“Adam. You’ve had your telephone turned off.” Sigrun’s voice was mildly annoyed.
“Sorry. It’s been . . . hectic.”
“If you require me to carry one, then you are also, in fairness, required to leave yours on. I’ve been watching the reports and been concerned.”
Adam checked his watch, and groaned. Judea was eight hours ahead of him. He’d been stuck at the airport for over five hours at this point, and it was therefore almost midnight where Sigrun was. “Sorry, neshama. I should have called you. My flight, if it leaves today, should depart in the next hour. Otherwise, I think I’m camping right here.”
“Why aren’t they letting flights out?”
“There have been threats called in to the airport itself. Probably just opportunists trying to cash in on the existing fear, but now they have to sweep every plane two or three times to make sure there aren’t any devices aboard—I really don’t want to see any of those ahuizotl, for example, rampaging through the aisle of my flight—and it’s not like dogs can sniff out a trapped spirit in a jar.” He rubbed at his eyes, which burned. But at least hearing her voice took some of the edge off, and lifted the darkness away from his soul.
“Do you wish for me to call Nith and come to you?”
“Sig, I don’t think I’d do well going through the Veil.” He glanced around, covering his mouth as he spoke.
“I would ask him to fly straight, once you were aboard. It would, I think, be faster than the airplane, since I have definitely seen him break the sound barrier.” Sigrun sounded deadly serious. “The biggest problem would be protecting you from his skin.”
“The scales don’t look that sharp—”
“Not the scales. The cold.”
Adam considered that for a moment, and then considered which portions of his body might freeze to the dragon. He still wasn’t sure if he should be vaguely threatened by her obvious attachment to the beast . . . which wasn’t really an animal, any more than a fenris was. Nith just didn’t speak the way a fenris could. But they’d kept up with the aerobatics practice every month that Sigrun was home, so that established a bond. Of sorts. Even if the beast’s tendency to snort ice crystals that were so cold they burned was a touch annoying. “On the whole, I think I prefer that my ass and other parts of my anatomy to stay attached to me, and not to him. I’ll wait for my flight.”
“You’re sure? I’d have thought the idea of going faster than the speed of sound would entice you.” A little hint of a tease. “Not to mention, being home all the quicker.”
“I wouldn’t want to impose. I’ll be home tomorrow. I hope. I love you, Sig.”
“And I you.”
Martius 3, 1986 AC
Adam had decided to put solar panels on the roof of their house. It was his project for the year, and it wasn’t as if Judea didn’t get a fair bit of sunlight over the course of the year, ‘micro-climate transition’ or not. He definitely didn’t remember the city looking this green and lush when he was a child, but he couldn’t object, and really, neither could any of the other residents. So he was up on the old tile roof with Sigrun, moving the collectors into position. He was tied off with a rope to one of the chimneys, for safety, and she was not.
An ungainly winged creature landed on the roof beside them. It had a toothed beak and a crest, and folded its wings up into V-shaped configurations on landing, bracing on them as if they were hands . . . which, in a way, they were. Nothing like it had coursed through the sky for sixty-five million years or so, but Adam glanced up in mild acknowledgement, and nothing more. “I see you’ve figured out how to compensate for the weight of the crest and the drag, Maccis.”
The body of the juvenile Quetzalcoatlus pteranodon shimmered and faded into the body of one of Trennus and Saraid’s children. White hair, fire-blue eyes, and pale skin. Naked, naturally; for shapeshifters other than spirits like Saraid and Lassair this was an issue. Adam took off his shirt and tossed it to the boy, who pulled it on over his head, so that it fell down to his knees. “Yes, I think so, Uncle Adam,” he said, enthusiastically. “I like being able to fly. Mother says I’ll get better once I’m able to adjust my body weight, but I don’t think I’ll ever be able to do that.”
“You could try to emulate a roc,” Sigrun suggested, and lifted another solar panel array into place, not even straining, so that Adam could align it in its mounting brackets.
“Oh, come on, Aunt Sigrun! Rocs aren’t real! They’re just a story!”
“You can ask Erida if they’re real, when next she visits,” Sigrun told the boy.
Adam liked Maccis. Like every last one of Trennus’ children, he’d gone through a dinosaur phase, but on this protean shapeshifter, some of that had stuck. He experimented with forms imaginatively and freely, and saw absolutely nothing wrong with trying to be a deinonychus one moment, and a chimera, the next. It also didn’t hurt that whenever there was a science fiction movie to be watched, Maccis was there, and eager to talk to Adam about the Mars outpost, now a small colony of two hundred people, mostly construction workers and scientists in the Cydonia region of Mars. “You still thinking about aeronautics?” Adam asked the eleven-year-old.
“Maybe. That’s one way to get to go to Mars.” Maccis walked around the roof fearlessly, balancing along a ridge in his bare feet. Adam had long since decided not to worry about the crazy stunts of Trennus’ children. If they didn’t think they’d get hurt doing something, generally speaking, they didn’t. “Mother’s had me talking to plants lately, though. They seem to grow better for me than they do for anyone else besides Inghean. So I was thinking . . . .”
“What?” Adam asked, setting the cordless driver in place, and pushing several screws home into the bracket, while Sigrun held the heavy collector panel in place.
“Well, I could go to Mars and make plants happier growing there. Terraforming. Inghean can make plants that’ll grow there, and I can make them happier about doing their job.”
Maccis sounded so sure of himself, that Adam really wanted to laugh. He wondered, fleetingly, if he’d ever been that young, that . . . idealistic. If he had, it must have been . . . a lifetime ago.
That night, his mother, now eighty-one, bade them good-night. Abigayil was getting increasingly frail, so he helped her up the stairs, Sigrun following behind, and then, after he returned back down to the ground floor, Adam could hear the shower running, and knew that Sigrun was, as usual, helping his mother bathe and wash her hair. No shadow in Sigrun’s eyes; Adam had learned to watch for that. His valkyrie wife could always tell when death was coming. Adam paused in the middle of pouring himself a cup of coffee. She’s on death-watch for someone, though. Kanmi, maybe. Or maybe for the whole damned world.
He pushed the thought away, and went about his business. Mid-way through the night, there was a thump, and a muffled cry of pain. Two sets of eyes snapped open, and two combat-trained people bolted out of bed, rushing across the house to find that Abigayil had gotten out of bed in the middle of the night, fallen, and broken her hip. A rushed trip to the hospital.
Complications.
Pneumonia.
“I miss your father,” Abigayil told Adam, about three weeks later, where she lay in a bed in the same hospital where Maor had died. She looked shrunken in on herself, and her white hair was spread over the pillow. “God should have taken me when he died, you know.”
He was alone with her in the room at the moment; Sigrun had refused to enter. He’d taken it as stubbornness at first . . . until he’d seen the tears in his wife’s eyes. “It’s time?” he’d asked her, in the hallway, horrified. This is a terrible gift of yours, neshama. It’s as bad, in its own way, as your sister’s gift of prophecy.
She’d just nodded, and Adam had swallowed, feeling lost. “Can I ask a favor, Sig?”
Another nod, and he’d taken her hand. “Call Rivkah and Chani for me. Let them know they should be here. And . . . I hate to ask it . . . but Mikayel, too.” Adam grimaced. He hadn’t spoken to his bro
ther since their father’s funeral in 1976 AC. Ten years.
“Families should be together at times like these,” Sigrun had told him, and slipped off to make the phone calls.
In the room, Adam took his mother’s hand. “And then you wouldn’t have seen all your grandchildren grow up,” he chided her, softly. “And Mikayel had a grandson this year. Your first great-grandson. You would have missed all of that.”
“True. But . . . you get used . . . to being around someone . . . all the time.” Her words grew further and further apart. “You grow into them . . . like two trees, leaning on each other. And when they’re gone . . . there’s no one to help you . . . hold yourself . . . up.” She moved her fingers in his. “You helped . . . hold me up,” she told him. “You’re a . . . good son.” Abigayil sighed, and a tear rolled down her cheek. “I wish you had been able . . . to have children . . . of your own.”
He held her hand as the words faded. Behind him, the door opened, and Rivkah slipped in, still in her surgical scrubs; she was a nurse at a neurosurgery facility, these days. She moved around to the other side of the bed, and took their mother’s other hand. Chani followed, a few minutes later, her eyes already red. And finally, Mikayel walked in, saying nothing to the rest of them, but taking a seat at the foot of the bed.
The struggle for breath increased. And then the alarms began to chirp from the various meters in the room, but Abigayil had been very specific: no resuscitations. When it was her time to go, she went willingly, and very patiently, and with the hope in her heart of seeing Maor again.
September 13, 1986 AC
Eleven-year-old Zaya Lelayn played with her brothers and sisters at the edge of the Caspian Sea. The waters were warm, and waves crashed endlessly on the shore. None of them were afraid of the water, but they were all forbidden to swim. “Your father doesn’t know if he can rescue you, if you happen to drown,” their mother had explained.
So Zaya sat on the shore, where the sand was still wet, and wrote there with a stick, while Zafir, nine, Nisane, seven, Ramsin, five, and Hedra, three, all flew overhead, dancing in the air, surrounded by little clouds of smoke. They didn’t care about swimming in the water, when they had the entire sky as a playground . . . though they did have limits. They couldn’t go where their father couldn’t see them. Then again, where can’t he see them? Zaya thought, and carved out another word. Her mother was very strict about their education. Her brothers and sisters were all getting many of the same lessons, of course, but Zaya didn’t know what any of them were going to use ancient Chaldean, Babylonian, Akkadian, Persian, and antique Attic Hellene for. The others didn’t need it. They were spirit-born. They couldn’t be sorcerers. And she didn’t really need it, either. She couldn’t cast so much as a single spell. But she sighed, and dug more symbols into the ground, as if the whole earth were a cuneiform tablet.
People always stared at them at the beach; her brothers and sisters, gamboling in the air, caught the eye. But the beach trips were one of the few times they got to go out in public, around other people, and Zaya always felt a little frightened and excited at the same time. Everyone on the beach besides her family was like her. Normal. She always tried to watch the other people who’d been born without the spark of magic, and was always, unaccountably, disappointed. That man over there, the one with the gray hair and the pot-belly hanging over his hips like a shelf, obviously hadn’t embraced the Hellene and Roman ideal of a perfect body in symmetry with itself. That woman over there, shrieking at her children to behave, sounded like a harridan . . . and then the children ran across what she’d been writing, and Zaya frowned. “I was just working on that!” she said, sharply at the toddlers, who looked up at her, wide-eyed, and then laughed. That infuriated Zaya. Her brothers and sisters were always in everything, but even they knew to leave books and papers alone.
The woman managed to catch up with her children. “I’m so sorry, magus,” she said, flicking a worried glance towards both Zaya and her mother, who’d just sat up from her blanket, a book in her hands, and had lowered her smoked lenses to study the situation. “They’re too young to understand that they could have disrupted your spell.”
Zaya was caught on the horns of a dilemma. On the one hand, it was delicious that someone thought that she was important enough to be a magus. On the other hand, the children actually hadn’t done anything dangerous. Zaya sighed, and knew her mother and father’s eyes were on her. “It wasn’t a spell,” she mumbled. “It was just a poem.” Her shoulders slumped. “And I’m not a magus.” I’m just me.
“Oh, thank the gods,” the woman said, looking relieved, and gathered up her children. Zaya watched them go, and turned to scuff out the rest of her work, kicking at each of the words with increasing fury. Useless. Useless, useless words. I can’t even make them do anything.
Her mother came over and stopped her. “Zaya, you handled that very well. You could have stopped at telling her that it wasn’t a spell, though.” Her mother smiled, faintly. “While I applaud the honesty? Sometimes, it’s . . . not a bad thing to let people make assumptions. Either that you’re more powerful than you are, or that you’re weaker than you are. Either way, you can use to your advantage. If they think you’re powerful, they’ll avoid you. If they think you’re powerless? They’ll underestimate you.” She leaned down and kissed Zaya on the forehead.
“But I am powerless.”
“Nonsense. I am arming you with the most powerful weapon in existence.”
“What’s that?”
“Knowledge.”
Zaya thought that was possibly the stupidest adult thing to say, ever, but couldn’t say that to her mother, of course.
Just then, she realized that people were clearing off the beach—moving off it in large groups, in fact, streaming back to their hotels and motorcars. “Is something going on?” Zaya asked, puzzled. The summer estate was near Chalus, in Media.
Her mother stepped in front of one of the retreating people, and asked a few quick, pointed questions, and Zaya could see her entire body tense, and then her father told them, I am taking those who can fly with me, back to the house. Immediately. Zaya, you will ride with your mother on the carpet.
When either of her parents used that tone, Zaya didn’t argue. Something bad was happening. So she helped pack up their belongings, and hopped on the back of the carpet, buckling their basket of books and food in place, and then herself. Her mother barely waited for her to get strapped in before the carpet rose from the ground, and took off, rippling under them. Zaya’s dark hair rippled behind her, like a banner; the carpet’s top speed was well over a hundred and fifty miles an hour, but her mother had never pushed it so fast before. “Mother! What’s going on!” Her voice sounded tiny, torn away by the wind.
Her mother looked back at her. “Immortals,” she shouted. “They just surrounded Rhagae.”
Rhagae was a hundred and thirty miles to the south, but Zaya’s mouth still went dry. “Does . . . does that mean . . . ?”
“They’re giving the city a day to surrender. Rhagae is trying to evacuate all of its civilians, but the Immortals won’t allow that. That’s not how this works. Either the city surrenders, together, or they all die, together. To the last child.” Her mother paused. “There’s a Roman garrison there, and an airfield. They might survive.”
Zaya crouched down on the carpet, and let the wind howl over her. But what does that mean for us? she wanted to demand, but that sounded childish when an entire city might be in danger.
They got back to the house, which her mother and father immediately began to renew the wards and bindings, and her father seemed to spend a good deal of time studying at the foundations. Zaya and her siblings, however, clustered around the far-viewer until bed-time. And her mother woke her up, just before dawn. “It’s started,” Erida told her. “You’re old enough to see this. Come and watch.”
The far-viewer gave everything a . . . distant quality. Zaya could see magnesium tracer rounds fired by anti-aircraft e
mplacements around the city with a host of other, unseen bullets. Each was an arc of fire, leaping into the sky, and then back down again . . . or hitting something above, unseen. The effect, around the ancient city, was that of a flower blooming in the night. That’s my Name, right there. Fireflower. It was beautiful, for something so horrible.
As dawn broke, however, the news crews in the field, far from actual combat, were able to show the viewers the ranks of tanks and personnel carriers lined up all around the city. Using a particularly long-range lens, they were even able to show some of the Immortals getting in and out of their vehicles. Every Immortal wore peculiar body armor; a helmet that completely enclosed the head, with a polished steel facemask at the front. Featureless, with a gas-mask attachment snaking up and under the mouth area. A ridge for the nose. Two ovals of tempered black glass over the eyes. Laminated strips of reinforced metal around the neck, to protect them from decapitation, Zaya was told, while torso-only flak jackets, adapted from those used by the JDF, kept their hearts relatively safe from bullets. The arms, the legs, and even the bellies, were left bare, other than boots. She was thus able to see that part of the process for making an Immortal involved gelding. “Why?” Zaya asked, blinking. She wasn’t new to the concept of eunuchs; many of them had served in administrative positions throughout the Persian Empire for centuries. “Why do that, and why are they mostly naked?”
The Goddess Denied (The Saga of Edda-Earth Book 2) Page 80