Avram Davidson - The Kar-Chee Reign

And vanished toward the south in one final smash of sight and sound and staying forever upon the seared eyes, only turning colors, on! off! as the astonished lids sprang down and up and down: blink, blank, red, black, hull, horror, chaos, Kar-chee, dragon, dark, fire, flame, burning light, Devils, Devils, death.

Daylight came at last, and when the morning mists had cleared away some strange disturbance in the air was seen toward the south, where the black sky-ships had gone.

This was the morning when Ren and Jow and the other men were to have gone to see for themselves the truth, if any, of the reports of the boys and the doddering oldfather.

They did not go.

Nobody went.

Nobody did anything.

Now and then a woman, movement automatic, perhaps more in response to habit or an aching breast, thrust her nipple into a tiny screaming mouth. Older children, not old enough to have quite succumbed as yet to the general paralysis of mind and body, either found food left over or went without. Now and then a groan or a sigh or whimper was heard, a rattling cough, a wordless and toneless murmur; nothing more. The wind spoke and the cattle complained, but nothing else. The very dogs were silent, scarcely bothering to crawl out of the sun. The very songbirds in their twig cages seemed to have caught the contagion and were silent.

It was close to noon when old Ren’s wife appeared in her doorway. She looked around, made a gesture of dreadful despair. Her hair hung in witchlocks, sluttishly about her pendulous cheeks. She walked with melting strides toward the tiny cages hanging under the eaves of thatch, one by one flung open the tiny doors. The little birds fluttered, but none fluttered out. She opened her mouth and breathed painfully. Then, as though each gesture cost her infinite effort and infinite agony, she reached her hand into every little pen and closed it around each bewildered creature and drew it out and flung it away from her. “Go,” she muttered. “Go… go…”

When the last of them had been released she looked around her once more; repeated her gesture of horror and hopelessness. For a moment only her expression changed to something approaching bewilderment and she shaded her eyes and peered as though looking for, as though missing something… someone… The moment did not long last. She melted back into her house. And all therein was silent.

Duro held his crossbow by the butt. He gazed, slack-mouthed, into space. Then his mouth closed, tightened, He swung forward on his knees and lifted the bow as though he were going to smash it into the ground.

Lors put his hand out. “Don’t.”

“Why not?”

The older brother’s face and hand and head did not move much, nor did his eyes. But Duro knew him well enough to understand that an answer existed and would be presently forthcoming. He sank back and waited.

“Listen,” Lors began after a long while. “When I was on my first overnight hunt, way out in the uplands,” he began, looking straight at his brother, no trace of condescension or rivalry in his voice: equal to equal, now; and Duro, for the first time since the trouble began, felt pleasure grow in his heart; “—you’ve heard me tell of that?”

Duro said he had. “But tell it again,” he said. The story was obviously intended to make a present point; besides, the hearkening to a story makes a pain to be forgotten (so the old proverb went).

A squall of snow, unseasonal and — peculiarly — driving downward from the middle upper ranges, had driven the hunting party even further up and out of their intended path. And up there in the clefts and rifts of the slope of Tihuaco they had come upon a hamlet of the dying and the dead and of the living-dead as well.

“The sickness had come on them,” Lors said, recollection making his mouth twist, “and it was still on them, so — you can imagine — we didn’t stay. But we stayed long enough for me to get the picture of it in my mind. Later on, hearing the older ones talk about it, I got it all clear and fixed. There’s no cure for the sickness — either you recover or you don’t. But those who were already sick just lay there as though they were already dead, and those who weren’t sick just lay there as though they already were. They could have left, but they didn’t. And not because they didn’t want to risk infecting others, either, because they never opened a mouth to warn us off when they heard and saw us coming. It wasn’t, either, that they stayed there to tend to the others, because we saw them begging for help and no one fetched them water.

“They just stayed and waited to die the way a rabbit does when it’s face to face with a big snake. It trembles but it doesn’t run. Even a rat will run or fight if it’s cornered.”

He paused and took a deep, shuddering breath.

“I saw Mia on my way out before,” he said. “She just lay against the wall and breathed… Yesterday you said I was in a hurry to get back and get on top of her. Well, I could have gotten on top of her right then and there and she wouldn’t have said No, Yes , or Oh, more . But it would’ve been like mounting a corpse.

“Is it like this everywhere, Duro? It must be. If even Popa and Moma have given up, then who hasn’t? They’re all just waiting to die. They seem to think they’re already dead.”

Duro’s head bent lower and lower. Then he lifted his hair out of his eyes as though it were very heavy, and said, “Who hasn’t? You haven’t. And I haven’t. Thanks for not letting me smash the bow. If there’s only one bolt left in all the world, then, brother, there’ll be one dead Devil.” And, just as Lors had made no stand of being older and in command, so Duro now made no stand of being younger and defiant. “Tell me what to do and I’ll do it.” Their eyes met in perfect understanding. They had never been so close before. They would never again be as far apart as they had been.

“I don’t know what to tell you to do,” Lors said, softly. “I don’t know what you should do or what I should do. Something happened yesterday and something happened last night and something is happening today and probably they’re all connected.

“But I don’t know…

“And even if they are connected, I still don’t know… We heard our fill of oldfathers’ tales about Devils and big Devils and little Devils. What does it mean? Maybe no more than the ones about Arno Half-Devil — and there are still people who’d stake their privates on his changing into a giant cat in the night! What can I tell you to do? I don’t know what’s right or what’s wrong. I only know what I’m going to do.”

He got to his feet. Duro did the same. They both knew.

They hadn’t gone far when someone swung onto the trail beside them. It was Tom-small, but not the placid Tom-small of the day before. They exchanged looks. “You’re going south to see what’s there,” he said. It was a statement.

“Yes.”

“So am I.” That was a statement, too.

It did not fail to occur to them that if they were capable of smelling the dragon-Devils, the dragon-Devils might be equally capable of smelling them. The thing, then, was to keep the wind in their favor… but this was a figure of speech: they could not of course keep the wind, they had to keep with the wind. At the moment there was none discernable, and this gave them time to reflect on the other part of the equation, which was the matter of where the Devils, thick or thin, might now be.

“Maybe along the beach-coast,” Duro suggested. There they had seen them yesterday, after all. Lors pointed out that it was no mere disinterested desire to find the creatures which alone had brought them, all there, upon the trail.

“There’s a way down to the beach not far from here, at Goat Rock,” he said. “And that’s all the way, either up or down, from here on south, until you get to the caves… which is quite a ways.”