by Neil Hetzner
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
Flight
They have been waiting at the river’s edge less than five minutes before Hortos unslings his bow and nocks an arrow. The remaining orange-feathered winger is flying rapidly upriver. Prissi can only guess what has happened to Joe, but the fact that the winger is flying rather than piloting the launch gives her hope. Even though the winger is a dozen meters in the air, in the middle of the river and beating his wings furiously, all of that activity seems to have no effect on the centaur. He draws his bowstring so far back that Prissi can’t understand why the bow itself doesn’t crack. When the arrow releases, the bow string hums. Prissi listens to that locust-like sound die as she watches the arrow fly toward where there is no winger. Yet.
To an incredulous Prissi, the arrow and the left leg of the winger intersect. Wings stop beating as the winger looks to see what possibly can have happened. Edgee plunges toward the water, until, at the last second, his wings start to beat again. When Hortos steps out of the shadow of the woods, Edgee notices. He immediately drops his left wing and makes a sharp turn toward where Prissi sits astride the man-horse. For some unknown reason, later Prissi thinks it could have been pride or even despair, Hortos delays reaching back into his quiver to draw another arrow. As Edgee flies toward them, he reaches down to his wounded leg. Prissi assumes that it’s the wound that draws his hand, but, instead, Edgee reaches into a pant leg pocket and withdraws the folding saw. Edgee is less than five meters away when Hortos’ second arrow digs deep into the winger’s chest. His wound will be mortal, but momentum and anger carry him forward. Prissi is thrown from the centaur as Hortos rears to protect himself from Edgee’s attack. The centaur’s hoofs strike as high as they can, but only catch the winger’s legs. Edgee’s wings cover Hortos’ torso as his hand begins maniacally slashing at the centaur with the saw blade. The dying winger and the centaur, bleeding from a dozen cuts, thrash about in the dense brush. Prissi, caught for a third time that day among the vines and thorns, struggles to twist herself away from the battle. Edgee knows he is in his last minutes, but with hate and rage is how he wants to leave life. He frantically slashes and stabs, but each following stroke of the blade does less and less harm. Hortos bucks and kicks and finally manages to throw Edgee to the ground. His hoof lashes out and snaps the arm that holds the blade. The centaur places a hoof and his weight upon the winger’s chest until the wildly pounding wrathful heart beneath grows still.
Although she is not wounded, Prissi is horrified that she is covered in almost as much blood as Hortos. She looks around and sees that she has been lucky because most of what holds her down is vine and not bramble. She twists and turns, plucks and pulls and manages to free herself. She uses the centaur’s rear legs to pull herself up. At her touch, the skin on Hortos’ legs quiver as if a horsefly had landed, but the legs themselves remain immobile. Once she is standing, Prissi works herself around Edgee’s blood-soaked wings so that she can see Hortos’ face. She reaches up to wipe the blood from the man-horse’s face, but he flinches.
”Let me help.”
“Going will help.”
Prissi doesn’t know whether the centaur means that her leaving will help or that his going, like Mortos and Olewan have gone, will help. She stands by, hands reaching out, but doing nothing until the man-horse bends his forelegs and, then, his hind legs so that he is sitting on the blood churned forest floor.
Prissi tries to catch his eyes, but Hortos is looking somewhere else. After a minute, he must have seen enough because he closes his eyes. Prissi closes hers, too and her hand reaches up to grab the crescent crystals hanging from her neck. She can wait for Hortos to die. Another one of her victims. Or, or she can move on.
More for Hortos sake than her own, the devastated girl starts off down the path. She has no idea of where she is going, and the idea that she is walking away from the water fills her with trepidation, but she feels she has no other choice.
She hasn’t gone a half kilometer when she hears a long moan that three times rises up an octave before dropping back down. In respect, Prissi waits for the sound to disappear before she continues hobbling down the path. She doesn’t stop until it is too dark to see.
Prissi, hungry, tired, near crippled Prissi, worms her way a few meters into woods, works her way under a clump of barberry, and spreads her wings to clean them as best she can before she folds them around her like a blanket. Exhaustion overrides all else—hunger, fear, remorse, sadness, even, hate. Her wounded body needs to heal as much as her mind needs relief. She takes three pills from the vial she had taken from the Bury, swallows them and falls deeply asleep.
The slivered moon is high in the sky, its light mostly filtered by spring’s new leaves, when Prissi is rousted by a hand tugging on her ankle. Despite how deeply she has been sleeping and how rough the awakening, the girl opens her eyes without fear.
The hand belongs to Fair. Even when Prissi sits up, the boy keeps pulling on her. The broken light of the moon hides what his face might tell, but his hands are insistent. When Prissi folds her wings so that she can get herself to her knees, Fair backs his way out to the path. Once they are both on the path, Fair talks, but what he is trying to communicate is more effectively done with his hands than his words. Prissi gets the gist. Olewan, the old man, Mortos and Hortos are dead and Fair’s world is crumbling. He has come to Prissi to seek salvation.
Since Prissi has no idea where she is, and since she has no desire to test her wings, even if she could find a break in what seems to be an unrelenting, unbroken, forest canopy, she snorts at the idea of the woods boy looking to her for help to make his escape. Although Prissi doesn’t see how she might be useful to Fair, it only takes her a moment to get an idea of how he might be able to help her.
“I’m going to the big water, the ocean. I can help you, but, first, I have to get to the ocean. Do you know where it is? The big water?”
Prissi shakes her head in disgust as she listens to herself. Fair’s nod is so tentative that the girl isn’t sure whether he understands what she is asking.
She points along the path, “The big water?”
Fair points across the woods and begins moving down the path. Prissi wants to follow, but she isn’t sure she trusts the boy. After all, he has no reason to trust her. She took Olewan’s crystal, lied to him and then ran away. Fair turns after taking a few steps, sees Prissi standing still, makes a face which seems more grimace than smile, and beckons her forward,
They walk for hours in the dark. Despite the medication she has taken, Prissi’s ribs ache. Her legs ache. Her heart aches. As she walks, the girl manages to ignore the first two, but not the third.
They change paths at least a dozen times. Each time they switch from one path to another, Prissi feels more out of control. To allay her fears, she begins to flex the muscles in her wings. She tells herself that she can, and, if she must, she will fly. Moving through the night’s soggy murk, the winger spends as much time looking above as she does looking ahead. She wants to be prepared so that if the need arises, she will know which way to fly. Most of the girl’s scouting is not reassuring. The woods on both sides seem dense and dark. As nearly as she can tell in the darkness, if she were to launch, she would crash into a tree in seconds. So, she plots and plods and is enervated by both. The only distraction from her thoughts comes when Fair talks. Prissi has a hard time understanding what he is saying, but she makes herself pay attention because she thinks it may help her later on. From Fair’s telling of the day’s events, it seems obvious to Prissi that life in the Bury is the same in its fundamentals as life beyond it. Anger, revenge, self-centered desire and love are what wind the clock.
Prissi’s feet, which have been tromping along without her mind’s guidance, are the first part of her to notice when the path changes. Walking is harder because the path is softer and the path is softer because it is sandier. It is not until she stumbles and throws her hands forward into Fair’s back that Prissi’s mind recognizes that they are getting
close to the shore. Once recognition comes, all of Prissi’s senses become alert to the changes. There is a briny smell to the air. The oaks and maples, pecans, and river birches have changed over to pines. The brush is thinner. There is a thump, as steady as a fool’s heartbeat, pounding in the distance. They are still embowered when Prissi shouts as she looks down the path to where the woods tight clutch gives way to open horizon. The sight of featureless spectral gray works a chemistry in the teener that causes her to cry. She can not say why. Her tears are profuse, but her feelings, as they have been throughout the long walk, though intense, remain diffuse.
Two minutes later Prissi and Fair are standing on the high landward side of a wrack-littered beach. Driftwood and netting, bubblebottles, seaweed and shells, a shoe, scraps of badboard, another shoe, a deeply gouged buoy and a million smooth rocks are strewn in that part of the wind-sculpted shore which rises higher than the most recent tides. Below the belt of refuse is a band of smooth wet sand. The pale light from the sliver of a defeated moon mottles the beach in taupe, black and gray. The ocean beyond is simpler—just black and grays except far to the east where someone has drawn a pencil line of molten pink.
Prissi stares at the horizon and is mesmerized by all of the open empty space. All that unendingness makes her realize just how cloistered her last days have been. She watches the pink line’s inexorable growing. She knows that as the dawn grows, the possibility that she can carry out her plan shrinks. She swivels her head so that she can look to the south and west. She sees nothing, but her years in Africa staring out at the vastness of Lake Tanganyika have taught her that bodies of water are slow to give up their secrets. Even though she is impatient, she forces herself to slowly study the darkness before her. Still, she sees nothing. She runs down the dune and across the surf swept sand to the water’s edge.
Prissi’s movements trigger a heightened wariness in Fair. He follows a step behind her with his hands poised in front of him like a shortstop with a good bunter at the plate. Prissi flares her wings to keep them dry as she carefully walks into the frothy gray surf. The water is so cold her ankles immediately burn. Despite the pain, she takes her time to carefully scan the horizon first and, then, the water in between. As she watches, a veil of fog far to the west shreds and she sees the faintest glow of lights. Without diverting her eyes, Prissi reaches behind her with an outstretched hand.
“It’s so beautiful. Let’s walk.”
With canine enthusiasm, Fair takes Prissi’s proffered hand. She squeezes his callused fingers in affirmation of her good intentions and begins walking fast along the shore. As they hurry along the smooth, hard, canted strip of sand, Prissi works to solve the most important math equation of her life. If object A traveling at x meters a minute….
Ten minutes later, although the sun itself still remains hidden, its bloody rays have leaked deeper into the gauze of the pale gray sky. The air is calm. Prissi is not. She is sure that all of Fair’s feral senses are keenly aware of her agitation. Seeing the dark shadow of a massive boulder jutting from the sand far down the beach, Prissi picks up the pace.
When they get close to the rock, Prissi drops Fair’s hand and in her most enthusiastic voice says, “Let’s climb it so we can see the sun come up. C’mon hurry!”
Prissi half flares her wings to keep them safe from the rock’s rough surface as she looks for a foothold. The boulder is more than two meters high, but less than that across. As Prissi begins to climb, a worried Fair circles the rock to find his own way up. By the time the girl summits and gets back up on her feet, she is disappointed to find that Fair is already there with a big smile on his face. She gives him her brightest most disarming smile and turns to the east as if to welcome the sun. As Fair turns with her, Prissi shoves his shoulder as hard as she can. Fair fights for his balance, but loses the battle. As the boy tumbles from the rock, Prissi flaps her wings. Before her victim can scramble to his feet, Prissi is five meters in the air. She circles Fair as she reaches into her kanga for the beat-up mypod she had bought what seems so long ago in Spicetown. She keys the mypod before throws it to the ground.
“I’m sorry. Sorry for everything.”
This part of Prissi’s plan depends on two things she can’t control. The first is that Fair will keep the pulsing instrument, a memento of her deceit, and that he will start back to the Bury. She is hoping the thick canopy of the woods will keep the solar cell from recharging. If her enemies, the other ones, the shadowy ones who want to kill her, pick up the signal, she is counting that the mypod will have lost its signal by the time they arrive. The evidence will be that Prissi came ashore and walked north into the woods where something happened and she and her signal were lost.
As Prissi climbs to thirty meters above the ocean, she pinpoints the lights which are her goal. She knows that she must not lose sight of those tiny beacons, but as the sun rises, she also knows that it will be harder and harder to keep her course. It is this part of her plan that is either mortally stupid or brilliantly audacious. No one would expect a fifteen-year old girl to voluntarily give up her mypod with its GPS function to fly across open water in the dark.
Prissi knows it is audacious. She also knows that it is stupid. But, it is the only plan she could come up with that might let her be free. In the same way that Roan Winslow became free to become Nora Langue. Life from death. A shadow phoenix rising.
As she beats her wings, Prissi’s thoughts shift from how painful it is to move her wings—she thinks she can actually hear the crack in her clavicle scrape back and forth—to what jubilation it is to be back in the air again. As she has counted on, the early morning winds are calm. The salt-soaked air is as joltingly invigorating as a meta-espresso. The sound of those light breezes sliding over the swells is like a lullaby.
When her fatigue increases and her pains grow sharper, Prissi tries to ignore that part of her mind which wants to calculate how far out from shore she can go before she would not have the energy to return. She pushes back the nattering voice that wants to relive her exhausted crash. She tries to escape the finicky monitor who wants to recount the number of times her wing has popped free of its socket in the days since she has left Dutton. She shakes her head to distract herself from the moral auditor who wants to tote up the damage—her father, the drowned zie, Bob Tom, Hortos, Olewan, Mortos, even Fair—and discuss payment.
Lull. Lull. Calm lullaby. Come, lullaby.
Since Prissi’s mouth is too busy sucking in the damp sea air, her mind sings to itself. The song may help to keep her calm, but it doesn’t hold back the dawn. When the girl looks over her left shoulder, she sees that an arc of yolk has risen above the horizon and the pre-dawn’s red lava line is morphing into a sweep of orange. Prissi is hit with a jolt of pure panic when she turns back and, for a moment and, then, another, and, then, two more, she can not find her guiding lights. A deep relief, like the medicine that surged through her veins at Columbia Unitarian Hospital, sweeps through her when those guides finally, but very weakly, reappear from the endless murk.
The winger shifts her heading more to the west southwest to give herself plenty of leeway. She restarts the lull, lull, lullaby litany, but suddenly a geyser of youthful defiance explodes in her. She won’t spend any more energy diverting fear. Instead, she imagines herself as the lead bird of a flock. She is out front, leading the others to a good place, a place of safety, a place of joy. She flies first, but in her flock her father follows. She turns her head and sees how happy he is to be with her, traveling along her path. As is Olewan. And….
Something drops from Prissi. Lightened, she rises in the air. The sense of her new lightness is so strong that she looks down to see if her kanga is still on her chest. The pak is there, but, somehow, a huge weight is gone. The winger climbs higher and higher, and, as she does, she feels ever lighter. She feels that, like an albatross, she could fly across the ocean to Africa.
Staring ahead, Prissi sees the ship’s lights wink out as dawn spreads across the Atlan
tic, but as those pin points disappear, the blocky shape they outline begins to emerge from the gray.
As the foundering teener draws closer, she can see that the hulk emerging from the mist is a freighter, a beat-up scabrous freighter. Heaven in a hulk. Prissi is instantly positive that the ship she is flying toward is the same one whose crew offered her sanctuary on the Hudson. She knows beyond any doubt that when she lands that a rail-thin, hard-muscled Liberian woman will wrap her in her arms.
Now, Prissi is truly amazed. She has found a point, or a plane, a place between life and death, where will is all. Beating her wings is effortless. She can fly through the gloaming skies with no more than thought. Because it is so easy, and because she is so eager to see her freighter friends, to touch their smooth black skin, to smell the pungency of harissa on their breaths and the macassar oil in their hair, to be rocked in the cradle of their care, Prissi beats her wings faster. But, in a sharp and amazing display of the interconnectedness of the world and will, as she flies faster, the boat goes slower.
But that can’t be. She and the boat, she and the crew, the African crew are meant for one another. She and Africa.
The freighter wallows, which will prove to be bad for the boat, but good for Prissi, because the exhilaration she is feeling is no more substantial than the fanciful bones and feathers of the Chimera. In actuality, the thrice-wounded teener is beyond exhaustion. She should have crashed and died minutes before. It is only an aberrant northeast wind, presaging a spring storm, lifting her wings and pushing her southwest, and the compromised speed of the disabled ship, that allow the girl and her goal to intersect.
A failing, wildly flapping, deliriously ecstatic Prissi approaches the Liberian freighter on its portside just behind the bridge. She clears the railings and makes such a poor landing that she bangs her shoulder and then her head against the rusty steel of that ancient tower.
A beaten heap of wet wings and worn will rises and falls as the freighter wallows in the low seas until a woman, an African woman, an African woman with thin hard-muscled arms, lifts the unconscious girl and carries her below deck to the relative safety of the crew’s small quarters.
When Prissi finally regains consciousness, her ears listen to the drum-laden music pounding from a banged up speaker, then, her nose smells the mahlebi, bird pepper and nigella and finally she opens her eyes to see a rainbow of brightly colored clothes hanging around the small room like Fifth World flags.
Africa. Oh, Africa. She beckoned and Prissi couldn’t wait. To go to her feverish, loving deadly bosom. Home. Where millions lived for the most basic of reasons. And millions died for no reason. Africa. Home. Prissi craved to be back in the land where she was born and raised, the land where cause and effect had disconnected dozens of decades before. Africa. Oh, Africa.
As Prissi sings her feverish hymn, the crew of the J.J. Roberts works to bring life back into a ship that is supposed to take them back the ten thousand kilometers to their war-torn home.
When they sailed into New York five days before to unload a cargo of coffee, no one had any doubts that the Roberts needed to undergo major repairs. The crew of West Africans contained a number of good mechanics, machinists, jerry-riggers and makers-do. The skills to make do were requisite for those sailing ships under Fifth World flags, but, the Roberts was in need of more than baling wire and ingenuity. She required money.
Money was requested, but money was denied. The owners, two-thirds of a Botswan junta once-removed, had other priorities. The captain of the Roberts, a wild-eyed Gabonese named Christian Bongo, was ordered to load his cargo of used clothing and make do. To insure that the captain understood his duties, the owners made mention of the health of Bongo’s wives and children.
The Robert’s wallows, but, to Prissi down below, that movement feels like rocking. Soon that rocking, along with a dreamy lullaby sounding deep inside her head, sends the girl into many hours of the deepest of sleeps. It isn’t until a minor miracle, also below deck, involving an acetylene torch and some non-traditional and suspect plumbing is accomplished that the Roberts gets back underway. When Prissi awakes she hears the roar of the engines and knows she is bound for Africa.
The rested winger keeps her eyes closed and, at first, only concentrates on the grumbling of the engines and the thudding of the waves banging on the bow. When those sensations finally bore her, she imagines flying with a falcon’s swift speed and sharp sight. Coming up over the hill and down across the soccer fields and, then, above the Mu and over Potter’s Pond where she can pick out Nasty Nancy with her frizzy hair and clipped wings hiding her butt against the low wall outside The Jig. Her hands are waving as fast as her lips are moving as she tells Adam Lin of all she did to help Prissi stay out of trouble, of how she misses Prissi, but…fly on…there’s Joe with his new wings and his alete’s body in that puffy stage of the newly fledged and the expression on Joe’s face looks as tentative as his body as he stands alone at the edge of the pond staring into its waters, but…fly, fly on…there’s Dr. Smarkzy with a package tucked under his arm and he looks so old and frail and, he, too, as he makes his way along the path made of thousands of bricks, each with a graduates name pressed into the clay, looks tentative in both his walk and thoughts, but,…fly…and Prissi veers north to Lakeville, but before she even gets to the edge of the Bissell campus, knowing the smug, self-assured look she will see on Jack Fflowers face, she turns back and she is so high, a klik high in the sky that from the ground she must look like no more than a smudgy dot and she is back and forth over the top of the building at the bottom of Central Park yet, as hard as she looks, even though she can see a gorgon and chimera and a massive centaur, there is no sight of an ancient man in a wheelchair, but…fly on…seventy blocks north she hovers over Spicetown riding the thermals and watches and waits until her patience ends and she dives toward a window defending itself from the world with heavy, faded red damask curtain and she’s through the glass and she has the simpering little evil doll man on the floor, but…no…fly, fly on…to a parking lot that hasn’t held a car in a half-century, high above the Hudson, where darting, dipping, minnow fast, Jiffy Apithy brings the soccer ball up field and his bright round black face is split in two by brighter white teeth and he dribbles the ball from knee to knee and then to his scarred head and then squatting down he gathers his strength and just as all his opponents arrive he snaps upward and the ball sails into the air higher and improbably, impossibly higher and Prissi reaches out and catches it and looks down and sees Jiffy laughing and hears a metallic noise and looks up and sees a door open and a round-faced woman with ritual scars on her cheeks, looking at her.
“I’m Princy Piety. If this god maddening ship is gon sink, we gon sink with full bellies.”
Princy Piety steps through the bulkhead with a battered tray and the smells from the food it holds make Prissi’s nose explode. Hearing the injured girl’s snort causes a blanketing laugh from deep in the African’s small strong body.
Prissi gives the slightest twitch to her wings.
Fly on…….
