The Deep Beyond: Cuckoo's Egg / Serpent's Reach

by C. J. Cherryh

  Another climb. Duun had gotten him on his feet again. Thorn had no memory how. “The road’s not far,” Duun said. “They won’t come above it. Come on.”

  And sitting then, sitting on a flat roadside stone where Duun set him, Duun holding him with one hand about his arms and the other against his chest. There was color in the world. It was dawn.

  “Breathe. You’ve got to walk again.”

  “Yes,” he said. He questioned nothing. Duun was Duun, source and force. Like the sun, the wind. He sat a moment and got up again, his heart hammering, his body swaying in the height of the world, with the treetops like black water whispering below them.

  They walked. He and Duun. Duun’s hand in his belt; Duun dragged his sound arm about his ribs and held it by the wrist. Going was easier on the road. Thorn’s feet discovered pain, lacerations that small stones wore at. His mouth was dry as the silken dust. The wind was cold on his bare skin and Duun was warm.

  Another rest. “Sit down,” Duun said. “Sit down.” And drew him against him and held him in his arms.

  “Why did they shoot?” Thorn asked, because that answer eluded him. “Duun, why?”

  “You scared them,” Duun said. “They thought you’d harm them.”

  Scared them. Scared them. Thorn recalled the children. He shivered. Duun’s arms clenched him hard.

  “Fool,” Duun said. He deserved it. He was ashamed.

  He slept. He opened his eyes on the ceiling of the big room in the house with no memory how he had gotten from the road. He heard Duun coming and going. (Guard your sleep, minnow. Dared he sleep?)

  “Drink,” Duun ordered him, lifting his head, setting a cup to his lips. He turned his head away, not wanting to be twice victim. (Fool. Won’t you learn?) “Drink, damn you, Thorn.”

  He blinked, all hazy. “Livhl—”

  “Dammit, no. I’m telling you drink, this time.”

  He drank. It was sweetened tea. It hit his stomach and lay there inert and he was glad to have his head down at level again before it should come up. “I lost,” he said. “You beat me, Duun.”

  “Be still.” Duun’s maimed hand brushed at his hair. (Duun holding him, Duun playing games, Duun touching him that way long, long ago.) “Meds are on their way. I called them. Hear?”

  “Don’t want meds.” (Ellud standing in the room. An old friend, Duun said. Be polite.) “Duun, tell them don’t.”

  “Hush. Be still.” The touch came at his hair again. At his face. “Rest. Sleep. It’s all right. Hear?”

  (Duun in the bedroom door at night. Go to sleep, little fish. There were no black threads in the doorway. No games. Go to sleep now, minnow.)

  V

  “They’ll pay for it,” Ellud said. Ellud had come with the meds. The house stank of disinfectants, of bandage and gel and blood. And Thorn’s distress. Duun folded his arms and gazed at the hearthstones. At dead ash. “They have to,” Ellud said. “Don’t they?”

  There was criticism implied. Duun looked around at Ellud and stared. Ellud flinched as Ellud had done sixteen years ago. But it took longer. There was wrath in Ellud now. There was offended justice. “Anything,” Duun reminded him hoarsely. “But no. Don’t charge them.”

  “You’ve left me with no choice. They fired on you.”

  “Did they? I don’t remember that.”

  “They called the magistrate. They confessed. They know what they did.”

  “So.” Duun walked away toward the closed door. The medicinal smells offended his nostrils. His ears lay down. He limped. Every muscle he owned was strained. Ellud wore his city clothes, immaculate. Duun wore nothing but a small-kilt. And let the scars show. He might have worn the hatani cloak. He had left it hanging. “I’ll talk to them, Ellud. No charges.”

  “They can’t do a thing like that and get away with it—”

  “Because I’m sacrosanct?” Duun turned back to him, ears flat. “You promised me anything, Ellud. I’m asking you. No charges. Deed Sheon back to them.”

  “They tried to kill you!”

  “They damn near did. Good for them. They’re not bad, for farmers. Do I have to take this on my shoulders too?”

  Ellud was silent a moment. His mouth drew down.

  “So you get what ought to make you happy,” Duun said. “I’m coming in. I trust you’ll find a place.”

  More long silence. “It’s about time. It’s about time, Duun. I’ll have a copter up here. Lift you out.”

  “He’ll walk down,” Duun said. “Day after tomorrow. He’ll be fit.”

  “Past them? Gods, hasn’t there been enough trouble?”

  “He’s hatani, Ellud.” Duun met the darkness in Ellud’s stare and matched it. “Understand that. He’ll walk out on his own.”

  • • •

  Thorn gained his feet after the meds left. Duun thought he would. “Sit down,” Duun said, sitting himself, on one of the risers that rimmed the room. The floor sand was trampled, dotted with darkness. Thorn had bled on it, amply. Thorn hung now in the doorway with his arm slung in a cord about his neck; his skin had an ugly waxen color, excepting the arm, where blood-reddened gels plastered an incision. There would be a scar. A long one. It had missed a major nerve: so the meds said. The bone was chipped but not broken. “You’ve got a lot of plasm in you for blood, boy. Left most you owned down in that valley. Come sit down.”

  Thorn came. Duun was polishing his weapons. Thorn sank down on the riser on his knees and sat down carefully, one leg off. There was sweat on his hairless brow. His hair clung to it.

  “We’re going,” Duun said, “to the city. We’ll live there now.”

  “Leave here—”

  Duun looked up at him. Sheon was lost. Twice now. There was darkness in his stare; and Thorn stared back at him with alien, clouded eyes, with thoughts going on, and dread. (Why did they shoot, Duun? Is this revenge? Is this against me? Was I wrong, Duun? What did I do, down there?)

  “I don’t want to go, Duun.”

  “They’ll come later and gather up the things we’ll want. These—” Duun polished the blade. “These we take.”

  “I don’t want to go.”

  “I know that.” Duun looked at him. Tears shimmered in Thorn’s eyes. “The countryfolk get the land. It’ll belong to them now. It’ll pay, maybe, for what I had to do. Do you understand me, Thorn? Haras? Do you hear?”

  “Yes, Duun-hatani.”

  “We’ll fly out of here. We’ll go to a place where the wind stinks and you won’t understand a thing you see. You’ll ask me your questions in private. There’ll be people around us. Always. No more hunting. No more woods. Just steel. Just thousands and thousands of people. A lot of shonun like that life. You’ll learn to.”

  Thorn bowed his head onto his arm, against his knee. Duun was aware of him. Duun looked only at the blade, gently polished the razor steel in small strokes of an oiled cloth. Oilsmell and steel. Steel and oil. His half-hand held the cloth, the whole left hand held the blade.

  “Give it away, Thorn. You’re hatani. Hatani own nothing. Only the weapons, the cloak on your back. This time it’s only a place you lose. When you’re what you will be, you’ll own nothing at all. I only used this place. You and I. It was a stage. It’s gone now.”

  Thorn’s face lifted. He had smeared his face with wiping it. His lashes were wet. “I’m sorry, Duun.”

  Duun’s hands stopped in a long silence. Then he took up the motion again. “You lost a year, perhaps. A year here. Maybe two. Then we’d have gone, all the same. It’s not much, two years. Your eyes are running. Do that tomorrow and I’ll beat you. Do you hear?”

  “Yes,” Thorn said.

  • • •

  They started in the dawn: they walked slowly on the winding track and there was no anger evident in Duun. “Joiit,” Duun said once, naming a birdsong. Thorn thought then that in t
he people-teeming place Duun described to him there could be no birds; and the sound from the woods made his heart ache. The very wind in the leaves did that. The silken feel of the dust under his sore feet. His arm ached as he walked. His head was light. They had closed up the house and walked out of the yard. And once Duun had looked back and Thorn did, just when the house was going out of view. It looked no different than it ever had when they left it in their hunting. The light was the same on the brown stone walls, with the hiyi growing here and there in lavender-edged green; all of it was from this distance, in the morning, stained and tinted like the earth. It was like every morning. The house appeared to wait for them. Would go on waiting, through the days. Someone would come, Duun said, to strip the rooms. The countryfolk would come and take it back. The children would explore the rooms, play tag in the yard—

  —hunt in the woods. They would know the old tree that was good to lie on in the sun; the hollow rock that overlooked the little pond back in the hills; they would know the tracks and trails where Duun had led him—

  Thorn shed no tears. When his heart hurt that much he looked away at the sky, the road, he said something, no matter what, he clenched the fingers of his wounded arm, which made it ache and took his mind away.

  He did that when the bird sang. And when the wind blew in the leaves that way; and when he realized he could smell things even scent-blind as he was, like dust, and grass, and the rough-raw scent of lugh-flowers, which was strong when one bruised them, when Thorn-the-child pulled off their heads and found his hands all sticky with sap, all one flavor with the sunlight and the giddy golden blooms—

  Everything came flooding in. Sights afflicted him with farewells, all along the road. And Duun was silent for the most part. (Duun was young here too. He knew the old tree, the stone— the paths— he showed them to me. I took them from him. Duun!)

  The trees spread away from the road in a purpling-green flood of treetops. Beyond them the valley fell away where countryfolk lived, a pale haze of land beyond that, flat as flat: and vast sky, delirious blued violet, and streamers of cloud like pond-ice, high, high above the plain, going off into milky white.

  Terror afflicted Thorn. The sky was all too large beyond the mountain. To fly, Duun said. There were machines; Duun had mentioned them. Now and again when the meds came he had seen one far away, before it went out of sight behind the mountain. Sometimes there were white trails in the sky: planes, Duun said. People fly in them.

  (Where, Duun? Where do they go? Why do they go? Can they see us? Thorn-the-child had waved at such planes, standing dizzily atop the tallest rock he could climb: “Here I am, here, here!”)

  (Notice me. Give me a sign you see. Here I am, are you like me? Do you see other children where you go? Have they skins like mine? And eyes like mine? And have they five fingers too?)

  (Thousands and thousands of shonun in the city. Will there be some like me?)

  The road wound down and down, among the trees and out of them. Far away was a sound the wind never made, that grew: machine-sound, thumping in ominous accents that always spoke of meds.

  “They’re coming in,” Duun said. “They’ll be early. Waiting for us.”

  The strangers came up the road to meet them. Not the meds, but others, dressed from neck to foot in blue and gray. Wearing weapons. Thorn hesitated when he saw them, but Duun kept walking, so he knew they were acceptable. “You didn’t need to,” Duun told them when they met. “We have orders,” one of them said; that was all. Thorn stood still in the encounter at a turning of the road. They looked at him, these strangers, and they looked away, as if he had no importance, being only an appendage, Duun’s. And the blue-clad folk led off, walking down again, with one of them behind them, another by Duun’s side.

  The mountain stopped being theirs then. Strangers owned it. Strangers came to get in the way of their last moments with it, his and Duun’s. He knew why Duun wanted them away. But Duun would not tell them no, and walked without looking at things like trees and stones, as Duun had looked about him before they came. Without talking to him. Duun was bitter. Duun hurt. Thorn knew it. (My fault. My doing. All of it. They should take me and go away and Duun would still have his mountain.) But no one offered Thorn that choice. Perhaps it did not exist.

  Down and down, the last little distance to the flat, around the last turning of the road.

  A machine sat in the meadow; it had huge blades. It had flattened a circle all around itself in the milky green grass. There were broad dusty roads that met there, and people stood there at that crossing, far removed.

  “We’ve kept them off,” said a man who had not spoken before. Only not a man like the Duun, like Ellud, like the meds. This one was broader-hipped, walked differently, had a quiet, smaller voice. Woman, Thorn thought, hearing that, and his heart picked up its beats.

  (“Women are,” Duun had told him, when he was small, “us and different.”)

  (“How different?” Thorn asked.)

  (“Inside. Outside, in some things. They have a place inside they make babies. Men put them there; women make them.”)

  (“How?” child-Thorn asked. “That does it,” Duun said, and showed him what this was. “I haven’t got that,” Thorn had said, looking at himself. “Duun, I haven’t got that. Mine’s all outside.”)

  (“You’re different,” Duun had said.)

  (“Am I a woman?”)

  (“No,” Duun said. “You’re a child. You’re going to be a man.”)

  (“How do women make babies?”)

  Duun had not answered then. Or he had forgotten. Thorn knew the answer later. (“See this,” Duun had said. Showed him the young inside a deiggen Thorn had killed. “They’re babies. You ought not to kill the does. See the eartips. Don’t hunt that kind.”)

  Thorn remembered that. But he had gotten a deiggen-baby out of its womb and laid it out on a flat rock to see it. It was not the death he remembered strongest, or the blood. It was that it had had no hair, was naked-skinned like him.

  (I was born and grew wrong. They got me out too soon.)

  He watched the foenin mate. (That’s how? He was appalled and interested at once in the black bodies one on the other’s back, the curious spasms they made as if one of them were sick.)

  (“Shonun do it face to face, usually,” Duun said. Thorn was twice appalled. It was odd enough to do from the rear. Having someone watching back right in one’s face—)

  This— woman— had a gun on her hip. She swayed when she walked. She had a bright white crest but she had shaved it far back as did all the cityfolk, not like Duun’s, which was black and long and swung freely when he walked.

  Thorn thought of the foenin. Clenched his hand to drive that thought away. He had made enough difficulty for Duun. It was not spring. It was not appropriate. There was something about smell, but Duun refused to discuss this with him.

  They walked out onto the flat toward the machine and foenin blurred in the waft of oil and warm metal. The copter. They would go up in the air in that. It looked too heavy. Thorn forgot about women. His heart began to beat in terror. (Fool, he told himself. Duun had warned him. The thing had gotten here, it would get away again with them inside. He would not be afraid in front of strangers. He would not stink of fear where others not scent-blind could smell it. He would not shame Duun. I will beat you, Duun had said, to get his attention; now Thorn remembered that and knew why Duun had threatened him. Not to be shamed by him. He would not flinch when they led him in.)

  • • •

  It was the countryfolk Duun watched, the spectators the guards had kept far off on the other road. He kept his ears aslant, shutting out what words the wind might bring him. He smelled the scent of them even at this range. His mind painted him hate; and fear. He was a fool to shut down his hearing; one of them might have brought a gun.

  But they had called the magistrate and turned themselves in. In fear
, he thought bitterly, of more general retribution. In responsibility, late arrived. Sixteen years they had waited, in the hope of Sheon’s land.

  (So it’s yours. Enjoy it. And be damned.)

  He was ashamed of the thought. He had come here for virtue and took away—

  —took away this shadow at his side. And the cold stares of those who had seen a hatani bend his vows. Who had lived for sixteen years in fear of what happened on the mountain they coveted.

  Well, well. It was not a mistake, perhaps. Duun looked toward the copter, exchanged perfunctory courtesy with the guard-captain, snagged Thorn with a gentle clawtip on his inner arm. “Come on,” Duun said looking at the captain. (Be done with it. Don’t draw it out. Get us out of here.)

  Thorn walked by him, lifted his head to wonder at the blades— Duun hit him in the back. “Fool, keep your head low beneath these things!” Thorn ducked and went; but the rotor was only lazily turning now. Not even enough for wind.

  Up the steps then, to a metal world, to plastic seats, the smell of oil and fuel. Duun settled Thorn— “There, that’s the buckle. Push, that’s right. That lets it loose. That tightens it. Keep it on.” He looked Thorn in the eyes, which no one else would meet, and saw stark terror there. Duun frowned and worked his way past Thorn to his own seat to buckle in.

  The crew took places. The guards climbed aboard aft, making the craft rock on its runners. The pilot brought the engines up— whup, whup, whup! Thorn looked toward the side window, looked ahead, looked his way. Duun reached over the shared armrest and gripped his arm, once, sharply, with the claws all the way out. (Behave!)

  Thorn settled then. And the whup-whup-whup grew louder, the aircraft tilting as it lifted, tilted and swung its tail about as the countryfolk ran in the dust the blades kicked up.

  Wh-wh-wh—! Sky in one view, ground in the other. He gave a look at Thorn, saw the cords in Thorn’s neck stand out as he braced himself. Another grip of claws. Thorn visibly relaxed. Turned his face to Duun’s with studied serenity.