by Kate Elliott
The boy walked in front of her. He had a good stride, confident and even jaunty, and he glanced back at intervals to make sure she hadn’t fallen behind or to warn her about an overhanging branch and, once, a snake that some earlier passerby had crushed with repeated blows. It had bright bands on what she could see of its body, a colorful, beautiful creature. Dead now. She sweated, but he had a canteen that he shared with her—not water but a sticky sweet orange drink. A rain shower passed over them, dense but brief, to leave a cooling haze in its wake. All the time they walked, he kept the big plateau to their left, although they did not ascend its slopes but rather cut around them along a maze of dirt trails.
“Who was that woman?” she asked after a while.
“My great-aunt? She’s some kind of crazy inventor, a genius, but she got into trouble with corporate politics. She was in prison for a long time, so I never saw her but I heard all about her. She was a real, uh, cabrona. Now maybe she is more nice.”
Rose could think of nothing to say to this; in a way, she was surprised at herself for asking anything at all. Just keeping track of her feet striking the dirt path one after the other and all over again amazed her, the steady rhythm, the cushioning earth, the leaf litter.
The forest opened into a milpa, a field of well-grown maize interspersed with manioc. A pair of teal ducks flew past. When they cut around the edge of the field they saw a stork feeding at an oxbow of muddy water, the remains of the summer’s flooding. Lowlands extended beyond, some of it marshy, birds flocking in the waters.
Another kilometer or so through a mixture of milpas and forest brought them to San Lorenzo Tenochtitlán on the shore of El Río Chiquito. Here the houses had a more modern look; half a dozen had solar ceramic roofs. There was a fenced-off basketball court and a school with a satellite dish and a plaza with a flagpole where the Sunseekers sat in a distraught huddle on the broad concrete expanse, staring anxiously westward while a few onlookers, both adults and children, watched them watching the horizon.
It was late afternoon. The sun sank quickly toward the trees.
The Ra sat forlornly on the grassy field behind the school, within sight of the old museum. Its stubby wings looked abraded, pockmarked, where the solar array had been stripped off.
“Rose!” Akvir jumped to his feet and rushed to her, his hand a warm fit on her elbow.“We thought we’d lost you!” He was flushed and sweating and a bruise purpled on his cheek, but he looked otherwise intact. He dragged her toward the others, who swarmed like bees around her, enveloping her with cries of excitement and expansive greetings. “You’re the hero, Rose! They said you begged for our lives to your dad and he asked them to let us go. And they did! All because of your father! They’re all fans of your father! They’ve all seen his shows. Can you get over it?”
She stood among them, drowned by them. All she could do was stare past their chattering faces at the boy who had led her here. He had fallen back to stand with a pair of village women, his arms crossed across his bare chest and the rifle, let loose, slung low by his butt. One of the women handed him a shirt; she seemed to be scolding him.
“Look!” screamed Zenobia, still clutching her torn clothing. “There they are! There they are!”
A pair of sleek, glossy hovercars banked around a curve in the river and leveled off by the boat dock, but after a moment during which, surely, the navigators had seen the leaping, waving, shouting Sunseekers, they nosed up the road to settle, humming, on the grassy field beside the disabled Ra. Akvir and the others jumped up and down, clapping and cheering, as the ramp of the closer ’car opened and three utility-suited workers, each carrying a tool kit, walked down to the ground. They ignored the crying, laughing young people and went straight for the Ra. After about five breaths, the second ’car’s ramp lowered and a woman dressed in a bright silver utility suit descended to the base where she raised both hands and beckoned for them to board.
The sun’s rim touched the trees. Golden light lanced across the village, touching the half-hidden bulk of the great stone head beyond the museum gates.
With a collective shout rather like the ragged cry of a wounded, trapped beast who sees escape at long last, the Sunseekers bolted for the ’car. Halfway there, Akvir paused, turned, and stared back at Rose, who had not moved.
“Aren’t you coming?” he shouted. “Hurry! Hurry! They’re fixing the Ra, but meanwhile we’re going on. You don’t want the sun to set on you, do you?”
“I’m not coming.”
Everyone scrambled on board, one or two shoving in their haste to get away. Akvir glanced back at them, shifting from foot to foot, as Zenobia paused on the ramp to wave frantically at him. The sun sank below the trees.
He took two steps back, toward the hover, sliding away as they were all sliding away, following the sun.“You don’t want to stay here with the night-bound? With the great lost?”
“It’s too late,” she said.
She had always belonged to the great lost. Maybe everyone does, each in her own way, only they don’t want to admit it. Because no matter how diligently, across what distance, you seek the sun, it will never be yours. The sun shines down on each person indifferently. That is why it is the sun.
His fear of being caught by the approaching dark overcame him. He gave up on her and sprinted for the ramp; as soon as he vanished inside, it sealed up and the second hover lifted off with a huff and a wheeze and a high-pitched, earsplitting whine that set all the dogs to barking and whimpering until at last the ’car receded away over the trees, westward. The first hover remained, powering down. The technicians had lamps and instruments out to examine the scarred wings of the Ra.
Rose stared at the lines the grass made growing up in the cracks between the sections of concrete pads poured down in rectangles to make the huge plaza. The eruption of grass and weeds created a blemish across the sterility of that otherwise smooth expanse. In the village, music started up over by the museum where someone had set up a board platform in front of the fence. Guitars strummed and one took up a melody, followed by a robust tenor. A couple of older men began dancing, bootheels drumming patterns on the wood while their partners swayed in counterpoint beside them, holding the edges of their skirts.
The boy approached across the plaza, torso now decently covered by a khaki-colored long-sleeved cotton shirt that was, not surprisingly, unbuttoned halfway to the waist. He no longer carried the rifle.
“Hey, chica. No hard feelings, no? You want to dance?”
“I’m waiting for my brother,” she said stoutly.“He’s coming to get me. He said to wait right here, by the museum.”
“Bueno,” agreed the boy. “You want a cola? There’s a tienda at the museum. You can wait there and drink a cola. I’ll buy it for you.”
Shadows drowned the village, stretched long and long across houses and grass and the concrete plaza. The transition came rapidly in the tropical zone, day to night with scarcely anything like twilight in between. She had not seen night for almost three months. Was it possible to forget what it looked like, or had she always known even as she tried to outrun it? Had she always known that it was the monster creeping up on her, ready to overtake her? The daylit gleam of the Ra’s wings was already lost to theft and now its rounded nose and cylindrical body faded as shadows devoured it.
Laughter carried from the museum as a new tune started up. The smell of cooking chicken drifted on the breeze. Dogs hovered warily just beyond a stone’s throw from the women grilling tortillas and shredded chicken on the upturned, heated flat bases of big canister barrels.
“You want a cola?” repeated the youth patiently.“I’ll wait with you.”
“I’ll take a cola,” she said, surprised to find that all her tears had dried. She set her back to the west and trudged with him toward the museum, where one by one lamps were lit and hung up to spill their glamour over the encroaching twilight. A woman’s white dress flashed as she danced, turning beside her partner.
“Your dad’s El
Sol?” he asked, a little nervously. “En verdad? I mean, like, we all see all his shows. It’s just amazing!”
“Yeah.”
Inside she was as hollow as a drum, but down and down as deep as the very bottom of the abyss, there was still a spark, her spark. The spark that made her Rose, no matter who anyone else was. It was something to hold on to when there was no other light. It was the only thing to hold on to.
“Yeah,” she said.“That’s my dad.”
The sun set.
Night came.
A SIMPLE ACT OF KINDNESS
A CROWN OF STARS STORY
CLOUDS MASSES, BLACK AND brooding, over the hills and the great length of forest that bordered the village of Sant Laon. They sat, almost as if they were waiting, and the wind died down and tendrils of mist and spatterings of rain were all that came of them through the day. At evening mass, at a twilight brought early by the lowering clouds, Deacon Joceran spoke solemnly of storms called up by unnatural means, and she warned all the villagers to bar their doors and shutters that night and to hang an iron knife or pot above the door and a sprig of rosemary above the window.
“No matter who knocks, invite no one in. May the Father and Mother of Life bless us all this night.” So it was that not one soul saw the woman ride into town just ahead of the first fierce lashings of the storm. No one but Daniella.
The back door to the inn slammed shut and set the baby to crying, again, but it was only Uncle Heldric. His cloak seemed to sparkle in the lantern light of the hearth room of the farmhouse.
“Lord and Lady have mercy,” said Aunt Marguerite, signing the circle of unity above her breast.“It looks like snow and ice on your cloak.”
“And this midway through summer,” said Uncle as he brushed the stain of snow off his shoulders. “’Tisn’t a natural storm, Deacon was right in that.” He cast his gaze round the room and found Daniella, where she sat on a stool in one shadowed corner, trying not to be noticed while she spun a hank of wool into yarn. “Girl, you take Baby upstairs and send down your brother. Seven of the sheep have got out and we must get them in before we lose the beasts to whatever walks in this storm. Night’s coming on soon.”
With the shutters closed and only a thin line of light showing around the cracks of the door and the window, it seemed like night already. A wind howled, whistling along the roof. Smoke from the hearth curled up toward the smoke hole in the roof, and a few flakes of snow spun into view in the patch of sky visible through the hole, only to melt at once, vanishing into the heat.
“I’ll go,” said Daniella. Upstairs lurked many things, not least her cousin Robert, who had been pestering her for months now, ever since her first bleeding came on her, and anyway, unlike her brother Matthias, she wasn’t scared of storms. She liked them. They had life in them, even if Deacon Joceran warned that some storms had demons and other ungodly life swirling in their winds and rain. Better outside in a storm than trapped in here.
“Ach, well,” said Uncle, knowing her well enough to forgive her impertinence. And she was better with the sheep, and not afraid of her own shadow, the way Matthias was. “You come, then. Put on a tunic over that. It’s bitter cold out. And the sheep clipped and likely to freeze.”
“It won’t last,” said Aunt, but she drew the circle again, not wishing to tempt the Evil Ones.
Uncle merely grunted and Daniella was quick to abandon the baby, who had stopped wailing in any case and was now busily tearing the hank of wool to shreds and stuffing bits of wool into its mouth.
“Matthias!” Aunt called loudly, through into the common room, where the ladder that reached the loft rested against one bowed wall of the long house.“Come and mind the baby.”
Daniella gave a last shuddering glance at the baby and hurried outside after her uncle. That’s what came of simple acts of kindness, of hiring a landless man to work a season for them because he was fair-spoken and likable and down on his luck. He had stayed the summer, worked hard for the harvest and the slaughtering, and then gone on his way . . . but it had been her cousin Dhuoda who had died giving birth to the child he had gotten on her, and who knew where he might have been by then. Perhaps getting another pretty young woman with child, and going on his way. And with Dhuoda’s death the life had gone out of the house.
That was the way of it, Deacon Joceran had said, that the Lord and Lady gather to their breasts the best-loved and the sweetest, to sing as angels crowned by stars.
Outside, the slap of winter wind on her face shocked her. She stopped, staring at the dusting of snow and the long tendrils of fog that laced through the village longhouses, coating half-ripened apples with frost and withering the asperia blossoms where they grew in clumps by the back door. Then Uncle shouted at her, his words lost in a gust of wind. She hurried after him.
Four sheep had strayed out onto the commons, huddling together near the pond, and she herded them back toward the stables, carrying a half-grown lamb over her shoulders. A cloaked woman—Mistress Hilde—ran from the porch of the church toward her own house, hunched over an iron pot which she sheltered from the wind and the gentle fall of snow as if it were as precious as a casket containing the bones of a saint. Daniella smelled, like someone’s breath brushing her face, a distant stench like a rotting carcass, but then the door into the stables banged open, caught by the wind, and she chivvied the sheep in under shelter. Her cousin Robert, closing the door behind her, brushed against her suggestively. She shook him off. The old sheepdog lay in the corner nearest the door into the kitchen, whining. He had urinated in the corner, so frightened that he wouldn’t even move off the wet straw.
“Gruff,” she said, coaxingly, “Gruff, come here, old boy.” But he wouldn’t come to her.
“Scared the piss out of him,” said Robert, thinking it a great joke, but even so she could hear the shake in his voice. From the other side of the wall, she heard Aunt scolding Matthias, and that made her angry, too. It wasn’t Matthias’s fault that he was sickly, and that he’d been the one five years ago to find their Da’s body in the slough after the spring rains where he had been caught in the branches and dragged under water, drowned by angry water nithies. Even Deacon Joceran had said so, that it was their revenge on Da for him building a dam and draining the south portion of the marsh for a new field. Matthias had been plagued by twitching and nerves ever since.
The door slammed open, shuddering in a new gust of wind, and Uncle Heldric kicked a sheep in before him and passed a bawling lamb to Robert. “Still one missing, the black,” he said. “She got past me, tore off into the woods.” He glanced back behind him, and Daniella saw by the taut lines of his mouth and the glint of white in his eyes that he, too, was afraid, of the storm, of venturing so far away from the house, which was protected by iron and rosemary. An iron knife hung above the stable door, rosemary over the shutters that opened onto the trough.
“I’ll go,” she said, because she knew he would let her, however reluctantly, however guiltily. The holding would go to Robert, with perhaps a field left over for Matthias, but there would be nothing for her except the kettle, knife, and wedding shawl that had been her mother’s, together with the length of green bridal cloth that Dhuoda had been embroidering in expectation of her own betrothal, whenever that might have taken place, though it never would now. Nothing else could she expect to receive from Heldric and Marguerite’s family, hard as times were and burdened now with three orphans, except for a necklace of amber beads that Dhuoda had, with her dying breath, left to her cousin.
As if it were a luck charm, Daniella brushed her fingers over the necklace of beads where it lay beneath her tunic, together with the Holy Circle she had inherited from her mother’s mother. Uncle Heldric handed her his cloak. She wrapped it around her shoulders and went back outside. Hunched down against the tearing wind, she walked out toward the scattering of trees, not truly a wood because so many had been cut down for firewood, that marked the farthest edge of the great forest that lay to the east.
; The black sheep was hard to find, for by now it was full twilight and the ewe’s coat blended in to the fog and the dark lean curves of tree trunks. But Daniella listened and heard a frightened bleating. Her feet knew the paths in this wood better perhaps than her eyes did, and she knew where the sheep wandered . . . down by the stream that wound through the wood and emptied at last into the marsh. Only one branch stung her face as she made her way through the wood and came out on the bank of the stream where the little ewe was poised between the trees and the steep slope that led down to the trickle of water and reeds that was all that was left of the stream in the summer heat.
There was no point in chasing it home. It would run off again. She lunged for it, grabbed its hind legs just as it bolted, and brought it hard to the ground, both of them together. It bleated, terrified, and voided all over, luckily missing her, but she could smell excrement and piss. The trees whispered in the wind, calling names, one name, like an old name in a dream. She got to her knees and wrestled the sheep up and over her shoulders. Unaccountably, the ewe calmed. Daniella looked up.
There, on the opposite bank of the stream, were not trees, though she had with that first swift glance thought them trees, so well did they blend in with the wood beyond.
They were creatures.
She stood rooted to the ground with terror.