The Chamber in the Sky

by M. T. Anderson

  “That’s super of you,” said Gregory. “Kids, let’s grab the tents and eat the last of the cookie dough.”

  They set up Gwynyfer’s silk pavilion in the center of the village. It had little peaked roofs and pennants and beautiful rugs for her to lie on inside. Setting it up was hot work. Brian and Gregory decided they’d just sleep outside in their sleeping bags. There was no chance of rain.

  They sat on their sleeping bags — and Gwynyfer sat near them, on her tapestry cloth of gold — and they watched the fungal priests prepare for the evening.

  The creatures danced around the village in the dying light of the lux effluvium. They had no heads, no top nor bottom, and so they danced with whatever branches were closest to the ground, spinning slowly, their fronds fluttering. A rich scent came from them, a hothouse smell, warm and green. This was, Gwynyfer said, their prayer. They exhaled scents to please the Great Body or stimulate it to growth.

  Tars Tarkas the germ clearly did not like or trust them. He leaned against Brian, almost wrapped around the boy. He leaned particularly close when Brian ate some branf.

  Brian watched the dancing and hated the Thusser for killing and burning these gentle and acrobatic growths. He couldn’t stand the cruelty. It reminded him of the bullies who’d poked at his chub in grade school and slapped him from so many directions he dropped his books. It was like a world where those bullies were grown and now could kill with glee, with delight. He was furious.

  He asked, “What did they mean about the strife in the thoughts of the Great Body?”

  Gwynyfer said, “We don’t know if the Great Body has a brain. No one has ever found it. It’s possible that instead, it thrives on the thoughts of the creatures that live in it, much, you know, in the way the Thusser use people’s thoughts as manure. Gregory’s thoughts, for instance. Gregory’s thoughts were clearly good manure. A few disco lights and he was knocked out cold and ready to serve the Thusser masters.”

  “Hey,” Gregory said, irked. “Not funny, okay?”

  Gwynyfer continued, “So the fungal priests were saying that the strife the Thusser Horde has brought here is like a particularly interesting and difficult idea to the Great Body. Some kind of uneasy dream. It’s stirring the Great Body. It might have woken it up.” She smiled. “Strife is life. Life is strife.”

  They fell silent, then, and watched as the pious fungi performed their weird ceremonies at the dying of the light.

  In a little while, they decided to go to sleep. The fungal priests were slowing down. Gwynyfer went into her silk pavilion, and they heard her arranging herself on her bed of pillows.

  Brian felt small paddling feet on his legs, and realized that Tars Tarkas was curling up on his sleeping bag. He looked down at the insecty dragon. Tars Tarkas’s beaky snout was resting on his front pair of claws while his tail and body wound around and around in a spiral. Brian liked the weight there on his knees. It was very reassuring. He liked the earthy smell of the creature, mixed with the deep, forested scent of the praying priests.

  He fell deeply asleep.

  When he awoke, the Thusser had found them.

  Brian stirred at the sound of wind rustling through leaves. He opened his eyes. A strange voice was hissing, Meat-children, awake and arise.

  Brian sat up. The high priest of the Blavage fungi stood near them, balanced on one stalk. Its other limbs were sticking straight out in a circle. It said, They followed; they found us; they are close round about us.

  “What?” said Gregory. “Who? The Thusser?”

  The vegetable creature didn’t reply, but flapped away. Others were crawling out of the car-tire huts.

  Gwynyfer came out of her embroidered tent wearing silk pajamas and a brocade dressing gown. She had overheard. “Well, that’s rather anxious-making,” she said.

  Gregory and Brian were peering down the slope of the intestine into the darkness. They couldn’t see any motion.

  “The Horde’ll still be a few minutes away, I suspect,” Gwynyfer told the boys. “The fungal priests will have set out guards. They’re all connected by mental roots. Anything the guards see, the circle of priests here see. We have some time. I suppose we should prepare some defense.”

  “How?” said Gregory. “We only have one rifle. Do the priests have anything?”

  “I think not. They’re very peaceable. Poisonous to animals, but peaceable.”

  The high priest had returned to them. Flee, friends; away. Leave us to our fate, our final pruning.

  “I learned about you in school,” said Gwynyfer. “I’m not going to let you be snuffed out.” She said it like the fungal priests were class pets, too adorable to die.

  Brian was thinking hard. He looked down the slope into the darkness. There had to be a way to protect the place.

  He hated the Thusser. The thought of them burning these creatures and hounding them into the darkness of the Volutes made him feel violent. There was no way they could let the Thusser destroy this settlement of peaceable creatures.

  He thought about what they had to work with. He looked around.

  Gwynyfer said, “We can take the tin roof off that shed and use it as a gun emplacement. Bri-Bri or I can fire from there.”

  Gregory said, “Let’s do it.”

  Gwynyfer patted his head. “Sorry, human G. You should learn the Cantrip of Activation sometime. Then you could fire a gun, too. Or turn on a light. Or change the TV station.”

  Gregory gave her an angry look. “Okay, okay,” he said.

  Gwynyfer said, “Come along, Bri-Bri. Let’s prepare.”

  Gregory followed them. Together, they lifted the corrugated metal sheet off the top of the shed. They rested it upright against the tires as added armor.

  “Now what?” said Gregory. “There must be something else we can do. One gun against a bunch of Thusser isn’t going to do much.”

  The high priest said, From our sentinels, news: There are twenty of the invader. They shall be here in minutes. They have slain already one of our tender number, a novice growth now laid low.

  The kids looked around wildly. There was still no sign of the enemy in the darkness down the slope.

  Brian had been thinking. Suddenly, he said, “Okay … I have an idea!”

  The others turned to him.

  He said, “Hannibal — the guy who invaded Rome on elephant-back — he was in a similar situation. He was surrounded. And what he did was tie bundles of twigs and sticks to the tails of his oxen and light the twigs on fire. Then the cattle all panicked and charged the Romans and set his enemies on fire.”

  “What a nice story,” said Gwynyfer. “Too bad we don’t have oxen or some sticks or war elephants.”

  “But what we have,” said Brian, pointing to her and Gregory, “is two pyromaniacs. And some tires.”

  The Thusser arrived twenty minutes later. They walked in three rows out of the darkness. Above them, up the slope, the car-tire igloos stood out in silhouette against the dim twist of lux effluvium.

  The Thusser sergeant murmured, “If there is one young fungal priest, there will be others. They don’t stay far from their own kind. The rest must be up there. We’ll have to burn them all. It will be easy. They don’t resist.”

  The Thusser soldiers began marching up toward the village.

  And then, with a whoomf! of flame, tires began rolling down toward them. Black tires coated in oil and gasoline, lit on fire.

  The first few Thusser in the line scampered backward — but not quickly enough. Their long, dark coats caught. They staggered, burning — but more tires were already careening toward them.

  Up the hill, there was a system: The priests pulled apart huts, lifted down tires, rolled the tires through a puddle of oil Gwynyfer had spread from a canister — and then sent them spinning on to Gwynyfer or Gregory, who threw matches, kicked the tires down toward the foe, and jumped back. Two by two, the tires tumbled down the slope. Some wobbled to a stop and lay there burning. Others rolled right into the ranks, causi
ng huge confusion. Thusser soldiers panicked and fell back, shoving one another out of the way.

  The sergeant yelled orders, and they began to shoot.

  Gregory and Gwynyfer ducked behind huts.

  Brian began to provide covering fire, shooting his musket from the side of the village, crouched in the shed. A Thusser warrior fell at his first shot and his second. Then the soldiers began firing on him.

  Gregory and Gwynyfer darted out and lit more tires, sent them rolling.

  “See?” Gregory shouted. “We make a great team!”

  Gwynyfer spared a moment to look at him with pity.

  Gregory said, “We were made to burn things together!”

  She laughed, threw a match, and said, “The flames of love!”

  “Yeah! The inferno of desire!”

  “A heart on fire!”

  “The third-degree burns of affection!”

  Meanwhile, Brian kept bobbing up and shooting. It kept the soldiers occupied.

  But in the shadows, a single Thusser soldier watched the kid’s head peek over the top of the hut and duck down. The dark-eyed man lowered his rifle and aimed it right at the spot where Brian’s face kept appearing. The sniper was going to blow the kid’s head up like a cantaloupe. He squinted. He began to speak the Cantrip of Activation.

  And then some monster was clawing at his hair, tearing at his hands — a dragony, insecty thing fluttering around his head, snapping with a sharp beak. He tried to knock it out of the air with the butt of his rifle, but the bacterium wrapped its tail around his neck and began to gnaw his nose.

  He fell.

  The tires kept rolling by, lit up like bonfires.

  The battle was over in fifteen minutes.

  The last few Thusser had fled.

  The kids had won.

  “It is a too delicious victory,” said Gwynyfer briskly.

  The high priest was not quite so excited. Soon they shall return. And with some magic-maker, some shaman who shall cause harm, wilt, and blight. We must take us farther in. We must flee. We must find turnings and ways they do not know.

  “You’re probably right,” said Gwynyfer. “You should set out speedy-like.”

  She and the boys heaped their things back in their wagon.

  Before they had even finished gathering up Gwynyfer’s pavilion, the fungal priests of Blavage were stalking off in a long line. They did not say good-bye. They did not thank the kids. They disappeared down the tunnel the way the kids had come.

  The wagon, with Gwynyfer shouting to the thombulants, followed ten minutes later. They passed the shuffling fungi. Now the leafy beings raised limbs in farewell.

  At a place the tunnel forked four ways, the kids went one way and the priests went another. All were swallowed up in darkness.

  For hours, the kids forced the thombulants to canter as fast as the beasts could go. The thump of those gigantic feet, the splash through rivers of half-digested ooze — these things were the only sounds the three heard. All they saw were ragged circles of gray picked out by the thombulants’ spotlights. They were joggled by the cart flying over the rough floor of the tunnel.

  They took crazy turnings, trying to make sure they were as hard to follow as possible.

  When they stopped to eat and rest many hours later, they were exhausted.

  They sat in the wagon, leaning on all their gear. They chewed on dried meat and fruits.

  Gregory poked at Gwynyfer with a dried apricot. “So, you agree that we make a good team.”

  “I agree.”

  “A really good team. Almost like we’re meant to be together.”

  Gwynyfer pushed his hand and his apricot away. “Stop congratulating yourself,” she said. “Let’s talk about Bri-Bri for a tick. He’s the real hero. He’s the one who came up with that delightful plan with the burning tires. And the elephants, though I got somewhat lost at the elephants.”

  From her voice, it did not sound like she was praising Brian to be nice. It sounded instead like she was praising him to make Gregory angry.

  She reached out and ran her fingers through Brian’s hair. “You know, I think maybe we should record Bri-Bri’s heroic deeds in song. Oh, for a lute! I’d strike out chords, and, Gregory, you could wear tights and sing, ‘Brian, Brian, fa la la. Brian, Brian, he’s the best. Fa la la.’ Et cetera.”

  “All right,” said Gregory miserably. He stood up. “I’m going to walk around for a minute.”

  Brian ducked to get Gwynyfer’s hand off his head.

  But Gwynyfer kept talking. “And Brian was the one who grabbed that knife from that terrible man in the factory. It was too very brave, don’t you think? He thought of it wonderfully quickly. And all the while, there you were, Greggers, staring into the light like a run-down mannequin.”

  “I’ve heard it before,” said Gregory. He clambered out of the wagon.

  “And Bri-Bri figured out who the murderer was. He figured out that the Emperor was a radio or a bomb or a bomb on the radio or whatever the Emperor was. He worked out the whole thing, which is frightfully clever, especially given that he’s really rather timid and maybe dim.

  “And Bri-Bri was the one who saved my parents when they were accused of murder. Bri-Bri was the one who figured out who was scheming things up with our explosive Highness and he so bravely stepped forward to speak the truth when all the Court wished very hard to pinch him and throw him off the balcony. Thank you, Bri-Bri.” She kissed Brian on the cheek. “Bri-Bri was the one who —”

  At this, Gregory snapped. He yelled, “No, he isn’t! No, he isn’t the person who saved your parents!” He pointed his finger at Brian, who looked like he wanted to shrink into a hole. “He’s the one who accused them in the first place! Okay? You hear me? He’s the one who said to me that you were in on the murder! He thought you were a spy! He thought your father stabbed the Regent!”

  Gwynyfer stopped in the middle of her speech. She swiveled her head to stare at Brian.

  “True, Bri-Bri?” she asked.

  He sat sheepishly, unable to answer. He said, “I, uh — you could … I was wrong about …”

  “True, Bri-Bri?”

  Brian said, “But I was wrong! I thought so, but only as one, you know, possible thing. With lots of other possibilities.”

  Brian could actually see Gwynyfer’s face fill with rage.

  “You thought my father had committed the murder?”

  “No, I —”

  “Yes,” insisted Gregory. “He did.”

  “I don’t believe you!” Gwynyfer said to Brian. “I don’t believe you hid that from me! You could have had us thrown off the tower! My whole family! You really are a vile little worm! I take back my lute song! You’re a pale, ugly, sneaky little lickspittle!” She flung herself to her feet, stooping beneath the bonnet of the wagon, and started kicking Brian’s shins. “You’re a hateful creep! A friend of bacteria! And machines! Your only friends — yes! — your only friends are mannequins and filth!”

  Brian was trying to defend himself. He tried shouting, but she shouted louder.

  “I hate you!” she screamed.

  “Hey!” Gregory hissed. “Quiet! The Thusser! We don’t know how far away they are!”

  She remembered where she was. She fell silent, but her eyes were still burning.

  She sat down across from Brian.

  She stared at him.

  “Sleepy?” she asked.

  He blinked back, but didn’t have anything to say.

  She kept staring and waiting.

  He moved to feed Tars some jerky.

  Gwynyfer swiftly kicked it out of his hand. “You’re not going to feed that thing our food,” she said. “Tell it to go away!”

  Tars, bunched up on the seat, looked confused.

  Gwynyfer still stared at Brian. He didn’t reach for more jerky.

  For the next several hours, they all thought about sleeping. But Gwynyfer would not let them. When Brian, miserable, would begin to droop, Gwynyfer would lash o
ut violently at his ankle. “Traitor!” she’d say.

  He’d sit up and shift.

  And so they spent an awful, wakeful time just sitting there, all half dazed with weariness. No one bothered to take out the sleeping bags or put away the food. They rested on mounds of supplies. Brian slid down next to a barrel of water.

  “Don’t sleep, porky!”

  Brian turned away. He was ashamed that he wanted to cry.

  “Think about what you did.”

  He felt a touch on his back. It was Tars. The creature crawled next to him. Brian heard Gwynyfer cough with disgust. Tars put his claw on Brian’s neck and curled his long tail around Brian’s arm.

  She’s right, he thought to himself. His only friends were bacteria and machines.

  In that moment, it felt like Tars was his only friend in the world. He leaned his head against Tars’s stomach.

  Finally, they all couldn’t hold their eyes open any longer. They passed to sleep.

  By the next night, they would no longer be together.

  Several hours later, Gwynyfer somehow remembered she was supposed to be glaring, and woke herself up.

  Brian was curled next to the water cask. Gregory was asleep on top of their folded tents. Everything was dark.

  Gwynyfer kicked out at Brian’s ankle again.

  “Ah!” He jolted up and slammed his head on the water.

  She glared at him. He looked around frantically.

  She remembered that he couldn’t see in the dark. She reached out and touched a lantern. She muttered the Cantrip of Activation. It lit up.

  She faced Brian again and took up her glaring.

  “Look,” he said, “I’m sorry. But we have to … I had to think about all the possible suspects. And your —”

  “Stick a sock in it.”

  Brian stopped talking.

  Gregory sat up. “What’s happening?” he said. “Did any of us keep watch last night?”

  “No,” said Gwynyfer. “It’s Brian’s fault.”

  Brian started to protest, but Gregory shouted louder, “Our food!”