Уолтер Мосли - Blue Light

“Alacrity” issued from my lips.

The next thing I knew, I was running. Addy and Reggie and Wanita were behind me. I was the first to reach her, though. I picked her up and hugged her hard. The squeeze she gave me nearly broke my spine.

She hollered in my ear and threw me around.

“Hi, everybody!” she yelled.

We all cheered and capered, a lost tribe of primitives secreted beyond the reach of sanity.

“Bones made me fight with the bears,” Alacrity said as we sat around the fire that night. Clothed only in her bearskin robe, she sat at my side, holding my arms, lacing her fingers with mine. A dark circle of dried food was etched around her full lips. “First it was just a little one. We wrestled for a hour almost, but then I pulled her ears so hard that she ran away. I wouldn’t have done that, but she clawed me on my jaw and that made me mad.”

Juan Thrombone was snoring under Number One while the rest of us sat around the fire under Twelve.

“But then,” Alacrity continued, “after I would fight, I’d get real tired and have to go to sleep. And all the bears were growling. And when I’d wake up there’d be another bear, only a little bigger, and then I’d fight again. But every time I was stronger and knew how to fight better. Sometimes I’d get a broken leg. Sometimes I’d get cut real bad. But the only scar was from the first time. Bones said it was first blood, and he put special dirt in it while I was asleep so it wouldn’t go away. He said that I should always remember first blood because I was a warrior, and warriors had to remember that they could be hurt too.

“Finally I had to fight Brutus.”

“Who’s that?” Wanita cried.

“Brutus was that big black bear that chased us here. He always hated me because I broke his nose. He’s always been waiting around here to get me, only Bones wouldn’t let him until we had the contest. ’Cause, you see, Bones said that I had to grow in order to feel my power. He said that I was always so restless because I needed to be big to do what I need to do. And so after each time I’d sleep, I got bigger. And when I was all grown up, I had to have a fight to the death with Brutus because that would be my bap... bap...”

“Baptism,” Addy said.

“Yeah,” Alacrity agreed. “Baptism.”

“Uh-huh.” Wanita nodded and looked into her friend’s eyes. “That’s ’cause you gotta be fightin’ an’ stuff. I seen that. I seen it, Alacrity. You were beautiful and real mad.”

“He came at me real fast,” Alacrity said. “But I jumped high and landed on his back. Then I pulled his ears and jumped off when he tried to crush me on a tree. And then I got me a stick and he kept comin’, but I’d keep jumpin’ outta the way and hittin’ ’im on the neck and stuff. One time he caught me and pushed me down with his paws and he cut my chest, but I rolled away when he got offa me for a second. And then I hit him across the face and he couldn’t see nuthin’. And so then I hit him on the head with a rock and he fell down and rolled around ’cause he couldn’t see and his head hurt.” Alacrity stopped for a moment then and looked very serious.

“So you beat ’im,” Wanita cried. “You won.”

“Bones said that I had to kill Brutus if I was the winner,” the warrior said. “He said that I had to be able to kill my enemy, and then we would eat his liver for a feast.”

“Did you kill him?” Wanita asked fearfully.

“I dug my fingers in his neck and tore out his windpipe, uh-huh, yeah.”

I looked closer at the dark circle around her lips. What frightened me was that she hadn’t washed off the grisly trophy.

We were all quiet after that. The only sound that could be heard was Juan Thrombone’s snoring more than a thousand feet away.

Alacrity’s change had a strong effect on Reggie. He began stalking her from a distance. When she’d go down to the stream to bathe with Wanita, Reggie could always be found somewhere nearby — watching. He brooded in her presence and said almost nothing to her directly. Sometimes he’d say things to Wanita while Alacrity stood there.

“She better wear a shirt if she gonna be climbin’, else it’s gonna be tittie trees,” he said many times, laughing thickly to punctuate his bad joke.

Alacrity was confused by Reggie’s behavior. They’d always been friends. She looked up to him. He showed her about pathfinding and made her little toys and trinkets out of wood.

Of course, Alacrity’s behavior didn’t help things any. She was still a child in many ways, moving around and dancing with no sense of shame. She liked her tree-cloth dresses short so that she could move easily and often went naked, or nearly so, like her mother.

Reggie spent even more time behind Number Seven.

The tension in the air was unsettling, and I found myself leaving the cathedral during the day to go out among the trees.

The special white firs around Treaty gave off a sense of deep calm. Juan had said that he planted many of them and helped them grow quickly, as he’d done with Alacrity.

“I got ’em all over here. They’re kinda like you, Last Chance — half-light and free.”

I learned not to ask about his pronouncements. Whatever he knew about me, he could keep to himself.

“I know about the song trees, the white firs, but where are these puppy trees that you keep talking about?”

“Where they belong, my friend. Where they belong.”

One day I left the camp early to go out among the trees. It was easy to pick out a tree that Juan had brought along because of the slight singing vibration it gave off. Sitting under the boughs of one of those young firs, I had the feeling of motion and peace. It was the opposite of being in a convertible racing down a straight road on a flat plain; even though I was standing still, there was the illusion of moving.

I was sitting in a grove of those special trees, wishing that I had brought my History along, when Alacrity came up. She wore a short dress of tree cloth with wooden buttons down the side. She bent down to lay her bow and arrows against the tree. You could see most of her powerful, long legs, and her breasts seemed to point wherever she happened to be looking.

She turned to me then.

“Hi, Chance,” she said. Then she moved close just like the child she still was.

“Hey, Alacrity. What’s goin’ on?”

“Nuthin’,” she said.

We sat there for a few moments, looking into space.

“When I was out there with Bones,” Alacrity said, “I could hear you calling for me. I could hear you when I was sleeping and I could feel myself gettin’ bigger and stronger. And I could hear you calling for me, and all I wanted was to come back here to you.”

She put her hand on the inside of my thigh.

“I wanted you to do it to me,” she said.

“Oh, yeah?” I tried to sound nonchalant.

“Uh-huh.” Her hand moved up slightly. I was very aware that the fabric of my tree-cloth pants was no thicker than skin.

“What do you want now?” I asked.

It was a first kiss for her. A first kiss as a woman, that is. She pushed her lips against mine and shivered. I wanted to believe that she was just a young woman coming to a man she thought she could trust.

It was a sweet kiss, and I needed love.

But Alacrity had been like a little niece to me only a few weeks before. I wanted her but had no intention of giving in to that desire. I’d like to say that I pushed her away and told her that there would be other men for her. But other circumstances separated us that day.

“You guys better stop that!” he shouted.

Alacrity was on her feet, nocking her arrow in the direction of the shout. Through the dense tangle of leaves, maybe sixty yards away, I could see a form that I knew had to be Reggie. With the impossible speed of a dream, Alacrity pulled and let her arrow fly.