Spears of the Sun (Star Sojourner Book 3) (9 page)

A grotesque form with great black arms murmured something behind me. I swung and fired. The hot beam set a thick-boled tree ablaze. Fire reared up like a giant candle that lit the woods.

“Oh, dammit!” I stumbled back. Not only had I given away my location, I'd probably started a wildfire. I'd better run for it.

I turned and tripped over a little humanoid. “Oh, sorry,” I said automatically. Fire flickered on his green jacket and top hat, his white beard. He was about three feet tall. “What the hell – “

“Ye blathering fool!” He hit my left ankle with a club.

I yelled and limped as I stood up. “You little shit. I'll hook you to a tree!”

“Owww!” I yelled as he hit my ankle again. I picked him up by his jacket and was about to hang him on a branch when I felt a jab in my right buttock.

I turned, still holding him aloft while he tried to kick me in the groin, and was confronted by a group of male and female dwarfs, perhaps seven or eight of them, all dressed in green jackets and hats, and pointing wooden spears with chiseled rock arrows at me.

“Now put him down,” the closest one said, a young male with a scraggly red beard.

I let go and he fell to the ground with a yell, then crawled to his club and grabbed it. He stood up and rubbed his backside, then raised his club threateningly.

I pointed at him and backed away. “Don't even think about it. I'll kick you like a football!”

He lowered the club and laughed.

I lowered my pointing finger.

“Ach, lad,” he said, “now did ye have a reason to burn down our main entranceway?”

I glanced at the flaming tree. “I heard a voice behind me and I fired. We need water!”

“Ye don't say now?” he answered. “An' how did ya figure that one out?”

There was a rustling of dried leaves in the dark woods. A line of dwarfs, all dressed in green and carrying buckets of water, strode to the tree and threw the water at the base of the trunk. The roots hissed and smoked.

The group glanced at me with open curiosity, then ran back into the woods with their empty buckets swinging.

The white-bearded dwarf brushed off his jacket and pants. “Now do ye always set trees afire when ye hear voices?”

I heard the sound of a hovair overhead. “Only when I'm being chased.”

“So it's
you
they're after?”

I didn't reply but the hovair's whine grew louder.

“Well,” the white-bearded one said, “that makes you a friend, Lad. Come along then!”

The group lowered their spears and followed as I limped beside the old one and grimaced with pain.

The woods were silent when the hovair landed, not far from us. The spear carriers trotted after the bucket brigade.

“The name's Darby O'Malley,” white beard said as we walked, “of the O'Malley clan.” He put out his hand. I shook it quickly and looked back.

Voices!

This time it was Vermakts. I unholstered my stingler.

“Now don't go burnin' down no more trees,” Darby whispered and took my sleeve. “This way.” He pulled me toward another large-boled tree.

“I won't,” I said, “if you don't hit me again with your fucking club.”

He chuckled and lifted the club to show me. “Tis a shillelagh, lad. Now what would ye be called?”

“Jules,” I whispered as the voices behind us grew sharper.

“An' yer clan, brudder?”

“My…my clan brudder? Oh, brother. I-I don't have one. Where's the damn entrance?”

“Yer standin' on it with yer big feet.”

I stepped back.

He reached down, felt around in the grass between tree roots, and lifted a hatch. Dim yellow light showed from the interior, but enough to see a ladder and the braced wall of a vertical dirt tunnel.

“In yer go,” he whispered and gestured.

I went down the ladder a rung at a time to favor my swelling ankle. Darby came in behind me and quickly slid the hatch in place.

“Off!” he said when we reached the ground, and we were in darkness. “That was a wee bit closer than I like.”

“Me too,” I said.

The voices grew louder, but after a minute they faded.

I braced a hand against the wall as he led me along the dark path.

“On,” he called. Yellow glow balls lit the main passageway and a maze of cross cuts in the warren. I had an uneasy feeling that on my own, I'd never find my way back out.

We came to an enormous cavern with dark side passages. I stopped, my jaw open. The walls and floor were burnished gold and amber, lit by glow balls, and laced with streaks of pure blazing yellow. This vast grotto was a mother lode mine. Water dripped down the walls, but the chill of stone was softened by small fires. A narrow, bubbling stream ran along the perimeter of one wall.

But it was the inhabitants that held my attention. Perhaps a hundred dwarfs and about twenty-five or so young people and children of average height lay on thick straw mats, or quietly talked as they worked.

Dwarfism results from mutated genes, I knew, and some of their children can attain average height. Toddlers had free range of the floor, where the warming fires and the stream were fenced in.

Three women talked quietly as they spun and weaved a blanket out of soft animal fur. One looked up in surprise as I walked by and nudged another one. They smiled. I smiled back.

Friendly bunch,
I thought.

“Now there's a looker,” I heard one say as I walked by.

“Ye be married, Hannah,” another said.

“Ach, I be married, Bridget, na dead!”

I chuckled as I went by.

Darby led me past a group of males who tended a distillery that was producing a dark, ruby brew with a foamy top. Guinness beer, I guessed. A woman scraped an animal hide spread on a frame with a sharp rock. She paused and watched me as we walked by.

We passed cobblers and hatters and I had the distinct feeling that Darby was parading me before his clan. There was a sense of quiet camaraderie here that I hadn't witnessed even in the Kubraen community on Halcyon, though Kubraens are aliens and it had been difficult for me to read their emotions or understand their connections to each other.

I turned to Darby. “Did you bring the fertilized eggs of Earth animals and seeds when you came here?”

“Aye, the grandfathers did that, and food to last until they were settled into the growing season.”

I held his shoulder to brace myself as he led me to a straw mat. I sat down with a long sigh and leaned back against the wall. My ankle throbbed, but with a little rest I thought it would be OK. “So why the underground community?”

Darby scratched his beard. “The clan left Ireland when they got tired o' living among the arses that decided dwarf tossing was the national sport.”

“What?” I asked.

“Ye take a little person an' ye toss him across the barroom floor, far as ye can. Winner takes the pot. I suppose 'tis great fun if your brain is soaked with the elixir.” He shook his head sadly. “T'was the last straw. The clan pooled their resources, bought a small private star worthy ship, an' left the homeland.”

“But why the Leprechaun act?”

“Ta be left in peace, lad! Our tall people go into town an' buy what we need with the gold we mine. They've spread the word that evil Leprechauns live in these woods an' would kill anyone who gets too close. We're magical, we are.” He winked. “An' we'd steal their children an' turn 'em into changelings that would hunt down their own parents and murder them in their beds fer what they did.”

A slender, red-haired young woman in buckskin pants and a colorful shirt strode up to us and sat next to Darby. “Grandpa!” she took Darby's arm. “Liam O'Donnell. He's going to sing 'Danny Boy'.” Freckles on her nose wrinkled as she smiled shyly at me. Her eyes were a striking green.

Darby kissed her cheek. “Me granddaughter Shannon.”

I smiled back. “Jules.”

People spread out and sat in a semi-circle around a chair with a green glow ball above it.

The community fell silent as Liam, a tall tag, perhaps in his fifties, wearing a ragged gray shirt and brown pants, walked out and sat in the chair.

“No music?” I whispered.

“Oh, no,” Shannon answered. “Tis best sung this way.”

Liam gazed at the ceiling but I had a feeling he was searching within. His face was lined, his jowls beginning to sag, a man whose joys and sorrows were etched in his features. He smiled at the people and shifted position. Then he began to sing.

“Oh Danny boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling,

from glen to glen, and down the mountain side.

The summer's gone, and all the flowers are dying.”

His tenor voice was clear as winter bells and I knew he had power in reserve. But more than that was the honesty of his style and the simplicity of the words. I was immediately caught up in the song and the singer.

“Tis you, tis you must go and I must bide.

But come ye back when summer's in the

meadow, or when the valley's hushed and

white with snow. Tis I'll be here in sunshine

or in shadow. Oh Danny boy, oh Danny boy,

I love you so.”

I shivered with the emotion that overwhelmed me. An ache of love and loss expanded within my chest. His song opened me and touched a part of my soul that I had tried not to expose to the light of day.

Oh, Willa
. I lowered my head and felt tears run down my cheeks. I couldn't stop them anymore than I could stem that flowing stream with my two fists.
Oh, God, Willa, I miss you.
I almost didn't want to hear the rest of the song. It hurt with such a sweet pain of memories. There were quiet sobs around me.

“And if you come, when all the flower

are dying, and I am dead, as dead I well

may be. You'll come and find the place

where I am lying, and kneel and say an

'Ave' there for me.”

I wiped eyes on my sleeve. Shannon moved closer to me, and put her hand on my arm. I glanced around. I wasn't the only one openly crying. When the singer's voice rose, my heart seemed to float with it, until the singer bore me out of this mundane plane of existence and to a place where joy wins the battle over loss.

“And I shall hear, tho' soft you tread above me.

And all my dreams will warm and sweeter be,

if you'll not fail to tell me that you love me,

I'll simply sleep in peace until you come to me.”

Liam sat amid the silence. No one clapped. The song, the singer, were beyond mere applause. Somewhere, a baby cried.

As Liam got up and walked to his place among the people, they reached out to touch him. But they could not bridge the gap that he had bridged, not with mere physical contact.

I looked at Shannon. She still held my arm. Willa was gone. A sense of finality, of a last goodbye, set into my soul.

“You were right about the music,” I told her.

She nodded. “What clan are ye from, Jules?”

I shook my head. “My sister and I were orphans. We were shuffled around to foster homes. She's, uh, she's gone now.”

Shannon sat back. “So then…ye have no family?”

“I have a daughter, Lisa, back on Earth.”

“On Earth?” She lifted brows.

“I visit her, occasionally,” I said defensively. I laid back on the soft mat. What had happened to Huff and Carmen and Chancey? Were they still alive? Or captured? Or looking for me? I had to get back out there. From my reckoning on the night I escaped from Rowdinth, his citadel wasn't too far from here. The real question was where, in Hell's twisted spokes, as Willa would have said, was the laboratory?

Supper was handed out in bowls, from steaming pots, to the line of people who gathered at the long tables. Shannon brought me a bowl of stew with potatoes and beans and meat and barley, on a tray, with a chunk of dark bread, and a glass of the ruby beer. It had been a while since Willa and I had cooked together, and this was the best meal I'd had since then. I thanked Shannon and she smiled and sat beside me to eat her supper.

After the meal, people sat in groups and quietly talked and laughed. Two couples held hands and disappeared into passageways. Some smiled as they strolled by to glance discreetly at me, and then continued on.

“You're the latest news,” Shannon said.

Glad it wasn't the obituary,
I thought. “Front page?”

“Oh, yes.” She got up and went to an old woman dwarf in a hooded black robe who sat before a blackened iron pot on a small fire and dropped bones into it.

Darby strolled over. “Well, what do ye think, lad?' Could ye love me comely granddaughter?”

“What?” I asked.

“We be needing some new blood in the clan.” He turned to stare at her. “An' she's sure a pretty lass. I'm thinking ye might stay an' make yer home among the O'Malleys.”

“That's quite an offer. But I-I have an important mission that I'm committed to finish.”

“Sure ye do. An' ye wouldn't want yer freedom taken away, now would ye?”

I bit my lip. “Maybe not.”

“I'll tell ye, lad, ye can either have ye freedom or the comfort o' family.”

“I know.”

Shannon said something to the old woman and nodded toward me.

The woman got up, rummaged through an animal skin on the floor beside her, took out a bag and hobbled over to me, followed by Shannon.

“This is Mother Holly-Eva,” Shannon told me.

Mother Holly-Eva nodded at me and carefully took off my left shoe and sock.

Now what?
I thought as she opened the bag and pulled out soggy cabbage leaves that dripped back into the bag.

What the hell?
I thought as I smelled urine. “You know what, Mother Holly-Eva, my ankle feels better already! I think all it needed was some rest!”

Too late.

Too late!

She slopped the leaves across my bare ankle as though she hadn't heard, and wrapped them under my foot.

I leaned my head back.
Christ and Vishnu.
I watched her take a roll of red thread from her robe and tie the cabbage in place. God forbid I might lose it.

“Thanks a lot, Shannon,” I muttered.

She smiled. “Thank you, Mother Holly-Eva.”