Days of Grass by Tanith Lee

Author:Tanith Lee [Lee, Tanith]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Astra Publishing House
Published: 2022-08-23T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

• • •

There was a dog licking her face.

She struck at it and it sprang back.

“Esther,” someone said.

Esther looked up and saw one last shadow squatting facing her across the corridor.

“Come on, Esther. I’ll help you. Didn’t I come back for you, when I saw you weren’t with the others?”

“Cury. Cuoory.”

“I know your fingers are broken. Did you? We’ll get someone to fix it.”

Esther smiled.

“Scared to go back in the pipe alone, Cury? Don’t worry, you won’t have to. Most of us are going to have to stay and roast.”

“No. Anyway, the fire’s been put out. And we don’t need the pipe. Come on and I’ll show you.”

Smoke blew along the corridor, but it came from the right now, it smelled spent. There was hardly any light, none of it red.

Cury came at her, and caught her sound hand. He tried to pull her to her feet.

“Go to Hell,” she said.

“That’s where we are, isn’t it?” He grinned. He was excited. “Hell, just like your Standish said in his manual. The Underworld. And Persephone, having eaten the pomegranate seeds, doesn’t want to leave.”

Something shifted in her brain. She let him haul at her, and helped herself, and stood up.

“What?” she asked.

“That’s fresh air blowing in your face. Can’t you tell? Part of the tunnel’s collapsed farther on, there’s a way out. A way up.”

Holding her right hand, he began to run. She found herself running with him.

They turned a corner, down a tunnel. Behind them came a soft gushing sound of falling powder. Running made her feel sick. She closed her eyes.

Suddenly she was very cold. Her nostrils widened on a smell of frost and growing things, of wind and cool stone and sap: The scents of the springtime city.

Cury patted her eyelids gently. “Look, Esther.”

She looked.

A great staircase, real steps woven in the rubble, twisted ironwork and torn brick. At the top, a circle of sky, graying in the hour before dawn.

She stared at the circle. It was perfect. How could it be so perfect?

Cury pulled at her. They started to climb. It was hard, with only one hand. She thought she would fall. Pebbles and bits of broken stuff, dislodged by their passage, rattled away around them. Scraps of clothing fluttered, memorial to the earliest ascent of the multitude. A man lay, trampled, between two shards of metal like stiff grieving arms.

“I can’t,” said Esther. She lay with her face on the steps.

“Oh, you must,” said Cury. In the watered starlight, she saw there was blood on his shirt, and on his cheek. “Do you want me to break another of your fingers?”

She got up, and began to move again.

“That’s better,” he said.

“Shut up,” she spat at him, dirt in her mouth.

The circle of the light came wavering nearer and nearer. She passed two more bodies, and recognized one with bemused surprise as a dead Doctor Philips.

She could see the moon now, a spring moon like a crystal. She had to try to use her other hand at the lip of the circle.

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