Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,253

the pace gradually quickening. Mab, during a brief respite between the attacks of the wolves, swooped up to cast light on the way ahead of them. This ought to have been a featureless sea of grass. But instead there was the hill, so close to them that Mab faltered and recoiled from it. The hill was in the wrong place; it was much steeper than when they had left it; and it was moving.

Mab could not cast enough light to illuminate the whole thing at once, and in any case the impressions of Adam and Eve were confused and fragmentary. But they saw giant stout stumps projecting from its bottom, like legs fashioned from piles of boulders glued together and lubricated by mud, and a midsection that looked like the hill they remembered, and the great tree at the top, looking like a head of stiff hair. The legs took turns moving in a sort of gait that had as much in common with mudslides and avalanches as it did with walking. The thuds they had felt coming up out of the ground were its footfalls. It would have given them pause, had they not been pursued by worse. The wolves faltered and the tone of their voices changed. “Run to it as fast as you can!” Mab urged them. “Whatever the hill-giant does to you cannot be as bad as what these wolves have in mind.”

Adam and Eve put their remaining strength into a last sprint. The hill settled, planting both of its bouldery legs, which collapsed into rock piles that were in the next instant covered and enshrouded by the green skirts of its slopes. Adam was losing his strength but Eve darted ahead and found a way up, and he followed her, just pulling his foot clear of the foremost wolf’s jaws, which snapped harmlessly in the air.

Looking back down at that beast, and the other members of the pack who soon joined him, they had the impression that the animals were slipping down and away from them. They understood that the hill was still reshaping itself, stretching upward to form a vertical cliff all the way around, just a little too high for the wolves to jump to its top. Branches crackled, and a bramble wove at the cliff’s edge, forming a living parapet. Then all became still, and the hill was as it had been before, except in a different place, and with a different shape.

Daybreak found them camped on the summit of the hill at the base of the great tree. Looking west they could see the paths that they had trampled into the grass during their headlong retreat. Intertwined with this were the arcs made by the wolves as they had pursued, curving inward from time to time to attack, then veering away as Mab had swooped down to dazzle them. To the east, they could see the trail that the hill-giant had made as it had strode toward them, scattering wet black earth and stray boulders and leaving craters where it had planted its legs.

The feet of Adam and Eve were bleeding from many small cuts. Their legs had been nipped by fangs and scratched by branches. But the largest and bloodiest wound was that on Adam’s hand. They had never seen blood before and so watched it leak from him in fascination.

From time to time Eve would stand and make a circuit of the hilltop, looking down the slope in all directions to the grass sea below. A few wolves lingered around the base of the hill, looking up at her in a way that she now understood was indicative of hunger, and a tendency to see her as food. But none of them could breach the defenses with which the hill had surrounded itself.

Adam for his part was content to lie in the shade of the tree watching the blood run out of his hand. The flow lessened as the morning wore on, but he had become pale and listless. “So many new fluids escaping my body,” he remarked, which was a puzzlement to Eve since she knew only of the blood. “If bodies are like other things, then what has been lost must needs be replaced if I am not to be diminished.”

“In the Garden we saw bugs eating the stuff of plants, and birds eating bugs,” Eve said. “The worm ate an apple, and recommended it. And the wolves seem to have eating us in mind.”

“O Spring!” Adam