Henry Kuttner - The Well of The Worlds

At any rate, he thought, Nethe was not going to get the Firebird.

He had been looking for a safe hiding place. Now that it was too late, he had found the ideal spot. He pushed the closed golden bar of the talisman into the burrow, digging it firmly into the soil against the rock. Then he found a second rock and jammed it tightly in after the first.

After that, he tried to climb the rope-like root, but the extra energy he had gained brought him only up to the edge of the overhang which began to crumble precariously as he dangled, the root slipping and jolting. He stopped climbing and simply hung on till the dirt stopped showering past him. Above him, there was more of an opening now, and he thought he caught a glimpse of Nethe.

Pretty problem.

Certainly he couldn’t hold on forever here. But if he fell, she wouldn’t get the Firebird. Its hiding place might be precarious. It too might fall. The squirrel might tunnel around the rock, guided by its insatiable curiosity, and become the wealthiest squirrel in creation by finding the Firebird for itself. In any case Nethe would not get it.

So, he thought grimly, he was in a position to bargain. He turned gingerly on his root and craned up the air-well.

“Nethe,” he called. “Can you hear me?”

Her brilliant face appeared like magic over the grassy verge. The grass dripped, and showers of rain drove now and then down the open well and blew in gusts past Sawyer’s cheek.

“If you can get me up,” he told Nethe, “I’ll bargain with you.”

She stretched out a demanding hand.

“I don’t trust you. Give me the Firebird first.”

Sawyer sighed. “All right. You’ll have to stretch a little farther, though. Here, reach!”

The smooth, narrow, subtly distorted hand waved blindly a foot above his face. Sawyer laughed aloud and seized her around the wrist with a desperate grip. He pulled, one threatening, experimental tug.

“Got you now!” he said. “Pull me up or we both go down.”

The scream of sheer fury that rang out from her just above his head made him jump convulsively. In the same instant the arm he held lashed into frenzies of writhing in a wild effort to shake him off. It was like holding a twisting serpent. The root he hung upon swayed and jolted, began ominously to creak. His own teeth were rattling with the violence of the struggle. He hung on for dear life, shouting above the furious, hissing curses she was gasping out as she fought:

“Stop it! Nethe, stop it! Hold still or we’re both done for! Pull me up!”

“I can’t pull you up, you fool,” Nethe said wildly.

“That’s interesting, in view of the bargain you were trying to make.” Sawyer told her, locking his grip harder around the lashing wrist. “Now—I come up or you come down.”

He heard the breath hiss through her teeth. He smiled up into the brilliant face straining down above him, almost too bright to look at because of the blaze in her large, inhuman eyes and the look of incandescence behind the fierce grimace. Looking at her, his heart sank a little. He thought. “No one with a face like that could ever give in. She won’t. She’d rather die.”

“I’m slipping,” he told her in an almost conversational voice. “This root’s slippery and my hand’s sweating. Last chance, Nethe.”

The baleful eyes flashed at him, flashed past him into the abyss. The root was slipping through his fingers faster and faster. Nethe slid farther over the edge, hissing furiously. She was half-way over the verge now, and the luminous earrings swung forward like tiny lamps to light their way to destruction. Then Sawyer felt the root quiver between his fingers, heard it snap.

“Well, it was an interesting life, while it lasted,” he said mildly, looking up into Nethe’s face.

Then the root broke, and for a dizzying second they swung suspended, held only by Nethe’s furious grip on some other anchoring root invisible to Sawyer. A look he could not read crossed her face fleetingly. He saw that she gave one downward glance into the abyss. He saw the look of brief, half-incredulous, exultant triumph light her blazing face.

Nethe laughed—and let go.

Which of the things that flashed through his mind came first in importance as he fell? He could not be sure. Time too seemed to have broken free of chronology and stood still around him.

He saw in the opening of the air-well, as Nethe’s body whipped through, a man’s dark face with a pointed cap above it, peering over the edge of the dripping grass, watching them go down. He saw it with photographic clarity, noting how every detail stood out even as the face and the ragged hole it peered through receded and dwindled above him into something as tiny as the world at the wrong end of a telescope. The watcher’s chin rested on the dark, wet grass as he lay flat, looking over the edge of the world, and the grass was like a dripping beard under his chin. Beard and all, he shot away upward to a pinpoint and then whirled clockwise across the sky and vanished.

All around them as they dropped turning through the abyss Nethe’s long, ringing scream of laughter echoed. They trailed it like a comet’s tail of clear sound.

As they shot downward through the whistling air, that dark storm-cloud which Sawyer had been dimly aware of under him all this while seemed to be floating to intercept them squarely. It shot upward to receive them. Was this why Nethe had laughed and let go, after her incredulous, triumphant glance downward? Even if it was, what use would a cloud be to save them?

It was, Sawyer realized with unwondering surprise, a tree-bearing cloud…

Quite suddenly branches were crackling all around him. Leaves whipped past his face. A deep cradle of limbs bowed strongly beneath the impact of his fall, received him, and sprang upward, tossing him into the air again. He thought, “When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall.” But the trees of this world were friendly to him if the people were not. Twice they intercepted his fall. What good a cloud-borne tree would do him, ultimately seemed doubtful. But it was comforting to feel branches under him.

“Good trees,” he thought approvingly. “Kind, clever, intelligent trees, hold me up.”

The tree at this point cracked him sharply across the head with a broken limb.

For once in his life Sawyer was very grateful indeed for the oblivion that swallowed him up.

He seemed to be lying on a hard, uneven pavement. Shadows flickered across it in a silvery gray dimness. Paved clouds were wholly outside his experience and he tried to lift his head to see more, whereupon a hand slammed his skull down ringingly upon the stones.

“Where is it?” Nethe’s voice demanded in a hot, fierce hiss. She must have been ransacking his coat, for she let go so suddenly that he rolled over hard upon uneven rocks, and stars swam before his dazed eyes. “What did you do with the Firebird? I know you had it. Where is it now?”

She bent over him, her blazing gaze a foot above his, the bright lanterns at her ears sending patterns of light into his eyes. Above her in a silvery twilight dark trees tossed. Through them, lowering like a storm-cloud to end all storm-clouds, he could see the black hanging bulk of the upper world, perhaps fifty feet overhead. Rain shot down past its verge in misty gusts.

“Maybe I dropped it,” Sawyer said, struggling up. “Where are we? On a cloud?”

“We’re on one of the floating islands,” Nethe told him impatiently. “Did you drop it? Answer me!” And she shook him with violent eagerness.

Sawyer felt the lump on his forehead where the branch had struck him. He looked up. Broken limbs and the shower of leaves about him on the pavement attested to their passage. It had been a minor miracle that both of them survived the fall. So that dark cloud had masked an island? A floating island? He struck the pavement a tentative blow.