Nearly Complete Short Fiction, page 138
“What about Franklin? He can’t do this to us, can he, Uncle Thomas? Don’t you want to escape? Don’t you want revenge on Franklin, on Ottilie, for what they did to your wives? Don’t you? Don’t you?”
He had to cut through his uncle’s confused mist of gathering delirium.
In complete desperation, he lowered his head and sank his teeth into a wounded shoulder.
NOTHING. Just the steady flow of argumentative gibberish. And the thin blood dripping from the mouth.
“I saw Arthur the Organizer. He said he’d known you for a long time. When did you meet him, Uncle Thomas? When did you first meet Arthur the Organizer?”
The head drooped lower, the shoulders slumped further forward.
“Tell me about Alien-science. What is Alien-science?” Eric was almost gibbering himself now in his frantic efforts to find a key that would unlock his uncle’s mind. “Are Arthur the Organizer and Walter the Weapon-Seeker very important men among the Alien-sciencers? Are they the chiefs? What was the name of the structure they were hiding in? What is it to the Monsters? They talked about other tribes, tribes I never heard of. How many other tribes are there? Are these other tribes—”
That was it. He had found the key. He had gotten through.
Thomas the Trap-Smasher’s head came up waveringly, dimness swirling in his eyes. “Other tribes. Funny that you should ask about other tribes. That you should ask.”
“Why? What about them?” Eric fought to hold the key in place, to keep it turning. “Why shouldn’t I ask about those other tribes?”
“Your grandmother was from another tribe, a real strange tribe in a faroff burrow. I remember hearing about it when I was a little boy.” Thomas the Trap-Smasher nodded to himself. “Your grandfather’s band went on a long journey, the longest they’d ever taken. And they caught your grandmother and brought her back.”
“MY grandmother?” For the moment, Eric forgot what was being prepared for him outside. He’d known there was some peculiar secret about his grandmother. She had rarely been mentioned in Mankind. Up to now, he’d taken it for granted that this was because she’d had a son who was terribly unlucky—almost the worst thing a person in the burrows could be. A one-child litter, after all, and being killed together with his wife in Monster territory. Very unlucky.
“My grandmother was from another tribe? Not from Mankind?” He knew, of course, that several of the women had been captured from other peoples in neighboring burrows and had the good fortune now to be considered full-fledged members of Mankind. Sometimes one of their own women would be lost this way, when she strayed too far down an outlying burrow and stumbled into a band of Stranger warriors. If you stole a woman from another people, after all, you stole a substantial portion of their knowledge. But he’d never imagined—
“Dora the Dream-Singer.” Thomas’s head waggled loosely: he dribbled words mixed with red saliva. “Did you know why your grandmother was called the Dream-Singer, Eric? The women used to say that the things she talked about happened only in dreams, and that she couldn’t talk straight like other people—she could only sing about her dreams. But she taught your father a lot, and he was like her. Women were a little afraid to mate with him. My sister was the first to take a chance—and everyone said she deserved what she got.”
Abruptly, Eric became conscious of a change in the sounds outside the burrow. More quiet. Were they coming for him now?
“Uncle Thomas, listen! I have an idea. Those Strangers—Walter, Arthur the Organizer—they gave me a Monster souvenir. I don’t know what it does, but I can’t get at it. I’ll turn around. You try to reach down into my knapsack with the tips of your fingers and—”
The Trap-Smasher paid no attention to him. “She was an Alien-sciencer,” he rambled on, mostly to himself. “Your grandmother was the first Alien-sciencer we ever had in Mankind. I guess her tribe were all Alien-sciencers. Imagine—a whole tribe of Alien-sciencers!”
Eric groaned. This half-alive, delirious man was his only hope of escaping. This bloody wreck who had once been the proudest, most alert band captain of them all.
He turned for another look at the guard. The man was still staring down the length of the great central burrow. There was nothing to be heard now but a terrifying silence, as if dozens of pairs of eyes were glowing in anticipation. And footsteps—were not those footsteps? He had to find a way to make his uncle co-operate.
“THOMAS the Trap-Smasher!” he said sharply, barely managing to keep his voice low. “Listen to me. This is an order! There’s something in my knapsack, a blob of sticky stuff. We’re going to turn our backs to each other, and you’re going to reach in with your fingers and fish it out. Do you hear me? That’s an order—a warrior’s order!”
His uncle nodded, completely docile. “I’ve been a warrior for over twenty auld lang synes,” he mumbled, twisting around. “Six of them a band captain. I’ve given orders and taken them, given them and taken them. I’ve never disobeyed an order. What I always say is how can you expect to give orders if you don’t—”
“Now,” Eric told him, bringing their backs together and hunching down so that his knapsack would be just under his uncle’s bound arms. “Reach in. Work that mass of sticky stuff out. It’s right on top. And hurry!”
Yes. Those were footsteps coming up outside. Several of them. The leaders of the Female Society, the chief, an escort of warriors. And the guard, watching that deadly procession, was liable to remember his duties and turn back to the prisoners.
“Hurry,” he demanded. “I told you to hurry, dammit! That’s an order, too. Get it out fast. Fast!”
And, all this time, as the Trap-Smasher’s fumbling fingers wandered about in his knapsack, as he listened with fright and impatience to the sounds of the approaching execution party—all this time, somewhere in his mind, there was wonderment at the orders he was rapping out to an experienced band captain and the incredible authority he had managed to get into his voice.
“Now you’re wondering where your grandmother’s tribe have their burrow,” Thomas began suddenly, reverting to an earlier topic as if they were having a pleasant conversation after a fine, full meal.
“Forget it! Get that stuff out. Just get it out!”
“It’s hard to describe,” the other man’s voice wandered on. “A long way off, their burrow is, a long way off. You know the Strangers call us front-burrow people. You know that, don’t you? The Strangers are back-burrowers. Well, your grandmother’s people are the bottom-most burrowers of all.”
Eric sensed his fingers closing in the knapsack.
The three women who ruled the Female Society came into the storage burrow. Ottilie the Omen-Teller, Sarah the Sickness-Healer and Rita the Record-Keeper. With them was the chief and two band captains, heavily armed.
IX
OTTILIE, the Chieftain’s First Wife, was in the lead. She stopped, just inside the entrance to the burrow and the others came to a halt around her.
“Look at them,” she jeered. “They’re trying to free each other! And what do they plan to do if they get themselves untied?”
Franklin moved to her side and took a long, judicious look at the two men squatting back to back. “They’ll try to escape,” he explained, continuing his wife’s joke. “They’ll have their hands free, they figure, and surely Thomas the Trap-Smasher and his nephew are a match, even bare-handed, for the best spearmen in Mankind!”
And then Eric felt the searching hands come up out of the knapsack to which his own arms were tied. Something fell to the floor of the burrow. It made an odd noise, halfway between a splash and a thud. He twisted around for it immediately with his mouth open, flexing his knees in a tight crouch underneath his body.
“You’ve never seen anything like the burrows of your grandmother’s people,” his uncle was mumbling, as if what his hands had just done was no concern of the rest of him. “And neither have I, though I’ve listened to the tales.”
“He won’t last long now,” Sarah the Sickness-Healer commented. “We’ll have to have our fun with the boy.”
All you do, Walter the Weapon-Seeker had said, is tear off a pinch with your fingers. Then spit on it and throw it. Throw it as fast and as far as you can.
He couldn’t use his fingers. But he leaned down to the red blob and nipped off a piece with his teeth. He brought his tongue against the strange soft substance, lashing saliva into it. And simultaneously he kicked at the burrow floor with curved toes, straightening his legs, jerking his thighs and body upward. Unable to use his arms for balance, he tottered erect and turned, swaying, to face the leaders of his people.
After you spit on it, throw it fast. As fast and as far as you can.
“I don’t know what he’s doing,” someone said, “but I don’t like it. Let me through.”
Stephen the Strong-Armed stepped ahead of the group and lifted a heavy spear, ready for throwing.
Eric shut his eyes, bent his head far back on his neck and took a deep, deep breath. Then he snapped his head forward, flipping his tongue hard against the object in his mouth. He forced out his breath so abruptly that the exhalation became a wild, barking cough.
The soft little mass flew out of his mouth, and he opened his eyes to watch its course. For a moment, he was unable to find it anywhere; then he located it by the odd expression on Stephen’s face and the fearful upward roll of his eyes.
There was a little red splotch in the middle of the band captain’s forehead.
What was supposed to happen, he wondered? He had followed directions as well as he could under the circumstances, but he had no idea what the scarlet stain, made loose and moist by his saliva, was supposed to accomplish. He watched it, hoping and waiting.
Then Stephen the Strong-Armed brought his free hand up slowly to wipe the stuff off. Eric stopped hoping. Nothing was going to happen.
Strangers, he had begun to think despairingly, that’s what comes of trusting Strangers—
THE blast of sound was so tremendous that for a moment he thought the roof of the burrow had fallen in. He was slammed backwards against the wall and fell as if he’d been walloped with a spear haft. He remembered the cough with which he’d expelled the bit of red blob from his mouth. Had there been a delayed echo to his cough, a gigantic, ear-splitting echo?
He lifted his head from the floor finally, when the reverberations in the little storage burrow had rumbled into a comparative silence. Someone was screaming. Someone was screaming over and over again.
It was Sarah. She was looking at Stephen the Strong-Armed from the rear. She had been standing directly behind him. Now she was staring at him and screaming in sharp steady bursts.
Her mouth was open so wide that it seemed she was about to tear her jaws apart. And with each scream she lifted her arm rigidly and pointed to the back of Stephen’s neck. She kept lifting her arm and pointing as if she wanted everyone present to know beyond the least doubt why and how she came to be screaming.
Stephen the Strong-Armed had no head. His body ended at the neck, and flaps of skin fell down to his chest in an irregular wavy pattern. A fountain of blood bubbled and spurted where his head had been. His body still stood upright, feet planted wide apart in a good warrior’s stance, one arm holding the spear ready for action and the other congealed in its upward motion to wipe the red blob away. It stood, incredibly straight and tall and alive.
Suddenly, it fell apart.
First the spear slid slowly forward out of the right hand and clattered to the floor. Then the arms began to fall loosely to the sagging knees and the entire great, brawny body slumped as if its bones had left it. It dropped aimlessly to the floor, an arm poking out here, a leg twisting out there, in a pattern as meaningless as if an oddly shaped bag of skin had been flung to one side of the burrow.
It continued to twitch for a moment or two, as the bubbling fountain of blood turned into a sluggishly flowing river. At last it lay still, a motionless heap of limbs and torso. Of the missing head there was no trace anywhere.
SARAH the Sickness-Healer stopped screaming and turned, shaking, to her companions. Their protruding eyes left the body on the floor.
Then they all reacted at once.
They yelled madly, wildly, fearfully, as if they were a chorus and she the conductor. Still bellowing, they made for the narrow entrance behind them. They got through in a pushing, punching scramble that at one point looked like a composite monster with dozens of arms, legs and swinging, naked breasts. They carried the guard outside with them, and with them, too, they carried their uncontrollable panic, screaming it into existence all along the great central burrow.
For a little while, Eric could hear feet pounding into the distant corridors. Then there was quiet. There was quiet everywhere, except for Thomas the Trap-Smasher’s interminable mumbling.
Eric forced himself upright again. He was unable to imagine what had happened. That red blob—the Stranger, Walter, had said it was a weapon, but it didn’t operate like any weapon he had ever in his life heard of. Except possibly in the times of the ancestors: the ancestors were supposed to have had things which could blow an object apart and leave no trace. But this was an alien artifact, a possession of the Monsters which Walter the Weapon-Seeker had somehow found and appropriated. What was it? How had it exploded the head of Stephen the Strong-Armed?
That was to be worked out another time. Meanwhile, he had his chance. It might not last long: he had no idea when the panic might subside and a patrol of warriors be sent back to investigate. He stepped carefully across the red stream flowing from the fallen man’s neck. Squatting down in front of the dropped spear, he managed to get a grip on it with his bound hands and rose, holding it awkwardly behind him.
No time to cut his bonds. Not here.
“Uncle Thomas,” he called. “We can get away. We have a chance now. Come on, get up!”
The wounded band captain stared up at him without comprehension. “—corridors like you’ve never seen or imagined,” he continued in a low monotone. “Glow lamps that aren’t on foreheads. Corridors filled with glow lamps. Corridors and corridors and corridors—”
For a moment, Eric considered. The man would be a heavy liability in fast travel. But he couldn’t desert him. This was his last surviving relative, the only person who didn’t consider him an outlaw and a thing. And, shattered as he was, also still his captain.
“Get up!” he said again. “Thomas the Trap-Smasher, get up! That’s an order, a warrior’s order. Get up!”
As he’d hoped, his uncle responded to the old command. He managed to get his legs under his body, and strained against them, but it was no use. He didn’t have the energy to rise.
CASTING apprehensive looks over his shoulder at the entrance to the storage burrow, Eric ran to the struggling man. Working backwards, he managed to get one end of the spear under the crook of his uncle’s arm. Then, using his own hip as a fulcrum, he levered hard at the other end.
It was painful, slippery work, since he couldn’t bring all of his muscles into play and it was difficult to see what he was doing. In between efforts, he gasped out orders to “Get up, get up, get up, damn you!” At last the end of the spear went all the way down. His uncle was on his feet, staggering, but at least on his feet.
Dragging the spear awkwardly, Eric urged and butted him out of the place. The great central burrow was empty of people. Weapons, pots and miscellaneous possessions lay strewn about where they had been dropped. The finished structure of the Stage stood deserted in front of the royal mound. And some time before, the bodies of his uncle’s wives had evidently been removed.
The chief and the other leaders had bolted to the left once they had clawed their way out of the storage burrow. They had apparently run past the scaffold structure and picked up the rest of Mankind in their panic.
Eric turned right.
His uncle was a problem. Thomas the Trap-Smasher kept coming to a bewildered halt. Again and again he began the story of his long-ago journey to the burrows of the strange, distant tribe. Eric had to push against him to keep him moving.
Once they were in the outlying corridors, he felt better. But not until they had made many turns, passed dozens of branches and were well into completely uninhabited burrows, did he feel he could stop and saw himself free of his bonds on the point of the spear. He did the same for his uncle. Then, throwing the Trap-Smasher’s left arm across his own shoulders and clutching him tightly about the waist, he started off again. It was slow going: his uncle was a heavy man, but the more distance they could put between themselves and Mankind, the better.
But distance where? Where should they go? He pondered the problem as they tottered together down the silent, branching corridors. One place was as good as another. There was nowhere that they would be welcome. Just keep going.
He may have muttered his questions aloud. To his surprise, Thomas the Trap-Smasher suddenly said in an entirely coherent but very weak voice: “The doorway to Monster territory, Eric. Make for the doorway to Monster territory where you went to make your Theft.”
“Why?” Eric asked. “What can we do there?”
There was no answer. His uncle’s head fell forward on his chest. He was evidently sliding into a stupor again. And yet, somehow, as long as Eric’s encircling arm pulled at his body, the man’s legs kept moving forward. There was some residual stamina and a warrior’s determination in him yet.
Monster territory. Was there more safety for them there now than they could find among human beings?
Very well then. The doorway to Monster territory. They would have to come around in a wide arc through many corridors to get to it, but Eric knew the way. He was Eric the Eye, after all, he told himself: it was his business always to know the way.
But was it? He had not enjoyed the formal initiation into manhood that was the usual aftermath of a successful Theft. Without that, perhaps he was still Eric the Only, still a boy and an initiate. No, he knew what he was. He was Eric the Outlaw, nothing else.
