Aeon Twelve

by Aeon Authors

“No!” The butterfly’s cry surged in my mind. Without another thought to me, it flitted from my hand and away down the slope.

  Shaken, I watched until it was only a speck against the hills. Then it was gone.

  The man handed me a handkerchief. “You all right?”

  I veiled my damp face with the tattered cloth. What had happened?

  After a while, he said, “You talk to them.”

  I dropped the cloth from my face and nodded.

  “How?”

  Shrug. In my head.

  “Thanks for letting me see.”

  I turned to the man and lifted my hands. That one didn’t like you. Why?

  He flushed. “Sorry if I disappointed your friend.”

  No, I said. My kin.

  A nod, slow, without surprise. “You’re wild.”

  I bowed my head. Yes.

  Wild, the word even the master dared not speak to my face. Witches he did not mind, for they could be warded off with yellow cloth cut against the weave and bitterstone and other charms. Ghosting spirits could not harm him and mudsuckers from ill-dug wells could be killed with a knife, but no one knew how to protect from a wild one. It was said they fellowshipped with stone-filled earth and wailing storms and all the untamed things, and these kin would do their bidding and destroy their foes.

  Few even dared whisper the word behind my back, for fear a hole would swallow them or a viper slide into their bed. Finally, though, kinlings heard of it and told me. They did not understand it, but they listened for me, and slowly I understood what the villagers feared.

  He had always made sure I had enough to eat and blankets to keep me warm. I think he had tried in his clumsy way not to discomfort me by asking questions. But now he seemed to regard me as something both stranger and more easily broken than before.

  And still we rode in the cart, up and up a faint, winding trail that he said led over the mountains. At my side he sat silent now for hours at a stretch, as though he had lost the trick to weaving words and had no more skill with them than I.

  Sometimes, though, he sang. Often I saw the scenes in my mind, the song picturing them to me as clearly as a kinling would. And when he sang sorrowful ballads of loves won and lost—mostly lost—his eyes were always on me, and somehow with the music they told me all the things he did not speak.

  Still the air cooled, both day and night, and his blankets were not enough, even though he insisted I sleep with them all, inside the tent where the air rushed less.

  “It’s because you’ve lived your whole life down there, where the earth traps the heat so it can’t get free,” he told me when he awoke one morning. I had been sitting next to the pony for heat; I shivered too much to sleep.

  That night we reached the summit, he said, the highest point of all. The earth was barren but for a few scrubby flowers hugging the ground, though a vast wood of needled trees grew lower on the mountain. Rounded heights, often dusted with snow, fell to unseen valleys before rising again, on and on, dipping and soaring to the horizon in every direction. I could see neither the place I had left nor the place I was going.

  The man had promised to sing me a story of Mallon, the imp who spooked ponies and turned men’s beards white as they slept. Yet when we huddled at the fire that night, he sang instead of a man sailing the great lake beyond the mountains, who caught sight of a water-woman. He dove from his boat, though the water was high and stormy. The sailor swam ever deeper seeking the water-woman, though he surely could never quest so far and return again. Yet even when he accepted the lake’s cool embrace, it was only a little sad, for always he would be with the water-woman, there below the waters.

  The wet feeling of reeds wrapping my skin faded slowly from my mind. Through the wavering flames, the man was watching me. Slowly he reached to me and traced a single finger around my face. Then his hand fell to mine and he took it in his, his grasp soft and gentle. When I did not pull away, he rose, still holding my hand, and led me beneath the canopy.

  And I realized that in all our days of travel, we had been but two butterflies on the air, dancing and courting, waiting for that night atop the mountains. And I did not fear.

  One day soon after, a lush clearing like a lake of greenest waters began flickering into sight from behind the trees. I did not need to see the flash of wings in the sun. In my mind I already heard them, those faint rustlings and whispers that I had lacked for so long. Though the kinling in the cocoon had hatched and then flown only a few days before, the sound of them was almost unfamiliar.

  When we were just in sight of the meadow, the man pulled the pony to a stop. “Guess you might want to go say hello,” he said, his voice low.

  I scrambled down from the cart and took off at a quick trot, but I kept nearly tripping over my own feet and finally broke into a run. Breaking through the edge of the meadow, just off the side of the worn wagon trail, I cried to them in my mind, “Hello!”

  At first they fluttered away, startled, but then they flocked to me, landing on my hair and dress, in my hands.

  “Are you kin?” they asked. “You smell wrong.”

  Thinking of all the long days and nights on the road, smothered in dust, I could only laugh. “I am,” I said. “I am!” And feeling their wings in my hair and their voices in my head, I laughed like the master had the day it rained after many months of drought, with his eyes closed and the drops splashing in his face.

  Suddenly, in one breath, nearly all of the kinlings whirled into the sky. The next moment, I felt the man’s hand on my shoulder. I was kneeling, I realized. I had not even noticed falling.

  “Are you all right?” The spoken words grated, like gravel shaken in my ears, but the touch of his hand was warm.

  I am fine, I told him with my hands. Let us stop here.

  “Sure,” he said, though his voice seemed to catch as he said it. At least, I imagined later that it did, though I paid little attention when he spoke. I stood and left him there as I walked deeper into the meadow, stepping lightly so as not to crush the late summer flowers.

  Near the middle, I sat and waited for them to come, sparing only a glance to see that the man had returned to his cart.

  Slowly they returned, wisping down hesitantly upon me in ones and twos.

  “I have missed you,” I whispered. “I have longed for your voices.”

  They settled somewhat, and at the edges of my mind I felt them rustling, talking among themselves, though I could not grasp their meaning. Out of these thoughts a clamor rose that I felt but could not understand, tremors of bewilderment that I found myself sharing, for I did not see what upset them.

  “You smell wrong,” one of them said again.

  I shook my head, sending a few of them up in the air again. Stilling myself, I waited, asking.

  “You come with him.” They pictured to me an image of the man, but misshapen, like the bottom of a pond distorted by shadows and diverted light. A dusky odor of fungus and decay hung about him.

  “I do not understand. He is my…friend. My breath-kin,” I said. “We share warmth.” I showed them the chilled nights and the mornings waking, enclosed in his arms.

  They exploded from me again at these thoughts, more and more of them, until only one white kinling remained, perched on my finger. Tears coursed down my face, for I felt the kinling’s sick, dry hatred as though it were mine, and underneath a lump of fear grew deep in me, tender and feverish.

  “We know you are kin,” said the butterfly, “For only kin speak to us. How do you not see?”

  “See what?” I cried.

  “He comes to this meadow to kill. You share warmth with one who slaughters your kin.”

  I flung the kinling into the air. The kinling was wrong. Wrong. It was not true. It could not be true.

  The hatched kinling had fled nearly at once. No other would even come near in all those long days through the lowlands.

  We shared warmth, and other things. He was kin as surely as they, was he not?

  Finall
y, I stood and stomped through the meadow, paying no mind to the flowers. The man stood by his cart, his face turned away. I clutched his arm and pulled him around to look at me.

  Hands flying, I asked, What do you do to my kin?

  I saw defeat in the slump of his shoulders, but ignored it. I could not believe it was true.

  “I’m sorry, Renna,” he said. “I won’t. For you—I won’t anymore.”

  No. No.

  A flutter near my ear; the white kinling had returned.

  “I will show you,” it told me. “You will see.”

  An image filled my mind of kinlings, all sitting in rows with their wings out, basking. Except they did not quiver or rustle or breathe. And then I saw nails, tiny nails thrust through their bodies and chaining them to the boards on which they lay.

  As I watched, the man—my master—took a board lined with kinlings and gave it to another man, strangely and richly dressed. Nodding, this man handed my master coins, many of them, nearly as many thrush as the master had given for me.

  I turned the image away and looked at the man. He must have guessed what I saw, for he said, “It’s why they call me the Butterfly Man.”

  A brief mountain breeze hissed sharp in our ears for just a moment. The sun fell warm on my face and the scent of high wild grasses and long-traveled dust curled past my nose. There was nothing to be said.

  I turned from him and strode away, my shawl pulled around me, and headed for the straggling bristly trees bunched around the edges of the meadow. My kin fled before me, and I felt their loathing for the man reach farther and farther, until it clouded over all their kinship with me. My eyes had turned blurry with a twist of feelings I could not even name. Striding away, faster now, nearly running I crossed into the beginnings of the deep forest. He called me, once, his voice rising to the scream of a boar at slaughter. I clutched the shawl tighter around me and stumbled through clearing and cluster, sometimes sloping and sometimes steep and always down.

  The same fingers that caressed my hair in the deep of night had in daylight speared many a feebly flapping kinling to a plank. The voice that sang so many wonders also named bounties to be paid for my kin.

  Tears rushed from my eyes unheeded, and I paid no mind to my path, caring only that it led me away.

  I should never have called him friend. I was wild. Human kinship could be no kinship to me.

  When the day suddenly faded, I glanced up to see a vast sheet of cloud shadowing the sun, and even as I looked the wind blew cooler in my face. Still barely thinking, I found myself slumped against a scraggly needled tree just as the first heavy drops pelted the ground. There I watched the gray streaming sky and pleaded in my heart for a well-timed lightning spear to end me.

  I woke damp and chilled near dusk, the sun a brilliant lantern dropping down behind the distant peaks. The chill lingered and brought with it shivers so deep they frightened me. All my kin had taken sanctuary among stronger folk—stolid rock and muttering tree—to escape the violence of the storm, and would not return to the air before dawn.

  And even if they had, they would have shunned me, for the stench of their enemy marked me a danger and worse: a traitor.

  “Why?” I cried to my fled kin, but then I saw I was asking the same with my hands, pleading the same trembling, stricken sign over and over. I dropped my hands, flushing.

  I was cold, likely soon dead if the shivers continued. Strange I should wish to die of lightning, but not of cold. The one was gift and the other, neglect.

  The night’s hush fell over the mountains, save for the rare bird swooping and diving toward warmer reaches. Even the breeze had calmed, perhaps having tired itself in the storm.

  I could not remember ever having been alone before. Always, always there had been my kin, whether fluttering nearby through the daylight hours or sleeping near my warmth at night. Even as winter washed the fields I felt the warm beat of the blood in the bodies of those kin sleeping the long sleep in my room, tucked into the corners.

  I had little minded the villagers so long as they let me alone. Still I think I harbored a belief that being wild gave me the power to survive as others could not. Now I found that it was not true, not at all. As certain as the drip of rain on my head, I knew that unless I acted, I would die there on the mountain. The great fertile earth would not coddle me and had no care for the wounds of my heart. Likely, if I fell asleep beneath that thin, straggly tree I would not wake up.

  What did I expect, that I had only to go the wilderness and it would take me for its own? That being “wild” meant all the untended world was kin to me? Foolish girl.

  He had already taken me for his own.

  With a last brilliant wink the sun dipped behind a far-off mount.

  In sudden decision I stood and stepped away from the tree, which was dripping more water then than it had shielded me from before. Glimpsing my path out of the corner of my eye, I climbed to a crack in the slope just deep enough to shelter me. I crouched there, arms wrapping legs and head capping knees.

  Another shiver coursed through me and I pulled myself more sharply together, pausing just a moment to offer a glare into the night. I would ask no more of my birthright.

  While the sun lazed still beneath the mountains, I crawled upwards as I had come, through brambles and over thrusts of stone. The heat of the climb replaced my earlier chill and I soon fell short of breath, but I dared not tarry.

  In mid-morning I broke from the forest gloom into the meadow again, and felt my blood drain as I saw his cart, drawn near forest’s edge opposite the meadow. He had stayed. He was slumped upon the cart, gazing down the winding, mud-coated road. The pony grazed nearby.

  I made my way through the meadow, a-flutter with kin who required no words to hear what I wanted said, though now they fled. Perhaps, one day, those voices would forgive and come again.

  When I was only a little distance away, the man looked over.

  He nodded, slowly. He opened his mouth, but no words came. Those eyes, dry but red. Surely if I reached up, I could smooth the lines there as I had the mistress and master’s bedclothes. But no, my hand still hung at my side, my fingers limp.

  Finally he leaned down and took my hand in his rough ones. I lifted them to my face, breathing woodsmoke and salt pork and, far deeper than these, the leather-and-sweat smell of the man himself that he left like a trail with every step and every breath he took.

  “Glad you came back,” he said softly.

  And I breathed deep of the fragrance in his hands and nodded, and I found no words were needed.

  Death Bugs You

  —or—

  The Worms Crawl in...

  Ok, poor title, but it’s hard to be glib about personal putrefaction and corpse consumption by invertebrate hordes, which is what I’m about to do.

  About a year ago I entered the world of forensic science as a forensic entomologist, wrenched from the green world by my ecological roots and thrust somewhat reluctantly into the disconcerting realm of shallow grave recovery. My approach to forensic entomology is embedded within a framework of thoughts about more general ecologically based problems. And even if the forensic importance comes from the living insects, the ecology is based on a putrefying body and thus the accompanying assault across your senses. So dab a little Vicks TM under your nostrils and let’s take a walk.

  When you die your body begins changing right away. Remember that each of your cells is a little powerhouse, a factory, working hard to maintain itself against biological entropy. When that process breaks down through natural or nefarious action, the chemicals of decomposition arise immediately. What was once a living creature has become a pile of resources for a relatively short-lived ecological community that will undergo a dynamic pathway of rapid consumption and predictable change. It’s as much an ecological succession as a pond filling into hardwood forest.

  Insects are usually the first to arrive at a dead body. The resources available through a decomposing corpse will support an
increasingly complex group of species that changes in response to resource usage and insect community composition. Insect activity on a corpse produces byproducts and consequences that make it possible for other insect species to exploit resources made newly available.

  Flies can begin arriving within minutes of death. Decomposing flesh produces putrefactive chemicals as soon as death starts shutting down different parts of the body, and these chemicals are as irresistible as cervelle de veau to your quotidian gourmand. Nostrils, eyes and, well, whatever exposed entrances there may be to the body, are rapidly colonized by flies laying their eggs. These fly parents are providing for their young with a large concentration of food, and in return expect them to scramble as fast as they can to consume, grow, pupate and mature. Once mature: Hey! Go find your own body.

  As maggots scramble to consume and metabolize as fast as they are able, a corpse may become host to what is called a maggot mass. This is an aggregation of so many maggots that the heat produced by their digestive processes, not to mention the friction generated by their wiggling one against the other, generates more heat than can be afforded by ambient environmental conditions. A maggot mass will sit well within the decomposing goo of a corpse, where the fly larvae are thus swimming in their own food and other stuff.

  Different fly species may arrive at different stages of decomposition, giving clues to any forensic investigator who may be interested in the time of death, and what investigator wouldn’t be? The earliest stages of nailing a time can come from simply noting whether a body has tell-tale tiny white eggs in the exposed bits. Even before hatching, they can snitch death’s details. Afterward, flies will progress through certain stages of larval development, or instars, which are fairly well differentiated one from the next in body size. Since identified species of fly larvae can be aged by size and ambient temperature, so by association can the time of death. There are other mitigating factors of course—weather, daylight, local microclimate conditions—all of which will be considered when reconstructing a crime.