Earthwind, p.2
Earthwind, page 2
‘She hasn’t scratched any symbols,’ said Brigedd. Elspeth’s heart raced. The girl was smiling at her, knowing of her fascination for the symbols used by the people of the crog. For the first time since they had arrived Elspeth noticed Brigedd’s arms— badly gashed and only just beginning to heal. She’d been in a very bad fight. Seeing Elspeth’s scrutiny she touched her left arm almost tentatively. ‘Duel,’ she said. ‘I won.’
Obviously, thought Elspeth, bearing in mind the finality of Aeran duels. The duelling system, here, was complex and was one area of the culture she would not fully understand until she was accepted inside the dune walls.
’That’s right,’ said Elspeth loudly, returning to the question of her carving the symbols of the hunt. ‘I haven’t done my duty yet. Who’s going to show me?’
‘I’ll show you of course,’ said Darren. He too knew how excited she got when she saw, or watched the production of, the complex symbols that the colonists (was that term appropriate any more?) used at every junction in their lives. He probably also knew that she was less interested in the blackwing hunt than in making the symbols for herself and having him explain them. Today, with luck, she would make a small breakthrough in understanding what had happened on this world, Aeran. And today, with any luck at all, she would take a large and important step towards understanding something that had been a mystery, a tourist-attracting enigma, for more than seven thousand years.
She bound up the gash on her ankle and then they ran through the fast-rising early morning mist until they came to the river. Here they found movement less difficult and wound their way, with the meandering water course, through the dense jungle of the forest, until at last they had left it behind. The land rose into a series of rolling hills, boulder-scattered and deeply incised with the valleys of rivers which ran from the distant mountains, through the forest and into the marshes.
Here, on the hills, a deep and soft layer of frondmoss made running very comfortable. They left the river and climbed over the top of the valley slope so they could look down at the thread of silver and out to the brown and glistening swamps. Lakes and mudflats, the inhospitable land between the crog and the vast salt ocean was a place where no Aerani had ever ventured, an area of carnivores and man-eating mud-pits. There, at the edge of the swamplands, the eyes and hands of dishonoured Aerani were committed to decay, denying the spirit its rightful consummation by fire. And there, too, the ground seemed thrown up into ridged humps, like peculiarly fashioned graves—but the graves, occasionally, moved and revealed themselves as the beasts they were.
’This way,’ called Darren, leading the group away from the direction of the river and further across the frondmoss plain. The air was crisp and cold and a strong wind, blowing up across the hills, carried with it the rich scents of the crowded forest. Elspeth, breathing deeply to compensate for the low oxygen content of the atmosphere, found the smells exciting and sensuous. She became dizzy with the effort of breathing and stopped, for a moment, to stare across the green and purple mat of foliage, the flickering snake tongues, the darting animal shapes…
Behind the forest rose the mountains…
Partly obscured by clouds, white with snow, jagged and sheer: the mountains. They cast their shadow across the land, the shadow of snow, evoking memories of her past, and a fear that had been for so long buried beneath her trappings of adulthood.
Fear surfaced—blizzard/blood…the coldness, the deathly chill, the needles of ice…
The terrifying memory receded, but her panic remained; she ran after Darren and the others, a silent scream echoing (silently) through her mind. While the mountains watched…
Eventually they came to a great causeway, dipping into the earth, running for nearly a mile and flanked by sheer cliffs.
Hanging from the cliffs, dangling almost effortlessly, were thousands of dark leathery shapes. Blackwings.
Laurian and Brigedd vanished, running silently over one cliff-top to get to the other end of the valley. Engus and Moir crept off along the other edge of the causeway so that the girl could watch the procedure of the hunt with Engus explaining. The youth was annoyed at having to waste this hunt in such explanations; Engus was always bad tempered, and his disapproval of Elspeth and her involvement with the colony (she was a nue after all, he often shouted) always made his presence unwelcome.
‘If we can’t catch one of that lot,’ said Darren, pointing to the sleeping blackwings, ’then we ought to be ashamed of ourselves.’
They lay on their stomachs and stared at the silent valley. Blackwings hunted in the early afternoon; two or three hours of frenzied feeding, and then back to the ‘roost’ for the rest of the day and all of the following night, hanging motionless but not quite fully unconscious as many an unsuccessful hunter had discovered to his cost.
‘You’ll need your own snare,’ said Darren, and slid out of sight behind a jagged rock. Elspeth crawled round after him and squatted on her haunches, staring at the desolation of the frond-moss plain. It was a stark land, rolling brown turf, scattered with boulders and the clumps of tangleweed that the Aerani hunters used as snares. It was not an angry land, it was an inhospitable land, and its bleakness chilled Elspeth more than the cool wind on her naked skin.
The wind had dropped to a whisper, and at the far end of the causeway a thin veil of mist remained, clinging to the valley and making shadows of the activity there. Elspeth could hear Moir babbling her questions, and Engus’s occasional angry grunt that silenced the girl for a few seconds. Suddenly, however, a new sound came from Moir’s direction; the sound of her voice singing.
Elspeth was taken by surprise and she listened intently to the song as it spilled across the valley, not loud, not shrill, not alarming, just a gently fluctuating note, quite entrancing and quite beautiful. Elspeth had heard singing from the walls of the crog— several songs, by several different Aerani—but this music, coming from the girl above the cliff, was unfamiliar.
‘She’ll scare the blackwings, won’t she?’ she said to Darren.
The boy shook his head, abruptly, decisively. He was watching his sister through narrowed eyes, a hint of a smile on his lips.
‘It’s an earth song,’ he said quietly. ‘She’s adding to it in her own way.’
‘What does it do?’
‘Wins the earth,’ he said matter-of-factly. ’The blackwing like it, they think all is well. All we have to do is capture the wind for a while.’
‘Singing?’
‘No!’ said Darren, shocked. ‘Not singing! Can you sing the wind song? Would you dare?’
Elspeth shrugged. ‘We’ll carve it, then. As a symbol.’
‘Not even I can do that,’ said the youth. ‘Not yet, anyway. No, we’ll make simple offerings to the wind…’ he trailed off, staring upwards. ‘Listen to her voice.’
Drifting, soothing, the note perfectly held, perfectly pitched. Darren watched her, distantly. He seemed full of pride, full of love.
They walked to the nearest clump of tangleweed. Seven whip-like arms trailed limply on the ground and under Darren’s instruction Elspeth lay across the clump; but although one strand moved slightly the weed remained, on the whole, uninterested. They walked to a second plant and here had better luck. As Elspeth stretched her body, stomach down, across the heart of the weed, so two of the whips shivered and wrapped around her limbs, drawing tight.
’Take your pick,’ said Darren. Elspeth reached for the longer tendril and gently detached it from the moss, shaking the clinging matrix from its three thin roots. ’The roots can be broken off.’
’Is that necessary?’
‘Not necessary, but they’ll burrow into you if you don’t.’
’Oh.’ She gently snapped the roots and the plant coiled and uncoiled for a moment, then wrapped around her arm.
‘It likes you,’ said Darren, grinning. He swept back his hair and looked around. ‘My turn.’
He reached out to the same clump of tangleweed and they all wrapped round him. He gently disentangled himself and uprooted the longest strand. The plant flexed and twisted as he practised with it, and the motions grew faster and faster, the expression of intensity on his face increasing. Eventually the tangleweed was moving too fast for Elspeth to observe. ‘Are you watching, stone lady? Are you watching? This is the sort of proficiency you need to make a snare.’ He seemed proud. ’Try it.’
The tangleweed raced in Elspeth’s grip. Darren nodded, satisfied. ‘With luck you’ll catch a blackwing and be inside the crog before night. Once the weed has a hold it’s up to you to keep your grip. That’s when it gets dangerous. But once the blackwing is snared it only takes a few seconds for its heart to stop. You’ll see.’
Moir’s song faded away and mournful wind sounds drifted out of the causeway.
‘When do I carve the symbols? Now?’
Darren laughed. ‘All right. Come on, let’s use that piece of bare rock.’
Crouched by a boulder, that grew out of the moss at the very mouth of the causeway, Darren removed his leather necklace and eased the crystal knife out of its binding. He passed this precious weapon (the gift of his initiation into warriorhood) to Elspeth, who cradled it in her hand.
With its tip she gently scratched the diamond-shaped pattern that aroused the forces within the rock. Three diamonds in a chain and Darren seemed satisfied. He stared at the boulder as if seeing more than its surface, and then directed her to add a fourth figure to the other three.
She scratched the rock, the lines coming out wavy and uneven, but her hand shook so much with excitement that she could hardly even think what she was doing…
This is how man carved the stones of Ireland seven thousand years ago…did it mean then what it means now?
Satisfied with the offering to the earth Darren took back his knife and licked the dust from its point. The knife was his greatest pride and he carefully slung it back around his neck.
‘What do they mean?’ Elspeth asked, smiling as she touched her shallow scratches.
‘You have put yourself into the wind; the shape allows for the passage of your hunter’s soul into the earth and the wind by way of the boulder. In water it would be different, through the forest different again. The rock itself is the most direct way of offering. Now the earth may return your favour by helping you snare a blackwing.’
Simple, really. Elspeth pondered the shapes. One more symbol for her answer book. The number that she understood was growing, and the repertoire of rock carvings was not vast. But this was the first that she herself had carved! Simple it may have been, but it was a great step forward for her.
She bent forward and kissed the symbol she had carved and Darren grinned. Then they ran back to the blackwing sleeping-grounds and lay flat on the spongy moss, staring down into the rift.
‘Before we came we asked our seer for a prediction,’ said Darren quietly. Interested, Elspeth glanced at him.
‘What did he come up with?’
‘Good fortune. New beast,’ said the youth.
She remained quiet for a moment, then turned back to regard their potential prey. ’That’s the trouble with your oracle, it doesn’t leave room to figure out what it means. Now where I come from there’s an oracle—’
Darren waved her silent. ’There’s your blackwing!’
One of the leathery creatures had dropped from its sleeping position and flown a few yards out into the bottom of the causeway. It curled up on a rock and wrapped its membranous wings about its body, buried its globular head in the skin wrinkles on its torso.
‘Aim your snare for the legs.’
‘Right.’
Elspeth, clutching her tangleweed tightly, walked quietly into the valley, ducking behind exposed rocks wherever she could, and bent almost double as she approached the creature. She realized she was sweating and the gentle breeze on her naked skin made her shiver with cold. There was something excitingly primitive about this sort of hunting, using parts of the environment to catch parts of the environment, matching strength with strength, speed with speed. One blast from her Kiljarold automatic would dispatch the blackwing to a better place in a split second. But there was no excitement in that.
Five yards from the creature she stopped, caught her breath and tried to calm her body. She was deep in the valley, the wind blowing quite strong now, and as she walked she could feel the dried blood on her calves cracking and irritating her skin. The gash was still painful, but she didn’t care. All around her the motionless black shapes of the blackwing population hung silent. High overhead, where the sheer cliff was a jagged grey gash against the brightening sky, two faces peered down at her. At the other end of the valley both Laurian and Brigedd were darting swiftly from rock to rock, approaching two susceptible blackwings as they snoozed on small boulders.
Stepping forwards gently Elspeth closed the distance between herself and her prey. The tangleweed in her hand seemed to tense with her, as if waiting for its instruction. She could see the beast’s throat moving as it breathed, hear the dull triple thump of its ‘heart’; pinflies, the animal’s natural parasite, moved across its body in apparently aimless activity. At any moment the blackwing might wake up, see her, and vanish in that bizarre mind-jumping flight that made the animals on this world so difficult to catch.
It had to be now.
Slowly she raised her arm, holding the tangleweed towards the animal. A moment later the blackwing’s eye opened, its head turned to look at her, and she squeezed the whip.
The plant uncoiled almost effortlessly and wrapped around the blackwing’s leg; the creature screeched and flapped into the air, but the tangleweed kept its grip. Elspeth felt her body swung into the air, and for a second she panicked…
Let go.
She hit the rock full face, grazing nose, forehead, jewelled breast. Sprawled across the boulder she watched the blackwing flicker away, leaving her in bursts of here/not-here; it covered the length of the valley in a few seconds, darting in different directions, almost defying her efforts to follow it with her dizzy gaze.
Miraculously the valley remained still, only a few blackwings actually flying off in panic pursuit.
Shaken, hurting where her skin was grazed and raw, Elspeth ran back to Darren and knelt beside him.
He was laughing. ‘You let go.’
‘I know I let go! I nearly bashed my skull in.’
He reached out and touched her grazed nose. ‘You’ll have to be more determined than that if you want to catch a blackwing.’
‘Are you sure we drew the right symbols?’
‘You and your symbols.’ Amusement. ‘Yes, we drew the right ones. The only thing that went wrong is that you lost your nerve.’
‘Well I won’t lose it again.’
‘We’ll have to wait for a likely prey—look, down the valley! Quick!’
She stood up and stared down the gorge. Distantly, only just in eyeshot, one of the two hunters at that end was snaring a blackwing successfully. The great beast had its wings at full stretch and was beating the air, flying in short jumps with the tiny human form gripping it securely at a distance of some ten feet. For a moment beast and man (woman?) vanished, and reappeared some way distant, but still the hunter held on, and the blackwing collapsed to the ground. A second later it was motionless and the hunter (it was Laurian) was waving at them.
‘It mind-jumped while he was still attached.’
‘A strong beast,’ said Darren thoughtfully. ‘It’s a strange sensation, especially if the beast changes direction in mid jump.’
‘And all the animals on this world can do that?’
Darren nodded. ‘All except us. But then, we have the Earthwind.’
’The Earthwind? What’s that?’
Before Darren could answer, however, Engus and Moir raced by, Moir laughing as a well-aimed kick from her marked man found her furry rump.
Darren called to them to be quiet and they both dropped to the ground, looking apologetic, although Engus’s remorse was only momentary as he met Elspeth’s gaze.
‘Nice try,’ called Moir. ‘We’ve seen enough. We’re going to hang for a while.’
They were gone, then, racing across the frondmoss until distance and the vapour barrier hid them from view.
‘Hang awhile? What does that mean?’
Darren glanced at her. ‘We’ll do it later. You’ll see. I’m not letting you go this time.’
Sex, thought Elspeth. It’s their term for sex. I’ve been here all this time and I still haven’t learned their most basic colloquialisms.
A sudden deafening beat of wing against air dragged their attention back to the valley of the blackwings. A huge male blackwing, with a span of nearly twenty feet, was settling on to the boulder beneath which they crouched. Darren fell backwards in surprise as the great single eye turned to look at the two humans, but Elspeth jumped to her feet and flexed her tangleweed so that it flickered outwards…
The air before her face was disturbed violently as the leather-winged creature slashed at her, but perhaps because of her unfamiliar dark skin, perhaps because of her unconscious movement backwards, the razor-sharp claws missed her. The blackwing, before it knew what was happening, had a tangleweed around its left leg.
It screeched, stretched and struggled into the air…
‘Hold it this time,’ yelled Darren, scurrying away as the great beast swung down to the earth, unable to pull itself into the air as easily as it had expected.
‘Help me,’ screamed Elspeth as she felt her body dragged forwards and upwards.
‘Do it yourself!’ shouted Darren, delighted.
‘I can’t! Oh God!’
‘Keep holding!’
All she could see was the immense black shape stretched out before her. The tangleweed was biting into her wrist where it had wrapped itself around her arm before snaring the blackwing’s leg; she ignored the pain, tried to ignore her fear that the primitive beast would turn on her at any moment. The blackwing was too busy panicking, however. The thunder she heard was the beat of wings. The wind she felt was her body being half dragged across the stony ground as the beast tried to fly.
