Catch a falling star, p.10
Catch a Falling Star, page 10
Rapidly Creohan recounted how Hoo and Arrheeharr and their kinfolk kept the herds of meat, and how the beasts were daily dispatched along the various trails out of the valley. He had a near escape from exposing his earlier lie about not coming from a city, but covered himself in time by going on to the nub of his argument. Perhaps the lights too had a breeding-ground, he proposed, and flocks of them set out each night to cities on both sides of this great ocean. Then only let that breeding-ground be found, and the brown warriors might trail a flock bound in a new direction, with—who could say?-new cities at the end of the journey.
“You t’ink da lights com from da star you go to,” the lord challenged. “You try to make use of me to carry you on da way!”
Creohan did not bother to try and correct that impression. He countered, “If you know you can gain nothing by roaming up and down this coast, you know you can lose nothing by searching elsewhere. True or false?”
A long mental struggle was clearly reflected on the lord’s face: hatred of accepting even a suggestion from the bigger people he had captured being slowly overcome by the tempting prospect of becoming his race’s first actual king in a dozen generations.
At last, with a glare so murderous it entirely contradicted the words it accompanied, he forced out, “True! As you propose, derefore, we’ll track da lights.”
XV
It had been an anxious moment for Creohan, wondering whether his suggestion would appeal enough to the lord’s ambitions to allow him to compromise with his distrust of people larger than himself. Greed and frustration must have turned the scale; he could not hope that he and Hoo had gained any respect by overcoming thirteen warriors. And the anxiety was obviously, then, not over. They would have to be continually on guard against treachery. But at least they had been saved long and fruitless searching up and down the land they were now leaving.
But there was no chance to talk to his companions and find out if they agreed with what he was trying to do. The lord was keeping too wary an eye on them.
The boats rocked and staggered through the surf where the river encountered the sea. Dawn shone bright across a vast and featureless expanse of water. The lord cupped his hands around his mouth and gave orders that the fleet should follow the line the lights had taken, and no one questioned his decision.
Ignoring his passengers, the lord then lay down on the after thwart, curling himself like a baby, and went to sleep. Cramped, uncomfortable, but willing, the three travellers did the same in the bottom of the boat.
When they awoke, they were out of sight of land, and they did not see a shore again for fourteen days.
The matter-of-factness with which these people undertook journeys beside which Glyre’s vaunted trip to his deserted islands never ceased to amaze Creohan. They treated their boats as home; they slept, ate and drank without leaving their posts, their paddles across their knees. When there was need of food a group of men would be told off to dive overboard and search the near waters, harpoons in hand. Seldom did they fail to return with great fishes, or clams, or polypods, or at the worst with clumps of juicy free-floating algae that-once the travellers had got over the qualms they felt at eating something which was still living when they got it to their mouths—drove hunger away swiftly.
On the second day, when the fleet had hove to for just such a fishing expedition, Chalyth went to join the swimmers, which Creohan thought was a risky venture in view of the lord’s continuing mistrust of them. But she gained the admiration of all by returning with a fish bigger than two of the little men could have handled between them. Creohan watched with no little envy, for he felt lonely and lost in this waste of sea.
Worse yet, they had still had no chance to talk together openly, for they were confined to the space nearest the stern of the boat, at arm’s length from the lord.
Under cover of the to-do which accompanied Chalyth’s return with her prize, however, he seized his chance and exchanged a few words with Hoo. The dark man had kept quite silent since they came aboard, as though all purpose in life had been drained from him by the memory of the dead city to which so many of his ancestors had sweated to send useless food.
“Hoo!” Creohan whispered. “What think you of these people?”
Hoo raised his bushy eyebrows and spat into the sea.
“Agreed. Yet may they not redeem their deeds of savagery and violence if they convey us across the ocean safely? They have already saved us much futile time and trouble.”
“Saved you from it,” Hoo corrected dispassionately. “I have no stomach for your vaunted mission to divert a star. What I would do, were I free, is no more than return home and tell my brothers how stupid we have been all our lives. And one thing more! When we do cross the ocean, and supposing we do find other cities on the shore yonder, how will you be able to quiet your conscience when these murderous little men set about sacking them—hey?”
Creohan could not answer, and Hoo, giving him a final glance of scorn, sank back into his sullen silence.
Shortly Chalyth came back on board, laughing and merry, and having wrung out her long hair sat naked on the gunwale to dry herself in the warm breeze. “Creohan!” she called to him. “You must learn to swim and come with us—it’s wonderful down here! It’s so different from the shallow waters I have known before.”
Abruptly realising that she was failing to communicate her excitement to him, she broke off and demanded what was wrong, to make his expression so downcast. Creohan briefly summarised the remarks Hoo had made, but had no chance to hear her views before the lord, who had been supervising the fishing, resumed his place and shouted for the paddlers to re-commence their rhythmic driving.
After that it became habitual for Chalyth to join the fishers, and while the lord’s scowl grew deeper his subordinates accepted her as a leader. It appeared to Creohan that only the lord himself suffered from true pathological jealousy of the taller captives, because they symbolised the ill chance which stood between him and the assumption of full kingship; his boat-captains imitated him, but the common warriors were willing enough to recognise talent where they found it, and Chalyth certainly possessed one which they admired. She could swim further away from the boats without tiring, dive deeper, and drag back more massive prey. Daily she tended to stay longer overside, straining the lord’s patience to its utmost, until the morning came when he threatened to paddle away without her if she ever did the same again. Overly contrite, she yet hid a grin as she turned away, and only Hoo and Creohan saw the look on her face.
Hoo, as ever, remained silent, but Creohan was worried. The charge Hoo had levelled against him was a well-founded one, and indeed if they discovered new cities on the far side of the ocean and the brown warriors sacked them it would be a terrible burden on their consciences. Over and over he cudgelled his brains for a solution which did not involve the risk of angering the lord and having them tossed overboard for their temerity. The best they could hope for was to stay alive and improvise when the moment came, and if Chalyth provoked an outburst of the lord’s fury that indispensable precondition would be ruled out.
Daily the coveys of lights flitted overhead, confirming that the boats were maintaining the proper course, and time slipped away. The lord grew more and more tense, though he was at pains to hide the fact from his men, and Creohan caught many suspicious glances thrown at him. He was relieved beyond measure when at last his deductions were proved right; two or three hours past dawn on the fifteenth day a number of lights in their drab daytime garb were seen to strike downwards to a knob of an island looming on the very horizon.
Great excitement filled the boats; even Hoo roused from his apathy to look as they pulled in towards a rounded, greenery-fledged beach beyond which lights that must have numbered in the millions crowded and clustered, flying about, perching, sometimes even doing something Creohan had never realised they did before-squawking.
“You right dis far,” said the lord from his seat in the stern. “I ’ope much you right all da way!”
“From here we only have to follow the line of flight of any lights that strike out across the sea in the opposite direction,” Creohan pointed out, and was uncomfortably aware of Hoo’s bitter eyes on him again.
They put into a sheltered cove, and groups of armed warriors disappeared to scout the island, returning with two items of information: that the island was devoid of human beings, and that the lights smelled like good eating. Accordingly the boats were beached, a camp made, and orders given that the party was to remain until they had determined at what times and in what directions lights did depart for the far coast.
Even the lord himself was so delighted by this proof that lands unknown to his people did in fact exist that surveillance of the travellers was greatly relaxed. Chalyth at once disappeared, and was seen thereafter at intervals bobbing among the rocks which studded the sea not far from the beach. Hoo did as Creohan had expected and walked moodily off by himself, leaving him nothing better to do with his time than to find out something about the way of life of the strange creatures which bred here.
And yet he learned little that he might not have guessed from his home city. The lights nested on high ledges, from which families of young dived hesitantly and tried their as-yet unilluminated wings. They got their food by dropping hard-shelled molluscs from a height on to the rocks, or seized small fish unwary enough to break the surface. But the pattern of their adult behaviour—the reason for their precisely timed flights to cities which now had small use for their illumination—remained an enigma, testifying perhaps to Molichant’s dictum about the skills of the past being lost forever. Certainly the intervention of man had brought about their instinctive actions; equally certainly the process had been set in train so long ago that scarcely even guesses could now be made as to the means.
Weary, he returned at the end of the day to the beach where the party had encamped, and accepted a portion of roasted light for his meal. As the scouts had suspected, their flesh was delicious. There was no sign of Chalyth, and he grew worried. He sat up long after he would willingly have been sleeping like his companions, until she stole up from the beach with a little of the phosphorescence of the waves still clinging to her hair.
“Where have you been?” Creohan demanded. “I’ve been worrying about you.”
“I’ve been exploring, of course,” Chalyth returned with an air of perfect casualness. “You know how much I’m always fascinated by the sea.”
“At a time like this you can—” Creohan’s voice, he realised, was too loud, and with a cautious glance around to see whether he had awakened any of the brown warriors, he dropped it to a whisper.
“At a time like this you can indulge a hobby?” he reproved. “Chalyth, don’t you understand that Hoo is absolutely right, and through my bumbling I may well be infecting the coast of some other mainland with the same plague which devastated so many cities we’ve left behind?”
The thought was actively preying on his mind now, and he had passed the whole period of waiting for Chalyth in reviewing what had been done at their first encounter with the little brown men, seeking and failing to find an alternative course of action which would have secured both their own survival and immunity from attack for the hypothetical cities they were bound for.
“What good does it do to talk about such matters?” Chalyth shrugged. “But for the chance of meeting these people, we’d have spent months or years wandering about from place to place, finding nothing but the tokens of their nasty little conquests. For themselves, they’re pleasant enough, but the ambition which drives their lord stinks in my nostrils.”
“Of course!” Creohan agreed. “So how can you be unconcerned about the prospect of their falling on some miserable new victims the other side of the sea?”
“Perhaps because as I once said to you before, I feel Mother Earth is on our side, our cause being good.”
That seemed like such an irrational attitude Creohan was on the verge of exploding into anger. But Chalyth laid a warning finger across her lips and nodded her head sideways, and he saw that one of the camp guards was approaching, almost within earshot.
That was the last chance they had to talk together before, at daybreak, the boats were again launched into the surf on the trail of the lights which, as Creohan had predicted, regularly departed towards the further shore.
Only one thing seemed different about this leg of the journey, apart from his mood of depression having worsened. The sea was as wide, the rhythm of the paddlers only slightly less regular despite the staleness which overcame them progressively as day succeeded day, and the stoppages for fishing were as frequent. The thing that had changed was that, whenever he looked astern, he fancied he saw something in the water, following them, in shape like a blunt brown rock and in pace more than the equal of the boats. But no one reported anything peculiar on returning from a fishing expedition, and in the end he put it down as illusion caused by long staring into the bright clear water.
XVI
“We are very near to land now,” whispered Chalyth, as she scrambled aboard after another plunge with the fishers on the twelfth day of their voyage’s second stage and reclaimed her tattered clothes from the thwart.
“How do you know?” countered Creohan. “Are we in shallow water?”
“Not that I know of.” Chalyth gathered a bunch of her dark hair and twisted the water out of it.
“Then what?” Creohan snapped. Ever since they left the island of the lights he had been trying to extract from her the reason for her apparently groundless optimism, or else to make her understand why he himself was so dismayed at the events he feared he had set in train. Maddeningly, she had prevaricated until he was half-convinced she simply did not appreciate the seriousness of loosing the brown warriors on an unsuspecting city. Yet she was by no means lacking in imagination. The whole problem amounted to a paradox which totally defeated him.
But before he could utter another word, Hoo spoke up from near at hand. “You have little time left to still your conscience, then!” he said.
Chalyth gave him a look of wide-eyed innocence. “What’s supposed to affect Creohan’s conscience?” she inquired. “You know very well!” snapped Hoo.
“Oh, I’ve already found a solution to that” Chalyth said, as though this instant realising what was on his mind, and Wild hope blazed up in Creohan on hearing her claim. But—as so often during the voyage—the lord resumed his post a moment later and he had no chance to question her more closely.
All the rest of the day the mystery plagued him, until the sun set and they were once more overtaken by a covey of lights, which this time began to circle in their familiar wheeling swoops before they vanished over the horizon. As the night darkened so they themselves grew brighter.
The sight brought the lord to his feet, careless of his unstable balance. “Dere is a city!” he shouted. “Dere is da new city for us to attack!”
A cheer of delight went up from all the boats, and the paddlers began to put their backs into the work anew. The lord sat down again and studied his passengers quizzically. His fingers began to caress the haft of his” favourite axe.
Creohan felt a pang of fear: suppose he did not even intend to give them the chance of reaching shore alive? Chalyth, however, appeared unworried, and even put a provocative question to the lord.
“Is it not dangerous to approach a strange shore at twilight? It may become too dark to call warning of sunken rocks.”
“My men are too skilled to strike rocks even in darkness,” said the lord carelessly. “Well, biggest people, I t’ink you uv paid price of thirteen warriors you cost me. We uv no more need of you.”
“So,” said Hoo quietly, and rose to his feet. Creohan’s heart sank; the lord’s intention could be only too plainly read in his sneer of triumph. But Chalyth was as calm as before, and her only reaction was to nudge both her companions and whisper in a voice too low for the lord to hear.
“Now you’re going to have to learn to swim!”
It would be a miracle if the lord let them go overboard in a state to swim, even if they could, Creohan felt. But an instant later, Chalyth had darted forward and snatched at one of the axes from the stern thwart—not to use, but to toss over the side, where it splashed noisily.
“Now!” she exclaimed, and herself took a tidy header into the sea.
The lord rose, red with fury; the paddlers shipped their blades and prepared to seize the remaining travellers—and the boat gave a sickening shudder as two of its boards were stove in amidships. A rush of water flooded around their feet, and the lord’s rage gave way to panic.
Hoo was quicker to react than Creohan. He grabbed him bodily and tipped him over the side after Chalyth, following himself. Before the astonished brown men had got over their shock, Chalyth had swum up to them, her body glimmering whitely under the surface.
Spluttering, and not a little frightened, for he was able to do little more than keep himself from sinking by his small skill in swimming, Creohan nonetheless retained sufficient self-control to understand when she instructed them to slip out of their clothes for greater freedom of movement and follow her. Another of the boats was capsizing now, and apparently each in turn was being attacked by some unseen agency, which either holed it or spilled its occupants into the sea.
They had barely had time to digest that fantastic fact when a face loomed up ahead of them. It was a giant face, as broad across as a man’s chest, and had a kind of humour about it. Creohan noticed at once that it was set on just such a brown, rock-like body as he had seen trailing the boats.
Chalyth swam up to the creature, gesturing and uttering words of praise; it wriggled as though from modesty, and Creohan almost expected to see it blush. She beckoned them, and under her guidance they took hold of the thing’s muscular flippers, one on either side and she at the tail. As soon as they had a secure grasp, the animal began to swim by undulating its body, and despite the drag of its passengers it very rapidly left the little brown men behind.
