Moongather by Jo Clayton

Author:Jo Clayton [Clayton, Jo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: sf_fantasy
Published: 1982-05-15T20:00:00+00:00

Water. They were deep under the surface. She panicked, but her body was clamped in place. After a moment she calmed as she found herself breathing without pain, floating like a fish in the water. The Noris’s hand left hers and she was drifting about as his WORD shook the water about her. She dived and flew through the water like a strange fish, the Noris forgotten behind her. She curved her body and swooped in a grand spiral, silent laughter bubbling out of her, filling the blue water with silver bubbles that tickled her when she swam through them. A long blue-grey fish with a white belly swam out of the blue and arched with her in her joyous flight. The large dark eyes sitting forward in its head were warm and friendly. As it swam under her, she caught hold of the fin in the middle of its back and rode astride as the fish danced with her, taking her down and down, then up to the surface, bursting through the barrier film for a golden moment that piercing agony in her lungs; then they were back again in cool blueness.

The summons came, twisting through the water, pulling them back and back to something she’d forgotten but remembered as terror. A dark figure drew them, fishes on a single hook. She tried to uncramp her fingers from the fin and kick the fish away from her. She couldn’t. She was bait to trap this fish. Bait. She saw and remembered the Noris then, and knew she was bait tossed in the water to catch this particular fish. She lay along its strong muscular back, felt the knobs of the spine moving under her, whispered soundlessly, I’m sorry, sorry, sorry.

The fish hung in the water in front of the Noris, its body moving slowly as it adjusted automatically to the slight tug of a sluggish current. Serroi tried to move, but could not, lay stretched out along the fish, struggling to lift her head, keeping it turned so that the eye-spot did not touch the fish anywhere. The Noris drifted closer. His hands curved with terrible gentleness about her head and eased it down until her face was flat against the slippery skin, her eye-spot pressed to the fish’s spine. The Noris’s hand continued to rest gently on her head as he used her to reach into things he would have no access to otherwise, into the life-affirming forces. The cool water that bathed her and sustained her began to stink and thicken as she tried to fight him away. Things came swimming around, circling around her as she lay on the fish’s slowly rotting body, beautiful translucent things that thickened and rotted with the water, that came slowly to the Noris and submitted to him. When he touched them, they blackened, were whole again, but whole in another way, solid black, shiny, filled with a terrible energy and slaved to the Noris. The water grew stiffer, blacker until

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