The clouds were turning color with the sinking of the hidden sun. They hung like a canopy of hot gold washed in blood. It was utterly silent, except for the birds. Birds. You never heard birds like that down in the low places. Matt Harker rolled over and sat up slowly. He felt as though he had been beaten. There was a sickness in him, and a shame, and the old dark anger lying coiled and deadly above his heart.
Before him lay the long slope of grass to the river, which bent away to the left out of sight behind a spur of granite. Beyond the slope was a broad plain and then a forest of gigantic trees. They seemed to float in the coppery haze, their dark branches outspread like wings and starred with flowers. The air was cool, with no taint of mud or rot. The grass was rich, the soil beneath it clean and sweet.
Rory McLaren moaned softly and Harker turned. His leg looked bad. He was in a sort of stupor, his skin flushed and dry. Harker swore softly, wondering what he was going to do.
He looked back toward the plain, and he saw the girl.
He didn’t know how she got there. Perhaps out of the bushes that grew in thick clumps on the slope. She could have been there a long time, watching. She was watching now, standing quite still about forty feet away. A great scarlet butterfly clung to her shoulder, moving its wings with lazy delight.
She seemed more like a child than a woman. She was naked, small and slender and exquisite. Her skin had a faint translucent hint of green under its whiteness. Her hair, curled short to her head, was deep blue, and her eyes were blue also, and very strange.
Harker stared at her, and she at him, neither of them moving. A bright bird swooped down and hovered by her lips for a moment, caressing her with its beak. She touched it and smiled, but she did not take her eyes from Harker.
Harker got to his feet, slowly, easily. He said, “Hello.”
She did not move, nor make a sound, but quite suddenly a pair of enormous birds, beaked and clawed like eagles and black as sin, made a whistling rush down past Harker’s head and returned, circling. Harker sat down again.
The girl’s strange eyes moved from him, upward to the crack in the hillside whence he had come. Her lips didn’t move, but her voice—or something—spoke clearly inside Harker’s head.
“You came from—There.” There had tremendous feeling in it, and none of it nice.
Harker said, “Yes. A telepath, huh?”
“But you’re not…” A picture of the golden swimmers formed in Harker’s mind. It was recognizable, but hatred and fear had washed out all the beauty, leaving only horror.
Harker said, “No.” He explained about himself and McLaren. He told about Sim. He knew she was listening carefully to his mind, testing it for truth. He was not worried about what she would find. “My friend is hurt,” he said. “We need food and shelter.”
For some time there was no answer. The girl was looking at Harker again. His face, the shape and texture of his body, his hair, and then his eyes. He had never been looked at quite that way before. He began to grin. A provocative, be-damned-to-you grin that injected a surprising amount of light and charm into his sardonic personality.
“Honey,” he said, “you are terrific. Animal, mineral, or vegetable?”
She tipped her small round head in surprise, and asked his own question right back. Harker laughed. She smiled, her mouth making a small inviting V, and her eyes had sparkles in them. Harker started toward her.
Instantly the birds warned him back. The girl laughed, a mischievous ripple of merriment. “Come,” she said, and turned away.
Harker frowned. He leaned over and spoke to McLaren, with peculiar gentleness. He managed to get the boy erect, and then swung him across his shoulders, staggering slightly under the weight. McLaren said distinctly, “I’ll be back before he’s born.”
Harker waited until the girl had started, keeping his distance. The two black birds followed watchfully. They walked out across the thick grass of the plain, toward the trees. The sky was now the color of blood.
A light breeze caught the girl’s hair and played with it. Matt Harker saw that the short curled strands were broad and flat, like blue petals.
3
It was a long walk to the forest. The top of the plateau seemed to be bowl-shaped, protected by encircling cliffs. Harker, thinking back to that first settlement long ago, decided that this place was infinitely better. It was like the visions he had seen in fever-dreams—the Promised Land. The coolness and cleanness of it were like having weights removed from your lungs and heart and body.
The rejuvenating air didn’t make up for McLaren’s weight, however. Presently Harker said, “Hold it,” and sat down, tumbling McLaren gently onto the grass. The girl stopped. She came back a little way and watched Harker, who was blowing like a spent horse. He grinned up at her.
“I’m shot,” he said. “I’ve been too busy for a man of my age. Can’t you get hold of somebody to help me carry him?”
Again she studied him with puzzled fascination. Night was closing in, a clear indigo, less dark than at sea level. Her eyes had a curious luminosity in the gloom.
“Why do you do that?” she asked.
“Do what?”
“Carry it.”
By “it” Harker guessed she meant McLaren. He was suddenly, coldly conscious of a chasm between them that no amount of explanation could bridge. “He’s my friend. He’s…I have to.”
She studied his thought and then shook her head. “I don’t understand. It’s spoiled—” her thought-image was a combination of “broken,”
“finished,” and “useless”—“Why carry it around?”
“McLaren’s not an ‘it.’ He’s a man like me, my friend. He’s hurt, and I have to help him.”
“I don’t understand.” Her shrug said it was his funeral, also that he was crazy. She started on again, paying no attention to Harker’s call for her to wait. Perforce, Harker picked up McLaren and staggered on again. He wished Sim were here, and immediately wished he hadn’t thought of Sim. He hoped Sim had died quickly before—before what? Oh God, it’s dark and I’m scared and my belly’s all gone to cold water, and that thing trotting ahead of me through the blue haze…
The thing was beautiful, though. Beautifully formed, fascinating, a curved slender gleam of moonlight, a chaliced flower holding the mystic, scented nectar of the unreal, the unknown, the undiscovered. Harker’s blood began, in spite of himself, to throb with a deep excitement.
They came under the fragrant shadows of the trees. The forest was open, with broad mossy ridges and clearings. There were flowers underfoot, but no brush, and clumps of ferns. The girl stopped and stretched up her hand. A feathery branch, high out of her reach, bent and brushed her face, and she plucked a great pale blossom and set it in her hair.
She turned and smiled at Harker. He began to tremble, partly with weariness, partly with something else.
“How do you do that?” he asked.
She was puzzled. “The branch, you mean? Oh, that!” She laughed. It was the first sound he had heard her make, and it shot through him like warm silver. “I just think I would like a flower, and it comes.”
Teleportation, telekinetic energy—what did the books call it? Back on Earth they knew something about that, but the colony hadn’t had much time to study even its own meager library. There had been some religious sect that could make roses bend into their hands. Old wisdom, the force behind the Biblical miracles, just the infinite power of thought. Very simple. Yeah. Harker wondered uneasily whether she could work it on him, too. But then, he had a brain of his own. Or did he?
“What’s your name?” he asked.
She gave a clear, trilled sound. Harker tried to whistle it and gave up. Some sort of tone-language, he guessed, without words as he knew them. It sounded as though they—her people, whatever they were—had copied the birds.
“I’ll call you Button,” he said. “Bachelor Button—but you wouldn’t know.”
She picked the image out of his mind and sent it bac
k to him. Blue fringe-topped flowers nodding in his mother’s china bowl. She laughed again and sent her black birds away and led on into the forest, calling out like an oriole. Other voices answered her, and presently, racing the light wind between the trees, her people came.
They were like her. There were males, slender little creatures like young boys, and girls like Button. There were several hundred of them, all naked, all laughing and curious, their lithe pliant bodies flitting moth-fashion through the indigo shadows. They were topped with petals—Harker called them that, though he still wasn’t sure—of all colors from blood-scarlet to pure white.
They trilled back and forth. Apparently Button was telling them all about how she found Harker and McLaren. The whole mob pushed on slowly through the forest and ended finally in a huge clearing where there were only scattered trees. A spring rose and made a little lake, and then a stream that wandered off among the ferns.
More of the little people came, and now he saw the young ones. All sizes, from tiny thin creatures on up, replicas of their elders. There were no old ones. There were none with imperfect or injured bodies. Harker, exhausted and on the thin edge of a fever-bout, was not encouraged.
He set McLaren down by the spring. He drank, gasping like an animal, and bathed his head and shoulders. The forest people stood in a circle, watching. They were silent now. Harker felt coarse and bestial, somehow, as though he had belched loudly in church.
He turned to McLaren. He bathed him, helped him drink, and set about fixing the leg. He needed light, and he needed flame.
There were dry leaves, and mats of dead moss in the rocks around the spring. He gathered a pile of these. The forest people watched. Their silent luminous stare got on Harker’s nerves. His hands were shaking so that he made four tries with his flint and steel before he got a spark.
The tiny flicker made the silent ranks stir sharply. He blew on it. The flames licked up, small and pale at first, then taking hold, growing, crackling. He saw their faces in the springing light, their eyes stretched with terror. A shrill crying broke from them and then they were gone, like rustling leaves before a wind.
Harker drew his knife. The forest was quiet now. Quiet but not at rest. The skin crawled on Harker’s back, over his scalp, drew tight on his cheekbones. He passed the blade through the flame. McLaren looked up at him. Harker said, “It’s okay, Rory,” and hit him carefully on the point of the jaw. McLaren lay still. Harker stretched out the swollen leg and went to work.
It was dawn again. He lay by the spring in the cool grass, the ashes of his fire gray and dead beside the dark stains. He felt rested, relaxed, and the fever seemed to have gone out of him. The air was like wine.
He rolled over on his back. There was a wind blowing. It was a live, strong wind, with a certain smell to it. The trees were rollicking, almost shouting with pleasure. Harker breathed deeply. The smell, the pure clean edge…
Suddenly he realized that the clouds were high, higher than he had ever known them to be. The wind swept them up, and the daylight was bright, so bright that…
Harker sprang up. The blood rushed in him. There was a stinging blur in his eyes. He began to run, toward a tall tree, and he flung himself upward into the branches and climbed, recklessly, into the swaying top.
The bowl of the valley lay below him, green, rich, and lovely. The gray granite cliffs rose around it, grew higher in the direction from which the wind blew. Higher and higher, and beyond them, far beyond, were mountains, flung towering against the sky.
On the mountains, showing through the whipping veils of cloud, there was snow, white and cold and blindingly pure, and as Harker watched there was a gleam, so quick and fleeting that he saw it more with his heart than with his eyes…
Sunlight. Snowfields, and above them, the sun.
After a long time he clambered down again into the silence of the glade. He stood there, not moving, seeing what he had not had time to see before.
Rory McLaren was gone. Both packs, with food and climbing ropes and bandages and flint and steel were gone. The short spears were gone. Feeling on his hip, Harker found nothing but bare flesh. His knife and even his breech-clout had been taken.
A slender, exquisite body moved forward from the shadows of the trees. Huge white blossoms gleamed against the curly blue that crowned the head. Luminous eyes glanced up at Harker, full of mockery and a subtle animation. Button smiled.
Matt Harker walked toward Button, not hurrying, his hard sinewy face blank of expression. He tried to keep his mind that way, too. “Where is the other one, my friend?”
“In the finish-place.” She nodded vaguely toward the cliffs near where Harker and McLaren had escaped from the caves. Her thought-image was somewhere between rubbish-heap and cemetery, as nearly as Harker could translate it. It was also completely casual, a little annoyed that time should be wasted on such trifles.
“Did you…is he still alive?”
“It was when we put it there. It will be all right, it will just wait until it—stops. Like all of them.”
“Why was he moved? Why did you…”
“It was ugly.” Button shrugged. “It was broken, anyway.” She stretched her arms upward and lifted her head to the wind. A shiver of delight ran through her. She smiled again at Harker, sidelong.
He tried to keep his anger hidden. He started walking again, not as though he had any purpose in mind, bearing toward the cliffs. His way lay past a bush with yellow flowers and thorny, pliant branches. Suddenly it writhed and whipped him across the belly. He stopped short and doubled over, hearing Button’s laughter.
When he straightened up she was in front of him. “It’s red,” she said, surprised, and laid little pointed fingers on the scratches left by the thorns. She seemed thrilled and fascinated by the color and feel of his blood. Her fingers moved, probing the shape of his muscles, the texture of his skin and the dark hair on his chest. They drew small lines of fire along his neck, along the ridge of his jaw, touching his features one by one, his eyelids, his black brows.
“What are you?” whispered her mind to his.
“This.” Harker put his arms around her, slowly. Her flesh slid cool and strange under his hands, sending an indescribable shudder through him, partly pleasure, partly revulsion. He bent his head. Her eyes deepened, lakes of blue fire, and then he found her lips. They were cool and strange like the rest of her, pliant, scented with spice, the same perfume that came with sudden overpowering sweetness from her curling petals.
Harker saw movement in the forest aisles, a clustering of bright flower-heads. Button drew back. She took his hand and led him away, off toward the river and the quiet ferny places along its banks. Glancing up, Harker saw that the two black birds were following overhead.
“You are really plants, then? Flowers, like those?” He touched the white blossoms on her head.
“You are really a beast, then? Like the furry, snarling things that climb up through the pass sometimes?”
They both laughed. The sky above them was the color of clean fleece. The warm earth and crushed ferns were sweet beneath them. “What pass?” asked Harker.
“Over there.” She pointed off toward the rim of the valley. “It goes down to the sea, I think. Long ago we used to go down there but there’s no need, and the beasts make it dangerous.”
“Do they,” said Harker, and kissed her in the hollow below her chin. “What happens when the beasts come?”
Button laughed. Before he could stir Harker was trapped fast in a web of creepers and tough fern, and the black birds were screeching and clashing their sharp beaks in his face.
“That happens,” Button said. She stroked the ferns. “Our cousins understand us, even better than the birds.”
Harker lay sweating, even after he was free again. Finally he said, “Those creatures in the underground lake. Are they your cousins?”
Button’s fear-thought thrust against his mind like hands pushing away. “No, don’t…Long, long ago the legend is that
this valley was a huge lake, and the Swimmers lived in it. They were a different species from us, entirely. We came from the high gorges, where there are only barren cliffs now. This was long ago. As the lake receded, we grew more numerous and began to come down, and finally there was a battle and we drove the Swimmers over the falls into the black lake. They have tried and tried to get out, to get back to the light, but they can’t. They send their thoughts through to us sometimes. They…” She broke off. “I don’t want to talk about them any more.”
“How would you fight them if they did get out?” asked Harker easily. “Just with the birds and the growing things?”
Button was slow in answering. Then she said, “I will show you one way.” She laid her hand across his eyes. For a moment there was only darkness. Then a picture began to form—people, his own people, seen as reflections in a dim and distorted mirror but recognizable. They poured into the valley through a notch in the cliffs, and instantly every bush and tree and blade of grass was bent against them. They fought, slashing with their knives, making headway, but slowly. And then, across the plain, came a sort of fog, a thin drifting curtain of soft white.
It came closer, moving with force of its own, not heeding the wind. Harker saw that it was thistledown. Seeds, borne on silky wings. It settled over the people trapped in the brush. It was endless and unhurrying, covering them all with a fine fleece. They began to writhe and cry out with pain, with a terrible fear. They struggled, but they couldn’t get away.
The white down dropped away from them. Their bodies were covered with countless tiny green shoots, sucking the chemicals from the living flesh and already beginning to grow.
Button’s spoken thought cut across the image. “I have seen your thoughts, some of them, since the moment you came out of the caves. I can’t understand them, but I can see our plains gashed to the raw earth and our trees cut down and everything made ugly. If your kind came here, we would have to go. And the valley belongs to us.”
The Best of Leigh Brackett Page 9
