Catch a falling star, p.7
Catch a Falling Star, page 7
The effect of these few words on the skin-clad man was quite astonishing. Abruptly he let fall his bow, hid his face in his hands, and wept uncontrollably.
Forgetful of her wounded feet, Madal looked about for a way to reach the outcrop on which the man stood. Finding no path, she seized the brink of the rock and swung herself up by main force.
“What ails you, my poor fellow?” she said tenderly. “What makes you cry?”
The man snuffled like a huge baby, so that his reply emerged in fits and starts punctuated by racking gasps of air.
“You—you come from a city—and you have no meat-it can all have—only one meaning! We have failed! My brothers and I have failed!”
“How, failed?” Madal pressed him, stroking his thick unkempt hair with gentle hands.
Recovering himself, the man spoke more normally, but still shielded his face as though ashamed to confront them openly.
“We devote our lives to watching over our herds, and we send them out in due time to all the various cities, as our fathers taught us and their fathers taught them and so to the beginning of time. Once, very long ago, strangers did come to us, to tell us they had no meat, so we had failed. And here you are, and you too have no meat!”
“But there is meat at our city,” Madal declared. “It comes daily from the hills and all who desire it have enough and to spare.”
The man’s mood changed like sunlight breaking through a stormcloud. “That’s the truth?” he demanded, wiping his eyes with the shaggy hair of his sleeve. Yet he still seemed doubtful. “Why have you none of it for your journey, then?”
Creohan spoke up, reasoning that to inform someone whose entire life was dedicated to raising the herds of meat for the sake of unseen distant cities about the ability of modern houses to feed their occupants without recourse to animal flesh would be unwise.
“We did not bring more with us than we needed to reach this place. What could be more pointless than to bring meat here, where there’s so much of it?”
The man stared at him, eyes large and round. Suddenly he began to chuckle, then chortle, then pant and whoop with laughter as crazy as the meat-creatures’ own. Jumping to his feet he performed a dance of joy, and all but tried to run up the sheer side of a nearby boulder.
“Come then! Come with me to my brothers! We must make a feast, a great big feast that will last all night long! Oh, but there will be such excitement at the news—we didn’t fail, we didn’t fail!” He broke off, and came to address Chalyth and Creohan over the outcrop’s edge. Mercurially, his mood had changed again and he seemed half angry.
“But why could you not have done this before? Was there too much to be done in your far-off city for you to spare the time to think of us? My father lived out his life and died without once discovering whether he had done his task well or ill. I have often thought I ought to go out in the wake of one of the herds which we daily drive forth, follow them to a city and ask if we’ve done well. But there’s so much work to share among so few of us… Oh, what am I up to, friends, to complain to you who came all this way just to bring the very news we craved?”
“Well, as a matter of fact-” Chalyth began. Creohan silenced her with a glare.
Noticing nothing amiss, the herdsman bent to retrieve his fallen bow, and in so doing saw Madal’s bloodstained shoes.
“Why, you have hurt yourself for our sake!” he exclaimed. “You must walk no more until you’re healed. Ill carry you to our home.”
And, cradling the girl in his arms without effort, he leapt from the overhanging rock and led the way downhill. Following, Chalyth murmured under her breath to Creohan, “Did you imagine there were such people as he in the world?”
Creohan almost laughed. “The world is so much greater and stranger than I ever dreamed, I here and now resolve not to be surprised at anyone we may encounter. Hope only that they who live on the road we’ve chosen are all as reasonable as our herdsman friend, rather than like the savages who slaughtered Quace.”
At the mention of Glyre’s comrade a shadow crossed Chalyth’s face, and they went on in silence.
They headed directly across the valley’s floor, and shortly found themselves among a browsing herd of meat, who stopped eating at their master’s approach and came shambling up to him. He called them each by name, and spared one hand from his burden to slap their buttocks or scratch their hairy coats, and they laughed their demonic laugh and moved away. Creohan wondered how many names the herdsman had to know to keep track of his beasts, and how it felt to send creatures so like himself off to their deaths each day.
The “home” he had spoken of proved to be a cave hollowed out from the central massif. Its only lighting came from wicks afloat in dishes of tallow; the stink of their burning hardly overcame the powerful reek of human occupation. Their wan flames revealed that the rock was seamed with metallic veins, smoke-dulled but distinctive, and Creohan was more than ever sure that this could only be a vast meteorite that had crashed here in the far past. Possibly it was the celestial hammerblow of its arrival that had laid low the city they had passed through earlier in the day. He wondered if he would ever again return to the Houses of History so that he might make inquiries about the matter among the Historickers of home.
There was no furniture except for shelves and niches carved in the rock itself, but there were large piles of skins near the mouth of the cave, and a big fire smoked to ward off the evening chill.
“Wait here,” their host instructed. “I go to inform my brothers.” He made to lay Madal down on one of the piles of skins, and his face registered enormous surprise—as did those of the others—when he discovered she had fallen asleep with her head against his chest. She barely stirred as he lowered her, but gave a wriggle and pressed her cheek into the yielding furs.
He explained that his brothers were out detailing the herds due to be sent forth at first light on the morrow. Puzzled by an elementary question of biology, Creohan asked whether he had sisters as well, but the word seemed to mean nothing to him.
“One thing further,” Chalyth said, before the herdsman went off. “Have you a name?”
“Of course!” the man cried. “You are strangers here, and I’m not known to everyone in the world as I am throughout this valley. Hey!” he shouted to a group of meat-creatures grazing not far from the cave-mouth. “Name me!”
As one the beasts threw back their heads and bellowed, “Arrheeharr!”
“You see?” the man said. “When one comes among us who has not got a name, we show him to the meat, and the first name they give that we do not have already, that is his.”
Then his excitement overcame him, and he departed at a wild run.
Creohan moved to spread his hands before the fire, keeping his head down to avoid the drifting smoke. “Well?” he said to Chalyth. “Do you think these people can set us on the trail to another city?”
“He spoke of cities in the plural,” Chalyth answered. “I have the impression, though, that their whole universe is bounded by this valley. For all our friend’s remarks about not going to see what was becoming of his meat because there was so much work to be done and so few to share it, I rather suspect he was a victim of the same trouble as Madal—afraid to wander out of sight of home.”
“Don’t speak too harshly of her,” Creohan reproved. “Did you not feel, when he broke out crying and she climbed up to comfort him, that there was a tenderness in her seeking a purpose she could put it to?”
“I did,” Chalyth admitted. “And because of it I think I could despise Vence with the same force as she does.”
“It’s ironical that our venture to save mankind should begin under the shadow of so much suffering,” Creohan muttered. “The thought of him starving with a broken jaw is going to haunt my nights.”
“It’s no good worrying about the past,” Chalyth said. “We can’t amend it. It’s only the future we can hope to control. And passing through that abandoned city-site today, I found myself wondering what good the attempt is anyhow. Our planet is littered ankledeop with the relics of vanished peoples.”
“True enough,” Creohan agreed. “Some may be crushed flat beneath this very spot—this rock, if I’m correct, is a meteorite, fallen out of the sky.”
“Never!” said Chalyth in wonderment, and turned to stare at the monstrous looming mass. “Well, if the people who went before could not save themselves from that, what chance have we to save Earth from colliding with a star?”
“I don’t know,” Creohan sighed. “One thing I’d not appreciated fully before we set forth, and that’s how empty our modern world must be. I learned of that, like so much else, while talking to Molichant at home; he said there had several times been many billions of us. Perhaps were reduced to a handful because our time has come.”
“So soon?” Chalyth exclaimed.
“Soon? Is it soon? It’s been generally agreed for millennia that we first learned to handle tools and light ourselves fires two million years ago. That’s a shortish span for a species, but not by any means the shortest known.”
There was a silence. Eventually Chalyth said in a brighter tone, “We’re still too close to home to consider such gloomy ideas. Let’s change the subject. Tell me: how do you think these meat-creatures, so like men, have become nothing but food?”
“Might it not be the other way around? Who knows how long these brothers have guarded their herds in this valley? Is it not possible that over the generations the animals have grown to be more like men than formerly?”
“If they can change in that fashion, then who is to say when they have become too much like men to be slaughtered for their meat? Vence said the females were near enough human for …” She choked on the words, and gave a shiver. But Creohan wasn’t listening anyway. He was staring up into the gathering dusk.
“Look there,” he said. “The threatening star is showing in the sky.”
XI
Whooping and shouting very like that of the meat-creatures but not so shrill disturbed them. Madal stirred and sat up. Through the twilight they saw Arrheeharr and his brothers approaching, bounding from hillock to hillock in their joy. There were eight of them, clad as he was in undressed skins; one bore the carcase of a freshly-killed animal on his back, another had a child of a few summers trotting at his heels. They clustered about Chalyth and Creohan asking eager questions, exclaiming in amazement at their clothing and belongings, and demanding confirmation of what Arrheeharr had told them.
“Yes, I can assure you,” Creohan declared over and over, “never once in all my life in the city I hail from did I hear a word of complaint about the way you attend to your work, and I’m only sorry that no one has come to tell you so before.”
That delighted them more than ever, and they fell to preparing their feast. One stoked the fire, one began to flay the carcase, a third plumped up the piles of skins. Watching them, Creohan saw the answer to his earlier puzzlement; it was evident through the gaps in the front of the skins they wore that these; “brothers” were in fact of both sexes—four and four, with the child a boy. Perhaps in this life where all must work and act alike, the distinction between “he” and “she” had somewhere been lost. Certainly they were all as muscular and tough-looking as Arrheeharr regardless of their gender.
He noticed other points which struck him as significant. They were crudely clad and shaggy-haired, but none of them was dirty, and after dealing with the messy task of carving up their meat the butcher in charge went around the side of the meteorite-hillock and came back dripping with fresh water, all traces of blood washed away. There must be a spring or a well back there, he deduced. They had only the simplest tools, many of them—like Vence’s—made of bone, but when one of them laid a knife down within his reach and he had a chance to examine it, he found its haft was decorated with an engraved drawing of a meat-creature, skilfully executed. Oh yes: these herdsmen, unbelievably inbred, isolated completely from the greater world, had somehow contrived to remain human.
Wondering at the unlikeliness of it all, he stared around him and realised that while he was studying his hosts, one of them was busy studying him. Standing a little apart was a man no taller than Chalyth, with a nervous, intense air, in whose dark-browed face Creohan read exceptional intelligence. Thinking back, he realised that this man alone of the herders had refrained from joining in the general excitement their arrival had caused, and had stood a little apart, seeming thoughtful, his dark eyes posing unspoken questions which, Creohan felt, he would find it impossible to answer.
“Hoo!” called Arrheeharr from a spot near the fire, and the dark man turned his head slowly. “Hoo, fetch liquor from the store, won’t you? We mustn’t stint our guests, after all!”
A ghost of a smile touched the dark one’s lips, but he departed into the depths of the cave without comment. While he was gone, Creohan’s attention was caught by Madal, who on waking had struck up an instant friendship with the little boy and was now coming with him to join the group working at the fire. The clumsiness with which they were going about their task seemed to irritate her. Hoping that they did not all share the mercurial touchiness of Arrheeharr, Creohan watched as she prepared a crude stone oven for the meat, so that it might bake instead of being scorched on a spit, and sent for juicy roots and leaves to flavour it while it was cooking. Arrheeharr fetched her bag at her request, and from it she took salt and other condiments, so that a rich and appetising smell soon went up, causing gasps of astonishment from their hosts.
“That’s good,” said a soft voice by Creohan’s side. “I was half afraid she might offend them by taking charge.”
He glanced around and discovered Chalyth at his elbow. “Yes, so was I,” he agreed. “Hope only that she’s not so successful at gaining their favour that they try to prevent us leaving again!”
At that moment Hoo returned with a barrel made of a hollowed cactus-stem, so heavy he could barely carry it, containing a thick, sweetish fermented juice which Arrheeharr scooped into bowls of the same material and diluted with fresh water before ceremoniously offering it to the guests. Creohan and Chalyth sipped theirs cautiously, finding it not unpleasant; hot and thirsty from her work at the fire, Madal gulped hers down, nodded approval, and marched over to commandeer a scoop of it with which to baste the meat.
Shortly the food was done, and they gathered around the fire to begin their feast, the brothers on their haunches, the guests on level rocks covered with skins. The fare was not precisely to the latter’s taste; still, they were so hungry and Madal had made the meat so appetising, they did not let nicety of manner hinder them but tore with their teeth at the gobbets they were given and returned for more. Curious stares fell on Madal as the “brothers” tasted theirs, and Arrheeharr declared he had never known meat so good. Hoo, licking his fingers, studied Madal with interest, but said nothing.
When they had all eaten their fill, Arrheeharr leaned back with a loud burp of contentment. “Now we should dance!” he exclaimed.
“Oh, it’s too soon to dance,” another complained. “Let the food settle first.”
“Very well then,” Arrheeharr acceded. “But at least we ought to sing. Hoo, you’re the one with the memory—let’s let our guests hear a ballad or two.”
“As you wish,” the dark man shrugged, and forthwith launched out into a lengthy song, delivered in a resonant baritone voice. The words were much interspersed with what Creohan judged to be calls of the meat-creatures, whose significance was lost on him, but in general the theme was clear: some long while ago, a mad beast had run amok through the herds, and a herdsman of the time had stabbed it with a spear. Madal reached for her harp and played a faint counterpoint to the declamatory tune, which likewise caused exclamations of wonder from the listeners.
When Hoo was done, they clapped and stamped and shouted their approval; he himself, however, sat rock-still until they fell silent, then addressed himself direct to Creohan.
“You’ve heard one ballad—I think that should suffice. Not all the world can be so concerned with raising herds of meat as we are here in this valley.”
Before Creohan could reply, two of the brothers got up and began the shambling dance around the fire which Arrheeharr had called for earlier, and all thought of further singing was forgotten. The steps were like the lumbering gait of the meat-creatures, and at first the only accompaniment was the dancers’ own cries, resembling the meat-creatures’ laughter, which brought the beasts themselves curious to the edge of the circle of firelight where they watched in silence. Shortly, however, the liquor having dulled the pain of her feet, Madal began to evoke a wild skirling melody from her harp which matched the irregular rhythm of the dance, and within minutes it had become a crazy rout in which everyone but Creohan and Chalyth appeared to have joined.
Or not quite everyone.
A voice spoke out of shadow behind Creohan, subtly pitched so that it could be heard clearly despite the shouting of the dancers and the ringing of the harp.
“I do not detect in you the air of satisfaction which ought to attach to the successful completion of a hazardous mission, or the attendant relief at being able to return home.”
Creohan twisted where he sat, and found Hoo gazing at him.
“Why-ah …” He fumbled for words. The dark man’s challenge had taken him aback; it was phrased with such delicate indirection that he was afraid to contradict it outright, for fear the deceit should be apparent. He compromised on a half-truth: “Why, it’s true that our journey is not over, but it’s no less true that your meat has come faithfully and in sufficient numbers since I can remember and probably for long before I was born.”
The dark mans mouth shaped a fleeting smile. “Oh, I’m not accusing you of lying to us. I doubt if you even misled Arrheeharr—at least not deliberately. And certainly it’s a relief to know that there are people far away who have benefited from what we’ve done. For all we knew, we might have been acting out a meaningless ritual, alone on the surface of a devastated globe.”
