Catch a falling star, p.5
Catch a Falling Star, page 5
“But you don’t understand,” the girl said miserably. “I ache for him with every cell of my body, and yet my mind is chained to my home. I could not go unless he dragged me, and because he loved me he would not do that… But—I” Her face suddenly brightened.
“You! You’re strangers! You could force me to go! You could drive me onwards if I grew faint-hearted out of sight of my home! I do not want to sit here singing alone until I die, but without help I can do nothing else.”
“Change your blossoms for warm clothing, then, and put strong shoes on your feet,” Creohan answered. “We will not drag you, for that would slow us down, but until your heart fails again you may use our company for a crutch.”
“So be it,” said the girl in subdued tones, and went into her house to make ready.
“Was that wise?” said Chalyth in a low voice when she was gone, and Creohan shrugged.
“Since this whole enterprise is the very height of folly, what difference can one more piece of unwisdom make?”
The girl was long in coming back, so that Creohan and Chalyth began to suspect she had reconsidered her hasty decision. But when she did appear, she was clad in plain grey with shoes on her pretty feet; in her leather belt was thrust a knife, over her shoulder was slung a bag containing food, and from a baldric at her side there depended a little harp.
“Just so did my man set out,” she said as she came near. “Except that he carried a flute instead of a harp. I am called Madal. And you?”
They told her, Creohan thinking that she must have more sense than he had given her credit for. Then they gave a last lingering glance back towards the city, though Madal’s eyes went no further than her home.
“Onward,” said Creohan, and they began to walk.
The sun passed the zenith and began to slide towards setting. At first they went on level turf; then they came to a stretch where the ground was rutted, in a pass between two hills, and after looking at the dints in the earth Creohan decided it must be by this route that the meat came nightly to the city. They picked their way delicately over the upturned dirt, agreeing to follow the tracks because they at least led somewhere.
Out of the corner of his eye Creohan noticed that Madal kept looking back, but he resolutely refused to copy her, even to see whether they were yet out of sight of her yellow home. Her face was set, and her mouth was frozen into a tight narrow line, but keeping level with her companions she plodded on.
The sun set and they were still following the track of the meat. By then Chalyth, the least burdened and most vigorous of the three of them, was leading the way at a cautious speed, a stick extended before her with which she thrust at soft-seeming patches of ground to warn the others of deep mud. Suddenly she halted and cried out.
“Listen!”
Far in the distance they could make out the crazy laughter of the meat as it wended its way towards a rendezvous with Death. Creohan looked about them. The light was dim and it was hard to make out details.
“We had best leave the track,” he suggested. “I have never confronted a herd of meat on the move, but I imagine they would give us scant attention. That way looks easiest, towards the left.”
They ran from the path up a steep slope, and perched on its grassy crown to wait for the meat to pass. The shrieking mirth grew louder and louder while the dusk deepened, until at length the leaders of the herd shambled into sight, shaggy and horrid in the gloom. Twice as high as a man, low-browed and lank-limbed, their vast padding feet squelching and plopping in the wet soil churned up by their passage, they made the very hills resound with the clamour of their manic delight: hahaaa, hahaaa… Creohan shuddered and had to cover his ears against the noise.
“I have never seen our meat alive before,” said Chalyth as the silence returned. “How like those beings are to men-two arms, two legs, an upright human stance! My stomach sours to think of them. Shall I ever be able to eat their flesh again?”
But Madal reacted differently. Her gaze fixed on the last point at which the meat had been in sight, she whispered, “They are going to our city! And in the morning when my neighbour calls for me to go together and fetch our bits of meat, he’ll find my house empty and no clue to where I’ve gone. Tonight I shall lie out under the sky, when waiting there is the couch on which I’ve slept these ten years—alone of late, but not wishing it were so …”
Chalyth rounded on her. “Follow those beasts, then! These ten years that you have lain on your soft couch, I’ve slept under the sky, though I could have had my choice of a hundred beds. And I can go with a stranger on a grand vain quest, while you could not even tag at the heels of the man you claimed to love. Tag at their heels, then—those brutish unthinking clods treading the path their kind have trodden for centuries. We would rather make our own path, Creohan and I.”
“You shame me,” said Madal after a pause. “Even so did Vence shame me when he left and I could not follow. I do not like to be shamed. So be it—we sleep under the sky. Here? Or shall we trudge on until we drop with weariness?”
“No, here, I think,” said Creohan, and sought a level place to stretch out upon. Chalyth broke branches from a low dry bush and built a fire, and they sat around it eating frugally of the provisions they carried, for they could not guess how long they must make their small store last.
Afterwards Madal took her harp and sang a sad slow song. She was still singing when Creohan and Chalyth fell asleep, and the melody rang through their dreams as though it were echoing from side to side of their skulls in the way the laughter of the herd of meat had rung between the hills.
The next morning they went on their way in silence, finding that they had almost reached the hightest point of the area. For it was as yet well before noon when they breasted a rise—still following the track of the meat, which ran quite straight—and looked out over a plain rich with ripe yellow grasses.
It stretched as far as their eyes could see, and Chalyth murmured, “Now I can tell how Glyre felt when he launched out into the trackless ocean!”
This is not trackless,” said Creohan, and led the way scrambling down the abruptly sloping path. Thorny shrubs bordered it at this point, and caught on the sharp prickles were patches big as a man’s palm torn from the grey-furred hide of the meat-creatures. Bloody stains testified to the eagerness with which they forced a way among the savage spikes. Creohan, half the size of one of those brutes, could himself barely thread his way between the clawing branches without being scratched; the giant beasts, struggling up the path two and three abreast in their haste, must be cruelly gashed by them, yet always and always they laughed…
Then the grasses were towering huge about them, their stems thick as his fingers. “Now we are compelled to follow the track,” he muttered. “Otherwise we shall be lost. These stalks come higher than my head.”
“That,” Madal said tartly, “supposes that were not lost anyway, and that the track leads somewhere.”
“It must go, at least, to the place where the meat-creatures breed,” Creohan pointed out. “And it’s improbable that ours is the only city they supply with food. So there will be another track beyond the breeding-grounds, maybe several. Let’s go ahead as quickly as we can.”
Madal sighed, but settled her bag more comfortably on her shoulder and took the; lead, thrumming a faint walking rhythm from the strings of her harp as though to lend herself courage. Falling into step behind her, Chalyth spoke to Creohan in a low voice.
“You saw the threatening star again last night?”
Creohan nodded. “Here where there are no lights flying we shall see it clearly every night.”
“It must surely be my fancy—yet it seemed brighter already!”
To that he made no reply.
The trail wandered and twisted among the high grass. It was useless trying to strike; away from it in a straight line, for the ground was so level it offered no points of vantage. Wearying, they walked until the sunlight no longer reached the ground between the ripe yellow vegetable walls enclosing them, and at that time they again heard the crazy laughter of approaching meat.
“Of course, the nearer we get to their breeding-ground the earlier in the day we shall encounter them,” Creohan reasoned, as they rounded a bend in the track.
Beyond, the way abruptly straightened for a hundred and fifty paces, and rounding another curve at the far end of the straight stretch they saw the herd confronting them. Somehow by daylight the beasts looked both more and less like men, and they laughed—how they laughed! A blind panic seized Madal, and she turned incontinently and ran.
“Get off the track, you fool!” shouted Creohan. Without waiting to see if she complied, he seized Chalyth by the arm and parted the grass to let them through. Hidden, they panted out of sight as the herd tramped by, the thick stems springing back to the vertical and concealing them.
After the sound of the laughter faded Creohan made to return to the track, but Chalyth begged him to wait for fear there might be laggards bringing up the rear of the herd. He consented worriedly, wondering whether Madal had fled blindly down the path or whether she had managed to hide among the grass as they had done. Their answer came soon.
“Creohan! Chalyth!” It was a high frightened call. Tm lost! I can’t find my way back to the track!”
They exchanged alarmed glances. “You cannot be far off,” Creohan shouted back. “We hear you clearly. Can you not see the stems you bent when you left the path?”
Chalyth touched his arm and silently indicated the grass they themselves had pushed aside. Except where their weight still bowed it, it revealed no trace of their passage.
“Stay where you are, Madal!” Creohan cried again when he realised the truth. “Call out every now and then, and we will head towards you.”
“She appears to be in that direction,” Chalyth said, pointing. “Maybe she turned off the track on the other side from us, in which case we’ll stumble across it as we go.”
“Agreed,” said Creohan, and forged his way ahead.
But the tough stems kept turning them imperceptibly aside from their course. Terror increased in Madal’s frantic calls, and when they at last heard her very close and thrust aside the grass and saw her, she was crouched on her knees with her face buried in her hands. When she looked up her cheeks were wet with tears.
“Where is the trail?” she moaned. “Where can it have gone?”
“We did not cross it while we were finding you,” Chalyth admitted.
“Then we are lost I” Madal wept. “We shall starve to death among these accursed plants!”
“Nonsense,” said Creohan. “At least, the next time some meat passes, we shall hear them and head in their direction.”
“I have a faster trick than that,” Chalyth declared. “Bow your back, Creohan, and I will stand on it and look about.”
Amazed he had not thought of that himself, he bent, and she scrambled up nimbly. “Well,” Madal demanded, “do you see the trail?”
“I see something of greater interest,” Chalyth replied. “I see smoke, rising from someone’s fire!”
“You are certain?” Creohan was so startled he all but straightened and sent her flying.
“It’s definitely smoke, and I doubt that the meat-creatures would build fires. These stems would catch light easily, too—were it a wild fire we’d already be trapped. It must be burning in a cleared space, and supervised.”
VIII
Still snuffling, Madal followed them as they forced a way among the high tough grass, pausing every now and then to let Chalyth climb up again and take a fresh bearing. Shortly, however, they could be in doubt of their goal no longer, for the distinct pungent reek of smoke came to them, accompanied by a faint noise. Finally they emerged into a trampled clearing twenty-odd paces wide, and stared in amazement to see a sort of crude shelter made of plaited grass-stems, propped up with what at first appeared to be white branches, but proved on closer examination to be long dry bones.
Now it was not only the odour of smoke they discerned in the air. Underlying it was another, less palatable smell, compounded of spilt blood and singeing hair. The source of the buzzing became obvious. One of the meat-creatures, gutted and flayed, lay lacking an arm at the far edge of the cleared area, and the exposed flesh was crawling with noisy flies.
The limb itself was scorching above the fire, on a sort of trivet likewise made of bones—a material of which there was no shortage here, for a knee-high stack of them, many still bearing shreds of flesh through which maggots burrowed, lay beside the shelter. A man sat watching the meat cook with such concentration that he hardly moved his shaggy head to acknowledge the newcomers’ intrusion on his solitude. Irresolute, Creohan walked close to him and spoke.
“Friend, do you know where the path leads to that runs across this plain?”
The man’s hair and beard were so tangled together that his head seemed to be a ball of whiskers. His body was filthy, and if he had ever owned clothes they had long ago worn to shreds. Now he opened his eyes wide and looked at Creohan, who started, for one of those eyes was blue and the other brown.
“No path goes anywhere across this plain,” the man said rustily, and went back to staring at his food. Creohan glanced at Madal, but it was plain she had not recognized this unclean wretch. She was wandering about with a look of mingled fascination and repugnance, peering into the shelter, examining the heap of bones. Hoping that the shock would not overwhelm her, he spoke harshly.
“So this is the sorry end of your bold journey, Vence!”
The man leapt to his feet. In the same instant Madal whirled, stared, let out a sighing gasp and might have fallen had not Chalyth stepped hastily to her side and caught her arm before echoing Creohan’s last word incredulously.
“Vence? You mean this thing is Madal’s lost lover?”
“Well?” Creohan pressed the stranger. “Are you not truly he?”
Wilting under the burning stare, the man gave a sullen nod. “Yes, that’s what I was called. And there is Madal with you yonder. I had—forgotten her name—until your woman spoke of it.”
“What happened to you?” Creohan demanded. “What are you doing here? How do you live? And why?”
“Live?” said Vence sourly. “This is not living, this is mere existence. The days melt together like coloured wax until they blend in a grey featureless nothingness.” He gestured at the roasting meat as though to excuse himself for failure. “I do have food, though. Should I-ah-give you some?”
“But why are you here alone?” Creohan cried, ignoring the repulsive offer. “Why did you end your trip so close to home?”
“Close? Close? I don’t know if you’re a liar or a fool, or the spawn which the sun has finally bred in my brain! I was driven off the pathway by a herd of meat, and I tramped this horrible plain for thirty days, up and down and around. For thirty long dreadful days I know I went forward, until by chance I stumbled once more across a track used by the meat-creatures and realised I must remain close to it or starve. At least I’ve stayed alive.” Once more he pointed to the meat. “Look—smell! Is it not fresh and good?”
Creohan tried to keep his eyes from wandering to the flies which swarmed on the new-dead carcase. He said, “And you’re content to sit here, on this one spot you’ve so befouled? Do you no longer want anything else of life?”
Vence shrugged and squatted on his haunches again, his dour self-possession seeming to return. “What else did I ever have from life except sitting in one place the whole day long?”
“But—but how do you overcome the meat you kill? You’re surely not strong enough to drag a brute like that with your bare hands all the way from …”
By the way of answer Vence tugged up the hilt of a knife, whose blade he had buried in the dirt at his feet to rub off the blood.
“That’s a puny weapon,” Creohan said. Vence’s upper lip curled in a derisory grin as he sank the knife back into the ground.
“Ah, the beasts are near enough human in some ways, and you can use a little guile with them. Fair words and certain acts will bring them willingly. Look there, look close. You’ll see my prize is female.” He seemed to take a relish in boasting of his degradation. “All my prizes are female. And they can be made to serve a man’s desires. Isn’t that all one ever needs a female for?”
What happened next occurred so fast that Creohan, taken aback, could not follow it while it was going on, but had to reconstruct it afterwards. A frantic movement, a wild flailing of something long and white, a cracking noise, a scream—and there was Madal, face transfigured with fury, standing over the whimpering body of her former lover and shaking at him the long thigh-bone she had brought slamming like a hammer against the side of his head.
“You brute! You beast! You less than animal thing!” she screeched. “Was that all you ever found to like in me, who loved you and waited on you and wept to see you leave? I hate you, hate you, hate you, do you hear?”
She began to belabour him frantically with the heavy bone. On one hand and two knees he tried to scuttle sideways and reach his knife, with the other hand vainly trying to fend off the blows she rained on him: shoulder, back, scalp, thigh, each with the full violence of her rage-behind the impact. Creohan and Chalyth tried to restrain her, but she bared her teeth at them and threatened to strike them also if they interfered.
“Do I not owe him this for stealing ten precious years of my life?” she forced out. “The dirty liar! To think he could have used me like—like one of those!” She jabbed the bone through the air in the direction of the flayed carcase. Vence whimpered aloud.
But he must have been less dazed than he appeared, for in the next moment he had hurled himself sideways, rolling, his mouth opening to bite at Madal’s calf. An early blow, however, had injured it—just how, the matted tangle of his beard prevented Creohan from seeing—and when he moved the muscles of his jaw the pain was so great he howled, forgot his weak attempt at retaliation, and sat there rocking back and forth and wringing his hands.
