"It is not any sort of bird. It is an engine." Thorinn fingered a skein of blue threads. "I thought engines were made of metal, or wood."
"Engines can be made of anything, even flesh."
Thorinn absorbed this in silence; the box had told him so many fantastic things that he no longer thought it worthwhile to argue with it; but at length he said:
"Well, why would anybody want to make an engine that looks like a bird?"
"Perhaps to watch over you, Thorinn."
Thorinn dug a hole slowly with his sword, dropped the bird in and kicked dirt over it until the last dusty feather vanished. If the bird had been set to watch him by other engines, what would happen now that he had killed it?
He climbed to his tower room by leaping from one outside balcony to another, a quicker and more direct route than going up the well inside. He ate a chunk of dried meat and drank from the magic jug, then stretched himself on the floor with his hands over his head. Close to his ears there was a muted scrabbling and scratching, the sounds of the insects that lived on the false floor beneath the woven cords. He glimpsed them sometimes, gray and brown beetles, long colorless wrigglers. His eye fell on the wooden pole that spanned the peak of the roof over his head. These poles were everywhere in the city; they must be perches for birds that preyed on the insects. As for the people of the city, Thorinn imagined them as winged too—tall men with dazzling white feathers like an eagle's, women soft as doves.
Perhaps he drowsed; at any rate, he came to himself with a start. Under him the floor vibrated in a short, sharp jolt; a distant sound came up the well below.
Thorinn leaped up, saved himself from floating away by grasping the floor cords with one hand, then with his toes. In a moment he had slung his belongings over his shoulders, and in another he was out the window and into a tree.
He clung to the branch and listened. At first he heard nothing unusual. A waterfowl squawked somewhere; then there was a faint, distant bawling. These sounds and others grew in a few moments to a babble of voices; Thorinn had never heard anything like it.
The wooded area around him was deserted; from where he was, he could not see into the courtyard or the fields beyond. He leaped back to the roof of the tower he had just left; clinging to the smooth bark, he thrust his head over and looked down.
Below him, the courtyard was full of dust and confusion. Broad pink and gray backs of beasts, small as beetles from this height, plunged toward the exit from the courtyard; there were dozens of them, no, hundreds, and beside them, flapping along close to the ground, were gray birds; they were goading the animals along with sticks held somehow beneath them. Now here came a sudden explosion of fowl, all nodding heads and yellow feet, and then after that a cluster of white animals with curved horns, all driven by the gray flapping creatures; they all passed out between the towers, and still more came from one of the ground-floor exits.
Thorinn could bear no more; he turned and slid down the roof head-foremost, leaned in, grasped the windowframe, pulled himself inside. The only other exit was a hole in the floor through which he passed into another empty room, and so on until he reached the top of the larger tower below. Here he leaned over the low railing of a balcony and peered down into the hall. It was dark and silent. He swung himself over and dropped from one balcony to another, pausing often to listen, until he had reached the floor two hundred ells down. Skylight, entering through the broad courtyard doorway, was full of yellow dust-motes. Thorinn leaped to the wall at one side of the entrance and cautiously put his head out. In the courtyard, fat grunting beasts and squawking fowl were being herded by flapping gray things—not birds, but men and women with wings like those of wingmice. They were shorter than he, with broad chests and bandy legs. Their long arms ended in three-fingered hands; their wings, which were like gray cloaks when they were folded, became taut membranes when they flew. The sticks they used to goad the animals were clutched in their long toes.
Thorinn withdrew into the darkness and said in a low voice, "Box, are they men or demons?"
"Some are beasts and some are fowl."
"I mean the ones with the gray wings."
"They are engines, Thorinn."
"Engines too—like the bird? Wait a minute." The sounds outside had changed; there were squawkings, screeches, the flapping of wings. Bursting with curiosity, Thorinn put his head out again, and found himself staring straight into the face of a wingman who was pursuing half a dozen ducks escaped from the flock. The wingman's gray-furred face did not change; his dull eyes passed over Thorinn expressionlessly, and in a moment he was pursuing his ducks in the other direction. After a moment Thorinn stepped out into the doorway, exposing himself fully. No one paid the slightest attention to him, even when he began moving across the courtyard toward the doorway from which the beasts and fowl were still issuing. The herdsmen's bodies were covered with short gray fur; their skin was a darker gray, their eyes brown. Their nails, on both hands and feet, were curved and horny. They wore tunics, kirtles, and caps of knitted wool, some plain, others with vivid designs in red, ocher, and blue. Between their thighs was a gray membrane anchored by a short tail, and all their garments were made with slits to accommodate the tail and wings.
As Thorinn drew near the doorway, a last explosion of ducks and other fowl burst out of it, followed by two wingmen; now he could see the floor of the central well inside, and he hopped in that direction, thinking the procession was over; but another wingman appeared, then four more, then another four, leaping up in the dimness out of what Thorinn now perceived was a huge oblong hole in the floor, with a lid tilted above it. Some sprang toward the outer doorway and were gone; others went flapping upward. The great well was murmurous with their wings, but otherwise they made no sound. Thorinn knelt beside the opening and put his head down. For a moment he could not understand what he saw. On the floor of the chamber below, several ells back from the opening, were stacked bundles of silvery translucent material like those he had seen in the treasure cave. Wingmen were pulling these off the stacks, setting them upright, and then doing something to them which he could not make out, whereupon the silvery film vanished like water and another wingman sprang forth out of each. Wide as it was, the chamber was packed full of these bundles. The chamber itself was walled and floored with some glassy yellow-gray material that looked slippery but was not; the lid, which was held open at an angle in some way that Thorinn could not make out, was covered with the same stuff underneath but was packed dirt on the upper side.
The stacks were dwindling visibly, but still there was no end to them. To pass the time, Thorinn began counting the wingmen as they were revived; he got to five hundred and still they came; he had never imagined that there could be so many people in one place.
Now something new was happening. The wingmen and women as they were revived were not leaping to the exit but standing in a cluster as if waiting for something. Now he saw them stoop, and here came three or four of them in a line, each carrying a small bundle with exaggerated care. When they came near enough, he saw that each bundle was a child, sleeping or dead. They were perfect miniatures of the wingmen, with tiny gray-furred faces and closed eyelids as delicate as the ears of mice. Each was wrapped in a sort of pouch, with only its head exposed; the pouches were woven in bright geometric patterns. Each wingman leaped up out of the underground chamber with his burden, then grasped it with his toes, spread his wings, and went flapping up into the darkness.
"Box," said Thorinn in a whisper, "why are all the children asleep?"
"If the children were awake, they would know they are being brought into the cavern from another place."
"Well, and why not?"
"Then they would know there is another place when they grow up, and they might try to leave the cavern."
"But why not real men instead of engines? Or why not engines instead of children? It doesn't make any sense."
"There must be real children or it would make no sense to have
engines which look like men. But there cannot be real men because they would remember another place. The children are too young to remember. When they are grown they will take the engines' place and will think men have always lived here."
Thorinn tried half-heartedly to puzzle this out, but his attention was distracted: the chamber was emptying rapidly. The last stacks were being taken down, and behind them he could see the rear wall of the chamber, but there was no sign of a tunnel opening yet. He waited with increasing impatience while the few remaining stacks were dismantled, denying to himself what he saw: the rear wall was unbroken.
"Thorinn, there is a danger to you unless you leave this place quickly." He turned and saw the last few wingmen crowding out through the opening. He followed them; they did something to the lid and it slowly descended, closing the chamber.
"Box," he said, "where is the tunnel?"
"There is no tunnel, Thorinn."
He had known it, he supposed, all the time.
While he was asleep they had all gone into the underground chamber to hide, and had set the bird to watch him. He would have lived out his life here, and then the bird would have told them he was dead (or rather, it would have stopped telling them he was alive), and they would have come out, just as they were doing now, to resume their existence—as if he had never been. 11
“ ^”
How Thorinn tried to fly without success, and built a bladder instead. The fields around the city were full of wingmen, and so were the byres, orchards, sheds, and the towers themselves. Wingmen and women were everywhere, setting things to rights, cleaning, repairing, weeding, gardening. The towers were aswarm with them; the sound of their wings, many times multiplied, made a susurrant whispering. Thorinn put his head into a few of the rooms on the lowest level and found joiners joining, tailors sewing, weavers weaving. None of them acknowledged his existence by so much as a glance or gesture.
He climbed the well to the upper rooms, buffeted by the wind of wings that missed him by finger-spans, and searched until he found some of the children asleep in hammocks of woven cord. Their small faces were serene. "When will they wake up?" he asked the box.
"When all the signs that they come from another place are gone."
"But they did come from another place—they'll remember that, won't they?"
"The other place is just like this place."
"How do you know all that?"
"I don't know it, Thorinn, but it must be so, or all this would be senseless." The wingmen toiled by day and night; they never slept, and even when the sky was so overcast that Thorinn could not see his hand before his face, they seemed to need no artificial light. When Thorinn approached them out of curiosity, aiming his light-box at their faces, they turned as if half asleep, blinked at his light, then went back to their labors.
Thorinn had made himself a shelter in the grove near the town, disliking the idea of sleeping under the wingmen's roof, although he well knew that they could find him anywhere if they meant him harm. On the third morning, when he poked his nose into the pantries for something to eat, he heard the piping of tiny voices above: the children were awake.
He found them here and there, some at their lessons, some in a nursery, some following the wingmen and women about at their daily tasks. Unlike the wingmen, the children stared at Thorinn with frank curiosity. One of them tugged at a woman's garments and said something; the woman answered curtly and drew the child away.
"What were they saying, box?"
"I think the child was saying, 'Who is that person?' and the engine was saying, 'Never mind.' There is danger for you, Thorinn, if the engines believe you might harm the children."
"I, harm the children?" said Thorinn indignantly. Indeed, there was something about them that drew him: they were like the young of rabbits or mice, innocent, tender, and beautiful. Now that he saw them beside the wingmen and women, he could well believe that the adults were engines, and he wondered that he had not seen it before. The big wingmen had dull faces; they were like the bark-creatures animated by Snorri in the tale; the children were bright-eyed, full of life.
Now that the children were awake, the adults no longer worked day and night; they slept, or appeared to sleep, hanging head downward from the perches in their apartments. Cooks were busy in the kitchens where, instead of fireplaces or ovens, they had great heaps of rotted vegetable matter secured in wooden presses; and the heat from these, as Thorinn felt for himself by putting his hand near them, was sufficient to cook their food.
The children were of different sizes, the smallest so young that they were just beginning to learn to fly, the biggest perhaps four summers older. They followed Thorinn about, in spite of the attempts of the wingmen to prevent it, and two or three turned up so often that Thorinn learned to watch for their faces. The box spoke to them whenever there was opportunity, and after a few days it could tell Thorinn what they said.
"Where do you come from?" was their persistent question. Thorinn told the box to answer that he came from the sky, but this did not satisfy them. Once when he was prowling along the wall of the cavern west of the city, followed as usual by two children whom he called Sven and Ilge (their own names were unpronounceable), the children stopped him and pointed to a cleft in the rock, no wider than two fingers'
breadth. "Here is where you come from," they told him.
"What, from that little hole?"
"It is too small now, but you were smaller before."
"I don't know what you mean. When was I smaller?"
"When you came out of the rock." Sven thrust his fingers into the cleft and pulled them out again, drawing his small hands apart as if to indicate something that emerged and grew. After a few more questions and replies it became clear that he thought Thorinn had really come out of the stone itself. "Like sap dripping from a tree?"
The child's face was merry. "Yes, just like that.
Naturally you do not remember; you had just come into the Egg."
"No, that was not what happened."
"Then," said Ilge, "how did you get into the Egg?" Thorinn hesitated, thinking of the cataract which could be seen in the distance from where they stood, but some obscure instinct made him lie. "From another crack," he said. He walked on, with the children fluttering about him. "But not a crack like that," he said. "A big one, a tunnel, like this." He held his arms out. The box seemed to be having trouble; it spoke, Sven answered, it spoke again. Ilge looked puzzled. She repeated Thorinn's gesture: "Like this? A crack? Where is there such a crack in the Egg?"
"Well, it is hidden."
Sven sniggered. "It must be well hidden."
"Someday I may show you."
"And in such a crack, there could be three Thorinns and not one."
"Oh, yes, and not three but hundreds."
"Hundreds!" Both children doubled over with helpless laughter, and fell into a leafy bush.
One morning he found the older children sitting in rows in a large room where a wingman in a yellow gown was making them repeat after him sentences which he read out from a book of reeds. Thorinn sat down and let the box tell him what they were saying; it seemed to be a fanciful account of the creation of the world. Presently he noticed that the wingman was speaking briefly, but the box at some length.
"Box, why is everything so much shorter when he says it?"
"In their language there are words which contain the meaning of several words together."
"How can that be? Tell me what he is really saying now."
"He is saying, 'Shéshiru fállana állishi hóloshen—' "
"No, I don't mean that, I mean what are the words that have several words in them?"
"Just now, when he talked about the shell of the Egg, he said, 'Shéshiru,' which means something that lasts a long time; then 'fállana,' meaning early life, then 'állishi,' meaning that time is what the sentence is about; then 'hóloshen,' of years; then 'shirishirishíri,' meaning dozens of dozens of dozens; t
hen 'lun,' which means nine, then 'leshíren,' not yet—"
"But that's nothing like what you said before," Thorinn protested. "It doesn't even make sense. How can they understand each other?"
He forgot to listen to the box's reply, for the children were standing up, bowing to the yellow-gowned man, then marching out the door, glancing at Thorinn out of the corners of their eyes. He heard them take wing a few moments later, fluttering up and down the well.
He still had no idea how he could get through the cataract, even supposing he could reach it; but the first thing was to find a way of getting there. If the wingpeople could fly with their leathery wings, why not he?
In one of the workshops he found two pieces of tanned leather, supple and thin, each more than an ell wide and long. He spread them out on a table and cut them into triangles, each with thongs at intervals—a waste of good leather, but it saved him the trouble of attaching separate thongs to them later. He had contrived the triangular pieces so that he could attach them to his arms at wrist, elbow and shoulder, and to his legs at hip and knee; in this way, he thought, he could improve on the design of the real wings, which extended only to the waist, and make up for the lack of the tail and the leathery flap that went with it.
Standing in a meadow near the city, with an interested audience of children, he leaned forward slightly, raised his arms and lowered them with a strong movement. He felt a surge that lifted him off the ground. Encouraged, he repeated the movement again and again; he felt himself being propelled upward, but the world was tilting; he strove in vain to right himself; now he was looking directly upward at the sky, and now the ground smote him on the back.
World and Thorinn Page 15