A, B, C

by Samuel R. Delany

  When what happened next finished happening, Rahm had dragged the soldier halfway through the town—till he no longer pulled at Rahm’s wrists, till he no longer flailed, struggled, gurgled, till he was limp and still and hung from Rahm’s grip, as Rahm stood in darkness—choking out one and another rib-wrenching sob.

  Horses’ hooves struck around him. Rahm heard a shout beside him. A blade—Rahm saw firelight run up sharpened metal—cut at his shoulder; and a sound that was not a sob but a roar tore up out of him. He’d hurled the little soldier’s corpse away (the flung body struck the sword from the soldier’s hand, knocked the soldier free of his horse) and fled—till much later Rahm hurled his own body, nearly a corpse, down among the foothills.

  He lay in the woods at the mountains’ base, his cheek on his wrist; tears ran across the bridge of his nose, slippery over the back of his hand. Breath jerked into his lungs every half minute.

  He lay in the leaves, gasping. His eyes boiled in their bone cauldrons. His teeth clenched so tightly, it was surprising the enamel of one or another molar did not crack. His body shook now and again, as if someone struck him hugely on the head, on the foot. What kept going through his mind was mostly names. Names. In the dark woods, he tried to remember all the names he had spoken that day, from the time he’d first reached the field to the time he’d stood in the common. He would start to go through them, get lost, then try doggedly to start again, to remember them all this time. (What were they again? What were they?) Because, he knew, a third of those names—children’s, mothers’, fathers’, friends’—were no longer the names of live people. And they mustn’t be forgotten. But his body finally shook a little less. They must not…Without his mind ever really stilling—

  —dawn struck Rahm awake with gold.

  He rolled and stood in a motion, blinking to erase unbearable dreams. He was still a long time. Once he turned, looked down the wooded slope, then off into the trees on either side. He began to shake. Then, possibly to stop the shaking, he started to walk—to lurch, rather, for the first few minutes—upward. Possibly he walked because walking was most of what he’d been doing for the past week. And the relief from walking, the feeling of a wander at its end, the astonishing feeling of coming home—something terrible had happened to that feeling.

  Rahm walked.

  Once in a while, he would halt and shake his head very fast—a kind of shudder. Then he would walk again.

  The trees thinned. As Rahm stumbled over the higher stones, bare rock lifted free of vegetation, to jut in crags around him or to crumble under uncertain handholds. Soon he was climbing more than walking. After an hour—or was it two?—he came around a ledge to find himself at a crevice. Fifteen feet high, a cave mouth opened narrowly before him.

  chapter four

  From inside, a flapping sounded—as of a single wing.

  Rahm eased along the ledge. Still numb, he had no sense of danger. His motivation was a less-than-passive curiosity—more the habitual actions of someone often curious in the past.

  A fallen branch, split along its length, lay on the rock. Morning light reflected on the clean inner wood, still damp from the breaking. Like metal. Like a polished sword gleaming in firelight.

  Rahm grabbed up the stick, as if seizing the reality would halt the memory. He shook it—as if to shake free the image from it. Then, a moment on, the shaking had turned to a hefting. One hand against the stone wall, the other holding the stick, Rahm stepped within the cave mouth, narrowing his eyes. A slant beam from a hole near the ceiling lit something gray—something alive, something shifting, something near the rocky roof. That something moved, moved again, shook itself, and settled back.

  Rahm stepped farther inside. Looking up, frowning now, he called out—without a word.

  A mew returned.

  Rahm took another step. The gray thing made the flapping sound again.

  As his eyes adjusted to the shadow, Rahm could make out its kite shape. It hung in a mass of filaments, one wing dangling. A tangle of webbing filled most of the cavity. Ducking under strands, Rahm took another step. Leaves ceased to crumble under his heel. Within, the softer soil was silent. He glanced when his foot struck something: a bone chuckled over rock. Rahm looked up again, raised his branch, brought its end near the trapped creature.

  He didn’t touch it. Between the branch’s end and the leathery wing were at least six inches. But suddenly the mewing rose in pitch, turning into a screech.

  Rahm whirled—because something had flung a shadow before him, passing through the light behind.

  Suspended nearly four feet from the ground, a bulbous…thing swayed within the cave entrance, dropped another few inches—much too slowly to be falling—then settled to the ground. It scuttled across the rock, paused, made a scritting noise, then danced about on many too many thin legs. Rahm jabbed his stick toward it.

  Mandibles clicked and missed.

  It ran up the wall, then leapt forward. Rahm struck at it and felt the stick make contact. The thing landed, spitting, and hopped away, one leg injured and only just brushing the earth. Behind it trailed a gray cord—the thickness, Rahm found himself thinking, of the yarn Hara might use on her loom.

  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) than 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, and 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 then another, feeling 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 the 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. 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 a 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 is now 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 cannot, 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.