They Fly at Ciron

by Samuel R. Delany

  It jumped again. Rahm swung again.

  Only it wasn’t jumping at him; rather it moved now to one side of the cave, now to the other:

  Two more cords strung across the cave’s width.

  And the cave was not wide.

  Backing from it, Rahm felt his leg and buttock push against some of the filaments behind, which gave like softest silk. But as he moved forward again, they held to him—and when one pulled free of his shoulder, it stung, sharply and surprisingly.

  This time, when it leaped across the cave, Rahm jumped high and, with his branch, caught it full on its body. It collapsed from the arc of its leap, landing on its back, legs pedaling. Rahm lunged forward, to thrust his stave through the crunching belly. Seven legs closed around the stick (the injured one still hung free): it scritted, it spat. Then all eight hairy stalks fell open. One lowered against Rahm’s calf, quivered there, stilled, then quivered again. The hairs were bristly.

  Blood trickled the stone, wormed between stone and dirt and, as all the legs jerked in a last convulsion—Rahm almost dropped his branch—gushed.

  Rahm pulled the stick free of the carapace and stepped back, breathing hard. He looked up at the thing trapped in the webbing above. He looked down at the fallen beast on its back. And above again—where cords, leaves, sunlight, dust motes, and movement were all confused. He raised the stick among the filaments. He did not bring the end near the creature, but tried to pry among the threads in hope of breaking some—possibly even freeing it.

  The branch went through them rather easily. The creature shifted above. Its free wing beat a moment.

  Then, in a voice like a child’s, but with an odd timbre under it not a child’s at all, it said distinctly: “Use the blood!”

  Rahm pulled his branch back sharply.

  “To free me,” the voice went on—strained, as though its position was manifestly uncomfortable, “use the blood!”

  “Thou speakest…!” Rahm said, haltingly, wonderingly.

  “Just like you, groundling! Big voice but stuck to the earth! Come on, I tell you… use the blood!”

  Rahm stepped back again. Then, because his foot went lower down (on that slanted rock) then he expected it to, he looked back sharply so as not to trip.

  The cave-beast’s blood had rolled against one filament’s mooring on the stone—the cord’s base was steaming.

  Now the filament came free, to swing over the cave floor. On a thought, Rahm pushed the stick’s bloody end against a clutch of cords beside him. There was a little steam. Half the cords parted. When he felt something warm by his foot, Rahm looked down: blood puddled against his instep. But, though it parted the cords, against his flesh it didn’t hurt or burn.

  Rahm spoke, once more. “Thou wilt not hurt me if I free thee… ?”

  “Free me and you are my friend!” The voice came on, like an exasperated child’s. “Quickly now, groundling—”

  “Because,” Rahm went on, “I have been hurt too much when I thought what would come was friendship…”

  What came from the trapped creature was the same sound that Rahm had already thought of as “mewing,” though now, since the creature had spoken, the sound suddenly seemed to be articulated with all sorts of subtle feeling, meaning, and response, so that—had it been on a lower pitch—he might have called it a sigh.

  Suddenly Rahm threw his stick aside, stepped back across the rock, reached down, and grabbed one of the dead thing’s hairy legs, to drag it through the cave. By two legs, he hoisted it onto a higher rock shelf, climbed up beside it, then got it and himself to a shelf even higher. Squatting, he took a breath, frowned deeply—and wiped his hand across the gory wound. Then he grasped first one cord, and another, to feel them tingle within his sticky grip, dissolving.

  After popping a dozen, one more and the bound creature fell a foot. The free wing beat. That voice—like a child who has something wrong with its breathing—declared: “You take care!”

  The creature mewed again.

  Once more Rahm smeared up a handful of blood and began to work.

  Later he tried to recall how he put all those aspects that told of an animal together with that childish voice that still, somehow, spoke of a man. As Rahm tugged cords away from the incredible back muscles, some of the soft hair stuck or pulled loose—and the muscles flinched. But the membrane-bearing limb those muscles moved—what he’d started to think of as an arm—was thicker than his own thigh and more than triple the length of his leg! It was all webbed beneath with leathery folds, folded down and caught between spines that were impossible distortions of fingers—fingers longer than arms! The teeth were small in that grimacing mouth. Once, in the midst of the pulling and parting, he saw them and the wedge-shaped face around them laugh at something he himself had missed. But it was still good to see laughter in that face that was not a face, because the nose was broad as three fingers of a big-handed man laid together; the sides of the head were all veined ear; and the eyes had pupils like a cat’s—small as a cat’s, too, which was strange, because, standing, at last, on the shelf of rock, with one long foot (whose big toe was as long as, and worked like, Rahm’s thumb), the creature was a head shorter than Rahm. “Here, now—help me get my other foot free… ?” said this man, this beast, this Winged One with thigh and shoulder muscles as thick as little barrels.

  Holding to rock, holding to that astonishing shoulder, Rahm leaned out, bloody handed, and caught another cord that dissolved in his grip. “Now—” he pulled back, with a quick grunt—“we must find some water to wash off this stinking stuff!” Small twigs and leaves caught up in the webbing fell to the cave floor.

  “As a pup—” the Winged One grimaced, flexing—“I used to sneak off with the rough and rude girls who went to collect these threads for our ropes and hunting nets—till my aunt caught me and said it was not fitting for one of my station. Well, don’t you know, an hour ago, hanging with the blood a-beat in my ears, I was thinking how ironic that I’d most likely end my life lashed up in the sticky stuff, once the beast, crouching just above the cave entrance there inside, grew hungry!”

  They climbed down, Rahm at a loss for what so many of the words (like rude, fitting, station, and ironic) might mean.

  “When I was a child,” Rahm said, supporting the creature above him, “the elders of my village always taught us to fear thy people—and to stay clear of thee, should one of thee ever alight near our fields!”

  “As well you should!” declared the high voice, as the wings, all wrinkled and stretched not a full fifth of their spread, still went wall to wall in that high, narrow cave. “We always tell our little ones, whenever they come near you, to act as frightening as they can—before they fly away! Oh, my friend, we’ve heard—and seen!—some of the things your kind can do to its own. And that does not portend well for what you might do to our kind or others. Oh, I don’t mean your own village in particular—Çiron at the mountain’s.foot. But we fly far of Hi-Vator, and we fly wide of Çiron; and we listen carefully—and often what we hear is not so good. So our elders have always thought a policy of self-containment, helped on by a bit of mild, if mutual, hostility, was best. I never took it seriously myself—though some I know do nothing else. Well, certainly, I’m glad it’s broken through, here and now, in this direction.

  “What’s your name, groundling?”

  “Rahm. And thine?”

  The Winged One tilted his head. “Vortcir.”

  On the cave floor, Rahm bent, picked up the blood-blackened end of the branch he’d used to kill the cave-beast. He looked at it. Blood, dry now, had gone dark all over his fingers and palms and wrists, stuck about with dirt. “And how wert thou trapped by this thing, Vortcir?”

  The Winged One cocked his head the other way. The short creature’s great shoulders lifted their folded sails—half again as high as Rahm—and brought them in around himself. “I was careless.” The expression (on that face that seemed to have so few of them) was embarrassment. “In the night,
I fled into its cave, unaware that the danger I fumbled into was greater than the one I fled.”

  “What danger didst thou flee?”

  Vortcir’s face wrinkled. “In the night a great wailing came to deafen us. It filled us with fear and we scattered from our nests, blundering low among the trees, yowling higher than the crags, till, unable to find our way, I saw many of my people driven mad by that terrible wailing. I could hear the echo from this cave. I flew in here, thinking the sound would be less. But I flew into the web and, by struggling, only entangled myself more. And when I excited the cave-beast enough, it would come over and throw another couple of threads about me. Uhh!” Vortcir paused. “But you arrived… how is it that you stray so high among the mountains, groundling Rahm?”

  Rahm waited while a wind stilled outside in the rocks. “I too fled the great wailing that came last night.”

  “I hear in your voice many strange things,” said Vortcir, frowning. “Will you now go down to your nest?”

  “My… nest has been destroyed.”

  “Destroyed? While I hung here, wound in that dreadful web, in this sound-deadening cave? Çiron? How is that?”

  Rahm turned suddenly and flung the blackened branch against the cave wall. He pulled his shoulders in. It was as if the thing that had come loose inside him shook, lurching into the body’s walls. Rahm felt air on his back. Something on his back was a touch, but it touched so much of him. He looked up.

  Vortcir moved his wing away from Rahm’s shoulder. The triangular face was puzzled. “You have saved my life,” Vortcir said. “By this, we are friends. What, friend Rahm, is this thing that makes your heart roar and the muscles sing on your bones with anger?”

  “Thou dost hear the sounds of my heart and bone?”

  “And of your tongue’s root, a-struggle in your throat for words, as if it would tear itself free of your mouth. My people have keen …” followed by a word that probably meant “hearing,” for the great veined leaves of Vortcir’s ears flicked forward, then back.

  Rahm looked out at the leaves beyond the cave mouth. “Let us wash this blood from ourselves.” His own voice was hoarse. “Is there a stream?”

  “You do not hear where the water is, right up there…?” Vortcir’s wing tip bent down in what first seemed a wholly awkward manner—till Rahm realized he was pointing with it.

  Rahm frowned.

  “Let us go wash.” Vortcir grinned. “And you may tell me what it is that hurts you so deeply.”

  They left the cave. Rahm moved over the rocks with long strides. Vortcir traveled in short-legged jumps, his wings fanning now and again for balance.

  “Vortcir,” Rahm said, as they walked, “my people go naked on the ground. Thy… people go naked in the air.

  Both are easy with the land about them. We fight with our hands and our feet—and then only what attacks. We love our own kind and are at peace with what lies about us. But… this is not true of all creatures…” In a low, quick voice, Rahm began to tell what he had seen happen in the streets of his village last night. As the tale went on, it finally seemed, even to him, simply outrage strung after outrage—so that at last he stopped.

  Rahm looked at Vortcir. His amber eyes seemed some substance once molten that had recently set to a shocking hardness.

  “… But what fills me with terror, Vortcir, is that the evil now is in me—too. I am filled with it. Yesterday morning, I killed a lion. This morning I killed the cave creature. And both of them were a kind of sport. But last night, Vortcir, I killed a man—a man like myself; a man as thou. I held his neck in my hands; and I squeezed, and I twisted it till…” As they reached the mountain stream, Rahm stopped. He squatted by the water, let one knee go forward into the mud. “I am not who I was, Vortcir.” As he began to wash, around his arms water darkened; not all the blood was from the fight in the cave. “Who I have become frightens me. I think perhaps I can not, or I should not, go back to my village.”

  Vortcir stepped into the water and squatted in it. One wing unfolded, began to beat against the water and wave about on it. “Why so?”

  Rahm turned his face from the spray and spatter of the Winged One’s washing—and grinned. The grin was at the splashing, not the thought. Still, it felt good to grin again. Rahm said: “Because if I would go down again, Vortcir, I would do the same to the neck of every blade-wielding soldier, of every black-cloaked officer still in the village of Çiron!” Behind his hard, hard eyes, Rahm was wondering what it meant to say what he said as seriously as he said it and still to grin as he was grinning.

  But it felt good—even as it gave him chills.

  Vortcir brushed drops from his face with his shoulder. “I hear you well, Rahm. Your people are good folk—we even watch you, time to time.” Vortcir gave a quick laugh. “Perhaps yours are a finer people than my own. We strive for peace. But sometimes we do not achieve it. We Winged Ones, as you call us—sometimes we kill each other. We know this is wrong. When one of our number kills another, we catch him and mete out punishment.” He shrugged, an immense, sailed shrug. “It does not happen often.” Vortcir turned and splashed about with his other wing.

  Rahm picked up a handful of wet sand and used it to scrub at his arm, at his shoulder. When blood came away from the cut he’d received last night, it stung. He looked at squat Vortcir—who stood, feet wide in the rushing foam. Both wings opened now, Vortcir raised his head. He began to mew.

  Rahm looked up.

  Suddenly and excitedly, Vortcir called: “My aunt nears!” Then, at once, he leapt. Twigs and water drops flew about. Rahm closed his eyes against the rush of leaves and dirt.

  When he opened them, Vortcir was clearing the broken cliff, rising before billowing cloud.

  For a moment Rahm lost him. Then, a moment later, he saw two Winged Ones, moving together and apart, circling, meeting, one soaring away, the other soaring after—till, suddenly, both were alighting on the rocks at the stream’s far bank.

  Vortcir splashed forward, then turned and spoke somewhat breathlessly to the other: “Here is the groundling called Rahm who saved my life!”

  The woman Winged One was a breadth larger than Vortcir in every direction: taller, deeper chested, broader sailed. She wore a brass chain around her neck—and was clearly the elder. “You are a friend, then, groundling?” While rougher and aged, her voice was as high and as breathy as her nephew’s. “You have saved my fine boy; all men and women who fly will be grateful to you and give you honor.”

  The grin had gone. There was only a smile on Rahm’s face now: “All …?”

  “Vortcir is Handsman of our nest!” she declared as if that explained everything. “Will you now come with us?” Smiling mirth became smiling wonder: “Where—?” “To our nest in the high rocks—to Hi-Vator!”

  “But how could I climb after thee, if—”

  “Easily!” Mewing, Vortcir turned to his aunt. “He’s tall—but scrawny! He can’t weigh much. Come, friend Rahm! Climb on my back.”

  “Canst thou support me?” Rahm stood at the water’s edge. He had never thought of himself as light. But, shorter than Rahm by a head, still Vortcir was half again as heavy.

  Rahm stepped across the water and behind Vortcir, who turned and bent to take him. Rahm grasped him over the shoulders. The furred back bunched beneath Rahm’s chest. On either side of him the leather sails spread, and spread, and spread! They did not beat—but vibrated, at first. Without any sense of motion at all—at first—the ground sank away. Then, at once, leaves in the trees above dropped toward them, fell below them. Rahm caught his breath—tightened his grasp. And the wings gathered and beat once more—and, yes, they flew!

  Looking down over Vortcir’s shoulder, Rahm saw far more rock below than green.

  “How does it feel to fly, friend Rahm?” Vortcir called back; then he cried to his aunt: “He’s light as a fledgling!” Vortcir’s mew rose. Rahm peered over Vortcir’s shoulder.

  Some bare, some gorse-covered, rocks moved far below
them. Wind stroked Rahm’s arms, his buttocks, his back. The smell of the fur on Vortcir’s neck was like the smell which might come from a casket or cabinet in Ienbar’s cabin, long locked and suddenly opened. Sometimes they flew so that Rahm hung against the thick back only by the hook of his arm. More often, they moved horizontally, so that Rahm lay prone on that body, broader than his own, even as his feet stuck free into the air. Sometimes it seemed they just floated, so that the sun warmed Rahm’s neck and the trough between his shoulders, and no wind touched him at all. At others, the wind pummeled Rahm’s face and his arms and chilled his fingers (locked against Vortcir’s chest), till he wondered if he could hold much longer. The excitement of flight contracted Rahm’s stomach and, sometimes, made his heart hammer. He hugged more tightly to the flexing back.

  Others had joined Vortcir and his aunt. As they descended, pitted cliffs rose. At last Vortcir’s feet scraped rock. Rahm caught his balance and stood alone once more, arms and chest tingling, while he looked at the great, windy back-beating maneuvers of the others landing about them—or at Vortcir’s own wingbeating, that finally stilled.

  Drawing in his sails and breathing quickly (but not deeply; deep breaths seemed reserved for flight itself), Vortcir turned. “At Hi-Vator, here on the world’s roof, now you will see how those who fly can live.”

  Others crowded in, then. There was a general cry: “Vortcir! Handsman Vortcir! Vortcir has returned!”

  Vortcir’s aunt pushed through. “But young Handsman—where is your chain of trust?”

  Again Rahm noticed the chain around her own neck.

  “I must have lost it when we were set upon by the terrible wailing.”

  “You cannot very well go without it. As I wear the sign and trust of a Queen, so must our Handsman wear the sign and trust of one ready at any moment to become King.”

  While this was going on, Rahm looked and blinked and looked again at these furred people, who stood so close to one another—in threes, fives, or sevens, always touching—but who, now and then, would explode into the air, soaring fifty, seventy-five, a hundred-fifty yards away from any fellows.