by Various
“I tried to go up there,” he said into his hands. “I wanted to see what it was.”
“And?”
“Jorma stopped me.”
I thought of the gangly doctor trying to hold Petr back, and snorted. “How?”
“He hit me.”
“But you’re”—I gestured toward him, all of him—“huge.”
“So? I don’t know how to fight. And he’s scary. I almost got to the top before he saw me and stopped me. I got this”—he pointed to his nose—“just for going up there. What the hell is going on up there, Aino? There were those bird things, hundreds of them, just circling overhead.”
“Did you see anything else?”
“No.”
“You won’t give up until you find out, will you?”
He shook his head.
“It’s how we do things,” I said. “It’s how we sing.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You said it’s a—what was it?—parasitic ecosystem. Yes?”
He nodded.
“And I said that the hookflies use the goats, and that it’s good for the goats. The hookflies get to lay their eggs, and the goats get something in return.”
He nodded again. I waited for him to connect the facts. His face remained blank.
“The birds,” I said. “When a baby’s born, it’s taken up there the next time Maderakka rises.”
Petr’s shoulders slumped. He looked sick. It gave me some sort of grim satisfaction to go on talking, to get back at him for his idiocy.
I went on: “The birds lay their eggs. Not for long, just for a moment. And they leave something behind. It changes the children’s development … in the throat. It means they can learn to sing.” I gestured at myself. “Sometimes the child dies. Sometimes this happens. That’s why the others avoid me. I didn’t pass the test.”
“You make yourself hosts,” Petr said, faintly. “You do it to your children.”
“They don’t remember. I don’t remember.”
He stood up, swaying a little on his feet, and left.
“You wanted to know!” I called after him.
* * *
A latecomer has alighted on the rock next to me. It’s preening its iridescent wings in the morning light, pulling its plumes between its mandibles one by one. I look away as it hops up on Petr’s chest. It’s so wrong to see it happen, too intimate. But I’m afraid to move, I’m afraid to flee. I don’t know what will happen if I do.
* * *
The weather was so lovely I couldn’t stay indoors. I sat under the awning outside my workshop, wrapped up in shawls so as not to offend too much, basting the seams on a skirt. The weaver across the street had set up one of her smaller looms on her porch, working with her back to me. Saarakka was up, and the street filled with song.
I saw Petr coming from a long way away. His square form made the villagers look so unbearably gangly and frail, as if they would break if he touched them. How did they even manage to stay upright? How did his weight not break the cobblestones? The others shied away from him, like reeds from a boat. I saw why when he came closer. I greeted him with song without thinking. It made his tortured grimace deepen.
He fell to his knees in front of me and wrapped his arms around me, squeezed me so tight I could feel my shoulders creaking. He was shaking. The soundless weeping hit my neck in silent, wet waves. All around us, the others were very busy not noticing what was going on.
I brought him to the backyard. He calmed down and we sat leaning against the wall, watching Saarakka outrun the sun and sink. When the last sliver had disappeared under the horizon, he hummed to test the atmosphere, and then spoke.
“I couldn’t stand being in the village for Saarakka. Everyone else talking and I can’t … I’ve started to understand the song language now, you know? It makes it worse. So I left, I went up to that plateau. There was nothing there. I suppose you knew that already. Just the trees and the little clearing.” He fingered the back of his head and winced. “I don’t know how, but I fell on the way down, I fell off the path and down the wall. It was close to the bottom, I didn’t hurt myself much. Just banged my head a little.”
“That was what made you upset?”
I could feel him looking at me. “If I’d really hurt myself, if I’d hurt myself badly, I wouldn’t have been able to call for help. I could have just lain there until Saarakka set. Nobody would have heard me. You wouldn’t have heard me.”
We sat for a while without speaking. The sound of crickets and birds disappeared abruptly. Oksakka had risen behind us.
“I’ve always heard that if you’ve been near death, you’re supposed to feel alive and grateful for every moment.” Petr snorted. “All I can think of is how easy it is to die. That it can happen at any time.”
I turned my head to look at him. His eyes glittered yellow in the setting sun.
“You don’t believe I spend time with you because of you.”
I waited.
Petr shook his head. “You know, on Amitié, they’d think you look strange, but you wouldn’t be treated differently. And the gravity’s low when closer to the hub. You wouldn’t need crutches.”
“So take me there.”
“I’m not going back. I’ve told you.”
“Gliese, then?”
“You’d be crushed.” He held up a massive arm. “Why do you think I look like I do?”
I swallowed my frustration.
“There are wading birds on Earth,” he said, “long-legged things. They move like dancers. You remind me of them.”
“You don’t remind me of anything here,” I replied.
He looked surprised when I leaned in and kissed him.
Later, I had to close his hands around me, so afraid was he to hurt me.
I lay next to him thinking about having normal conversations, other people meeting my eyes, talking to me like a person.
* * *
I’m thrifty. I had saved up a decent sum over the years; there was nothing I could spend money on, after all. If I sold everything I owned, if I sold the business, it would be enough to go to Amitié, at least to visit. If someone wanted to buy my things.
But Petr had in some almost unnoticeable way moved into my home. Suddenly he lived there, and had done so for a while. He cooked, he cleaned the corners I didn’t bother with because I couldn’t reach. He brought in shoots and plants from outside and planted them in little pots. When he showed up with lichen-covered rocks I put my foot down, so he arranged them in patterns in the backyard. Giant Maderakka rose twice; two processions in white passed by on their way to the plateau. He watched them with a mix of longing and disgust.
His attention spoiled me. I forgot that only he talked to me. I spoke directly to a customer and looked her in the eyes. She left the workshop in a hurry and didn’t come back.
* * *
“I want to leave,” I finally said. “I’m selling everything. Let’s go to Amitié.”
We were in bed, listening to the lack of birds. Oksakka’s quick little eye shone in the midnight sky.
“Again? I told you I don’t want to go back,” Petr replied.
“Just for a little while?”
“I feel at home here now,” he said. “The valley, the sky … I love it. I love being light.”
“I’ve lost my customers.”
“I’ve thought about raising goats.”
“These people will never accept you completely,” I said. “You can’t sing. You’re like me, you’re a cripple to them.”
“You’re not a cripple, Aino.”
“I am to them. On Amitié, I wouldn’t be.”
He sighed and rolled over on his side. The discussion was apparently over.
* * *
I woke up tonight because the bed was empty and the air completely still. Silence whined in my ears. Outside, Maderakka rose like a mountain at the valley’s mouth.
I don’t know if he’d planned it all along. It doesn’t matter. There
were no new babies this cycle, no procession. Maybe he just saw his chance and decided to go for it.
It took such a long time to get up the path to the plateau. The upslope fought me, and my crutches slid and skittered over gravel and loose rocks; I almost fell over several times. I couldn’t call for him, couldn’t sing, and the birds circled overhead in a downward spiral.
Just before the clearing came into view, the path curled around an outcrop and flattened out among trees. All I could see while struggling through the trees was a faint flickering. It wasn’t until I came into the clearing that I could really see what was going on: that which had been done to me, that I was too young to remember, that which none of us remember and choose not to witness. They leave the children and wait among the trees with their backs turned. They don’t speak of what has happened during the wait. No one has ever said that watching is forbidden, but I felt like I was committing a crime, revealing what was hidden.
Petr stood in the middle of the clearing, a silhouette against the gray sky, surrounded by birds. No, he wasn’t standing. He hung suspended by their wings, his toes barely touching the ground, his head tipped back. They were swarming in his face, tangling in his hair.
* * *
I can’t avert my eyes anymore. I am about to see the process up close. The bird that sits on Petr’s chest seems to take no notice of me. It pushes its ovipositor in between his lips and shudders. Then it leaves in a flutter of wings, so fast that I almost don’t register it. Petr’s chest heaves, and he rolls out of my lap, landing on his back. He’s awake now, staring into the sky. I don’t know if it’s terror or ecstasy in his eyes as the tiny spawn fights its way out of his mouth.
In a week, the shuttle makes its bypass. Maybe they’ll let me take Petr’s place. If I went now, just left him on the ground and packed light, I could make it in time. I don’t need a sky overhead. And considering the quality of their clothes, Amitié needs a tailor.
Copyright (C) 2013 by Karin Tidbeck
Art copyright (C) 2013 by Greg Ruth
Contents
Title Page
Begin Reading
The trains carved into land that wasn’t theirs, and swallowed the men who laid their iron roads—the tracks like threads to draw white men closer together—monsters belching smoke across a land they meant to conquer.
So Faye made herself scarce the day the men from Union Pacific visited Western Fleet Courier, to ask Elijah about the land.
Elijah wasn’t a man who thought much where he didn’t have to; maybe it was just as well, since many who’d thought harder were cruel, and Elijah’s place was where she and Frank had made their home.
So far.
The railroad men spoke with Elijah a long time. They cast looks around the yard where Fa Liang and Joseph were working on a dog, weighting the front pair of its legs so it wouldn’t flip backward the first time you scaled a rock face. Fa Liang muttered something to the dog, and Joseph laughed, and the tall railroad man watched.
They watched Maria tending vegetables, rake in hand, shirtsleeves rolled to her elbows.
Faye kept in the barn. And Frank was somewhere those men would never find him. (Better not to trust anyone with the government. That much they’d learned the hard way.)
But Elijah was white, and kindhearted, and had made friends when he lived in River Pass—Harper at the general store still set things aside for him. Elijah had no reason to fear two men who smiled and seemed polite; once or twice, he laughed.
Bad sign, Faye thought.
They shook hands with him and left at last, and Faye was able to tear herself away from the hole in the boards and pretend nothing was wrong.
People came with messages for delivery every week: homesteaders, wagon trains, the Pony Express. If she was shaken every time a stranger showed, she’d spend her life in this barn.
When Elijah came into the barn, he smiled, but there was a second’s pause before he said, “Hello, Faye.”
She didn’t mind the pause; worse to be called a wrong name.
It was easy to mistake Frank and Faye. The twins looked like their mother, the high brow and strong jaw, and they had the matching, flinty expressions of a lot of the Shoshone children who were sent to the white school. It made Frank look like a warrior, and Faye look troubled.
She stood beside Dog 2, one hand on its right foreleg. It was foolish to seek comfort in machines—look at the railroad—but still, she felt calmer with it close by.
She should have had a wrench, if she was pretending to work, but she’d been shaking.
Elijah meant well. Elijah was an easygoing man, most days. He tried to keep peace, he tried to be fair.
Faye just didn’t think she and Elijah had the same idea of fair.
She couldn’t even ask—the words stuck when she saw him—and she held her breath and looked at the open door behind him, the sliver of deep blue sky.
She’d been waiting for a sign to run. An open door was as good as anything.
Then Elijah said, “Lord, these trains have made men greedy.”
The land can be beautiful, depending where you’re coming from.
The sun sets in bands of red and gold, and one of turquoise just ahead of the night; sunrise is cool in summer and sharp in winter, like ice cracking; and the horizon’s so unbroken that weather isn’t a surprise—you see clouds well ahead of the rain.
The soil is shallow and it fights, but there are wildflowers and tall grass until snowdrifts cover them. Snowdrifts, with rock to rest against, climb taller than a house, thin dry powder. The snow can turn any moment, with the wind, and swallow a man whole. You don’t go out alone in winter if you want to make it home.
There is, sometimes, water. It’s always flowing away from you.
There are always hills on the horizon, even though you’re already so high up you never catch your breath. You can look out and out and out across the basin, and see specks on the horizon, twenty miles away, where a city’s fighting to take hold.
Sometimes a city lasts. Sometimes you look out one night and not one lamp is lit, and you know the land passed judgment on it.
When you look at the night sky, it makes you dizzy.
Part of this is wonder. Part is knowing how far away from other lives you are, in this wide unbroken dark.
If you’ve made your way west from the forests, and given up town life for the frontier, this land seems like punishment.
It’s beautiful, if you’re coming home.
Elijah Pike owned the fifty acres of Western Fleet Courier.
He’d come to River Pass from Boston, after he’d tired of being someone else’s clerk and decided it was time to make something of himself in the West. He’d been an indifferent farmer—too uncertain of the soil—but River Pass needed even indifferent vegetables, and he’d found enough success on his own that when Fa Liang presented himself, Elijah had the land, and money for an extra barn, and parts for the dogs.
He was proud of the business; he was proud that they sometimes boarded a scrawny boy from the Pony Express while they handed off a message going where no horse could reach.
Elijah had painted the wooden sign himself: “Any Message, All Terrain.” It hung below the wrought-iron sign for Western Fleet, nailed to the arch marking his property line.
It was just as well he owned the land; he was the only one of them who could.
A dog has six legs. Each one is thin, and tall as a man, and arched as a bow, and in their center they cradle the large, gleaming cylinder of the dog’s body. The back half conceals a steam engine, with a dipping spoon of a rider’s seat carved out ahead of it, with levers for steering and power, and just enough casing left in front to stop a man from hurtling off his seat every time the dog stops short.
It looks ungainly. The casing jangles, and the legs seem hardly sturdy enough to hold it, and when someone takes a seat it looks like the contraption’s eating him alive.
But legs that seem ungainly in the yard are smooth on ope
n territory, and dogs don’t get skittish about heights or loose ground, and when scaling a rock face, six legs are sometimes better than four.
There’s a throttle for the engine, and three metal rings on each side of the chair, where the rider slides his fingers to operate the legs. Left alone, the dog walks straight ahead; when the rider starts his puppetry, it treads water, dances, climbs mountains.
It takes a strong boy to wield one—not muscled, but wiry, a boy who can keep his balance and his head if the ground slips out from under him.
Faye won’t train them if they look like they force their own way. On the trail, a rider has to understand enough to sidewind Dog 3 in heavy winds, enough to hear what’s breaking in old Dog 1 before it breaks.
Sometimes she and Fa Liang placed bets about what would need fixing up when some boy came back.
“The boy,” Frank said, “if he breaks Dog 2.”
Faye shouldered him, but Fa Liang said, “No bet.”
The dogs never tire, and need one quarter the water a horse does. The boys carry some, but the inside of the engine shell collects condensation at night, which siphons into a skin.
That was Faye’s idea; their mother taught her, a long time ago.
They’re five strange beasts—they terrify horses—but they do as promised. The Express advises riders to use them if the road gets impassable for animals.
Even folk in River Pass have a little pride that for those who need a message sent where no messenger goes, you can point them right to Western Fleet.
Fa Liang started the business.
He left the Central Pacific line and came to River Pass in search of work. River Pass wouldn’t have him.
He’d never said if it had come to blows; it didn’t always have to.
But Susannah Pell from the clerk’s office followed him out of the general store and told him about Elijah, living on land of his own, well outside the city limits.
Elijah welcomed him. He was working alone, then, and the place was falling to ruin.
The barn had a pile of equipment Elijah had run so poorly that no one would take it off his hands.