I lay on my back with the hilt of the blade on the floor, point up. Very few people, or bulls, can hit a ten-penny nail and drive it to the hilt. Fortunately.
He jerked me from the floor, pinioned to his palm, and I got flung around (holding on to the blade with hands and feet and screaming) an awful lot.
He was screaming too, butting the ceiling and lots of things falling. From twenty feet he flung me loose. The blade pulled free, my flute filled with his blood, and I hurled into the wall and rolled down.
His right shoulder struck the right wall. He lurched. His left shoulder struck the left wall. And his shadow flickering on the dripping ceiling was huge.
He came down towards me, as I dragged my knees over a lot of wrought stone beneath me, rocked back to my feet (something was sprained too), and tried to look at him, while he kept going out between steps.
Beside me in the wall was a grating about three feet high, with the bars set askew. It was probably a drain. I fell through. And dropped about four feet to a sloping floor.
It was pitch-black above me and there was a hand grasping and grasping in the dark. I could hear it scrabbling against the wall. I took a swipe overhead, and my blade struck something moving.
Roaaaaaa . . . !
The sound was blunted behind stone. But from my side came the sharp retort of his palm as he started slapping.
I dived forward. The slope increased, and suddenly I slid down a long way, very fast, getting even more scraped up. I came up sharply against pipes.
Eyes closed, I lay there, the tip of the crossbow uncomfortable under my shoulder, the blade handle biting between the bars and my hip. Then the places that were uncomfortable got numb.
If you really relax with your eyes closed, the lids pull slowly open. When I finally relaxed, light filled my eyes from the bottoms up like milk poured in bowls.
Light?
I blinked.
Gray light beyond the grating, the gray that sunlight gets when it comes from around many corners. Only I was at least another two levels down. I lay behind the entrance to another drain like the one I’d leaped through.
Then somewhere, the roar of a bull, echoing through these deep stones.
I pulled myself up on the bars, elbows smarting, shoulders bruised, and something pulled sore in the bulk of my thigh. I gazed into the room below.
At one time there was a floor level with the bottom of this grating, but most of it had fallen in a long and longer time ago. Now the room was double height and the grate was at least fifteen feet above the present floor.
Seventy, eighty meters across, the room was round. The walls were dressed stone, or bare rock, and rose in gray slabs towards the far light. There were many vaulted entrances into dark tunnels.
In the center was a machine.
While I watched, it began to hum wistfully to itself, and several banks of lights glittered into a pattern, froze, glittered into another. It was a computer from the old time (when you owned this Earth, you wraiths and memories), a few of which still chuckled and chattered throughout the source-cave. I’d had them described to me, but this was the first I’d seen.
What had wakened me—
(and had I been asleep? And had I dreamed, remembering now with the throbbing image clinging to the back of my eyes, Friza?)
—was the wail of the beast.
Head down, hide bristling over the hunks of his shoulders, gemmed with water from the ceiling, he hunched into the room, dragging the knuckles of one hand, the other—the one I had wounded twice—hugged to his belly.
And on three legs, a four legged animal (even one with hands) limps.
He blinked about the room, and wailed again, his voice leaving pathos quickly and striking against rage. He stopped the sound with a sniff, then looked around and knew that I was there.
And I wanted very much not to be.
I squatted now behind the grating and looked back and up and down and couldn’t see any way out. Hunt, Lo Hawk had said.
The hunter can be a pretty pathetic creature.
He swung his head again, tasting the air for me, his injured hand twitching high on his belly.
(The hunted’s not so hot either.)
The computer whistled a few notes of one of the ancient tunes, some chorus from Carmen. The bull-beast glanced at it uncomprehending.
How was I to hunt him?
I brought the crossbow down and aimed through the grate. It wouldn’t mean anything unless I got him in the eye. And he wasn’t looking in the right direction.
I lowered the bow and took up my blade. I brought it to my mouth and blew. Blood bubbled from the holes. Then the note blasted and went reeling through the room.
He raised his head and stared at me.
Up went the bow; I aimed through the bars, pulled the trigger—
Raging forward with horns shaking, he got bigger and bigger and bigger through the frame of stone. I fell back while the roar covered me, closing my eyes against the sight: his eye gushed about my shaft. He grasped the bars behind which I crouched.
Metal grated on stone, stone pulled from stone. And then the frame was a lot bigger than it had been. He hurled the crumpled grate across the room to smash into the wall and send pieces of stone rolling.
Then he reached in and grabbed me, legs and waist, in his fist, and I was being waved high in the air over his bellowing face (left side blind and bloody) and the room arching under me and my head flung from shoulder to shoulder and trying to point the crossbow down—one shaft broke on the stone by his hoof a long way below. Another struck awfully close to the shaft that Lo Hawk had shot into his side. Waiting for a wall of stone to come up and jelly my head, I fumbled another arrow into the slot.
His cheek was sheeted with blood. And suddenly there was more blood. The shaft struck and totally disappeared in the blind well of bone and lymph. I saw the other eye cloud as though someone had overblown the lens with powdered lime.
He dropped me.
Didn’t throw me; just dropped. I grabbed the hair on his wrist. It slipped through my hands, and I slid down his forearms to the crook of his elbow.
Then his arm began to fall. Slowly I turned upside down. The back of his hand hit the floor, and his hind feet were clacking around on the stone.
He snorted, and I began to slide back down his forearm towards his hand, slowing myself by clutching at the bristles with feet and hands. I rolled clear of his palm and staggered away from him.
The thing in my thigh that was sprained throbbed.
I stepped backward and couldn’t step any more.
He swayed over me, shook his head, splattering me with his ruined eye. And he was grand. And he was still strong, dying above me. And he was huge. Furious, I swayed with him in my fury, my fists clutched against my hips, tongue stifled in my mouth.
He was great and he was handsome and he still stood there defying me while dying, scoffing at my bruises. Damn you, beast who would be greater than—
One arm buckled, a hindleg now, and he collapsed away from me, crashing.
Something in the fistsful of darkness that were his nostrils thundered and roared—but softer, and softer. His ribs rose to furrow his side, fell to rise again; I took up the bow and limped to the bloody tears of his lips, fitted one final shaft. It followed the other two into his brain.
His hands jerked three feet, then fell (Boom! Boom!) relaxing now.
When he was still, I went and sat on the base of the computer and leaned against the metal casing. Somewhere inside it was clicking.
I hurt. Lots.
Breathing was no fun any more. And I had, somewhere during all this, bitten the inside of my cheek. And when I do that, it gets me so mad I could cry.
I closed my eyes.
“That was very impressive,” someone said close to my right ear. “I would love to see you work with a muleta. Olé! Olé! First the verónica, then the paso doble!”
I opened my eyes.
“Not that I didn’t enjoy your less sophis
ticated art.”
I turned my head. There was a small speaker by my left ear. The computer went on soothingly:
“But you are a dreadfully unsophisticated lot. All of you. Young, but très charmant. Well, you’ve fought through this far. Is there anything you’d like to ask me?”
“Yeah,” I said. Then I breathed for a while. “How do I get out of here?” There were a lot of archways in the wall, a lot of choices.
“That is a problem. Let me see.” The lights flickered over my lap, the backs of my hands. “Now, of course, had we met before you entered, I could have waved out a piece of computer tape and you would have taken the end and I would have unwound it after you as you made your way into the heart to face your fate. But instead, you have arrived here and found me waiting. What do you desire, hero?”
“I want to go home,” I said.
The computer went tsk-tsk-tsk. “Other than that.”
“You really want to know?”
“I’m nodding sympathetically,” it said.
“I want Friza. But she’s dead.”
“Who was Friza?”
I thought. I tried to say something. With the exhaustion, all that came was a catch in my throat that might have sounded like a sob.
“Oh.” After a moment, gently: “You’ve come into the wrong maze, you know.”
“I have? Then what are you doing here?”
“I was set here a long time ago by people who never dreamed that you would come. Psychic Harmony and Entangled Deranged Response Associations, that was my department. And you’ve come down here hunting through my memories for your lost girl.”
Yes, I may have just been talking to myself. I was very tired.
“How do you like it up there?” PHAEDRA asked.
“Where?”
“Up there on the surface. I can remember back when there were humans. They made me. Then they all went away, leaving us alone down here. And now you’ve come to take their place. It must be rather difficult, walking through their hills, their jungles, battling the mutated shadows of their flora and fauna, haunted by their million-year-old fantasies.”
“We try,” I said.
“You’re basically not equipped for it,” PHAEDRA went on. “But I suppose you have to exhaust the old mazes before you can move into the new ones. It’s hard.”
“If it means fighting off those—” I jutted my chin towards the carcass on the stone. “Yeah, it is.”
“Well, it’s been fun. I miss the revueltas, the maidens leaping over the horns and spinning in the air to land on the sweating back, then vaulting to the sands! Mankind had style, baby! You may get it yet, but right now your charm is a very young thing.”
“Where did they go, PHAEDRA?”
“Where your Friza went, I suppose.” Something musical was happening behind my head within the metal. “But you aren’t human and you don’t appreciate their rules. You shouldn’t try. Down here we try to follow what you’re doing for a few generations, and questions get answered we would never have even thought of asking. On the other hand, we sit waiting out centuries for what would seem like the most obvious and basic bits of information about you, like who you are, where you’re from, and what you’re doing here. Has it occurred to you that you might get her back?”
“Friza?” I sat up. “Where? How?” La Dire’s cryptic statements came back.
“You’re in the wrong maze,” PHAEDRA repeated. “And I’m the wrong girl to get you into the right one. Kid Death along for a little while and maybe you can get around him enough to put your foot in the door, finger in the pie, your two cents in, as it were.”
I leaned forward on my knees. “PHAEDRA, you baffle me.”
“Scoot,” PHAEDRA said.
“Which way?”
“Again. You’ve asked the wrong girl. Wish I could help. But I don’t know. But you’d better get started. When the sun goes down and the tide goes out, this place gets dark, and the gillies and ghosties gather ’round, shouting.”
I heaved to my feet and looked at the various doorways. Maybe a little logic? The bull-beast had come from the doorway over there. So that’s the one I went in.
The long, long dark echoed with my breath and falling water. I tripped over the first stairway. Got up and started climbing. Bruised my shoulder on the landing, groped around and finally realized I had gotten off into a much smaller passage that didn’t seem like it was going anywhere.
I took up my machete and blew out the last of the blood. The tune now winding with me lay notes over the stone like mica flakes that would do till light came.
Stubbed my toe.
Hopped, cursed, then started walking again alone with the lonely, lovely sounds.
“Hey—”
“—Lobey, is—”
“—is that you?” Young voices came from behind stone.
“Yes! Of course it’s me!” I turned to the wall and put my hands against the rock.
“We snuck back—”
“—to watch, and Lo Hawk—”
“—he told us to go down into the cave and find you—”
“—cause he thought you might be lost.”
I pushed my machete back into my scabbard. “Fine. Because I am.”
“Where are you?”
“Right here on the other side of this—” I was feeling around the stones again, above my head this time. My fingers came on an opening. It was nearly three feet wide. “Hold on!” I hoisted myself up, clambered onto the rim, and saw faint light at the end of a four-foot tunnel. I had to crawl through because there wasn’t room to stand.
At the other end I stuck my head out and looked down at the upturned faces of the Bloi triplets. They were standing in a patch of light from the roof.
2-Bloi rubbed his nose with the back of his fist and sniffed.
“Oh,” 1-Bloi said. “You were up there.”
“More or less.” I jumped down beside them.
“Damn!” 3-Bloi said. “What happened to you?” I was speckled with bull’s eye, scratched, bruised, and limping.
“Come on,” I said. “Which way is out?”
We were only around the corner from the great cave-in. We joined Lo Hawk on the surface.
He stood (remember, he had a cracked rib that nobody was going to find out about till the next day) against a tree with his arms folded. He raised his eyebrows to ask me the question he was waiting with.
“Yeah,” I said. “I killed it. Big deal.” I was sort of tired.
Lo Hawk shooed the kids ahead of us back to the village. As we tromped through the long weeds, suddenly we heard stems crash down among themselves.
I almost sat down right there.
It was only a boar. His ear could have brushed my elbow. That’s all.
“Come on.” Lo Hawk grinned, raising his crossbow.
We didn’t say anything else until after we had caught and killed the pig. Lo Hawk’s powered shaft stunned it, but I had to hack it nearly in half before it would admit it was dead. After el toro? Easy. Bloody to the shoulders, we trudged back finally, through the thorns, the hot evening.
The head of the boar weighed fifty pounds. Lo Hawk lugged it on his back. We’d cut off all four hams, knotted them together, and I carried two on each shoulder, which was another two hundred and seventy pounds. The only way we could have gotten the whole thing back was to have had Easy along. We’d nearly reached the village when he said, “La Dire noticed that business with Friza and the animals. She’s seen other things about you and others in the village.”
“Huh? Me?” I asked. “What about me?”
“About you, Friza, and Dorik the kage-keeper.”
“But that’s silly.” I’d been walking behind him. Now I drew abreast. He glanced across the tusk. “You were all born the same year.”
“But we’re all—different.”
Lo Hawk squinted ahead, then looked down. Then he looked at the river. He didn’t look at me.
“I can’t do anything like the animal
s or the pebble.”
“You can do other things. Le Dorik can do still others.”
He still wasn’t looking at me. The sun was lowering behind copper crested hills. The river was brown. He was silent. As clouds ran the sky, I dropped behind again, placed the meat beside me, and fell on my knees to wash in the silted water.
Back at the village I told Carol if she’d dress the hams she could have half my share. “Sure,” but she was dawdling over a bird’s nest she’d found. “In a minute.”
“And hurry up, huh?”
“All right. All right. Where are you in such a rush to?”
“Look, I will polish the tusks for you and make a spearhead for the kid or something if you will just keep off my back!”
“Well, I—look, it’s not your kid anyway. It’s—”
But I was sprinting towards the trees. I guess I must have still been upset. My legs sprint pretty fast.
It was dark when I reached the kage. There was no sound from behind the fence. Once something blundered against the wire, whined. Sparks and a quick shadow. I don’t know which side it came from. No movement from Le Dorik’s shack. Maybe Dorik was staying inside the kage on same project. Sometimes they mated in there, even gave birth. Sometimes the offspring were functional. The Bloi triplets had been born in the kage. They didn’t have too much neck and their arms were long, but they were quick, bright ten-year-olds now. And 2-Bloi and 3-Bloi are almost as dexterous with their feet as I am. I’d even given Lo 3-Bloi a couple of lessons on my blade, but being a child he preferred to pick fruit with his brothers.
After an hour in the dark, thinking about what went into the kage, what came out, I went back to the village, curled up on the haystack behind the smithy, and listened to the hum from the power-shack until it put me to sleep.
At dawn I unraveled, rubbed night’s grit out of my eyes, and went to the corral. Easy and Little Jon got there a few minutes after. “Need any help with the goats this morning?”
Little Jon put his tongue in his cheek. “Just a second,” he said and went off into the corner.
Easy shuffled uncomfortably.
Little Jon came back. “Yeah,” he said. “Sure we need help.” Then he grinned. And Easy, seeing his grin, grinned too.
Surprise! Surprise, little ball of fear inside me! They’re smiling! Easy hoisted up the first bar of the wooden gate and the goats bleated forward and put their chins over the second rung. Surprise!
Einstein Intersection Page 4