Рафаэль Лафферти - The Best of R. A. Lafferty

“A love poem, perhaps, but with a difference,” said Robert Derby.

“I never was able to go his stuff, and I tried, I really tried,” Magdalen moaned.

“Here is the change of person-subject shown by the canted-eye glyph linked with the self-glyph,” Steinleser explained. “It is now a first-person talk. ‘I own ten-thousand back-loads of corn. I own gold and beans and nine buffalo horns full of watermelon seeds. I own the loin cloth that the sun wore on his fourth journey across the sky. Only three loin cloths in the world are older and more valued than this. I cry out to you in a big voice like the hammering of herons’ (that sound-verb-particle is badly translated, the hammer being not a modern pounding hammer but a rock angling, chipping hammer) ‘and the belching of buffaloes. My love is sinewy as entwined snakes, it is steadfast as the sloth, it is like a feathered arrow shot into your abdomen—such is my love. Why is my love unrequited?’”

“I challenge you, Steinleser,” Terrence Burdock cut in. “What is the glyph for ‘unrequited’?”

“The glyph of the extended hand—with all the fingers bent backward. It goes on, ‘I roar to you. Do not throw yourself down. You believe you are on the hanging sky bridge, but you are on the terminal cliff. I grovel before you. I am no more than dog-droppings.’”

“You’ll notice he said that and not me,” Magdalen burst out. There was always a fundamental incoherence about Magdalen.

“Ah—continue, Steinleser,” said Terrence. “The girl is daft, or she dreams out loud.”

“That is all of the inscriptions, Terrence, except for a final glyph which I don’t understand. Glyph writing takes a lot of room. That’s all the stone would hold.”

“What is the glyph that you don’t understand, Howard?”

“It’s the spear-thrower glyph entwined with the time glyph. It sometimes means ‘flung forward or beyond.’ But what does it mean here?”

“It means ‘continued,’ dummy. ‘Continued,’” Magdalen said. “Do not fear. There’ll be more stories.”

“I think it’s beautiful,” said Ethyl Burdock, “—in its own context, of course.”

“Then why don’t you take him on, Ethyl, in his own context, of course?” Magdalen asked. “Myself, I don’t care how many back-loads of corn he owns. I’ve had it.”

“Take whom on, dear?” Ethyl asked. “Howard Steinleser can interpret the stones, but who can interpret our Magdalen?”

“Oh, I can read her like a rock.” Terrence Burdock smiled. But he couldn’t.

But it had fastened on them. It was all about them and through them: the brightness of serpents and the serenity of toads, the secret spiders in the water, the entrapped dreams oozing through the broken eye socket, the pustules of the sick rabbit, the belching of the buffalo, and the arrow shot into the abdomen. And around it all was the night smell of flint and turned earth and chuckling streams, the mustiness, and the special muskiness which bears the name Nobility of Badgers.

They talked archeology and myth talk. Then it was steep night, and the morning of the third day.

Oh, the sample digging went well. This was already a richer mound than Spiro, though the gash in it was but a small promise of things to come. And the curious twin of the mound, the broken chimney, confirmed and confounded and contradicted. There was time going wrong in the chimney, or at least in the curious fluted core of it; the rest of it was normal enough, and sterile enough.

Anteros worked that day with a soft sullenness, and Magdalen brooded with a sort of lightning about her.

“Beads, glass beads!” Terrence Burdock exploded angrily. “All right! Who is the hoaxer in our midst? I will not tolerate this at all.” Terrence had been angry of face all day. He was clawed deeply, as Steinleser had been the day before, and he was sour on the world.

“There have been glass-bead caches before, Terrence, hundreds of them,” Robert Derby said softly.

“There have been hoaxers before, hundreds of them,” Terrence howled. “These have ‘Hong Kong Contemporary’ written all over them, damn cheap glass beads sold by the pound. They have no business in a stratum of around the year seven hundred. All right, who is guilty?”

“I don’t believe that any one of us is guilty, Terrence,” Ethyl put in mildly. “They are found four feet in from the slant surface of the mound. Why, we’ve cut through three hundred years of vegetable loam to get to them, and certainly the surface was eroded beyond that.”

“We are scientists,” said Steinleser. “We find these. Others have found such. Let us consider the improbabilities of it.”

It was noon, so they ate and rested and considered the improbabilities. Anteros had brought them a great joint of white pork, and they made sandwiches and drank beer and ate pickles.

“You know,” said Robert Derby, “that beyond the rank impossibility of glass beads found so many times where they could not be found, there is a real mystery about all early Indian beads, whether of bone, stone, or antler. There are millions and millions of these fine beads with pierced holes finer than any piercer ever found. There are residues, there are centers of every other Indian industry, and there is evolution of every other tool. Why have there been these millions of pierced beads, and never one piercer? There was no technique to make so fine a piercer. How were they done?”

Magdalen giggled. “Bead-spitter,” she said.

“Bead-spitter! You’re out of your fuzzy mind,” Terrence erupted. “That’s the silliest and least sophisticated of all Indian legends.”

“But it is the legend,” said Robert Derby, “the legend of more than thirty separate tribes. The Carib Indians of Cuba said that they got their beads from Bead-spitters. The Indians of Panama told Balboa the same thing. The Indians of the pueblos told the same story to Coronado. Every Indian community had an Indian who was its Bead-spitter. There are Creek and Alabama and Koasati stories of Bead-spitter; see Swanton’s collections. And his stories were taken down within living memory.

“More than that, when European trade-beads were first introduced, there is one account of an Indian receiving some and saying, ‘I will take some to Bead-spitter. If he sees them, he can spit them too.’ And that Bead-spitter did then spit them by the bushel. There was never any other Indian account of the origin of their beads. All were spit by a Bead-spitter.”

“Really, this is very unreal,” Ethyl said. Really it was.

“Hog hokey! A Bead-spitter of around the year seven hundred could not spit future beads, he could not spit cheap Hong Kong glass beads of the present time!” Terrence was very angry.

“Pardon me, yes sir, he could,” said Anteros. “A Bead-spitter can spit future beads, if he faces north when he spits. That has always been known.”

Terrence was angry, he fumed and poisoned the day for them, and the claw marks on his face stood out livid purple. He was angrier yet when he said that the curious dark capping rock on top of the chimney was dangerous, that it would fall and kill someone; and Anteros said that there was no such capping rock on the chimney, that Terrence’s eyes were deceiving him, that Terrence should go sit in the shade and rest.

And Terrence became excessively angry when he discovered that Magdalen was trying to hide something that she had discovered in the fluted core of the chimney. It was a large and heavy shale-stone, too heavy even for Magdalen’s puzzling strength. She had dragged it out of the chimney flute, tumbled it down to the bottom, and was trying to cover it with rocks and scarp.

“Robert, mark the extraction point!” Terrence called loudly. “It’s quite plain yet. Magdalen, stop that! Whatever it is, it must be examined now.”