Grimus Read Free Page A

whispered to the breeze and shivered and then he wasn’t there.
    Bird-Dog was not normally a voluble woman so Joe-Sue would have found her speech strange even if it had been about the weather. As it was it was shattering. She reached into a deep pocket of her rags and brought out two more bottles, identical to her own proud possessions. They were his, mine. The yellow eternity of life and the blue eternity of death. Joe-Sue took them and ran into his tent, scrabbling in the earth to bury them under his sleeping-mat. When he came out again the yellow bottle stood empty and the blue bottle lay dashed to fragments on the rock where Bird-Dog sat. —Death, she said. Death to death.
    But Joe-Sue didn’t drink his. It would soon be a division between them.
    After a long silence, in which distances stretched like universes in every direction, she said, with her old aggressive practicality, —Off with you now Joe-Sue, off with you to town.
    So I went down the side of the Axona table-top to the plain of the Whirling Demons that I had been taught to fear; but the little whirlwinds that spring up on that barren plain soon proved, as Bird-Dog had said, to be nothing but air, so I reached the town without trouble, dancing easily out of their way. I saw automobiles and launderettes and juke-boxes and all kinds of machines and people dressed in dusty clothes with a kind of despair in their eyes; I saw it all hiding behind doors and fences and lurking in corridors and I don’t think I was seen. Finally I’d seen enough; the glimpse had infected me already and entirely though I didn’t know it yet, just as it had infected Bird-Dog.
    And the people in the town were white.
    A curious thing happened on my way up to the table-top. I saw an eagle sitting on a rock, about shoulder-height to me, looking at me. It stopped me in my tracks, I tell you. A great full-grown cruel-looking monster of an eagle. I moved slowly, slowly, closer and closer to the bird. It didn’t move, showed no sign of fear, as if it were expecting me. I stretched out my hands; it came peacefully into my grasp. I was astonished yet again on this astonishing day. I held it and stroked it a moment and then, abruptly, as unexpectedly violent as it had been calm, it began to fight me. Of course I released my grip rapidly, but not before that cruel beak had scarred my chest. It flew away. I watched it go; you could say a part of me went with it.
    —Flapping Eagle. The voice was Bird-Dog’s. She had been watching, silently.
    —That is your name. Flapping Eagle. Why else do you think the eagle came to you before attacking you? It’s your brave’s name, it must be.
    —Flapping Eagle, said Joe-Sue aloud. Yes.
    —It’s a name to live up to, said Bird-Dog.
    —Yes, I said.
    —And now’s the time to start, she said. She lay down on the rock where she had sat to watch me with the eagle, and raised her ragged skirts.
    So, on one day, I was offered eternal life, broke the law of the Axona, took a brave’s name from an omen and lost my virginity to my sister. It was enough to make a fellow believe there was something special about being twenty-one.

IV
    T HE S HAM -M AN ENTERED Flapping Eagle’s tent brandishing his ju-ju stick like a sad, sadistic schoolmaster, filled with deep regret for the grief he loved to cause. The Sham-Man said he only loved bringing pain to others when it was forced on him by his duty, for he loved his work. He was a huge, shambling, beaded walrus to Flapping Eagle’s tense, terse, silent oyster.
    —My apologies, said the Sham-Man mournfully, for intruding. I believe we have a slightly delicate matter to discuss. (Flapping Eagle noticed his mouth; it was watering at the edges.)
    —Ahem, continued the Sham-Man, I just wondered, have you any idea at all where … she … is? In common with most of the Axona, he was reluctant to concede to Bird-Dog her right to a brave’s name; also in common with most of the Axona, he’d forgotten what she had