Clive Barker - Everville

It caused him no little pain, but the sensation seemed only to fuel his frenzy. Thrashing as he went, he dragged his body through the opening, inch by agonizing inch, until his wings met the crack. Though they were folded behind him as tight to his body as they'd go, they were too bulky to be pulled through. He let out a pitiful cry, and turned his eyes in Maeve's direction.

She started towards him, but he waved her away. "Just... be... ready-" he gasped.

Then, drawing a single, tremendous breath, he pressed every sinew into service and began to push again.

There was a terrible tearing sound, and blood began to flow from his back, running down over his shoulders. Maeve shuddered in horror, but she could not look away. His eyes were locked with hers, as though she was his only anchor in his suffering. He rocked back and forth, the muscle that joined wings to torso torn wide open, his body shuddering as he visited this terrible violence upon it.

The horror seemed to go on an age-the thrashing, rocking, and tearing-but his tenacity was repaid. With one final twisting motion he separated his body from its means of flight, pressed his mutilated form through the crack and fell, his honey blood flowing copiously, on the other side.

Maeve knew now what he'd meant by just be ready. He needed her help to stem the flow from his wounds before he bled to death. She went to the body of Buddenbaum's attacker and tore at his robes. they were thick and copious, precisely to her purpose. Returning to Coker, who was lying face-down where he'd fallen, she pressed the fabric gently, but firmly, against his wounds, which ran from his shoulder blades to waist, telling him softly as she did so that this was the bravest thing she'd ever seen. She would make him well, she said, and watch over him for as long as he wished her to do so.

He sobbed against the snow-the crack closed above him-and in the midst of his tears he answered her.

"Always," he said.

Buddenbaum had been wounded before, though only once as badly as this. The stabbing would not kill him-his patrons had rendered his constitution inhumanly strong in return for his services-but it would take a little time to heal, and this mountain was no place to do it. He lingered in the vicinity of the two rocks long enough to see the door close, then he stumbled away from the slope, leaving the O'Connell child and her miserable consort to bleed and weep together at the top. Discovefing how innocent little Maeve had come to cause such mayhem he would leave for another day. Not all the witnesses to the night's events were dead; he'd seen a handful fleeing the field when he'd arrived. In due course, he'd trace them and quiz them till he better understood how his fate and that of Maeve O'Connell were connected.

One thing he knew for certain: connected they were.

The instinct that had made him prick his ears that April day, hearing the name of a goddess called in a place of dust and dirt and unwashed flesh, had been good. The miraculous and the mundane lived side by side in this newfound land, and, in the person of Maeve O'Connell, were indivisible.

Coker and Maeve lay in the shelter of the two rocks for several hours, resting bones, flesh, and spirits traumatized by all that the previous night had brought. Sometimes she would make little compresses of fabric soaked in melted snow, and systematically clean his wounds, while he lay with his head upon her lap, moaning softly. Sometimes they would simply doze together, sobbing sometimes in their sleep.

There was no snow that morning. The wind was strong, and brought convoys of puffy white clouds up from the south west, shredding them against the peaks. Between them, sun, too frail to warm them much but reassuring nevertheless.

The supplies of carrion lying on the slope had not gone unnoticed. An hour or two after sunrise the first birds began to circle and descend, looking for morsels on the battlefield.

Their numbers steadily increased, and Maeve, fearful that she or Coker would have an eye pecked out while they slept, insisted they move a few yards into the cleft between the rocks, where the birds would be less likely to come.

Then, sometime towards noon, she woke with her heart hammering to the sound of growls. She got up and peered over the rock. A pack of wolves had nosed the dead on the wind, and were now either tearing at the bodies, or fighting over the tenderest scraps.

Their presence was not the only grim news. The clouds were getting heavier, threatening further snow. "We have to go," she told Coker.

He looked up at her through a haze of pain. "Go where?" he said.

"Back down the mountain," she told him, "before we freeze or starve. We don't have that much daylight left."

"What's the noise?"

"Wolves."

"Many of them?"

"Maybe fifteen. they won't come after us while they've got so much food just lying there." She went down on her haunches beside him. "I know you're hurting and I wish I could make it better. But if we can get back to the wagon I know there's clean bandages and-"

:'Yes-" he muttered, "and what then?" 'I told you: We go on down the mountain."

"And what happens after that?" he said, his voice pitifully weak. "Even if we could find the rest of your people, they'd kill us soon as look at us. they think you're a child of the Devil, and I'm-1 don't know what I am any more."

"We don't need them," she said. "We'll find our own place to live. Somewhere we can build."

"Build?"

"Not right now, but when you're well. Maybe we'll have to live in a hole for a while, steal food, do whatever we have to do, but we're not going to die."

"You're very certain."

"Yes," she said quietly. "We're going to build a shining city. You and me."

He looked at her almost pityingly. "What are you talking about?" he said.

,,I'll tell you as we go," she said to him, pulling on his arm to raise him up.

She was right about the wolves: they had more than enough food to keep them occupied. Only one of the pack, a scarred, runty animal missing an ear, came sniffing after them. Maeve had armed herself with a short sword plucked from one of the corpses, and rushed at the animal with a blood-curdling shout. It fled, its tail between its legs, and did not venture near them again.

The first flakes of snow began to fall just as they reached the forest, but once beneath the canopy of branches it was no concern to them. Getting lost, however, was. Though the gradient of the ground plainly pointed the way down, the forest covered most of the lower slope, and without Coker's preternatural sense of direction, Maeve would have most assuredly lost her way between the trees, and never have emerged again.

they spoke very little as they went, but Coker-who despite his wounds showed amazing fortitude-did broach one subject: that of Buddenbaum. was he a Blessedm'n, Coker asked? "I don't know what a Blessedm'n is."

"One who works with the spirit@'

"Like a priest?"

"And does miracles."

"Priests don't do miracles."

"What do they do then?"

"they say prayers. they break bread. they tell people what to do and what not to do."

"But no miracles?"

"No miracles."

Coker thought about that for a time. "Then I mean something different," he said.

"Are Blessedm'n good or bad?"

"Neither. They're explorers, is what they are."

That sounded like Buddenbaum, she said.

"Well whatever he is," Coker went on, "he has more power in him than most. That wound should have killed him on the spot."

She pictured Buddenbaum as he spoke, pulling the blade out of his own back.

"It was extraordinary," Coker replied. Though she had not said a word she knew without question he was speaking of the same sight.

"How did you do that?" she said.

He looked at her guiltily. "I'm sorry," he said, "that was impolite. It's just that it was so clear."