Sydney J. Van Scyoc by Starmother

Author:Starmother [Starmother]
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780425064672
Publisher: Berkley
Published: 1984-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

THAT FATEFUL morning after her babe was stolen, Piety straggled up from the vines. Her skirts and shirtwaist were wet with mud, caked on one side, slippery on the other. Her face, she knew from examining it with fingertips, was a grimy horror. Like some tentback monster, she realized weakly. The fingers she pulled back were blue with cold. As she sat, her entire body resisted her, an unwilling bag of grain she had to forcibly heft upright.

For a while she sat, dumb with exhaustion. Then, cumbersomely, she gained her feet. Erect, she swayed perilously, a human prominence jutting above some vast and threatening plain. Briefly her head was a light, hollow vessel riding dizzily on an overlong neck, blown by otherworldly winds. Then it filled and settled and she was standing in the familiar gray-green viny profusion of the tangles. Hoisting her skirts, she turned, trying to locate some familiar landmark. But there was nothing to orient herself upon. There was no settlement, home or otherwise, no outbuildings, no roadway, no field. There was only a musty grove on the horizon—and stretching vines.

Lost, she stood for a long while at the center of an empty world. Occasionally, returning from the fields, she had lingered behind her work crew. But that bore no relation to the present situation. Today she was totally alone, open to wind and rain, ready victim for whatever dark forces might move across the face of this Nelding-world when no human eye was watching.

She was paralyzed there forever, every joint frozen.

Then she snatched up her skirts and, in a sudden, activating burst of panic, began to run. Mud splashed over her legs. Vines caught her feet. She made no effort to select direction. She flashed across the vines blindly, panic-driven, until her breath would no longer sustain her flight. Then she crumpled down. Her second flight was less precipitous. The grove drew her, offering shelter from the threatening openness of the vines. Her third spurt of running brought her there. She plunged under its tenting limbs like an animal harried to its den. Tossing herself down, she gasped and sobbed drunkenly for breath. She was safe, enclosed in dimness.

But then, lungs replenished, adrenalin still surging in her bloodstream, she found her mind torturingly clear. The entire procession of recent events marched across her memory in sharp tones, the starhand riding past, her own defection, the birth of her babe, its loss.

It was a short procession. Another followed it, a train of future happenings. She saw herself stumbling out into the vineland again, wandering alone until she found some landmark, some cluster of cabins, perhaps, or the roadway, then delivering herself to the first work party she met. But when its Father reared up and bellowed his indignant questions, what did the muddy wraith reply, her eyes swollen from grief, her skirts and shirtwaist solid with mud, her hair unknotted around her ears?

Piety shrank against the leaves, trying to find words for that wraith to defend herself by.

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