Forty Thousand in Gehenna (30 page)

Then her knees hit sand, and she hurled herself a lung-wracking length further, sprawled on the shelf in shallow water, sucking air in great gulps and with her arms threatening to collapse and drown her in the shallows.

“Scar,” she managed to call, and struck the water with her palm the way she would to call him up, but there was not a ripple. She wept with strangling sobs for breath, wiped her salt-stung eyes and nose, tried to walk and inched her way up the slope, flailing with swimming strokes while she could, crawling-swimming in the extreme shallows because that was all she could do. She turned about again looking at the sea in panic.

Then a body broke the surface close in, and she sobbed for breath and tried to get up, but it was Scar rising out of the sea, his wedge-shaped head coming closer until he could get his bowed legs under him and serpentine his weary way up the slope. He vomited water, but not the way he would coming out of fresh. His jaws trailed mucus and he dipped his head and washed himself, coughing in great wounded gasps. He snorted his nose clear and dipped his head again, suffering from the salt, pawing at his face in misery. There was a raking wound on his rump that wept clouds of blood. She got up in shaky haste and felt something wrong with herself, looked and saw the blood clouding away from her calf through the shallow water.

She cast a panicked look toward the shore, saw a human figure standing there. “Help,” she called out, thinking this one of the riders come hunting her. And then she thought not, because the outlines were wrong.

Scar was moving now, striding surely if slowly toward the shore. She joined him, limping, feeling the pain now, coughing and wiping her eyes and hurting in her chest. The blood leaked away too quickly. She moved with some fear because of it, and the figure was clearer in her eyes—no one from the Towers, not in that strange bright garb. It was a star-man staring at her, witnessing all that had happened, and she stopped at the water’s edge ahead of Scar, bleeding into the sand, feeling the life leak out of her in one rush of sickness.

She had to sit down and did, examining the deep gash that ran a hand’s length across her thigh, deep into the muscle. It made her sick to see it. She tried to stop the blood with her fingers and then thought of her clothes far up the shore, which was all she had for bandages excepting her halter, and it was leaking out too fast, making her dizzy and sick.

Scar came up the beach, hissing. She looked up, saw the star-man both closer and standing quite, quite still with Scar’s collar up like that and his tail tip flicking. Elai’s heart pounded and her head spun. They were stranger than Weirds, the star-folk. Lately they came and went and just stood and watched the workers in the fields, but this one had something more in mind, and herself sitting here bleeding to death of her own stupidity.

“Can I help?” the star-man called to her, at least that was what it sounded like, and Elai, sitting there and trying to hold her life inside with her bare fingers and her head none too clear, thought about it and gave a whistle that called Scar back, because the star-man was carrying a pack that might have help in it of some kind. Scar hardly liked it, but the star-man came cautiously closer and closer, standing over her finally and bending down out of the sunglare—a woman after all, with her hair silky fine and her clothes of stranger-cloth and glittering with metal bits and wealth and colored patches. Elai frankly stared open-mouthed as this apparition knelt down by her and opened her pack, taking out this and that.

“That’s bad,” the star-man said, moving her fingers off the wound.

“Fix it,” Elai said sharply, because she was scared and it hurt; and because it seemed a star-man who could make ships fly might do anything.

The star-man took the tops off jars and unwrapped bandages, and hissed cold foam onto her leg, at which Elai winced. But very quickly it stopped hurting and the foam went pink and red and white, but the blood stopped too. Elai drew a great breath and let it go, relaxing back onto her hands in the confidence now that she was right and the star-folk could fix whatever they had a mind to. The pain just stopped. At once. She felt in command of things again, while Scar put his big blunt head down closer to give everything a one-sided examination. There was only a little queasiness in Elai’s stomach while she watched the star-man work, while she put sticky stuff all over the wound somewhat the color of her leg. “Now you let that dry,” the star-man said.

Elai nodded gravely, drew her leg back from the star-man’s hands in the sudden conviction it was a little less than herself to be sitting here mostly naked and sandy and half drowned. She looked the other way, while Scar took up a protective posture, his head shading her from the sun.

“You think you can walk?” the star-man asked.

Elai nodded, once and shortly. She pointed down the beach, where the point they had started from was out of sight. “My clothes are there.” Go get them, she meant. The star-man seemed not to take the hint and Elai frowned, suspecting star-folk of pride.

“You can send someone to get them,” Elai said.

The star-man frowned too. She had bright bronze hair, a dusting of freckles. “I don’t think I’d better do that. Maybe you’d better not talk about this much, umn?”

Elai picked up a handful of sand and patterned it aimlessly, commentary on the matter. “I’m Elai,” she said. “Ellai’s daughter.”

“
That
Ellai.”

Elai looked up, liking the surprise she caused, lifted her chin toward the sea. “We’d have crossed the sea, only the river comes out into the sea too strong.”

“You hit a current. But there was something else out there too.”

“The sea-folk.” The memory assailed her confidence, made her think of Scar, hovering over her, and she got up, holding to him, and favoring her leg. Her head spun. She leaned against his ribs looking at the cut he had got. “Fix his too.”

“He might not like that.”

The star-man was scared, that was what. Elai turned a wicked glance at her. “He won’t bite. Go on.”

The star-man did it, taking up her medicines; and Scar flinched and hissed, but Elai patted him and stopped him from more than a whip of his tail and a ducking of his head. “Hai,” she said, “hai, hai, hai,” and Scar stood still for it. She reached as if to mount, which worked: Scar settled, flicking his tail and stirring up the sand, his collar jerking in ill temper. But her dizziness came back and she leaned there against Scar’s shoulder looking at the star-man as she finished, and Scar put his head about, likewise looking after his one-sided fashion.

“Going now,” Elai said, and set her foot to mount.

“You might fall off,” the star-man said critically.

Elai just stared, letting the spinning-feeling stop.

“I think I’d better walk back with you in case,” the star-man said.

“I’m going after my clothes.” Elai climbed up, after which her head really spun, and she reeled badly when Scar rose up on his four legs at once. She caught her breath and focussed her eyes and started Scar back down the beach, out into the water where the rocks came down.

“Don’t do that,” the star-man called, panting along after them, but over the rocks. “You’ll get the leg wet.”

She tucked that leg up behind Scar’s collar and gritted her teeth through his lurching about, his more-than-casual pace which sent him whipping along in serpentine haste, throwing her constantly to one point of balance and the other. He hated her to lock her legs because of his breathing. She gripped the bony plates with her hands, feeling the sweat break out on her, but eventually he clambered over the rocks to the place where she had left her breeches and her boots and the vest she wore over her halter.

She climbed off and got everything, and shrugged the vest on, wrapped the boots up in the breeches and just sat down a while until she could get her head to stop whirling and her heart to stop pounding. It seemed a very long way home now. There was the Seaward Tower, and the New Tower was closer, but she had no desire to show her face there, Ellai’s daughter, limping in half-naked and half-minded and not able to get her breeches on. She hauled herself up again and clutched her bundle to her as she crawled up and over Scar’s shoulder to set herself on his neck. He was patient now, understanding she was in trouble: he came up gently and searched back and forth for the easy ways up the slope, and meanwhile she held onto her clothes and onto him and let the sky and the grass and the distant view of the nearer two Towers pass in a giddy haze.

Suddenly there was a thumping and a panting and the star-man came jogging to catch up with them from the side, having found her way up off the beach onto the grassy flats.

Scar looked askance at that. Elai tapped her bare toes at him and soothed him with her hand, blinked hazily as the star-man caught up and strode along with them, jogging sometimes to stay even.

“What do you want?” Elai asked.

“To see you get home. To see you don’t fall off.” This between gasps.

She slowed Scar down. The star-man plodded along with her pack, breathing hard and coughing.

“My name’s Elai,” Elai said again pointedly.

“You said that.”

“Elai,” she repeated, scowling at the rudeness of this concerned stranger.

“MaGee,” the star-man said, whether duly reprimanded or only then figuring out what was due. “I really don’t want to make a stir about this, understand. I’ll just see you get where you’re going. What were you doing swimming out there?”

Elai considered sullenly. It was her dream, which she had never talked about to anyone, a private thing which had gone badly, humiliatingly wrong.

“I watched you,” MaGee said. “You chase one of your rafts out? Your river-in-the-sea could just about drown you, hear?”

Elai lifted her head. “There was the seagoer out there. That was what stopped us, not the river.”

“A little outmatched, weren’t you?”

She was not sure, but it sounded insulting. “They’re big.”

“I know they’re big. They have teeth, you know that?”

“Scar has teeth.”

“Not like those.”

“Where did you see one?”

MaGee’s face took on a careful look. “Just say I know, umn? Next boat you lose, you let it go.”

“Boat.”

“Raft.”

“Ship,” Elai concluded, and frowned. “You fly, MaGee?”

MaGee shrugged.

“How do you catch the wind?” Elai asked, suddenly on that track, with a star-man at hand and answering questions. “How do you get the wind to blow the ships up?”

She thought she might be answered. There was of a sudden such a look in this MaGee’s pale eyes. “Maybe you’ll figure that out someday,” MaGee said, “when you’re grown.”

There was a sullen, nasty silence. Elai gnawed on it, and her leg was hurting again. She ignored it, adding it up in her mind that star-man medicine was fallible. Like star-men. “Your ships ever fall down?”

“I never saw one do it,” MaGee said. “I don’t hope to.”

“If my ships had the wind,” Elai said, “they could go anywhere.”

“They’re quite good,” MaGee said. “Who taught you?”

“I taught me.”

“I’ll bet not. I’ll bet someone told you.”

“I don’t tell lies.”

“I guess you don’t,” MaGee said after a moment of looking up at her as she walked along at Scar’s side. “They’re good ships.”

“Your medicine doesn’t work,” Elai said. “It hurts.”

“It’s going to if you keep hanging that leg down like that.”

“I haven’t got anywhere else to put it, have I?”

“I guess you don’t. But it’s going to hurt until you can lie down and get it level.”

“Huh,” Elai said, frowning, because she really wished the star-man could do something. But she was mollified about the ships. Proud, even. A star-man called them fine. “How did you know about the river?”

“The word is current. Like in the river. The sea has them. Really strong ones.”

Elai stored that away in her mind. “What makes them?”

MaGee shrugged again. “You do ask questions, don’t you?”

Elai thought about it. “Where do rivers start from, anyway?”

MaGee grinned, laughing at her, at which she frowned the harder.

“Someday,” Elai said, “Scar and I will just go up the Cloud and see.”

MaGee’s grin perished into something quite like belief. “I shouldn’t listen to your questions.”

“Why?”

“Why, why, and what? I’ll get you home, that’s what. And I’ll thank you if you don’t say I helped you.”

“Why? Don’t they like that?”

“Questions and questions.” MaGee hitched the pack up on her shoulder and plodded on, panting with the pace.

“What makes the ships fly?”

“I’m not going to answer your questions.”

“Ah. You
know
, then.”

MaGee looked up, sharp and quick, the distance to Scar’s back. “You talk to him, do you?”

“Scar?” Elai blinked, patted Scar’s shoulder. “We talk.”

“When you make Patterns on the ground, what do you do?”

Elai shrugged.

“So, there are some things you don’t talk about, aren’t there?”

Elai made the gesture of spirals. “Depends.”

“Depends on what?”

“Depends on how Scar is and what he wants and what I want.”

“You mean the same thing means different things.”

Elai shrugged, blinked, confused.

“How do you know?” MaGee pursued.

“Tell me how the ships go.”

“How much does Scar understand? Like a man? Like that much?”

“Caliban things. He’s the biggest caliban in the Towers. He’s old. He’s killed Styx-siders.”

“Is he yours?”

Elai nodded.

“But you don’t trade calibans, do you? You don’t own them.”

“He came to me. When my grandmother died.”

“Why?”

Elai frowned over that. She had never clearly thought that out, or she had, and it hurt her mother that Scar had not gone to her: that was not for saying out loud.

“That’s a very old caliban, isn’t he?” MaGee asked.

“Maybe he is.” Elai patted him again.

“How many years?”

“Where do star-folk come from?”

MaGee grinned again, slowly, and Elai felt a little triumph, swaying lightheadedly this side and that. The Cloudside towers passed into view now. The precious time passed.