Green Boy (16 page)

I had no time, and I knew it. I picked up the machete and slashed at her. The first hit cut off one of her spinning-legs. It dropped away like a broken branch. The spider stopped weaving and for a stunned moment she didn't move. That was the luckiest moment of my entire life. I held the machete high in both my hands and brought it down as hard as I could, and the one stroke split her head and then cut her belly open almost in two. The machete smashed against the rock as it came down, and the impact made me stagger.

The spider made no sound. An awful-smelling green goo spurted out of her belly as the body fell backwards, and the legs flailed and twitched. I tried desperately to keep out of their way, because as I looked at her now, something jumped out of my memory. In our islands, the most dangerous spider is one called the bottle spider, or sometimes the black widow, and the way you can tell her is that she is black with a red marking on her belly the shape of an hourglass. If one of her stinging-legs gets you, you can die.

And that's when she's only the size of my little fingernail.

That huge disgusting body jerked violently once more, and inside it, along with all the green stuff, I glimpsed a cluster of small white things, all pressed together. I think they must have been eggs, like when you cut open a fish you've caught and find the roe, the mass of eggs the fish would have laid if you hadn't caught it. I feel sorry when I've killed hundreds of unborn fish, but I sure didn't feel sorry about the unborn spiders. A wave of the smell from the spider's guts hit me, and I retched, and threw up on the rocky floor.

Lou was lying beside me, all trussed up in spider-silk. I was terrified she might have stung him; he wasn't moving, and his eyes were closed. I thought desperately:
don't spiders wrap up insects to keep them alive?

“Lou!” I said. “Lou! Look at me!”

I gazed at his face, praying. After a moment his eyelids flickered, and he was blinking at me.

“Oh thank God,” I said, and I picked up my machete, wiped it on my shorts, and went to rip the spider-silk off Lou's body. I thought it would be easy; I just slipped the end of the machete blade under the first few strands and gave a little flick.

They wouldn't budge. They were so fine you could hardly see them, those tiny strands, but they might have been made of steel wire. My machete is pretty sharp, but I couldn't cut even one strand, however hard I sawed at it. Lou was wrapped so close, his arms against his body,
his legs tight together, that there was no way I could use the machete like an ax to chop through the silk, not without chopping at him too.

I knew that wouldn't have worked anyway. When you touched the stuff, it was soft and gentle and stroky, just the way that glimmering nest in the wall looked. But it was stronger than steel, or stone, or fiberglass, or fish line, or anything I'd ever seen on earth. Nothing could cut it, nothing at all.

A great wave of hopelessness suddenly swallowed me up, and I heard myself let out a noise I didn't know I could make, a long shriek of rage and fear and despair. More than anything else I think I was screaming for help—in a place where nobody could hear me, nobody cared, nobody would come. Then I choked up, and started to cry.

So I didn't hear the first small rustling sounds, because my own sobbing was in my ears. The light was very dim in the cave now. The moment the spider had died, that beautiful iridescence in its gleaming wall-nest had died too, so that the only light around us was that faint glow in the air that had come with us from the beginning. In both directions, everything else was shadow.

And out of the shadows at the far end, beyond the spider's nest, came a host of little flickering dark shapes as soft as moths, as quiet as falling leaves, dancing through the air. They flew jerkily, silently, darting round our heads. In a ghostly throng they hovered around Lou and tugged gently at the ends of the spider-silk that
bound him, pulling it away from him, nudging him to his feet so that they could spin him round and round as they pulled the fine terrible strands away.

They were little brown bats, a great crowd of bats, light and fragile, and as they worked I thought once or twice that I could hear a high whispering twittering amongst them. But then it would be gone, and I felt I had imagined it. They filled the air with their tiny bodies and their delicate membrane-wings; there was a fluttering brown cloud all around me, and yet not one small body even brushed my face.

I stood very still, hardly breathing, my cheeks still wet. And there stood Lou before me, free of the spider-silk, eyes wide and bright, smiling.

We hugged each other, and for an instant I heard the high twittering voices in my ear like joy. Then there was only the rustling, the sense of a flickering brown cloud persistent all around us, filling the air. They weren't going away, they were in charge of us, they wanted us to pay attention. But to what?

Lou stood there with his head up, and his eyes closed. It was as if he was listening to them, though there was nothing but the soft rustling to be heard. He began to walk, slowly. I knew it must be the way the host of bats were taking us and I walked with him. The light that had always been with us faded out of the air and was gone. We were in the dark now, in the kingdom of the bats, moving where they wanted us to move.

From the ground, I heard a brief scurrying, of quick feet rushing by. The rats must have got scent of the spider. In a moment they were gone.

Then Bryn's voice came out of the darkness. “Lou? Trey?”

“Bryn,” I said. I was walking in a slow daze, walking where the fluttering guardians round my head took me, and it didn't even seem surprising that Bryn was there. I assumed the bats had somehow fetched him too.

“Is Lou,” Bryn said, his voice husky, “is Lou—” and he couldn't finish the sentence but I knew what he wanted to say, and I thought I knew why.

“Lou's alive,” I said coldly. “Lou's here.”

That is, I hoped that he was there, because we were separate now, no longer holding hands. We were alone in the dark, together.

And then the bats whirled in a frenzy in front of us, making us stop. We had come to the place where we were meant to be, and it was all so strange that it's hard to find normal words to tell what it was like.

There was no light, and yet I felt I could see. Perhaps I was seeing only what was put into my mind. I thought I saw a kind of rounded space in the darkness, gleaming a little the way the inside of a big soup-pot or cauldron might gleam, and in the center of the round gleaming space I saw a woman's head. Only her face, and that very hazily. It was the way I've seen a face in a dream, and known that it was a particular familiar person, Grammie
or Mr. Ferguson or Kermit, even though it was a face I'd never seen before.

This was a face I had never seen, a woman with kind eyes and a strong mouth, and I knew it was someone I had never known and yet had always known. I can't tell you what that means now that I am back here, but I understood then, there. The face was Gaia.

She spoke to us. It was like the voice of the whole earth.

“You mistake me always. You dream of monsters, who will kill your heroes. No! No monsters are needed. I asked not for sacrifice, but for renewal.”

I think she was talking to Bryn, and he answered her. His voice was shaking, full of astonishment.

“But it was in the prophecy,” he said.
“Out of the labyrinth the weaver spins him.
She was a Wilderness creature, and our people have had her below, for generations. They told us that was what the prophecy meant. I was born Spiderkeeper, taught to keep her alive. Throw in food through the airholes, keep her there, to weave Lugh through death to life.”

So he had sent us into the labyrinth knowing the spider would kill us, expecting Lou to be magically reborn, to somehow save their world. They had all done that, all the Underground people, even Gwen. Had we never been anything to them but a sacrifice?

Gaia sighed, in a great deep rumble that came through the earth like thunder. “Mankind,” she said with distaste. “The last species. So ingenious, so foolish. Hear
now, man, and understand. Lugh followed his instructions. He passed through the stars into the dark labyrinth, so that I might bear him up to the light, as I bear every sprouting seed. But the weaver of his rebirth is not a great monstrous spider, it is a child.”

Bryn said, bemused, “A
child?”

“Children weave story,” said Gaia's rumbling voice. “Wait, and watch. From child to child the right words go, and are preserved, even as the child dies by becoming man or woman.”

“Forgive me,” Bryn said. “Forgive us.”

“I forgive, but at a price,” Gaia said. “At a price. Many will die, but all will be renewed. Go up, and you will see.”

The eyes in the shadowy face glinted blue, green, brown, all colors, and they were fixed on Lou. And it was not Louis Peel from Lucaya that they were seeing.

“Go up, brave Lugh,” she said. “Go up to my Lughnasa games. It is the day to dance with the children, in the story as old as time.”

The long low growling under the earth grew suddenly into a crashing roar, and above our heads the rock split open. Up and up the split ran, bursting, cracking, until you could see a chink of daylight at the top.

In the darkness below, there was a busy rustling on all sides, from all directions. The host of little brown bats filled the air again, flickering about us, and each one of them brought a strand of spider-silk—from the wrapping
that had held Lou, from the soft nest in the wall, maybe even from the dead spider herself. They released the fine strands into the air, and in the glimmer of light from above we saw all these iridescent threads merge into a shining knotted rope, rising up, rising.

As if an invisible hand pulled it, the slender, shining rope rose up to the daylight, and hung there, still, without swaying. Lou went to it and began to climb, holding the rope with hands and feet, and I put down my machete on the rocky ground and climbed after him.

W
e climbed and climbed up the rope, pulling with hands, pushing with feet, from knot to knot. My arms and shoulders were screaming at me by the time we reached the top. Above me I saw Lou tumble sideways off the rope, into daylight. I hoisted myself the last few feet and tumbled after him, and found myself rolling on sandy dirt. Bryn's head rose up out of the split in the ground behind us.

We were on a rocky hillside, overlooking a town. You could see that most of it was new, still being built. The part right below us looked old, with roofs and terraces spread in rows down to a kind of square, and a road running down from that to a harbor, and a glimpse of grey sea. I could only see a little piece of the harbor, because most of it was hidden by the hill on which we stood.

Inland, though, you could see slope after slope of new houses, covering every foot of land, and in the distance, chunky machines standing on the next sandy brown hill, waiting to chop down its few scrubby trees
and replace them with buildings and roads. The horizon beyond disappeared into a rim of brown fog, under the hazy Pangaian sky where the sun always looked furry, even on a fine day.

I heard music from below, jolly music, with bright trumpets and jingly tunes, and I realized that the square down there was filled with people. Lou was already scrambling over the rocks toward a path that led downward, and I went after him. I no longer cared much whether Bryn was following, but I knew he was; I could hear his sliding feet.

The first streets we came to were empty, but as we went farther down we began to catch up with people walking: a couple here or there, then a family, then more, all hurrying down toward the square. Bryn was walking with us now, and a chunky, youngish woman with two little girls skipping beside her glanced at him and smiled. I suppose he was a striking sight, with his tall broad-shouldered figure and his golden beard. She had a friendly face and she included us in the smile; she was one of those people who just like to talk.

“With any luck, the speeches will be over,” she said.

Bryn said amiably, “I hope so.”

She laughed. “They do so like to make themselves sound grand, don't they?
Incorporation of Greater Harbiton
—as if it was anything more than making the town bigger and bigger.”

“And bigger and bigger,” said Bryn.

One of the small girls was skipping with a rope, murmuring some rhyme to herself as she skipped, keeping pace with us. The other, smaller, was hopping along on one foot, kicking a round stone. She nudged it over to Lou, and Lou kicked it gently back, and they hopped happily along together, grinning, kicking.

“It's nice to have the space, though,” the woman said. “The girls with their own room. Did you move out of the city too?”

“Oh yes,” said Bryn. “Indeed we did.”

“Nice to have the space,” she said again, contentedly. “And this was all desert, after all.” She looked fondly at the little girl and Lou, hopping along kicking their stone. “Are yours looking forward to the games?”

She was asking Bryn, but she was smiling at me, so I smiled back. “Sure,” I said.

We turned a corner, and suddenly we were part of a crowd of cheerful people in the square, which looked much bigger now that we were in it. Big grey stone buildings ran along its edge, with alleyways leading off into a mixture of brick-walled houses and glass-walled office blocks. At one end of the square, people were applauding, as a bunch of official-looking men and women climbed down from a platform. A band was playing. I glanced nervously at two or three groups of security police, in the dark red uniforms, but they all seemed very relaxed and cheerful and paid us no attention.

The music stopped, and people began drifting to the
edge of the square, leaving a growing space in the center.

“Just in time!” the woman with us said happily, and her two little girls ran out into the space. The smaller one looked back at Lou. She was a cute little girl, with two bows in her hair.