Читать книгу World Enough, and Time - FastPencil Premiere - Страница 6

THE hills of Monterey formed a promontory on the tip of a crooked finger of land that pointed southwest into the blue Pacific. The base of the peninsula curved gently back to a coastline that ran east, then smoothly south all the way to Port Fresno. From Fresno the coast turned east again, and then south once more down to Newport, near what once had been the Mexican border. Of course, since the last war there were no more borders; only frontiers.

Beauty’s farm lay in the southern meadows of a depopulated area that extended north to the Ice Coun­try. The Ice Country itself was uninhabitable: a vast, frigid zone, the penumbra of a glacier that sat snugly on the top third of the world like a white electrocution cap. The glacier moved ten miles south every year, extending the boundaries of the Ice with imperial resolution. Monterey had grown accustomed to seeing the invader’s frosty designs as late as June.

South of Beauty’s farm were scattered ranches, set­tlers and trading posts. Population density increased far­ther south, until there were actually scattered cities – usually walled, self-sustaining centers where people and other animals gathered for companionship, commerce or protection.

Beauty’s farm was ideally situated. Cool and sparse enough most months of the year to be uninteresting to adventurers and soldiers and warmed enough by the Pa­cific currents to make fruit-growing easy. Beauty hadn’t ever considered leaving before, once he’d set­tled down there with Rose. Neither had Joshua.

So it was with considerable regret that they folded up their lives and slid them like wedding suits into the bottom drawers of their memories. They were hunters now, and a successful hunter can afford only one thought: the prey.

They set off in the morning as first light trembled. Beauty carried only his bow and a quiver; Joshua had his knives and his falcon-feather pen.

There was no trace of the Vampire or the Griffin, save a green wing feather from the latter – they’d ob­viously made their escape by air. But the wounded Accident left a fairly easy trail of blood, smells and sign, which Beauty and Josh tracked east from the farm for many miles into a woodsy marsh­land.

There the trail turned south.

Tracking became a bit more difficult through the marshy scrub, but Josh had a good eye, and Beauty an equine sense of smell. So they kept up a steady pace all morning and were silent, side by side, with senses alert. When their shadows were short they paused by the rim of a pond to rest and to eat.

“He is paralleling the coast,” said Beauty, flaring his nostrils into the wind.

Josh lay on his belly sipping from the pool. “He’s slowing, though.” Beauty nodded, shook his mane back and forth, pawed the ground. Joshua stood up. “Be still, Beauty. Thoughtful rest is the hunter’s friend.”

Beauty snorted, “Spoken like a Scribe.” He stood at the edge of the cool water and watched his reflec­tion dance in the ripples that still ran from the spot where Joshua’s thirsty lips had touched. Beauty scorned the Human religion of Scribery. It elevated unreal, meaningless scratches to something they were not and turned them into powerful tokens. It promoted false patience, false hope, false priority. Beauty shrugged as it was but one more Human enterprise that remained cryptic.

Josh squinted into the south. “We’ll find our people.”

Beauty turned his head, his lips thinned in smile. “It is good to hunt with you again.” He gave all his words equal weight, his meaning many-layered, alluding to much that had passed between them. First, it referred to the fact that he was born to the hunt, had always hunted, had missed the hunt these past few years on his farm. It referred also to ten years earlier, when he and Josh had regularly hunted to­gether, when they together supported an extended family of friends and relatives on their game. It referred to the great Race War that had pitted Humans against all the other species and had divided Beauty and Joshua. It had even forced them to hunt each other. Until Beauty was wounded by a Human prince, and Joshua hid him in the woods, nursing him back to health with Rose’s help.

When the War ended, national boundaries were gone, and Kings and Popes went on waging their own personal wars for land and power, but Beauty put down his bow and swore to be a farmer the rest of his days and give part of his crop always to what was left of Joshua’s family.

So now he meant to tell Josh that it was good to hunt again, good to hunt with Josh again, good to hunt with Josh again, good to hunt with Josh again.

Josh understood and said so with his face.

A nearby orange tree provided the two hunters with a meal of the sugar-heavy fruit.

“Where do you think he’ll go to ground?” Joshua asked.

“There is a Forest of Accidents some hundred miles east and south,” said Beauty, “but I doubt the thing can last that far. Best just to stalk and corner.” He paused. “I only hope we catch it before it dies, so we can question it.”

Joshua nodded. “We need more information if we’re ever going to trace the others.”

“If it is slave trade this concerns, I know two places to nose about. One is a brothel, not more than half a day from here. The Accident may head there, in any event.”

“I remember, we went there once, fifteen years ago.”

“It is not so nice a place now, I am told.” They shared a brief, painful thought: their loved ones, sold in chains, to pirates or worse.

“And the other place to nose about?” Josh asked.

“A pirate camp, on the coast south of Newport. I have friends there as well who may help.”

“Pirates?’

“Now, yes. Once they fought with King Jarl’s Elite Guard.” Jarl was the Bear-King, and his Elite Guard Service – the JEGS – had won many battles against the Humans in the Race War.

Joshua remembered them well. “But if this isn’t slave trade, if this is war again…”

Beauty left the question unanswered. It lay be­tween them a moment, then blew away like the ashes of yesterday’s fire. “We are brothers now. They cannot make us hunt each other again.”

Joshua felt Beauty’s truth. “Rose read my eyes yesterday,” he said.

“What did she see?” He didn’t always believe in Rose’s predictions, but they held special import now, if only as tokens of his be­loved.

“She told me I lost something.” They looked at each other with sad hindsight. “She said there’d be a long hunt, though, and that I’d find it again.” He put the force of promise in his voice.

“What else?” Beauty insisted, buoyed by the vision.

“The rest needed translation. She said I was going to drown – but that I’d live again.”

“Better not tell that to the Pope’s men. They would drown you for blasphemy, and if you lived again they would drown you doubly for double blasphemy and insolence.”

They were about to set off when Beauty twitched his ears to the side and said, “What was that?”

“I didn’t hear anything,” said Josh.

They both listened. The wind, a cricket, the leaves. And then a subtle sound, almost not a sound at all.

They crept silently toward the noise, through tall grass and shallow puddle. It grew indistinctly louder and seemed to be coming from behind a large rock formation. It made the sound a hand makes passing through spiderwebs.

Beauty stood clear of the rocks and strung an ar­row. Josh took out his blade and sidled around to the far side of the stones. Knife in hand, he crouched behind the larg­est piece of granite, then leapt over it blindly to the other side.

He was ankle-deep in mud. Before him was a pool, five yards across – a tar pit, covered with a quarter inch of water. At the edge of the pit, just begin­ning to sink, was a huge, brightly colored butterfly; its four-foot wings beating wildly to try to pull itself into flight out of the tar.

Josh smiled sympathetically. He reached out, grabbed the terrified creature by its dark furry body, and lifted it gently out of the mire. It shivered vio­lently.

He carried it back to where Beauty was standing, bow drawn. “Just a Flutterby. Trying to drink the water off a tar pit,” Joshua explained. The animal was quivering, its delicate red-and-gold wings straight up in frightened attention. Josh carried it back to the pond and began to wash the tar off the large insect’s belly with sand and lemon juice from a nearby tree’s fallen fruits. Beauty put up his bow and walked over.

“Poor thing,” the Centaur shook his head. “They are beautiful, but not, I think, the smartest of crea­tures.”

Josh finished washing the Flut­terby’s body clean, then placed it on some dry grass in the sun. “There you go, big girl, you’ll dry off soon enough.”

It sat there timidly. Its ebony body was glistening wet as its flower-thin wings rose and fell tenta­tively with each respiration. The creature’s heart continued to palpitate so quickly that the sides of its dark slender body seemed to vibrate. It looked at Joshua, and its scared, warm face smiled.

“It will be safe here,” said Beauty. “It will dry within the hour.” He looked at the sun. “We should be gone.”

Josh nodded in agreement.

They started off, but didn’t get fifty paces before Josh stopped. “Wait a minute. Be right back.” He ran over to the pond, broke open an orange, and laid sev­eral juicy slices on the ground in front of the Flut­terby. Shyly, the animal lowered its eyes.

Josh ran back to where Beauty was waiting. “Let’s go,” he said, and they continued south at a trot.

Not only the contour of the western coastline, but the terrain itself had undergone considerable alteration following the quakes of Fire and Rain, and then once more after the Great Quake, which marked the beginning of the steady southward creeping of the Big Ice.

A temperate band of hills and wood extended from Monterey down to Port Fresno, but there the land became subtropical. Newport, in fact, was surrounded by rain forest, and no one civilized had ever been much south of that since no one knew when.

The marshland over which Josh and Beauty were trekking was itself highly variable in character. Areas of bogs, fens, and marshes were interspersed through­out, sometimes in great density. On the other hand, great spans of grassy plain extended sometimes for miles. It was hilly in places, rocky elsewhere. There were even scattered acres of trees.

It made tracking difficult. The wounded creature had gone over stony flats that held not a print, through foul mire that absorbed all smell. Josh and Beauty kept on the trail, but they had to slow down. At one point they missed a turning and had to back­track a mile before they picked up the true scent.

The sun was still high when they came to the shore of the Venus River. The Venus was a long water that ran from inside Mount Venus in the east, all the way to the sea. It was fairly calm where it cut through the marshlands, but a hundred yards wide, and too deep to tell how deep.

They were both good swimmers, but Josh was hesi­tant and water-shy as he remembered Rose’s vision. Beauty admonished him, though, and assured him Rose had been speaking in metaphors. They stood at the muddy edge for a few minutes, watching the slow, implacable current move, like time, toward them and past them. Leaves bobbed on the surface, and rotting logs and dragonfly wings. A flower floated by. As it came even with them it paused on an eddy or under­current. For a moment the whole world was still for Joshua.

The moment passed. They jumped in and raced to the other side. On the other side, there was no trail.

“Most likely he let the current take him downstream,” said Joshua. “We’ll do best to walk west along the bank, pick him up where he came out.”

“So it would want us to think. But a strong Accident can swim upstream. And its home forest is east of here.”

“The brothel’s west,” suggested Josh. They thought in silence and considered alternatives. “We could split up,” Josh added. He didn’t want to. Beauty was all he had left.

Beauty placed this thought between his temples and examined it from all sides. “No,” he said finally.

Josh agreed. “We’ll walk upstream for two miles. If we don’t pick up the trail, we’ll turn back and follow the river west. He couldn’t have swum upstream more than two miles.”

In a measured voice, Beauty replied, “Yes.” It was the Human way - to try to cover all the possibili­ties. Such an approach had its merits, Beauty conceded to himself, when Horse sense failed.

It was a standing joke between them, Beauty’s economy of words. Quiet Josh was positively garrulous next to his equine companion, and frequently teased the Centaur about his dour, parsimonious speech. Beauty, in his turn, would accuse Josh of logorrhea, of being a Scribe just to scribble, of meaningless chatter. And so it went.

Josh looked at his friend now, after the two monosyllabic retorts and said, “Tell you what, stamp your foot once for Yes, twice for No. Okay?” It was his great joy in life to tease his golden friend.

Beauty looked down his nose distantly at Josh, raised his right front hoof, and tapped the young man backward into the river. Joshua splashed, spluttered, and pulled himself out.

“Like that?” beamed the Centaur angelically.

With a gleeful whoop, Joshua jumped on top of Beauty’s back, leaned his full weight to one side, his hands in the Horse-man’s mane, and wrestled the Centaur to the ground. They rolled around the mud, horse-playing for a full minute before Josh looked up to realize they were surrounded by a party of hostile creatures.

He stood up slowly, hands away from his knives. Beauty jumped up in a single motion and stood perfectly still, waiting.

There was a big fellow, hair covering most of his face. He aimed a crossbow directly at Joshua’s middle. Beside him stood a gaunt, toothless woman holding a zip gun – these primitive firearms exploded as often as not, but one never knew. Next to her was a muscular man with no arms and the head of a large black bird. At his side a gorilla smiled, opening and closing its fists.

And the leader, a nearly naked woman with a saber in her hand and a black cloth hood over her head; her brilliant green eyes stared out through the two holes cut in the cloth. On her right shoulder was branded an upright trident.

Nobody moved. It was an animal thing. Each was sniffing the air, reading the wind. Josh felt a droplet of sweat congeal under his arm and creep down his side, precipitating out of the hot afternoon sun with tension in the air. Finally the woman in the hood spoke, in a low monotone.

“Are you a believer?” she said.

Josh tightened. The question identified the interlopers as BASS – Born Again ‘Seidon Soldiers – and though they looked pretty scruffy, they were known to be tough infighters. Furthermore, they considered themselves highly moral, and Joshua knew this meant they were labile and dangerous.

“Our journey is moral,” Josh said to the hooded woman.

“We are tied to no King,” explained Beauty.

“Nor the Pope,” added Josh. BASS were under the command of the Doge of Venice, and though the Doge was aligned with the Pope, there were factional hostilities. The BASS worshiped Poseidon or Neptune, God of the Sea. Their religion prophesied that someday the sea would reclaim the land, and then Neptune would rule the whole watery world.

“Are you believers?” repeated the hood-woman.

“Our mission is Venge-right,” said Josh. “Vampires have killed our people.”

“Perhaps they had a right,” said the hooded woman. The Bird-man made a raucous noise in his throat, like the sound of a ratchet being turned, then was silent again.

Josh noted Beauty’s hind legs flex, ready to spring. “They had no right,” said Beauty. The hairs on his mane stiffened.

“Nonbelievers lie for their own ends,” said the hooded woman. Her eyes were on Beauty and her hand on her saber.

“Our journey is moral,” repeated Joshua. He felt the situation deteriorating quickly; something had to be done. His fight was not with these people. He wanted only to show them that neither was their fight with him. So he decided to gamble. “Our power comes from the water,” he intoned.

He saw them tense. Beauty looked at him questioningly. Josh knew these people had a complex, mystical, baptismal relationship with the sea, and he suspected they would react strongly to his statement. He was right, the air was electric.

“Water is sacred,” warned the hooded woman. The Gorilla stopped smiling. The Bird-man opened his beak wide, as if he were silently screaming.

“The water gives us our power,” Josh pronounced. “I can make fire from water.”

The man with the hirsute face violently shook his head back and forth. Beauty looked ready to leap.

Josh walked away from the bank with slow, deliberate movements. He gathered up a handful of dried grass and bark, then brought it back down to the river and set it on the shore. The crossbow and the zip gun followed him like afterthoughts.

He picked a long blade of green grass and tied a little loop in it, too small to let a berry pass through. Then he dipped the blade of grass in the river. When he pulled it out there was a bead of water balanced delicately in the loop. The others watched these mysterious manipulations in fascination.

Holding one end of the grass blade, he positioned its loop six inches over his pile of dry grass, as the hot postmeridian sun glared through the refractive bead of water. He moved the liquid lens up and down a few inches until the focal point fell into the center of the kindling. Then he simply sat, motionless.

They watched him. No one spoke.

In a few minutes smoke began to rise from under the tiny glare of the water-beaded grass-loop. Joshua blew lightly on it. The smoke disappeared and then floated up heavier until the dry tinder erupted in soft yellow flame.

The creatures backed off except for the hooded woman. She stood, unmoving.

“Your power is from the water,” she said finally. She made a sign to the others, and they ran off into the forest that lined the south side of the river.

Beauty was amazed. “Where did you learn that?”

“In a book,” shrugged Josh.

“Scribes,” Beauty shook his head tolerantly. “You are lucky you were not hanged for a sorcerer.”

“Words make the strongest magic sometimes.”

“Silence is stronger,” said the Centaur.

“I’m talking about written words.”

“Then why did you not just scribble something in the sand for the BASS to read?” Beauty snapped.

“BASS don’t trust people who read or write.” He spoke with the tolerant condescension of one who knows himself to be right, but appreciates the ignorance of others.

Beauty became thoughtful. “They are far north for BASS.”

“Raiding party, maybe,” agreed Joshua.

Just then there was a soft humming noise behind them. They turned. Sitting on the bank was the Flutterby, its red-and-gold wings moving slowly up and down with a hopeful expectant smile on its black little face.

“She followed us!” exclaimed Josh.

“Go back, little one,” Beauty spoke calmly to the timid creature. The face remained upturned at Josh.

“You can’t come with us,” said Josh. “We’re hunters.” The frequency of the hum rose as its tiny heart beat faster.

“She cannot keep up,” concluded Beauty. “Come.”

Josh and Beauty turned and trotted east upriver, looking for signs of their prey. The Flutterby’s face fell, but she lifted herself airward and floated calmly, high above her new friends.

*****************************************************

There was no trace of the Accident upstream, so the hunters returned west. They found evidence of the wounded creature’s exodus from the river around sundown, and followed the trail into the woods until those thinned out to clear, open fields.

It was near midnight when they saw the red light in the distance, the creature’s foul footprints leading directly toward it. They looked at each other and started walking in the same direction. It was the old brothel they were approaching, and the Accident was there.