The Carpet People Read Free Page A

pill . . .
    A shadow flickered high up in the hairs, and flashed away towards the south.
    There was a sound so loud as to be felt by the whole body, hitting the Carpet with horrible suddenness. The brothers sprawled in the dust asthe hairs around them groaned and screamed in the gale.
    Glurk gripped the rough bark of a hair and hauled himself upright, straining against the storm that whipped round him. Far overhead the tip of the hair creaked and rattled, and all round the hairs waved like a grey sea. Smashing through them came grit, man-sized boulders half rolling and half flying before the wind.
    Holding on tightly with one hand, Glurk reached out with the other and hauled his brother to safety. Then they crouched, too shaken to speak, while the storm banged about them.
    As quickly as it had come, it veered south, and the darkness followed it.
    The silence clanged like gongs.
    Snibril blinked. Whatever it was, it had taken the headache with it. His ears popped.
    Then he heard the sound of hooves on the road as the wind died away.
    They got louder very quickly and sounded wild and frightened, as though the horse was running free.
    When it appeared, it was riderless. Its ears lay back flat on its head and its eyes flashed green with terror. The white coat glistened with sweat, reins cracked across the saddle with the fury of the gallop.
    Snibril leapt in its path. Then, as the creature hurtled by him, he snatched at the reins, raced for a second by the pounding hooves, and flung himself up into the saddle. Why he dared that he never knew. Careful observation and precise determination of goals, probably. He just couldn’t imagine not doing it.
    They rode into the village, the quietened horse carrying them and dragging the snarg behind it.
    The village stockade had broken in several places, and grit boulders had smashed some huts. Glurk looked towards the Orkson hut and Snibril heard the moan that escaped from him. The chieftain climbed down from the horse’s back and walked slowly towards his home.
    Or what had been his home.
    The rest of the tribe stopped talking and drew back, awed, to let him pass. A hair had fallen, a big one. It had crushed the stockade. And the tip of it lay across what was left of the Orkson hut, the arch of the doorway still standing bravely amid a litter of beams and thatch. Bertha Orkson came running forward with her children round her, and flung herself into his arms.
    ‘Pismire got us out before the hair fell,’ she cried. ‘Whatever shall we do?’
    He patted her absently but went on staring at theruined hut. Then he climbed along up the mound of wreckage, and prodded about.
    So silent was the crowd that every sound he made echoed. There was a clink as he picked up the pot that had miraculously escaped destruction, and looked at it as though he had never seen its design before, turning it this way and that in the firelight. He raised it above his head and smashed it on the ground.
    Then he raised his fist above him and swore. He cursed by the hairs, by the dark caverns of Underlay, by the demons of the Floor, by the Weft and by the Warp. He bellowed the Unutterable Words and swore the oath of Retwatshud the Frugal, that cracked bone, or so it was said, although Pismire claimed that this was superstition.
    Curses circled up in the evening hairs and the night creatures of the Carpet listened. Oath was laid upon oath in a towering pillar vibrating terror.
    When he had finished the air trembled. He flopped down on the wreckage and sat with his head in his hands, and no one dared approach. There were sidelong glances, and one or two people shook themselves and hurried away.
    Snibril dismounted and wandered over to where Pismire was standing gloomily wrapped in his goatskin cloak.
    ‘He shouldn’t have said the Unutterable Words,’said Pismire, more or less to himself, ‘It’s all superstition, of course, but that’s not to say it isn’t real. Oh, hello. I see you survived.’
    ‘What did