The Einstein Intersection (4 page)

“Hold up,” I said and put Bloi-3 down. “Now where was all this?”

They turned together and pointed through the woods.

Hawk swung down his crossbow. “That’s fine,” he said, “You boys get back up to the village.”

“Say-
“ I
caught Bloi-2’s shoulder. “Just how big was he?”

Inarticulate blinking now.

“Never mind,” I said. “Just get going.”

They looked at me, at Lo Hawk, at the woods. Then they got.

In silent consensus we turned from the river through the break in the leaves from which the children had tumbled.

A board, shattered at one end, lay on the path just before us as we reached the clearing. We stepped over it, stepped out between the sumac branches.

And there were a lot of other smashed boards scattered across the ground.

A five foot section of the foundation had been kicked in, and only one of the four supporting beams was upright.

Thatch bits were shucked over the yard. A long time ago Carol had planted a few more flowers in this garden, when, wanting to get away from
the it
-all of the village, we had moved down here to the old thatched house that used to be so cozy, that used to be ... she had planted the hedge with the fuzzy orange blooms. You know that kind?

I stopped by one cloven print where petals and leaves had been ground in a dark
mandala
on the mud. My foot fit inside the print easily. A couple of trees had been uprooted. A couple more had been broken off above my head.

It was easy to see which way he had come into the clearing. Bushes, vines and leaves had erupted inward. Where he had left, everything sort of sagged out.

Lo Hawk ambled into the clearing swinging
bis
crossbow nonchalantly.

“You’re not really that nonchalant, are you?” I asked. I looked around again at the signs of destruction. “It must be huge.”

Lo Hawk threw me a glance full of quartz and gristle. “You’ve been hunting with me before.”

“True. It can’t have been gone very long if it just scared the kids away,” I added.

Hawk stalked towards the place where things were sagging.

I hurried after.

Ten steps into the woods, we heard seven trees crash somewhere: three-pause-then four more.

“Of course, if he’s that big he can probably move pretty far pretty fast,” I said.

Another three trees.

Then a roar:

An unmusical sound with much that was metallic in it, neither rage nor pathos, but noise, heaved from lungs bigger than smelting bellows, a long sound, then echoing while the leaves turned up beneath a breeze.

Under green and silver we started again through the cool, dangerous glades.

And step and breathe and step.

Then in the trees to our left-

He came leaping, and that leap rained us with shadow and twigs and bits of leaf.

Turning his haunch with one foreleg over here and a hind-leg way the hell over there, he looked down at us with an eye bloodshot, brown and thickly
oystered
in the corners. His eyeball must have been big as my head.

The wet, black nostrils steamed.

He was very noble.

Then he tossed his head, breaking branches, and hunkered with his fists punched into the ground-there were hands with horny hairy fingers thick as my arm where he should have had
forehooves
-bellowed, reared, and sprang away.

Hawk fired his crossbow. The shaft flapped like a darning needle between the timbers of his flank. He was crashing off.

The bark of the tree I had slammed against chewed on my back as I came away.

“Come on,” Hawk hollered, as he ran in the general direction the man-handed bull had.

And I followed that crazy old man, running to kill the beast. We clambered through the cleft of broken rock (it hadn’t been broken the last time I’d come wandering down here through the trees-an afternoon full of sun spots and breezes and Friza’s hand in mine, on my shoulder, on my cheek). I jumped down on to a stretch of moss-tongued brick that paved the forest here and there. We ran forward and-

Some things are so small you don’t notice them. Others are so big you run right into them before you know what they are. It was a hole in the earth and the side of the mountain that we almost stumbled into. It was a ragged cave entrance some twenty meters across. I didn’t even know it was there till all that sound came out of it.

The bull suddenly roared from the opening in the rock and trees and brick, defining the shape of it with his roaring.

When the echo died, we crept to the crumbled lip and looked over. Below I saw glints of sunlight on hide, turning and turning in the pit. Then he reared, shaking his eyes, his hairy fists.

Hawk jerked back, even though the claws on the brick wall were still fifteen feet below us.

“Doesn’t this tunnel go into the source-cave?” I whispered. Before something that grand, one whispers.

Lo Hawk nodded. “Some of the tunnels, they say, are a hundred feet high. Some are ten. This is one of the bigger arterioles.”

“Can it get out again?”
Stupid question.

On the other side of the
hole
the horned head, the shoulders emerged. The cave-in had been sloped there. He had climbed out. Now he looked at us, crouched there. He bellowed once with a length of tongue like foamy, red canvas.

Then he leaped at us across the hole.

He didn’t make it, but we scurried backward. He caught the lip with the fingers of one hand-I saw black gorges break about those nails-and one arm. The arm slapped around over the earth, searching for a hand-hold.

From behind me I heard Hawk shout (I run faster than he does). I turned to see that hand rise from over him!

He was all crumpled up on the ground. The hand slapped a few more times (Boom-Boom!
Boom!)
and
then arm and fingers slipped, pulling a lot of stone and bushes and three small trees, down, down, down.

Lo Hawk wasn’t dead. (The next day they discovered he had cracked a rib, but that wasn’t till later.) He began to curl up. I thought of an injured bug, I thought of a sick, sick child.

I caught him up by the shoulders just as he started to breathe again.
“Hawk!
Are you-“

He couldn’t hear me because of the roaring from the pit. But he pulled himself up, blinking. Blood began trickling from his nose. The beast had been slapping with cupped palm. Lo Hawk had thrown himself down and luckily most of the important parts of him, like his head, had suffered more from air-blast than concussion. “Let’s get out of here!” and I began to drag him towards the trees.

When we got there, he was shaking his head.

“-no, wait, Lobey-
“ came
over in his hoarse voice during a lull in the roaring.

As I got him propped against a tree, he grabbed my wrist.

“Hurry, Hawk! Can you walk? We’ve got to get away. Look, I’ll carry you-“

“No!” The breath that had been knocked out of him lurched back.

“Oh, come on, Hawk! Fun is fun. But you’re hurt and that thing is a lot bigger than either of us figured on. It must have mutated from the radiation in the lower levels of the cave.”

He tugged my wrist again. “We have to stay. We have to kill it.”

“Do you think it will come up and harm the village? It hasn’t gone too far from the cave yet.”

“That-
“ He
coughed. “That has nothing to do with it. I’m a hunter, Lobey.”

“Now, look-“

“And I have to teach you to hunt.” He tried to sit away from the trunk. “Only it looks like you’ll have to learn this lesson by yourself.”

“Huh?”

“La Dire says you have to get ready for your journey.”

“Oh, for goodness-
“ Then
I squinted at him, all the crags and age and assurance and pain in that face. “What I
gotta
do?”

The bull’s roar thundered up from the caved-in roof of the source-cave.

“Go down there; hunt the beast, and kill it.”

“No!”

“It’s for Friza.”

“How? “
I demanded.

He shrugged. “La Dire knows. You must learn to hunt, and hunt well.” Then he repeated that.

“I’m all for testing my manhood and that sort of thing. But-“

“It’s a different reason from that, Lobey.”

“But-“

“Lobey.” His voice nestled down low and firm in his throat. “I’m older than you, and I know more about this

whole
business than you do. Take your sword and crossbow and go down into the cave, Lobey. Go on.”

I sat there and thought a whole lot of things. Such as: bravery is a very stupid thing.
And how surprised I was that so much fear and respect for Lo Hawk had held from my childhood.
Also, how many petty things can accompany pith, moment, and enterprise-like fear, confusion, and plain
annoyance.

The beast roared again. I pushed the crossbow farther up my arm and settled my machete handle at my hip.

If you were going to do something stupid-and we all do -it might as well be a brave and foolish thing.

I clapped Lo Hawk’s shoulder and started for the pit.

On this side the break was sharp and the drop deep. I went around to the sagging side, where there were natural ledges of root, earth, and masonry. I circled the chasm and scrambled down.

Sun struck the wall across from me, glistening with moss. I dropped my hand from the moist rock and stepped across an oily rivulet whose rainbow went out under my shadow. Somewhere up the tunnel, hooves clattered on stone.

I started forward. There were many cracks in the high ceiling, here and there lighting on the floor, a branch clawing crisped leaves, or the rim of a hole that might go down a few inches, a few feet, or drop to the lowest levels of the source-cave that were thousands of feet below.

I came to a fork, started beneath the vault to the left, and ten feet into the darkness tripped and rolled down a flight of shallow steps, once through a puddle (my hand
splatting
out in the darkness), once over dry leaves (they roared their own roar beneath my side), and landed at the bottom in a shaft of light, knees and palms on gravel.

Clatter!

Clatter!

Much closer: Clatter!

I sprang to my feet and away from the telltale light.
Motes
cycloned
in the slanting illumination where I had been.
And the motes stilled.

My stomach felt like a loose bag of water sloshing around on top of my gut. Walking towards that sound-he was quiet now and waiting-was no longer a matter of walking in a direction. Rather: pick that foot up, lean forward, put it down. Good. Now, pick up the other one, lean forward-

A hundred yards ahead I suddenly saw another light because something very large suddenly filled it up. Then it emptied.

Clack! Clack! Clack!

Snort!

And three steps could carry him such a long way.

Then a lot of clacks!

I threw myself against the wall, pushing my face into dirt and roots.

But the sound was going off.

I swallowed all the bitter things that had risen into my throat and stepped back from the wall.

With a quick walk that became a slow run I followed him under the crumbling vaults.

His sound came from the right.

So I turned right and into a sloping tunnel so low that ahead of me I heard his horns rasp on the ceiling. Stone and scale and old lichen
chittered
down at his hulking shoulders, then to the ground.

The gutter on the side of the tunnel had coated the stone with fluorescent slime. The trickle became a stream as the slope increased till the frothing light raced me on the left.

Once his hooves must have crossed a metal floor-plate, because for a half-dozen steps orange sparks glittered where he stepped, lighting him to the waist.

He was only thirty meters ahead of me.

Sparks again as he turned a corner.

I felt stone under the soles of my feet and then cold, smooth metal. I passed some leaves, blown here by what wind, that his hooves had ignited. They writhed with worms of fire, glowing about my toes. And for moments the darkness filled with autumn.

I reached the corner, started around.

Facing me, he bellowed.

His foot struck a meter from my foot and from this close the sparks lit his raw eyes, his polished nostrils.

His hand came between his eyes and me, falling! I rolled backward, grabbing for my machete.

His palm-flat this time, Hawk-clanged on the metal plate where I had been.
Then it fell again toward where I was.

I lay on my back with the hilt of the blade on the floor, point up. Very few people, or bulls, can hit a ten penny nail and drive it to the hilt.
Fortunately.

He jerked me from the floor, pinioned to his palm, and I got flung around (holding on to the blade with hands and feet and screaming) an awful lot.

He was screaming too, butting the ceiling and lots of things falling. From twenty feet he flung me loose. The blade pulled free, my flute filled with his blood, and I hurled into the wall and rolled down.

His right shoulder struck the right wall. He lurched. His left shoulder struck the left wall. And his shadow flickering on the dripping ceiling was huge.

He came down towards me, as I dragged my knees over a lot of wrought stone, beneath me, rocked back to my feet (something was sprained too) and tried to look at him, while he kept going out between steps.

Beside me in the wall was a grating about three feet high, with the bars set askew. It was probably a drain. I fell through.
And dropped about four feet to a sloping floor.

It was pitch-black above me and there was a hand grasping and grasping in the dark. I could hear it scrabbling against the wall. I took a swipe overhead, and my blade struck something moving.

Roaaaaaa
...

The sound was blunted behind stone. But from my side came the sharp retort of his palm as he started slapping.

I dived forward. The slope increased, and suddenly I slid down a long way, very fast, getting even more scraped up. I came up sharply against pipes.