by James Comins
Chapter Ten
Höfn
or, It Was 1999
The empress sprinted sprinted. Hexagonal black basalt pillars rose up before them like a giant’s walkway, blocking the path darkly. The empress jumped up from the sand field onto the flat shapes at the top of the pillars and kept running. From this precarious vantage point along the pillartops the empress followed the coast, all day and into the night. Everyone got a long day and a bad night’s sleep with only crusty slices of a loaf of bread with meat and skyr baked into it for all their meals. There was nothing but hexagonal volcanic rocks, spread wide between the rocky spine of the hills and the brown tufts of silk and seaweed at the coast.
Höfn hugged an inlet. The town was flat and set beneath a mountain range. Green glass pyramids socketed with gold dotted wide streets twisting around the placid bay. An enormous walnut-yellow wooden skeleton treaded water in the harbor. It held on at the dock, carrying a backpack the size of a house, full of flapping cod. On the skeleton’s head was a crown of socketed crystals, glowing faintly.
Along the docks, heaps of blunt, gem-shaped fish like flopping decanter-stoppers lay on blue tarps. Bearded men sorted long squids whose hoods and arms were decorated with floral and paisley prints. Pairs of automatic gyroscopic wheels rolled people to and from their jobs.
The empress scented the daedelus and wouldn’t approach the city limits, so at the outer edge of the black pillars, Talvi had everyone climb down the empress’ steps while he tethered the empress to a post. It didn’t seem to like being tethered, scrabbling and straining against the rope and examining the tether with its pincers.
“Should we really just leave it here?” Lenna asked Talvi.
“There’s no time, Lenna. The beast doesn’t eat. If someone steals it, we get another. Yes?”
“But you promised. You promised her, Talvi. You said you’d give the empress to someone who’d look after it.”
“Lenna. If it was you, would you rather be rescued or have some old promise kept?” he asked.
So the five of them walked along Höfn’s long, spiralling central avenue beneath the patterned sky. Lenna looked behind her, over and over, until they passed out of sight of the sad waiting empress. They headed toward the daedelus pen on the ridge at the far end of the city. Around some people’s heads were thin black halos, and Lenna glimpsed one gray halo sitting in a restaurant. Kaldi led the household down the sloping oceanfront road past a wheeled thing dealership, past shipping lots full of giant skeleton-boat-sized backpacks, past oval warehouses made of colored glass, and down to the piers. The beach was splattered with stringy seaweed and snot-colored pods. Red kelp, hard and dry and crunchy, caught at Lenna’s boots. The sand had a new texture, dinging like sleighbells. Puzzled, she picked up a handful of sand and peered at it. It was made of tiny seashells, each of them whole and unbroken, conchs and abalones and mussels and spirals, each of them as small as a grain of sand. She let them spill.
The beach faded to dirt and wended up, turning to an uneven boardwalk of pool-cue branches sliced lengthwise, leading to the upper reel of Iceland’s Ring Road.
Here was the daedelus in a pen on the ridge. Its body was a glass house, the blue of the ocean and as vast as a Viking longhouse. It paced on a thousand strange clawed fins which scurried beneath it like hermit crab feet. At the front was mounted a colossal carved wooden head like a dog-faced dragon, tapering to a snub snout, its teeth biting its own leg. The name Oseborg was painted on the leg. The glass body of the creature housed a zillion upholstered seats. An enormous blue propeller was the creature’s tail. Banks of crystals glowed beneath its forehead, shining faintly through the painted wood. Three handlers looked after it as it scuttled around its zoo pen. Beyond the paling was an open-air entryway with a security tunnel, and in front of that, a low formica desk and a lobby with benches.
Brugda went to the desk to arrange the flight. Everyone else crowded the edge of the enclosure to admire the daedelus. Lenna climbed up Kaldi’s back and sat on his shoulders to see over the fence. The daedelus seemed like a fierce, angry beast, a lion or a bear kept caged in a pen. Of course, its face was carved that way. It couldn’t ever change its expression.
A noise dropped out of the sky, slashing, shrieking. It must be another evil cloud, a horrible swastika following them, coming after them to blast them with spidery lightning, here where they weren’t protected. Everyone heard it coming. Aitta buried her face in Talvi’s broad chest. In line behind a Scottish couple, Brugda clutched her hands together. The sound was like a plague of locusts filling the air. Lenna grabbed Kaldi’s hair and squeezed her fists, burrowing her face against his head.
A violet shape bowed over them, sunlight-deflecting and sky-filling. Lenna started crying.
The daedelus keepers laughed at her.
A second daedelus circled and descended into the pen. A woman in a red sequin suit waved it down with an orange plastic semaphore stick like Binnan Darnan’s following-stick. The creature landed with a bump and a scuttle.
“That wasn’t funny,” Lenna grumped to no one in particular as the purple daedelus’ propeller shut down and silence returned.
Brugda took out her credit crystal, tapped it on the resonance pad and put it back in her pocket crossly. A young woman read out some terrifying security rules.
“Have you flown recently?” a janitor asked Kaldi.
“Years ago,” he answered.
“You’d better get your shoes off, even for a charter.”
Kaldi, bemused, began taking his shoes off.
“I think he was joking,” said Aitta.
“No, really, ma’am. Since 9/11 and all ...” The janitor trailed away. “Speeds things up.”
Everyone sat on uncomfortable benches in their socks. Menacingly, the pretty young woman at the desk had a thick black halo, darker than any other Lenna had seen. Had she arranged Binnan Darnan’s kidnapping?
Nothing reminded Lenna of how angry Binnan Darnan made her as much as not having her around. Pairs of memories showed up, one and the other, back and forth, as if her two lives with the little black-haired girl were flashing before her eyes:
Pretty draglets weaving above. The two of them sitting together in the dragon tower, watching the flappers bopping into each other and croaking.
At table with Momma, handling a fine bone teacup, looking out the summer window at the servants.
Sitting on the rug on the plank floor of the barn, side by side, squabbling and arguing about dumb stuff.
Sneaking upstairs to decorate her room with wild crepe paper colors, only to have Momma tear them down later when she wasn’t around.
Running out together to watch the breeding dragon being unloaded from the delivery truck’s back and having to listen to stupid Binnan Darnan talk to the pretty creature.
Staying inside most of the day, hoping Kaldi would finish cooking and tell her a story.
Singing to a badbad piglet after overhearing Binnan Darnan singing to some draglet she had named Vonska.
Alone in her plain white room, making up songs that all the animals could sing to each other, if she had had any animals.
The two sets of memories made her feel like two people: one person who had no one in the world except a friend under the snowy barn roof, and another person who thought the little black-haired servant was nothing but a nuisance.
Everyone in the airport was standing. They treaded, sock-on-tile, through a tunnel of floppy red cordons, through a humming crystal archway thing and around the tall wooden fence of the pen. A handler brought a carved stepladder and opened the big glass door of the daedelus. Wind swept up and was getting stronger.
Inside the daedelus’ belly was nice seats and nice smells. They sat down and buckled in and waited and waited. The handler followed after some time and told everyone about the horrible things that would happen if there was a catastrophe. If the glass exploded, they would need help breathing. If they fell into the ocean, they would need lifevests to k
eep from drowning. To get lifevests they’d have to rip up their seats. If there was fire, there were chemicals, but more likely they would all burn and die. It was awful.
Lenna curled up and snuffled into the seat. Aitta buckled her in. Right away her arm started to fall asleep. Somehow the padded, snuggly-looking seats with headrests and built-in footstools were not as snuggly as they appeared, not even as comfy as the empress.
That poor, lost empress. Wouldn’t Binnan Darnan be mad. Lenna felt good that she had defended it. But it reminded her that it wasn’t dragons. There were no more dragons. Sigh.
Another awful sound was the daedelus’ propeller starting. The scuttling feeling as the fins crept forward was sickening. The jolt as the daedelus pushed itself into the air made her insides feel twisty, like Höfn’s streets.
During the flight, Lenna toyed with the seatbelt; worried; remembered things; compared the old and new memories; felt complicated; accepted a miniature cup of fruit juice, which spilled; grumbled to anyone who’d listen; and stewed relentlessly. Most of the beige and blue seats were empty, so she decided to stretch out. Then she discovered that the armrests didn’t move. She caught herself picking at the paint sloughing off the seats and stopped, figuring the daedelus wouldn’t like it. A lady invited her up front to see the crystals that gave the daedelus flight, but her ears hurt and she was not really in the mood. She began to ask Talvi when they would get there, and he didn’t know the answer the third time she asked any more than the first.
Years passed. Months. Centuries. The lifetimes of ancient trees. Soooo slowly.
The lady announced they’d be landing forty-five minutes before they actually did. Foreverforeverforever.
They hit the ground hard, and a vicious screaming sound vibrated through the cabin as the daedelus slowed to a stop. They stood, waited, then sat back down as it became clear that the lady wasn’t going to open the door yet. Finally Kaldi walked out into the aisle, keeping his head ducked under the low ceiling, and the rest of the house followed him. Lenna felt sleepy and fuzzy and numb as she stumbled out the door between Talvi and Aitta into rushing heat and wild, fresh smells. A man had brought over a spiral staircase on wheels, and they climbed down to the green ground.
It was hot, steaming hot, and Lenna was glad her dress was sleeveless. The airport runway stood alongside a verdant field. The tufty linen grass had begun to grow tall here already, somehow, even though it was still early spring. The grass was green and blond and dotted with satin-petaled bursts of yellow and pink. The sliding white and orange origami-wallpaper sky carried a network of fiery blue lines in a wrapping paper design. Crooked budding trees in unusual shapes bordered the quiltland of farms, whose crop of neon orange vines seemed tall enough to be a forest, and it was only April. The air was thick with life. In the distance, little polished walls of stacked gold bullion rose up no taller than Lenna’s waist. She looked down at the hard green ground. Under her feet were perfect, clear emeralds.