Ursus of Ultima Thule by Avram Davidson Read Free Book Online

changed in him forever. He dried his eyes, including the one no longer swollen — and he was on his knees and rising when he realized that the perry was no longer there.
    • • •
    He was aware of hunger and thirst, but more of thirst. He was aware of something else, a sound that had been sighing in his ears for as long as he had been in this shelter which somehow the perry had made for him. Sometimes the sound was as faint as a baby’s breath; sometimes it grew almost as loud as the wind which carried it and sometimes louder, the rider overbearing the steed. Somewhere not so very far away was a river and now, in this moment of his great thirst (water perhaps needed to replenish that shed by his uncommon tears), great was the sound of its rushing.
    The perry had stood upright, but Arnten found he was obliged to stoop, although certainly the grasses and the light, light withes would have yielded easily to his head. And so, while at the curiously woven opening, stooping slightly and about to go out, he became aware of two things lying almost concealed by the fragrant grasses of the shelter’s floor. One was the witchery-bundle to which both bark basket and knife had been tied by deft and curious perry-knots; the other reappeared to him as though out of his dream-world between the time the Painted Man had beaten him to the ground and the time of his reawakening.
    He recalled it now. When he had felt (and doubtless had indicated) thirst, something had glowed and glittered in the air before him, touched his lips and he had drunk. He had in his semi-thoughts believed it a fragment of a rainbow conveying the cooling rainwater to his lips; or a gigantically distended drop, suffused with multicolored lights, distilling into water on his lips and tongue. Now he saw it to be, less fantastically but not much less wondrously, a flask of some substance unfamiliar to him. Light passed into it and through it and he voiced wordless surprise on observing that he could see
through
it! What he saw was subject to a gross distortion. The flask was iridescent as the fingernails of the perry or the interior of certain shells, shining with a multitude of colors which shifted and changed. And it weighed much less than a vessel of earthenware of the same bulk. He marveled, but did not stop for long to do so; he placed it in the basket along with the witchery-bundle (knife again by hip); he considered what its name might be. For present identification alone he deemed to call it perryware.
    And then he stepped outside, ready to seek his stream.
    The sound of the river was quite strong outside the small grass shelter, shelter so slight that seemingly a fawn could have crushed it by rolling over, now that the protecting presence of the perry was withdrawn. He saw no traces of a fawn, but pausing a moment and wondering what had cropped the small measure of meadow, greenery and flowery, he saw the pellet droppings of the wild rams and — his eyes now opened — here a shred and there a fluff of their wool. His uncle had at one time amassed a small heap of their hooves (begged, doubtless, from hunters) which lay a long while in a corner, oily and strong-smelling. Once a nain had come to trade new iron for old and the rams’ hooves had vanished — but for what consideration and for what purpose he had never asked and never learned.
    The wind brought the river sound stronger, nearer, to his ears; the wind brought a scent of flowers, too. He was on a downward slope and in a moment, following the land contours, he found himself wading through the blossoms — first they were under his feet, then around his ankles; then they touched the calves of his legs, his knee — and he brushed them away from his face. Glancing at his hands, he saw blood.
    Astonished, he looked around. Each clump of flowers grew from a fleshy green pod. Pod? Paw? There had been a wild catton in the village once, though not for long. Taking amiss being prodded with a stick as it lay