The Island Under the Earth Read Free Page A

He looked at her with some surprise, but she was not looking at him, she was trying to turn in the cramped space so as to see this creature, gossip or airsucker. Stag took the bosun by the wrist and led him to the litter slung between two stout geldings. The hireling followed. To him, as soon as they were next to her, Stag spoke. “Tell about it,” he said.
    “Some call it wyver,” he said. “Wyvern, wyvert, same thing. Another name is gossip, also — look you here — ” He reached out a finger terminating in a nailclaw of uncommon dirtiness and began to do a slow stroking under the creature’s shallow underjaw, and, after a moment, the mouth pursed and a sucking noise was heard and a slow swelling began to grow beneath his stroking. Something like a bladder puffed and kept puffing. The bosun’s feet moved, but he held his hands firm enough. Then the packtrainman gave the swelling a jab with his finger. The air went out, noisily, and a sort of guttural croaking was heard. After a moment, to the astonishment of the three sea-folk and the smirking amusement of their hired man, the croaking resolved itself into something resembling human talk.
    Leave a girl alone won’t ye. Always abothering of me.
    All four laughed, then hushed.
    You’d like it me coney come on there’s a sweet gal. Oh suppose someone was to see. Who’s to see none’s about. Anyway there’s the yan thicket be a sweet gal do.
    “Now you know why they’re called airsuckers and gossips; as for th’other names, I’ve no notion … shall I step on it?”
    A cry of sorts from the woman, a movement of her hand, the onagerer surprised, three look at the fourth. Stag asks, “Does it bite or do other harm?” “No — just croaks like such you’ve heard. Oh, some says she prognosticates, but others say: No, she don’t, just creeps to folks’s thresholds, listens, talks if you makes her suck air — ” Abruptly Stag says, “Give it to her, Bosun. On with it!” But he says it without rage. The woman, perhaps with the feeling of one captive for another, cuddles the wyvern in her own soft lap, leans over and whispers to it. The party starts off again.
    The path becomes a bare track, crawling over hills and across downs. The soil is thinner, trees more seldom, huge rocks push up and lean at crazy angles. They meet the woman crying for her children.
    Afterwards, Stag was to think:
A fool was I to have yielded, to have listened, plainly she was a spy, a land-siren and lure-lurly
. Afterwards.

Chapter Three
    But then, all that any of them knew was that she was heard before she was seen, coming at a gait which was half a trot and half a stumble, but heard, first, in the form of a sort of hoarse crooning which set the hair of their napes on edge. At first they thought, when sight and sound came together and came closer, that it was the form of madness: hair disheveled, eyes wild, hands out and groping, and that dreadful and horrifying voice. But finally she seemed to focus on them and the expression of her face quite changed; her voice formed into coherent syllables: names: childer-names.
    “Trenny! Darda!”
she called. Her feet came faster. She wobbled a ghastly caricature of a smile at them, her eyes roved frantically.
“Tren-ny! Dar-da!”
The sing-song sound was unmistakable; even if one had never heard the names it would have been clear that here was a mother calling for her children. “Tren-ny? Dar-da?” Voice and face grew frantic, hands pressed to head.
    Stag growled, called out, “There’s no children with us and none been seen by us at all, goodmother — ” He might have saved his breath. She circled round them, the onagers rolling their eyes after her, she moved her dry, cracked lips in silence one fearful moment, then close up she came and (with a glare which defied them) laid her hands upon every pack on every beast, feeling and squeezing. And all the while she called the names — as though hopeful rather than fearful that her two