40, page 18
In all my years on the mountain, I’d hunted everything the law allowed. I’d trained to kill people in the Army, had seen my friends killed, at times had wanted to kill, though I never had. I wasn’t special. There was no need for training, no mission, no elaborate plan. All it took to kill was willingness and a moment.
The old postman preached on in full-throat. “The children will not return until we’ve made a home worthy of their children, and their children after. In the next forty days, we’ll take every statehouse and courthouse. We’ll strip America naked and dress it in gold. They’ll come for our new homeland, but the Nation of 40 are a mighty people, a nation of warriors, a nation of saints. The Novae Terrae are an army of millions, the largest standing force ever assembled, and so long as we fight for freedom, with the children in our hearts, we will not be defeated.”
Raja Garbos sidled up to me in his full captain regalia, his eye patch in his hand. His face hung somber. He set his forehead against mine and hummed. He told me to hum, too, that it would calm me, though it didn’t.
Then it was time. The marching band struck, the old impostor saluting a white flag at the back of the stage, Raja pulled on his eye patch, gave me a nod, and we strode out into the bracing cheers from a nation stoked feral with pride.
Raja’s white smile shone across the video screens. I saw my own sullen face, my fretful eyes. Nowhere to look and not see myself, I channeled my sight into the back of the old impostor’s head.
The band playing, the postman stepped again to the microphone. I was now near enough to read the words scrolling on the teleprompter as he bellowed, “I’m but a conduit for the power that guides us all. Brave Novae, warrior saints of 40, our consent comes from above.”
A rumbling shook the sky. The video screens cut to an aerial shot of seeding drones trailing their sulfate potion. The curtain of mist cascading down, the ferric fog bloomed into white clouds that stacked and billowed into a glistening mountain of air.
The mountain of clouds blocked the sun, its shade cast over the plaza. From within the cloud emerged a wink of gold. The tiny light drifting lower, the video screens revealed it was a man in a white cape over shining golden armor, and a white plumed helmet with a visor drawn over his face.
Levitating by his own mechanics, the golden knight’s descent halted high above us. The band’s song heralding, the knight standing on a platform of air, he extended down a hand and, like a blessing, tossed a single white lily that tumbled and drifted into the crowd.
“All hail 40,” the old impostor roared.
His hail became a chant, a million voices exalting as one. I glanced to Raja. The look on the actor’s face matched the dread inside me. I didn’t breathe or even blink as my wings lifted me from the stage to pass the grandstand, the dignitaries jubilantly waving, General Özdemir’s face ardent with devotion.
Trails of smoke arced from the rooftops, the whistling and crash of fireworks. The sky rained golden sparks as I soared up through the grid of drones, then swooped higher, the concussions from fireworks pulsing against my skin, colored light strobing in the folds of the clouds.
By his sculpted armor, hulking and muscular, the golden knight was the largest man I’d ever seen. Hovering below him, I clutched the silver pencil and prayed this was a vainglorious ruse, and he was merely Joseph Samuel Pfarlier in a colossal suit.
The knight beckoned me to him with a wave of his hand. The fireworks booming, glycerine spray willowing down, I wafted up beside him. The knight’s gauntleted fingers clasped my hand. He thrust high our arms, our triumphant pairing lit across the screens below, the Novae rapturous with delight.
The glittering of fireworks danced in his visor, his face covered but for a rectangular opening for his eyes. I had to see those eyes. I smiled like he was a gift, and leaned near as if to pass a secret. He did as I’d hoped. His face turned, and in the flash of the fireworks I glimpsed his eyes: one blue, the other green.
The moment had arrived. And I was willing.
With my free hand, I brandished the silver pencil, the point of which I plunged with all my weight and strength into the black heart of his swooning blue eye.
The pencil deep in his socket, the knight bucked backward, tearing at his face, blood purling from beneath his mask. For a moment, the giant hung convulsing in the air. Then, like a marionette cut from its strings, the spell of flight was broken, and he tumbled down and down to break upon the crowd.
The Novae scurried away. There lay Jo Sam, a splayed speck of gold. As if triggered by his heart’s dying shudder, a flash of blinding supernal light engulfed the city, followed by the thunder of detonations and waves of pyretic wind that blasted like a furnace to shred the clouds and spin me breathless.
Gasping, my nostrils singed, I righted myself in the air. The land quaked, the golden buildings wavering, ten thousand windows shattering and their glass raining down. The video screens blinked black. The grid of drones fell like shot birds onto the crowd, who flailed and tripped and trampled one another.
I couldn’t make sense of what was happening. I swooped higher than the highest rooftop, and saw that every curve around the valley’s caldera gushed heinous gouts of black smoke, with fists of fire boiling up into brimstone clouds.
Pain d’Alethea. Spillways. The dams were destroyed, and the surrounding sea raged unabated into the streets. Flying over the plaza, watching the mud-black spate’s approach, I tried to locate Raja, and cried out for Donta, but I couldn’t find them or even hear my own voice over the wailing and water.
I witnessed it all, the streets of people swallowed like bugs in a gutter, flumes surging into flumes, all to converge at Silvesteri Plaza, the stage and tents swept under, Xavier Yan’s golden pyramids launching waves to crush the grandstands, the Glory Gate arch tilting then falling, Nalli taken in her cage.
Crests as high as houses broke against crests as tall as trees. Great geysers erupting, barreling white water laced with stone and glass, the crackling sting of electrical wires sparked explosion after explosion as the floodwaters writhed across the valley.
The land gone, the people gone, the water climbed the buildings. Whirling in dire circles, the hiss of the water deafening, I was too fraught to recognize the molten disk in the smoke as the afternoon sun. I fled from the light, madly flapping above the ruins of the city lost within the ruthless current.
At the valley’s eastern rim, I came upon a dam. The ocean’s torrent pummeling the remains of the spillway and clawing the earthen hillside, an infernal wall of smoke curdled up from the rift.
I hadn’t a thought. Not of death. Not of welfare. I didn’t consider the defense shield being down or active. Even escape was a desire and not a thought. I closed my eyes and held my breath and flew with abandon into the suffocating blackness and searing heat.
Drowning not in water but in fire, when I emerged hacking and coughing into the open sky, my eyes burning and soot scorching my lungs, I gulped the air and did not look back, flying without land to mark my course, the smoke of the dying sun behind me, the ocean ahead a borderless plain, murky and wide and feathering into forever.
6
FLYING WITHOUT GLIDING, my back twitched with spasms and the muscles of my thighs burned. Even my neck grew tired from bracing my head. I ground through a headwind high above the white-peaked waves, the sea below as if the valley’s inhabitants were trapped beneath the water, thrashing to puncture the skin of its surface.
My mind darkened with the night. Phantom faces appeared in the pitch. Donta screaming. Raja screaming. A silver rod in the cavern of Nalli’s mouth. Coral and Sondra and Henry, the golden eyes and paraffin-painted skull of Meera among the others.
Ceaseless movement set a sheen to my skin. I flapped through the icy dark, refusing the damp, refusing the brine. Flying through the starless sky, if there was earth below I could not see. If I’d passed into the black matter of space, I could not see. If I’d passed beyond the realm of the living, I could not see.
* * *
LIGHT OOZED FROM THE DARKNESS. The air frigid, a cold to crack the soul, the blush of morning washed over mountains cragged and frosted. Then came the mirrored expanse of a lake so perfectly calm it reflected the sky.
Two suns, two skies, two lakes, my mind and body wasted, I couldn’t distinguish up from down. Flying higher that was actually lower, the sky that was water rippled, and I reared startled and felt the strain in my spine as I pulled abruptly out of my descent.
My body rose, a coup, one wing clamping at the joint and folding backward like an umbrella opened in a gale. My lone wing beating, I plummeted in a tightening spiral, lower and lower, until I crashed through the leafless boughs of a tree.
Grasping and flailing, limbs snapping against me, I flopped down into the powder-white sand. Dazed beneath a towering tree, the sky in scraps through its broken branches, I lay breathless on the shore of a salt lake.
* * *
BELLS CLACKING, many bells. With what feeble energy remained, I willed my eyes to open. Golden eyes with rectangular pupils on either side of a black snout stared down at me.
The sheep lapped its pink tongue at the air, a red tag on a white woolen ear flapping as it bolted away from a yapping dog, the tin bell strapped to the sheep’s neck clanking as the dog herded it back among the other rattling bells.
A hag of a woman stooped over me. Puffy slits for eyes on a liver-spotted face, hands like fossils, the old woman wore a fur hat with earflaps and a wool shawl clodded with dung.
Two cold fingers checked the pulse in my throat. The old woman draped her stinking shawl across me. She opened a hide canteen and pressed it to my peeling lips to drink.
The old shepherd looped a leather strop up under my arms. She squatted on her heels, slid her head through the loop, and secured the strop around her shoulders. With a guttural groan, the woman hoisted me onto her curved back.
The woman was stout, but not tall. My feet and wings dragged as she plodded up a hillock to a little covered wagon. She sat me on the tailgate and pushed against my shoulders for me to lie back, then covered me with pelts.
* * *
I SMELLED WOODSMOKE and meat. The shepherd peeked into the wagon. She showed me a steaming wooden bowl. I nodded, and she climbed into the bed beside me.
The women blew on spoonfuls. I parted my lips and the salty broth warmed my throat and belly and made me groggy. I closed my eyes and could smell the tobacco on the shepherd’s clothes as the spoon kept butting my teeth.
I took the stew into my mouth. This repeated until my head flopped sideways and my body became a casing of rags. Tiredness like tablets stacked onto my chest, the woman removed my boots and tucked the covers tightly around me.
* * *
A LANTERN HUNG from a chain at the mouth of the wagon. I took a moment to focus my eyes on the buffeting flame, then pushed off the layers of wool and felt the frigid sting of the morning air. I wrapped a pelt up around my shoulders and wings, pulled on my boots, and slid down from the wagon.
I slumped around to the campfire. A hand-rolled cigarette hung off the shepherd’s lip, her neck and face so swaddled she had to turn her body to see me.
She sat on a stump beside the fire with a little iron camp stove leaking smoke from the flue. The stovetop was crowded with a skillet, a tin pot, and a bucket of steaming water.
The shepherd reached a gnarled hand into the bucket and pulled out a tin plate dripping and smoking. Her hand red from the water, she forked bacon from the skillet onto the plate.
The plate I took from her was hot, and made me flinch enough that the blanket slid from my shoulders. The old woman peered unblinking at my drooping broken wing.
She said something in a foreign language. Slavic sounding: maybe Russian or Polish. “Aleshka,” she said, tapping her chest.
I understood that was her name. I told her mine. She held up a hand for me to wait. She dug a ram’s horn from her bag and set the point into her ear and aimed the funnel in my direction.
“Mazzy,” I said again, and tore the bacon with my teeth.
THIRTY SHEEP AND FIVE DOGS, a horse and a mule. The sheep wore numbers painted onto their sides and ear tags in red or blue or green. Two of the dogs were mastiffs. The others were border collies, all almost identical with black coats and white faces.
Aleshka rode on horseback, the pack mule tethered to the horse and pulling the wagon. The old woman said I could ride the mule, but I preferred to walk.
I didn’t know where we were, but by the salt lake and the terrain I deduced it might be Utah. I didn’t really care if we were in Utah, or if Utah and America even still existed. I wanted to be nowhere, and that was where I’d landed.
We trailed the sheep that moved together like a single organism down through black rocks and brush, and into a gully of sodden grass that splashed under their hooves and sounded like rain.
Aleshka whooped and whistled to keep the sheep moving. The large dogs plodded alongside me. The work dogs ran barking and snapping at the bawling sheep.
Over a pass of burnt-out forest, across a stream, through a sheer-walled gorge, and into thick woods that snarled the advance and made Aleshka shout curses at the animals.
Soon we came out onto a little sloping pasture with a split-rail corral and a timber-and-daub cabin and barn. Another large dog barked and trotted out from the barn. The other mastiffs rambled forward, and the three of them playfully fought.
Aleshka whistled at the work dogs that dashed to guide the sheep into the corral. I hurried and closed the gate behind the flock and then Aleshka sat tall in the saddle and took tobacco and papers from inside her woolen coat and rolled herself a smoke.
* * *
THE CABIN was rustic and cold. Aleshka lit a fire in the iron stove. My forehead hot, wing throbbing at the wounded joint, I wanted to impress upon her I was strong and sat at the wooden table instead of lying on the couch, which itself was but a low wooden pallet cushioned with pelts.
Aleshka disappeared back into the bedroom. She returned with her arms full of clothes and an old pair of brogans. The woman motioned for me to try them on. The pants were stiff and heavy and a little large, the boots just about right. I handed back the shirt and pointed at my wings.
“It won’t fit,” I told her.
The old woman sucked on her cigarette. “You fly?”
“I did,” I said. “They’re injured now.”
Aleshka set her cigarette on the edge of the table and waved a finger in the air for me to turn around.
I thought the woman wanted to inspect my wings, but she reached around me with the shirt. The shirt backward, she had me stick my arms through the sleeves and pulled it tight and buttoned it up the back as far as it would go.
* * *
MORNING CREPT through the treetops, the sheep silent in the mist rising off the pasture. Aleshka and the dogs gathered the flock into the shearing barn. The old woman laid her midsection into a harness hung from a counterweighted chain hooked over the barn joists.
Slung in her harness, Aleshka roughly grabbed sheep and used heavy shears to clip their wool in long white peels. Once the sheep were shorn, the old woman shoved them at me, and I wrestled them bawling through a trapdoor in the barn’s side panel.
Periodically we took breaks for water and a bite of jerky. Aleshka smoked and sheared and seemed not so much a human as a mechanism of nature, as unhurried and relentless as a stream that over time erodes a canyon into bedrock.
* * *
WE ATE A STEW of venison and potatoes. Fresh fleece in her lap, Aleshka smoked and sewed swath to swath. For a time, I watched the woman meticulously work, but my fever was stoked, my spine bowed beneath the deadweight of my wings, my tired eyes batting.
“You not well,” Aleshka said, harsh but not unkind. “Go and sleep. Aleshka need you well.”
* * *
I USED CHAINS and the mule to drag a felled pine out behind the barn. The axe was sharp, and I trimmed the finger-boughs and chopped the trunk into sections and the sections into splits. I added the logs to the great unwieldy pile in the woodshed. Aleshka brought me coffee and a steaming potato wrapped in cloth, had a cup and spud herself, and together we watched snow cartwheel down from the white sky and over the woods.
* * *
DOZENS OF ARROWHEADS decorated the cabin’s wall. I pressed my finger to the point of one and was impressed it’d retained its sharpness. Aleshka stepped in beside me, holding up a cloak of fleece. Open in the back like a painter’s smock, she’d sewn leather straps to the folds that wrapped around to fasten in the front. It was soft and warm and cut so only the slightest bit of skin was exposed between my shoulder blades and the heavy joints of my wings.
I spoke loudly to say it was perfect.
Aleshka seemed to not hear me. She stood staring at the arrowheads on the wall. “You been fighting at war?”
More words than she’d spoken in days, I considered just saying yes and leaving it at that, but I told her, “A man wanted to kill a lot of people. I thought I was stopping him. Then something happened. I did something terrible.”
The shepherd offered no reaction. She looked at me and grabbed the strap at the front of my waist, unbuckled it, cinched it tighter, and buckled it again.
“You with Aleshka now,” she said. “No more war.”
ALESHKA ROUGHLY WOKE ME. Outside the cabin, and from the lightless well of the night, I heard the dogs madly barking and the sheep bawling. Aleshka shoved the rifle into my hands and brandished her pistol.
We hurried out into the pasture, Aleshka training a flashlight up the slope, the beam reflecting in the dozens of glowing gems that were the fretful eyes of sheep. Beyond the flock of eyes rang the riotous sounds of yelping and snarling, a sheep shrieking.
