by Scott Azmus
On her third call, the barrel swings toward her.
I lunge. Too slow. The barrel looms large and bucks. My face stings. Hot barbs tear through my cheek and ear. I sail backward and land solidly in the burning mineral grit.
I hear Father swearing and pumping the barrel. I hear myself wail. The sand cradles me. I hear the metal on metal rush as Father plunges another dart into the barrel.
Taloned digits grasp my ankles. A red blur blots the sky. My back shrieks agony as the sand rasps beneath it.
A baby cries. For the first time, I shift my gaze from the bright triangles to the veranda far below. My family is reacquainting themselves. All have returned for this occasion. The central residence and all the surrounding village swells with my progeny. All the babies are here. I enjoy watching them. The simplicity of their moods and actions pleases me.
The baby cries. One of my granddaughters coos to it. Its cries stretch on and on. She sings. The cries become intermittent wails. Finally, when it is quiet, I can hear the smiles in the adult voices as they congratulate themselves.
Someone sings. I wake on my belly and try to scrub dried tears from my eyes. My fingertips grate against a convex plate of desiccated bark. The singing wavers, drops to a hum, and stops. “Wait, young human. Do not touch.”
That voice. I remember it as if from a dream. I pull my hand back. I can only open one eye. She is there. She is with me. She sketches a diagram on a sheet of translucent gypsum. Her look is wary. At her side, a crude bandage seeps with bright blood. I look away.
Whitish green and faded rose color the desolation. Striated towers of gypsum and ulexite cast the only natural shade upon the salt-encrusted pan. Dry, penetrating heat warps a distant stony scarp, above which I see a long dead forest. Withered roots claw the air and skeletal trees lean precariously. The cliff’s base is a tangle of fallen carcasses.
I run my hand over the same dried wood from which the Vrin has built her shelter. It pulls the moisture right out of me. The dense grain whispers with the hushed voice of wind across autumn’s last leaves. Curls of shaved wood carpet the floor. I look at her carving, but the picture is too faint to mean anything to me. Again, I look away.
We are perched upon a shallow terrace directly upslope from the crash site. Through the weave of dried timber, ragged bits of metal flash in the sunlight. I can’t guess the distance. I wonder how Rob is doing down there. A twinge of guilt courses through me. Rob is only five.
Stiffly, I sit up. I stare into the distance, at nothing. I want her to ask me what is bothering me, but dare not speak first. Her hiss of sudden pain pulls my gaze around. She bends double and her dark tongue laps at her wound. I fight a choking swell of guilt to say, “I’m sorry. My father doesn’t mean to—”
“Hush.” She looks up from her wound. Her flesh is dark, the exposed bone achingly white. I recognize the classic crescent slash of a Shierna blade. I see his favorite throwing knife half buried in the shavings. “We do not know one another well enough to exchange lies. Your father is a mercenary murderer. No more. You know this.”
She’s right. I know it. Father boasts of having the only Shierna blades this side of the Havvark Nebula.
I get my first real look at her as she cleans the wound further. Small feathers carpet her narrow breast and belly, but she is not a bird. Longer feathers, these blue and iridescent, form long silky tufts along her back. I imagine them braided. Beneath, I see lustrous diamond scales and an intricate netting of tiny blood vessels. Beneath that, firm cords of agile muscle. Her eyes close with each dipping of her tongue and then flash with finely parallel lines. Her look says that she does not trust me.
What at first looked like a beak is pliable and rubbery. She molds it around every chorded sound. “You have not moved for three sun cycles. I was becoming concerned. I must examine your dorsal side.”
I turn away so she can see. “My back.”
“I am sorry I injured your back.” Her talons whisper in and out of leathery sheaths as she picks sand from the bloody gouges. I clench my teeth and do not protest.
“Are you a queen or princess or something?”
She cranes her neck over my shoulder and sweeps her head up so both latticed eyes swing toward me. Her stare is reluctant. Her voice is proud. “I am a Vrin warrior.”
“Father called you ‘your majesty.’”
“He is ignorant. Must we debate this?”
“No.”
She pushes herself up with the fluid grace of the consummate predator. I marvel at my lack of fright. “My name’s Cal,” I say.
Her neck feathers rise and her voice gains a musical trill I can’t duplicate. “Pella.”
“Is it true what you said: Father can’t survive here?”
“I am not a visionary. He squanders much that would help your family survive.”
“They’re not my family.”
“They are human. They are yours.” She yanks and twists my arm. I do not cry out even though I can feel the ends of two bones meshing beneath my flesh. “Ah, you too are a warrior. Very good. We shall serve each other well.”
We spend the next days trapping rodents and sweeping salt hoppers from their hiding places. Pella finds fresh water in the deep roots of withered plants. I collect impossibly light branches for the continued erection of our home and for her endless carving. Each night, at her insistence, we visit Father’s camp to leave a portion of our gatherings.
Late one night, well past the darkest, coldest hour, I linger to explore. His wife sleeps in the far tent. I circle it. She does not stir and I come next to my sisters’ tent. Susan and Caroline sleep the dreamless sleep of the exhausted. They find our gifts each morning. They prepare all the meals. They keep the camp running. They will not rise until the sun bakes their tent. Rob’s shelter is next to last in line. I worry about him. I want to warn him, maybe ask him to come away with me. I pause at the tent flap. Voices; the usual propaganda.
Father stopped working on me almost a year ago, but I imagine Rob’s face in rapt attention as he spins his ugly tales about our mother. I listen closer. Ah. It’s the one about Mother’s supposed adultery. Father’s voice rises and falls with all the finesse of a master storyteller. At times he whispers some question. Sometimes he growls at Rob’s naive answers. Through it all, I hear the slurring of his words and the calm, attentive breath of my little brother.
When Father finally leaves, I push into the tent. Rob is half asleep in his bundle of rough sheets. “Cal!” he shouts.
“Hush!” I freeze until sure I hear no footsteps. The single oil flame gutters and spits until I lace the entry flap shut. “Hey, Rob. You’re not buying any of that guff, are you, pal?”
Tears well in his eyes. He carefully drags his arm from under the blanket. I follow the scars from his shoulder to his back. Not fresh, they’re maybe two days old. My own back aches just looking at them. His stare is sullen, defiant.
I don’t blame him for his resentment. “Come with me. The Vrin, her name’s Pella, is real nice. We hunt, we build things, we even tell stories.”
“Why don’t you just come back?”
“Can’t.”
He turns from me and the sheet shudders with dry, dry tears. After less than a minute, I carefully tuck the sheet tight under his chin. He’s asleep.
I crawl to the storage tent. Its thin panels shudder with the winds of approaching dawn. It reeks of alcohol and—
My mouth waters. I pull aside several full liquor crates. I drop to my knees and scratch white powder from a crate of hidden rations. I tear my fingernails in sudden urgency. Jaw muscles tighten. I gulp saliva.
The crate slides open. I paw through it and back away. Bitter tears cloud the darkness. Two dozen emptied ration packs, one plastic spoon.
My fist closes on a jury-rigged screwdriver, bent and blunted. I jab it into another crate. Glass breaks and texadrine laced quas pours into the thirsty sand.
I raise the weapon for another strike.
Susan scr
eams. I rush to her shelter. Father did not go to his own bed. Caroline cowers under her cot. Susan fights father as he pins her arms wide and drools a kiss across her face.
She screams and jabs her toes into his groin. Father backhands her to the floor. He roars and raises a lash. Shards of woven metal flash. I step forward. The lash curls around my forearm, stripping flesh as I pull it away. Father turns. He pales.
My voice breaks halfway through my words. “Go away!”
Father’s breath is more than 100 proof. His words are thick and slurred. “Who, the hell?” he asks. His palm knife whips by me and hits the tent flap hilt-first. I’m shaking hard, but step closer to him anyway. His fist swings. I duck under. His recovery is comic. He collapses onto his knees as if corkscrewing into the alkaline soil.
I look to my sisters. Their stares are hard, accusing, and hateful. Despite everything, they love him. Always have. I am about to haul him out of the tent when the pumping of the tranquilizer gun breaks the new silence.
I dive under the shelter’s far end.
The shot never comes.
After watching Father’s wife lead him away, I return to the storage tent. I spend the rest of the night opening liquor crates and each of the seventy-two bottles therein. Discarded caps litter the workbench. The floor is saturated. Salt hoppers push from the surface and gasp.
At dawn, I run from the campsite. Around mid-day, Father’s anguished wail echoes from the surrounding cliffs. I hide from Pella’s stare and continue doweling timbers together in the pattern of her instruction.
My great-granddaughter, little Elisandra, knocks softly on the arm of my rocking chair. I stare and stare until her wide, dark eyes come into focus.
“Momma say time eat,” she says.
I trace a gnarled knuckle down her cheek. It is so smooth. So smooth. She leans into me like a cat and grins. I smell cinnamon tarts and honeyed shampoo. “Time eat.”
“Thank you, darling,” I say.
She pouts. “I not darling! I mousy.”
I give her my deepest chuckle. I reach to tickle her. She laughs and twists and pins my hand to her frail chest. I hug her.
“I love you,” I say.
She laughs and dances away. “Time eat.”
My joints ache as I rise. But she is gone. I lift my cane, but then slump back into my chair. I lift the polished resinwood to my nose. The tang of the dry, dry wood anchors me in the past. I smile.
When not collecting knotty timbers or wood for Pella’s carving, we collect stones from as far away as we can travel. The drag line chafes my chest and under my chin. The woven basket constantly catches on risers of ulexite and salt. They shatter and clink behind us. My toes rake the interbedded clay and white powdered trona. “Why do we have to go so far when there are these rocks all over?”
“These minerals do not even retain the heat of the day. And soon, very soon, we will be too busy to travel so far for what we need.”
I dump my load in the shade of her rising structure. It has grown into the shape of an inverted bowl. As usual, her wary glare admonishes me not to follow her within.
The structure rises and rises. Sweat runs down my face as I bind a cross beam into place twenty, maybe thirty, meters above the ground. When finished, I squat on my ropy scaffold and look down into the camp. Even from this distance, I feel Father’s baleful stare. A coppery flash at his lips tells me that I didn’t find all of his liquor.
Pella pokes from a dark passage to announce that she requires more stones. “Be careful,” she warns.
I grin. At least she doesn’t add, “And don’t get dirty.”
As I pull the gritty cobbles from the scarp, their coolness surprises me. The dry, penetrating heat of the salt pan has not reached more than a few centimeters into the rock face. I wonder why. And I wonder why we never considered climbing the cliff. I shade my eyes to gaze up the stony incline. What’s up there? Is all of Denholm so severe?
I drop another cobble into my shoulder harness. My thoughts drift while my fingers search out the next stone. Back on Endebar, Dad used to take us to the beach. We’d gather stones and he’d throw out a block of wood or an empty bottle. Rob’s rocks rarely made it to the water, but the rest of us would pretend the block was a competing merchant or a pirate running our blockade. Our stones became asteroids or missiles. We whistled and hissed and boomed sound effects until the shore sounded like a war zone. My shots always came the closest. After a while, I couldn’t miss. That’s when Dad took to blasting the things out of the water with his pistols. We stopped going to the beach after that.
Tears well, but do not slow my fingers. That was before Father seized control of the company. Long before the quas seized him. I rasp another cobble from the strata. I heft it and circle my index finger around it. I stand this way for I don’t know how long, but finally drop it into my sack and return to Pella.
She thanks me for the stones, but seems distracted and moves in a peculiarly ponderous way. I wonder if she is ill. I don’t see her for days.
I bind the last timber into place and trace her diagrams. I gaze up at the flat-topped, crown-ridged dome. It is, as far as I can tell, complete. I am proud. The entire structure gleams in the noon sun. Where is Pella? I can’t find her. I want to show off.
I crawl through the dome’s silent labyrinth. Hot winds blow inward along the narrow passage. The sand warms beneath me as I journey to its core. I know I have entered the innermost chamber when the air flow leaves the ground to shoot straight up the center of Pella’s dome. I sit with hands propped against my thighs. The room is no more than three meters across and, in the darkness, infinitely tall.
I waddle forward until my knees crash against something. My eyes are adjusting, but not fast enough. My fingers brush the cobbles. Pella has paved the floor with them. Hundreds radiate from a central pit. I count five bluntly tapered, football-shaped stones erected within. I move closer. Their speckled surface is pliant to my wondering touch. I move back. These are not stones, but eggs.
Eggs!
A skittering beside me warns that I am not the only visitor. A white scorpion crab regards me from the edge of the paving. It is as large as my doubled fists. The darkness magnifies the crisp clatter of its chitinous claws. I draw my legs under me as another blade-clawed scorpion heaves itself free of the sand.
I feel a kind of growl building in my chest. Both clatter forward while sidling to face me across the shallow pit. The first totters on the brink beside the eggs. One swipe and the leathery sacks will split to deliver a feast.
It watches me intently while its partner moves behind it. I pry a pair of paving stones from the warm sands. The first thumps behind them and, as their eyes swivel—oh so briefly—I leap the pit and grind the second down upon them. The cartilaginous crunch sends tremors deep into my guts.
Something else, much larger, moves across the room’s far side. I prepare to dive upon it, but relax instead. It is Pella. Her feathers have molted and strands of reptilian skin hang all about her. Her lips are white and her talons cracked. “You have done well. You are the royal guardian.”
I kill another dozen scorpions within the hour. This goes on for days. I carefully remove each from Pella’s dome. Their arms and tails still jerk and lance even days after.
Sharp bladed shadows stalk me. The dusky sea breeze begins to chill. The pyramids flash brighter and brighter. As I seal the window, the trees whisper their secrets.
My daughters whisper, too. Their children sleep in their arms. Their husbands gather in the light of flickering fires. I smooth a quilt across my knees. Smoke settles on the breeze, tinting our sunset red.
Later, when the wind shifts, I crawl from my burrow to adjust our meager windbreak. I’m tired. I don’t know how much longer I can guard the nest. Pella wanders out to stare at the star-speckled sky. I ask her how long until her eggs hatch.
Her cloak of half-shed skin sways with her shrug. “Your task is nearly concluded.” Her tone pulls my gaze to her eyes
. They are damp. I look past her. A landing craft streaks the night. Somewhere beyond, one of Father’s starships watches and waits.
“Cal!” Rob runs toward us. “Cal!” He turns every few steps as if to assure himself that the landing craft is still descending. He stops at the edge of the dome and stares at Pella. It is not the first time he has seen her. He helped unload the cages when we first landed. But now he stares and with her slightest movement, he screams. He screams and races back toward the camp.
I follow him. The landing craft touches down. One of the survival shelters overturns in the downdraft.
I race from gypsum spire to gypsum spire and silently circle the camp. By the time I’m close enough to see clearly, a pilot’s jacket hangs from Father’s shoulders. This is the closest I’ve seen him in months. He looks more frail and bent than I remember. He hefts a heavy autoblaster. He thumbs and clears the safety. The dull whine sets my teeth chattering. “Which starship? Who’s in command.”
The landing craft pilot follows the motion of the weapon. “Negotiator, Sir. J.S. Halverson commanding.”
“Fine, fine.”
“We spotted your signal tower, or dome, or whatever, from low orbit. It’s a miracle you all survived. Except…well, I’m sorry about your older boy.”
Father pins her with a long stare. “Don’t be. He refused to submit to rationing and, late one night, the Vrin dragged him off and made a meal of him. We buried his bones in the dome’s foundation on the third day down. Now—” He flips the autoblaster from hand to hand. “—I’ll bury the fucking Vrin.”
I race to meet Father halfway up the slope. He is alone. His blaster hums steadily. He stares past my scarred face and his eyes flicker to and back from Pella’s dome. This is the first time in years I’ve seen him sober.
“What the hell are you doing here? You’re sure as hell not welcome to leave with us...”