The branch went through them rather easily. The creature shifted above. Its free wing beat a moment.
Then, in a voice like a child’s, but with an odd timbre under it not a child’s at all, it said distinctly: “Use the blood!”
Rahm pulled his branch back sharply.
“To free me,” the voice went on — strained, as though its position was manifestly uncomfortable, “use the blood!”
“Thou speakest!” Rahm said, haltingly, wonderingly.
“Just like you, groundling! Big voice but stuck to the earth! Come on, I tell you…use the blood!”
Rahm stepped back again. Then, because his foot went lower down (on that slanted rock) than he expected it to, he looked back sharply so as not to trip.
The cave beast’s blood had rolled against one filament’s mooring on the stone, and the cord’s base was steaming.
Now the filament came free to swing over the cave floor. On a thought, Rahm pushed the stick’s bloody end against a clutch of cords beside him. There was a little steam. Half the cords parted. When he felt something warm by his foot, Rahm looked down: blood puddled against his instep. But though it parted the cords, against his flesh it didn’t hurt or burn.
Rahm spoke, once more. “Thou wilt not hurt me if I free thee?”
“Free me and you are my friend!” The voice came on, like an exasperated child’s. “Quickly now, groundling — ”
“Because,” Rahm went on, “I have been hurt too much when I thought what would come was friendship.”
What came from the trapped creature was the same sound that Rahm had already thought of as “mewing,” though now, since the creature had spoken, the sound suddenly seemed to be articulated with all sorts of subtle feeling, meaning, and response, so that — had it been on a lower pitch — he might have called it a sigh.
Suddenly Rahm threw his stick aside, stepped back across the rock, reached down, and grabbed one of the dead thing’s hairy legs, to drag it through the cave. By two legs, he hoisted it onto a higher rock shelf, climbed up beside it, then got it and himself to a shelf even higher. Squatting, he took a breath, frowned deeply — and wiped his hand across the gory wound. Then he grasped first one cord and then another, feeling them tingle within his sticky grip, dissolving.
After popping a dozen, one more and the bound creature fell a foot. The free wing beat. That voice — like a child who has something wrong with its breathing — declared: “You take care!”
The creature mewed again.
Once more Rahm smeared up a handful of blood and began to work.
Later he tried to recall how he put all those aspects that told of an animal together with that childish voice that still somehow spoke of a man. As Rahm tugged cords away from the incredible back muscles, some of the soft hair stuck or pulled loose — and the muscles flinched. But the membrane-bearing limb those muscles moved — what he’d started to think of as an arm — was thicker than his own thigh and more than triple the length of his leg! It was all webbed beneath with leathery folds, folded down and caught between spines that were impossible distortions of fingers — fingers longer than arms! The teeth were small in that grimacing mouth. Once, in the midst of the pulling and parting, he saw them and the wedge-shaped face around them laugh at something he himself had missed. But it was still good to see laughter in the face that was not a face, because the nose was broad as three fingers of a big-handed man laid together; the sides of the head were all veined ear; and the eyes had pupils like a cat’s — small as a cat’s too, which was strange, because, standing at last on the shelf of rock, with one long foot (whose big toe was as long as, and worked like, Rahm’s thumb), the creature was a head shorter than Rahm. “Here now, help me get my other foot free?” said this man, this beast, this Winged One with thigh and shoulder muscles as thick as little barrels.
Holding to rock, holding to that astonishing shoulder, Rahm leaned out, bloody-handed, and caught another cord that dissolved in his grip. “Now”—he pulled back, with a quick grunt — “we must find some water to wash off this stinking stuff!” Small twigs and leaves caught up in the webbing fell to the cave floor.
“As a pup”—the Winged One grimaced, flexing — “I used to sneak off with the rough and rude girls who went to collect these threads for our ropes and hunting nets — till my aunt caught me and said it was not fitting for one of my station. Well, don’t you know, an hour ago, hanging with the blood a-beat in my ears, I was thinking how ironic that I’d most likely end my life lashed up in the sticky stuff, once the beast, crouching just above the cave entrance there inside, grew hungry!”
They climbed down, Rahm at a loss for what so many of the words (like “rude,” “fitting,” “station,” and “ironic”) might mean. “When I was a child,” Rahm said, supporting the creature above him, “the elders of my village always taught us to fear thy people — and to stay clear of thee, should one of thee ever alight near our fields!”
“As well you should!” declared the high voice, as the wings, all wrinkled and stretched not a full fifth of their spread, still went wall to wall in that high, narrow cave. “We always tell our little ones, whenever they come near you, to act as frightening as they can — before they fly away! Oh, my friend, we’ve heard — and seen! — some of the things your kind can do to its own. And that does not portend well for what you might do to our kind or others. Oh, I don’t mean your own village in particular — Çiron at the mountain’s foot. But we fly far of Hi-Vator, and we fly wide of Çiron; and we listen carefully — and often what we hear is not so good. So our elders have always thought a policy of self-containment, helped on by a bit of mild, if mutual, hostility, was best. I never took it seriously myself — though some I know do nothing else. Certainly I’m glad it’s broken through here and now in this direction.
“What’s your name, groundling?”
“Rahm. And thine?”
The Winged One tilted his head. “Vortcir.”
On the cave floor, Rahm bent, picked up the blood-blackened end of the branch he’d used to kill the cave beast. He looked at it. Blood, dry now, had gone dark all over his fingers and palms and wrists, stuck about with dirt. “And how wert thou trapped by this thing, Vortcir?”
The Winged One cocked his head the other way. The short creature’s great shoulders lifted their folded sails — half again as high as Rahm — and brought them in around himself. “I was careless.” The expression (on a face that seemed to have so few of them) was embarrassment. “In the night I fled into its cave, unaware that the danger I fumbled into was greater than the one I fled.”
“What danger didst thou flee?”
Vortcir’s face wrinkled. “In the night a great wailing came to deafen us. It filled us with fear and we scattered from our nests, blundering low among the trees, yowling higher than the crags, till, unable to find our way, I saw many of my people driven mad by that terrible wailing. I could hear the echo from this cave. I flew in here, thinking the sound would be less. But I flew into the web and, by struggling, only entangled myself more. And when I excited the cave-beast enough, it would come over and throw another couple of threads about me. Uhh!” Vortcir paused. “But you arrived…how is it that you stray so high among the mountains, groundling Rahm?”
Rahm waited while a wind stilled outside in the rocks. “I too fled the great wailing that came last night.”
“I hear in your voice many strange things,” said Vortcir, frowning. “Will you now go down to your nest?”