Levels: Fantastic and Macabre Stories

by Nathan Shumate

  All were at the muddy edge of the River at first full light the next morning, the excitement of the parents eclipsed by the anxious energy of the young. The parents and small children stopped high on the crest of the bank, well above the edge of the muddy wash that the Flooding of the last Longyear had deposited, the renewed soil that fairly seized the seeds we planted and threw forth crops in abundance. This had been a prosperous Longyear, the adults all said; for after the Flooding, the mud had stayed moist for months, and even after that there came gentle rains which watered the plants without washing the mud back into the River’s flow. Good food and good water meant good living, and there were more children playing at the high water mark of the wash who had been born since the last Longyear than the oldsters ever remembered seeing.

  The young women came down onto the banks that had been mudded and then planted so many times. Old XiLi, XiHe’s mate, stopped them halfway up from the River, and they dispersed themselves, each finding a spot of clear earth in which they could sit and recline, each in full view of all of us young men who stood at the very edge of the water and rocks. XiHe was with us, solemnly instructing us, but each young man’s ears were stoppered to XiHe’s admonitions as our eyes sought out those to whom we most wanted to run, dripping and gasping, after the Flooding. I found LuRa and tried not to display my teeth in a smile of foolish eagerness. XiHe stood patiently as our attention was drawn elsewhere; he had seen six of these Longyears, and maybe even remembered the time when he himself had waded out into the River. He patiently used his stick to knock some shins, and our attention went back to him, though we could all feel the eyes of the expectant young women still upon us like a breeze on the fur on the backs of our legs.

  “Let us pray,” he said, and he bowed his head and stared down into the water up to his shins, the crest of his hair a bristly white stripe down his head and back. We all stepped into the cool River, feeling the tingle as the cold met the soles of our feet, and each stared down into the clear water that flowed, unhurried but constant, around our legs and on down the river. XiHe prayed in words that had long fallen away from the everyday tongues of the people; his cadence was that of one who learns the sounds at the feet of another, whose mouth makes its forms from obeisance rather than intent. These, I knew, were words handed down from eldest of the old to eldest of the old from so far back in time that the River alone matched them for age. The people of River Home birth and age and marry and die; the River runs on, and the prayers to and for it linger just that long, passing to new sets of lips as the old ones go silent.

  The prayer ended and XiHe raised his head. We all did likewise, blinking in the sun, and I think we all involuntarily looked to the shore for an instant, reassuring ourselves that the young eager women were still there. I moved my weight from foot to foot as each slid into the silt that lined the edge of the River.

  We stood in silence, listening to the murmur of the River, the whine of insects which flitted over River and shore and alighted harmlessly on fur. We watched XiHe, who steadied himself with his staff in the gentle current. His eyes were closed; he was listening. As were we all.

  And together we heard it, distant but unmistakable even to those of us who couldn’t remember it from the last Longyear: the high-pitched braying of the Far Trumpeter perched on the cliffs that marked the horizon to the south. XiHe’s son JaZa could see the Flood coming.

  ***

  XiHe opened his eyes as the crackle of excitement passed over all those in the River and on the land. “You who are to brave the River this Longyear,” he addressed us, and his voice cracked to reach all of us over the steady babble of the River, “find the spots in which you will withstand the embrace of the River. Some of you, the River may take to herself, and all of us in River Home salute you now, for we will not have occasion later. Those whom the River leaves will then find the embrace of your mates, and we will have ample time to salute you afterward. Go now.”

  And we turned as one from XiHe and looked to the River.

  The rocks which punctuated the River here were washed down from the distant cliffs, it is said, and stuck out from the flowing water here and there, in ones and twos and threes. Some had been smoothed where the water flows eternally past them, but most had spent the endless years sticking out above the waterline, and remained rough-edged and craggy. Birds perched on a few, and white streaks from their droppings striped the tallest ones. These few stones were our safety. To the south, at the closer end of the valley, the River flowed eternally through the breach in the low cliffs; north of this garden of stones, the River swept unbroken until it exited the valley far to the north.

  I was small and spry. I dashed out into the current with leaping steps to keep from having to drag my legs through the water, very conscious that such bounding was boyish, not manly. But it didn’t matter much. Emerging from the River after the Flooding would confer and prove manhood more than my gait. My object was a small cluster of three stones, the one in the middle taller than the rest and leaning forward into the current. I knew that wrapping my arms around that taller stone, with the two on the sides to shield me, would offer me as much protection as could be had in the Flooding.

  Others also headed toward that same trio of stones, but I got there first; grumbling, they turned aside to grasp other rocky anchors. The River here didn’t lack for such stones; this was why the Flooding was always observed at this spot.

  XiHe stayed in the River up to his knees, leaning on his short staff, until all the young males had chosen an anchor. Then we all heard it from the distant cliffs: the second warning blast from the Far Trumpeter. XiHe nodded, raised a hand in mute benediction, and turned his silvered mane to the shore where his XiLi waited for him with a staff of her own; together they helped each other up the sloping bank.

  My eyes turned from their old hobbling shapes further up the River’s bank, seeking out my LuRa. All of the young eager females had now moved back to the crest of the bank, and their silhouettes against the sky as they stood or crouched were almost indistinguishable one from another.

  It was because my attention was focused on the land that I didn’t notice SuChi nearing me until his heavy hand fell on my shoulder and pulled. “My spot, ErWe,” he said gruffly, and with a single tug yanked me clear from the trio of stones that had been my sure protection. SuChi was the heaviest of the young males in the River; he had matured quickly, and was half again as heavy as I was. The defiant sound in my throat died without passing my lips; there was no way that I could defend my spot, no way in which I could pry SuChi’s strong, fleshy arms from the tallest of the three stones and reclaim my place.

  I looked desperately to the shore. XiHe’s back was still turned as he and his wife clambered up the slope, and I knew that SuChi had used what passed for cleverness in his brain, waiting until the old silvermane’s gaze was no longer enforcing custom and order.

  And then, as I stood waist-deep in the cold rushing water, I heard the sound of the third trumpet. The Flooding was near; even had XiHe still been turned toward the River, there was no time to plead my case and regain my rightful spot. Nothing stops the Flooding.

  There were still vacant stones, I could see, but they were too far for me to get to now that the third trumpet had sounded. All of the most viable nearby stones had been taken by those my age who now watched me as I cast this way and that, seeking refuge like a mouse cut off from its hole.

  At last I dashed forward into the current, past the spot where SuChi crouched in safety and smirked. There was another stone a dozen paces beyond it, unoccupied and standing slightly out of the water. Its sides were slick and smooth, and it tilted back, dangerously so. But the third trumpet had sounded, and the Flooding would not wait. I splashed forward and wrapped my arms around it, locking my wrists awkwardly as the trumpet sounded again.

  Again? It took half a heartbeat to realize it. The warning trumpet sounds three times, no more; everyone knows that. But it had sounded a fourth time. And now, a fifth. Even abo
ve the murmur of the River, I imagined I could hear the muted voices of consternation on the shore. I glanced over and saw XiHe and others shielding their eyes to look in vain toward the far cliffs where JaZa now blew ragged blasts on the horn one after another with scarcely a breath in between.

  I craned my neck around my stone and looked forward to the gap in the low cliffs through which the River pours into the basin of River Home. It loomed too close for any of us in the River to even pretend to see where JaZa was perched on the high cliffs beyond. I could only see the channel in the rocky walls cut and deepened by the eternal River, its walls stained above the current water level with the marks of the high water of Floodings past. A roar started out of that gap, a heaving of rough wind as the Flooding drove the air before it.

  And then I saw it. And I forgot to breathe.

  The Flooding was coming. It was a wall of water thick with the silt and mud of the spring runoff, churning with the violence of its approach. And it was twice as high as the highest mark on the wall of the gap.

  JaZa still blew his horn, but it faded behind the steady exhaled roar of the oncoming water, a Flooding unlike any ever seen before. I only just remembered myself and gasped a full breath before the Flooding hit.

  The water was a solid thing of cold and fury, as hard and crushing as the stone around which my arms were desperately wrapped. It hit my face and front as hard as if I had been standing unprotected in mid-River, and pulled my back like a thousand SuChis with their fingers entwined into my fur. The water beat at my hands clasped together around the stone; the cold and pressure ground them like millstones until my fingers were left insensate. I could feel bubbling panic forcing its way into my lungs, pushing up through my mouth and nostrils. This Flooding wasn’t the River rising up to claim the weak as her own mates; she was a raging animal, the queen of demons, lashing out with her pent-up fury at poor little ErWe who had dared into her unstoppable, murderous path.

  I only knew that my numb fingers had let go when I felt the water carry me backwards instead of pushing against me. I gave myself up for lost and hoped that the River would deposit me in the next world before my lungs burst.

  Then something struck me in the back—or rather, I struck it. I had to clap both hands to my mouth to keep the stale air in my lungs from jetting out in surprise and pain. The small of my back was against a stone in the River, the very same stone, I realized, where I had confidently positioned myself before SuChi dragged me from my place. The forward stone angled down into the current, and it was there that the current held me, pinned by the water at the angle where the leaning stone met the River bottom. The Flooding bent my head back and tore at my eyes and nostrils, but my back was securely wedged under the stone.

  I crawled one hand up the surface of the stone that held me, hoping to find the air above the churning water; but if I reached it, my senseless fingers could not tell the difference between wet and dry. The other hand I balled into a fist and pressed against my stomach, willing myself to hold the desperate breath that hammered on the inside of my chest to be let out. All of us had practiced holding our breath, together and separately, in the open and with our faces in basins of cold water, but who could have imagined the fury that the River would unleash upon the eager young men of River Home?

  Then, when my lungs were fighting for fresh air like a trapped beast, when I was nearly ready to breathe the water in just to end the oppressive anxious need, I felt the River’s pressure slacken. Not much, but enough that my head wasn’t bent almost backwards with the current. I stretched both hands toward the rock face and turned myself to face the stone which had held me down and kept me from being swept away. My fingers were no better than broken sticks, but I clumsily pulled myself upright against the current—still strong enough to whisk me away like a dried leaf, but compared to what it had been it felt like the sloshings in a washtub—and finally, finally, my face broke through the frothing surface. I released the breath I had held for what seemed like a full Longyear and gasped in new air that burned all the way down my throat unto lungs that could not wait to expel this breath and draw in the next and the next and the next.

  My eyes felt bruised when I opened them. They probably were, having faced the River water which had struck me like fists. I looked around for SuChi in fear that he would peel me from “his” stone and I would be swept away after all, down the River and out of the valley. But I could not see SuChi through my blurry eyes.

  I clung to the stone and gasped, feeling my blood brighten and my head clear. The overlapping aches of my body, overshadowed until now by the all-encompassing pummeling of the River, began to fight each other for my attention, and I knew that by tomorrow I would be a single massive bruise under my fur, barely able to move.

  But tomorrow I would be alive. And LuRa would be there to tend me, LuRa who I would now rename WeRa as soon as I reached shore and discarded the name my parents had given me, ErWe, and named myself WeSa as an adult.

  I brushed the fur around my eyes with one hand to clear the mud and blinked toward shore, ill-focused like a newborn. I could see the father and mothers, the oldsters, and the waiting young women at the top of the shore. I could see the line of churned wash along the slope of the shore, higher than I had ever known it could reach. The roaring within my ears dimmed, and beyond the continued slosh and rush of the River, there was no other sound.

  Finally I judged and hoped that the current of the Flooding was weak enough and my own feet strong enough to let go of my stone and make my way to shore. I set one foot solidly on the bottom, then the other, leaning sideways into the current. I took another step. And another.

  Then I looked for SuChi again, realizing what it meant that he was not clinging to the same stone I had been. He was gone? Had the Flooding truly swept away the strongest of the youths of this Longyear? I could not see him, and though I had been torn from my own mooring and yet lived, such a happenstance was not to be trusted twice; I had never heard of it happening before, in all the tales told of Longyears past. SuChi was a bully and a braggart, exulting in his size and his early cresting as if it were a thing earned and merited, but even so his loss was the first I had ever known. He was my age, and now he was dead.

  Then I looked to the other stones and groups of stones, sticking from the River with the dirty wash of the Flooding curled around them.

  I saw no one else.

  I stood there, dumb, staring from rock to rock as the truth of it sank slowly into my soggy mind. Save for the stones which had stood there for Longyears out of memory, I was alone in the River.

  My eyes followed the current downstream. Past this field of stones, where the youths of every Longyear clung to show their fitness to be men, the path of the River was unbroken again until it finally passed out of sight at the north end of the valley of River Home. There were no outcroppings to provide purchase for desperate fingers, no curls where eddies might drag the fortunate out of the current and toward the bank; all who lost their grip during the Flooding were taken far out of the valley, and if their bodies were ever brought to shore again in a distant land before the River reached the sea, none knew it.

  I could feel all eyes upon me from the bank. I stumbled as I waded through the water still as high as my chest, feeling the weight of attention. I could feel the grit and silt that had saturated my fur. I tried to concentrate only on my footing, but while I did not look up at the score of stunned, devastated females on land, I could hear them: a nasal keening from the back of their throats that rose unbidden in desperation, both mournful and pleading.

  When I reached the shallows where the water was below my knees—and I realized how much further up the bank this point still was than when I had entered the water surrounded by young hopefuls—I could no longer maintain the pretense of deliberation over my footing and looked up. There, the young women who had had their own favorites swept away watched me, eyes bright with a desperate hope. Almost all of them had slipped down the slope toward me, as if I might s
imply choose the one who was closest to be my mate. Some reached a hand out to me in supplication. Some even threw aside shame and stretched their legs wide to offer me the moistness peeking from their fur, as if a mere glimpse could entice me. I passed these brazen ones, who suddenly closed themselves as if awakening to their shame.

  I could choose any of them. It was a realization that sat on the surface of my stunned mind, a fact which seemed to have no personal import to me, like something memorized in schooling. It meant nothing to me. I had already made my choice.

  I stepped out of the eddying water onto the dry earth. Slowly, wearily, I walked up the slope. I looked neither to left nor right, and the keening rose full-throated in every young woman I passed, consigned by my passage to fruitless spinsterhood. I saw the parents and oldsters who had prepared of a day of uncertain celebration, now watching me in silent grief. My own mother and father were somewhere in the crowd; they had been rooted to their spots in shock, and I could not see them as I ascended further and further the shallow slope of the River’s bank.

  But I was not looking for them. I had eyes only for LuRa, who still sat on the summit of the bank, legs folded demurely under her, eyes averted in either excitement or sorrow or both.

  I leaned over when I reached her, almost falling to my knees in stiff weariness, and kissed her.

  And the keening behind me became a full-throated wail, drowning out whatever we might have said after that.

  ***

  The only one who openly hates me is my birthsister ErRu, who lives still with my parents and will help raise their coming birthpair. While all of the other females had still held out a slim hope that they would yet mate, when she saw me stand alone from the embrace of the River she knew there was not even that hope for her; for what could she do, when the only eligible male to emerge from the Flooding was her birthbrother? The other young women lamented that their chosen had not come back out of the River; ErRu hated that I had.