Black Pockets Page 7

  “But where are you born?”

  “From the earth itself, but even if you knew the place you would not be there at the right time to see it. There is nothing you can do except wait for the passage of time to free Dawnstone.” The creature sneered at him. “And the one hundredth generation will be the last. None will follow it to rob us of our vengeance.”

  Beldon raised the meat cleaver and buried it in the gargoyle’s throat, cutting through to the spine, killing the creature instantly. For a moment he regretted his anger. He had to remind himself that this was not an individual he had spoken with, but a monstrous single being incarnated in living forms. He thought he could almost sense its bodiless evil near the fire, hovering there, mocking him...

  He sat looking at the body for a long time. Spring, he thought, the creature had spoken of spring. Tomorrow, this morning, was the first day of spring. He thought of eggs hatching in the earth— in a field. The only fields near the castle were worked by the peasants.

  But he did remember a clearing in the forest which he had not seen since he was a boy. He had never been there on the first day of spring.

  He got up and threw the body into the flames. He was certain that his guess was correct.

  As he put on his cloak in the hallway he felt that some new sense was guiding him. From the rack by the front door he took a walking stick, instinctively thinking of it as a weapon.

  He opened the heavy, oaken door. It squeaked loudly, bringing a sleepy servant out to close it behind him as he went out.

  He went across the windswept outer court and through the open front gate. He wondered if he would be back before his mother woke up from her trancelike sleep.

  He started to run in the predawn darkness, his robe a flapping wing behind him. He slowed to a walk and his hand was on his knife hilt. Deep inside him the need to hurry was a fearful urgency uncoiling into his limbs, a fluid looseness in his hands and arms and a constricting pull in his legs and thighs.

  He came to the fork in the path which led down from the castle into the village. The way left led into the forest. He followed it without stopping. He knew that he had to be at the clearing before sunrise.

  He started to run again. The trees became rushing shapes on both sides of the narrow pathway. They were gray and black forms with a thousand paralytic fingers outlined against a lightening sky.

  He burst out of the forest into a large clearing and stopped. He looked at the ground carefully in the pale light. It looked as if it had been plowed a long time ago—but by whom?

  Something was waiting to come out of the earth. He could almost feel its presence in the morning hush. He leaned on his walking stick and waited in the chill air.

  The sun started to come up in the trees and the air grew warmer. It was a bright orange sun that grew hotter as it rose over the trees before him. A wind passed through the branches, fluttering the leaves for a moment before dying, leaving an abrupt stillness over the clearing as if the world was holding its breath...

  Suddenly Beldon saw the earth crack open in a thousand places across the field. He saw that it was moist under the parched surface. As he watched, thousands of small, pink-red sparks pushed out of the wet dirt.

  He stepped closer, leaning over, and saw the tiny body of a winged gargoyle, pink and wet all over, entering the world from below, hatching from some infernal egg that had been waiting in the ground.

  The sun caught the creatures across the entire surface of the clearing, turning their tumescent skins into red-orange slivers of fire, thousands of them transforming the field into a flame-dotted ground surrounded by green forest. There was an odor of birthing coming up from the land, making Beldon gag. Before him an evil nature was throwing up the things which were his enemy, and would continue as the seasons turned. Each spring would be a fire-like beginning for these fleshy creatures, and all would struggle toward maturity and the aim of tormenting the heirs of Dawnstone.

  Something seized Beldon from inside like a fist entering a hand puppet, and he gripped the walking stick with both hands. Raising it, he began to walk across the open rows in the field, striking the newly born devils with a rhythmic precision, splitting open their little heads and torsos, spilling their blood back into the soil. He was tireless. The force that drove him seemed endless. Fear, sorrow, and hatred had made an alliance for the possession of his body long enough to carry out this deed. His reason was an approving spectator.

  He struck them until thousands lay torn open in the morning air, their blood clotting under the open sky. Beldon continued until the sun was almost overhead. Thousands still remained to be killed. He did not know which horrified him more—the dead or the still living.

  He grew tired, overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of trying to stifle this fertility of numberless newborn. He stopped and picked up a living specimen. Its wings huddled close to its body. Its eyes were red rubies glazed with moisture. The creature opened its mouth to yawn and Beldon saw the tiny fangs, so much like the full grown ones which had take Elina’s life.

  He lifted the creature high over his head and dashed it to the ground. He stepped on it immediately with his boot heel, feeling its life melt away into the soft earth.

  Around him shadows raced on the ground. Shapes covered the sun. The shadows hovered near his feet. He looked up and saw five full grown gargoyles diving toward him out of the sun.

  He raised his stick to defend himself but he was too tired. Sweat ran into his eyes. The talons struck him and hurled him to the ground. A blow hit him in the right temple and a shower of lights exploded in the darkness like sparks from a blacksmith’s anvil...

  He remembered being carried in the air and being dropped to the ground in the castle’s courtyard. He remembered vague faces looking at him, the faces of his servants and his mother. He woke up in his bed thinking that now his mother knew about Elina. Through the window he saw dark clouds driving across the sky, leaden masses filled with flashes of lightning, each pulse of light growing stronger.

  He got up knowing that they had brought him back so he would continue. They knew that he would go to the village eventually and choose a new bride. In time they might come for her, or her son or daughter, or his daughter’s daughter. Someone every ten years, as long as there were victims.

  There were too many of the creatures to stop. He would never be able to surprise them again, they would see to that. The clearing would be carefully guarded from now on. It would be unapproachable.

  And yet, he knew, some would live at Dawnstone untouched. Perhaps the ones who would be close to him now, his future bride and children, maybe they would live in peace, unharmed. He almost hoped that he would be the next one to be taken, and his family-to-be spared. It seemed right that he should be next.

  He walked over to the window and looked out at the driving clouds again. He felt very different now, sure that he would be the next one to die. But his family would live, and it seemed that it should be that way and no other. Rain was falling from the clouds now, curtains of sweeping water that struck the colored glass of his bedroom window. Wind rattled the frame. He felt the hollow emptiness of acceptance as he watched the horizon of swaying trees, and the line of darkness advancing on the castle. There was a sudden break in the storm clouds and the setting sun cast its redness into the rain, turning the droplets for an instant into blood.

  First Love, First Fear

  IT WAS COLD IN THE WATER. THE SUN WENT behind some clouds in the west, chilling the air; the sky turned a deeper blue, the sea became darker. Tim treaded water, watching the disk of the orange sun in the clouds massed on the horizon, no longer warm, a cadmium globe rolling through ashes, another sign that the long second-summer of Lea was finally ending.

  The sun came out again suddenly, lighting the sky and warming his wet shoulders. He looked at the jagged rock ahead sticking out of the water; it was overgrown with glistening green seaweed. He swam toward it with renewed strength.

  His father had forbidden him to swim
too far from shore, but he would never know. He had gone to the starport a hundred miles down the coast to bring back a couple and their daughter to share the homestead, and would be back in a week.

  Suddenly Tim was afraid of the depths beneath him. Cold water rushed up from below and swirled around his feet, sending shivers through his body. He thought of the mother-polyp thing he had dug up on the beach last summer. It had been a dead shell of a creature whose young had eaten their way out in the spring, leaving the parent open and raw. The insides had been rotting for a while when he had found it, and they had looked like red mushrooms and fresh liver covered by sand, a mixture of sandy smell and decay. He had covered it up quickly and it had taken a day for his stomach to settle. Were there any such things swimming under him now?

  The planet was one huge ocean, miles deep in some places, warm and shallow for thousands of square miles elsewhere. New Australia was the only continent, with one starport a few miles inland on the west coast, just south of their homestead, and two dozen settlements scattered in a semicircle inland from the starport, the most distant a hundred and fifty miles inland. The interior was unexplored except for the satellite photomapping—a huge forest plateau covered by tall trees, some of them thousands of years old. Among the explored worlds the land was unique because it did not have a native population like most planets habitable by men. The intelligent folk of the world lived in the sea.

  Tim swam more quickly as he neared the rock, still worried about what might be lurking in the water beneath him. His hands and feet touched the slippery rocks underwater; he grasped the sea plants growing there and pulled himself forward, half swimming, half crawling on the hidden rocks. At last he stood up in the water, balancing precariously.

  He moved forward a step at a time until he was standing in front of the rocky spire. At his feet an alien crab fled into the water. He turned and looked back at the beach, but he could not hear the breakers, and the high, sand-covered rocks looked small from a quarter of a mile. The gnarly, black-barked trees, clinging to the rocks above the beach, were sharp against the sky.

  He turned from the beach in time to see the orange sun slip behind the dark clouds which were pushing up over the edge of the world; he saw that it would not come out again before setting.

  He grasped the clinging plants on the spire and began to move around it to the right, intending to circle it. He moved slowly, peering around as he went. The steel blue of the water made the very air seem darker. The breeze was quickly drying his skin and trunks, and he paused to brush some hair out of his eyes. For a moment his hand seemed darker to him, almost as if the sea had somehow stained it.

  The beach was to his left now and he could see the first moon rushing up from behind the rocks, a small, silvery mirror, the brightest object in the sky now that the sun’s direct light was gone. He knew that the water would be colder when he swam back. In the winter he might try walking out here across the ice.

  He stepped around to the other side of the rock where he could no longer see the beach. There was a sharp tang in the air, ozone blown in by the wind from a storm at sea. A small wave broke against the rock, spraying him with foam, and he tasted its freshness with a shiver.

  He brushed some water from his eyes and saw the shallow indentation at the base of the rock. He looked closer. It was almost a small cave. He bent over and went down on his knees for a closer look.

  When he saw the dark shape crouched inside, his heart began to pound. She leaned forward and fixed him with her eyes. The pupils were a glowing red, surrounded by perfect white. He saw the gills on her shoulders opening and closing slowly as they gulped air. His eyes adjusted and he saw they were a delicate pink inside. She was a girl, one of the sea people; he was sure of that even though he had never seen a living girl, human or native, that he could remember. He had seen photos of women and of his mother, who had died in childbirth. He had been brought up by his father and Jak, the hired man, who was his friend and had taught him how to use the teaching machine from old Earth.

  He stood up and moved back as she unfolded her body from the shallow cave, letting her hair fall down to her waist. She was just barely his height—about four feet ten. She had a warm, pleasant musky odor about her which made him want to stay near her. She stood only two feet from him, and he felt and heard her breathing as it stirred the air near his face.

  Her feet were webbed; her legs were long and delicate for her height and build. Her waist was narrow, but her hips were full; her pubic hair was a mass of ebony curls, holding droplets of water and foam like milky white pearls. What seemed to be her breasts were partially covered by her long, black hair.

  He felt a vague expectation. The wind was picking up, drying his trunks and skin, covering him with goose bumps. He could think of nothing except that he had to stand and look at her for as long as she continued to notice him. He felt a tightening in his stomach, and a delight that she was looking at him. He became aware of his pulse, beating just below the rush of the wind in his ears. The pleasure was accompanied by a sense of strength. The cold swim back would not matter; the rising wind and coming darkness were not important. The rock and sky and wind, and the home he had come from were unreal; his father was a distant image, far from the vivid reality around him.

  She took a step toward him, looking up at him, her eyes wide and curious. She was smiling. He noticed that she had no eyebrows, and her gray skin was covered with a musky film which caught the light strangely. The smell of her was intoxicating.

  She put one leg forward, bending it at the knee and brushing it against him, making him take a deep breath and sending shivers through his body. Then she opened her mouth and uttered a soothing, soprano-like sound, almost like the fragment of a song she would not sing. He smelled the freshness of the seawater in her hair.

  He stood perfectly still, knowing that something was expected of him. Her presence seemed miraculous, and a moment like this might never come again. He would have to try it.

  She reached out with a webbed hand and touched his exposed stomach just above the elastic of his trunks, breaking his resolve. Then she touched the green of the synthetic fabric curiously, as if thinking that it might be a part of him.

  Suddenly she moved past him, brushing full against his body, and dived into the water between the rocks. He turned and followed her immediately, wading in and launching himself quickly after her. He swam out a few feet and treaded water, waiting for her to surface.

  Without warning she pushed up against him from below and her head was in front of him. She was smiling again, her hair a tangle of black seaweed filled with water. Her body was hard against his for a moment and he was touching her round breasts with his fingers. And then she was gone again.

  The western horizon exploded in reds and dark blues over the choppy ocean. The closed fist of clouds which had been holding the setting sun opened just enough to show the bloated and deformed sphere sinking into the sea, its dull redness staining the clouds and darkening the water.

  She came up again a few feet away. She blew water out of her gills, and he wanted desperately to be near her, to reach out and touch her long hair, her stomach, and long graceful legs.

  He swam toward her, but she dived and came up behind him near the rock. He watched her climb out, her body glistening, and the sight of her buttocks was a new delight—something he would have laughed at if merely told about. He remembered the fun in imagining what the women in the pictures from Earth would look like if he could undress them and turn them around. He watched her as she sat down with her back to the rock. Her gills spilled a little water across her front as she adjusted to the air.

  He paddled toward the rock, watching as she stretched her legs in front of her, opening them for a moment while looking directly at him. He sank for a moment, paddling faster to keep his head above water. He bumped his knee sharply on the rocks.

  At last he managed to get up on the rock again. It seemed colder and more slippery under his feet. He stood
looking at her, confused, breathing heavily, pleased with himself, staring at her as if at any moment she might fade away. He was unable to look away; her eyes were rooting him to the rock.

  A huge bellow sounded from the beach. Tim turned on the first echo, almost losing his footing. He regained his balance and looked toward the beach. Now the larger moon had just risen over the rocks, casting its dull gold light on the gray sand. The small moon, a bright silver disk almost overhead, would rush around the world once again before the large moon set. The rocks cast long, jagged shadows of solid black across the beach, Stygian teeth thrusting into the breakers. The shadows would recede as the larger moon moved across the sky. In the west the ocean had swallowed the rotting sun and the dark clouds had reknitted their ebony jigsaw, blotting out a third of the sky. The tide was coming in quickly now and soon all but the top of the spire would be covered. Overhead a few stars shone near the small moon.

  The bellowing came again, an urgent, half-angry sound echoing in the rocks above the beach, carrying out to him over the water. The girl stood up and came toward him, but her eyes were fixed on the beach. He grabbed at her and tried to hold her, but she was steadier on the rock than he was. He slipped and fell sideways, his feet in the water.

  She dived and swam toward the beach, slipping through the water swiftly, only her head showing. In a moment she was invisible against the dark water. He sat up staring at the shore, feeling desolate, as if his life had ended.

  In a few minutes he saw a dark silhouette walk up on the beach from the water, as if the darkling sea had taken a shape. Another figure detached itself from the black of the rocks and came down to meet her on the moonlit sand, casting a long shadow before itself. The two silhouettes merged, forming a two-headed creature which cast a single shadow toward the sea. He watched it move away from the water until it became one with the rocks and invisible.