Something is happening between them. Something instant of the instant.
“I want to see,” my wife says, “all the things of here.”
I will show myself. I will risk as Wren does, whatever it is they do to people from Up, but mostly risk so my wife will see my miserable condition and know that I’ve saved her. I look at myself… my bandages leaking, my shredded sleeves and trousers, shredded everywhere where the apron didn’t cover. My limp is not a pretence. My legs wobble. If I fall it won’t be on purpose. Will either of them notice?
Does she understand what we add up to, I and my sweet Wren? That I’ve saved her and all the village and the children can play capture the peak? For now until some other beast comes around.
I will speak. I will say, As to the two of us. As to us….
And I do speak, but what I say is, “As to myself and the Project and the meaning of it….” For a moment it’s as if the Project is before me, just as it has been every day and all the days of my life until now, shining, polished white against our sky, which is of a darker blue than this pale blue of the Down. The Project as hub of all paths. I think to say more of the things that are important, but I start to shake. I go down on my knees.
They turn to me. I see my wife seeing what I wanted her to see. She says, “Oh!”
But he says, “You!” and again, “You!”
It’s he who comes to me, lifts me and hugs me as if a brother found at last, kisses each cheek before I have time to think to pull away. I haven’t the strength to anyway. This is not the mountain people’s way. The horse leans and noses me. I don’t know if he’ll bite or not. His head is much bigger than I thought a horse’s head would be and bonier.
Though I’m almost as big as this man, he lifts me over his shoulder and then pushes me up upon the creature. Sits me sideways. (The creature is warm as a wife. Warm as the lion was when I carried her away from the trail.) The man walks us towards the village. The movement of the horse is painful to my scratches. I gasp, but my wife is looking up at this man, not at me. She walks beside him as though it was the most natural thing in the world to be crossing this flat land with grass all over it, with a stranger, and with me on a horse.
Other men, sideways on their horses are coming out, one by one and two by two, to their fields. As we meet the first, the man says, “Here’s our long lost bastard half brother. We’ve waited all this time for him to come back to us. And doesn’t he look just like his father?”
I want to say, A bear! A bear was my father, but I’m too tired and sick to protest. I think my wife should do it for me considering the state I’m in. I want her to say how I’m a mountain man; how, if could I walk, you would see it in my walk; and if I spoke, you would hear it in my words, but I fear she may no longer be proud of our mountains, though she knows full well the mountains are where everything begins, where even this very water, here in this very roadside ditch, rolls down from, even where the weather is engendered, else why would clouds hang at their tops? How can it be that one look in one single moment to one man almost as ugly as I am, is enough to change her mind?
I must protest. I don’t know how much these people know of important things. Perhaps there’s no such thing as marriage as we know it up there. We always say they’re in need of speeches down here, so I begin, even just to these two men and these two horses who swivel their ears towards me, listening. I had not thought to mention the Project, but I do. I say, “How would we know anything without the Project be the reasons for it? How figure elevations so as to know the highest and therefore most important of all the mountains?”
But my wife interrupts me right in the middle of it, “What are you saying! Even here among the strangers of the Down, you speak of such things! Here, sick and bloodied, and having done it for my sake, even as you faint, you speak of unimportant things!”
I say, “You speak as if of turnips.”
“Make a speech if you must, but you would miss my turnips if I never grew them.”
If she loves me still, or ever has, it’s for everyday things that amount to very little. I lose hope. I, the foreman of the Project, the killer of the lion, having made everybody safer, fall.
I must have fainted at that very moment of losing heart, because of it in fact. Next thing I know I’m in a bed and a large dog is licking my face.
I’ve been washed and re-bandaged. My scratches no longer hurt. I’m covered with a quilt the likes of which I’ve never seen. It’s as light as if a froth. There’s a smell of stew. I had not thought the Down would be as comfortable as this.
A woman sits near me. She’s dressed in long skirts and no red at all unless you count her rough red hands. They’re as large as mine, and are in her lap with her darning. Her face is wide and flat as the wide flat land that must have made it so.
And here’s my wife, also wearing the skirts of the Down and no red. (Those skirts must snag and tangle in their legs. They will have to be holding them out of the way.) She looks so odd I have the thought that she’ll even talk as they do. I wonder what she’s been doing as I’ve been lying here unconscious.
She comes to me from stirring pots, still holding a wooden spoon. She pushes the dog aside so that he licks my hand instead, and tries to get under the bandages. “So,” she says, “and after all this time.”
I don’t know if she means that I’ve finally awakened or that I’ve finally killed the lion.
“The catamount! The catamount!”
The way she looks at me…. Her eyes must seem strange to the people down here, they are the bleached blue of us mountain people (except for mine), but she looks at me as though I am the stranger. She says, “So you finally.”
I think to tell her something of my love so I say, “I have feelings for more than just the Project.”
She shakes her head, disgusted. She’s still… even still, put out with me. Is there no gratefulness? From anyone? Lions can roam great distances, even in a single night, and they’re not easy to kill. It not only takes skill, but also a willingness to end up with scratches and gashes, top to bottom. Our lioness may well have taken children from here also. All peoples will have profited from my daring.
“I have risked the killing of it.”
“Did you know, all this time, your name isn’t Harrier? Has never been? They’ve kept track of you down here. You’re easily seen from half way up. The large in you belongs to them. Look how this chair is large. Look at the bed. Look how even their pots and pans are large.” She waves the spoon at me. “Here, look, a spoon as if for a giant.”
“I have risked,” I say and then I turn away. She turns away, too, and lets the dog lick my face again. At least the dog. At least him.
Time goes along here as there and I recover some. First I can do little more than sit outside, I and the dog, his big wide flatland head on my lap. It’s just as I used to sit of an evening up home with a dog all the way on my lap. I sit and learn things of the down. I hadn’t thought there’d be so much noise down here. Even all night long, cows and horses, dogs running off barking at things yipping with high voices. We don’t have coyotes up there.
Later I walk around and see things. There’s both more and less mystery to it. I see how a plough works, how to yell out to cattle and yet keep them calm. “Curious as a cow,” they say down here, and it’s true, every time I hobble down their road, cows come to see what I’m about and then follow me.
The people call me Hosh. It has no relationship to any bird that I know of.
It seems Wren has become a sort of personage down here. I think because of her eyes and her size and that she’s bleached all over and that her fingers are long and graceful. Since she has few skills besides knitting and cooking looking out for goats, what other reason can there be? Her grace should be for my eyes and none other. Her hair also, for me only. Her cheeks…. (I saw that first man we met, he’s called Boffin… I saw him touch her cheeks, one forefinger on each side of her face, as if he thought to measure her.)
&
nbsp; (Why have they named me something without one of their endings on it, as Boffin, Duggan, Mawlin, and Algun? Is it to insult me? Do they laugh behind their hands at the shortness of my name every time they say it?) I’ll not be brother to the likes of them who look at Wren the way they do.
So then I look at these women swishing around in their skirts (as Wren is swishing now also). They’ve fed me, spoonful by spoonful, washed me…. They have salves for my lacerations. They’ve been doing all the things that Wren should have been doing. They even look at me as Wren looks at Boffin, but everything about them only reminds me of myself. Even their necks are as wide as my own. I could borrow their shoes.
Every day I wonder, where is Wren? When I see her in the distance, I always take her for one of their children at first, before I see it’s her. There’s always several men around her. I’ve killed the lion only for her.
There comes a day of bad weather. Thunder and lightning, off and on hail even, right here in the Down as if on the mountains. Our weather—they say so themselves—come all the way down here, just as our water does.
Rain is so rare everybody is out to see it and feel it protected only by their sun hats. Even I, though I’ve already seen more of it than I need to. Clouds roil. The light is as if twilight. We all stand outside looking towards the mountains.
And then, out from under thunder-heads, exactly over the Project, only there, the weather suddenly clears. It’s as if the Project had done it. There’s only that one place with blue sky, and I see…. Yes, it is! The capstone is raised. Perpendicular! Atop the eight holding stones. Around it, a circle of clear weather, as though caused by it. And why not? With that last boulder the Project is the highest of all the peaks surrounding it.
In my wildest speculations I hadn’t thought such beauty. I’d thought: monumental, majestic, exalted even, but not this loveliness. And from down here, such delicacy. And with the sun on it, such sparkle. This will show my wife the importance of important things, and the need. What would the sky be without it? Just look at the faces of the people. And my wife, as wide-eyed as any of them.
“There!” I say, “That’s what we mean. Look! That’s what I’ve always meant. Can you say it wasn’t worth it.”
Even so, wide eyed as she is, and all glittery with the look of our Project…. Even so, she leans towards me and whispers, “But Sparrow.”
“And I’m not there,” I say. I know I sound as though I don’t care about Sparrow. It’s that I don’t know what to say. What can I say? What should I answer? I say, “But I’m not even there.”
She says, shouting, “Don’t shout!”
Everybody looking up. Every single one of them—stunned at first, rain and tears flowing down their faces. Then the lightning lights their grins. They’re saying, “Well, well, well!” and, “The little brothers of the Up have done it,” and other things of that nature. They pat me on the back. Little pat, pat, pats. Pats! As if it hadn’t taken years. Generations. As if it wasn’t a grand and noble, even an impossible thing. Do they realize the Project will be there longer than their little lives? Do they know I was the foreman?
I limp away, I and the dog. I’ve done with them.
They have their arms around each other’s shoulders. They’re in a circle doing a skipping sort of dance, which, seeing how big they are, makes them look more ridiculous than ever.
(They’ll be dancing up there, too, stamping, jumping, also in a circle, though not touching. There was a special beer saved for just this day.)
“Hosh,” they say, and they open a space for me in their dance. “Little brother. Come.”
To have more pats?
They say I’m not well enough to return, but I’m done with their over-watered fields (wasting our water), their slippery grass where even the horses skid and go down, let alone the people. On the mountain we have more dangerous dangers, but they’re dangers more to my taste.
If, for instance, some night we should steal a horse and ride out, fast, through the long straight flat places…. (I have said to myself and long before, that I wouldn’t return without Wren.)
I’ll tell her I’ve loved her just as if she was the Project and for as long. Since she’s finally seen it as it should be seen, she’ll understand the importance of my love. How it sparkles. How it will last beyond either of us.
But she won’t come. I know it ahead of time. Yet again she’ll say, “What, what!”
I’ll say, “I killed the lioness only for you.”
She’ll humpf.
(It’s the dog will follow me as a wife should. Try to. He’s old and arthritic. He likes somebody who limps. We’ll be two of a kind.)
I’ll say, you stay for the love of radishes the size of turnips, for chairs too big to sit on, for spoons that don’t fit your mouth. I risked my life, I’ll say. I say it, “I risked myself.”
This is the beginning of everything that happens afterwards. This and lightning, and hail, as it’s falling now, big as walnuts. I look up straight into it. They’ve all run inside, even Wren, but I’m used to worse. I suppose they’re afraid of ruining their hats. Hats! The meaning of the meaning of life, nor beauty either, has nothing to do with hats.
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, August 2001
Foster Mother
directions for the small:
YOU’LL have to bottle feed it. Give it plenty of strokes and hugs until it’ll follow no one but you. Don’t let it get too obstreperous. That can happen when no other big ones of its own kind are around. Then hand it over and leave the rest to us.
You may name it if you feel so inclined though a name is not necessary. We’ll give it a name of our own choosing if we need one.
Don’t expect too much. They have small brains, about the size of two lima beans. As far as we know, their smiles might not be smiles. Their tears, not tears. Though they bleed, they don’t feel pain as we do.
Afterwards, let it go on with what it has to do. Go live a different story someplace far from here. Don’t come back.
Remember it belongs to us.
And so I’m thinking: Lester? Jester? Or, on the other hand, Baladin? Balladeer? He should have a name the opposite of what he will become. It might stand him in good stead, and there might be a little bit of hope.
Probably nobody will ever get to know the name except for the two of us.
He’ll have to find his own kind of joy by himself. Best to have a joyful name. At least that. And best we laugh a lot (if that is laughing). Tickle and tussle. Dance.
They call him, “it.” The sex is not important to them.
He was absolutely the cutest thing I ever saw. They start out small. Just like us. Little chubby goat-boy. Little chubby donkey-boy. Loves me already. As who else is there but me? I know I mustn’t take it personally.
But now, later, little skinny boy and even more goat-like and still the cutest thing I ever saw. Now he calls me Mush, Mushka, Mash…. I don’t remember how that started. I call him Kookie, Cookie….
I think he should have a musical instrument. Something that makes a deep bass sound. Tuba or some such? Or the biggest viol there is? Except he’s still too small. I think trumpet. That’ll sound out nicely from mountain to mountain, though it is a bit on the military side and reminds me of those others who are in charge of us.
See us—both of us leaping, though I’m not as good at it as he is. See us on cliff edges, naked or almost. Well, he is, the sun browning us. See them, pointing up at us and looking pleased, folding their hands around their important papers, all the paraphernalia of their status and their jobs hanging about them. They wear so much nobody knows what they look like. Are they us or are they some sort of alien?
He depends on me. In the beginning I even chewed his food for him. Better than trying to cut it. They didn’t give me a grinder.
We take long walks holding hands. When he gets tired I carry him piggyback. I made him booties. They don’t supply footwear or clothes. They say he grows too fast for t
hem to bother. They say he doesn’t need shoes. (Actually, they don’t supply much of anything.) We fish. We pick flowers. By now he knows the names of all the ones around here. They say he’s not smart enough for that, but he is.
We brought home a gopher snake. We hope it stays and lives under our shack. We named it Squiggly. We planted an apple tree. Already he says, “See my tree.” We named it Appy.
When he’s happy he wiggles all over. They said that wasn’t happiness. They said he can’t feel much more than rage. I think that’s what I’m here for, to make sure it’s rage. What he says most of all is “Let’s get going.” They think I’m too old to “get going” with him. They think I’ll hold him back and that will make him angry, but even when he’s about to roar at night I’m awake before it happens. I hear his first whimper so I’m by his side before it can turn nasty. I sing to him, long song stories. “That’s a Ballad,” I say. “That’s what I named you, Balladeer.”
We live at the top of a strategic pass. He’s supposed to get the know the whole region so he can patrol it. We climb to the mountain tops on each side, and across to the dangerous drop off. He’ll be able to leap off that one of these days, but now he’s still too little to leap streams. We take off our booties and wade. (He goes through booties like you wouldn’t believe.)
It’s a paradise up here. If, that is, one likes one’s paradise steep and rocky, with boulders to climb around or over. A paradise if one likes it rugged. If one likes to slip and slide, and suddenly, flop! so, now and then, be on the ground looking straight up into the, usually, blue sky.
He gets into everything. I brought out my suitcases and shoes and hats. They forgot he might have wanted toys, but—well—when did a young one ever need toys when there are pebbles and sticks and flat pieces of slate, pots and pans, packing boxes? And I have paper and crayons. Pieces of cloth. I know he’s male (or he seems so to me) but I made him a rag doll.
The Collected Stories of Carol Emshwiller, Vol. 1 Page 80
