Earthwind, p.1
Earthwind, page 1
07-12=2023
EARTHWIND
by the same author
Eye Among the Blind
Contents:-
PROLOGUE
ONE RITUAL
one
two
three
four
five
TWO RETREAT
six
seven
eight
nine
ten
eleven
twelve
THREE RECKONING
thirteen
fourteen
CODA RENAISSANCE
EARTHWIND
Robert Holdstock
Faber and Faber
3 Queen Square
London
I wish to thank the Office of Public Works in Dublin for allowing me to see unpublished photographs of certain discoveries from the Boyne valley excavations at the Knowth tumulus. My thanks also to Dave Langford for t+0.02 sin(235.619t); and especially to Bernard Le Gette, whose peculiar relationship with a certain book helped me sort out my own with this one.
First published in 1977 by Faber and Faber Limited 3 Queen Square London WC1
Printed in Great Britain by Redwood Burn Ltd., Trowbridge
All rights reserved © 1977 Robert Holdstock
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Holdstock, Robert
Earthwind.
I. Title 823’.9’IF PR6058.0/
ISBN 0-571-11119-X
for Kath and Bob Holdstock
As one with the knowledge and magic of the source
Attuned to the majesty of music
They marched as one with earth.
Jon Anderson
The Ancient: Giants Under the Sun
PROLOGUE
Some of them died in the cave, died of cold or of hunger, unable to find the spiritual strength to carry on through the winter. Others died out on the snow-covered plateau as they hauled fragments of the ruined ship into the barren cavern in the middle of this ice wilderness; instinctively they knew that they were high on the side of a mountain. When the snow clouds occasionally dispersed they could see into the distance, and though ice crystals stuck their eyelids together, and made blue-skinned statues of them, they could see the green of the lowlands.
A woman led the way, a woman who had once been important to the group, and who was now just a name. They followed her blindly, those who had decided to leave the remains of the crashed ship. Others stayed behind, secure in the vacant mountain cave, slowly starving.
Those that went had already forgotten what the ship meant to them - they had forgotten what they were and who they were, where they had come from and where they had been going; the blinding, driving snow chased these memories from them, but nothing mattered now, nothing but the green lands below them.
And the pattern in their minds, the bizarre and frightening alien image that began to haunt them…
ONE RITUAL
one
She dreamed of the Stone Age again, and on waking felt a sense of disappointment as the images fled rapidly from her mind, leaving just coldness and strange alien smells. How vivid the recollection of the great tumulus had been, how piercing the imagined sounds of ancient chisel on rock, echoing through the still summer air. Then there had been familiar faces, crowded in a small chamber, and the babble of excited voices, sounding hollow and unreal in the dank confines of the tomb. A flickering light had illuminated the surfaces of the rock that lined the passageway…there had been a sense of pain, and of pleasure…words, meaningless as she thought about them on waking, had left her with a sense of great age, of great enigma, of bizarre activity in the dawn of civilized man…
The dream decayed but for some minutes Elspeth Mueller lay waiting for the after-images to dissolve fully, allowing her sideways view of the forest to assume importance. The sense of pleasure evaporated, but not the pain. The pain persisted.
After a while, in order to examine her ankle, she sat up as straight as she could in her low-roofed cawl, a hastily erected tent of blue-bark and dead vegetation. The cut was deep and blood had run everywhere. It had dried on her calves and soaked into the white leather of her moks, which had taken her hours to make and of which she was very proud. She pulled the shoe from her wounded foot, hating the leather’s greasy waterproofing because she remembered where the grease had come from. Tentatively she touched the gash and managed to open the wound again.
A spike of blue-bark, part of the curved frame of the cawl, had driven into her ankle as she slept. Perhaps it had sprung out of position, and at some time during the long night she had impaled herself, not waking, but sensing the pain even in her dream.
The feeling of pain that had accompanied her unconscious revisitation of that Stone Age tumulus came back to her. How bizarre the way two elements of her life, separated by many years, could combine in such a totally inaccurate but such a very coherent way during one short dream, one brief transcendence of normal time. An agony of her childhood, and an event from her recent past (the exploration of the tomb) drawn together in the half-light of her sleeping mind.
With pain she was well acquainted. The ritual agony of her girlhood, the final almost unbearable attack upon her, initiating her, bringing her to womanhood, defining her as a particular type of woman—a magda, breast less, childless—those moments, those terrible, beautiful moments, haunted her sleeping hours more and more…
As if my mind senses the fading of memory—touching her breast —as if it knows how soon I’ll forget…
There had been no pain when she had been in that ancient valley on Earth. The pain of laughter, of jokes, directed at her almost alien strangeness—that pain, yes: and friendships, maturing naturally into love, but frustrated, defeated, by her ritual lack.
The passage of years, her twenty years in normal society, had poisoned the beauty of her initiation. She thought of her home planet, now, as a brutal place, with barbarian habits, a horrifying world that was as primitive, beyond its glass and steel shutters, as Aeran with its stone and slings.
And yet—again she touched the two glittering jewels that were sewn tight, deep, in the skin of her chest—and yet the earth is in me, in all my kind, earth and stone, intimate with the red life of my body.…
Perhaps that was why Darren—such a young boy to be such an experienced hunter—perhaps that was why he felt so strong an attraction to her.
‘Stone lady’ he called her, and it was a name given out of respect, and out of affection. And more recently it had started to become my stone lady.
She smiled at the thought, staring out through the wide entrance of her cawl to where huge, damp fronds of blue-bark hung limply in the dense forest, absorbing the dawn mist and waving gently in the unfelt breeze that filtered down through the canopy. To love an alien, to mate with a nue, with a beyonder, with a nakedskinned black-skinned stranger from beyond the air and sky…
What was it doing for his reputation in the crog? What thoughts filled the air behind those earthen walls? For the most part they had accepted it, his elders, the seer, the singers of earth and wind and stone; they had not condemned him.
Noise: the noise of wind, high above the forest, not really penetrating this deeply through the tangled growths, the purples and greens and reds, and the flickering tendrils of light-gatherers, reaching into the air above the canopy, thousands of them, like the darting tongues of snakes.
Noise: the chatter of skitch, migrating away from the winding river for an hour or so in search of certain juicy ‘worms’ that emerged into the hot undergrowth during the night, before coolness and dawn drove them back into the mossy soil.
Noise: the explosive gasps of a gup, jumping backwards from branch to branch as it escaped some unseen terror, a plate-toothed vine, perhaps, or a snapdragon (yes, a snapdragon—she could hear the staccato snap of those slimy monsters, a squad of them, she imagined, swarming through a blue-bark, consuming all that had made the ’tree’ their home).
After a while, into this symphony of alien forest sound, came a new noise. Voices, the babbling laughter of a girl, the grunting anger of a boy. They weren’t as close as they sounded; the blue-bark fronds, with their peculiar resonating ability, could retransmit forest sound for miles. The group could be miles away, just leaving the crog, excited at the prospect of a full day’s hunt downriver on the scree plain bordering the marsh.
Elspeth stretched out her legs so that her feet extended beyond the protection of the cawl. Blood from the ugly gash ran freely on to the moss that covered the soil of the clearing in a thick, spongy bed. And, like a sponge, the frondmoss absorbed and digested the strange alien fluid, leaving no trace but the odour of raw meat.
Am I raw meat? To an animal any other animal is just that —living, raw flesh. Blood is the taste of meat. I am the taste of blood. Natural flesh, living, pulsating, stinking like decayed meat. I am decay. How strange.
Staring at the wound, experiencing the pain, the sight of her bodily loss.
Strange. So long since the last time.…
Her ship—faithful servant, a sailing star among the stars, so far above her—the ship had protected her for twenty years, preventing pain, preventing wounds, preventing disease. She had almost forgotten what it was like to function normally. For the first time in her adult life she knew what it was like to be fully human.
Where are those kids?
She could hear their voices, drifting, echoing through the saturated jungle. They were running through the mist, following instinctively th e unbeaten track to the small clearing where Elspeth and Darren had built the cawl. They sounded more than usually excited, perhaps because today was the day they would show the beyonder, their strange, hairless female friend (and the ‘marked woman’ of the older youth, Darren) how to snare blackwing.
She had waited so many hours for this moment, so many desperate hours…
That sudden thought of how long she had spent on Aeran made her heart miss a beat and she glanced at the tiny watch she still wore on her left wrist. The green figures flickered on and off, checking the seconds as they drained away. Nearly one hundred hours. She had been on the surface nearly one hundred hours.
Long before she had arrived in orbit around Aeran she had known that her time on the planet would have to be restricted or…well, it was still a fanciful thought, even if the evidence was overwhelming. (Remember Austin, screaming his fear, his gradual destruction, an insane man filled with a desperation to cling to the last vestiges of what he had once been…?)
She had set that arbitrary limit of a hundred hours as the time of her total stay if she was to remain unaffected by whatever had destroyed Austin. She had been in orbit over two standard months, spending a few hours on the outskirts of the crog, or with the marked couples on their hunting trips; but now, aware of the privilege she was being granted, she had been a full Aeran day in this tiny clearing, sheltered by her hastily made crawl, naked but for a pair of moks and a leather belt from which hung a roughly chipped bone knife. It was part of the preparation for her first hunt, her first taste of alien ritual. And it had used up her time, almost to the full.
Ten seconds, nine, and she watched with growing horror as the last moments of safety drained away.
Five seconds and the voices of Darren and the others grew loud. Two seconds and she shook her head, reached out to the watch and began to remove it from her wrist.
A hundred hours came and passed and she tore the watch from her arm, flung it deep into the bush in front of her, sat trembling and waiting for her friends.
She didn’t feel any different, certainly, save for her now total resignation to death. Not death in the physical sense; she was well aware that death was always present, that from the moment she had slipped from the womb she had begun a slow, then increasingly rapid, slide down the road to decay, and would soon crawl back into the womb of the Earth Mother. Not that sort of death, but the death of everything she had been, everything she was, everything she might have hoped to be. How long remained to her she didn’t know. She had never discovered how long Austin had been on Aeran before he had realized what was happening. That arbitrary figure had been based on nothing at all. Even a hundred hours might have been too many. But what the passing of that self-imposed limit meant was that she had resigned herself to obliteration, and had done so cheerfully, and without remorse.
She would have to watch her own past very carefully, and monitor the way it faded.
Easing herself out of the crude shelter, Elspeth drew up to her full height and stretched her limbs. The cold, the damp, the cramped position did not bother her, she had found that out very quickly. The nightlife of the forest had been a nuisance and her calves were covered with white blisters where yellowspins had fed on her during her light sleep. The blisters were not the result of the bites but her body’s immune reaction to the whip-like parasites that the yellowspin had injected into her. None of them had succeeded in penetrating very far. The ache in her muscles soon vanished and there was just the natural and persisting pain of the gash on her leg.
Elspeth Mueller, standing at her full height, was over six feet tall, a head at least taller than Darren, who was a tall male. Her extra height in no way affected their relationship, although it had prompted much discussion of her ethnic origins, long weeks before, when she had told the young hunter just exactly what she was and where she came from. It had not been a good thing to do, she had realized afterwards, since it constituted cultural interference, but the crog’s special interest in her had soon faded.
Her brown skin was naturally sexually unattractive to the males on Aeran, who found her colour amusing; but Darren had penetrated beyond the superficiality of the strange nue (hairless humans of either sex) and Elspeth had no doubt that Darren was experiencing something not far short of desire for her. He had, after all, asked her if he might be her marked man, as obvious a declaration of desire as any she had experienced in her short life. She had not yet agreed, but saw his point that it would help her enter the inner dune of the crog, where she was at the moment forbidden to go.
Quite suddenly Darren came bounding out of the undergrowth, grinning and breathing heavily, holding on to a crystal knife that hung round his neck by a thin leather cord. Two other males followed him and behind them came two younger-looking girls. The two youths she recognized as Engus and Laurian. They were both heavily built youngsters and rather bloodthirsty; she had seen their proficiency with stone, sling and spear, but they were not as highly regarded as Darren. Laurian, in fact, had failed his initiation ritual and was hardly thought of at all, but in time he would try again. In the meantime Darren and Engus both demonstrated a pleasant fact of Aeran life—friends were made to last. They had not rejected Laurian as Elspeth might have supposed they would had she not been here witnessing life in the forest at first hand.
Darren was the most slender of the three, and also the tallest. He had to look up to Elspeth, something he didn’t like, but towered over most of the rest of the colony. He was good-looking beneath his long yellow hair that hung limply, and dirtily, all round his neck. His body hair seemed tighter than that of the others; deep yellow (in some places almost orange) it looked not so much like fur as a tight-fitting yellow garment. Only his face, above the jaw, was pink and bare. And, at appropriate times, his sex organ.
The two girls were identically furred, save that the younger was still obviously pubescent and large areas of her breast and shoulders were still naked. This girl Elspeth didn’t recognize, although she knew the older girl, Brigedd, the marked woman of Laurian. She was unhappy with that status since Laurian had failed to complete the rigorous initiation programme (more a test of physical stamina than anything), whereas she had managed easily. As a consequence, even though her acquaintance with the couple was brief, Elspeth had a picture of a constantly fighting and very unhappy match. Darren talked casually about ‘stealing’ Brigedd before too long—he always said it within Laurian’s range of hearing and the non-warrior grew furious, but was not allowed to do anything by way of issuing challenge.
The group gathered about Elspeth. ’This is Moir,’ said Darren, putting his arm round the youngest girl’s shoulder. ‘My sister.’ Moir looked up at the tall negress and moved her lower jaw in the side-to-side motion that signified wary greeting. She’s very pretty thought Elspeth. Without the fur these people are really beautiful.
’Elspeth is a friend,’ snapped Brigedd, and the younger girl smiled self-consciously. ‘Hello.’
‘Hello Moir. Your first hunt?’
‘She’s not hunting,’ said Engus darkly. (Why was he always so bad tempered?) ‘She’s watching. Which means I’m watching.’ Elspeth realized, quite suddenly, that this was Engus’s marked woman. Darren’s sister! Was Darren unhappy about the fact? She couldn’t decide.
Elspeth noticed Darren and Engus looking her up and down. She felt herself flush and fought not to drop her hands to conceal herself. ‘You’re making me uncomfortable.’
Darren smiled, fixed her with his blue-eyed gaze. ‘Why?’
‘Never mind. When do we start?’
’As soon as we can,’ said Darren.
