Earthblood (4 page)

"Suppose you can't read for Studies? You'll get sent away from home with the Junior Apprentices."

Raff frowned, watching her mop up the floor with the dish towel. "Of course he can read good enough for Studies. If only he don't trip up on a word we haven't come across in the gracyl graffiti yet. Even so, a gracyl that develops seventy per cent literacy goes for Studies. Roan's reached that by now."

Bella straightened painfully from the floor and rubbed at her shedding skin with the dish towel. She looked at Roan and bit at her lip, an old gesture that had once even been cute.

"He's been working so hard, Raff. Maybe we ought to let up on him some." Roan went to the door.

"Here! Where you going, Son?"

Roan looked defiantly at Raff. "I'm going to do what humans can do and gracyls can't. And it isn't reading and it's not flying." And he was out of the door into the rain.

"Raff, stop him!"

"Don't worry. He's human. He knows what to do even if he doesn't know he knows."

They both sat by the strip of cloudy plastiflex window and watched the rain on the garbage dump, waiting. They didn't reach for each other any more. Only for the boy.

The ten yearers were hilarious with the game of swoop ball in the rain when Roan came over the hill in sight of them. It was a simple game. The idea was to keep hold of the ball. They played in a grove of scattered trees, and whoever decided to take the ball would swoop down on whoever had it and take it away and then another would swoop down and take it from the second one, if possible in mid-air. And when you took the ball, you also knocked the gracyl out of the air, which was easy, and if possible into the yard-deep ditch of muddy water that ran along the edge of the little grove. Roan leaped lightly across the muddy ditch.

The gracyls were delighted to see him. The gracyl with the ball tossed it to him and then four of them swooped straight at him and their momentum shoved him back, straight down into the mud of the ditch.

"OK," Roan said, climbing out of the oozy mud. "OK. I just wanted to be sure I was in the game."

One of the trees was a young purplefruit tree, and Roan found a straight rope vine and cut off a good length from it, several times longer than he was tall. He tied a slip knot in one end and then coiled the rope and slung it in his belt. At the edge of the grove by the ditch, he picked a quarter-grown sapling and climbed up its straight trunk, hanging by his hands when it began to bend, and edging along the length of the young, springy tree until the top of it bent down to the ground. Then carefully, using his full strength, he bent the tree all the way back on itself and used a length of rope to tie the top to the lower part of the thin trunk. He still had plenty of rope left.

The gracyls gathered around and jeered. "That's a silly game," they said.

"Who ever played that?"

"It's part of swoop ball," Roan said. "You just watch."

"Yah, yah," said the gracyl who had the ball at the moment. He was up in a nearby tree and he swooped to a lower branch. Then another gracyl swooped the ball away from him and Roan was twirling his rope as the last gracyl was flying across the grove with the ball.

He caught the gracyl around the leg in a beautiful loop and drew him in squawking.

Roan calmly took the ball away and threw it to another gracyl to start the game again, and trussed the lassoed gracyl to the sapling and slipped the rope, so the gracyl went sailing away over the ditch.

Roan climbed up the sapling and bent it again. It no longer stood straight but there was plenty of spring left in it. He looped his lasso again and caught the next gracyl that came sailing by.

"I seem to keep winning," Roan said, trussing the next gracyl to the tree and slipping the rope again. This one landed right in the ditch and scrambled out and made for home.

The gracyls could have played swoop ball higher up in the trees, where Roan's lasso couldn't reach them. Or they could have moved the game. But they didn't; this was where gracyls played swoop ball.

Roan took care of two more gracyls. "Give up?" he asked the rest.

"Yah, you can't even fly," they said, and kept on playing exactly the same way. No one tried to take his rope away. No one tried to keep him from bending the sapling.

Pretty soon there were no more gracyls. The last one went sailing over the ditch and hopped off home, whining.

All except Clanth, of course, with his one undeveloped wing. He'd learned to sit and watch games.

"That was fun," Clanth said.

Roan tossed the rope into the muddy ditch and leaped across it and turned back to watch the deserted spot where the swoop ball game had been. He rubbed the mud off his hands down the sides of his trousers.

"I won," he said, and grinned, and went home to practice his reading.

Roan sat on the stoop of his house with a large book spread in his lap. It was entitled Heroes of Old Terra, and it was packed with shiny tri-D

pictures of men and ships and great towering cities. It was a very old book, and some of the pages were missing, but the pictures were still bright.

"Hey, c'mon," someone said. Roan's mind swam out from the book. Clanth, who was the nearest thing Roan had to a friend, stood waiting.

"Where?" Roan asked.

"Where!" Clanth flapped his one, useless wing. His black, leathery gracyl face was alight with excitement, the round amber eyes asparkle. "It's the spring pre-mating. Out in the grove."

Roan's fair cheeks flushed, back to the roots of his deep red hair. "Don't be ridiculous," he said. "But . . . good flying," he added, so as not to offend his friend. It might have been an offensive phrase to Clanth, because of his disability, but Roan had found that Clanth preferred for him not to be sensitive about it.

"I . . . Oh, I'm not like the others, either." But Clanth was handsome, gracyl handsome, and well developed for fourteen, and you noticed that before you noticed about his wing. And since he was in Studies, not Labor, it didn't make so much difference about the wing. "C'mon, Roan . . . "

"What would I do there?" Roan asked. "Provided I could get a female up a tree to begin with?"

"Well . . . wings aren't really necessary. At least I hope not. Look at me." And he raised his wingless right arm.

"I'd rather not try." Roan pictured the black, screeching little gracyl females. He was glad he didn't want one, because she'd laugh at him if he did. Sneer at him. Flap her wings at him.

"But gee, here you are fourteen years old," Clanth persisted. "What are you going to do?"

"I'll wait," said Roan.

"For what?" Clanth asked, and didn't wait for an answer, for a gaggle of fourteens went by and Clanth ran off to join them.

Roan watched them go, then sat with the book in his lap, gazing at the clouds and trying to picture a human female. The portraits in his books, the descriptions he'd read; he tried to put all his knowledge together, but it wouldn't add up to a definite picture. Every time he thought he had it, it slipped away from him.

Day wore into evening and still Roan sat, and he thought about human women and then about human men, and the old heroes of his book, who left human women to go out and find new worlds, and died showing there were places besides earth where human men could bring human women. Human women were not like Ma. They were . . . Roan couldn't find the thought. He didn't know.

The gracyls had finished going by. The crowds of young males had gone out, and the crowds of ripening females. The first moon was still white in the sky, but it was brightening and soon the sickle anti-moon would come up and the ceremonies would begin and Roan wished Clanth well and hoped his female would not laugh too much at his poor wingless arm. Another group of youths was coming along; there was a low mutter of talk and laughter among them—and they were not gracyls.

"Supper!" Ma called. And came to the door. "What are you doing reading in that light?"

Roan peered through the gloom to see who was coming. The Veed. What were they doing out of their ornately decorated quarters in the heart of the town?

"Has there been a Veed murder or something?" Roan asked, because Ma always managed to know, without talking to anybody, what was going on in the adult world.

"If there has I don't want to know about it and neither do you," said Ma, retreating further behind the front door. "You come on in. You don't want to tempt that trash to stop here."

But Roan waited to watch them go by, the young Veed, their scalesuits glittering faintly even in the tarnished twilight. They walked upright, looking almost human, talking their Veed talk.

"They're children," Roan said, and went in finally. "About my age."

"About fifty years old," Ma said, spooning stewed limpid seeds onto the grits on his plate. "That would be about half mature, for them."

"One of them was an aristocrat. I saw the iridion quadrant on his cheek." What magic lives they must lead, Roan thought, those Veed, with their painted porches and their gardens and their endless games of slots and colored beads, and their lives that stretched on forever.

"When will I die?" Roan asked, and Dad dropped his knife with a helping of purplefruit balanced on it.

"What made you ask that?"

"Nothing. I just wondered. I mean the Veed take forever to grow up and gracyls die if they get broken badly, but what about me?"

"You," Dad said. "Well, I've always answered you straight. You'll live a long time yet. Take me. I'm a hundred and eighty, and still got lots of years ahead. You'll live longer yet. You're prime Terry stock, boy."

"Even if I don't get broken or something? That's all I'll live? I'll just die?"

"There's a story," Raff said, picking up his knife and scraping the dirtied fruit off on the side of his wooden plate, "an old, old story that at the beginning of time the nine Gods called all the species of intelligent beings together and asked them which they preferred, a long life or a glorious one. Only Man chose the glorious life. And he's always been proud of it." There was another sibilance of Veed going by outside and Roan scurried to the dark front window and saw a second group, headed the same way, toward the gracyl mating grove, the grove of trees by the ditch, where long ago Roan had used his lasso to win a game of swoop ball. The sapling was a tree with spread limbs now, and maybe Clanth would be waiting in it to drop down and catch his female.

The moonlight shown yellowish pink now, and the garbage dump outside the window was jeweled with it. It was Veed garbage, Roan thought, and for some reason this made him love the gracyls and hate the Veed.

"There's going to be trouble tonight," Roan said, and finished his dinner thoughtfully.

Raff silently got down his big hammer and nailed a panel and a bar of wood across each plastiflex window.

"No," said Roan, when Raff started to nail the door bolt from the inside. He wiped the last of the grits off his knife and stuck it through his rope vine belt. He pulled his tunic up short, so that it draped over his belt and left his legs free for running. Raff looked at him.

"Clanth's out there," Roan said. "I'll be back after a while."

"Now, boy," Raff started. But Roan was already gone, out into the moonlight and the warm spring night.

"Why did you tell him that silly story?" Bella asked, sitting in the darkened house and miserable at the thought of the long, dark hours before Roan might come home.

"Because," Raff said, "I think it's true." Roan knew something the Veed didn't know. He knew every shack and rock and ditch and garbage pile in the slum. As he came out of the house he sensed another group approaching, and he ducked into a tunnel through the heaped garbage.

They were speaking Veed, their hushed, hissed tongue, so Roan could not tell all of what they were saying, though they passed so close he could have spit on them. But he did catch "gracyl" and "moon," which were the same in all their languages.

If it were only the children out, that meant it was a lark, not a hunt in retribution for some crime or suspected crime. "Ten half-breeds for one Veed," was their rule. Half-breeds included anybody that wasn't Veed. But this. This was children playing. Or practicing.

Roan gave the Veed a good head start.

He went through the back yard of the funny old voiceless couple that kept mud-swine, and around another garbage heap, and through a series of gullies, and then crept up the knoll that overlooked the ditch and the grove of trees where the gracyl were sporting.

In the grove, where the moonlight could pick them out through the trees, Roan could see the running gracyl, and hear their high, shrill calls. They had no thought for anything but each other. He even thought he could make out Clanth, flapping grotesquely in the tree that Roan had known as a sapling. And he thought he saw something else, very strange. It looked like a white figure, high in one of the trees, looking on very still.

Around the grove, in the ditch, the Veed boys were gathered in full force, a ditch full of glittering Veed, swaying silently in unison. They must be almost ready for the attack.

Roan leaped to the top of the knoll and filled his lungs. "Danger!" he screamed, and the gracyl began running about in the grove in confusion and making for the treetops.

The Veed attacked immediately and furiously. No one seemed to have noticed that the scream had not come from within the grove. Roan was through the ditch and at the grove in seconds.

The Veed filled the grove now, furious, slashing about with their razor-sharp wrist talons. They had planned to catch the gracyls on the ground. With the gracyls in the branches of the dark trees it was going to be harder, and less fun.

Roan crept forward and into and up the side of the dry ditch. And got caught by a Veed as he started up the purplefruit tree on the edge of the grove. He'd thought it was a tree that brought him luck. The Veed's raking hands curled around his thighs and he felt the blood spring out into a thin line of pain and he jerked the knife free of his belt and slashed the coarse Veed flesh and felt the hands recoil instantly. In the brief moment this gave him, Roan was scrambling up, swinging on a rope vine to the next tree. Around him gracyls fluttered and squawked. The cry of the wounded Veed had brought his fellows to his side; and there were indignant conferences and hisses of outrage. No gracyl had ever dared to use a weapon against a Veed.