure, ransom for a king. She had read about royal ransoms, consisting of rooms full of gold and silver, chests and wagons loaded with a nations treasure to redeem the honor and freedom of some lost noble. But as far as she was concerned, what she was looking at was a hoard beyond imagining. She supposed that the gold was no more remarkable than any gold and that the jewels were not as distinguished or nearly so many as the display she had ogled in the Tower of London, back before the world fell away. “But,” she allowed quietly, “I’m impressed.” One problem had slid from consciousness only to pop up again – just why was all this being dumped at their feet in the middle of the wilderness, when food and water would have been much more welcome, not to mention a few items of clothing? The big fellow rose from emptying the last leather bag before Robin’s crouching form. He spread his sizable arms and Claudia could hear certain sounds of his speech, as he addressed Robin. In the silence which followed, the small creature doffed her green turban, revealing a hairless scalp. She tossed the loose coils of cloth onto the pile. The big one took the little one’s lead and slid out of his cracked, leather sandals, which were added in turn to the edge of the heap. Claudia could think of no words more eloquent to say that they were exhausted of wealth. Robin reached out from where he squatted and selected a horseshoe of gold, finely drawn and twisted into a flower-knot in the center. He reached up to grip Claudia’s upper arm with his still incredible strength in order to draw himself erect again. Taking her hand, in one of the most personal gestures he had yet used with her, Robin tried with his one good hand to fit the bracelet of gold onto her wrist. Claudia had to assist with her free hand. Robin’s eye proved sharp – it fit neatly. Then he made an abrupt gesture with his good wing, drawing it before him, and turned his back. “What?” Claudia said, and stood in frozen quandary until she felt a firm touch on her elbow. It was the smaller of the two individuals, who had been dumping treasure so peculiarly on the ground. “Robin!” Claudia touched him on the back, but he did not respond. The answer to one question, at least, had become clear to her – what had all this gold and silver been offered in exchange for? It was her. Claudia let herself be led; she could not see; she could not think. Her feet moved to take her where the wizened creature tugged her to go. Even though her heedless feet struck sharp stones on the ground, she felt lost in a swamp of despondency that robbed pain of any significance. When the gnome holding her by the wrist eventually stopped in its tracks, Claudia came to a halt as well. For her, a gulf wider than mere death had already separated her from her Robin. In the silence Uvan turned to gaze at the pile of valuables. He spoke to the surrounding tribals and they hurled themselves onto the carcass of wealth with clutching feet extended, snatching coins and jewels in their mouths. While they flapped and fought over the pile, he made the laborious effort to bend for the wallet of papers, which had been part of the trove. The effort worsened the throbbing of his wing and made his head swim. But bitter intensity cut through such sensations like a great light. Small steps brought him to the ashy remnant of her fire. He spilled loose documents into the center and waited with a patience he suddenly seemed to have in unending supply, while the few coals found strength to set eager flames about their edges. Finally, satisfied that the pages would not survive, he shuffled back to the much diminished pile where daws were returning from places in the cliffs for more. The silver ingot was beyond their power to fly with, so he bent again to lift it in its leather bag. Unsteady on his feet, he turned toward the vertical face of the mesa, a few yards off. Although his strength was almost gone, his better hand grasped a diagonal ridge and he set his feet to climb after it. He could use the fingers of his throbbing wing-arm to feel the way a little, and that helped. It was a slow and painful business to inch several times the length of a tall tree up the rough wall. He had at least the advantage that he lacked a fear of heights. In a long life, altitude had never been his enemy and he sought it now. If only he could budget his strength to gain enough of it, height would be his last friend. Dangling by its drawstring from his one good hand, the pursed silver ingot swung awkwardly overhead, banging and throwing its weight about. When the two departing with her were only toy-figures, appearing and disappearing as they walked across the brushy, broken land below the high wall, he found a crevice deep enough to receive the ingot. In that opening, he dropped the soft leather pouch to be a stone among stones. The little scavengers would know of its location, of course, but that was of no consequence. It would be lost to the pair who had paid the price. It would be necessary for them to place the highest possible value on what they had bought. It brought him none of the peace he had hoped for to see her taken by hands he knew would be more able to care for her safety. To know how he would be supplanted made death suddenly sweet. His quest had been duty, not gainful employment, and clearly failure in such a cause was more to be honored than success in another. The first skill to develop was always bravery. But he had never hated any creature as he hated them, nor had he ever wished anyone so fervently well. After climbing a short distance more, there came an unbroken rock face Uvan could not find a way to scale. Even yet, it was not an easy thing for his mind to return to. All along, he had attempted to absolve himself of personal guilt by recollecting all the records of the innate attraction of these wonderful monsters. Returning to the example of food being the greatest lack for his people, he had been one who would eat less, so that others might have more. He had devoted himself to strict asceticism from an early age. Paying the price for excellence willingly, he had isolated himself to gain control over his senses. There had been instructors, naturally, but they had tended to be older, very old, in many cases, and of course, all male. He had very little real contact with females of his own people in the course of his life. His mother, naturally, but even she was more an abstract memory. And when he grappled with the falling body which had broken through the barrier, he had no clear idea what it was. He could not know if it were a being who would kill him instantly or a weight too great for his wings. And certainly, he did not know whether it would be male or female or something other. There were many possibilities on all points; he had studied them. But on the instant, he could not hearken to such considerations or the moment would pass and all would be lost. So..., it had been necessary that he make himself vulnerable in order to seize the prize; he knew it was a prize. She had twisted immediately into mating position and the power of her fragrance...oh, it stirred the blood even by the memory of it. He had always hoped to be a benefactor to his people. He had not thought to become their father. But if the ascending flight had been strenuous, the journey to earth was even more so. It perfectly met the requirements for a mating flight, to make a pair receptive one to the other. His people did not mate coldly, at ease on the earth. He had been lost, lost in her embrace and the fume of her body. The faculties of mind and spirit were only smoke in the wind of her lust. Now, weakened as he was, he could not recollect the details..., only ecstasy. She used him, took control of his body and senses, as her kind did, and cast him aside, as he accepted he must be. He forgave the abruptness and brutishness of her use of him, in as much as it was his to forgive her nature. As a child, he had considered, in the way a child does, the pairing of his parents and it always seemed to him that their bond must have been long in the making, from earliest courtship to their un-thinkable mating flights. He had not been prepared, despite all his preparation, to be seized so roughly and...used..., a beast or a thing, worthy of no personal contemplation. His one-eyed vision was clouded, but he still looked blindly over his shoulder, in the direction which the three had taken. A great pang struck through him and with a cry, too high for his beautiful, cruel, lost mate to have heard, Uvan leaned back, half spread a wing, and stooped upon the earth. Claudia turned in the grip of the smaller creature, when they suddenly paused to look back; her eyes were filled with tears again and she could see almost nothing. The little thing which drew her by the arm, had a wicked, pointy face. The huge thing in a robe fell in step behind and they went between the boulders leaving behind the Inca ransom they had dumped on the ground. |
4
Everyday Poetry She had menstruated once. “By golly, you can’t take that away from a girl.” Well, there was a way, but she hoped it would not happen to her. Anyway, other than that, it would have been impossible to say how long she had been in the world. The lack of a sun rising and setting threw all such calculations to the wind. In any case, Claudia’s feet had started to toughen. And she had a bodacious tan. However, the way was full of sharp rock and thorns, so she limped. Mornings of the constant day were renewed with a small bowl of water (when available) in the desert behind the tent (if it had been erected), which (with practice and instruction) provided cleanliness. Claudi fastened her robe with a long sash, wishing for a real bra more than anything (well, almost anything), while the crone set about the business of campfire cookery with efficiency. The morning meal was usually stretchy leaves of bread made on the coals and some spicy handful of whatever vegetable they had gathered along the way. Appetite gave it a savor, which she could not recall in meals from the previous part of her life. They gradually unloaded and re-stowed the contents of the jumbled wagon as they went, and each morning they set off in slightly more organized condition, slogging through the dry, trackless landscape, world without end. Days were easy, almost boring. The boss mostly seemed to take an interest in the progress of the wagon. Apparently, they were driving a convertible; the full Conestoga canopy usually would be taken down and tucked over their gear to keep out the plentiful dust. But sometimes they assembled a hood at one end or the other of the wagon bed and Claudi or the crone would take turns riding on their jolting sacks. The boss led the tortoise-thing on its course through obstacles of stone and brush and heaved or tugged as needed, warbling high and growling low to the locomotive under its carapace. That patient creature talked back and seemed to understand a lot more than the “Gee,” and “Haw,” she would have expected of a horse. Together they would break or beat down large shrubs, which the tortoise would somehow shear off, heavy wood and all, once they came beneath its shell. Claudi, unbidden, kept a sharp, erratic watch on the skies. And after a bit, it became obvious that they sang. She could not hear the whole of their music, as at least half of it seemed to rise above her hearing. But, mixed with grunts, which accompanied the moving of large stones, and chirruped signals to the tortoise, Claudi’s ears came gradually to expect a rhythm, broken by gaps in her hearing, that passed back and forth between the hulking gargoyle, who picked their stony way through this broken, dry country and his smaller accomplice. Though the big fellow could drop his voice to buffalo depths the crone could not reach, the upper registers of their voices were out of Claudi’s ken. She could not be confident that the human protocol applied, of males taking the lower register, while females took the higher. Their voices were so flexible, with so wide a range and dynamics that they seemed to play much more varied roles than simply for the men to sing low and the women high, in the manner Claudi was used to. Sometimes the big one sang alone and seemingly for his own pleasure; at times the little one broke into a soft, rhythmic ditty, which she could not have expected anyone else to overhear. But long spells of time went into elaborate calls back and forth between the two of them. The effects were very imperfect to Claudi, whose ears caught only the lower half of what they sang, less maybe; but it was obviously music of a bizarre, even complicated sort. The business of being carted across wide desolation lent itself to song, somehow, and nothing ventured, nothing gained, Claudi believed. Contemporary music she had liked back in her old life was not very singable, she was surprised to notice; so, one day she thought of Barbara Allen, bonnie Barbara Allen. Her first timid words fell into the creaking and snapping of their passage through the desert, which now passed for silence. “He sent his man down through the town, To the place where she was dwelling...” But by the time she had come to the “O hooly, hooly rose she up,” she had found voice enough to lean gladly into the tune. Verse after verse soared out of her soul from a perching place she had in memory, until the very pity of the final quatrain sweetened her voice beyond anything Claudi had ever believed herself capable of. “O mother, mother, make my bed! O make it soft and narrow! Since my love died for me today, I’ll die for him tomorrow.” The Crone added a flourish of doo-dah’s, which served as instrumental finale to the piece and showed that she had been listening. From behind a mass of grey-green twigginess ahead, after a few moment’s pause, came a tentative echo, recognizable after all her practice listening, as Claudi’s tune and the poorly digested remains of the words, “for love of Barbara Allen.” One long, over-heated afternoon, when Claudi and Crone both opted to ride in the hooded back of the wagon, the silence oppressed Claudi, and she let words tumble out of her in a way she knew she had no right to expect the wizened little woman to understand. “This business of learning your language isn’t going too well. Even if I could hear half of what you say,” she complained, “I can’t get my voice up there to talk back. You can hear what I say, but as I’m the only one here who can speak English, you don’t hear enough to learn that.” Crone was sorting the contents of a sack, pouches and smaller bundles wrapped in cloth which she identified with a knowing squeeze or sniff. She looked up from what she was doing and sensed that Claudi was not content. Wordlessly, she reached to give Claudi’s hand a pat, which helped... some, Claudi supposed. Once they gained confidence in her not to run off or behave in otherwise unsuitable fashion, the crone ranged out into the surrounding countryside with Claudi tagging along. They plucked berries, where there were berries, and leaves where the crone thought the leaves looked good. They whacked rodent-things over the head with sticks and brought them back in the hem of a skirt (Crone’s skirt) for an evening meal. Claudi resolved not to eat that evening, (“I’m not eating that tonight, you hear?”), but she did, and scrupulously overlooked the fact that it tasted good. During the day, they would chew wads of tasty bark until they lost flavor and spit out the remains. Water was one of the most enduring mysteries. Rambling through the brush, the crone would hesitate now and again, raising her head in thoughtful fashion, and after few casts through the stones at cliff base or on a jumbled slope she would pounce with a cry of pleasure on a small spring. “It’s never much, is it?” Claudi opined. There were days at a time when not even so much liquid as that would appear. In one of these stretches of arid terrain a tall, cactus-thing grew, with thorns which were more than enough to put Claudi off the project, but the boss approached a small – eight-foot – specimen and used a casually selected stick to rub off the needles on the sides from ground-level to head-height. Stooping to make a sideways flick of his wrist, his nails slashed through the tough tissue of the plant at its base, cutting several inches deep with repeated slices. After circling the bottom with such cuts, at which he seemed very practiced and accurate, he snapped off the whole growth with a butt from his shoulder. The women descended on the felled trunk and Crone sank her own, only just-less-imposing claws in the tough, but juicy flesh. Together she and Claudi tore the cactus open lengthways to reveal a glistening sponge. Crone snatched out a grape-colored handful and offered it to Claudi to chew on, “What?” though she had to demonstrate even that. The boss kicked off a couple of partially stripped, arm-thick branches and gingerly carried them to the tortoise, whistling ahead for it to be ready for the treat. Claudi watched him unceremoniously dump the fat limbs beside the big shell, thorns and all. A fringe made of tiny, blue specks of eyes emerged from beneath the heavy shell on the near side, to assess the situation. The bug-tortoise lifted an edge of its covering over the end of the nearest thorny branch. The green length was drawn in by legs she had watched the first day and nothing remained but the thorns when they moved on. The tortoise seemed to be a perfectly adapted desert dweller, browsing in mysterious fashion on anything which passed beneath its shell. And it seemed intelligent. Boss never forced it to do anything. “You two gossip like teen-aged girls,” she commented to the un-interested air, “about the lay of the land, I suppose.” Their speech seemed a combination of the tortoise’s warbles and the boss’s more variable grunts and squeaks. He was an incredible vocalist, covering the spectrum of sound from earthquake to dog-whistle, and discussing his affairs with batmen, flying scavengers, and tortoise-bugs as he came upon them. “And you’re learning the lyrics to Bonny Barbara Allen, fer gossakes!” In spite of the resentment lingering over her status as chattel and presumptive sex object with options still un-exercised, Claudi admitted, “OK, I’m impressed.” Supper at that day’s end was leftovers of the fibrous, damp cactus tissue, lightly crushed on Crone’s flat stone from the back of the wagon, together with some of the dried berries and seeds they had been assembling as they traveled. Every evening, when the meal was prepared, Crone took a shallow wooden tray of their supper to the edge of the turtle’s shell, where it was duly received with mutual chirping. This evening, gestures with the wrist and upper lip helped assign this task to Claudi for the first time. “I can’t see any other reason for you to keep company with us, Claudi told the tortoise. “So, I wonder if maybe this food is more important than I realized?” Claudi felt surprised. She realized that she was beginning to understand not only tone of voice, but an occasional word or phrase. It made the crone sound as if she were speaking broken English. In fact, Claudi reflected, as she trudged toward the waiting tortoise, she was listening in broken English, so maybe she was learning some of their language, too. She leaned on the grounded shell, to set the wooden tray on gravel. As she could not manage the warbles with which Crone usually announced the first sitting, Claudi simply gave a shave-and-a-haircut tattoo on its surface. For luck, she whistled three notes. That always broke Crone up and made the boss wobble his head. She supposed it must be just close enough to speech to sound silly to them. First, the tiny blue dots of eyes flickered out, like a cerulean eyelash, then the huge carapace lifted and slid over the tray of spicy vegetable and bread. She was given a fluting whistle in return and all disappeared. Breakfast, when they woke, was a drier version of the same. “Whee-oo, that’s it for me!” Claudi usually called out with relief, as she would fall into the wagon every afternoon. She realized she was being given special treatment in every possible way by these two tough desert dwellers. Left on her own, she knew, she would perish in a very short time. Even asked to keep their pace, without heaving at the wagon bed and scampering through the brush to gather such sparse plenty as the land afforded, she would have been defeated. Though Crone had twisted bark fiber into twine, the twine into rope and the spiraled rope into one good sandal for her (she sort of wanted to, sort of had to learn to make the other sandal herself), Claudi’s feet had toughened to a degree she had never imagined possible. Her cracked heels reminded her of dog-pads. But she wearied on the long treks. Without a time-keeping sun, she could only guess at the length of things: “I’m sure these days are much longer than those I lived by all my life,” Claudi complained. Crone shrugged. The sandal had lead to basket making, which used the same sort of techniques and materials, at least that was so for the first basket. For one thing, Claudi was pleased to note, basketry could take place while riding in the back of the wagon; for another, she found she liked the process and enjoyed working out the patterns. Crone, as with everything, had decided opinions on how a proper basket should be shaped and which designs belonged on what sort. A decorative spiral rotating out anti-clockwise was just what she expected to see; a clockwise version was an excrescence, or so Claudi gathered, and really ought to be un-worked and done right, if a body expected further instruction or, for that matter, if she wanted to be a right-thinking person. “A thing that’s not worth doing right isn’t worth doing at all,” Claudi muttered to Crone’s bland indifference. But she persevered because..., well for several reasons, but also because she enjoyed making baskets. “Who would’ve guessed?” And every night, when they bedded down in the unvarying brightness, the unspoken issue arose of sex. Claudi was aware that she had her own needs in this regard. “I’m not immune to primary processes!” she exclaimed, when she thought nobody was listening. And if this strange world were where she was going to spend her life, she surely wanted to find love in all its forms, “Or what’s the point anyway?” But she fought away from the big boss’s all too transparent intention to use her as interspecies – well, heck, she thought, intergalactic...heck, a chronosynclasticinfundibulotrix sex object, bought and paid for. The crone, for all her housekeeping tidiness, regarded the matter as somehow settled and worthy only of ribaldry. More than once, the boss had moved to the side of the fire which Crone had selected for her pallet, after the first few bright nights of close watch over Claudi’s sleep. Beneath propriety’s tossing sheet, they snuggled in a way which Claudi, trying not to watch too obviously, had to admit probably qualified as affection. It made her lonelier. In her taxonomy of the new world, Claudi had originally classified them as very different species, based on the enormous disparity of size between Boss and Crone. Her earlier sleeps in that tent had been haunted by the fear of a bloody and painful death. But she was not so young as all that and, for the time, had not been forced. Crone was not as tall as Claudi, though made of hard rubber and braided whipcord; so, in the niceties of her estimation, Claudi tentatively set aside the risk of bloody and painful death in that particular form. She did not set it so far off that she could not quickly snatch it up, though. In fact, she was no longer seeing monsters – a troll and a gnome – stomping ahead of her across the desert and snorting in their sleep. Boss had somehow been transformed into a largish man, younger than his wife, who worked very hard every day, bringing his wagon and women across unmarked terrain. He was patient. She had seen him heave for half an hour to free the high axles of the wagon from a hang-up and then set about backing the rig by the weight of his shoulder, while the tortoise made its way to the side, so that the offending boulder could be chipped with one of its own relatives. He would stop in the middle of his over-heating labor to accept a drink or appreciate a high-pitched joke from Crone. Once, Claudi was offering him a cup of water from their little cask. This time he met her eye. Pressing of his lips was a smile, she understood. He was reluctant to show his big teeth and that gave him a serious air. Not so chatty as Crone, he took the yellow gourd from her with one hand and her hand with his other. Carefully separating out Claudi’s smallest finger, he dipped it in the water. He downed the liquid with a burlesque of savoring sweet. She had told him, “You’re such a big goof,” at the time, though afternoons, when she lay in the wagon, Claudi thought about such things. Crone was a cheerful woman of a certain age, with an earthy humor, most of the particulars of which Claudi lost in translation, but that her jokes pertained to body parts and functions came across. She was businesslike in her ways. “Shopping!” Claudi cried, when the two of them would set out with a basket to glean the evening’s meal along the way. Crone’s knowledge of the countryside was encyclopedic. It seemed no buried nest of eggs or fruiting vine hid from her. And yet, she too, could be surprised by the un-foretell-able variety of the countryside. Just one of the differences between the older woman and Claudi was that Crone never seemed unprepared to be surprised, a trait Claudi strove to acquire from her. One day, the two women had left sight and squeaky sound of the wagon behind in their rambling course through the ocean of bushes, which every few minutes surged over their heads. Crone stopped alertly, when she saw a clear area twenty feet across off to one side in the brush. “Got something?” asked Claudi. The smooth earth there was penetrated by many narrow pencil-holes, but no tracks or signs of life were present to suggest the nature of the creature inhabiting the area. A stick tossed into the ring produced nothing. So, Crone started to dig with the end of a stout branch. In a flash, they were ankle deep in thousand-legers, which bit or stung. Claudi’s arm was nearly jerked out of its socket. She had bent to swat the dark red wave of attackers off her feet. More alert to the big picture, Crone bolted, not failing to take Claudi with her by the wrist. In the retreat, they lost the basket of yellow cactus fruit, which was Claudi’s magnum opus to this point, as well as all the little attackers on their clothing and ankles. Stumbling to a halt several hundred desperate yards away, they collapsed on the ground to catch their breath and examine their burning feet. Crone made some disparaging remarks, “...piss-worms...” Claudi was beginning to catch on to the demotic. Though she rubbed at the bites, Crone’s leathery feet were just marked with angry red pinch-marks. Claudi was horrified to see her own feet and ankles bleeding freely from dozens of small, but deep, semi-circular incisions. The burning was bad enough. She screamed, not too loud. A person never knew what might be listening. The pain instantly blossomed and she thought she would revive the hitherto-un-introduced human custom of fainting. “No, no! To come after. Up! Claudi, come after, come after.” Crone spoke severely and gestured abruptly, seeing the tears in Claudi’s wide eyes. She raised her head and made a high yodel, which continued up beyond Claudi’s hearing. Apparently, Boss answered back for Crone responded several times as she led their limping way through a maze of growth. In a minute Boss crashed through a thicket and emerged without picking the small wood out of his garment. He asked sharply, “What harm, hurt...feet?” “No, I’m…, well…” Without waiting for an answer, he swept Claudi up and hurried through the bushes, less impulsively than he had come, toward the wagon. He was clearly in the grip of strong emotion as he placed her in the shady bed of the vehicle. Crone climbed in after them. Claudi was astonished to see that she was carrying the lost basket. It was empty, though. Boss examined Claudi’s bitten feet and legs without touching them. She raised them and drew the hem of her robe back to her knees so he could do so. The blood had clotted and little more was being lost, but the sheer number of bites, each producing its trickle, made a distasteful sight. Claudi decided, “I’m not going to look at it. You look.” Boss turned to Crone and said something sharp. The older woman simply turned her face to put the basket in a remote corner of the wagon. Claudi seized his upper arm. “Boss, no!” she said emphatically. “Crone is good. She saved me. She nearly jerked my arm off to get me out of there.” From her seated position, she made pantomime of someone being snatched away by the outstretched arm, along with appropriate whoops! and whoas! “I would have been eaten to pieces, if she hadn’t pulled me away!” Claudi was overcome by the sudden physical realization that this was very likely so. She shuddered. Crone appeared, gesturing gruffly with a vial of something she wanted to dab at the wound. Claudi was not certain that they knew about bacteria or infection theory. But she certainly had nothing better to suggest, so she submitted to the ministrations. “Actually, that stings!” Claudi uttered through clenched molars. Boss said something that sounded conciliatory and Crone grunted, so Claudi gave up mothering, sank back and allowed herself to be mothered. Boss spoke in a low voice to Crone, who glanced up from Claudi’s foot and was given a peculiar embrace, forehead pressed to domed forehead by a hand at the back of her neck. They held the pose briefly and both turned away, Crone to her daubing and Boss to some fiddling aside. Claudi felt truly left out and alone, in spite of the attention her feet were receiving. Boss’s inward gaze swept across her and on. Claudi’s face must have revealed something of her feelings, though she did not think anyone was paying attention. But, returning like a circling radar, Boss’s eyes fixed on hers. His voice was still very soft as he said, “And Claudi.” He leaned forward to butt her gently with the bosses of his forehead. His hand was easy at the back of her neck. She did not feel like a sex object at all. So, it was not much longer that, on waking after a restful sleep period, Claudi felt very kindly to the long limb, which lay over her and folded up between her arms. With a limber squirm, she turned to press her front the length of his sleeping form. He woke and kept waking until his every extremity was fully alert to her softness. That included the agile, searching one, in fear of which she had lived so long. Adrenaline was added to the stew of hormones simmering in her blood. Their limbs intertwined and she sought a kiss, the first, to her knowledge, this side of the great divide. She was not doomed to bloody death that day, but it did hurt her – a bit. Boss restrained his eagerness, but still he overwhelmed Claudi’s physical strength. It was almost like making love to a careful rhinoceros, she thought. Somehow the notion was endearing, though she would never have felt that way before. And she was satisfied in the end that she had given as good as she got, for the great form collapsed beside her, after a long time, and resumed snoring, while she re-spread the sheet and snuggled close. As she reached over his shoulder to pull the spread over them, Claudi caught Crone’s eye. The older woman lay impassively on her pallet. If it were possible to be asleep with the eyes open, Claudi would have believed Crone was. Crone was a superlative camp cook, with specialization in tangy, clay-pot stews, which took very little water, and could be eaten with the soft bread she baked either on the coals or a hot, stone griddle. Starting from way back, Claudi was just mastering the usual apprentice jobs of preparation and clean up. Just how did one wash a pot with no water? With gritty soil, of course, using a wad of grass or bark as a scrub pad. Simply add elbow grease and the job was good as done in any local restaurant. Crone herself used the method readily and with good result. She had a single, thick, glassy stone blade, which folded out of a flat, wooden handle at right angles. Sterilizing a boulder with a few flaps of one’s hem, or spreading a cloth on the ground, a suitable boulder being unhandy, Claudi learned that from the squatting position, the toes of one foot would hold the handle in place while food might be sliced on the erect blade. Making a gesture with the back of her wrist, Crone indicated the cutter. “Small man.” she called it. “Because it stands straight up?” Claudi asked, making the thumbs-up. Crone tucked in her chin in abrupt negative, spreading her hands down, flat. “No. Biting everything food before ready.” They burst into simultaneous gales of laughter, forcing Claudi to give up slicing green pods for fear of cutting her fingers. “Do, do it!” Crone made hurrying motions with her hand. “Food keep...” she made huge cupping gestures at her own invisible bosom. “Good to feed babies, little men, big men too.” It was actually more like, “Good, good, feed” here she pretended to rock an armful of imaginary swaddling clothes. “And big,” with a toss of the head toward the direction in which Boss had last disappeared. The older wife was a practical and earthy being. She found nothing embarrassing about such physical functions as husbands. Claudi hardly even noticed the discontinuities between their growing repertoire of gestures and pidgin speech. Crone drew the little man toward her and finished slicing pods, while Claudi rocked from side to side, wiping tears of laughter from her eyes. Crone knew when Claudi was failing and would allow her to rest. She knew when Claudi was feigning and drove her on to fetch and carry. Claudi’s hands and feet had toughened with the work and shoeless travel and her skin had darkened in the light, much to the amazement of the others, as she grew used to the rigors of desert vacationing, and to being bossed all day by Crone and Bossed nearly every other sleep by Boss. She figured she could have used her new-found leverage to work a small revolution, but she was reasonably content with her position – Beloved Second. It was based on realistic assessments. With many hand signals before they slept and transcriptions to a lower key, with whole body pantomiming, Boss sang for her what Claudi rendered into her memory as: “This stony land of sweet wells is love of the Beloved But for beauty’s need to see, we could not have eyes. Her foot on a stone centers creation over the earth, Bending the sky down forever in every direction. Her face would coax vision out of the most reluctant eye Water even, in her cupped palms, wants to see what it reflects.” Claudi really didn’t care how big the desert might be. |
5
Up-Hill All The Way “I never suspected we were looking for anything particular in all those shady places.” Claudi hollered. They had been rambling through country that gradually descended to a dry basin. At last, after many sleeps, they ran along the dusty skirts of a range of real mountains with vertical escarpments that sheltered little springs and shrubby growth in their angles. Rising walls of stone would cut out some of the ubiquitous light, changing the mix of flora and fauna to be found there. Claudi and Crone explored each canyon for bark, leaves, berries, roots, pods, water, and small game. The rare, large wildlife, usually a wary thing with flat feet and horns, was left to its solitary lifestyle, as Crone, who did most of the shopping, seemed content with very little meat. Boss was equipped dentally and by physique, to devour the lion’s share of any table setting, but he never commented unfavorably on the menu. In fact, his typical remark, when settling down to his evening platter of stew and bread was, “Ah, this smelling good a mile back.” Well, not a mile, but Claudi knew what he meant. In fact, she never had been very familiar with how far you had to walk for a mile, but she knew absolutely all there was to know about ‘pyra’. He seemed to take positive pleasure in repeating at every morning’s repast, “This making good day already.” Well, not a day, exactly. What did one call the period between sleeps when there was eternal light? Skimmarich, of course. Claudi knew what he meant. Crone’s head scarf caught on a twig and came loose around her ears when she jerked her head up at Boss’s distant call. They were nearing another day’s end, far up one of the larger draws. Boss was using a voice Claudi could not catch, but she realized something was afoot from the tension in Crone’s quickened step. As they hurried up the slope, Boss was already disappearing over the next rise in the ground, leaving Friend Tortoise to wait behind with the wagon. Claudi turned to look with Crone at the vertical wall of this canyon. So high up that she could not imagine how anyone had ever managed to perpetrate the act, there were graffiti. The four-limbed cartoon figure of a person, species undetermined, striding or dancing or shaking poo off their shoe, stood out white against the dark section of cliff-face. Claudi could see that the placement of the picture must have been dictated by the need for a dark field against which a light image could be created by scratching away the oxidized surface. The height also prevented vegetation from obscuring this ancient billboard. She stared briefly and then hustled after Crone, up the slope of the box canyon. Claudi had been in plenty of such canyons. She could have written a book. They always ended in vertical surfaces which alpinists might have found intriguing, but not a sedate family, boasting a wagon dragged by a pill-bug. Although this inlet seemed no different to Claudi, it did go on and on. After a few minutes, when Claudi had caught up with Crone, the older woman stopped and raised a hand to the small ear hidden beneath the edge of her head cloth. An hour later, Claudi heard a yodel, which could only have been good news from the front. They trudged on, but slowly now, to meet Boss as he bounced down the slope with his robe tucked up to free narrow shins. He called out, jumping from a head-high step in his haste to bring them the news. Rather than warbling the good word at the supersonic levels which he used over long distances to communicate with Crone, he saved everything but his excitement until he could stand in front of them and drop into the simple speech and hand motions Claudi knew they used just for her. “On top, hey, going right through, Crone, Claudi, this one, wagon, Friend Tortoise even. Hah! This one was knowing this mountain. Was hearing that thing told in (unpronounceable).” Crone, more grounded in particulars, asked, “High-high?” with a little flicker of the eye toward Claudi, which the subject would never have noticed at one time, not long since. “How many sleeps?” Claudi asked. “One sleep, two, hah!” Boss tossed off the answer with satisfaction. Claudi wondered at this excitement, as they had always seemed content to ramble through the brush. For her own part, it was all wonderful, and Claudi was sure that the other side of the mountains would be, too. They camped that night in what Claudi called a very strange place, though it drew hardly any comment from either of her companions. The tortoise crept with their creaking wagon slowly along the obstacle course of the canyon floor. There was one step, well above Claudi’s knee, which the active bug-legs negotiated with a nimble enough exertion, but even the high wheels of their wagon simply could not be tugged or heaved over. A ramp had to be constructed, mostly by Boss, using broken stone cleverly fitted together and two planks detached from the sides of the wagon. Serving as a windlass and coached with chirrups from those braced below, the shelled engine gripped down on the stony way and pulled on the heavy cable which attached to the wagon’s front axle. This victory left everyone pleased but fatigued. A few dozen yards' additional pulling brought them to a level place. “What do you say we call the day over and camp here?” Claudi suggested. She saw that the place had recommended itself to others before. On their right hand a small, stone building with no roof stood against the canyon wall. Boss, waved Claudi’s questions about it away vaguely with a line of commentary song: “Old things. Old things. No good anymore. Memory of loves and wonders gone before.” She was pretty sure he did not make these things up on the spot. Crone hopped up from their communal rest against the tortoise shell, to rummage out utensils for preparation of the evening meal. A high pitched trill was her signal that firewood needed gathering as well as a few other things of which she would think shortly. It was not really a word, as far as Claudi could determine. She thought that Crone spoke partly, maybe largely, in ideograms, rather than simple words – verbal symbols, like Chinese writing, with complex and dynamic meanings. They made no objection to her poking about the ruins, once Boss had stuck his head inside for a quick survey. Already she was able to protect herself from casual dangers, like the little things with stinging tails, which took ill any disturbance of the rocks under which they lived. There were no artifacts that Claudi could find. The doorway was just dressed stone, with a massive stone lintel set in mud mortar. If there had ever been a roof, no sign of it remained. Just why the three windowless rooms of the small building felt so peculiar to her was difficult to clarify in her thoughts. It was like the abandoned ruin of her own bygone days, she decided at last. The structure held some remnant of nostalgia for the cities of her lost past mixed up with the history of this mysterious new world suggested by these small ruins. Stretching her awareness to take in the universe and her place in it, Claudi sighed, “How will I ever find anything strange again?” Crone had found a small pouch among her possessions, which contained several packets of seasonings, hitherto lost. She had still not forgiven the dragon for its disruption of her household, though she never commented on the attempt it had made to eat them. Spurred by this find, she set Claudi to work at the grindstone and sent Boss out to see about the small hoppers, not really the rabbits Claudi called them. By the time he returned, dangling three, one for each of them, which he had brought down with shotgun-like handfuls of pebbles, Crone was deep into the creation of something elaborate out of dough, which she proposed to roast in the coals, if Claudi would ever get enough wood, wrist-sized, like this, she was shown. This was not going to be something a body cooked over crackling twigs. Claudi, hungry as always, scurried to find what was asked for and get back in time to learn how it was done. “I am both scullery maid and apprentice, I like to think.” Tossing down a double armload of dry brush near Crone’s fire, it was suddenly clear to her just why the ruined building had no remaining wooden parts. Then she took her small flint and relieved the hoppers of their skins and incomprehensible guts. Crone cackled in hilarious mockery when Claudi dripped gravy on her front, trying to take a bite directly out of the curried-rabbit-chilie-stew-Wellington. She made only a dry comment when the Boss did the same thing. Apparently, a real lady broke pieces of the crust set before her and used them to pick up the contents, both diminishing in proper proportion until they had disappeared tidily together, leaving no stain but an appreciative belch. Crone was their prize belcher. Claudi tried to emulate her, but without noteworthy success. The pastry creation had been so delicious, she was ready to kiss Crone’s feet, never mind bridling at her humor. She groaned about sand-scouring the wooden mixing bowls and grindstone, though. “No one would have thought you spent so much of our so-called rest period as actively as you did,” Claudi spoke to herself, observing the energetic manner with which Boss took to throwing their belongings into the back of the wagon. Even though they had not set up the tent, still there had been need for bedding and so forth. By waking time, every stopping place always looked like the Girl Scouts had held a jamboree there. He chirped the tortoise out of the wedged position between two boulders in which it liked to rest, and fed it, first, the small breakfast Crone made for them and then the big hawser. The wagon groaned up the slope only as long as they all groaned after it. At sticking places, Claudi found that her arms were little help, but by placing her back to the tailgate and using her legs to heave, she could make an appreciable contribution. Back in the old world, she had been ambulatory without assistance, but not much more. Now she was energetically muscling Conestoga wagons over the passes without even real shoes or a bonnet. When she lay with closed eyes, before and after sleep, she often thought about her deceased parents. She was confident they would have been proud of her in her present life. Astonished, yes, but proud. She was in love, after all. Pretty soon Claudi gave up running ahead of the wagon, to see what came next. She knew now what was coming next and could barely drag her own body to the place where the wagon would need help to make a sharp turn or to rise over a step. At a place where the road bed, if it could be thus flattered, was tilted sideways too sharply for the wagon to pass without upsetting, Boss had had taken off his robe and folded it as a pad between his back and the sharp, bottom edge of the wagon-bed. He placed the small of his back against the lower side, between front and rear wheels, and waved both Crone and Claudi away when they hurried to join him. “Too much being happy. All-all for this one,” he grunted, as the tortoise braced the edge of its shell against projecting rock and prepared to draw on the cable. Claudi hesitated, undecided, but Crone grasped her arm and drew her back uphill, silently. Claudi took in the look of concern on the older woman’s face. Boss called out to the tortoise and sidled along as weight was added to his step, and the wagon’s tilt increased to the point where he could brace his hands, first against the fluted muscle of his upper thighs, then on his high, trembling knees. No veins showed, but the armoring plates of his skin took on incredibly sharp definition over the bulging muscles of his calves and thighs. His stomach took on a complicated pattern of ripple and strain as he was forced to lean farther and farther forward under the loaded caravan. The wagon straightened suddenly, as the stony way twisted flat again beneath it. Crone and Claudi were to either side of Boss, to help support him by his shoulders. He staggered and grunted, as they let him settle to the ground. “Stones under wheels,” he gasped. “Put, put, this one cannot be doing again.” “You’ll sleep tonight,” Claudi told him. Boss rolled his eyes and groaned, “No, no rest. Claudi making to die tired.” He sang with short breath two lines of a melody Claudi thought she would always remember. “Claudi swears this binding oath-- Not to torment this one’s carcass more.” Even the mighty tortoise was fatigued with laboring toward the top of the pass. Boss, who had gone ahead the day before, said it was not far. Claudi felt strong, but next to Boss and Crone, she was a child. Still, Claudi doubted that even they could travel much longer without a really substantial rest, one worth pitching the tent for. They were on their feet again, while she could still feel her pulses pounding. Not only were they physically tough, but they spared themselves very little. It was a mental attitude which Claudi was not even sure she wanted to learn. However, at the moment it was pretend to have energy or be left behind, so she staggered to her sore feet and went to move a stone. On the canyon’s rough wall above them, she saw another inscrutable, pale figure scraped into the rock. |