was precious little charity for able-bodied persons who didn’t provide for those years.
Sunset caught him on a promontory overlooking the ocean. The ground dipped away on three sides, on the south into a little, tree-covered valley. On the crest beyond the dell was a house that looked like the one the postmaster had described. But Sherk still wasn’t in a hurry. This was the most beautiful view of the day. He watched the plaids shade into limited colors, the sun’s trace fading from the far horizon.
Then he turned his automobile and started down the steep dirt road into the dell. The canopy of the forest closed in above him… and he was into the trickiest driving of the day, even though he was moving slower than a cobber could walk. The auto dipped and slid in foot-deep ruts. Gravity and luck were the main things that kept him from getting stuck. By the time he reached the creek bed at the bottom, Sherkaner was seriously wondering if he would be leaving his shining new machine down here. He stared ahead and to the sides. The road was not abandoned; those cart ruts were fresh.
The slow evening breeze brought the stench of offal and rotting garbage. A dump? Strange to think of such a thing in the wilderness. There were piles of indeterminate refuse. But there was also a ramshackle house half- hidden by the trees. Its walls were bent, as if the timbers had never been cured. Its roof sagged. Holes were stuffed with wattle-bush. The ground cover between the road and the house had been chewed down. Maybe that accounted for the offal: a couple of osprechs were hobbled near the creek, just upstream of the house.
Sherkaner stopped. The ruts of the road disappeared into the creek just twenty feet ahead. For a moment he just stared, overwhelmed. These must be genuine backwoods folk, as alien as anything city-bred Sherkaner Underhill had ever seen. He started to get out of the auto. The viewpoints they would have! The things he might learn. Then it occurred to him that if their viewpoint was alienenough, these strangers might be less than pleased by his presence.
Besides… Sherkaner eased back onto his perch and took careful hold of the steering wheel, throttle, and brakes. Not just the osprechs were watching him. He looked out in all directions, his eyes fully adapted to the twilight. There were two of them. They lurked in the shadows on either side of him. Not animals, not people.Children? Maybe five and ten years old. The smaller one still had its baby eyes. Yet their gaze was animal, predatory. They edged closer to the auto.
Sherkaner revved his engine and bolted forward. Just before he reached the little creek, he noticed a third form—a larger one—hiding in the trees above the water. Children they might be, but this was a serious game of lurk-and-pounce. Sherkaner twisted the wheel hard right, bouncing out of the ruts. He was off the road—or was he? There were faint, scraped-down grooves ahead: the real fording point!
He entered the stream, the water spraying high in both directions. The big one in the trees pounced. One long arm scratched down the side of the auto, but the creature landed to the side of Sherkaner’s path. And then Underhill had reached the far bank, and was rocketing upslope. A real ambush would end in a cul-de-sac here. But the road continued on and somehow his hurtling progress did not carry him off to the side. There was a final scary moment as he emerged from the forest canopy. The road steepened and his Relmeitch tipped back for a second, rotating on its rear tires. Sherkaner threw himself forward from his perch, and the auto slammed down, and scooted up over the hillcrest.
He ended up under stars and twilit sky, parked beside the home he had seen from the far side of the dell.
He killed the engine and sat for a moment, catching his breath and listening to the blood pounding in his chest. It was that quiet. He watched behind him; no one pursued. And thinking back… it was strange. The last he had seen, the big one was climbing slowly out of the creek. The other two had turned away, as if uninterested.
He was by the house he had seen from the other side. Lights came on in the front. A door opened, and an old lady came out on the porch. “Who’s there?” The voice was sturdy.
“Lady Enclearre?” Sherk’s voice came out in kind of a squeak. “The postmaster gave me your address. He said you had an overnight room to rent.”
She came round to the driver’s side and looked him over. “That I do. But you’re too late for dinner. You’ll have to settle for cold sucks.”
“Ah. That’s all right, quite all right.”
“Okay. Bring yourself on in.” She chuckled and waved a little hand toward the valley Sherkaner had just escaped. “You sure did come the long way, sonny.”
Despite her words, Lady Enclearre fed Sherkaner a good meal. Afterward they sat in her front parlor and chatted. The place was clean, but worn. The sagging floor was unrepaired, the paint peeling here and there. It was a house at the end of its time. But the pale glimmer lamps revealed a bookcase set between the screened windows. There were about a hundred titles, mostly children’s primers. The old lady (and she was really old, born two generations earlier than Sherk) was a retired parish teacher. Her husband hadn’t made it through the last Dark, but she had grown children—old cobbers themselves now—living all through these hills.
Lady Enclearre was like no city schoolteacher. “Oh, I’ve been around. When I was younger ’n you, I sailed the western sea. “A sailor! Sherkaner listened with undisguised awe to her stories of hurricanes and grizzards and iceberg eruptions. Not many people were crazy enough to be sailors, even in the Waning Years. Lady Enclearre had been lucky to live long enough to have children. Maybe that was why, during the next generation, she settled down to schoolteaching and helping her husband raise the cobblies. Each year, she had studied the texts for the next grade, staying one year ahead of the parish children, all the way to adulthood.
In this Brightness, she had taught the new generation. When they were grown, she was truly getting on in years. A lot of cobbers make it into a third generation; few live the length of it. Lady Enclearre was much too frail to prepare for the coming Dark by herself. But she had her church and the help of her own children; she would have her chance to see a fourth Bright Time. Meanwhile she kept up with her gossip, and her reading. She was even interested in the war—but as an avid spectator. “Give those bleeding Tiefers a tunnel up their rear, I say. I have two grandnieces at the Front, and I’m very proud of them.”
As Sherkaner listened, he stared out through Lady Enclearre’s broad, fine-screened windows. The stars were so bright up here in the mountains, a thousand different colors, dimly lighting the forest’s broad leaves and the hills beyond. Tiny woodsfairiestick ed incessantly at the screens, and from the trees all around, he could hear their stridling song.
Abruptly a drum started beating. It was loud, the vibrations coming through the tips of his feet and chest as much as through his ears. A second banging started, drifting in and out of synch with the first.
Lady Enclearre stopped talking. She listened sourly to the racket. “This could go on for hours, I’m afraid.”
“Your neighbors?” Sherkaner gestured toward the north, the little valley. It was interesting that, except for her one comment about his coming the “long way round,” she hadn’t said a thing about those strange people in the dell.
…And maybe she wouldn’t now. Lady Enclearre scrunched down on her perch, silent for the first significant period since he’d arrived. Then: “You know the story of the Lazy Woodsfairies?”
“Sure.”
“I made it a big part of the catechism, ’specially for the five- and six-year-olds. They relate to the attercops cuz they look like little people. We studied how they grow wings, and I’d tell them about the ones that do not prepare for the Dark, the ones who play on and on till it’s too late. I could make it a scary story.” She hissed angrily into her eating hands. “We’re dirt poor hereabouts. That’s why I left for the sea, and also why I eventually came back, to try and help out. Some years, all the pay I got for my teaching was in farmers’ co-op notes. But I want you to know, young fellow, we’re good people…. Except, here and there, there are cobbers whochoose to be vermin. Just a few, and mostly farther up in the hills.”
Sherkaner described the ambush at the bottom of the dell.
Lady Enclearre nodded. “I figured it was something like that. You came up here like your rear end was on fire. You were lucky you got out with your auto, but you weren’t in great danger. I mean, if you held still for them, they might kick you to death, but basically they’re too lazy to be much of a threat.”
Wow.Real perverts. Sherkaner tried not to look too interested. “So the noise is—?”
Enclearre waved dismissively. “Music, maybe. I figure they got a load of drugged fizzspit a while back. But that’s just a symptom—even if it does keep me awake at night. No. You know what really makes them vermin? They don’t plan for the Dark… and they damn their own children. That pair down in the dell, they’re hill folk who
