The Island Under the Earth Read Free Page B

were somewhere enwrapped and concealed. And so she came to the litter and she reached her hands in and, the while she licked her mouth and gaped and peered, lifted the coverlets and groped beneath the cushions …
    Then she lifted her face and saw the woman inside and their hands locked and the newcomer’s face broke into a thousand lines and she began to wail and she began to weep.
    No one ever said, Let her come along with us … She came. She told her story, and she told it again. She never ceased the flickering back and forth of her eyes over the land and she told her tale and she told it. By and by it became a conversation, or, rather, an argument: rationality and logic versus fury and raw, hot grief.
    She would have done better to have stopped nearer home; doubtless the children were still nearby … “They’re not! They’re not! The dog would have found them, for I had him with me when I looked up and down our valley, and they couldn’t have gone past it by themselves before I first missed them: the girl wouldn’t leave the boy, and the boy is lame!” But if the children couldn’t have gotten out of their home valley, how could they have gotten this far? “They never went by themselves, they never! They were taken! They were taken!
The Sixies took them!
” The packtrainman guffawed and Stag and Bosun made scoffs and shook their heads.
    “Grannytales, grannytales! What would the Sixies want with your pair brats?” — the packtrainman.
    “Likelier, goodmother, ’twas raiders come up from the coast in the dark of night.” — the bosun.
    “Yes: and best for you to turn bum and beat a track down to the Town, to tell your tale there, have the Provost sound a hue and hunt, maybe find the raid-vessel hid in a creek, say.” — Stag.
    “No.” — from the litter.
    Stag’s face went slack, then taut, and dark. His lips drew up, and his hand opened. Then he gave his head a swift, single shake; he said to his woman, “You never said me No before. Why now?”
    Her face was pale, but no paler than usual; her voice had been raised to nay-say him, but it was seldom raised at all. “Raiders wouldn’t bother with a lame child. There’d be no market.” The goodmother squinted at this, said it over soundlessly. No one else said a word. The brute-simple logic of the statement left nothing to be said.
    Only the sound of the onagers, hooves chopping down, now and then a whinny, was heard a while. Then the goodmother began her calling once more. Stag brushed his hand at his ear, next said, in a good enough humor, “Well, woman, if we run across centaurs and your kids with them, we’ll make them give over — eh, Bosun?”
    “Aye, Master,” said he, stoutly. Winks were traded, the packsman made a mowe, but the countrywoman saw nothing of this: she, with a cry, fell down before the captain and embraced his knees. Then, before he could move to kick or catch at her, up she got and threw him one look of gratitude which shut his mouth. Then she set herself to walking with a steady pace quite unlike her former hazard caperings, and all the while she looked leftwards and rightwards and only now and then she called her children’s names, but always she kept her hand on that side on the frame of the litter. And always the woman who sat in it held her own hand upon the other one.
    Captain and Bosun fell a bit behind, Bosun squinting his blue eye at the packman’s back. “When and where was that one to pick up the guide, Captain?” he asked. Captain shrugged, supposed: when he needed to. The track was still clear enough.
    “Air about here smells odd … dead …” he mused. “If we were at sea — well, but we’re not.”
    “… good thing, too,” Bosun muttered. His brown eye met his Captain’s. Who guffawed.
    “Nervy, are you,” Captain asked. “Having second thoughts after not having first ones about
‘raiders’?
Forget it. Memories aren’t as long as lives, and lives are short … some lives, to be