Earthwind, p.23
Earthwind, page 23
A fragment of those minutes was lost, a fraction only, but the fraction. She had forgotten her own insight—it had not had time to imprint on the more permanent chemical recorders of her mind. A flurry of electrical activity and then…the killing, the fleeing, the panic—succeeding the tenuous structure of her intuitive understanding of the symbol that had become so central to her purpose in life.
Brutality and insight, she reflected bitterly, and struggled for a while to contrive some epigram, some sour nutshell that would at once crystallize and catherize her feelings on the relationship between the two things. She failed miserably, angrily, managing to come up with nothing that did not start, how like life… . and she winced involuntarily as those age-old words crept into her mind, but it was not the cliche that bothered her…
There was no life, no life to remember, no events to add substance and freshness to a routine concept. Life had gone, the past, dark and blank, was a ghost—a void—voices, scenes, faces, echoed and re-echoed, jumbled, crazy, meaningless. It had all gone, all but her visit to Aeran, the events of her life here, the Earthwind, Gorstein and his aggressive sexuality, a vague structure of fact and scenery called Newgrange, an Earth scene (/ remember Earth!), a tomb—significant yet weakly held in her decaying mind, solely because it contained the symbol, and therefore entered her narrowing field of focus.
As Darren and Moir chewed nosily on the rock-root fungus cakes that were all Darren had been able to gather (Darren watching Elspeth through eyes filled with aggravation, Moir seeming unconcerned again with anything but the satiation of her own hunger) so Elspeth came to terms with the fact that Aeran had caught up with her, had eliminated everything she had held precious and was merely biding its time before it crept in among her neurones and rooted out all the traces it had missed over the past few weeks.
How calm she felt. How alone, how dead—and yet, how totally calm. Her life was nearly gone, and yet life was still going on. Filled with ease, lacking totally in anxiety. As if, by the losing of her life, she had eliminated all the causes of anxiety from her system.
By deliberately not thinking about her childhood or the first years of her adulthood, she found that the years of her life were filled with fragments and blurred images of no-places and nonpersons, and this served to trick her into thinking that there was nothing wrong. To try to see detail was to come up against the emptiness. Her past was that same sort of indistinct fabrication that existed at the very edge of her vision. Colours and shades, movement and shapes that in no way could be defined or identified, but served to supply a sense of completeness, of reality.
The illusion kept her sane, helped her cope with a situation that should have driven her screaming to the banks of a river whose deep and icy currents offered their own particular end to her darkness.
She drifted into sleep, the food she had eaten lying heavy in her stomach and repeating on her with an almost offensive aftertaste. The distant moaning of some ponderous beast set her skin alive with the bristling fear-reaction of her body hair. She imagined the creature was crawling through the underground caverns towards her, sniffing, scenting, announcing its inexorable approach with its sonorous cries. Opening her eyes in panic she found herself staring at the fully illuminated rock ceiling. Sitting by the torch, Moir was a fragile shape, shivering violently. As Elspeth roused herself, grimacing as pain from her bruised scalp shot through her system, Moir grinned at her.
‘Darren’s down there.’
‘Where?’
Moir looked in the direction of the howling, down a narrow, low-ceilinged passageway. Elspeth, as she shook away the last cloying threads of sleep, recognized the sound as natural, not biological. Wind?
Moir said, ‘Down there, near the Earthsong.’
’Is that the Aeran oracle, that sound?’ Excitement.
’Earthsong, yes. It blows out of a cave near the crog and Iondai consults it when he wants to learn about the future. We were going to show it to you the day after your first hunt.’ Sadness in her voice, memory of happier hours before the beyonders came.
‘Iondai consults the wind? How does he do that?’
Moir, obviously puzzled as to why Elspeth was so interested now of all times, shrugged. ‘He just stands in it and it speaks to him.’
‘And Darren is doing that now?’
‘No,’ said Moir, surprised that Elspeth had misunderstood. ‘No, he’s just waiting for it to drop in strength enough for us to walk up the tunnel. He says he’s heard there are several tunnels further up and the wind only comes down one. But they all lead up into the mountains and we can use them to get past the hunters.’
Intrigued, Elspeth left the cavern and crept down the passage towards the roaring wind sound. The noise grew deafening as she approached, then abruptly died away; hesitating, wondering what had happened, she saw Darren approaching her. He looked up in the semi-darkness, scrutinized the figure before him for a moment, and then recognized Elspeth.
’Fetch Moir,’ he said, ‘we may not have very long.’
‘I’m right here,’ called the girl, and Elspeth realized that Moir had followed her down the passage (perhaps afraid to stay in the cavern alone) and that it was the light from the torch that had followed her down here. Moir passed the torch to Darren who took it and turned away. The leather packs, with some small fragments of food, Moir slung over her shoulders, declining Elspeth’s offer of help. When they get heavier, yes, she said. But it isn’t necessary yet. Elspeth noticed that Moir still carried her small blackwing pouch around her neck.
They returned to the main wind channel and Darren cautiously stepped out into the wide, low-roofed passageway, stood, for a moment, the torch outstretched, staring into the tunnel’s maw. Elspeth could see a glimmer of light in the other direction.
’That’s the oracle,’ whispered Moir. ‘If Iondai is down there he might see the torch.’
‘Do you hear that, Darren?’ said Elspeth.
‘Iondai doesn’t concern me,’ said Darren, sullenly, but he lowered the torch so that his body screened its light from the other end of the tunnel. ‘Come on.’
He led the way across the jagged rock floor. Moir complained about the damp, and her occasional cries of irritation and loud splashing jumps annoyed her brother. Elspeth found the low roof a burden, but she kept quiet, making a conscious effort to stoop at all times. A cold wind, not heavy but ominous, blew against them, cooling sweat, and making bodies shiver violently.
The light behind them vanished. Ahead the single tunnel seemed endless. The wind grew stronger, rising and falling like the disturbed breathing of a nightmare dreamer. If the gale blew now they would be cast back down the passage like flotsam, smashing against the walls and the ceiling until their broken bodies were flung into the outside world…
The image, the sense of broken corpses, flung before violent winds, brought a sense of familiarity back to her, a moment’s pang of distress…it passed away rapidly. Just an irrational fear, she guessed.
A sudden gust of bitterly cold wind knocked them all backwards. Moir screamed as the torch went out and the three of them were suddenly in total darkness.
‘It’s coming back,’ cried the girl.
‘Shut up!’ screamed Darren. ‘And run!’
Elspeth, frozen for just a moment by confusion, heard his footfall vanishing away into the distance and she pushed herself away from the wall in pursuit. Stumbling over Moir’s crouched and trembling body, she helped the girl to her feet and hauled her along with her.
‘Let’s go back,’ implored Moir. ’This is stupid…’
‘Come on!’ yelled Darren, already very distant.
‘We’re coming,’ called Elspeth. ’Find that branched tunnel!’
The wind did not increase in force, which surprised Elspeth. It was a strong wind, and they had to fight against its flow in order to run fast, but she expected it to increase in strength steadily; when it held its force constant she was puzzled but immensely relieved.
Minutes passed. Her legs ached with the effort, but slowly Moir became more firm in her own footsteps and eventually, though she hung on to Elspeth’s arm, she ran without support.
Ahead of them there was a sudden deep booming sound, a cry as of some angry beast. The voice of the real wind.
Elspeth sensed the passage of a shockwave through her body, chilling her to the bone, making her sick with sudden fear; and yet she kept running, dragging Moir with her, not listening to the girl’s terrible cries of pain and fright. The roaring approached, unseen in the total blackness, bearing down on them…
A moment before it seemed they should be run down by the legs of the giant, trodden to death by the stampede approaching them, strong hands pulled Elspeth out of the tunnel and into a recess. Moir collapsed in a heap and Elspeth felt the girl’s body dragged deeper into the hole in the tunnel wall. Darren had found safety with not a second to spare.
In fact, it was some moments before the full force of the gale ripped past them outside, thundering for what seemed like hours, reaching explorative fingers into this sudden nook to try to tease the flimsy humans out of their secure cubby hole…
And abruptly it passed away, leaving deafening silence, a ringing in their ears, bodies shivering, heads filled with echoing and re-echoing screams and moans, but all imagined…
Moir sat up and felt for Elspeth in the darkness.
‘A close call,’ said the beyonder with an unseen grin. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever had so much excitement in my life, but I can’t quite remember offhand…that’s a joke. Which I really shouldn’t expect anyone to get, and even if they did—not funny.’
‘Well, Darren,’ she said at length, staring into the darkness. ‘Where to now?’
There was no sound from where she thought the youth was sitting.
‘Darren?’
Moir said, ’There’s someone approaching down the tunnel, listen.’
A footfall in the dank rock, the sound of breathing, of pain, reached her ears and she stepped out into the passage, stared into the blackness. ‘Who is it?’
‘It’s me.’ Darren’s voice. He sounded very hurt.
‘Where’ve you been? Why did you leave the cave?’
‘What cave?’
’This cave. What’s the matter with you, boy?’
‘I’ve been clinging on to a jutting piece of rock, that’s what’s the matter with me,’ he shouted. A moment later he fell heavily against Elspeth and she had to stagger to keep him upright. She pulled his suddenly limp body into the cave and laid him down, felt for his face and noticed the stickiness of blood coating almost every inch of his body fur. ’For tao’s sake, Darren…what have you been up to?’
’There was nowhere to hide,’ he gasped. ‘When the wind came I was blown backwards against a spur of rock and 1 just…clung on. I’m tired. I’m really tired.’
‘You mean you didn’t find this cave?’ she asked the invisible face. Her expression, had anyone been able to see it, was totally blank.
‘I must have missed it. I’m tired…I want to sleep for a while.’
‘Yes…close your eyes and relax.’
Elspeth sat back on her haunches and stared into the nothingness. If not Darren, then who? Whose hand had saved her from extinction? Who had been crouched in this nook in the rock wall, and heard their gasping, screaming, panicking approach, and taken pity on them?
‘Moir?’
‘I’m here. Elspeth, there’s a tunnel at the back of the cave.’
She crawled in the direction of Moir’s voice. Sure enough, far from being a shallow hollowing in the wall, this was the start of a low tunnel leading off at an angle from the main passage.
Whoever had saved them had almost certainly left their presence through that tunnel, and obviously knew his way about. It never occurred to Elspeth to debate the point. Instinctively she knew that this was the route to take.
Darren’s cuts were extensive, but superficial, and though he was almost certainly bruised over most of his torso, he refused to make any concessions to his obvious agony, as if in some way the admission of pain was an admission of weakness. After an hour or two, during which they finished their scant food supply and watered and washed themselves in the trickle of fluid in the Earthsong tunnel, they began the slow crawl along the coffin-like passage away from danger.
Elspeth could not keep track of time. As they crawled it seemed like hours but when finally, and with joyful cries of relief, they emerged into daylight she had to admit that on reflection they had not been long in the cramped rock tunnel.
They had emerged at the base of a rising cliff, a wall of mossy rock that towered forty or fifty feet above their heads. They were on a slope that ran, uneven and scrub-covered, down to dense vegetation that filled much of the view. But distantly, in its wide clearing, the crog was a brown and green castle, defiant by virtue of its precision in a land otherwise quite disordered. The ship had indeed gone, and Elspeth quietly cheered.
Darren looked far worse than he was, scraped and blood smeared, and it gave Elspeth quite an unpleasant turn to see him. They inspected his wounds more thoroughly, now, and bound up one particularly deep gash on his arm with a strip cut from Elspeth’s leggings. She herself was filthy dirty, and her clothes, having been savaged by knife and rock alike, seemed little more than functionless rags. She tied loose ends to make the clothes more secure, but warmth was gone and only a certain sexual privacy remained as a practically unimportant reason for keeping the tatters about her.
’Onwards,’ she said at last, and waited for Darren to lead. He looked up the cliff for a moment and Elspeth coughed negatively.
‘No way, Darren. We’ll take the long route.’
He smiled and shrugged but Elspeth knew that in his present condition the climb would have been beyond his capabilities. She followed him along the base of the cliff and up the steep scramble that took them, gradually and painfully, on to higher ground. Moir scrambled behind them, grunting and complaining, but she kept up well. Always she kept in the background, not contributing to discussion of where to go, or how to do it. Always she stared at her brother as if she saw him in some special way. She never spoke to him and he never spoke to her. They spoke of each other, but direct address was a luxury they had mutually forfeited because of the duel that had been fought. At times Elspeth felt sad about the hostility, at other times she felt irritated at its silliness. But as long as she was there the two Aerani were prepared to cooperate with each other.
At no time did they talk about the crog, or their father’s death, or their own banishment; they didn’t seem sad, but Elspeth felt that the memories of the life they had enjoyed until recently were not far below the surface. They might have been merely numb, at the moment, and the numbness would wear off.
They walked away from the cliff, mile after mile, still on rising ground, but soon the first slopes of the really high hills could be seen. They rose some miles distant, their lower slopes a jumble of colours, mostly greens, their upper slopes becoming almost silver where the dark of rock and the brightness of snow combined to form a brilliant metallic sheen. Elspeth looked at the scattered snow and felt an awful apprehension. She had a feeling that the cave, and the source of the Earthwind, lay beyond those snows. She didn’t dare ask for the moment. Her irrational behaviour jarred against her current desperate pragmatism, but she swallowed the inevitable question, put it from her mind. Every dark nook in those fields of white seemed to call to her, to beckon her. Caves and ledges, from this distance they all became gaps in the earth, mysterious pores in the mysterious world.
They slept a night in the shelter of rocks, and woke up frozen but in high spirits. They walked some more, Darren walking easier, now, and Moir herself not lagging too far behind. She had gathered rock-root and some fragments of white-gum, which— she explained—was not food, but by sucking the yellow gum from the porous white rock (it looked like chalk) you could get very happy and very energetic. Save it, said Elspeth, for when we need happy energy.
Darren stopped, after a while, and crouched on the ground. They had come a long way, and yet the distant mountains still seemed as far away. ‘I still think we’d do best to head across those foothills towards the valley,’ he said, pointing towards the deep cleft between two ranges of snowcapped mountains. ’They say it’s good land…’
Irritated with his insistence that they should do something she didn’t want to do, Elspeth said, sharply, ‘Who’s they, Darren? That’s twice you’ve said they.’
’Friends,’ said the youth. ‘Just friends.’ What was he hiding? She pressed him for more details.
‘And how did you know about the passage in the Earthsong tunnel? They again? Your friends? What are you doing, Darren? Taking hugely inspired guesses?’
He shook his head. Moir said, quietly, ‘He’s been consulting the oracle, I expect,’ and laughed, softly, sarcastically.
Darren turned on her furiously, and struck her to the ground. She screamed with pain and shock and when she tried to get up he kicked her. ‘I’ll kill you,’ he shouted, and raised his rock knife.
Moir kicked his legs out from under him and as he tumbled she climbed over him and tried to push out his eyes. His knife hit and slashed her cheek and she rolled over.
‘Squatling!’ he yelled, abusively. ‘Coward! I should have killed you back there. I’ll do it now.’ Moir looked up at him, completely impassive, ready for the blow he was about to deliver. But Elspeth snatched the knife from his hand and clipped his ear so that he forgot the one fury and turned angrily on her. ‘Don’t interfere!‘ ‘Don’t be foolish,’ said Elspeth. ‘Help her up.’
