Hothouse - Brian Aldiss [103]
Soon a roaring somewhere ahead told them of a waterfall. Peering into the gloom, they saw a light. It was burning on what, as far as they could discern, was the lip of the cliff. The procession halted, bunching protectively together.
‘What is it?’ Gren asked. ‘What sort of creature lives in this miserable pit?’
Nobody answered.
Sodal Ye grunted something to the talking woman, who in turn grunted at her mute companion. The mute companion began to vanish where she stood, rigid in an attitude of attention.
Yattmur clasped Gren’s arm. It was the first time he had seen this disappearing act. Shadows all about them made it the more uncanny, as a ragged incline showed through her body. For a while her tattoo lines hung seemingly unsupported in the gloom. He strained his eyes to see. She had gone, was as intangible as the resonance of falling water.
They held their tableau until she returned.
Wordlessly the woman made a few gestures, which the other woman interpreted into grunts for the sodal’s benefit. Slapping his tail round his porter’s calves to get him moving again, the sodal said, ‘It’s safe. One or two of the sharp-furs are there, possibly guarding a bridge, but they’ll go away.’
‘How do you know?’ Gren demanded.
‘It will help if we make a noise,’ said Sodal Ye, ignoring Gren’s question. Immediately he let out a deep baying call that startled Yattmur and Gren out of their wits and set the baby wailing.
As they moved forward, the light flickered and went over the lip of the cliff. Arriving at the point when it had been, they could look down a steep slope. Lightning revealed six or eight of the snouted creatures bouncing and leaping into the ravine, one of them carrying a crude torch. Ever and again they looked back over their shoulders, barking invective.
‘How did you know they’d go away?’ Gren asked.
‘Don’t talk so much. We must go carefully here.’
They had come to a sort of bridge: one cliff of the gully had fallen forward in a solid slab, causing the stream to tunnel beneath it before splashing down into the nearby ravine; the slab rested against the opposite cliff, forming an arch over the flood. Because the way looked so broken and uncertain, its hazards increased in the twilight, the party moved hesitantly. Yet they had hardly stepped on to the crumbling bridge when a host of tiny beings clattered up startlingly from beneath their feet.
The air flaked into black flying fragments.
Savage with startlement, Gren struck out, punching at small bodies as they rocketed past him. Then they had lifted. Looking up, he saw a host of creatures circling and dipping over their heads.
‘Only bats,’ said Sodal Ye casually. ‘Move on. You human creatures have a poor turn of speed.’
They moved. Again the lightning flashed, bleaching the world into a momentary still life. In the ruts at their feet, and just below them, and over the bridge side, reaching down to the tumbling waters, glistened such spiders’ webs as Gren and Yattmur had never seen before, like a multitude of beards growing into the river.
She exclaimed about them, and the sodal said loftily, ‘You don’t realize the facts behind the curious sight you see here. How could you, being mere landlivers? – Intelligence has always come from the seas. We sodals are the only keepers of the world’s wisdom.’
‘You certainly didn’t concentrate on modesty,’ Gren said, as he helped Yattmur on to the farther side.
‘The bats and the spiders were inhabitants of the old cool world, many eons ago,’ said the sodal, ‘but the growth of the vegetable kingdom forced them to adopt new ways of life or perish. So they gradually moved away from the fiercest competition into the dark, to which the bats at least were predisposed. And in so doing the two species