Beyond the golden stair
Page 19
He strutted a small circle, admiring his wavering reflection. ''Sometimes I used to think that I was a pretty good-looking bird, but I never knew it would be taken hterallyl"
"Biurks, when Pattu" sent you down here, did he give you any instructions? I mean, did he tell you how to distinguish between just anybody coming here and those people who have been instructed and who carry the Sign?*-
"He told me simply to open the way for whoever should come,** the bird said disinterestedly, still strutting.
'Do the words va khoseth yaga mean anything to you?^
The flamingo took a webbed foot from the water and examined it, then critically lowered its head and tugged on a toe with its curved beak. "No. Should theyr
And sharply: "You're not thinking you can soft-soap me to fly up and yell for the steps to come down, are you? Patur told me to give you the brush-off if you tried.'*
Hibbert was silent. The flamingo said: ^Well, we all got what we asked for, even if it wasn't everything that we wanted. I'm a bird and serving the Great Ones. Frank played the fool once too often, and that stupid, faithful Carlotta had to play it with him. You're so changed that your mother wouldn't recognize you, and your bad leg's healed. Nobody can ever grab you now to pin that murder rap on you! And you've got yourself a girl, but you'll lose her unless you make good at the job all cut out for you."
Hibbert said: Tve lost her already."
The bird's tone went coldly peevish. '"You're damned fortunate to have done so welll Don't loaf around here expecting me to salve you with sympathy. I'm not interested in your problems and never was—I'm still the same lone wolf as before. Buck up and act Kke the man you lookl"
And temperamentally: "Now beat it—don't spoil my first moments here as a flamingol I'll be here a long, long while, and I want to do some quiet thinking about it"
He thrust up a claw, pointing the way from the
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208 Beyond the Golden Stair
pool, and flapped his wings emphatically. Hibbert was dissatisfied. He felt that there should have been something poetic and poignant in their parting, some symbohc word or deed to set its seal on the occasion.
But the bird was Burks and no poet. And there in the velvet blue moonlight, in the sorcery of brooding black shadows and rising Imninous mist, the blue bird beat its pinions and shrilled: *'Go on, scraml**
Loth as Hibbert was to leave this last link with the world above, he smiled and drew a deep breath.
"Right, Burks. Goodbye—and my bestl"
Biurks answered negligently: **Many returns of the day,'* and forgot him, intent on his own pleasures.
The stair which led down to the nightboimd garden was black vdth shadows, a well of sorrows. An occasional arrow of moon-fire pierced its riven walls, touched clustered flowers and set them to burning blue. A limpkin shrieked eerily like a banshee to all of Hibbert's hopes.
Hibbert went numbly down the steps. Across the last few of them a spider had thrown its wide snare, and fireflies trapped in it made it a spangled net Hibbert pushed through it, and it trailed from his shoulders like the sparkling rags of a harlequin cloak.
He passed through the mist-flooded garden and the fern-brake beyond it. The canoe was as it had been left among the mangroves, only hours ago.
Hoiursl What had happened to him in Khoire could never be duplicated here in his own world though he were to hve for centiuiesi
He dragged the canoe down to the water, his naked feet shpping on the chilly mud. He climbed within and took up a paddle. The damp, rank sweetness of the swamps rose into his nostrils. He looked up toward the towering steps, but already the palmettos had
hidden them. He wondered if when he returned—^for by God, he would return—^he could find them again, and doubted that even a passing airplane could locate them among that leafy screen.
The canoe was leaking, its water lapping his toes. Ah yes, the others and he had pulled it ashore to repair it, not long agol He paddled downstream through the plaid fabric of thickening shadows and the frigid blaze of the moon. And paddhng, heard Mareth's whisper anew, as he must hear it ever and again through the long years impending:
"Vfl khoseth yagaF'
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