Roan leaped lightly across the muddy ditch.
The gracyls were delighted to see him. The gracyl with the ball tossed it to him. Then four of them swooped straight at him and their momentum shoved his back, straight down into the mud of the ditch.
“Okay,” Roan said, climbing out in the oozy mud. “Okay, I just wanted to be sure I was in the game.”
One of the trees was a young Purplefruit tree, and Roan found a straight rope-vine and cut off a good length from it, several times longer than he was tall. He tied a slip knot in one end and then coiled the rope and slung it in his belt. At the edge of the grove by the ditch, he picked a quarter-grown sapling and climbed up its straight trunk, hanging by his hands when it began to bend, and edging along the length of the young, springy tree until the top of it bent down to the ground. Then carefully, using his full strength, he bent the tree all the way back on itself and used a length of the rope to tie the top to the lower part of the thin trunk. He still had plenty of rope left. The gracyls gathered around and jeered. “That’s a silly game,” they said. “Who ever played that?”
“It’s part of swoop ball,” Roan said. “You just watch.
“Yah, yah,” said the gracyl who had the ball at the moment. He was up in a nearby tree and he swooped to a lower branch. Then another gracyl swooped the ball away from him and Roan was twirling his rope as the last gracyl was flying across the grove with the ball.
He caught the gracyl around the leg in a beautiful loop and drew him in squawking.
Roan calmly took the ball away and threw it to another gracyl to start the game again, and trussed the lassoed gracyl to the sapling and slipped the rope, so the gracyl went sailing away over the ditch.
Roan climbed up the sapling and bent it again. It no longer stood straight but there was plenty of spring left in it. He looped his lasso again and caught the next gracyl that came sailing by.
“I seem to keep winning,” Roan said, trussing the next gracyl to the tree, and slipping the rope again. This one landed right in the ditch, and scrambled out and made for home.
The gracyls could have played swoop ball higher up in the trees, where Roan’s lasso couldn’t reach them. Or they could have moved the game. But they didn’t. This was where gracyls played swoop ball.
Roan took care of two more gracyls. “Give up?” he asked the rest.
“Yah, you can’t even fly,” they said and kept on playing exactly the same way. No one tried to take his rope away. No one tried to keep him from bending the sapling.
Pretty soon there were no more gracyls. The last one went sailing over the ditch and hopped off home, whining.
All except Clanth, of course, with his one undeveloped wing. He’d learned to sit and watch games.
“That was fun,” Clanth said.
Roan tossed his rope into the muddy ditch and leapt across it and turned back to watch the deserted spot where the swoop ball game had been. He rubbed the mud off his hands down the sides of his trousers.
“I won,” he said, and grinned, and went home to practice his reading.
III
Roan sat on the stoop of his house with a large book spread in his lap. It was entitled Heroes of Old Terra, and it was packed with shiny tri-D pictures of men and ships and great towering cities. It was a very old book. Some of the pages were missing, but the pictures were still bright.
“Hey, c’mon,” someone said. Roan’s mind swam out from the book. Clanth, who was the nearest thing Roan had to a friend, stood waiting.
“Where?” Roan asked.
“Where!” Clanth flapped his one, useless wing. His black, leathery gracyl face was alight with excitement, the round amber eyes asparkle. “It’s the Spring pre-mating. Out in the grove.”
Roan’s fair cheeks flushed, back to the root of his deep red hair. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. “But . . . good flying.” he added, so as not to offend his friend. It might have been an offensive phrase to Clanth, because of his disability, but Roan had found that Clanth preferred for him not to be sensitive about it.
“I . . . Oh, I’m not like the others, either. But Clanth was handsome, gracyl handsome, and well developed for fourteen, and you noticed that before you noticed about his wing. And since he was in Studies, not Labor, it didn’t make so much difference about the wing. “C’mon. Roan!”
“What would I do there?” Roan asked. “Provided I could get a female up a tree to begin with?”
“Well . . . wings aren’t really necessary. At least I hope not. Look at me.” And he raised his wingless right arm.
“I’d rather not try.” Roan pictured the black, screeching little gracyl females. He was glad he didn’t want one, because she’d laugh at him if he did. Sneer at him. Flap her wings at him.
“But gee, here you are fourteen years old,” Clanth persisted. “What are you going to do?”
“I’ll wait,” said Roan.
“For what?” Clanth asked, and didn’t wait for the answer, for a gaggle of fourteens went by and Clanth ran off to join them.
Roan watched them go, then sat with the book in his lap, gazing at the clouds and trying to picture a human female. The portraits in his books, the descriptions he’d read; he tried to put all his knowledge together, but it wouldn’t add up to a definite picture. Every time he thought he had it, it slipped away from him.
Day wore into evening and still Roan sat, and he thought about human women and then about human men, and the old heroes of his book, who left human women to go out and find new worlds, and died showing there were places besides earth where human men could bring human women.
Human women were not like Ma. They were . . . Roan couldn’t find the thought. He didn’t know.
The gracyls had finished going by. The crowds of young males had gone out, and the crowds of ripening females. The first moon was still white in the sky, but it was brightening and soon the sickle antimoon would come up and the ceremonies would begin. Roan wished Clanth well and hoped his female would not laugh too much at his poor wingless arm.
Another group of youths was coming along; there was a low mutter of talk and laughter among them—and they were not gracyls.
“Supper!” Ma called. And came to the door. “What are you doing reading in that light?”
Roan peered through the gloom to see who was coming. The Veed. What were they doing out of their ornately decorated quartets in the heart of the town?
“Has there been a Veed murder or something?” Roan asked, because Ma always managed to know, without talking to anybody, what was going on in the adult world.
“If there has I don’t want to know about it and neither do you.” said Ma, retreating further behind the front door. “You come on in. You don’t want to tempt that trash to stop here.”
But Roan waited to watch them go by, the young Veed, their scale-suits glittering faintly even in the tarnished twilight. They walked upright, looking almost human, talking their Veed talk.
“They’re children,” Roan said, and went in finally. “About my age.”
“About fifty years old,” Ma said, spooning stewed limpid seeds onto the grits on his plate. “That would be about half mature, for them.”
“One of them was an aristocrat. I saw the iridion quadrant on his cheek.” What magic lives they must lead, Roan thought, those Veed, with their painted porches and their gardens and their endless games of slots and colored beads, and their lives that stretched on forever.
“When will I die?” Roan asked, and Dad dropped his knife with a helping of purplefruit balanced on it.
“What made you ask that?”
“Nothing. I just wondered. I mean the Veed take forever to grow up and gracyls die if they get broken badly, but what about me?”
“You,” Dad said. “Well, I’ve always answered you straight. You’ll live a long time yet. Take me. I’m a hundred and eighty, and still got lots of years ahead. You’ll live longer yet. You’re prime Terry stock, boy.”
“Even if I don’t
get broken or something? That’s all I’ll live? I’ll just die?”
“There’s a story,” Raff said, picking up his knife and scraping the dirtied fruit off on the side of his wooden plate, “an old, old story that at the beginning of time the nine Gods called all the species of intelligent beings together and asked them which they preferred, a long life or a glorious one. Only Man chose the glorious life. And he’s always been proud of it.”
There was another sibilance of Veed going by outside and Roan scurried to the dark front window and saw a second group, headed the same way, toward the gracyl mating grove, die grove of trees by the ditch, where long ago Roan had used his lasso to win a game of swoop ball. The sapling was a tree with spread limbs now, and maybe Clanth would be waiting in it to drop down and catch his female.
The moonlight shown yellowish-pink now, and the garbage dump outside the window was jeweled with it. It was Veed garbage, Roan thought, and for some reason this made him love the gracyls and hate the Veed.
“There’s going to be trouble tonight,” Roan said, and finished his dinner thoughtfully.
Raff silently got down his big hammer and nailed a panel on a bar of wood across each plastiflex window.
“No,” said Roan, when Raff started to nail the door bolt from the inside. He wiped the last of the grits off his knife and stuck it through his rope vine belt. He pulled his tunic up short, so that it draped over his belt and left his legs free for running. Raff looked at him.
“Clanth’s out there,” Roan said. “I’ll be back after a while.”
“Now, boy,” Raff started. But Roan was already gone, out into the moonlight and the warm Spring night.
“Why did you tell him that silly story?” Bella asked, sitting in the darkened house and miserable at the thought of the long, dark hours before Roan might come home.
“Because,” Raff said, T think it’s true.”
IV
He knew something the Veed didn’t know. He knew every shack and rock and ditch and garbage pile in the slum. As he came out of the house he sensed another group approaching, and he ducked into a tunnel through the heaped garbage.
They were speaking Veed, their hushed, hissed tongue, so Roan could not tell all of what they were saying, though they passed so close he could have spit on them. But he did catch “gracyl” (“shryshl”) and “Moon” which was the same word in all their languages.
If it were only the children out, that meant it was a lark, not a Hunt in retribution for some crime or suspected crime. “Ten halfbreed for one Veed,” was their rule. Half-breeds included anybody that wasn’t Veed.
But this. This was children playing, or practicing.
Roan gave the Veed a good head start.
He went through the back yard of the funny, old, voiceless couple that kept mud-swine, and around another garbage heap, and through a series of gullies and then crept up the knoll that overlooked the ditch and the grove of trees where the gracyl were sporting.
In the grove, where the moonlight could pick them out through the trees, Roan could see the running gracyl, and hear their high, shrill calls. They had no thought for anything but each other. He even thought he could make out Clanth, flapping grotesquely in the tree that Roan had known as a sapling. And he thought he saw something else, very strange. It looked like a white figure, high in one of the trees, looking on very still.
Around the grove, in the ditch, the Veed boys were gathered in full force, a ditch full of glittering Veed, swaying silently in unison. They must be almost ready for the attack.
Roan leapt to the top of the knoll and tilled his lungs. “Danger!” he screamed, and the gracyl began running about in the grove in confusion and making for the tree tops.
The Veed attacked immediately and furiously. No one seemed to have noticed that the scream had not come from within the grove. Roan was through the ditch and at the grove in seconds.
The Veed filled the grove now, furious, slashing about with their razor-sharp wrist talons. They had planned to attack the gracyls on the ground. With the gracyls in the branches of the branches of the dark trees, it was going to be harder, and less fun.
Roan crept forward and into and up the side of the dry ditch.
And got caught by a Veed as he started up the purple fruit tree on the edge of the grove. He’d thought it was a tree that brought him luck.
The Veed’s raking hands curled around his thighs and he felt the blood spring out into a thin line of pain and he jerked the knife free of his belt and slashed the coarse Veed flesh and felt the hands recoil instantly.
In the brief moment this gave him, Roan was scrambling up, swinging on a rope vine to the next tree. Around him gracyls fluttered and squawked. The cry of the wounded Veed had brought his fellows to his side. There were indignant conferences and hisses of outrage. No gracyl had ever dared to use a weapon against a Veed.
Roan listened, catching a word here and there. They were out without permission, because young Veed were always carefully protected. So they couldn’t complain to their elders about the wounded Veed. This meant they had to take their vengeance on the spot.
But they couldn’t get up into the trees because their bodies were too awkward for climbing and they couldn’t throw things up into the trees without hitting each other.
Several of the Veed went over to one of the slenderest of the trees, where three gracyls hung in the branches like clumps of moss, and began pushing the trunk back and forth. The gracyls screeched, clinging tighter in their panic, and as the tree gained momentum, one of them fell to the ground, too panicked to try to fly.
The Veed were gleeful. It was like smashing the purplefruit off a tree.
Several Veed grabbed the gracyl and Roan carefully didn’t watch what they did with him.
“Fly to the next tree.” Roan called to the other two gracyls. “All you have to do is stay calm.”
But they couldn’t. They could only screech; the way gracyls always did when they were frightened. They couldn’t change, even to save their Ives.
Another gracyl fell.
Other Veed were starting on other trees.
“Make for the thickest trees,” Roan called. “They can’t shake the thickest ones.”
But no gracyl moved. Roan burned with the frustration of it all, the helplessness of the gracyls and the blunt cruelty of the Veed. Where was Clanth? Perhaps he was already safe in a broadtrunked tree.
“Clanth!” he called, but there was no answer. Perhaps Clanth couldn’t hear him, or perhaps he was clinging to a tree, squawking with terror, like the other. gracyls. But he had always been a little different; surely he would save himself. Then Roan remembered. Clanth couldn’t fly.
Roan’s tree began to sway.
He looked around for a rope vine, to make it to the broader trees toward the center of the grove, but there was no rope vine. He cursed himself for not having cut one and looped it through his belt when he was in the first tree. But it was too late.
Well, it would be easy enough for him to hang on. He stood on one branch and held on to the next, watching the gleeful Veed below, their teeth gleaming as they smiled their crocodile smiles, their crests swaying contentedly.
Something dropped past Roan and fell into the waiting arms of a Veed. They gasped to see it and so did Roan. It was all white and for a moment Roan thought it must be a human child.
That was the moment he leapt.
He leapt for the back of the Veed holding the screaming white creature and he drove his knife deep into the Veed’s right eye, through to the brain, and the Veed died beneath him.
Roan pulled the knife out and stood on the dead Veed, the white creature clinging to his neck, and stood to meet the slashing blows of the other Veed.
But they backed away from him.
They were in awe and fear of him, that he had wounded one Veed and killed another. They had seen many a gracyl die, and that was funny. But they had never seen a Veed die before; they hadn’t thought anybody could kill a
Veed.
They fled to take revenge on more gracyls. It was safer.
Roan pulled the white creature from his neck and looked at it.
She was a white gracyl.
“I’m not dead,” she said wonderingly. Gracyl fear didn’t last long when the danger was over. “I knew I was going to be broken and I am prepared to die and . . . now I feel as though I must have died and here I am still alive.”
“You’re a half-breed?” he asked. “Or a mutation?”
“I’m an albino,” she said. “You saved my life, didn’t you? You did that on purpose.”
Then they were silent a moment, looking at each other in the little moonlight. Caught in the brief bond of savior and saved, they tried to meet minds across the deeps and dimensions that separated their alienesses.
“I belong to you now,” she said and clung to him, and he held her close and felt her whiteness and kissed her strange, cold mouth and it was all a part of the swaying darkness and the hissing Veed and the dying gracyl and the death that Roan had made. The dead Veed and the victory.
Roan had lost the threads that bound him to himself and all that was left was the white gracyl woman under his hands in the sickle moonlight.
Across the grove, the gracyls were screaming as they fell but Roan was not thinking of them dying, only of the distant music of their voices.
“That one was Clanth,” she said dreamily. “I was going to be his female and now . . .”
“Clanth!” Roan cried, and came to himself.
“Yes. Only Clanth. After all, I just took him because nobody else wanted me and now it doesn’t matter.”
“Doesn’t matter!” He yanked her savagely to her feet. “Show me which way the scream came from! Show me where Clanth is.” He had not been listening. He had been not caring. He had been as bad as a gracyl. Worse, because they couldn’t help it and he could.
Collected Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 33