The Birthgrave (55 page)

We reached the summit of the hill, and Fethlin looked upward at the thunderclouds.

“Did you find what you sought?” Wexl asked me.

“No,” I said, “not what I sought. There is no answer for me here, after all.”

I stood still and empty. I could think of nothing, no solution or hope. What was there for me now? My life had been a meaningless journey indeed. I stared back at the valley. Perhaps I had been wrong to call for help. It would have been easy to lie down beside my other self, and give myself up to the dark.

“We must find shelter,” Fethlin said. “Sunset is near, and the storm may mask it. We cannot reach the sea before the night comes.”

I glanced at their faces. I could tell they were not afraid, yet their looks were set and stern with unease. They did not trust the ruined cities by night.

No rain had come with the storm, yet a twilight chill settled as we followed Fethlin over the boulders and the broken walls. The thunder folded itself away into the sea, leaving an immense silence.

4

Darkness gathered. In the hiding place Fethlin had found us—a tiny sunken room, still roofed over, and with a low narrow door-mouth—we crouched around our little fire. Wexl and Peyuan had piled loose stones against the door, now only a small hole remained. The room became very smoky, and even so the orange warmth of the fire leaked away. I did not know what it was we hid from, neither, I think, did they. Old tales and older instinct had combined to make them wary.

They ate oatcake and cheese, and Fethlin set a watch—himself first, Wexl second, and Peyuan last, through the hours of the night. I was not included, whether out of politeness, or because he thought me incapable. I am not sure. I did not argue the point. I curled myself into a corner where a stubborn bush was growing, and slept wearily, not even caring what dreams or memories came.

But it seemed at first an empty, quiet sleep. Once I woke, and saw that Wexl had replaced Fethlin by the door hole.

The second time I woke, things were very different. Wexl was no longer at his post, and beyond the fire were no longer stretched the sleeping shapes of Fethlin and Peyuan. The fire itself was out yet I was aware of a great glow in the blackness beyond the door.

I stood up and went to the door, and found I could move out of it standing upright. Beyond the shelter, streets of tall buildings stretched away, steps led up and down, obelisks stood straight as spear shafts. I knew then that I dreamed, for this was the city as it had been, not as it had become, and its sisters with it in the terraced hills. Yet there were no lights in any of the palaces, no lanterns swung from poles, no colored lamps went by in the hands of men. Only that great harsh glare that flared eastward, out toward the sea, an unwholesome red beacon of some disaster. I walked out into the city streets, under the shadow of the old walls. I climbed higher and higher into the hills until at last I could look down and see that huge torch burning on the tongue of land that ran out from the beach. There was some movement around it, a dismal mechanical movement. Occasionally the flames would leap very high, and magenta smoke clouds would funnel into the sky. The sea glittered bloodily across the bay.

A dreadful certainty came on me that I would be trapped by my dream in the old world with its miasma of calamity. I made that supreme effort, so like the thrust of a swimmer up from some river's muddy bottom, and my head broke the surface of the dream, and I woke.

At once Wexl's hand grasped my arm.

“Make no sound,” he whispered. “There is some danger.”

I nodded and he let me go. I sat up. The little fire had been darkened by a heap of loose soil. Fethlin and Peyuan were kneeling by the door hole, staring out, looking this way and that.

Then the noise came, from somewhere outside the shelter. My skin became icy, and my hair prickled. Never had I heard such a noise. Not knowing even what it was, I became sick with fear and loathing. A sort of slithering rustle that seemed like the movement of dry old flesh, dragged inch by flacid inch over the grassy paving of the street. The first thing that came to my mind was that some huge snake was pulling itself around our hiding place. I had never seen these great serpents in the wild, but I had heard the bandits, and later the wagoners, tell stories of them, and remembered the creature the woman had danced with in Ankurum, as wide as her waist and twenty feet long, or more. Despite their terrifying size, they did not eat man, but preferred smaller juicier morsels, such as unlucky hedgehogs. But then the sound came again, and there was something in it that made me certain it was more than a snake; it was too large, and there was nothing sinuous in it, none of the grace of the serpent. And it was coming closer.

I crawled to the door hole and looked out.

Between the broken walls, something came. It stood in the street, flexing its body, turning its head, twitching the long tail backward and forward, with a sound of dry, old flesh scraping on stone.

I had heard of dragons. Now I saw one. Though it was not a true dragon, I realized, when I had begun to reason again.

After I had crossed Aluthmis, I saw the three girls dance in the chief's hall, and the object of their dance had been the great lizard, large as a wolf, a mutation of its kind. I had thought that horrible and curious enough. Now I saw that Change was not finished with its experiment in size. I told myself that the thing in the street was only a lizard, yet it was hard for me. No wolf-sized creature this. It towered high above the walls, its broad flat head was the length of a man's body, its tapering thrashing tail as thick as four men roped together. The faintest hint of starlight picked out the dry, rustling, black cascade of its scales; its whole body was armored. In its long mouth were well-developed teeth, and a long, black, whiplike tongue. Its enormous eyes turned on their incredible axis, each one a different way. It heaved itself upward on its stumpy legs and came toward us.

Silently, stiffly, we drew back from the hole. But I think there was still a hope in us that it did not know we were there.

Through the chink of the hole we watched the ghastly head lower itself, slide toward the opening, and stop short. It made another sound now, a hissing spitting noise of anger, and the stench of its breath filled up the room, a stink of death, and foulness, and everything decayed. We had flattened ourselves against the walls, and as well we had. The long tongue darted, and flashed in through the doorway at us, large as a snake in itself, blindly questing about the tiny space in spasm. It was how a smaller lizard would catch flies.

None of us thought to strike at the tongue as we stood congealed against the walls. In another moment it was withdrawn. And almost immediately a frantic scrabbling began outside as it started to paw its way in to us.

“We will be killed, Fethlin,” I said, “if we stay here.” I made no effort to keep my voice low; there was no longer any point.

“The roof will fall soon,” he answered. As if to emphasize his words, an avalanche of stones rushed and rattled outside.

“Or it will open the doorway wide enough to see where it thrusts its tongue,” Wexl muttered.

A slab thudded from over our heads and exploded in the street. I felt sick, but a thought came to me.

“There is no moon,” I said, “and the thing has slept by day. Perhaps it is afraid of the light. When it came you doused the fire.”

“True.” Fethlin drew the flint from his belt. He leaned and struck flame from a stone, and shook the flame off into the heaped-up fire. A twig snapped alive, “Our only chance,” Fethlin said. “If light keeps it back from us, then we must run toward the beach; we do not have enough kindling to last the night. It will follow, no doubt, but I do not think such a thing likes salt water, either.”

We pushed the soil off the fire and threw on further branches snapped from the bush in the corner. Peyuan cracked loose four of the sturdiest limbs and gave us one each to dip and use as torches. Outside the thing gave a snuffling cough as smoke irritated its hungry, merciless throat. A rush of red flame came suddenly, lighting up the door hole, and the lizard hissed. We heard its awkward flight backward, the crunching as its great paws crushed pebbles. Wexl and Peyuan thrust the stones out of the door-mouth; Fethlin flung the burning stuff after them. The spitting branches in our hands, we burst from cover. I had one glimpse of it, cowering back, yet only a few feet from us, its eyes half-blinded, and saliva gushing a poisonous yellow from its jaws. Then we had turned and were running hard and silent through those streets of white bones, making for the sea.

* * *

It followed us. We had known that it must. We saw the sea below, and heard its rustling, unstoppable progress behind us. We found the road and the trees, and by this time our branches had guttered out in our grasp, extinguished by the damp wind from the bay. There was no time to stop and make new fire among the trees, and no scattered branches ready to hand. But there seemed to be fire enough in my lungs.

We stumbled out onto the beach. It was very wide and gray under the overcast sky. The sea lay a long way out, ink-black, whispering.

Peyuan took my arm, and hurried my flagging body forward.

“Only a little way,” he panted.

“Peyuan—I do not think I can swim—”

And then the sound came in the sand behind us, unexpectedly immediate.

We had the sense to break free of each other, and each run to opposite sides, but one paw glanced across Peyuan's neck, and he fell and rolled a little way, and was still. I thought of the third warrior I had pushed aside in the tower, and how his skull had snapped from the spine. I could not think how it had come on us so quickly, but I suppose I had dropped behind, and the beach was an open place for it to cross, with no obstacles in the way. Now it spat, and lurched sideways after Peyuan's body. I found a stone by my foot, and reached, and threw it at the lizard. Its armor deflected the stone, but it turned back, and its eyes fell on me. I did not understand why I had done such a thing. Peyuan was dead—I could not help him. Why had I not left him, and run for the sanctuary of the water?

A shout came from my left, and Fethlin ran back up the beach. The monster turned yet again, once more distracted. Wexl leaped on my right with a high hooting wail. He flung sand up at the lizard, and ran around it waving his arms. Stupidly the terrible head swerved to follow him.

It became a grotesque game. Dancing and shrieking we ran, with an energy gouged from our weariness, in circles around the lizard, edging always nearer to the sea, safe while it could not decide which of us to strike at first. But my head swam, and my legs could scarcely carry me. I did not think I should reach the sea.

We made a great deal of noise, and the monster hissed at us venomously; I am not certain when I first became aware of that other sound. High, steady, a throbbing whine almost beyond the pitch of my ears. I thought at first it was only the quick prelude to the faintness which would finish me. And then the Shadow fell over us all.

It lay across the sand, containing us, a vast oval of blackness, and we responded to it with an automatic fear of the unknown thing which beats down from the sky-lands where men cannot go. We drew back, not even daring to look up at whatever hung there, our eyes riveted on its earthbound manifestation. Only the lizard remained unmoved. It started after us, spit flying from its hissing jaws. In that moment, a thin line of white fire struck down and covered it, blinding us. And when we could see again, a pile of smoking stinking stuff lay where the lizard had been, and the sand was black dust.

I had heard them tell stories, in camp and krarl and village, of the gods, and the bolt which a god casts that burns and destroys. I fell to my knees, but my head tilted back on its own, and I looked full at the gliding, thrumming silver thing which hovered a moment more, high above the beach, then dipped sideways and southward, and vanished beyond the far line of cliffs that marked the bay, leaving a thread of golden fire behind it on the darkness.

5

After such a thing has happened, men find they cannot speak to each other of it. It is too alien and too immense to be grasped, it has no place in the world of normal things, therefore they make no place for it. The stuff of legends had touched us, and we said nothing.

We got up, and walked back to where Peyuan's body was lying. Wexl leaned over him, and gently rolled him onto his back. Peyuan's eyes opened.

“Did you kill the beast?” he asked.

“It is dead,” Fethlin said truthfully.

Peyuan grinned and Wexl helped him up. Peyuan shook sand from himself.

“Now you will not have to swim, Morda.”

I could hardly believe that he was alive. I had seen Giltt die and Dnarl die. I could hardly believe. I went to him and touched his shoulder, and he grinned all the more.

“Yes, I live.” He laughed, and he hugged me to him. “A miracle, a god-gift.”

We walked back up the beach together, found branches among the trees, now that the need was no longer urgent, and built a fire. There was a warmer feel to the night and no sense of danger, yet Fethlin set his sentries anyway.

The predawn coldness woke me. A gray light was opening over the sea, and against it Peyuan patrolled up and down before the trees, trying to keep himself awake. I rose, and picked my way softly by the fire.

“Peyuan,” I said, “I will take your watch.”

“No, no, I wait to see the sun rise.” He yawned convulsively.

“You took the lizard's blow that should have fallen on me,” I said. “I at least can take your last hour here.”

After a little arguing, he went to the fire and lay down, and fell instantly asleep.

So I saw the sun come up again over the long sea.

And I thought many things. I thought how rarely, since I had come from the Mountain, had I turned back into my past. Events divided each section of my life, and now the ruins, the lizard, and the great Shadow had divided it yet once more. I could not now return to Qwenex's people. I must go onward into the unknown places yet again. I turned and looked at the three sleeping warriors, and I thought how Peyuan lived. I wondered then if he had lived because I had at first rejected them, when before always I had welcomed the three guards who came to me, as my protection and my right. I understood what I must do.