But Hiraethog was an old cruster.
It was tradition to help. Grigor couldn’t not help. It flew against every digging instinct. This deep in the ground there was a network of trust. And one of those items was that diggers would pay any cost to rescue diggers. How else could some walk into the mines day after day, knowing the risks?
“Gods below,” Grigor muttered angrily. Brace yourself dwarf!
Yes. He was a dwarf, he was tough, he could do this. He unslung his pick-axe. An armed dwarf.
What would a pick-axe do against a dragon? he wondered.
Not much.
Hiraethog’s voice began to beg for help again. Grigor rubbed his forehead and smeared muddy sweat over his brows.
Okay. This wasn’t bracing, or chipping away at a seam, but a level head and quick reflexes still applied.
A pick-axe was useless. Keep a granite head, Grigor, he told himself. Nice and stable, no crumbling.
Grigor fumbled with his mid-pack, and pulled out explosives. One stick in each hand.
He shook his head. Hiraethog was seeing things in the dark, and that meant Grigor might too. He bit the long cords off, like Hiraethog had. One went back in the pack, the other he kept in his hand.
He had to be careful not to blow himself up. This dragon was able to manipulate what people saw, and that meant Grigor could trust nothing.
Or maybe it was hallucinogenic gases. He wasn’t sure. Take the simpler assumption, he thought: everyone saw something, it’s manipulating us.
How?
Doesn’t matter, think about that later. Just live for now.
Grigor took a set of rapid, successive breaths and scrambled out in the dark towards the newly created pile of rubble Hiraethog had brought down on himself. Grigor avoided Michno, doing his best to not even think about the dwarf’s fate.
He carefully felt his way along, occasionally flicking his lighter on and then off again as quickly as he could to find Hiraethog trapped under a four-foot chunk of rock. Blood stained his overalls, but he could still speak, and move. Somewhat.
“Grigor, help,” Hiraethog moaned.
Grigor shoved his fingers under the stone and pushed. He could hardly move it, and Hiraethog began spitting something and crying when he did.
He stopped and sat next to him.
“I’m so sorry,” Grigor said.
“Knew of a group...” Hiraethog grunted, his voice burbly with blood, “dug under like this. All killed each other with dynamite and axes. Do me a favor...” he raised his head.
But Grigor saw a flash of scaly movement in the rockpile near where he had come from.
“Something moved over there.”
Hiraethog turned his head, skullcap scraping as he did so.
“Yes.” Hiraethog took a deep breath and moved his hands around, fumbling for something. He grabbed Grigor’s hands and put something in them.
Grigor looked down at the dynamite stick in his hands warily.
“Take it,” Hiraethog said. “You’ll need all you can to fight the damn thing. Just... leave me something.” He patted about and grabbed hold of Grigor’s pick. Grigor unfastened it.
The point clinked against the rock as Hiraethog let it drop, too weak from all the movement to even hold it. It would do him little good, Grigor thought, standing up.
Another glint in the deep dark over by the rocks caught his eye. Grigor began to skulk his slow way over.
There!
It was no giant beast with wings. It was a worm. He could see it through the dark: a worm with glittering quartz scales wiggling over the rock. A pick would do nothing against the creature’s skin.
But dynamite would.
Grigor lit a fuse and threw the dynamite. No waiting with it, like Hiraethog. He flung it clear and the stick clattered into the rocks.
“Grigor?” It was Michno’s voice. Surely another trick of the mind.
The explosion deafened anything further. Grigor kept down behind a solid chunk of rock, his eyes closed against the flash that lit up the inside of the back of his eyeballs. He looked around the edge as the explosion’s echoes died away.
No worm visible in the dark.
Grigor fired the lighter, and the flickering ochre licked at the bare edge of the rock pile.
When he strained his eyes he saw blood and flesh stained the rocks. Grigor had thrown the dynamite at the wrong rockpile. His hiding space had been blown open and Michno’s body scattered around in rags of flesh from the blast.
Grigor shoved at the rock and then pounded it with a fist. Tricked by his own senses again. He bit his lip to keep the scream in and stay alive.
He’d killed Michno.
The sound of gravel hitting the floor startled him. He flicked the lighter off and moved several paces away from his location.
“Grigor?” Hiraethog yelled. “Are you ne...”
His voice trailed off. Grigor retraced the path back to Hiraethog, smacking his shins into a square slab of rock and subvocalizing the curse of pain.
“Hiraethog?” he whispered.
There was no reply. Grigor eventually found the boulder Hiraethog lay under, and ran his fingers down along it until he encountered Hiraethog.
Something was wrong.
Grigor moved his hands over to Hiraethog’s face, and found the pick instead.
“Oh no,” Grigor said to himself. “No.”
He flicked the lighter, just for the spark. In that brief instant of light he saw Hiraethog’s grubby face staring back at him, lifeless, bloody, the pick rammed through his right eyeball towards the brain.
Had he been fooled into it, or just chosen to kill himself?
Grigor wasn’t sure.
He took the last two sticks of explosive and threw them back under Hiraethog’s legs, where he couldn’t reach them. This way he couldn’t blow himself up.
He swallowed and pulled the pick out of Hiraethog’s head. It slid free with a faint sucking sound, and Grigor used a spare piece of cloth from his back pocket to clean the blood off.
Without dynamite, knowing what he was up against, Grigor felt his way across the rock, looking for a place to burrow.
Think rock, his crusty grandmother had told him once. Think it, breathe it, be it.
Grigor found a crawlspace small enough to fit him, yet large enough that he could still swing the axe at anything coming in the opening.
I’m not coming out, he told himself as he settled his back against the hard, irregular rock. It’ll just have to come get me. He would wait for the rescue party. They would come.
Diggers always rescued the trapped.
• • •
Grigor hunkered down for hours. He could hear water dripping somewhere, a steady monotonous plink that made him flinch every three seconds.
He sweated. His clothes clung to his back and belly.
Without sight in the darkness he began seeing specks of movement and light. He could imagine just about any shape about to menace him, though he knew just by placing his palm against the rock in front of him there was nothing there.
He kept the pick in front of him though. His muscles tense, expectant, just waiting for a shuffle, or snort, and then they would explode forward to kill it.
The sound of bones cracking came to him. Chewing and loud swallowing.
It went on for forever, and Grigor shivered in his hole. At least, he told himself, you know where the creature is, and what it is doing.
He tried to count time, marking of seconds, then minutes. He stopped after he got to another hour. The creature had stopped eating, moved, and continued. Michno and Hiraethog would not even have the honor of being recovered and sealed into their family catacomb.
It was a final insult. The numbing terror of the past hours turned into rage. If he died doing it, he would try to kill this thing with his own dirty hands.
Another sound carried into the cavern.
A steam drill.
The faint mechanical whine was unmistakable. His cramped
muscles ached to let him out into the air, which would be fresher outside.
Wait, Grigor told himself. It must be a trap.
Yes, but suppose it isn’t? he wondered. If the rescuers come in, unprepared for the kinds of traps this thing can create, more will die.
Grigor groaned to himself.
As the sound of the drill got louder and louder, he tried to remember everything since walking into the cavern. He had seen the dragon with flames, seen it as a scaly worm, and seen glimpses of movement.
But hearing?
He’d heard it eating. If it could have, it would have masked that.
Or maybe it was softening him up, driving him all shadowy like some madman with the dripping water and sounds of eating.
Grigor hefted his axe. The sound of steam drill got louder, until the sound of crumbling rock falling into the cavern overpowered it. Distant shouts echoed in, and metal scraped against rock.
He could trust he sense of touch, and doubt anything else.
The sound of dwarves worming their way through the tunnel floated around him, and Grigor slowly came out of his niche. Cold air hit him. It was fresh.
Grigor kept his eyes closed and began swinging his pick around in figure eights. Behind, in front, over, back again. His triceps groaned, his back threatened to quit.
He couldn’t walk around just yet, the thing would hear him. So he stood by his niche, swinging, bouncing up and down from a crouch position quietly, waiting.
The rescuers burst through. Grigor could feel their lantern light against his eyelids.
He listened.
It was moving towards them. A dwarf began screaming.
Grigor ran over rock, stumbling, pushing others aside. He could hear the damn thing moving, and he kept after it, swinging in the dark of his closed eyes like some demented child playing stick-wack.
One of the rescuers leapt on him.
“Don’t kill her,” he screamed at Grigor, “she’s so beautiful!”
Grigor used the butt of the pick to smash him in the face. He kicked him aside and sprinted the last few meters to the sound of scrabbling.
At the last second he opened his eyes, taking in the huge expanse of grey-green scales, glittering and impenetrable diamond skin. Malevolent red eyes glared at him, the teeth in the dripping acidic maw seemed a foot long.
“Grigor!!!” It was Kokran’s voice shouting at him.
Grigor leapt into the air and slammed the pick down with every last ounce of strength his protesting muscles. It sank into flesh.
He pulled it back out and swung it from his side into flesh again, and grease ran down the wooden handle.
Barely able to hold on Grigor kept swinging and pulling the pick out until all movement stopped. He opened his eyes, pick dangling by his side, and looked at the dragon.
A pale, squishy slug draped formlessly over the rocks in front of him. Seven feet long, with feathery antennae covering its body, it quivered from the last strike. Body fluids leaked into the rock under its body.
Oval eye-dots stared lifelessly ahead at the cavern walls.
Grigor was covered in pus colored grease. He dropped the pick and walked away, and his rescuers bobbed their lanterns at him, stumbling forward in dazed amazement.
Kokran pushed over a rock and looked at the thing.
“A Dragon?”
Grigor’s stomach felt like a tiny knot, drawn in on itself. He started to walk across the cavern to the hole.
“This will go down in tales,” one of the rescuers muttered, eyes wide and staring at Grigor. “A family hero. They’ll carve your name.”
Grigor crawled through, and on the other side he looked around at the quartz on the walls for a long moment. He leaned his cap against the glittering chips and threw up with relief. As he did so they held his shoulders and told him he’d been in the dark for a whole rotation.
After finding nothing more in his stomach he turned and started to walk out, foot by foot, slow and steady.
• • •
Word spread ahead of his walk out of the shaft. Dwarves ran forward or took cars up, and before long a wall of men had stopped all work to line the rails and look at him.
Some clapped him on the back, a dirty puff of commiseration, congratulation, and admiration. Others somberly clapped.
They asked questions, and Grigor ignored them.
Someone insisted he get in a railcar, but Grigor wanted to keep walking.
He could trust his touch, and his feet told him he was walking far away from the cavern.
When he reached the bottom of the Maw he stopped and looked up at the light far above his head. The men gave him the lift to himself, and the groundling apprentices yanked him up out of Mother Earth as fast as they could.
Toop and Picket were at the top, out of breath, surrounded by bystanders hoping to get a chance to spot the super-crusty dragon-slaying digger.
“We just heard,” Toop said. “We will make sure you are well compensated...”
“Is there anything we can do?” Picket asked.
Grigor shook his head.
“I’d want to go to town,” he said.
“We’ll get you a covered wagon,” Pickit said.
“No.” Grigor shook his head. “I won’t be needing one of them.”
The two townies looked, surprised, as Grigor began to walk back up the slowly slanting tunnel towards the light. His eyes blinked and watered, but adjusted with each step.
At the mouth of the tunnel he wiped his eyes with the back of his hand and looked out.
Overhead the sky was a deep blue, broken by a scattering of strung out clouds. A soft wind kicked up the dirt, and a dandelion rooted by a nearby rock waved back and forth.
Fresh smells played across Grigor’s wide noise. Grass, flowers, rain, dirt.
He walked out of the tunnel and into the sun.
Men needed Dwarven skills. He could build houses, or tear down things. He knew explosives, machines, and bracing. Structures needed bracing. Grigor could find a good number of sorts of employment in Farrington, or in any other town.
In fact, he reasoned, Dwarves were limiting themselves, banding together and staying separated from men kept them at the fringes of society. A minority.
No, they needed to go out in numbers and mingle with men.
The outside wasn’t bad. He felt free under the infinite sky, the breezes playing over his callused skin. Grigor looked behind him at the tunnel he’d stepped out of, and for the first time in his life it seemed confining, dark, and heavy.
He’d changed, in there.
A nasty thought occured to Grigor, one so nasty he grabbed his belt out of reflex.
Was he being fooled?
How could he tell?
Could he ever tell?
He glimpsed a future lifetime of waking up sweaty from nightmares, jumping whenever he turned a corner, when someone touched him, and never sitting with his back to anything open.
Grigor closes his eyes and thought back to every smell, every sensation, on his way up the tunnel. He remembered Pickit’s enthusiastic smile, the sound of the elevator coming back up the Maw.
Was that all false?
This kind of thinking would drive a dwarf mad, Grigor realized.
He walked out from the tunnel’s mouth into a field of flowers. None of them looked familiar to him.
Grigor grunted and bent over. He ripped one of them out from the ground and looked at the five misshapen petals. He sniffed it, smelling something vaguely honey-like, with fruitier overtones.
This was real. How could he have drawn this up in his own head?
The field stretched between him and Farrington. Kicking up a small cloud of petals behind him, Grigor struck off towards the town for several, large pints of ale.
If he kept out in the open, stayed in the daylight, he’d never have to second-guess himself again.
And that was that, Grigor figured, squinting up at the warm, friendly sun in the vast expanse of beautiful
sky.
A Green Thumb
I know I’ve been tipping my hand concerning where I get the ideas for my stories, but I have to admit that the genesis for this story mainly came from a commercial I’d seen on TV for a car. A man sits and plants a seed in his lawn, then walks inside his house. The next morning he wakes up to find a brand new car outside. What a compelling image, I thought, and set out to write a coming-of-age magical realist story around it.
However the story had a twist in it yet. After a conversation with Stan Schmidt, the editor of Analog, I sent the story on to him anticipating that he would reject it. He didn’t, he instead asked me to figure out how to make it a science fiction story so that he could justify buying it for his strongly science fictional magazine. It took me a couple weeks of thinking about it, but I managed it. And Stan did indeed purchase it.
When Jerry walked out across his lawn to catch the morning bus to Effendale High, he stopped to admire the new car Mr. Atkinson had growing in his lawn. Jerry could see the doors stretching up towards the roof, small branches of metal trying to reach their stringy edges up and around the rough frame. It looked like a regular car had melted, but in reverse. Every day Jerry stepped out, he could see more of the car’s gray paneling filling in around the rough frame. Mr. Atkinson tended towards planting larger luxury cars, like any other retired old man. The half-finished Cadillac sat in between the rose bushes and posies that Mrs. Atkinson cared for. Both car and bushes glinted with a fresh coating of morning dew.
Jerry looked at the Caddy and wiped his eyes with the back of his sleeve. There was no way in hell he would get on the bus with tears. Dad had flat out told him “no” before, and this morning’s argument certainly didn’t change his opinion.
Damnit, he was old enough to grow his own car. Maturity. Jerry bet he could do a better job than Mr. Atkinson.
The large yellow school-grown bus rolled around the corner, and Jerry hurried out to the sidewalk.
No matter. He had other plans.
Kids wandered through the halls and corridors, and Effendale echoed with adolescent energy. Jerry pushed through, finding his own particular group of familiars. Andy and Nathan looked up from an intense debate on cafeteria lunch. Hamburger, or hockeypuck. No one could present evidence on either side.
Tides From the New Worlds Page 22
