Элизабет Мун - Moon Flights

In the fullness of spring, with flowers everywhere and the scent of them filling the nose, Dall Drop-hand, Gory the Tail’s third son, quarrelled with his father and brothers, and went off to find adventure.

“You’ll regret it,” his father said.

“You’ll come crawling back as soon as your belly gripes,” said his oldest brother.

“You’ll find out nobody wants a fool whose only talent is dropping things,” said his second-oldest brother.

His younger brothers and two of his sisters merely jeered. But the last sister cried, and hugged him, and begged him to stay. The others watched, still laughing, and he turned away.

“Wait,” she said. “I’ll give you a parting gift.”

“The only parting gift he needs is a kick in the pants,” said his father. But he stood aside to let the girl scamper to her bed and pull out her treasure, a bit of wood carved in the likeness of a knife. She had found it lying loose among the leaves while nutting the year before. She ran back to her brother, and put it in his hand.

“Take this,” she said. “You may need it.”

It was only wood, and not very sharp, but hers was the only kind voice that day. “Are you sure, Julya?” he asked.

“I am,” she said, standing straight as young children do, upright as a pine, and she flung her arms around him and kissed him. Then she stood back, and he was bound to go, a gawky lad of no particular beauty or skill, out into the world all alone, at the very season when food was shortest, for no one can live on flowers.

He walked off down the path that led to the ford, and stopped to drink deeply of that fast, cold water. He would have taken some in a waterskin, but he had no waterskin. Still it was spring, with water running fast in every brook and rill, and he was sure he would find water at need. Food was another matter. He had no bow, no line for setting snares. In all this wealth of flowers, no fruit had set but wild plums, and they were green and hard as pebbles still. His eye fell on a ruffle of green leaves trembling in the moving water. They looked very much like the greens his mother grew in the back garden. He picked off a piece, and tasted it. Yes. The very same. He picked a handful, and stuffed them into his shirt and set off away from the stream, on a path that narrowed here to a foot’s width from little travel.

By midafternoon, he had passed through the woods near the stream and come out into open country, fields grown up into tall grass and flowers that reached his waist. He had lost the path in that tall growth, and found it again by stumbling over its groove; now he walked slowly, letting his feet feel their way and hoping no snake lurked below, where he could not see through the lacework of white and yellow. In the distance, the land rose in billows to blue hills, but he could not tell how far off they were.

At sunfall, he was still in the fields, wading slowly through the flowers. He trampled out a circle his own length, with the groove of the footpath running across it, and sat down. The footpath made a little tunnel, forward and back, under the tall growth. If he’d been a small animal, he could have used it as a private road and traveled hidden. The thought amused him; he wondered what it would be like to be so small, to see the meadow as a forest. For him, the footpath would make a comfortable hole for his hip, when he lay down to sleep.

The leaves he’d gathered were a limp, unappetizing mess when he pulled them from his shirt, but he ate them anyway and tried not to think of his family at their supper. He lay down then, and sat up quickly as his sister’s gift poked him in the side. He pulled it out and rubbed his finger along the rib of wood. There was still enough light to see that it gleamed a little, where his sister had rubbed it with fat, but not enough to see the design that his finger felt, something carved, not deeply, into it. He kissed the thing, blessing the sister who had given it—useless though it was, it had been her treasure—and lay down to sleep with it in his hand.

He woke in darkness, uneasy, at first not knowing where he was. His shirt had rucked up, baring his back to the chill spring breezes; he yanked it down one-handed but could not go back to sleep. Around him, over him, the grass and flower-stalks rustled in the breeze. So did something else; he sat up, eyes wide. Was that more than star-shadow, that dark movement on the trail? Meadow mice, probably, or the slightly larger field rats. A stoat? A fox?

Laughter ringed him in so suddenly that he felt a shock like cold water. They were all around him, tattered shadows in the starlight, holding weapons that already pricked his back, his sides. Weapons that glinted slightly in that faint light. Laughter stilled to uneasy silence.

“Mortal man, you trespass.” That voice was high, higher than his youngest sister’s, but very clear.

“I’m not a man,” he said. His voice broke on the absurdity of that; he had told his father he was man enough, when his father called him boy once too often.

“Not a man?” the voice asked, mocking. Laughter rimmed the circle again, and again died. “And what, pray, art thou if not man? Art too tall for rockfolk, too uncomely for elvenkind, and having speech canst not be a mere beast, despite the smell…” More laughter.

He found his voice again. “I’m a boy.” Most of the elder folk were kinder to children than adults; he would claim that protection if he could. Surely if his father considered him a mere boy, so also would beings far older than his father.

“I think not,” the voice said. “I think thou art man grown, at least in some things…” The voice insinuated what things, and he felt himself going hot. “And since we found thee asleep athwart our high road, man-grown as thou art, I say again: mortal man, you trespass. And for your trespass, mortal man, you shall be punished.”

The shift of tone, from common to formal and back again, jerked at his mind, confused him. He fell back on childhoods excuse. “I didn’t know…”

“Did not know what? That this was our highway, or that it was forbidden to such as you?”

“Either—both. I was only trying to get away from home…” That sounded lame as a three-legged cow in the night, with sharp points pricking him.

“You drew a circle across our highway,” the voice said. “You drew a circle and then lay athwart, your loins on the path, and you thought nothing of it? No loss to the world then, such an oaf as you.”

“But a circle is holy,” he said. “A circle protects…”

Hisses all around him, as sharp as sleet on stubble; his belly went cold.

“A circle with a line across it negates the protection of the circle,” the voice said. “And when that line is our highway—you have made a grave error, mortal man, and you will indeed be punished. Away from home, you wanted to go? Away from home you shall go indeed, never to return…”

His fists clenched, in his fear, and in the heart hand his sisters gift bit into the insides of his fingers. But what use a little wooden knife-shape against the creatures here, whose sharp weapons were surely harder and sharper than wood?

He had to try. He shifted the knife forward in his hand, and the blade caught the starlight and flashed silver.

“Ahhhh… so you would fight?”

“I… just want to go,” he said. He felt one of the weapons behind prick through his shirt, and jerked forward, away from that pain. The shadows in front retreated, as if that knife were a real weapon. He waved it experimentally, and they flinched away.

“Do you know what you bear?” the voice asked.

“It’s a knife,” he said.

“Thou art a fool, mortal man,” the voice said. “Stay away from our highways; thy luck may change.” The pricks at his side and back vanished; a huddle of dark shapes ran together, vanishing into the tunnel beneath the grass.