Arthur laughed. “I wouldn’t have missed this for the world,” he said. “But don’t you think it’s getting hot in here?”
It was. However large the airless place was, the fires couldn’t burn like this for very long. Soon, when the heat became too great, he would fall to prostration and suffocation.
“Is that it? Am I supposed to smother?” he asked.
“You must be here long enough,” she said. “Unless … unless you want to stay.”
Arthur looked down. Some of them had. Quite a lot, in fact. They were in all stages of disintegration, a few sloppy wet and stinking, but most of the rest with dry skin clinging to the bones stretched over them like parchment. Others were shattered brown heaps of crumbling bone and a few only shadows marked by a crumbling skull, one or two long bones, or a scattering of teeth.
It was getting hotter and hotter in the shell.
“Will you ride the wheel?” she asked.
He shrugged. “Why not?”
The water was a relief. It was icy but that didn’t seem to trouble him. He tried to close his eyes, but found he couldn’t. He could feel the water around them, but was no more troubled by it than he would have been by air.
What? Where? he thought, looking at the pebbled streambed beneath him. The stones had a polished glow brought on by water. As he watched, a fish slipped into the field of vision belonging to his right eye. A salmon, greenish-black back, red belly.
Why isn’t it afraid of me? he thought. It was close enough for him to reach over and touch it. He moved to stretch out his arm, but his muscles wouldn’t obey him.
He leaned toward the fish. An extra sense from somewhere told him he was leaning as the pressure against his side changed. With an elegant and utterly inhuman motion, he righted himself.
I am, he thought, also a fish. Yes, a man breathes, a fish swims. Neither has to think about it much.
He willed himself to rise toward the rippled, gleaming ceiling of the stream in which he was swimming. He felt the strange sense of lessening pressure as his body approached the surface. He didn’t need to see to know his depth.
Trees along the stream smothered it in dark green. The black of wet, broken rock, the brown of splintered shards of broken trees washed downstream by the winter snow melt. All crowded around the water.
Down, he thought. And his fins carried him toward the bottom.
Faster, he moved past the fish he still saw to his right. And suddenly, with a shock of fear, he found himself stranded, gravel under his belly, the air, the cold spring mountain air an icy shock of deep pain.
A few minutes more and you will die, something in the dark instinctive matter of his brain warned him, and nudged him toward panic. But he was still a man and beat back the fear. Think!
His eyes were clear of the water. Ahead was a death trap; the shallows continued for as far as he could see. And indeed, he saw the desiccated and scavenged bodies of those who had made the same mistake he had.
One chance. He took it. A fish can bend almost double when it wants to. He wanted to.
His powerful musculature snapped his head around toward his tail. A second later, he found himself still in the shallows but looking toward deeper water. Now, fish, pretend you are a snake.
He did, wiggling forward, ignoring the occasional sharp rock that poked at his soft belly. A few seconds later, he found himself part of the resting crowd in deep water, gills working. He could feel them now, relieved to be safe for the moment.
Everything eats salmon! Hawks, eagles, bears, men!
Ah, yes. But a lot of them survive.
The stream bottom was a road, a gleaming tunnel roofed by a surface that showed him broken images of an ancient forest of pine, yew, and evergreen. A path of clear water floored with glowing stone. He and some others who had rested enough started along it, this time more cautiously than before. He kept to the deeper channel.
He heard the rapids. He had ears of a rudimentary sort, but the changes in pressure, the pickup of rapid staccato swirls of movement alerted him to their presence. He moved toward the surface. He found he didn’t have to will it any longer.
He saw the falls, a set of shallow stairs laced with tumbled deadfalls from upstream set in the emerald green of new leaves on the poplars, willows, and young water ash at their margins.
A beautiful place, but a lot of trouble for a fish.
He turned toward the shallows, but to do so, he must cross the deepest part of the pool below the falls.
No! No more recklessness. He did notice most of the fish entering the pool behind him broke to one side or another of the dark depths. He moved easily around them, keeping a wary eye out for movement until he reached a deep hole under a willow, an old willow, half rotted near the foot of the first falls.
Fish. I am fish, he thought as he sank toward the bottom. Am I fish? And he knew among the many dangers that awaited him here was one he hadn’t counted on if he remained too long. Or was it that if he became too comfortable with this shape, he might forget who he was? Who he had been. And, indeed, the human memories seemed to grow dimmer as he listened more closely to what the fish told him. As the images of silver sides flashed in his mind.
Then they were crisscrossing the shallows above him. At least a dozen. He struck, felt the recurved teeth in his throat. Crush, savor, swallow. Even as he dove toward the bottom.
Not very smart above, they were still darting as before. But then his mind saw the exquisite economy of it.
The mayflies were swarming, green lacy wings landing in the water by the dozen. Some might eat and die, but the rest would eat and that was what was important. But if it was important to them, and they were important to him, might it not be that he could be important to something else?
What?
He sank deeper, belly resting in the mud, fins barely moving.
What? Nothing!
Then the pike glared out of the gloom. A fish can’t stop breathing, can it? But he felt as though he had.
The first was delicious, but the second one he went for would have been his last. But then, he couldn’t be the only one on the hunt. Now, could he?
A second later, he saw the hook jaw snap shut on another silver side, the red belly a scarlet splash in the light from the surface. The jaws that seized it were as long as he was. Blood crimsoned the water; he could taste it as it passed his gills. He watched the pike vanish into the depths with the still-struggling salmon in its teeth. His eyes studied the pool, much movement, all of it small fish, though.
Nothing ventured, nothing gained. He struck again, and again, until his stomach was full. Then slowly he stroked out of the shallows, then shot forward. The leap carried him out of the large pool into the smaller one at the first step of the falls.
Get to the top. The fish was taking over; all the man had to do was let go. But he wouldn’t. Yet he knew he would obey the fish.
How does a fish jump? The thought made him clumsy. The salmon leap, a warrior’s tactic.
Don’t think! Act! Up! And he was, after a brief journey through air, in a higher pool.
The falls were a buffeting pressure wave. He didn’t see the bear until the last second. It was fishing in the shallows, almost at the top. There was no time for a leap; there was no time for anything except regret and a question.
How would I have been as a fish?
The vicious jaws were falling toward him. The fish executed it, but the man invented it. One powerful slap of the muscular tail and the bear had eyes, nose, and mouth filled with icy water. It stumbled back with a roar, swinging a paw down, armed with gleaming talons.
Hero’s salmon leap, and the fish fought the current at the top of the falls. He was peeled away like a bird taking wing.
She seemed no longer dead this time, and they wandered through a strange, haunted wood, dark even by day. It was achingly silent; no insect buzzed, no bird called. They were walking along the riverbed. He wondered if it could be the same river, but she, striding along
beside him, said, “No! Everything here is dead. Even the river.”
It was so long ago. The trees were green, smooth trunked, tall, green-black at the base but growing lighter and lighter as they approached their twisted, feathery tops as much as a hundred feet above and more. Dappled with sun, the soft canopy above moved gently in every vagrant breeze, allowing dappled light to penetrate the ferns and mosses growing with equal thickness in the rock-lined riverbed.
She was beautiful in an eerie sort of way—tall, taller than he was, her wide head covered with a crest of white feathers contoured to cover her head smoothly, the way a bird’s do. Her face was covered with an even finer growth of gray feathers. The long, powerful fangs projected down from a rather small jaw. Her body—he could see enough of it through her golden mesh tunic and long pants—was covered by feathers also, all the way down to the feet, which were rather slender claws, like a bird’s. Even the backs of the long-fingered hands were feathered, looking curiously nude when she opened them, showing the palm and fingers. Her eyes were a bird’s also, light brown with a black ring around the iris; and the pupil could contract to a pinpoint in one instant, then expand into a black well the next.
“Everything here is dead?” he asked. “Even you?”
“Yes!”
“So there is life after death,” he said.
“No,” she answered. “There isn’t, but there is something—at least, for me there is. I cannot say what others will find, but whatever they do, it is not life. Of that you get only one. Use it well.”
The wind blew a little harder and the trees murmured as the very fine, feathery leaves and branch networks were tossed around by it. Arthur rested his hand on one of the dark-green trunks. It was lightly ridged with a complex pattern of leaf scars. But then, that was how they grew and he saw they were very simple plants, because there were saplings next to the river’s rocky bed. Even when small they came straight up out of the ground, the growing points at the top differentiated into many fine branches, which gave way to equally fine, soft leaves, rather like the soft, loose feathers of a plume.
As the herb … bush … tree—somehow it managed to be all three at the same time—grew, the stem at the base expanded from within, not the way a tree grows along the outer bark but at the soft curve. And the reason they could grow so close together was that they were top to bottom, even in the deep shadows of the high-canopied forest—all green.
“What are they?” he asked, caressing the smooth, ever-living trunk.
She ran her eye over the nearest, a two-hundred-foot giant decorated along its length by scattered masses of plumed foliage.
“Moss,” she answered. “Moss. Not much different from the soft carpet you tread on.”
He glanced down at the mosses at his feet, some as fine as deep-green velvet. Others, coarse like tufted cushions, occupied the spaces between the velvet-covered boulders. Just then the sun vanished, wrapping the world in green gloom, and the rain began sending its misty silver curtains among the tightly packed trees. The trickle of water at the center of the stream where they walked grew wider and reflected the gray above, then blue as the storm clouds passed, blown away by the wind.
A crackling, snapping sound spread through the forest, a simple statement amid the omnipresent silence. All around him the aisles and aisles of trees, dense, almost impenetrable, echoed with the sound.
“What is it?” he asked.
“They speak their souls,” she said. “After the rain, the female cones—the ripe ones, that is—open and give their spores into the wind. See? If you look closely, you can pick them out against the soft leaves.”
And indeed, he could. Dozens and dozens of them massed the green feathery cushions of the giant trees.
“Hush,” she whispered. “Hear them.”
So many cones were cracking, they echoed like a drumroll, as though an invisible army rode the wind through the moss forest.
“Life,” he said. “This is a tale of life, but you are the Queen of the Dead.”
“That is what death speaks to—life,” she said.
He woke in the dark. The pitch dark.
I am indeed riding the wheel, he thought.
Then, when he tried to shift his body, he felt an instant thrill of revulsion. He tried to express this in sound; it came out a hiss.
Well, he thought. What else can you expect if you are a snake?
Death. She had spoken of death. Death woke the … snake he was.
It didn’t mind dying. It didn’t mind much of anything. It was far too simple.
But such stark simplicity opened the doors to other realms. It was old. The mind of the creature, even the fish’s mind, hadn’t seemed so terrifyingly old.
I am, I was, I will be? were all the same to the snake. There are the many and then the one. I am the one, unless death reaches me.
There are many deaths, but all one and, like me, death is one and many. There is the death from above without warning, hawk or rock slide the same to the snake. Death from below with warning, but inescapable nonetheless. Death by predator—pig, weasel, otter, wolf, cat, human. Death by torpor and cold. This threatened the snake now.
Winter was ended. The tongue flicked out and tested the air. The den was still cold, but outside the sun was shining. The air the snake tested was warm.
Feed or die. Things are simple to a snake. But he knew the creature elevated paranoia to a high art.
Lord, this thing could move well. Point the head, the rest follows. The snake cleared the den slowly, carefully, testing, testing the air all around for the spike of heat that would indicate the approach of a large predator.
No! Nothing!
Ah, warm.
The snake coiled on a bed of brown pine needles before the den mouth. Warm, he felt his body and his senses quicken as the sun seeped into him.
Ah, warm!
Simple. The man Arthur had not known simplicity could be this absolute, this pure. The gratification so intense, the experience so all-encompassing.
Do not think, but be.
Yet, after a time, there was such a thing as enough. He moved forward toward a patch of new green grass shaded by a domed rock.
Test the air; taste the air every few seconds or so. The forked tongue and deep mind mapped the world. A rock sun-warmed on one side. A pool, not a very big one, but big enough to hold a dangerous inhabitant. On the other side, the forest. The living things there were glowing spots of heat. Birds, baby birds in a nest in the lowest branches of a pine.
Too high.
A fallen tree, still half green, a maple, branches glowing with a thousand new green leaves. That spot on the base, on the rotten side, mice—a whole family. They gnawed their way into the tree, the hole they made too small to admit him.
Keep that, and the memory was placed among the rest, only a few, like beads on a string, each discrete, complete, embodying all the meaning it would ever have. The tree was rotting; the chamber the mice inhabited was fairly large. At the moment, they were safe, the tree bark still intact. He could not gnaw. But the wood would rot.
The pond to the left of the domed rock. Winter-killed brush filled the shallows near the rock, clustered around one fallen willow sapling. Willow like it was still alive and formed a curtain of branches, cutting off the pond from the brush. The trunk was canted.
A perfect resting place? The man’s mind questioned the mind of the snake.
Taste the air. No. Nothing. No bird. No otter. Cool water, warm trees, and reeds.
Moving cold—fish, frogs, insects.
Feed tonight. Feed or die.
We hate them, the man thought—Arthur thought. We do not begin to understand them, but we hate them nonetheless.
He peered into the deep, dark well of the snake’s mind. Sought approval—found it, and moved toward the broken willow. Point the head, the body follows. Can snakes climb trees? Actually, they are rather good climbers.
He reached one of the willow branches. It was leaning again
st the rock. Now warmed by the sun and moved by hunger, he went quickly, head out, around and around the slender branch, his body vanishing against the gray-green bark.
Look up.
Ah, the man thought. The snake noted the bird. The tongue flicked—warm.
Arthur’s mind stumbled. The snake was so wholly other.
Of course. That was the death without warning—he was looking at it. He knew the snake had to be faster than the bird.
No, faster is dangerous.
Drop?
No. Too much noise. Other things live in water. They can hear. He must move and hope the bird didn’t see him.
He turned bonelessly as a rope, clasped the slender branch, and flowed toward the ground as his body turned around the center of the branch. First one eye, then another looked up. The bird began to fall.
But he held himself steady, understanding why now. As long as he moved at one speed, the bird’s eyes might not see him clearly. Any sudden jerk would trigger a flash of certainty in the hawk’s mind. The slow, steady movement managed to convince the hawk he might be mistaken, but he had seen enough to drop down and take a closer look.
The snake gambled. It must eat to live. To stop now, give in to his terror, might well be a death sentence. Stop now, and he would be caught in the open by the hawk. Even a small hawk was deadly to most snakes. Arthur had seen them kill and knew they were born knowing how. If at all possible, they landed behind the snake’s neck. Even as the talons embedded themselves in the body, the sharp, efficient beak snipped off the head.
A snake was a lovely kill. No waste; they ate him nose to tail. All of him.
One thing to admire efficiency in the abstract; another to contemplate it with respect to one’s self.
But the snake’s cold cunning was as much inborn as the bird’s skill. It commanded the pace, and he entered the water before the bird drew close enough to see the snake clearly and snap into its stoop, the closed-wing fall of a bird of prey when it strikes its chosen victim.
The snake moved through the green, watery gloom—it was warm—beyond the fringe of branches on the willow. And from the shadows, stealth dictated he could see the afternoon sun illuminating the central area of the pond. There were minnows at the surface. Water striders were already present, their feet dimpling the thin layer of molecules neither water nor air, which floats between the two worlds. Dragonflies, a lot of them, darted like the spangles of a jeweled gown.
The Dragon Queen Page 50
