Icarus Down

by James Bow

  I took off all my carrying bags and set them around me. That was when I heard a splash. The boy had fallen into the stream. He sat, staring at me, the water coursing over his lap. Then he looked away quickly. I could not stop myself from laughing — he looked so silly — but I had work to do. I went outside, returning with an armload of sticks.

  The boy had pulled himself up beside the stream and sat, twisting water from the fabric that covered him.

  At the centre of the bank, I shifted a large stone so it was flat. Then, from one of my pouches, I pulled out the round container of firepills I had taken from a hut in my village. There were not many left, but I was in no mood to build a fire from scratch.

  The boy stared as I took the firepill from the container. Again he spoke in that howler-climber language of his.

  I placed the firepill on the stone and whacked it with a stick. Flame leapt up. I held the stick over the flame until it caught. Then I piled on more sticks, making a fire gather.

  The boy crept forward, his eyes on the shiny canister. I let him take a few more steps before I put the canister back in its pouch. I pulled out my second-favourite bone knife and went to work on the slink’s sinewy flesh. The boy backed away.

  Soon, two hunks of meat were sizzling on the stone. The smell made my mouth water. Looking up, though, I saw the boy draw back, a look on his face that was not quite fear, more like disgust, with a touch of sorrow.

  The boy pulled himself to his feet, limped to the cave mouth and stared out at the fog. He walked as though he was in pain. That should not be surprising. Given that he had fallen out of his hive, I was surprised he was not hurt more. But this pain looked old. Maybe it had to do with his burnscars.

  Soon our meal was ready. I placed the meat on large leaves that I had brought in from outside, and I held it out to him, « Here, take this. »

  He hesitated when I held out the leaf-wrapped meat, staring at it as though it were still alive. I frowned at that. Surely he should be hungry?

  But he took the meat from my hand and took a bite. We sat by the stream, the fire between us, and started to eat.

  I stared at him while he ate his meal. It was clear that whatever I had thought I was going to do when I got to the invaders’ hives was not going to work. But I had seen a hive fall. This boy had landed at my feet, and his people would not let him go home. That meant something. Maybe he knew why the hive had fallen. Maybe I could ask him. But how, when his language was so different from mine?

  Perhaps this was a question best answered after sleep. I ate my meat, washed my hands in the stream, and got up. The boy looked up from his half-eaten morsel.

  « I will come back, » I said, and stepped outside. I returned with my arms full of fern fronds. The boy stood up as I entered, wincing as he did. I measured out half of my bundle and tossed the fronds on the ground in front of him. He looked at the leaves, and then at me.

  How could he not see the meaning? I began arranging my fronds on a flat area in a corner of the cave. As I worked, I glanced back. I saw the boy pick up his ferns. He looked at my work and began spreading them around where he stood. He worked clumsily, but he worked.

  Finally, I placed a leaf-wrapped stone where I would lay my head and stepped back and looked at what I had done. It would serve.

  Then the boy called me. He stood beside his pile of leaves. He pointed to it with one finger and squealed something.

  I tilted my head. My shoulders ached at the thought of how his shoulders would ache when he woke from sleep — if he did find sleep. But I was tired and in no mood to help him rebuild his nest, or gather more ferns to help him pad it.

  Then I looked again at the strange fabric that covered his body. That might do for something soft to lie on. « Try that, » I said, pointing.

  He looked at my fingers, then at his chest. He did not understand.

  « These! » I pulled at his sleeve. « Use these. That will make you comfortable and you can sleep. »

  He pulled away at my touch. I could not believe it. He wanted to keep these things on!

  « These are silly. » I gripped the fabric that covered his chest and pulled. « You cannot carry anything in them, and they will make you too hot. Use these as padding and get a good sleep! »

  But the boy jerked back and pulled the covering tighter against himself. The fabric was surprisingly strong.

  « Fine, » I snapped at him. « Be like that. Silly thing. »

  I stomped to my side of the cave, angry with myself as much as with him. Why should I care that he wanted to keep his silly coverings on? He was an invader boy; it was not my concern. I sat down in my nest and speared him a glare. Then I rolled over and lay down my head for sleep.

  I sensed the invader boy’s gaze on my back for a while before finally I heard him settle into his nest. As I had expected, he rolled around and mumbled a lot, but he must have been more tired than I thought. After another little while, he was asleep.

  I thought about what I would do next. I thought long, because there were no answers. Sleep found me first.

  And in my dreams, I returned to my mother.

  Her nest had been laid out by the Elder herself, but Mother had slumped against the side. Her eyes, which had so recently gone white, stared out at nothing.

  I settled beside her and stroked her cheek with the back of my hand. Softly, I began to murmur the comforting sounds she had murmured to me when I was sick; sounds she had learned from her mother many sun-turns before.

  Her head jerked. « Daughter? »

  « I am here. »

  « I am not, » my mother replied. « I feel myself fading. Tell the Elder. It is almost time. »

  « Do not go, » I begged. « Please. »

  « I cannot help it, » she replied. « I am spent. This place takes away my life, just as it took away your father’s life, and your brothers’. »

  « I do not want to be alone! »

  My mother shifted. Her voice changed. « The Elder tells me you plan to go to the invaders’ hives. »

  I hesitated before answering, but I could not hide the truth. « Yes. »

  « Do not be a fool. »

  « The invaders need to pay for what they have done to us! »

  « Daughter — »

  Suddenly my mother cried out. I flinched at the sound. « Mother! I will get the Elder — »

  « No! » My mother rested her fist on my arm. « No. I need — I must tell you — Please … »

  She took a deep breath, though it seemed to hurt. Then, though she was blind, she looked right at me.

  « Daughter, » she said. « Tend to your ancestors’ graves. »

  My jaw tightened. « I cannot. Do not ask me to. »

  Her words cut me: « The invaders are your people, too. »

  Then she died.

  I woke with a gasp. The cave was cold. The fire had burned to embers. On the other side, the strange invader boy lay curled up in his hollow, snarling in his sleep.

  I glared at his back. « I am not like you, » I snapped. Then I settled back in my nest and fell asleep again.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  BURNSCAR

  EK-TAAK-TOCK-TAAK:

  The boy’s mumbles and squawks made for a fitful sleep. « Be quiet, » I snapped.

  Then he screamed.

  His cry jerked me out of my nest to look for the lizard that had gotten into the cave and was trying to eat us. But there was no lizard. There was only the boy, screaming in his sleep.

  I stomped over and grabbed at his arms. They were crossed across his chest and would not move aside. I shook him. « Wake up! » I clicked. « Wake up! You dream too bright! »

  The screams stopped, and he stared at me in bewilderment and fear. Some expressions your body knows ahead of your mind.

  I could feel his heart thumping against my fingers as I held his arms. I felt his beat slow as he calmed down.

  Then he began to gasp for air.

  He pulled back against my grip. He gaze went up towar
d the ceiling. His arms stayed across his chest.

  That’s when I realized he could not move his arms. He could not move anything.

  My heart sped up. I had only seen so much pain once before.

  I eased him onto his nest, carefully unlocked his arms and pulled them to his side. Every move seemed to make a wind-blow of pain. When he was flat and straight, I gathered the ferns from my own bed and stuffed them under him, making him more comfortable. But still his breath came in short, sharp gasps.

  What had happened? If it had been the fall that had done this to him, he would not have been able to follow me here. What were his coverings hiding from me?

  His coverings were cut through with a line of metal teeth. There was a handle at the top of this line. Curious, I pulled it down, and the teeth gaped apart. I pulled the flaps of strange hide aside, and found another covering, this one without the line of teeth. The only way to remove it would be to pull it over his head, and I could not do this without causing the boy pain.

  But his gasps continued. I had to do something.

  I got my pouch of bone knives and picked a sharp one, with a handle that curved away — for fitting under things and slicing up. I went back to the boy and raised this knife in the air.

  He stared at it, wide-eyed.

  « Come now, strange boy, » I said. « If I wanted to kill you, would I have saved you and fed you? »

  I brought the tip beneath the covering, and sliced it open. I pulled the new flaps aside.

  Great Mother of the Sky! His chest was almost all burnscar.

  How had he walked this far? How had he even survived?

  But I knew now why he could not breathe. I knew how to ease the pain.

  « Stay, » I told him. I poked the embers of our fire until flames leapt up from it, then added wood. I placed large, round stones the size of my fist around the fire, and I stepped out of the cave, returning with the fat, meaty leaves of the bowl-plant. I draped them across the boy’s chest. He looked down. His eyebrows arched up.

  Finally, a leaf in my palm, I picked up a stone near the fire. It made the leaf hiss steam, scalding my palm, but I wrapped the leaf around the stone, and turned to place it on the boy.

  Fear came back to his face. He squawked something. He did not want this, but he did not know that it would be good for him. I could only show him, and he could not stop me.

  He cried out as I placed the hot rock on his shoulder. Then, almost instantly, the cry became a groan. The muscles of his chest relaxed, and he breathed deeper.

  « As I told you, silly boy, » I said, softly.

  I placed a second leaf-wrapped stone on his other shoulder, and a third on his chest. Even his tightly clenched fingers relaxed.

  His eyes drifted up. He murmured something I could not understand, but it was soft, grateful.

  Before I realized it, I started murmuring my mother’s sounds of comfort, a soft, soothing rhythm, with tones that flowed up and down.

  And the boy … sang it back. He was half conscious, but I saw his mouth moving. As I listened, I heard the same rising and falling tones. His noises were different; fuller. Were these words in the boy’s howler-climber language?

  The boy’s eyes fluttered closed. Within breaths, he was asleep.

  I put on my travel pouches, grabbed my spear and left the cave.

  Outside, I looked at the cave mouth and thought about what I should do to hide it. I would be tied here for days as the boy recovered. If I left on a hunt, he would be easy prey for the first slink to nose its way in.

  And when he got better, what then? I thought about leading him anywhere with his slow, limping gait; helping him over logs. He would slow me down. And in the forest, slow was dead.

  But he was an invader boy, cast out by the invaders. He was my best hope for revenge.

  And … I had seen burnscars like that before. My brother, the one nearest to me in age, had been caught in a boiling wind and horribly scalded. He had survived, but his injuries had made him easy prey. We tried to protect him, but there were not enough of us, and eventually someone …

  Eventually I made a mistake …

  I closed my eyes against the memory. My hatred of the invaders burned. They had cast out a boy who had been injured worse than my brother. The boy could not survive in the forest. How could those people be so cruel?

  I was also angry at myself. Had I known he was this badly hurt, I would have helped him build his nest.

  But I could help him stay alive.

  I snapped off branches and long stalks, and whittled these down to points. Across the mouth of the cave, I wove a low fence, the points of the branches sticking up and out, ready to impale any slink that dared to cross.

  The boy slept. I decided he was safe enough for me to look at the ruins again.

  The fog had disappeared where the metal hive had clawed out the forest. The sky was open. I flinched from the brightness of it, then pulled back under the cover of the forest edge as one of the mechanical insects roared overhead. The ferns crunched beside me. The leaves here were brown and brittle like the edges of a scab. I wondered if the forest would ever heal. The forest around my village had not, fully.

  More flying machines buzzed overhead, and I watched as they settled on the ground near the fallen hive. People in white or grey coverings climbed over the carcass like scavenging mites. The ones in grey, I saw, had wrapped themselves in white to hide themselves from the sun. I clicked my tongue. What a strange people.

  I followed the edge of the gouge, heading toward the ruins. As I approached, I heard machines and voices as they worked on the carcass. Stranger still, I heard someone howling … not howling. There were words in the noise, like the boy’s voice. There was music in it too.

  I pressed as close as I could and found a place where the ferns were thick. I pushed through and peered out at the wreckage.

  They had cut into the fallen hive. The area was littered with things that had once been smooth and were now twisted, and strange machines that the white-covered people surrounded and looked over. Some of these were loaded onto one of the flying machines, at rest, now, on the mud flat beside a new lake.

  On a rise at the other end of the clearing, a woman in white stood with her hands at her sides. The strange howl came from her.

  I looked back at the invaders, some less than fifty steps in front of me. I had almost despaired when I had come to the death-dealing fence, but here were my targets. I might never get a better chance than this for revenge.

  I pulled my bone knife from its pouch. It wasn’t my favourite, but it would do. Behind cover, I clicked at them. « Tik-tik-tik-tik. Hello, invaders. I am coming for you! »

  Two invaders, carrying something from the ruins on a board between them, looked up at the noise. It was as I had been told: The invaders were afraid of our voices. « Yes, be afraid! Tik-tik-tik-tik! »

  The invaders screamed, dropped the board they were carrying, and ran. More invaders shouted. The wailing woman stopped her voice. I tightened my grip on the bone knife and prepared to pounce.

  Then I saw what was on the board they were carrying. They had pulled it from the wreckage, but it was not a machine. They had covered it with something white. It was —

  Oh.

  Farther along the mud flat, two invaders walked to the edge of a hole they had dug in the ground, tipped their board, and let the body fall in. They looked up when they heard the shouts.

  A shout caught my attention — a tall man calling to the people clambering over the wreckage. Of those wearing the grey coverings, he alone did not wrap himself in a cape of white. He was all grey, even his hair, like smoke. I peered out from behind the cover of a bulbtree for a better look, and put my hand on a branch. The branch snapped and fell into the dry ferns with a crash.

  The grey man turned and stared at where I was. He pulled a tube from his belt and pointed it. The tube sparkled.

  Suddenly the trunk of another bulbtree burst out in little holes, as if blowdarts
were whipping past.

  I ducked behind the bulbtree and curled into a ball. The whistling and the snapping of the leaves stopped, and voices came closer. I struggled to my feet and looked for a place to hide, but saw that running was better. I ran into the forest. The voices faded behind me.

  I returned to the cave, stepped over the fence, and found the boy where I had left him, snarling in his sleep. I set my travel pouches around me, pulled my knees to my chest and thought about the events of the past few sleeps.

  I had lived longer than I had thought I would, but it was clear my plans were useless. On the other side of the leaf, Father Fate had given me something I had never expected to receive.

  I looked at the sleeping boy.

  I had made him my responsibility, but what else was he?

  How could he help my future?

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  PEACE OFFERING

  SIMON:

  The mysterious girl sang to me.

  My next few days were an echo of my time in the infirmary, this one spent in firelight instead of a bright hospital room. I could do little more than sleep, while this dark-haired stranger slipped into and out of my dreams. But I was sure her song wasn’t a dream, because I had to work to recognize it.

  Rockabye baby, on the treetop.

  When the wind blows, the cradle will rock.

  When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall,

  And down will come baby, cradle and all.

  She wasn’t singing the words. I only recognized the tune, an ancient song from Old Mother Earth that I remembered from my childhood. It struck me that she could sing as well as click.

  The tune was comfort, especially after the nightmares.

  The girl tended to me, rubbing chewed-up leaves on my chest, applying more hot rocks to my sternum. Slowly, my cramped muscles unclenched, and the ache of my burns receded.

  Then one morning, I woke with a gasp and found I could sit up. A blanket of leaves (an echo of my hospital robe, I guess) fell off me as I looked around the cave, lucidly, for the first time in days. The girl wasn’t there; probably off hunting. The fire had burned down to embers.