by Gene Wolfe
I told her that I had never thought about it; and to change the subject I asked again how Fishcatcher died.
“They cured him—the people of the Great Sleigh. At first, when I carried him to them, they said they would not cure him because his torment was none of their doing. Then they said they would help him, because my own torment would never have existed if their presence had not given me hope. They would not cure him because of his agony, though his back was bent like a rush stem in the wind and the slaver dripped from his mouth; but they cured him for me, because I wept and tore my hair. That seemed very odd to me, and still does. They took him away, and when they came back with him he was better, and in an hour he could walk without help. Later, he was stronger still, and I struck him again”—she held up the wand she carried—“and he died. Now I wish to be with them. I know that I am fit for only the meanest work among them, though I am the eldest daughter; but the meanest task there is more than the greatest elsewhere. I will clean their catch—and eat the guts, if need be. Do you also feel that?”
“I only feel that I belong there—that the Great Sleigh is my home, or a part of my home.”
“You are very fortunate-I wish I felt that.”
“May I ask your name?”
She smiled. “It is Cim Glowing. Do you think that is a pretty name?”
I touched my chin.
“When I was born my father wished to name me Seven Snows, which is a common name for girls among our people. But I was born while he was away in his boat; and before he returned, my mother had left her bed and seen the Cim blowing from tree to tree like a soft star in the air, and completed the naming.”
We camped when the sun was almost down.
We are no more than a few hours behind the Great Sleigh, judging from the freshness of the track—there is very little drifted-in snow now, and a slickness to the packed surface that allows us to fly along at a good rate even in the light winds we have had all day. I think that if there had been only a trifle more wind—or if I had not picked up Cim—I would certainly have overtaken it. As it is, I was tempted to keep going after nightfall; but, remembering what happened before, I forced myself to stop in time to build some sort of shelter for us.
Cim knows a great deal more about this sort of thing than I do. I was going to make camp in an open area not far from the track, but she directed me to this little fold in the ground a few hundred meters farther on. There is a stream here, and we found good firewood scattered along the bank, and saplings to cut for a windbreak, I told her that I had no food to share with her, but she laughed at that and told me to heave a large stone to break the ice over the pool nearest our fire. She stood at a shallow open spot a little downstream, where the current runs fast, and thrust the wand she carries into the water. When the stone struck the ice, I saw the darting shapes of several fish pass close to it. She made no attempt to strike them, but we found them belly up under the ice of the next pool; it was a simple matter to break the ice of that one too and pull them within reach with pieces of driftwood. We ate well, and she is sleeping now. The wind is rising, and if the Great Sleigh has stopped for only a few hours tonight, I think there is every chance we will be up with it by tomorrow afternoon. If not, we may be in for another full day of pursuit.
And now it is the seventh day. Again, I played back everything I recorded yesterday evening before starting this; and it seems to me that much more than a day has passed, although there is really not much to tell. When I had finished talking last night I fell asleep. Our shelter was open at one end—like Eggseeker’s lodge—and we had built our fire in the doorway. I let Cim sleep next to the fire, not because I harbor any silly superstitions about feminine weakness, but because I feel certain that her furs, beautiful as they are, are not as warm as my quilted coverall.
Sometime in the night, I woke and saw that the fire had died almost to ashes. Cim was shivering in her sleep, and she must have thrown all our little pile of reserve wood on the fire in the course of the night. I got up and stepped over her and went out to search for more, feeling ashamed that she had been the one who kept the fire going.
Both moons were in the sky. The snow glistened with their light, and the water, where it was free of ice, showed like snippets of black ribbon against it. We had already picked up all the wood that lay near our shelter; I went two hundred meters downstream and came back with an armload.
At first I believed that I was hallucinating—the double shadows cast by the moons have deceived me before. But shadows, perhaps only the shadows of trees, as I thought, seemed clustered around our dying fire. Then I saw one bend and lift a soft-edged bundle. Then as the thing that carried her turned, the light of the moons struck Cim’s face: her head hung limply down outside the creature’s arm, and her cheeks seemed whiter and more bloodless than the snow.
I dropped all the wood I carried then except the largest piece and shouted and ran toward them. It was a ridiculous thing to do: There were four, as I saw in a moment, and each was at least three meters tall. Nevertheless, I got in one blow. One of them stepped between me and the one who held Cim Glowing, and I swung my piece of driftwood. It struck solidly and I heard the ring of metal; then my body seemed to catch fire; I fell backward, and for a few seconds, the thing I had struck leaned over me. I saw its ravaged face—like something from a nightmare, I was going to say, but the truth was that I was in a nightmare, and even now I am talking largely because I am afraid to sleep for fear they will come again.
I must have lain in the snow for several hours. The pain gathered itself into my chest, on the right side just above the beginning of the ribs; but I felt somehow that no serious harm had been done—that it was only something like a blow from a whip or the sting of an insect—so that despite the pain I was more worried about the cold and the possibility of freezing to death where I lay than about whatever it was they had done to me.
At last, just as the first light was striping the snow, I found that enough life had returned to my arms and legs to let me open the front of my coveralls and touch the wound in my chest. My hand came away covered with blood.
When I was able to get up, I gathered the wood I had dropped the night before and rebuilt the fire. I would have given a great deal then to have had a pan in which to warm the water for washing my side and my clothes; but I have no sort of container, and I had to splash freezing water from the stream onto the bloodstains and make my way back to the fire when I could no longer bear the cold. I tore the sail of my sledge into strips and used them to stop the bleeding, and have thrust another piece through the hole in my coveralls and knotted it on either side to keep out the wind. Whatever it was that wounded me entered my body but did not exit—there is no corresponding wound in my back.
The question—and I am still not sure I have decided correctly—was whether to follow the creatures who took Cim Glowing, or to continue after the Great Sleigh and, when I caught up with it, enlist the crew (of whom, as it seems, I am properly a member) to help me. I have decided to follow the trail myself, though, as I say, I am aware that I may have chosen badly. If I had continued after the Great Sleigh, I might have overtaken it too late—that is the great consideration; and without a sail I could have gone no faster than I have tracked the things who stole Cim today.
And then, I am afraid—and I should face it—of what I may discover when I overtake the Great Sleigh. Surely, if a crew member were missing by some accident, that fact could not go unnoticed for long. The Great Sleigh would reverse its course, or a rescue party would be sent back along the track. As nearly as I can tell, neither of these things has occurred. It may very well be that I have been exiled for some crime; or that, as Cim Glowing hinted, I have stolen these clothes and, with them, an identity to which I am not entitled.
Nothing else to report today. I have been following their footprints north, over increasingly hilly country; but because I am so weak, I doubt that I have covered more than ten kilometers. I have seen men’s trails crossing theirs i
n the snow several times, but I have met no one. I have no food. Perhaps I should also mention that I have taken Cim Glowing’s weapon, the endieva wand. In appearance it is a straight stick, quite light in weight, about fifty centimeters long and two centimeters in diameter. The handle end is light brown in color—like the wood used in the clubbow I used to have—and has a wrist thong. The striking end is black, with eight or ten stubby projections like thorns, which are nearly white. I have not used it as yet and have been careful not to touch the dark end.
I want to say that this is the eighth day, but the truth is that I am not certain whether it is or not—there is no day here, and no night. Whatever the day may be, I am stopping to rest; and so I shall record my experiences—though I think it is very likely that I will be dead before I can tell what I did on the ninth.
Yesterday I stopped late in the afternoon. I made a shelter for myself in a thicket and built a little fire that went out almost before I was asleep. I was too weak to do anything more and half-expected death to come during the night.
When I woke this morning, the first thing I saw was a snow monkey watching me from a branch about twenty meters off. I threw the endieva wand at it, feeling something tear in my chest as I drew back my arm. By some sort of remarkable luck I hit it. It jumped as though surprised and leaped to another tree farther off. After half a minute I could see that it was having difficulty clinging to the limb; in another half-minute it fell. It staggered several steps before it collapsed, and even when I reached it, it was still alive, and rolled its little eyes at me so that it seemed to beg for mercy. It died as I watched, the brown eyes misting over and losing their mobility, the lips drawing away from the tiny teeth in a last grimace.
Unfortunately, though the snow monkey had fallen, the endieva wand had not. It was lodged in a loop branch about six or seven meters up, and I had to throw a dozen snowballs at it before I could knock it loose. While I ate the monkey, I cut some long, thin strips from the piece of sail I have left, braided them into a slender rope, and tied one end to the wrist thong of the wand. With this arrangement, I hope to be able to throw the thing without much risk of losing it, though I have not had an opportunity to try it out yet.
The monkey furnished so little meat that there seemed no point in trying to save a part of it. I ate what there was to be had and went looking for the trail of Cim Glowing’s kidnappers again. There had not been much wind during the night, and it was nearly as clear as it had been the day before. I remember that as I walked I tried to convince myself that I felt better today and would be able to go further—but it was not true. I was actually weaker, if anything. I had hardly gone a kilometer before I knew that I would have to stop soon to rest, and that once stopped, sitting among the rocks in the rising wind, I might never be strong enough to get up again.
I was on the point of looking for some sort of shelter when I saw that the trail of the creatures I was following disappeared into what seemed to be just the kind of place I was looking for myself, a crevice in the side of a cliff. Thinking that they had rested there the day before, I went in; just as I entered the darkness that lay between the rising walls of stone, I noticed that their trail did not emerge.
The cleft in the rocks, which I had supposed would be only a meter or two deep, never ended. Instead, it slipped under a roof of stone, very high at first, and wound downward into the hill.
After the first twenty steps all the light was gone. I took the firemaker from my pocket and lit it, then put it out again at once for fear they would see me. The glimpse I had of the cave was disturbing enough: It went on for a long way in a nearly straight line, fifteen or twenty meters high and wide, with stalactites hanging from the ceiling, and a floor paved (as it seemed) with packed clay, but littered with fragments of stone fallen from above, and dotted with pools of standing water.
I went forward, on and on, until I was certain I was far beyond the end of the part I had seen, and nothing seemed to have changed except the temperature of the air, which gradually grew warmer. After a time, I opened the top of my coveralls.
The change—the loss of the cold and sunlight of the outdoor world—seemed to work a corresponding change in my mind. I was disoriented, and remain so, but I seem to feel closer to the Great Sleigh, as though this entrance into this hidden place is somehow a return to the kind of life I led before the Wiggikki found me in the snowbank. It is difficult to describe. I have a tired confidence, as if I knew my own powers and limitations, what I can do and cannot do. I feel sure now that the wound in my chest will not kill me, though it is more painful than ever, and the feeling contradicts the plain reasoning of my mind. At the same time, I have more fear of the things that took Cim Glowing—but less of death itself, which does not seem to me to be so much of an evil as it did outside. But I have not finished the day.
I went onward, then, in the dark, with one hand to the wall, feeling each step with my foot before I took it at first; then, when I had gone farther and had grown very tired of that, feeling ahead of me with the endieva wand. After so many hours in the dark, light, when I saw it at last, was difficult to recognize; I thought at first that it was only a disorder of my eyes caused by staring so long, like the flashes I see at night when I press my hands against them. But it grew brighter with each step I took and at last snapped into focus. It was just here, where there was light, but not enough to see by, that I first encountered the vampires.
At least, that is my own name for them. They are bats with human faces and hairless bodies. Their wingspan is a meter, or perhaps a little more. They attacked me the first time, as I said, here, where I could not see them at all except where their flutterings blocked the point of light ahead of me for a moment. I beat them off with the wand; they screamed in high-pitched voices when it touched them, and I could hear the poisoned ones striking the walls and scrabbling about on the floor of the cave, though at that time I did not know what they were—I stepped on several as I went forward. Fortunately, my boots are too tough for their teeth, but I got a long rip in the outer fabric of my coveralls along the right forearm.
When I had progressed another hundred meters, I could see them better. Their faces are human—so much so that their sex is clearly distinguishable. They have long, flying hair. Their arms and fingers—the fingers connected by webs of pale skin so thin as to be nearly invisible—form their wings; the fingers are greatly exaggerated in length. Their bodies are entirely naked, and their legs, which I would have expected to be short, are long and slender instead; they run very agilely along the floor of the cave. Their feet can be closed like a man’s hands, or the talons of a bird, permitting them to cling to the smooth stalactites of the cavern roof.
I think that their small faces, set with large, darkly blue eyes, would be beautiful if it were not for their teeth, which seem too big for the mouths that contain them and are cruelly pointed. Since I have found the crevice where I am resting now, I have watched them wading in the little stream below. There are blind white fish in it, and the vampires stand on one leg to catch them, plunging the other in and grasping the unfortunate fish with their claws when they come too close. I imagine I could catch some of the fish myself by poisoning them with Cim Glowing’s wand, hut they are very small, and I have no fire over which to cook them.
The ninth day—at least, I slept. This place is only about a quarter of the way up the wall; nevertheless, it seems very high. I can see the city in the center of the cavern almost as though I were a bird. Or better, one of the vampires. I think that I am on about the same level as the tops of the towers.
It is ghostly in appearance even from here, because the buildings have no walls or roofs. They are only skeletons of metal, built as though to enable the builders to pile one floor above another, so that the cave itself is their roof and their climate. The effect they give is one of having rotted away, and there are sections of walls clinging to them still, here and there.
Today when I woke I knew I would have to find something to eat if
I were not going to get weaker and weaker until I died at last without helping Cim Glowing. I went toward the city in the hope of turning up some sort of fuel I could use to cook fish from the stream. I had left the clay-paved path, of course, long before I slept, because the light had increased until I was afraid I might be seen.
The cavern floor over which I traveled was smooth, water-washed shingle, littered in spots with great tilted slabs of stone. I kept to the shadow of these as much as possible, but as I came nearer the city, the light from the buildings—yellow and dim though it was—increased and diffused until at last I felt naked, as though many pairs of eyes were watching me from the unwalled towers and there was no way in which I could escape them.
When I had gone two or three kilometers, I was close enough to see that they were filled with machines, all standing silent. For some reason, I had supposed there would be smaller buildings on the fringes of the great ones I saw, and perhaps heaps of discarded material beyond that. As I drew nearer, I believed I had been mistaken——the towers seemed to spring from the cavern floor without preamble, as though they had grown from its untouched surface.
Rut as I came nearer still, I found that my first idea had been correct. I crossed a part of the cavern that must have been piled with rubbish once. But the rubbish is gone now—melted and rotted into the gravel and clay of the cave itself, until its former position is shown only by a slight unevenness in the surface, by discolorations and mottlings of red, yellow, and brown, and by an occasional piece of unrusted metal of some gleaming alloy so stable that it has withstood the centuries that have turned everything else to soil and stains.
The same passage of time has destroyed the small buildings that once stood at the feet of the great ones. I found their foundations still traceable, and the vaults that had once been beneath some of them remain as rectangular pools of dark, still water; but nothing was left of their upper structures, and perhaps they were only simple platforms, and had none.