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

sticky stuff, once the beast, crouching just above the cave entrance there inside, grew hungry!”
    They climbed down, Rahm at a loss for what so many of the words (like
rude, fitting, station,
and
ironic)
might mean.
    “When I was a child,” Rahmsaid, supporting the creature above him, “the elders of my village always taught us to fear thy people—and to stay clear of thee, should one of thee ever alight near our fields!”
    “As well you should!” declared the high voice, as the wings, all wrinkled and stretched not a full fifth of their spread, still went wall to wall in that high, narrow cave. “We always tell our little ones, whenever they come near you, to act as frightening as they can—before they fly away! Oh, my friend, we’ve heard—and seen!—some of the things your kind can do to its own. And that does not portend well for what you might do to our kind or others. Oh, I don’t mean your own village in particular—Çiron at the mountain’s.foot. But we fly far of Hi-Vator, and we fly wide of Çiron; and we listen carefully—and often what we hear is not so good. So our elders have always thought a policy of self-containment, helped on by a bit of mild, if mutual, hostility, was best. I never took it seriously myself—though some I know do nothing else. Well, certainly, I’m glad it’s broken through, here and now, in this direction.
    “What’s your name, groundling?”
    “Rahm. And thine?”
    The Winged One tilted his head. “Vortcir.”
    On the cave floor, Rahm bent, picked up the blood-blackened end of the branch he’d used to kill the cave-beast. He looked at it. Blood, dry now, had gone dark all over his fingers and palms and wrists, stuck about with dirt. “And how wert thou trapped by this thing, Vortcir?”
    The Winged One cocked his head the other way. The short creature’s great shoulders lifted their folded sails—half again as high as Rahm—and brought them in around himself. “I was careless.” The expression (on that face thatseemed to have so few of them) was embarrassment. “In the night, I fled into its cave, unaware that the danger I fumbled into was greater than the one I fled.”
    “What danger didst thou flee?”
    Vortcir’s face wrinkled. “In the night a great wailing came to deafen us. It filled us with fear and we scattered from our nests, blundering low among the trees, yowling higher than the crags, till, unable to find our way, I saw many of my people driven mad by that terrible wailing. I could hear the echo from this cave. I flew in here, thinking the sound would be less. But I flew into the web and, by struggling, only entangled myself more. And when I excited the cave-beast enough, it would come over and throw another couple of threads about me.
Uhh!”
Vortcir paused. “But you arrived… how is it that you stray so high among the mountains, groundling Rahm?”
    Rahm waited while a wind stilled outside in the rocks. “I too fled the great wailing that came last night.”
    “I hear in your voice many strange things,” said Vortcir, frowning. “Will you now go down to your nest?”
    “My… nest has been destroyed.”
    “Destroyed? While I hung here, wound in that dreadful web, in this sound-deadening cave? Çiron? How is that?”
    Rahm turned suddenly and flung the blackened branch against the cave wall. He pulled his shoulders in. It was as if the thing that had come loose inside him shook, lurching into the body’s walls. Rahm felt air on his back. Something on his back was a touch, but it touched so much of him. He looked up.
    Vortcir moved his wing away from Rahm’s shoulder. The triangular face was puzzled. “You have saved my life,” Vortcir said. “By this, we are friends. What, friend Rahm, is this thing that makesyour heart roar and the muscles sing on your bones with anger?”
    “Thou dost hear the sounds of my heart and bone?”
    “And of your tongue’s root, a-struggle in your throat for words, as if it would tear itself free