Collected Short Fiction, page 655
Once, ten years ago, Elena had seen Vesuvius: that dark ashy cone, those sinister fumaroles, the coiling wisps of greasy smoke. Touch a cigarette to the ground, and it ignited. She had gone right over the lip of the volcano and had stared into its black heart, looking down on the death of Pompeii and shivering. Here she did not dare get so close to the crater. It was sacred ground to these people. The villages began in the valley and straggled up the slopes for hundreds of yards. Above the last houses lay a thick green belt of cloud forest, untouched by cultivatic a, untouchable, holy. Above that lay an ancient cinder zone, leading to the summit. When the first rumbles of the disturbance had sounded, Elena had wanted to climb the peak and evaluate the danger at close range. Haugan had forbidden that. He was not only her lover but the chief of the three villages, the King of the Golden River, and she could not disobey him. So here she was, atop the uninhabited neighboring peak, looking across the valley at the deadly mountain.
“Much dead when it blows up,” Vondik said.
“Surely everyone will be a safe place by then,” said Elena.
The children laughed: a shrill chorus, rising in pitch, then descending. When she had first come to this world, she had found its style of laughter intolerably strange. Now she was used to it, and it charmed her. But to laugh in the face of a throbbing volcano?
The sky was darkening. Purple, feathery puffs of cloud drifted in from the east, from the sea, heavy with rain. Against this darker background Elena could plainly see the incandescent material shooting high in the air from the funnel of cinders across the island. There were distant hissing and roaring sounds. A fountain of cinders and pumice spurted forth, bright red, cascading down the slopes. Through her spy-lens Elena watched a shower of glowing little particles lose itself and grow dark in the wilderness of ash that bordered the summit. She trembled. How long could it be before the volcano was hurling its matter into the sacred forest on its flanks and then spewing its seed into the huddled villages themselves? How could everyone be so calm about it? The ground seemed to be shaking, even here, kilometers from danger. Elena knew that beneath this entire island, both peaks of it, conduits of liquid fire crossed and recrossed. A mighty beast was stirring far beneath her feet.
Vondik’s hand was gone from her thigh, now. She looked for the boy and saw his agile, naked form high in a tree, reaching for a gleaming winefruit. He seized it and jumped; the other children caught him and bore him triumphantly to her side.
“A winefruit for you.”
Apple for the teacher. She took it, touched his cheek to thank him and bit into it. The children watched anxiously. She smiled to tell them that it was ripe and delicious. Winefruits were left to ferment on the bough, but if they were left too long they were sickening. Elena felt faintly giddy as the alien alcohols attacked her metabolism. The children gamboled about her. How could they be so cheerful? Their homes would be destroyed. These folk were no simpletons, no backward rustics. In their own way they were shrewd and sensitive. Yet they did not appear troubled.
Markun, one of Vondik’s many sisters, capered and pointed. “Now the lightning comes!”
Darkness had fallen with tropical suddenness. The pearly sky had grown ashen, and now the pumice fountain flamed like a giant Roman candle, and above and around it hovered a black cloud of erupting gases. And in the cloud flickered white sheets of forked lightning. At first Elena thought the lightning came from the purple rain cloud she had seen earlier, but no, there was that cloud sitting on the forest like a veil spread out in the tree-tops, well below the cinder zone. This lightning had something to do with the forces being unleashed within the volcano. It crackled and danced with demonic fury.
“We’d better start back to the village,” said Elena nervously. “It’s late. It’s getting dark.”
They did not object. Whooping and leaping, they preceded her down the steep incline, waiting every few moments for her to catch up.
Elena found the downward path more strenuous than the ascent. Gravity here pulled a little less harshly than on Earth, and she was in fine physical shape, thirty years old, tight-fleshed, strong. But the mountain path was cut at a devilish angle. Going up, it asked no more than stamina, which she had in abundance. Going down, it imposed ugly strains on her slender ankles. She managed. Soon they were on level land again, crossing the gentle sway of the valley. The first houses appeared. Dinner fires had been kindled. Instead of the twenty children who had gone with her to the lookout point, Elena now found herself surrounded by fifty, a hundred, a hundred and fifty. They greeted her with piercing cries of pleasure, crowding close, lightly slapping their hands against her bare body.
It had been easy enough to get accustomed to going naked here, but Elena had never conditioned herself to the sight of so many children. On Earth, where births were so strictly regulated, children were rare sights. Here such regulation was unknown; and, besides, this was a race that bore quintuplets as a matter of course. Elena had never heard of a Utter smaller than three. Six and seven births at a time were not uncommon. And the children thrived. The air was warm and gentle, the valley fertile, the lake generous with its yield.
Boisterously the children escorted her to the Parting of the Ways.
These were all one people, one culture; yet the three villages were separated by barriers of custom and caste as high as mighty walls. Largo, the lowland village, was a farming settlement. Hulgo, at the base of the volcano, was a town of artisans and potters. Gilgo, higher on the slopes, produced the laborers who did the heavy work, the fellers of trees, the builders of houses and canoes. Elena saw no necessary reason for this arbitrary division, except that it provided an exogamic structure for these insular folk. A man of Gilgo took his wife from Largo or Hulgo; no one ever married within his home village. That kept the population mixing, at any rate. Except for marriages, there was little contact between one village and its neighbor.
Haugan, the chief of all three villages, lived high up in Gilgo. He ruled the lower two villages through surrogates; there was little real ruling to do, merely the proclamation of festivals and holidays and the occasional imparting of justice. Elena took the Gilgo road, with only Vondik, Markun and a few of the other children following her. Clammy dampness had descended on the island. She was tired now. Her breasts heaved, her skin felt sticky. She leaned more heavily on the climbing-stick Vondik had cut for her. As she entered Gilgo she paused a long moment, a lean, naked, blonde Earthwoman far from home and clad in worries and humidity.
She looked up at the smoking summit, dimly visible between the trees. A gigantic eruption cloud now towered over the peak, laced with lightning in continual flashes. It seemed to her that the subterranean rumbling was louder. She had the illusion that the air was full of minute particles of ash, and she felt grimy and soiled from them, even though a finger drawn across her chest did not produce the expected streak. She hurried onward, to the large hut that she shared with Haugan.
The king came out to greet her. They embraced solemnly. “What have you seen?”
“Fire and smoke and lightning. Haugan, it’s going to erupt!”
“Not yet. Not yet. Dinner is waiting.”
He led her inside. He was taller than she—the tallest man in the village, as was fitting—and moved with such grace that she never failed to feel cowlike in his presence. Alien as he was to her, she had always responded in an immediate physical way to him, from the day she had come here, a foolish expatriate looking for illumination in the outworlds. She had not expected to become the bride of an alien.
But of course he was not all that inhuman. He had too many fingers and too many joints; the texture of his skin was strange, his eyes were all pupil, he was without hair or fingernails, and she did not dare to think much about the arrangement of his internal organs. Yet the general pattern of his body was humanoid. Evolution had come to the same conclusions here as on Earth about how a dominant mammalian species should be designed, and Haugan stood upright, had two walking limbs and two grasping limbs, carried his forehead, eyes and teeth in the same flat plane and found it convenient to cover his women with his body in the act of love. Elena had ceased to regard him as bizarre.
They squatted on the mat.
Dinner—stewed meat, green wine, starchy vegetables—was served in silence by Haugan’s maid Leegar. Her belly swelled with a new litter. She was six months along. Haugan, of course, was the father; it was a chief’s prerogative to take concubines. The girl was shy but not at all apologetic about it. She smiled as she set Elena’s food before her. Leegar seemed to be saying, “You may be the king’s wife, but I carry the king’s children!”
Elena had never quite grown used to the sight of the women, with their triple rows of breasts reaching from throat to navel. It was a sensible arrangement, considering the habit of multiple births here, but it seemed unutterably alien to her in a way that Haugan’s minor aliennesses no longer did. The feeling seemed reciprocal. When they lay together at night, Haugan’s hands often came to rest on the flat, taut drum of her chest as though in unending wonder at the absence of the lower four breasts.
Haugan said, “You aren’t hungry?”
“The volcano frightens me, Haugan.”
“God in his time sends all blessings. We are prepared for what may befall.”
“But I saw it clearly,” she said.
“It’s like a bubbling caldron. At any minute, it might bury us in lava.”
“The priests are keeping watch. The lava will not come for several days.”
“Several days! But—”
She hesitated. Often, she found herself lecturing or haranguing him, slipping into the role of the educated Earthwomen telling the native chieftain what the universe was all about. But she hated that facet of herself. This was his world, his island, his kingdom; and it was folly to imagine she was superior to him merely because her civilization had interstellar ships and his made pottery from coils of clay.
“What do you suggest?” he asked quietly.
“I don’t know. It only seems sensible—”
“Tell me.”
“—to start evacuating the three villages. Move everybody across to the other mountain. We’re just sitting here under the crater waiting to be killed.”
“There is time to evacuate.”
“Haugan, there are thousands of people—the domestic animals, the tools, the furniture—”
“We will not leave so quickly.” He poured more wine for her. Elena drank and grew giddy. Haugan remained calm—insanely calm, she told herself. He was like a rock, steady, assured of all he did. In every decision, from judging a paternity dispute to ordering the flight from the eruption zone, Haugan seemed equally unhurried and equally confident, a true king.
When the meat was gone, they went outside and walked through the village, king and consort, hailed by all. From the promontory on the eastern slope they studied the volcano above them. The eruption cloud had grown greater, as had the flaming fountain coming from the heart of the cinder cone. Now it seemed that the angle of that Roman candle had changed, dipping to point to the west. Elena saw the red reflection sprawling like a bridge across dark Lake Muuk. Every few minutes there came small booming explosions from above. Steam and black ejecta spurted high and fell back. The air had a singed smell. Elena looked at her arm and found a coating of fine ash trapped in the golden down on her skin. She showed it to him. Haugan stroked her body and murmured, “You have the soft fur everywhere on you. Not only here and here and here. Except for a few places, your skin has the light strands of fur all over. Wonderful!”
“Haugan, you’ve noticed that before. I’m showing you the ash, now. The air’s full of it.”
“Yes. And it will get worse.” He did not seem to care.
Later, several old men came to see him. He sent Elena inside and squatted with them before the hut. They talked more than an hour. Elena could not understand their words—the old men spoke in thick mumbles, and Haugan replied in whispers—but now and again she seemed to sense sharp disagreement. Something the oldsters said made Haugan angry, and she heard him snap sarcastically at them. The conclave broke up at last. He came in and lay down beside her on the sleeping-mat.
“What did they want?” she asked.
“To talk about the volcano. To make plans.”
She said suddenly, “Haugan, do they blame me for the eruption?”
“You? Why should they blame you?”
“The king has taken a wife from another world. Maybe they think that was sinful and is bringing destruction.”
“If they thought it was sinful, they would never have allowed the marriage.”
“I know some of your people objected to it.”
“Elena, you know we must marry outside our village. It is the rule.”
“Outside the village, yes. But to bring in a woman from a different world—”
“You fill your head with wrong ideas,” he told her. “Is this some imagining of your own planet, that it is an evil omen for the king to marry a foreign woman? Here it is acceptable. Necessary, even. The more foreign, the better. And you are the most foreign. No one blames you for the fire overhead, Elena. I swear to that.”
She was not soothed. Obscurely she believed that the old priests held her guilty for the impending disaster. No one had voiced even a hint of such a feeling to her, but she could not shake the notion away. It was too easy for her to think in glib anthropological terms. The exogamic exchange of women here had significance for her as the passage of unspoken messages between tribal groups; the women who embodied those silent messages were units of economic, biological and symbolic significance exchanged in a manner which kept the general structure—the meaning—of the island society coherent and dynamic. Haugan had incorporated her into that structure. But what was the unvoiced message that she carried, if not one of doom and destruction? The islanders did not marry mainland women, despite the rule of exogamy. Was it not a blasphemy for Haugan to have married an alien? Elena could not shed her sense of guilt.
In the morning she saw that the cataclysm had not yet arrived. But it was closer. Now, periodically, the crater belched steam and pumice. A thin steam cloud hovered over the lake. At the summit, the cinder cone seemed to have grown by at least a dozen meters since the previous afternoon. It rose precariously higher on the lakeward side than on the valley side, and about midday some new convulsion split the higher shoulder, breaching it to form a horseshoe-shaped rim. A dribble of clinkers became a talus slide reaching toward the upper margins of the forest. The forest itself was dingy with an overlay of ash, and every gust of wind now brought light drifts of debris into the village.
Among the people of the Golden River villages, life seemed to go on as it always had.
The men felled trees and hewed them into canoes. The women tended their babies. The children played. In the lowlands, the harvest continued. No one acted alarmed. Haugan was away most of the day, conferring with priests and elders in the official huts at the upper end of the village. Elena momentarily expected the evacuation order to come, but it did not.
Darkness was early that evening. The sky was so clotted with ash that it would not let the late sunlight through.
There was feasting after dark. Elena eyed the pillar of fire above the village. It seemed to her that she could feel bursts of hot steam on her nakedness, the exhalations of the monster. Soon would come a vomit of steamy mud, and boulders of pockmarked tuff, and then the devastating river of lava.
That night Haugan occupied himself making lists on sheets of bark. He had no time for Elena. Throughout the night he conducted interviews in low muttered tones. At last he seemed to be showing some sense of an emergency, but only he and his coterie of withered priests appeared at all involved with the gathering force of the eruption, and even they were calm. She was the only one to feel fear.
Now it was the third morning since the rumblings and roarings and hissings had begun. Through the ash-clouded sky the sunlight looked sickly and strained. Small explosions were coming every five minutes. A layer of ash covered the village lightly.
Haugan said, “Come with me to bathe, Elena.”
She was glad to get out of Gilgo and put more distance between herself and the growling volcano. Together they journeyed through the lower villages and to the shore of the lake. They both were grimy, though his smooth body had retained less of the ash than hers. The water was serene, but when Elena touched it she drew back, hissing at its warmth.
“It’s boiling, Haugan!”
“Not yet. We can still enter it.” He waded out, hip-deep, and beckoned to her. She stepped into the shallows again. Once in Japan she had taken a bath that she was certain would scald her; this was at least as hot. Yet she forced herself forward, until the water swirled up about her loins, and knelt to submerge her body to the chin. The mud underfoot was voluptuously warm. She dug her toes into it to hold back the pain. Haugan, beside her, ran his hands over her as if to scrub away the grime. She did the same for him. After perhaps five minutes they rushed from the water, cleansed. Her skin was puckered and unnaturally pink; his appeared unchanged.
Standing by the shore, Elena looked to her left, toward the smoldering volcano, and then to her right, at the quiescent taller peak. Why were there no villages on the other mountain? It was not holy; beasts were tethered there, children roamed it, but no one lived there. The Golden River folk all clustered about the lesser peak, and she had never thought to ask why. Over there, a close-packed jungle covered everything, except for the roads and the grazed places and the ancient coating of cinders at the very summit.
