Later, as we climbed a rocky incline, a cave loomed near at hand; from the smell, a woodsnarl lair.
I turned to warn them around it, only to discover that I’d lost my audience. They were ten steps behind me, at the bottom of the rocks, walking very slowly and talking quietly, holding hands.
Dark and angry, wordless, I turned away again and continued on over the hill. We did not speak again until I’d found the dust pile.
I paused on its edge, my boots an inch deep in the fine gray powder, and they came straggling up behind me. “Go ahead, Gerry,” I said. “Use your flash here.”
The light roamed. The hill was at our back, rocky and lit here and there with the blurred cold fire of bluemoss-choked vegetation. But in front of us was only desolation; a wide vacant plain, black and blasted and lifeless, open to the stars. Back and forth Gerry moved the flashlight, pushing at the borders of the dust nearby, fading as he shone it straight out into the gray distance. The only sound was the wind.
“So?” he said at last.
“Feel the dust,” I told him. I was not going to stoop this time. “And when you’re back at the tower, crush one of my bricks and feel that. It’s the same thing, a sort of powdery ash.” I made an expansive gesture. “I’d guess there was a city here once, but now it’s all crumbled into dust. Maybe my tower was an outpost of the people who built it, you see?”
“The vanished sentients of the forests,” Gerry said, still smiling. “Well, I’ll admit there’s nothing like this on the islands. For a good reason. We don’t let forest fires rage unchecked.”
“Forest fire! Don’t give me that. Forest fires don’t reduce everything to a fine powder, you always get a few blackened stumps or something.”
“Oh? You’re probably right. But all the ruined cities I know have at least a few bricks still piled on top of one another for the tourists to take pictures of,” Gerry said. The flash beam flicked to and fro over the dust pile, dismissing it. “All you have is a mound of rubbish.”
Crystal said nothing.
I began walking back, while they followed in silence. I was losing points every minute; it had been idiocy to bring them out here. At that moment nothing more was on my mind than getting back to my tower as quickly as possible, packing them off to Port Jamison together, and resuming my exile.
Crystal stopped me, after we’d come back over the hill into the bluemoss forest.
“Johnny,” she said. I stopped, they caught up, Crys pointed.
“Turn off the light,” I told Gerry. In the fainter illumination of the moss, it was easier to spot: the intricate iridescent web of a dream-spider, slanting groundward from the low branches of a mockoak. The patches of moss that shone softly all around us were nothing to this; each web strand was as thick as my little finger, oily and brilliant, running with the colors of the rainbow.
Crys took a step toward it, but I took her by the arm and stopped her. “The spiders are around someplace,” I said. “Don’t go too close. Papa spider never leaves the web, and Mama ranges around in the trees at night.”
Gerry glanced upward a little apprehensively. His flash was dark, and suddenly he didn’t seem to have all the answers. The dream-spiders are dangerous predators, and I suppose he’d never seen one outside of a display case. They weren’t native to the islands. “Pretty big web,” he said. “Spiders must be a fair size.”
“Fair,” I said, and at once I was inspired. I could discomfort him a lot more if an ordinary web like this got to him. And he had been discomforting me all night. “Follow me. I’ll show you a real dream-spider.” We circled around the web carefully, never seeing either of its guardians. I led them to the spider-chasm.
It was a great V in the sandy earth, once a creekbed perhaps, but dry and overgrown now. The chasm is hardly very deep by daylight, but at night it looks formidable enough, as you stare down into it from the wooded hills on either side. The bottom is a dark tangle of shrubbery, alive with little flickering phantom lights; higher up, trees of all kinds lean into the chasm, almost meeting in the center. One of them, in fact, does cross the gap. An ancient, rotting spikearrow, withered by lack of moisture, had fallen long ago to provide a natural bridge. The bridge hangs with bluemoss, and glows. The three of us walked out on that dim-lit, curving trunk, and I gestured down.
Yards below us, a glittering multihued net hung from hill to hill, each strand of the web thick as a cable and aglisten with sticky oils. It tied all the lower trees together in a twisting intricate embrace, and it was a shining fairy-roof above the chasm. Very pretty; it made you want to reach out and touch it.
That, of course, was why the dream-spiders spun it. They were nocturnal predators, and the bright colors of their webs afire in the night made a potent lure.
“Look,” Crystal said, “the spider.” She pointed. In one of the darker corners of the web, half-hidden by the tangle of a goblin tree that grew out of the rock, it was sitting. I could see it dimly, by the webfire and moss light, a great eight-legged white thing the size of a large pumpkin. Unmoving. Waiting.
Gerry glanced around uneasily again, up into the branches of a crooked mockoak that hung partially above us. “The mate’s around somewhere, isn’t it?”
I nodded. The dream-spiders of Jamison’s World are not quite twins to the arachnids of Old Earth. The female is indeed the deadlier of the species, but far from eating the male, she takes him for life in a permanent specialized partnership. For it is the sluggish, great-bodied male who wears the spinnerets, who weaves the shining-fire web and makes it sticky with his oils, who binds and ties the prey snared by light and color. Meanwhile, the smaller female roams the dark branches, her poison sac full of the viscous dreaming-venom that grants bright visions and ecstasy and final blackness. Creatures many times her own size she stings, and drags limp back to the web to add to the larder.
The dream-spiders are soft, merciful hunters for all that. If they prefer live food, no matter; the captive probably enjoys being eaten. Popular Jamie wisdom says a spider’s prey moans with joy as it is consumed. Like all popular wisdoms, it is vastly exaggerated. But the truth is, the captives never struggle.
Except that night, something was struggling in the web below us.
“What’s that?” I said, blinking. The iridescent web was not even close to empty—the half-eaten corpse of an ironhorn lay close at hand below us, and some great dark bat was bound in bright strands just slightly farther away—but these were not what I watched. In the corner opposite the male spider, near the western trees, something was caught and fluttering. I remember a brief glimpse of thrashing pale limbs, wide luminous eyes, and something like wings. But I did not see it clearly.
That was when Gerry slipped.
Maybe it was the wine that made him unsteady, or maybe the moss under our feet, or the curve of the trunk on which we stood. Maybe he was just trying to step around me to see whatever it was I was staring at. But, in any case, he slipped and lost his balance, let out a yelp, and suddenly he was five yards below us, caught in the web. The whole thing shook to the impact of his fall, but it didn’t come close to breaking—dream-spider webs are strong enough to catch ironhorns and wood-snarls, after all.
“Damn,” Gerry yelled. He looked ridiculous; one leg plunged right down through the fibers of the web, his arms half-sunk and tangled hopelessly, only his head and shoulders really free of the mess. “This stuff is sticky. I can hardly move.”
“Don’t try,” I told him. “It’ll just get worse. I’ll figure out a way to climb down and cut you loose. I’ve got my knife.” I looked around, searching for a tree limb to shimmy out on.
“John.” Crystal’s voice was tense, on edge.
The male spider had left his lurking place behind the goblin tree. He was moving toward Gerry with a heavy deliberate gait; a gross white shape clamoring over the preternatural beauty of his web.
“Damn,” I said. I wasn’t seriously alarmed, but it was a bother. The great male was the biggest spider I’d e
ver seen, and it seemed a shame to kill him. But I didn’t see that I had much choice. The male dream-spider has no venom, but he is a carnivore, and his bite can be most final, especially when he’s the size of this one. I couldn’t let him get within biting distance of Gerry.
Steadily, carefully, I drew a long gray arrow out of my quiver and fitted it to my bowstring. It was night, of course, but I wasn’t really worried. I was a good shot, and my target was outlined clearly by the glowing strands of his web.
Crystal screamed.
I stopped briefly, annoyed that she’d panic when everything was under control. But I knew all along that she would not, of course. It was something else. For an instant I couldn’t imagine what it could be.
Then I saw, as I followed Crys’ eyes with my own. A fat white spider the size of a big man’s fist had dropped down from the mockoak to the bridge we were standing on, not ten feet away. Crystal, thank God, was safe behind me.
I stood there—how long? I don’t know. If I had just acted, without stopping, without thought, I could have handled everything. I should have taken care of the male first, with the arrow I had ready. There would have been plenty of time to pull a second arrow for the female.
But I froze instead, caught in that dark bright moment, for an instant timeless, my bow in my hand yet unable to act. It was all so complicated, suddenly. The female was scuttling toward me, faster than I would have believed, and it seemed so much quicker and deadlier than the slow white thing below. Perhaps I should take it out first. I might miss, and then I would need time to go for my knife or a second arrow.
Except that would leave Gerry tangled and helpless under the jaws of the male that moved toward him inexorably. He could die. He could die. Crystal could never blame me. I had to save myself, and her, she would understand that. And I’d have her back again.
Yes.
NO!
Crystal was screaming, screaming, and suddenly everything was clear and I knew what it had all meant and why I was here in this forest and what I had to do. There was a moment of glorious transcendence. I had lost the gift of making her happy, my Crystal, but now for a moment suspended in time that power had returned to me, and I could give or withhold happiness forever. With an arrow, I could prove a love that Gerry would never match.
I think I smiled. I’m sure I did.
And my arrow flew darkly through the cool night, and found its mark in the bloated white spider that raced across a web of light.
The female was on me, and I made no move to kick it away or crush it beneath my heel. There was a sharp stabbing pain in my ankle.
Bright and many-colored are the webs the dream-spiders weave.
At night, when I return from the forests, I clean my arrows carefully and open my great knife, with its slim barbed blade, to cut apart the poison sacs I’ve collected. I slit them open, each in turn, as I have earlier cut them from the still white bodies of the dream-spiders, and then I drain the venom off into a bottle, to wait for the day when Korbec flies out to collect it.
Afterwards I set out the miniature goblet, exquisitely wrought in silver and obsidian and bright with spider motifs, and pour it full of the heavy black wine they bring me from the city. I stir the cup with my knife, around and around until the blade is shiny clean again and the wine a trifle darker than before. And I ascend to the roof.
Often Korbec’s words will return to me then, and with them my story. Crystal my love, and Gerry, and a night of lights and spiders. It all seemed so very right for that brief moment, when I stood upon the moss-covered bridge with an arrow in my hand, and decided. And it has all gone so very very wrong …
… from the moment I awoke, after a month of fever and visions, to find myself in the tower where Crys and Gerry had taken me to nurse me back to health. My decision, my transcendent choice, was not so final as I would have thought.
At times I wonder if it was a choice. We talked about it, often, while I regained my strength, and the tale that Crystal tells me is not the one that I remember. She says that we never saw the female at all, until it was too late, that it dropped silently onto my neck just as I released the arrow that killed the male. Then, she says, she smashed it with the flashlight that Gerry had given her to hold, and I went tumbling into the web.
In fact, there is a wound on my neck, and none on my ankle. And her story has a ring of truth. For I have come to know the dream-spiders in the slow-flowing years since that night, and I know that the females are stealthy killers that drop down on their prey unawares. They do not charge across fallen trees like berserk ironhorns; it is not the spiders’ way.
And neither Crystal nor Gerry has any memory of a pale winged thing flapping in the web.
Yet I remember it clearly … as I remember the female spider that scuttled toward me during the endless years that I stood frozen … but then … they say the bite of a dream-spider does strange things to your mind.
That could be it, of course.
Sometimes when Squirrel comes behind me up the stairs, scraping the sooty bricks with his eight white legs, the wrongness of it all hits me, and I know I’ve dwelt with dreams too long.
Yet the dreams are often better than the waking, the stories so much finer than the lives.
Crystal did not come back to me, then or ever. They left when I was healthy. And the happiness I’d brought her with the choice that was not a choice and the sacrifice not a sacrifice, my gift to her forever—it lasted less than a year. Korbec tells me that she and Gerry broke up violently, and that she has since left Jamison’s World.
I suppose that’s truth enough, if you can believe a man like Korbec. I don’t worry about it overmuch.
I just kill dream-spiders, drink wine, pet Squirrel. And each night I climb this tower of ashes to gaze at distant lights.
AND SEVEN TIMES NEVER KILL MAN
Ye may kill for yourselves,
and your mates,
and your cubs as they need,
and ye can;
But kill not for pleasure of killing,
and seven times never kill Man!
—Rudyard Kipling
Outside the walls the Jaenshi children hung, a row of small gray-furred bodies still and motionless at the ends of long ropes. The oldest among them, obviously, had been slaughtered before hanging; here a headless male swung upside down, the noose around the feet, while there dangled the blast-burned carcass of a female. But most of them, the dark hairy infants with the wide golden eyes, most of them had simply been hanged. Toward dusk, when the wind came swirling down out of the ragged hills, the bodies of the lighter children would twist at the ends of their ropes and bang against the city walls, as if they were alive and pounding for admission.
But the guards on the walls paid the thumping no mind as they walked their relentless rounds, and the rust-streaked metal gates did not open.
“Do you believe in evil?” Arik neKrol asked Jannis Ryther as they looked down on the City of the Steel Angels from the crest of a nearby hill. Anger was written across every line of his flat yellow-brown face, as he squatted among the broken shards of what once had been a Jaenshi worship pyramid.
“Evil?” Ryther murmured in a distracted way. Her eyes never left the redstone walls below, where the dark bodies of the children were outlined starkly. The sun was going down, the fat red globe that the Steel Angels called the Heart of Bakkalon, and the valley beneath them seemed to swim in bloody mists.
“Evil,” neKrol repeated. The trader was a short, pudgy man, his features decidedly mongoloid except for the flame-red hair that fell nearly to his waist. “It is a religious concept, and I am not a religious man. Long ago, when I was a very child growing up on ai-Emerel, I decided that there was no good or evil, only different ways of thinking.” His small, soft hands felt around in the dust until he had a large, jagged shard that filled his fist. He stood and offered it to Ryther. “The Steel Angels have made me believe in evil again,” he said.
She took the fragment from him word
lessly and turned it over in her hands. Ryther was much taller than neKrol, and much tinier; a hard bony woman with a long face, short black hair, and eyes without expression. The sweat-stained coveralls she wore hung loosely on her spare frame.
“Interesting,” she said finally, after studying the shard for several minutes. It was as hard and smooth as glass, but stronger; colored a translucent red, yet so very dark it was almost black. “A plastic?” she asked, throwing it back to the ground.
NeKrol shrugged. “That was my very guess, but of course it is impossible. The Jaenshi work in bone and wood and sometimes metal, but plastic is centuries beyond them.”
“Or behind them,” Ryther said. “You say these worship pyramids are scattered all through the forest?”
“Yes, as far as I have ranged. But the Angels have smashed all those close to their valley to drive the Jaenshi away. As they expand, and they will expand, they will smash others.”
Ryther nodded. She looked down into the valley again, and as she did the last sliver of the Heart of Bakkalon slid below the western mountains and the city lights began to come on. The Jaenshi children swung in pools of soft blue illumination, and just above the city gates two stick figures could be seen working. Shortly they heaved something outward, a rope uncoiled, and then another small dark shadow jerked and twitched against the wall. “Why?” Ryther said, in a cool voice, watching.
NeKrol was anything but cool. “The Jaenshi tried to defend one of their pyramids. Spears and knives and rocks against the Steel Angels with lasers and blasters and screechguns. But they caught them unaware, killed a man. The Proctor announced it would not happen again.” He spat. “Evil. The children trust them, you see.”
Dreamsongs 2-Book Bundle Page 26
