Read Online They Fly at Ciron by Samuel R. Delany - Free Book Online Page A

cave-beast’s blood had rolled against one filament’s mooring on the stone—the cord’s base was steaming.
    Now the filament came free, to swing over the cave floor. On a thought, Rahm pushed the stick’s bloody end against a clutch of cords beside him. There was a little steam. Half the cords parted. When he felt something warm by his foot, Rahm looked down: blood puddled against his instep. But, though it parted the cords, against his flesh it didn’t hurt or burn.
    Rahm spoke, once more. “Thou wilt not hurt me if I free thee… ?”
    “Free me and you are my friend!” The voice came on, like an exasperated child’s. “Quickly now, groundling—”
    “Because,” Rahm went on, “I have been hurt too much when I thought what would come was friendship…”
    What came from the trapped creature was the same sound thatRahm had already thought of as “mewing,” though now, since the creature had spoken, the sound suddenly seemed to be articulated with all sorts of subtle feeling, meaning, and response, so that—had it been on a lower pitch—he might have called it a sigh.
    Suddenly Rahm threw his stick aside, stepped back across the rock, reached down, and grabbed one of the dead thing’s hairy legs, to drag it through the cave. By two legs, he hoisted it onto a higher rock shelf, climbed up beside it, then got it and himself to a shelf even higher. Squatting, he took a breath, frowned deeply—and wiped his hand across the gory wound. Then he grasped first one cord, and another, to feel them tingle within his sticky grip, dissolving.
    After popping a dozen, one more and the bound creature fell a foot. The free wing beat. That voice—like a child who has something wrong with its breathing—declared: “You take care!”
    The creature mewed again.
    Once more Rahm smeared up a handful of blood and began to work.
    Later he tried to recall how he put all those aspects that told of an animal together with that childish voice that still, somehow, spoke of a man. As Rahm tugged cords away from the incredible back muscles, some of the soft hair stuck or pulled loose—and the muscles flinched. But the membrane-bearing limb those muscles moved—what he’d started to think of as an arm—was thicker than his own thigh and more than triple the length of his leg! It was all webbed beneath with leathery folds, folded down and caught between spines that were impossible distortions of fingers—fingers
longer
than arms! The teeth were small in that grimacing mouth. Once, in the midst of the pulling and parting, he saw them and the wedge-shaped face around them laugh at something he himself had missed. But it was still good to see laughter in that face that was not a face, because the nose was broad as three fingers of a big-handed man laid together; the sides of the head were all veined ear; and the eyes had pupils like a cat’s—small as a cat’s, too, which was strange, because, standing, at last, on the shelf of rock, with one long foot (whose big toe was as long as, and worked like, Rahm’s thumb), the creature was a head shorter than Rahm. “Here, now—help me get my other foot free… ?” said this man, this beast, this WingedOne with thigh and shoulder muscles as thick as little barrels.
    Holding to rock, holding to that astonishing shoulder, Rahm leaned out, bloody handed, and caught another cord that dissolved in his grip. “Now—” he pulled back, with a quick grunt—“we must find some water to wash off this stinking stuff!” Small twigs and leaves caught up in the webbing fell to the cave floor.
    “As a pup—” the Winged One grimaced, flexing—“I used to sneak off with the rough and rude girls who went to collect these threads for our ropes and hunting nets—till my aunt caught me and said it was not fitting for one of my station. Well, don’t you know, an hour ago, hanging with the blood a-beat in my ears, I was thinking how ironic that I’d most likely end my life lashed up in the