“They’re dead!” she said aloud, in a voice she hardly remembered using. Her mind divided like water running down a slope: she wondered why she was outraged, she wondered why she was afraid, why she was not more afraid. She would not have killed them, those strangers, though she had not wanted them here.
She went outside again, into another day that insisted on being like any other. Again it was hot, humid, the sky clotted with clouds moving slowly before a steady wind. Why did it matter if they were all dead? They had come; they had gone; she was alone again, and she had wanted to be alone.
It was not the same.
It would never be the same.
Something—no, someone, some creatures—lived on this world that wanted to kill her—that had killed humans—and she had not known any such danger existed. She could not unknow it, struggle though she might.
The air stank of strange smoke; a grassfire burned on in the distance, its smoke plume mourning the nests. Though the grass would return and cover the nakedness of the land with her shawl, the People would always know where the scars were. This smell would last.
Defeat, drummed the righthand. Not defeat, victory: they are gone and we are here, drummed the lefthand. One by one, the righthand changed places, until the lefthand drumming carried all the power of the People.
Far above, a sinuous white streak where the monster had flown, scarring the very air. The righthand reminded that generations ago such streaks had been seen far off to the south. The lefthand continued drumming Victory, victory, safety, haven, return.
The scar in the sky blew away to nothing. No more monster noises from the air, no more bad smells. The People danced, winding around the burnt earth, sending out a long spiral coil of dancers to find live sprigs of grass, passed from one to another inward, until the site had been replanted. They danced on, drumming and dancing, until the wind drums answered, until the sky people gathered to dance in their own coils and spirals, weeping at the monster tracks, filling them with sweet tears that nourished the grass.
On the move again after the rain, following the wind drums across the grass, laden with the gourds of skylight-maker, drum-beater, the youngest troop of the People called questions to each other. Why scars in the sky? Why monsters in gray and green? Why flat-faced? Why wingless, toeless—
Not toeless, one called back. Short-toed, foot-clothed in toeless garments.
Garments, not shells?
Not shells, garments.
None without them . . . shells.
No flesh-bond. Garments.
Then—the sky creatures also garments? A lively debate followed, whether the stinking corpses of great flyers had been shells or garments or separate creatures, allies of the monsters. One held out for machines, no more than complicated mechanisms like those of the stone-tossers. The others laughed scornfully. A city tale, something the shore-dwellers thought up when their brains were smoke-dimmed. Machines could not fly . . . who could draw the strings tightly enough to have the wings flap.
Those wings did not flap.
That we saw.
It could work. The same enthusiast; they knew that eagerness for machines. The People had good machines; they were proud of this enthusiast. It could work, but it would need a new idea. They loped on, silent now. Never distract someone on the path of a new idea; it is like distracting a hunter on the trail of game, and means missing a feast.
The enthusiast fell behind; they knew what that meant. A time of sitting still, a time of seeking out other enthusiasts, a time of playing with sticks and little stones and sinew, and eventually there would be a new machine, something no one had ever seen. It did not concern the rest of them until then.
If there are others, someone called, free now to call.
Others? Where?
The legends. The sky-scars. Somewhere south. Others. Allies of allies, allies of monsters.
All alert, they crowded around. More monsters? More nest-burners, nest-scrapers? More thieves and children of thieves? It would be broodseasons before the nests just replanted were ready for young again; in the meantime they would have to nest elsewhere, which meant unfriendly seasons contesting for marginal sites with the others who roamed the grasslands. And would they come back, eager for the great nestmass, only to find more monsters?
An elder troop overheard their keening and swept them up. No monsters had been seen after that earlier sky-scar. Chances were it had been a scouting raid, no more.
No one ever looked.
Many broodseasons. Monsters are hasty. No need. No one ever looked. That from a youngling as enthusiastic this way as the machine-enthusiast had been. They all knew that, as they all knew everything about each other.
Too far. The desert. The thornbrush. Then too wet, and trees too tall. Worse than cities. The final insult, strong enough to discourage anyone but this youngling, who had the hunter’s own determination to follow any trail where it led.
Stinking trail, one of the oldest finally said. No good at the end. Empty belly, can’t eat monsters.
They had tried, only to be spectacularly sick in the burnt grass.
Nestmass, said one of the shy younglings. Many grumbled at that. If the shy ones started, the whole People might turn aside, and that at a time when new nests must come first.
Go . . . drummed the lefthand, passing the drumming from troop to troop on that flank, and then through the center. Go, go, go. Seek, seek. Take enough, but not too many.
After nesting? The youngling troop were not that eager to wander into dryness and salt and thorn and then swamp and tall trees for inedible monsters.
Now go, drummed the lefthand. Now, now, now. GO.
The youngling troop split, and split again. The enthusiast, not so enthusiastic now, but like any hunter intrigued with a new quarry. The shy youngling, only a broodseason from needing a nest. A few more of the raucous type which the older troops were glad enough to see leaving. And the elders who, on second or third thought decided that it might be an adventure, who had heard about the fishing on that more southern coast, who had a relative who had seen the sky-scar. With them, in the gourds and sacks and pouches of a nomad People, went their knowledge, their skills. However far they went, however long it took, the People relished travel, relished the chance to learn, the flavor and fiber of novelty.
As they went they discussed the monsters, reminding each other of every last detail, all that had been seen, heard, smelt, tasted (ugh! that disgusting flavor, turning the belly), surmised. Inbrooders, like the grasseaters they hunted? Likely. Two-formed, one with sticks and one with holes. Two-everything, except where on the ends of arms and legs the little bits stuck out in fives. Odd number, fives. Sacred to some, mostly fisheaters. How well could they see with those two eyes in the flat face? Well enough to aim fire tubes; they’d noticed that. Flaps on the side of the head: might be ears. Or tasters. Little ones big-headed, otherwise similar. Only a few little ones, most big ones. Big ones all dark-hairy on top, shades of earth-color. They passed the images back and forth. Yes. They would all know a monster if they saw one again.
The question of sense took longer. The monsters had sense enough to recognize threat, but so had most creatures, even the very stupid. Quick response meant nothing; the People knew that Carriers had little sense, although they responded quickly to anything, even training. Some of those things had been machines, some very large machines, but how hard was it to build a machine to carry dirt? Any child could do that.
It moved on its own.
It didn’t. It had a spell cast on it.
It didn’t. A monster guided it.
Who saw? The answer to that quelled all doubt; a monster had guided the machine that moved the dirt (and the nests! Filthy thieves!) and although no one had seen the twisted sinew or string, it must have been in there somewhere.
We should have looked harder.
Machine-lovers look at machines.
They would, too. That distraction shrugged off, they went back to considerin
g whether monsters had sense. Had they known they were robbing nests? How could they not, with the People’s sigil in plain view, the braids and coils of grass that warned of nestmass and named the nest guardians. If they were not blind, they must have seen. If they had sense, they must have understood.
The arguments went back and forth, across the open grass, until someone scented game, and drummed a short signal.
SIX
Loneliness weighed on Ofelia like stones. She struggled through each day, forcing herself to work in the gardens, forcing herself to check on the animals. Too many times she came back to herself and found that she’d stopped what she was doing to stand gape-mouthed, rigid, listening for sounds she knew she could not hear.
She didn’t understand it. It hadn’t been like this when the others left, her own son and daughter-in-law, people she had known most of her life. Then she had felt free. Then the empty streets and the quiet houses had given her chances she had never had before. Then no voices had been welcome, and over the days even the memory of them had fallen away, leaving her mind at peace.
Now she felt trapped, confined in a narrower place than she remembered. The empty streets might be full of enemies; the quiet houses gave hiding place to her fears. She could not forget the strange voices, voices of people she had never seen, crying out for help, crying out in fear and pain. And death.
She had not cried long when Humberto died, or the children. She had not cried at the thought of her own death; death was death, and it came to all, and there was no help for it. But now she cried, feeling the wobbling of her face, the wet tears, the runny nose, the spittle that ran down her chin—the ungraceful tears of the old—for people she had never seen, and had not wanted to see. They had come so far to die, and she had not wanted them.
It made no sense. When the tears finally ran out, she wiped her face with a rag—it had been a scrap of fabric from the center, carried home without noticing—and peered into the street. Nothing. Yesterday and the day before and the day before that, nothing, and nothing would be there tomorrow or the day after or the day after that. She lived in the center of nothing, in a moment always suspended between the eternity behind and the eternity before. It had never bothered her, and now it did.
Slowly, as slowly as the retreat of pain from a serious injury, the loneliness wore itself out. The fear remained. Something had killed all those people, and would kill her if it found her. She had been ready enough to die alone on this world, when she chose to stay. But she had believed age would kill her, or accident. Not malice.
She felt fragile, exposed, helpless. There were a few weapons in the storehouses, but she knew they would not save her. No one could be alert all the time; she was human, she had to eat and sleep and use the toilet. One person alone, even with the help of all the machines, was not a human presence. If those things found her, they could kill her easily. She had no doubt they would, as quickly as they had killed dozens of people younger and stronger.
But the fear wore itself out too, more slowly than loneliness. Days at a time she managed to forget—not trying, but simply immersed in the irregular routines of her life. They had not found her yet. They had not killed her yet. And she still enjoyed things, and still wanted things.
She retrieved the beads she had dropped from under the sewing tables, and strung them again. She made and painted more beads, added the slimerod cores she had dried, the seed pods of this plant, tufts of long hair from cows’ tails caught in brush . . . she wasn’t sure what she was making, only that she liked the patterns of chunky things and thin ones, color and texture and line. When she put the construction on her body, she realized it needed a bit more here—another length of beads—and something else there to balance the weight and keep it from slipping off her shoulders. She looked in the mirror. Odd how seldom she’d done that, not since before the other landing. She had not wanted to see her expression; she had been afraid that she might frighten herself. But now the figure in the mirror hardly looked human.
She stared. She felt the same—mostly the same—and in the mirror her own face scowled at her, the familiar scowl with which she had always greeted her mirror-self. Her eyebrows were thinner and whiter; her white hair a tousled bush of silver. But the inner self that had been so intent on stringing beads and feathers and wool and cows’ hair and seedpods, that had been so sure where to lace this string to that, and how to hang the tassels—that self had not imagined how she would look in anything but the old drab workshirts and skirts and bonnets of earlier years.
Indecent, the old voice said. Amazing, the new voice said, with approval. Her body was old, wrinkled, sagging, splotched with the wear-marks of nearly eighty years . . . but hanging on it in weblike patterns were the brilliant colors and textures of her creation. When she shifted her weight from her sore hip, the whole mass swayed, as if she were the breeze. The big beads across the back rolled in the hollow of her back, comforting. The plant fibers she’d used across her shoulders scratched itches she always found it hard to reach.
She stood looking a long time, then carefully took the garment off. It would not be comfortable for many of the things she needed to do, but she liked the way it felt. She would wear it often, she knew. In the meantime, she tied on the wrap she now wore most of the time, and made herself grin into the mirror. Rosara would not have approved of this, which left her legs bare, which had nothing underneath it but her raddled skin. Defiantly, thinking of Rosara, she stuck a finger in the pot of red paint she had used on the beads, and streaked it across her chest. Black paint: spots on her cheeks, on her forehead, on the sides of her thighs. Blue: a narrow line down her nose. She began to giggle; she had not imagined how much fun it could be to treat her body as the material of art. She made green handprints on her belly, on the front of her thighs, one each on buttocks. She splashed yellow on hands and feet. Then, leaving yellow footprints, she walked out into the street, unafraid, unthinking, for the first time.
It was drizzling, a warm drizzle that hovered as much as fell. Ofelia walked up and down the street, touching the doors of the houses she passed, leaving handprints splotched yellow and green. Suddenly she wanted to mark them all; she ran back into the center, snatched up the pot of yellow paint, and strode from house to house, touching every door. By the time she was halfway through, it was more than a game; fear returned in a rush, demanding that she finish, insisting that something dire would come if she stopped for anything, if she were interrupted, if the paint ran out before the last door was marked with her sigil. Breathless, her legs aching, she ran from door to door, house to house, even the toolsheds, the storage sheds, the waste recycler, back to the center, every door in the center. . . .
The panic subsided. Thunder muttered outside, and the drizzle thickened to rain. She remembered other times of strange feelings before storms, forebodings, crazy feelings, wild actions. It was just the storm. When it was over, she would feel better.
Wind slapped harder rain against the center windows. Ofelia looked down at her decorated body, and laughed. What a mess. She couldn’t go to bed like this. The rain would wash off the paint. She went outside and let the warm rain flow over her, scrubbing at her spots and stripes with her yellow hands, until she stood in a rainbow puddle. How odd that the colors didn’t merge into one muddy mess . . . for a moment her mind caught on that oddity, as the colors avoided each other and made rings and blotches on the ground. Then a closer peal of thunder sent her dashing across to her own hand-marked door. Warm rain it might be, but she felt cold now.
Inside, she dried herself and began humming. Memories of childhood naughtiness tumbled through her mind. Mudpies, messes in the kitchen, the time she had used colored chalk to make her sister’s foot look swollen and infected . . . they had both thought it was funny, but her mother had been first scared, then furious. Her cheeks felt hot even now, remembering the slapping she’d gotten for that. Silly, silly, silly . . . she had been a silly child, and she was a silly old woman, but it had been fun. Pai
nting herself had been fun, and she would do it again. Why not? If she was going to be killed by some strange animals, she might as well have what fun she could first.
After the storm, the cattle were unsettled. Ofelia squinted across the meadow to the river, trying to count the restless animals. Fourteen . . . no, thirteen, she had counted the red one with the black face twice . . . no, fourteen, because there was the rusty black one with the white spot. And the bull. She couldn’t see the calves in the tall grass. The sun was out; she had put on a wide hat tied with a long narrow piece of pink, and a blue cape beaded with green and yellow in flower patterns. She didn’t like it that much now, but that meant she didn’t mind if it got dirty while she hunted for the cattle.
One of the cows shied and broke into a bouncing trot away from the river; two more followed, moving faster. Ofelia caught a glimpse of a calf’s head between the cows, then the rest of the little herd lunged away from the river, grunting. The bull swung around to confront whatever had spooked them. Ofelia could see nothing. Halfway to the buildings, the cattle slowed and milled uneasily. Ofelia walked past the calf pen, angling upriver where the dust wasn’t so bad. The cattle watched her now, ears wide; the bull moved away from the river to rejoin the herd. She counted again: black-faced red cow, solid red cow, rusty black, brindle with white spot, plain brindle, red-and-white, rusty black with white spot . . . fourteen cows, one bull, at least one calf. From a distance she heard others, probably the younger bulls, who ran in a clump together.
She really needed to know how many calves there were. She angled nearer the herd, not directly at it. A dark red calf, paired with the black-faced red cow. And there, another one, brindle with white legs, beside one of the brindle cows. The cows shook their heads; she kept her distance, trying to see between bodies and legs and wide ears. Was that another? Yes—a lighter red calf, tucked into the middle. Ofelia walked back to the village, keeping an eye on the cows to be sure none of them charged her. The black-faced red cow had a bad temper.
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