Higher Mythology

by Jody Lynn Nye

  “Uh-uh. I’m not so good at cooking. Usually my wife cooks.”

  “Never fear,” Dola told him. “I will continue to make the meals. In exchange, you wash the dishes.”

  He eyed her. “Who’s getting the short end of that deal, huh?”

  “You needn’t eat your own cooking. Isn’t that worth a little trouble?” Dola asked.

  Skinny stood up and stretched. “Oh, all right. It’s better than being cooped up in here all day.”

  Dola went to the door to wait. Instead of following her, Skinny started looking around. His eye lit on the length of twine used to hold the food box shut. He lifted it, and yanked it between his hands to test its strength.

  “And what is that for?” Dola asked warily.

  “For you,” Skinny said. “I can’t trust you. Jake and the Boss-lady will be down my throat if I let you get away. Hold your arms out from your sides.”

  Patiently, Dola held up her arms and stood while Skinny tied a loop of rope around her waist. He took the free end in one hand and unlocked the door.

  “Now we’ll go.”

  It was well worth the inconvenience to get away from the musty-smelling cabin and into the fresh air. As soon as she was out from under the roof, she felt outward with all her strength for a sense of her family, hoping that her father and Holl would be able to trace her there.

  She sensed nothing. Instead, she returned her attention to the world around her. The forest, rich with the rain that had fallen overnight, smelled green and healthy. Dola inhaled breath after breath, enjoying the fresh air.

  Skinny stumped along behind her on the narrow dirt path, tugging on her tether from time to time as if to keep her in check. After one annoyed glance over her shoulder to show him what she thought of such treatment, he stopped pulling back so hard. She needed her balance to keep from tripping over roots that rose up suddenly on the way. Her guess that it was a deer path was confirmed when she spotted the narrow double-slotted hoofprints in the rain-softened earth.

  And now to the question of herbs. The men had brought enough food with them to feed the village for two days. She had cooked something out of a box the night before, after choosing which one smelled the least antiquated. All the Big Folk packaged goods seemed as if they were years old. Nothing could make generic macaroni and cheese or dehydrated beans and sauce delicious. If she added something fresh, it at least might make them palatable. She spotted a handful of wild mustard growing in the midst of a rough patch of ground. She started toward it, thoughts of cooked greens and spice making her mouth water. She was jerked back harshly, and uttered a wordless protest.

  “Where are you going?” Skinny demanded, as she straightened up with the help of a tree branch.

  “Only to pick herbs,” she said. “Look there.”

  “Weeds?” he asked scornfully.

  “No, food! Look about you! Tender young dandelion greens, a few late fiddlehead ferns, a few early mushrooms here and there. It’s a cornucopia of good things to eat, all fresh and all free.”

  “Well,” Pilton thought about it, “if you want to eat them, I guess you can. Maybe your diet’s different than mine.”

  “Healthier, I’m sure,” Dola said ironically. With Skinny in close attendance holding her leash tightly, she picked a huge elephant-ear leaf and began to fill it with young plants. She dropped to her knees beside the lushest bed of plants and began to tell them over. The quick-growing mustard was in all three stages: green, flowering, and past gone to seed. Some was even young enough to yield the tender greens that were the tastiest. Judging Skinny’s appetite to be three times’ hers, she picked enough to feed them both.

  None of the oldest mustard plants had any seed left. All the pods were dried to brown husks and split open. Well, that wouldn’t stop the cooks at home who wanted mustard to cook with, and she had the skills to follow their example. She glanced behind her to see what Skinny was doing. He looked down at her from time to time, but he was bored, and was paying little attention to what she was doing. All the better, she thought.

  With a little smile, she put two fingers on either side of the nearest blossom and pulled at it, enhancing the growth process. Behind the blossom, which began to wilt, the seed pod lengthened into a tube of green as long as her finger and as thick as a pencil lead. It filled out slowly. The petals dropped off, leaving the pistil, and the pod began to turn golden, then sere. She moved on to the next one, until she had plenty of ripe seed, and uprooted the weed into her makeshift basket. Her attentions had aged the plant before its time, but she took care to drop a pod’s worth of seed where the roots had been, to start the next generation of plants growing. No sense in robbing the forest that had been so generous to her.

  “What’s all that?” he asked.

  Dola described everything in the leaf-basket.

  “My mama makes good greens,” Pilton said hopefully. Maybe this walk wasn’t the wild-goose chase it first seemed.

  “So does mine.” Dola felt a pang as she thought of Siobhan and Tay.

  “Come on, let’s go back,” Pilton said, with an impatient tug at her leash. Dola straightened up, her treasures in her hands.

  Skinny seemed much more cheerful on the way back to the cabin. He even filled a pan with water so she could soak the sand out of the greens. Dola turned them over, yanked out the tough inner veins, and went looking through the foodstuffs to find things to cook with.

  Many of the supplies were packet mixes, which claimed to be complete meals. Dola read them all, and discarded anything that had more than three ingredients she couldn’t recognize. Soon, there was an aluminum Dutch oven swinging from the pot hook filled with a savory, bubbling mixture smelling delightfully of mustard seed, wild chives, and wild marjoram. There was a can of bacon in the box, a traditional American addition to greens. She handed the package to Pilton to open. Using a hooked attachment in his pocket knife, he ratcheted the lid off. Recalling as much as she could from the recipe, Dola fried a chunk of bacon until there was a film of grease in the bottom of the pan, then added the greens to wilt.

  “You oughta use the cast iron pot,” Pilton said.

  “I don’t like those,” she said, eyeing the iron stoveware uneasily.

  “Well, aluminum causes Alzheimer’s disease, you know?”

  “This is lighter,” Dola said sharply, not wanting to talk about her Folks’ sensitivity to iron. “If you cook, you may cook in what you please.”

  “Well, all right,” Skinny said, and went back to his magazines. Dola was glad to have the peace and quiet to think.

  It was satisfying to be in such a good place. The logs were well-aged hardwoods, providing a steady, hot flame. Swiftly, she tended the fire under the pot, and mixed a simple dough to make flattened breads on the pot lid while the meal was cooking.

  “You’re good at that, you know?” Pilton asked suddenly from behind her. He was impressed by the little girl’s adaptation to her surroundings, and her knowledge of woodcraft and housekeeping. Whoever taught the little fairy woman how to do it all ought to be proud of their pupil.

  She nodded politely at his compliment, and went back to tending the cooking.

  It was a pity he’d had to go and have a temper tantrum like that earlier, because the girl had shied away from him ever since. She had every reason to be aloof, because she was a prisoner. He wished she would like him, because she was really something different. He wondered when he could get her to grant a wish for him.

  Not far above three hundred feet, a couple of air sprites swooped in upon the Skyship Iris, circling and circling it, their tails whipping past their eyes at amazing speed. Holl saw the traditional image of sunrise in his mind, and tried to picture a slightly different one in response. They seemed to be happy with his efforts, for they slowed down and stared, the pupils of their huge eyes widening joyfully at him.

  “Sunrise is their greeting,” he explained to the Master, “and sunset their farewell.”

  “So Meester Doyle has told
me,” the Master said tersely. He had said little during the ascent. Holl wondered if he was as nervous as Tay, who had retired to his usual spot on the floor of the basket. Likely not: he seemed to have no difficulty looking down at the ground, but that could be because he was forcing himself. It was also impossible to tell if he was enjoying the flight.

  The Master, knowing in advance from Keith Doyle what to expect, was able to communicate immediately in the sprites’ pictorial style without needing to verbalize at the same time. Holl knew that there was a conversation going on between them only because he could see the sprites’ reply to the Master’s queries. He was asking about their origins, their numbers, and what they subsisted on. The images were colorful, but confused, as if they didn’t understand why he was asking those questions.

  “They seem to haf very limited intelligence,” the Master said at last. “Each does not haf much on its own. I belief they haf more of a hive consciousness, like bees.”

  The sprites protested at once, showing a beehive from which sprites swarmed out and in, that burst apart into individual clouds.

  “They say no,” Holl translated. In their typically feisty and mischievous response to a challenge, the sprites’ next image was one of the Master in the basket of the balloon, smiling broadly and looking around him with wonder in his eyes. Even though the situation was serious, and he didn’t show any outward signs of enjoyment, the Master had apparently found there was much to take pleasure in. Holl smiled. “They also say you are having a good time.”

  The Master peered disapprovingly over his glasses at the nearest sprite. The creature’s pupils swelled, giving it an innocent, puppy-like expression. It gazed back.

  “It’s no use,” Tay laughed. “They can read your thoughts.”

  “Then let them see these,” the Master said, his brow furrowing. The creatures of the air soared up and back in agitation, then revealed the images Frank had told them about: Dola in front of a log cabin chinked with concrete, and Dola walking on a rope lead before a tall man with brown hair.

  “They vill now lead us to her,” he said, folding his arms with an air of finality. The sprites swirled away from the basket and took their places ahead of the balloon.

  Night was falling. Dola scraped the last of the food out the door onto a pile Skinny had designated for edible garbage. She took the pots back inside and washed them out, then banked the cookfire so it would keep them warm until bedtime. She was getting bored with her imprisonment. Skinny was not worth talking to. There were no friends to play with, no lessons, no books to read, no music, and, she sighed, no Asrai. She felt it was time to formulate her escape.

  Skinny was her chief obstacle, but she felt she could get around him with care. He’d been so suggestible while she was incarcerated in the office. If they hadn’t been interrupted by Jake, she and Asrai would have been long gone.

  It wasn’t too late to prepare the ground again. Besides, Dola chided herself, she ought to practice her lessons. Just because she was from home didn’t mean she could be allowed to go rusty. Dola quivered to think what the Master would say if she was saved, and had neglected her education. She glanced up. Skinny was in the bathroom. He always lay at one end of the couch, reading by the light of the lamp over his head, with his feet up on the other armrest. She studied the other lamp. Both had woven cloth shades that reached almost all the way to their earthenware bases. She got up to touch one. The illusions almost leaped from her fingers to the rough fabric. It would hold pictures well. She made a face appear to grin conspiratorially with her.

  Normally she had had to hold on to a cloth to keep the illusion alive. She yanked her hands back from the shade, seeing how long the face would remain without contact. She was able to count to sixty before the illusion faded. That was a good long time, she told herself. But how to extend the effect? More concentration might be the answer, lending a little of her will to the tooth of the cloth. The face laughed at her for twice sixty and longer. Dola was jubilant. She made the whole thing seem to vanish. All that remained visible was the toe-like shape of the protruding base and the tip of the brass bulb holder on top.

  She heard water running, and fled back to her seat on the hearthrug Skinny emerged, wiping his hands on his pants legs. She looked up innocently at him. He flopped down on the couch and picked up his magazine.

  “Where’d the lamp go?” he asked.

  “I’ve not taken it away,” Dola said, turning a page in her book. “It’s a big heavy thing. I’d not lift it.”

  “But it’s gone.” Skinny said, pointing. The earthenware base, much the same color as the table on which it sat, blended in against its surroundings.

  “No, it is right there,” she insisted. With a sigh for the obtuseness of Big Folk, she rose and went over to the lamp. At the same time that she turned it on, she dropped the illusion. “There. You see? But we don’t need it; it is not dark out yet.” She turned it off. Skinny gave it an uneasy glance. He picked up his magazine.

  Dola left a fading charm on the lampshade, so that it vanished slowly away again. Over the edge of his periodical, Skinny checked again, and jumped.

  “You stop that!” he demanded. Dola raised her hands.

  “I’ve done nothing,” she said, but she was secretly pleased.

  During the next few hours, Dola played with the shadows in the room, practicing making faces appear amidst the hanging curtains and long arms of darkness reach forth from the sides of the chimney. The thin man kept looking up from the page he seemed to have read a dozen times, becoming more and more nervous. The shadows looming about the fireplace grasped for him, and withdrew into the dancing of the firelight.

  “I dunno what’s going on in here,” he said.

  “All houses have an aura, did you know?” Dola said, matter-of-factly. “A personality of their own. It may be that this one doesn’t like you, holding an innocent child prisoner as you are.”

  He looked around suspiciously, refusing to acknowledge that he more than half believed her. “It ain’t as if I’m hurting you,” he said, projecting his voice to the corners of the room. “Besides, you aren’t an innocent child. Well, you aren’t an ordinary one anyhow.”

  “Then beware, lest my presence stir up the household spirits to haunt you,” Dola said, in the sepulchral voice she used for telling ghost stories to the smaller village children. Skinny blanched.

  A light breeze came in under the door and whistled in the chimney. Dola played with the shadows, making pictures on the floor in the firelight. Left to themselves, they crept across the rag rug, spiraled up the leg of the couch like snakes, and waited for the human to notice them. Catching a peripheral glimpse of his stalkers, Skinny’s head jerked first one way, then the other. He whimpered. The shadows melted. Dola saw the whites of his eyes all the way around his irises and decided it was time to stop teasing him. He was really frightened. Maybe one more vision, but something harmless and colorful, as she might make for the baby. In the fabric of the rug, she began to craft her illusion.

  “I don’t want the house to hate me,” Skinny said. “Ms. Gilbreth would be real sore if I let you go. But maybe I’d do it anyway, if you do some real magic for me.”

  “What do you want, a chest of jewels?” she asked, with heavy sarcasm.

  “Can you do that?” he asked, surprised, then greedy. Dola was disgusted.

  “No! We can barely cover the mortgage payment of a month. Of all the foolish questions. I’m an ordinary girl. All the things I do are ordinary.”

  “I know better,” the man said, leaning back with his arms folded over his chest. “I saw you vanish the other day, and you know it. Do some big magic for me.”

  She started to stir the influence she was drawing from the rag rug. No illusion was beyond her power, but what if he wanted to touch what she conjured up? It was all very well, having him promise to set her free, but she couldn’t pay his price. Maybe she should use the last vision to scare him again. A dragon! No, a rainbow. Dola thought of he
r father, and Holl, and the Master, out looking for her, standing in a wicker basket high in the air, suspended underneath a rainbow. Keith Doyle had visited more than once in such a conveyance. She attempted to thrust the vision away, putting it down as an unlikely fantasy. Besides, rainbows weren’t scary.

  At the same time, she felt that someone was looking at her. Something white bobbed past the window of the cabin. Dola bent her head and glanced sideways to watch it. Pictures appeared in her mind, of Tay smiling, Holl falling in a river, Keith Doyle with his camera. She tilted her head further, and saw kindly blue eyes looking in at her through the glass. The face itself made her gasp. It was featureless, the blue-white of cirrus clouds. The head and body were grotesquely distorted, and kept changing shape as she watched. She had no idea what kind of being it was, only that it was friendly and intelligent. It was trying to tell her that her folk were seeking her.

  Behind it, far away in the sky, she saw a colorful dome shape, the same thing she’d seen the day Keith and her father had rescued Asrai. All at once she realized it was the great balloon that belonged to Keith Doyle’s friend. Taking the bobbing creature’s appearance as an omen of good fortune, she decided it was time to escape. The white thing would serve as a proper distraction.

  “I can’t fetch money for you, but I can make visible the spirit of the house so you can atone. Look there!” She pointed out the window. The white shape floated past again, its body stretching and reforming. “See!”

  “A ghost!” Pilton yelled. “This place is haunted!”

  Dola leaped to her feet. While he was frozen, Dola meant to make a dash for the door and let herself out. Skinny cut her off in his dive for the shotgun. He pushed her down into the shadow of a chair. She realized too late what Skinny was doing.

  “Go away!” she cried to the creature. But the man, rolling over like a commando, drew a bead, aimed, and fired.

  The crash of the glass pane blowing out of the window was drowned out by Dola’s scream. The white creature, caught in a shape with a grossly inflated head and puny, wasted body and wings, seemed to explode soundlessly. It spread out across the sky, becoming more and more misshapen until it dissipated like oil on the surface of a pond. Before it vanished. Dola saw an image in her mind of the kindly eyes going wide in fear and pain. She sank to the floor where she crouched, rocking, tears racing down her cheeks.