Earthwind, p.3
Earthwind, page 3
Sudden nausea!
She shook her head. Her stomach had turned over and the dizzying sensation of impending sickness had flashed through her skull. What had happened?
It happened again! And again!
The cliffs seemed to jump as if they were being displaced by split seconds. A boulder flashed by and was gone, not smoothly, just vanishing. She screamed. The blackwing too began to screech, in its horrifying high-pitched voice; loudly, angrily, beating the air, but fallen, now, to the ground.
Elspeth kept a tight hold on the tangleweed, but maintained her distance from the threshing animal. Slowly she climbed to her feet. Her whole body was trembling, her stomach hurting with the wrenching sensations of sickness that had accompanied the flight. She knew what had happened but was almost too confused to think about it. The here/not-here dance of the blackwing had carried her with it, instantaneous transportation across several yards at a time. She had teleported. She had jumped through space hanging on to the beast’s mind by the vegetable whip that had served her so well.
The blackwing died.
Its threshing ceased, its eye began to bleed, sepia blood running down its shiny black skin. Elspeth released her grip on the tangleweed and the plant curled about her arm like a passionate snake, gripping her tightly and burying its tip in the warm wetness of her underarm. She wiped her hands on her thighs, stared at the smeared blood from the broken skin on her right wrist. Darren raced up and dropped beside the dead blackwing. He looked up into the sky, stared at the cliffs where large numbers of the animals still hung calmly and disinterestedly.
‘You were lucky,’ he said. ’That final screech usually makes them attack. That’s the one thing you have to fear, the blackwing calling for help.’
‘It panicked a few of them.’
‘But they didn’t attack.’ Darren stared at her, reached out to touch the tangleweed and let his fingers run over her ebony skin. ‘Perhaps this, perhaps your own darkness…I’ve never known them not attack before.’
They stared at their prey. Its wings had begun to shrivel as body fluid drained out of them and into the slowly distending body cavity, and after a moment Darren crawled over and took a hold of the skeletal structure of the blackwing’s upper limbs. He snapped the bones with a great deal of effort and ripped the wings from the body. Using the sharp end of the bone he punctured the body cavity and glistening green fluid spurted across the ground, bubbling as it drained into the moss.
‘Help me,’ he said.
Elspeth gripped one of the beast’s legs, and with Darren hauling at the other they dragged their hunt back to the entrance of the causeway. Breathless they squatted for a while and laughed. Their laughter became more excited, more childish. Elspeth said she thought that she must have looked really funny being dragged by the blackwing. They laughed. Darren said that she had. They laughed some more. Elspeth said she’d never been so frightened in all her life; they shrieked with laughter.
Some of the blackwings left their sleeping places and beat a noisy track out towards the distant weed-clogged lakes of the nearer marshlands; haze and mist consumed them as the two hunters watched, silently contemplating the morning’s events. Elspeth ran her fingers along the faint symbols she had drawn, tracing the shaky lines of the lozenge patterns. ’Thank you,’ she whispered, feeling strange as she said it, watching the rock as if some reply might miraculously appear on its grey surface.
‘We’ll come back tomorrow and chip them in deeply,’ said Darren.
‘A successful hunt,’ said Elspeth proudly. ‘My own permanent symbols.’
‘It’s a great moment,’ agreed Darren. ‘If you go on like this you’ll soon be carving the Earthwind.’
‘What is that, Darren? You mentioned it before. What is the Earthwind?’
He looked at her in surprise, then glanced at the spidery symbols scraped on the stone. ’The Earthwind is…well, the Earth-wind.’ He smiled, looked at her and shook his head. ‘It’s the symbol that gave us life, and gives us the earthsong to guide us.’
’The oracle!’ said Elspeth loudly, making some slight sense of what he was trying to say. ‘You call the oracle “Earthsong”. Is that right?’
Darren seemed uncomfortable. He traced round Elspeth’s symbols with his forefinger and frowned. He said nothing.
‘But Earthwind,’ insisted Elspeth. ‘Darren, what is that? I mean…well…show me. Please, show me.’
‘I can’t show you…’ Darren trailed off looking awkward. ’The Earthwind, it’s…’ He struggled for words. On his face, above the fur, a thin sheen of sweat appeared.
Suddenly he jumped to his feet and ran back to the dead blackwing. ‘Come on, let’s get him to the forest, out of sight of the rest.’ Elspeth sighed, but decided to live with her intrigue. There was plenty of time yet. She looked down the valley and realized there was no sign of Laurian and Brigedd. ‘Where are they?’
‘Doing what we should be doing,’ said Darren. Elspeth felt her stomach knot; Darren seemed matter of fact.
‘Hanging?’
‘Hanging. But not with this beast lying around for any hunter to pick up and claim as his own.’
They dragged the carcass back to the river and from there back to the forest and the tiny clearing where they had all met earlier. Darren was out of breath, his yellow-orange fur saturated and matted with sweat. Elspeth just felt cold. Her wrist was hurting and she wished she had just a pair of shorts or even a decent pair of tall boots. The leather moks she was wearing rubbed her heels and slipped about with the sweat from her feet. Nakedness had its shortcomings.
Resting, squatting on the ground, Darren unwound his tangle-weed and flexed it a couple of times. He looked at the vegetation wall all around and finally spotted something. He pointed. ‘Look there. See?’
Peering through the tall plants, the great divided trunks of the blue-barks with their precisely straight branches sticking out like vanes, she saw what looked like a large net. It was difficult to discern exactly what she was looking at…a sort of cocoon hanging from one of the lower branches—orange laced through with black…
With a start she realized what it was and it made her heart race. Engus and Moir were hanging from the tree, locked together by their tangleweeds, legs trailing limply, faces together in a long, almost motionless kiss; each had one hand on the branch and they were tied to the girder by one end of each tangleweed. They swung slowly round, completely still, completely unbothered by anything.
Darren became very excited. Elspeth became very anxious. She was several inches taller than the youth, and a lot heavier, and she didn’t know whether or not she liked the idea of having sex whilst dangling from two whips. But then what was she here for if not to become a part of these people until she could fully understand the symbols of their culture?
She rose to her feet and took a deep breath. Darren grabbed her hand and almost dragged her to the nearest blue-bark.
‘Do what I do,’ he said calmly, and reached up so that his snare could wrap itself around the lowest branch. Elspeth did the same and the two tangleweeds curled down and reached around their bodies. With a jolt, and a gasp of surprise, Elspeth felt herself lifted from the ground, her body, the jewels in her breast, her belly, still tense with anticipation, locking against Darren’s furry torso.
For a moment she felt the breath squeezed from her body, but as the tangleweeds dragged them upwards and her right hand locked on to the stability of the branch, the plants curling further down and creeping around buttocks and thighs to support her, so she began to experience an unexpected sensuality. Darren’s lips pressed against hers and she closed her eyes, felt his warm tongue in her mouth touching her own. He penetrated her with some difficulty and she unconsciously hauled herself higher so their height difference became lessened. The tangleweed contracted and she felt herself securely held.
He moved very slowly, almost too slowly for her taste, but as they started to spin, first to the left, then back, blown by wind and the slight movements of their bodies, so her body began to whisper its pleasure, her heartbeat became a solid, impassioned thumping and her kissing motions became wild and uncompromising. She wanted to do so much and there was nothing the tangleweeds would let her do but gently twist and turn, moving ever so slightly, focussing all her awareness on the touch and interlocking of their bodies.
When they returned to the clearing Engus and Moir already had the blackwing cut into easily transportable chunks. They were sitting on the ground and Moir was watching as Engus eased the blackwing’s teeth from its gaping mouth. As Elspeth walked over to them and knelt, without saying a word, Moir giggled.
‘What’s funny?’ asked Elspeth. Her right arm ached and the skin was raised in angry weals where the tangleweed had failed to take all the pressure from her body.
‘Nothing,’ said Moir, glancing at her but looking embarrassed.
‘She’s laughing at us,’ said Darren, inspecting the divided carcass. ‘Good. You’ve done a good job.’
‘Did we look funny?’ asked Elspeth self-consciously. Engus smiled and ignored her. Moir stuck out her lower lip and stared at her brother.
‘Well?’ said Darren in mock severity. ‘Did we?’
‘Just a bit,’ said Moir.
‘You shouldn’t have been looking,’ murmured Elspeth. She was about to say that anyway they’d both looked funny too, but she didn’t.
Taking as much of the blackwing as they could carry Engus and Moir left the clearing to return to the crog. Darren helped Elspeth widen her shelter slightly and she squatted inside it for a while, watching the youth tying the remainder of the blackwing to a long piece of bark. Her intention was to return to the crog for a few hours and take immediate advantage of the fact that, having snared her first blackwing, she would now be allowed to sit on the inner perimeter of the earthworks, with the other initiates who were slowly working their way back into the heart of the settlement. She would then fly her shuttle back to the orbiting ship and record her experiences and few discoveries; then—a long bath, spend an hour in the medical unit, and sleep for a day. She was bitten, bruised and shaken, and that was too much for a girl to bear all in thirty or so hours. A tactful retreat was called for.
As she watched Darren working, so she thought of what she had learned. In all of her previous visits here she had remained outside the giant earthen walls with the two or three juveniles who were beginning their programme of self-proving. Here she had talked with both youths and adults, getting their trust and their interest; she had even been allowed to walk around the outer compound, which was nothing more than the ditch between the double walls of the crog (the dune-trench, they called it). In all that time she had struggled and worked to pick up hints as to the cultural meanings of everything she could see about her. There were omissions and additions, certainly, but the colony on Aeran had done nothing less than completely recapitulate a particular Stone Age culture; at least, the tomb-building and rock-decorating aspects of that culture. And those decorations, those symbols, were tantalizing. She had seen them in Ireland, preserved on the timeless face of stone, and she had wondered then what they had meant. But imagination is reason’s worst enemy and she had left in an agony of incomprehension. Now they were alive again, living symbols of a living culture. She had to understand what they meant and what had happened here…But all the time she was faced with a single problem: linking names and meanings to shapes and designs. She had interpreted only seven symbols in more than forty hours, and if Austin had been right then time was already running out for her.
And there was one symbol that she had never seen and, until today, never even heard mentioned. The Earthwind.
When Darren had mentioned the Earthwind he had seemed uneasy, uneasy at her lack of understanding as if it was something he couldn’t believe was true—a person not fully comprehending the symbol. He had said it was the symbol that had given them life. An earth symbol, obviously, or a womb symbol. But equally obviously it was something of basic and paramount importance to the Aerani. Her next task had to be to pick that symbol out.
Making her mental plans she hadn’t noticed that Darren was standing outside the cawl, looking upwards and away to the south.
’Finished?’ she asked him. (Was he angry because she hadn’t helped?)
‘Quiet. Listen.’
Elspeth crawled outside and stood up. Immediately she heard it, the sound that was bothering him. A whining, moaning sound, very distant…but coming closer.
She looked up through the thin canopy of this part of the forest, into the grey skies where the spiral clouds whirled across the jungle, away from the lakes and up into the snow-covered mountains. The sound carried beneath them, riding the winds, opening out across the forest.
Louder.
The rhythmic beat of pulse-engines pushing a ship forwards at subsonic speed; the moan of a stabilizer field, the shriek of metal cooling against the wind…familiar sounds to Elspeth; terrifying sounds to Darren.
The youth was white beneath his fur, and he looked at her in panic, but when she didn’t panic he stood his ground.
‘Do you know what that is?’ he asked, the words almost choking him.
‘Yes. Yes, I do…’
‘A beast? A new beast…’ He was remembering the oracle’s prediction. New beast. Something from the swamps, he was almost certainly thinking. But it wasn’t from the Aerani swamps that the flying beast had come.
The ship never entered their field of vision, riding away to the west. It was flying towards the crog and the clearing around it, and the changing rhythm of the engines made it obvious that it was slowing to land.
As it passed from earshot Elspeth found herself trembling almost as much as Darren, who walked across to the blackwing and crouched, his head bowed in silent contemplation.
‘It’s nothing to be afraid of,’ she called to him as she walked behind him. What a terrible thing to say. Before I even know what they’re doing here.
A fleeting memory of her childhood: the sprawling metropolis of New Anzar on Pliedase IV, the perpetual rumbling of rocket ships passing above the tribal city. On that day of her great pain, the ritual mastectomy that she had borne before the cameras without a whimper, without a tear, the great ships had been pouring through the skies, bringing the invader to the deserted lands in the northern hemisphere. Against the roar of the ships she had seen her body mutilated in a beautiful barbaric way. The glittering jewels sewn into the raw meat wounds. The hymns, the scream of rockets, the stench of ozone, the shuffling, crying, moaning amorphisms of the thousands of tribes crammed into the giant city, dancing and laughing, and celebrating the initiation rituals of their various ethnic groups.
She remembered her friends, so many friends, so many tears…
But as she tried to remember their names, their faces, so she found those memories were gone; there was just the agonizing motion of the knife, the deafening thunder of rockets, the wet lips of the surgeon, slashing, slashing…
Her friends had gone. The moments before that ritual were gone. As she strained to remember, to recall her life before the initiation, she turned away from Darren and began to scream. Her scream echoed through the clearing and carried away through the forest on the resonating fronds of the blue-barks. Darren watched her with shocked surprise, then ran to her and shouted her name.
She continued to scream. In her head there was a blankness, a darkness, an emptiness that she had only just noticed.
Ships…
Sobbing…
Shuffling, agony, pain…
But nothing before it! The past was slipping away already. She had known it would, and she had expected it, but the fact of its passing was a shock that could only be borne by screaming.
When she stopped sobbing Darren was still holding her. It was dark. Something had crept out of the forest and stolen the remains of the blackwing.
two
The vehicle wound across the landscape of Aeran, slowly weaving through and around the forest, crashing through dense undergrowth, skirting jagged rock formations and plunging nose first into bitterly blue rivers; rode downstream with the currents, rising and sinking, all the time watching and listening.
It emerged on to the bank of one river where shaped stone posts suggested a long-disused landing station, primitive and crude, yet still intact against the winding spiral of time, the gusting winds, drenching rains. Perhaps a hundred years since this small station had been used to moor a boat, or a raft. The vehicle shimmered yellow, creaking its disused moving parts as antennae turned, and cameras extended, swivelling in a slow circle, taking in the view of the world.
Then moved on its way, groaning, burning vegetable life as it laboured up steep slopes; cracked the air, the oxygen, leaving the tang of ozone, electric discharge snapping at the unturned, richly mineralized earth. /
Miles distant its eyes were the eyes of Karl Gorstein, ship-Meister of the Gilbert Ryle, seated in his plush, warm quarters, the lights turned low, a hint of rose in the air, ventilation rustling, ruffling the red and blue drapes which moved almost imperceptibly giving their static life force a dynamic energy; animals and landscapes rippled and changed on the walls.
’Turn left,’ murmured Gorstein into the quietness, and the eyes turned left, showed him mountains half hidden by blue tree-forms; a black shape winged across the foliage, dropped swiftly out of sight. The sun glanced sharply from scattered crystal outgrowths on the distant slopes. White caps, the white of snow: gleamed.
’Turn right,’ he said softly. From the screen came the dizzying sensation of rapid movement as the vehicle pivoted; green and purple, the unobservable low-growth swept past his vision; flash of glass; crystallized earth essence, perhaps quartz, perhaps mica, perhaps diamond, or the shards of a broken emerald, smashed by geomantic forces, scattered above the living earth. The vehicle would tell them when it returned.
Turned right. Showed shipMeister Gorstein the flowing waters of the river, widening back along the route the vehicle had already followed. More black flying shapes were settling distantly, out of sight behind the forest. There was movement nearby, almost imperceptible. As he watched, so that movement resolved into a running shape, orange, furry, small and lean. It darted out of sight and did not reappear.
