Children of a Different Sky

by Jane Yolen

  A plasma weapon is thrust into Garcia’s hands, and the order counts down to fire. He fails to discharge; can’t even bring his finger near the trigger. An officer strides over and smacks him on the back of the head. “Fire, you piece of shit!” he screams. “Think you’re better than the rest of us?”

  Garcia never looks to see who spoke. When the next order comes he depresses the trigger and holds it down, spraying everything in front of him with the searing plasma. But he does it blindly: he can see nothing, his eyes blurred and streaming.

  Remember. Remember.

  The bodies fall, and Garcia stops firing only when the voice no longer calls to him.

  ~*~

  Left alone in his barracks while everyone else heads off to dinner, Garcia throws the earbuds and noseclip aside and stands next to his cot, shaking. His clothes are filthy, stained with mud splashes and cooked viscera that splattered back when he helped cut the fey bodies down. He tears off the shirt and kicks it under the bed.

  Think you’re better than the rest of us?

  He takes a long, deep breath and realizes he’ll never drink beer or eat chocolate again. Or listen to music. That’s all ruined. But that’s the least important thing. He can’t do this day again. He won’t.

  Better than the rest of us?

  “Maybe I am,” he says to the empty quarters.

  Garcia slips out of the tent and heads directly for the cages full of silent fey. There are two guards, and shift change is imminent; everyone else in camp is at chow.

  “Hey,” he tells one guard. “I’m up tonight.”

  “You’re not Mendez.”

  “It’s Garcia, you knucklehead,” he says. “Our names aren’t all the same.”

  The guard gives him a strange look, but shrugs. “Whatever. Your funeral if you’re wrong. I’m starvin’ anyway.”

  Then there is just the one other guard, and he’s easily dispatched with a butt to the head that’ll leave him with a giant headache in the morning. Not that Garcia plans to be around to find out. Then he goes back to the cages.

  “OK,” he says. “Do it.”

  They stare at him mutely.

  “Look, I know one of you can open this thing. So do it. We’re going.”

  Every fey turns inward and there is a strange, crackling energy among them. They are speaking, he understands that—but not to him. They turn back and continue to stare blankly.

  Shit, thinks Garcia. “Your queen—asked for help. She sent—somebody to help me. He’s gone now. We—I—killed him. But … no more. No more.” His voice cracks on the last word. He’s pleading, now. If he has to do this one more day, he’ll throw himself in the pit with the others.

  We know you, comes a voice. Not D78. Another. You are not our hero.

  “No,” he says. “But I’m all you got.”

  A long moment of emptiness. Dusk is approaching; night will give them the cover they need to escape. He hopes. They’re out here on a countryside plain and no one should notice for an hour, maybe two. That might be enough.

  It’ll have to be.

  Then there’s a zap on the keypads of all the cages and the locks open as one. The fey emerge in a shuffling, loose clutch. He backs away until everyone has exited the cages. “I’m sorry,” he says.

  Take us home, Anthony Garcia.

  All at once, that is his only wish.

  He slips them around the far side of the cages, then traverses the camp edge with the group as the sky loses its light. The camp is open to the elements, wall-less and gate-less, but he goes cautiously until he is reasonably certain everyone has crossed the perimeter.

  Once they are clear, he turns north with a soldier’s jog. They race silently behind him, like children following a Pied Piper. But there is no cave to take them to, no safe haven or worn-up place, only the deep, cold water of the Channel some miles ahead—which is farther than Garcia expects any of them will be able to get. He has no plan, only the repeating obsessive knowledge that they need to be not here.

  So he runs and they run with him into the gathering dark, leaving lush, blooming trails in their wake, a verdant trail of impermanent magic that anyone with eyesight will be able to track. They are their own worst enemies here, thinks Garcia. They don’t know how to be anything other than themselves.

  Yet they run with him, tireless, for hours. Eventually when Garcia stumbles, throat parched and chest exploding they scoop him up and carry him into the starry night, continuing their escape to nowhere. Hoping all along that somewhere ahead is a worn-up place in the universe waiting to gather them in its arms and bring them home.

  You can’t right the wrongs of the whole world,” she said.

  “All you can do is your very best to make a difference to the people in front of you right here, right now. Help one person, and then another, and another. Don’t even count them.

  Jacey Bedford

  The Horse Head Violin

  Jacey Bedford

  I didn’t notice him until the crowds of Belgian refugees from the train at Queen Street Station had thinned. He was hanging back, his left arm in a sling, thick bandages around his hand. His right hand clutched the hand of a girl of maybe nine or ten years old. “Voulez-vous une tasse de thé?” I asked. “Et ta soeur?”

  “Ja. A cup of tea, thank you.”

  His voice squeaked, giving his age away. He was probably no more than fourteen.

  “You speak English.”

  “A little.” He squeezed the girl’s hand. “Tea, Eveline. Say thank you to the lady.”

  The child looked up at me with eyes round as saucers but said nothing.

  “Eveline means to say thank you, miss, but... she’s shy.” His English was perfectly understandable despite a pronounced accent. He said something in Flemish to Eveline, who released his hand, but clutched the fabric of his coat. I saw that tucked inside his sling was the neck of a violin. The head, usually a scroll, was carved into the face of a woman. There wasn’t room for a whole violin inside the sling. It had to be a broken-off neck. I hoped that if he was a musician, his damaged hand would heal so he could play again.

  “Do you need to see a nurse?” I pointed to his bandaged hand. “Or a violin maker?”

  He shook his head. “The dressing should be changed in three days. Alas the violin…” He shook his head, his slate-grey eyes wet with unshed tears.

  His hair was thick and wavy and might be fair when it was clean. His lips were well-shaped, but trembled when he spoke. His sister, Eveline, had the same fair hair. Even taming it into two thick plaits couldn’t disguise the natural curl. Her heart-shaped face was solemn, her eyes never still. She glanced about as if looking for something, or someone.

  ~*~

  I was seeing first hand the tragedy that I’d read about in the newspaper. Life was never dull in my job as secretary to Mrs. Ratcliffe. She was a society lady, wife of Mr. Charles Ratcliffe, and niece to Mr. Edward Brotherton—former member of parliament and owner of the Brotherton chemical company. He had the honour, if honour it was, to be Lord Mayor of Leeds when the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo, triggering a chain of events that led to war. Being a widower, Mr. Brotherton had asked Mrs. Ratcliffe to be his lady mayoress, and she had stepped into the role as if born to it. It was that role that took us to the station. Mrs. R. was always one to lead by example.

  Britain entered the war in 1914 when Germany invaded neutral Belgium. Our brave boys, my own brother amongst them, volunteered to fight, thinking it would all be over by Christmas.

  Hardly had Tommy kissed me goodbye and set off for Pontefract to join the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, when Mrs. Ratcliffe called me into her study.

  “Polly, we are going to welcome the Belgian refugees,” she announced. “Your French is passable.” Mrs. Ratcliffe, though only about six years older than me, was already a force of nature. She could silence a roomful of chatterers merely by walking into it. If Mrs. Ratcliffe said we were going to welcome refugees, then we
were, and so, no doubt, was every lady of quality in Leeds who wanted to earn Mrs. Ratcliffe’s approval.

  “The Belgian refugees,” she continued, “will be arriving by train from Folkestone where they have been obliged to sleep on the beach.” I had read the newspaper. On the fourteenth of October, after the fall of Antwerp, sixteen thousand Belgian refugees landed at Folkestone in a single day, and more arrived daily at Tilbury, Margate, Harwich, Dover and Hull. Never had Britain seen such an influx, but Brave Belgium, as a country, was a war hero, standing as it did between the Kaiser’s troops and the French border.

  Everyone rallied round, donating spare clothes and blankets. The Belgians were being sent inland by the train-load, ill-equipped and traumatised, to be housed in church halls or by families with goodwill and a spare bed.

  As the train huffed into Queen Street Station, Mrs. Ratcliffe gave the ladies of the Refugee Committee one last cool stare. “You all know your places and your jobs. Let’s do our very best to give these poor souls a warm welcome.”

  Some of the volunteers had been running around all afternoon trying to reunite husbands with wives, children with parents. We heard an occasional joyous shout when they succeeded.

  “Have you lost someone?” I asked the boy as he gave me back his empty cup.

  “Ja.” He didn’t elaborate.

  “Maybe the next train?”

  He shook his head and squeezed Eveline to him.

  “Are you hungry? There are sandwiches.”

  I saw him begin to frame a polite no thank you, but he looked down at Eveline and nodded.

  Ida Lupton, scurried past. “Ooh, my feet are killing me. Mrs. Ratcliffe says there’s another train due in ten minutes. I’m not sure how she knows.”

  “If that’s what she says, then there is. The train wouldn’t dare be late.”

  “Mrs. Kitson-Clark says she’s a witch,” Ida giggled. “How else could she know what she knows and do what she does?”

  I put two rounds of sandwiches into a paper bag and handed them over to the young man together with two more cups of tea. “Have they told you where you’re staying tonight?”

  “Eveline is supposed to go to the Society of Friends and I am to go to the Town Hall.”

  “They’re splitting you up?”

  Eveline gave a little mewling cry and clung to her brother’s arm, her eyes wild.

  He nodded.

  “That can’t be right,” I said. “There are a dozen people whose sole job it to reunite families.”

  He shrugged. “We will not go.” He looked around the station as if looking for a corner to hide in. “We have lost too much. We will not lose each other.”

  With the toot of a whistle and the screech of metal the next train huffed into the station in a cloud of sulphurous smog.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be on the platform?” Ida said, retying her apron over her dress.

  “I suppose so, though I think I’ve forgotten most of my French and I don’t speak Flemish.”

  “Do what you did before. Smile and point.”

  “Polly!” Mrs. Ratcliffe barely had to raise her voice to make herself heard.

  I scurried to catch up with her as she sallied forth into the crowd of folks descending from the second train.

  I flinched from their dead-eye stares and hesitated.

  A firm hand in the middle of my back propelled me forward. “You won’t do any good like that, girl,” Mrs. R. said.

  “I’m not sure how much good I’m doing anyway,” I said. “There’s so much hurt.”

  She looked me in the eyes and dropped her voice to a throaty whisper. “You can’t right the wrongs of the whole world,” she said. “All you can do is your very best to make a difference to the people in front of you right here, right now. Help one person, and then another, and another. Don’t even count them. It’s not a competition. Small steps, Polly, and you’ll walk a long road.”

  She was right. By the time the second train-load of refugees had been fed, clothed, tended and directed to their next destination, my feet were sore and my back ached, but I didn’t feel useless, even handing out cups of tea and smiles. The smiles were most important; even without language they said, you are welcome. We will take care of you. We can’t make up for your loss, but we can help you to go forward from here.

  In the late evening Mrs. R. clapped her hands for our attention. “That’s it for today,” she announced. “Well done, ladies. There’s another train arriving tomorrow at three. Please be here by two-thirty at the latest.”

  I glanced around to make sure I hadn’t left anything behind. It was then I saw a girl peering through a crack in the waiting room door. As our glances connected, a hand appeared around her shoulder and drew her inside. The door closed.

  It took me a few moments to place her heart-shaped face. I walked to the waiting room and pushed open the door. There were two figures sitting together on a bench, their backs to me.

  “Eveline?”

  The child jumped up, startled at the sound of her name. Her brother stood and pushed her behind him. “You can’t separate us. We will not go.”

  I raised both hands, palm outwards. “I’m not here to send you anywhere. Besides, everyone’s gone. Why are you still here? Can I help you to find where you should be going? Didn’t you say something about the Town Hall? It’s not far I can give you directions.”

  “It’s for boys only.”

  Ah, so that was why they were trying to split up brother and sister.

  “So what do you intend to do?”

  His grey eyes clouded over and he shook his head. “Maybe tomorrow they will find somewhere where we can be together.”

  “Where are your parents?”

  He shook his head. “We have no one. No one and nothing. Except each other.”

  “I don’t even know your name,” I said.

  “Verlinden,” he said. “Piet Verlinden.”

  “Pleased to meet you. I’m Polly Daniels.”

  An idea had been taking shape. I’d have to let someone know tomorrow and see if a permanent place could be found, but for tonight...

  “You can come home with me,” I said. “My brother Tommy joined up, so you can sleep in his room if you like.”

  “Say thank you to Miss Daniels, Eveline,” Piet said, but Eveline said not one word. “She doesn’t mean to be rude, miss. I thank you on her behalf.”

  We walked home from the station in the deepening dusk, past riverside warehouses and garment factories, and finally up Beeston Hill to Shaw Street, a cobbled cul-de-sac with a long line of back-to-back, brick-built houses. The toilets, earth closets clustered together in a yard, a little further down the street, one for every two houses.

  I didn’t know how to talk to my charges. Whatever I said was bound to remind them of what they’d been through. I’d lost both my parents, but not in such traumatic circumstances and at least I still had a roof over my head.

  It took a while to light the fire and coax it to give out enough heat to boil potatoes on the trivet and to fry sausages on the plate above the side-oven.

  As I put the sausages and mash on the table I said, “My brother has joined the army, the King’s own Yorkshire Light Infantry. He’s already shipped out to France.”

  “I hope he returns safely,” Piet said.

  I felt a shiver run down my spine. Mortars and shells had destroyed Piet’s home. Tommy would face all that and more.

  “They say it will be over by Christmas,” I said.

  He didn’t reply.

  “Would you like to put that somewhere safe?” I nodded to the violin head still poking out of his sling.

  He drew the intricately carved head out of its hiding place. It still had about six inches of the neck attached but the fingerboard was missing and it had lost all its pegs. Eveline stared at it and whimpered a little when he placed it carefully on the sideboard.

  “Do you play?” I asked.

  “A little, but my sisters both play better
than me.”

  “Sisters?” The question was out before I’d thought about it.

  “Eveline and Marika.”

  At the sound of her sister’s name Eveline whimpered again.

  I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing. Eventually the silence worked. “We were told that Zeebrugge was about to fall to the German advance, so we tried to reach Oostende, but then we were directed to Blankenberge. We lost Marika... at Blankenberge...”

  Eveline whimpered again.

  I gave Piet a pair of Tommy’s old pyjamas and Eveline a spare nightdress that buried her.

  “I hope you’ll be comfortable.” I showed them the bedroom, shadowed in the glow from the gas mantle, and pointed out the chamber pot under the bed before retiring to my own room.

  I slept fitfully, woken once by Eveline’s screams and another time by her brother’s low voice and her pitiful sobs.

  In the morning the siblings were up before me. By the time I came downstairs, Piet and Eveline between them had persuaded the fire into life and the kettle was already singing on the trivet.

  I popped out to visit the necessary and then ran up to the corner shop to buy bread, onions and carrots, and a pound of shin beef from the butcher which would need to simmer all day to make the best of it.

  “I have to go to the station again today,” I told Piet and Eveline. “But you two can stay here and I will enquire as to whether there’s somewhere you can both go together.”

  “Thank you,” Piet said. “What can we do to help?”

  “I’m going to make a stew,” I said. “You can keep the fire going and make sure it doesn’t burn.”

  “We can do better than that.” He waved Eveline to the table. “We will make the stew.”

  I left them to it and went to join Mrs. R. and the ladies at the station.

  When there was a break in the influx of refugees, I told Mrs. R. how I’d acquired my guests and asked if it wasn’t a shame to split up siblings just because one was a boy and one was a girl, especially when they’d lost so much already. She took it upon herself to interrogate the accommodations committee, but could find nowhere that my refugees could call home, at least not until Piet’s hand healed. When he was fully fit there might be an agricultural job for him which would allow him to take his sister. She did, however, add me to the register of billets, so I could claim a small amount to feed my charges.