People of the Sky

by Clare Bell

  “This time, no return,” said Kesbe, looking over her shoulder at the Pai woman. Chamol nodded tightly.

  With a blast from the offside prop, she pivoted Gooney around, countering the turn by use of the opposite engine. From her twelve-foot perch in the cockpit, she surveyed the mesa-top. It was barely lit from a sun still hidden below the horizon—too early for take-off on visual flight procedures, unless she knew the runway well enough. She decided that she did.

  She bent down, threw the lever that locked the C-47’s tail-wheel, checked both her passengers once more. Chamol looked pale but determined. Imiya had fallen into a troubled sleep, the thing inside him evidently quiescent. Perhaps the painkiller had affected it. Hopefully once they were in the air, repeated doses would keep it that way until they reached Canaback.

  She stood on the brakes as she pushed the throttles to full take-off and held the plane there, feeling its engines surging. As soon as she lifted her toes, Gooney began to track down the mesa, wheels bumping over hidden stones. As the plane gathered momentum and started to lift, Imiya stirred in his seat.

  He uttered a mournful bubbling cry that made Kesbe jerk her head toward him in the same instant that she was reaching for the lever to raise the landing gear. He gasped hugely, straining up against the harness. His legs went rigid, his head arched back and his belly thrust upward like that of a woman in labor…

  “No!” he cried, clawing at his stomach. “No, it must stay within. It is the only chance I have!”

  “Chamol, do something!” Kesbe yelled, pushing forward on the yoke, for in those few seconds of inattention, the plane had begun to climb too steeply and was wallowing toward a stall.

  The Pai woman spun back to get the medical kit. Imiya was rigid, legs starting to splay apart in the rudder-pedal well. Kesbe saw a glimpse of muscle contractions that banded and squeezed the mass of whatever was in his stomach. Fluid began to run from between his legs, darkening the seat and puddling on the floor.

  “No,” he sobbed. “It must stay. Even though it hurts me, it must live…it must live…” He forced his hands between his legs as if he could stop his body from expelling the larval aronan Sahacat had forced him to bear.

  “Chamol!” Kesbe screamed. She couldn’t fly the plane with something like this going on nearly on top of her. Her stomach was doing flip-flops from fright and revulsion and the only thing holding her together was the fierce need to concentrate on the aircraft.

  She pointed the nose down. Enough mesa was left for her to land. Imiya bucked and writhed in his seat harness while Kesbe hung onto the wheel, trying not to imagine what might burst out of him and suppressing an irrational but powerful urge to climb out of her seat and flee into the cargo bay. Chamol ran in with a white face and the medical kit.

  “Get him out of here!” Kesbe hissed, but her voice was drowned out by a breathy grunt from the youth as he drew up his knees. From the corner of her eye Kesbe saw a strong contraction draw down the upper part of his abdomen. She had all too close a view of what was happening. She saw a strange opening resembling a vulva directly behind his gentials. It bulged and swelled like a woman’s birthway when the baby is crowning, but this was no human infant. Something white and glistening slithered halfway out.

  A grimace distorted Imiya’s flushed face. He heaved and cried aloud as he expelled the parasite. It flopped into the rudder pedal well in front of his seat.

  Kesbe heard it flapping about wetly, the sound making her feel sick. She felt even worse an instant later when she realized her dual rudder controls had gone strangely stiff she couldn’t press left rudder. Something had caught beneath the copilot’s pedal on Imiya’s side, jamming the mechanical linkage. She had a good guess what it was. She tramped hard on the pedal, hearing an increased frenzy of trashing from the opposite well.

  She glanced sideways to where Chamol was trying to lift the panting youth from his seat. “Forget him,” she said shakily in English, then switched to Pai. “Get that thing out of there,” she gestured frantically. “It’s stuck!”

  Dammit, she needed full rudder control. A crosswind was blowing. Quickly she crabbed Gooney Berg with the ailerons, going into a sideways slip. That last piece of mesa was sliding away…

  She lost altitude faster than she expected. There wasn’t time to flare for landing. She could only straighten the plane with ailerons and engine thrust before it flew itself onto the dirt, coming in fast and hot.

  “Hang on,” she yelled above the roaring engines and the scream of air past the fuselage. It wasn’t in Pai, but Chamol understood well enough. She flung herself across Irniya, clinging to his harness straps.

  Grit pelted Kesbe’s windshield while dust boiled up around the aircraft. The wings bounced and flexed alarmingly with the impact of the landing. Her attempts to brake resulted in a lot of squealing and not much else. When the brakes finally did take hold, the C-47 nearly went over on her nose.

  The sickening downward rotation of the cockpit reversed itself just as Kesbe thought the props were about to scrape sandstone. Goomy Berg slammed back on her tailwheel, rocking and squeaking in indignant protest.

  All Kesbe wanted to do was disintegrate into a limp sweat-soaked mass in her seat, but the soggy slapping and scraping sounds from the copilot’s rudder well had her out of her seat in an instant. She grabbed for the fire-extinguisher mounted against the forward bulkhead, intending to freeze the loathsome thing with a well-placed blast of cold carbon dioxide.

  To her astonishment, Chamol met her with a face contorted with anger and struck the canister from her hand. It rolled away with a clank, under the seat where she couldn’t reach it. “Why must your answer to fear be to destroy?” the Indian woman spat. She turned from Kesbe, lifted her brother out of the copilot’s seat and began to drag him down the companionway.

  Kesbe was beside her, trying to grab her shoulders in the narrow passage. “Chamol, where are you taking him?”

  “You have done your task. Imiya is rid of the aronan inside him. I take him to my house to recover.”

  “You take him off Goomy Berg and Sahacat will do god-knows-what to him,” Kesbe said grimly. “He needs treatment. He’s in shock.”

  Chamol only thinned her lips, heaved the moaning Imiya over her shoulder and headed for the door. “I do not need your help any more, warrior-woman.”

  Kesbe made a sudden decision. She lunged at Chamol, tearing the youth from her grip. Thrusting him onto a crate, she whirled, caught Chamois arm, twisting it behind the woman’s back, and forced her out the cargo bay door. She pulled the door home with a heavy clunk and dogged it, ignoring the Pai woman’s frantic pounding.

  Next she grabbed Mabena’s radio from a locker behind the pilot’s compartment, retreated into the cargo bay and latched the forward door against the sounds and the increasingly obnoxious smell emanating from the cockpit. She put the radio to one side while she lifted Imiya off the crate and made him a bed on a pile of tarpaulins. She tucked an emergency blanket around him and elevated his feet to reduce shock. Despite the fluid still seeping from between his legs, and some bleeding, he looked better for having gotten rid of the parasite.

  “You poor kid,” Kesbe muttered, ruffling the hair above the flushed, tear-streaked face. One hand grabbed her arm, held it, then loosened as the boy’s eyes closed. He sank into a troubled sleep.

  She considered her next step. Did she have the fortitude to go back up to the cockpit, find the fire-extinguisher and dispose of the aborted horror? The very thought of being near it again gave her uncontrollable shudders. Even the possessive anger at being forced from her own flight deck could not overcome the revulsion she felt. It was asking too much and she was already drained.

  The pounding from outside had stopped. Chamol had probably become disgusted and gone away, perhaps to fetch others of the Pai from Tuwayhoima.

  Kesbe hesitated. There was nothing wrong with asking for help. Not in a situation like this. Her previous resolution not to reveal the existence of the P
ai Yinaye to anyone outside would have to be sacrificed.

  Wearily, she got up, retrieved the hand-cranked radio set and put it between her knees. She set it up the way Mabena had showed her, began to grind and hoped that someone would be listening. He had been serious when he gave it to her, hadn’t he? She would hate to find he only meant it as a bizarre joke.

  She was beginning to think so, when, after several minutes of cranking and calling, she got only static. Then a voice came through. A woman’s. She was startled, then remembered that Mabena’s engineer was female.

  She gave her name, her location in degrees latitude and longitude and the emergency nature of the call. The engineer told Kesbe she would take down the information. Meanwhile, Kesbe was to stay on the air. In a few minutes, she heard another voice, tinny and broken with static, but recognizable. Mabena’s African-Maori accent was a welcome one to her ears. She answered,

  “Tony, you were right in warning me. Something devilish is going on here and I’m right in the middle of it.” She gave him a short version of the events that had taken place during her stay in Tuwayhoima.

  Glancing at Imiya, she felt a renewal of the repugnance that had gripped her when the parasite had come slithering out of his body. “I rescued a teen-aged boy who had an embryonic aronan inside him. Luckily we got it out,” she continued into the radio. “If I hadn’t realized exactly what was going on, Tony, I would have ended up the same way. The damn things seduce you, then lay an egg in you that hatches and grows…” She caught herself.

  “Can you take off with Gooney Berg?” Mabena asked.

  “I’ve got to check her out for damage. My last landing was pretty rough. Besides…” she faltered as she remembered the aborted parasite that still writhed on the floor of her cockpit. She just couldn’t face even looking at it.

  “Contact Canaback,” she said. “Give them the information I gave you. Tell them that this is vitally important. The Pai must be freed from this infestation, evacuated if need be.”

  “It’s that serious?” Mabena asked. “I had some gut feelings, but…”

  “You don’t know the half of it,” Kesbe replied fervently, “And believe me, you don’t want to.”

  “I’ll contact the base. Keep transmitting at half-hour intervals. We’ll monitor you and get back with Canaback’s response. Mabena out.”

  Chapter 20

  Kesbe let the old disk-microphone slip from her hand. She wiped sweat from her brow with her coverall sleeve. It was getting hot in the plane. Chamol had gone, but other voices sounded outside the aircraft. She went to a port-window and peered out.

  She expected to see an angry crowd of villagers surrounding the plane to demand that the boy be given up to them and that she be punished. Instead, what met her eyes was a row of priests costumed as kachina dancers. The black hair spilling from beneath the mask of the center dancer and the wristlet made of two-tailed scorpions told her that it was Sahacat.

  Anger burned in her. She wanted to confront Sahacat with her crime—to fling the horror of the act in the woman’s face in hope that it would shame her. And perhaps drag from her the reason.

  One glance at Imiya told her he slept the sleep of one who has been utterly drained. He would be safe here in Gooney Berg. She took the C-47’s keys from her pocket and threaded them on a cord around her neck.

  She stepped down from the cargo bay, turning quickly to lock the hatch behind her. She slipped the keys inside her flight coverall. No one would be able to reach Imiya now. Even if the shaman did take the keys from her, Sahacat wouldn’t know how to use them, since the Pai had no concept of keylocks or latches.

  Sahacat and the other priests were arrayed in ceremonial kilts, sashes, aronan feather-scales and kachina masks. A ceramic pot-drum hung from a cord around the shaman’s neck. She began to beat it. The sound was a counterpoint to the wail of the wind across the mesa.

  Kesbe felt herself strangely divided as she faced the shaman and the line of priests. Part of her ridiculed the idea that they could mount any meaningful attack, but part of her remembered previous encounters with Sahacat.

  The Pai dancers began to stamp to the drumbeat. The outsize kachina masks bobbed grotesquely. Ankle and hand rattles hissed. She found it surprisingly difficult to interrupt, for the Indian in her was reluctant to disturb the sanctity of the dance. Thinking of Imiya heightened her anger and gave her the resolution she needed.

  “You think you are going to frighten me away? Take off those masks and show your faces!”

  Her shout blew away in the wind. The dance continued.

  “This isn’t a child’s game! Sahacat, you nearly killed that boy by implanting a parasite in him. I want to know why. I want you to answer. Are you afraid?”

  The drum stopped. The line of dancers fell back, although they continued the stamp-shuffle. The central figure lifted the barrel-like structure of the mask from her head, shaking back her hair.

  “You say I have done evil in making Imiya lomuqualt,” she said. “A thing is evil when seen through eyes touched with evil. Or made blind by ignorance and fear.”

  “I don’t care what sort of fancy name you give to it—the whole thing is sickening. In my tribe, you’d be severely punished and I’m going to see that you are.”

  “Words,” Sahacat said, scattering a handful of tiny feather-scales to the wind. “These are words. It is acts that have meaning. I dance. If you would seek answers, dance with me.” With a thump of her drum, the shaman joined once more with the line of stamping priests. She pivoted away from Kesbe and when she turned forward once more, her mask was again in place.

  Her voice boomed hollowly from the interior of the mask. “Do you know me, warrior-woman? I am Sasquasoha, the Blue Star Kachina.”

  “You’re a psychotic,” Kesbe snarled, slipping into English in her rage. She found herself fighting the urge to move her feet in the same rhythm as the dancers. It wasn’t only the booming of the shaman’s drum, something in the air was intoxicating her, pulling at her…

  She pulled a cloth from her pocket and covered her nose with it, damming the increased sensitivity to scent that contact with Baqui Iba had given her. With every move and turn Sahacat made, she cast out scent. It was a bitter odor with a charcoal undertone that caught Kesbe’s emotions and wrenched them toward despair.

  Kesbe pinched her nose shut, but she still had to breathe and she could feel the scents penetrate through the inside of her cheeks, the back of her throat and the exquisitely smell-sensitive nodule that had developed in the roof of her mouth. Already Sahacat was playing on her as she would the black flute, but this time the music was that of odor.

  She knew too that her own mind was betraying its vulnerability in the odors her body was releasing. She wasn’t experienced enough to put up a barrier. Sahacat would know everything she needed.

  “Dance, warrior-woman,” came the voice from inside the mask, so strange that it made Kesbe’s hair prickle in spite of herself. Anger flooded her. All right. She would confront Sahacat in the battle of dance. She shouldered out of her coverall, it was too confining. One of the stamping priests threw something that landed at her feet. It was a white kilt with a woven sash.

  Kesbe picked it up and hesitated. She had nothing to cover her top. Quickly she peeled out of her shirt, pants and underclothes, bound the kilt around her waist and faced Sahacat. Clenching her fists, she began a slow stamp-shuffle.

  Again the voice resonated inside the kachina mask. “Dance with your fears, warrior-woman.”

  As if scent were a cloak, Sahacat cast it and Kesbe felt its folds settle on her. It was a wild, challenging smell, bringing images of clouds and crashing thunder into her mind. It made her feel as if she were once more aloft in Gooney Berg, battling a high-altitude storm. The beat of the shaman’s drum was the roll of thunder. The stamp of Kesbe’s feet in her own rhythm became the drone of engines, roaring back defiance.

  She danced as if she were the plane itself, feeling the rain pounding her meta
l skin, sucking fuel from her wing tanks to feed the powerful pulsation of her engines. She danced and she became the plane. The winds grew fiercer and still she flew. But the storm’s might seemed endless and her tanks began to drain. She felt the last liter of fuel run down the lines, then her engines sputtered in their last burst of thrust. Her propellers windmilling helplessly, she started a fateful glide down to the rocks that awaited her below…

  She was no longer the plane. Her wings had been stripped from her. The glide became a fall. She lifted her head in despair to the sky that was receding from her, knowing in the next instant she would be shattered.

  No, this was a dance and her feet were still moving to the drum, but most of her mind was locked in the terror of the fall. The moment slowed, seeming to pass in a series of freeze-frames that grew more extended. She would plummet forever, her mind seized by the frenzy of panic as the impact came ever-closer, yet never happened.

  And the sky laughed and the canyon mocked her in Sahacat’s voice. She knew her dancing had begun to falter and she would soon crumple, but even if her body became still, her mind would still be imprisoned in the moment of the fall and would stay locked to it. She would crawl away beaten and crazed, letting the shaman triumph.

  Kesbe gritted her teeth, flung her head back, felt the sweat that ran from her body and forced her feet to stay in the stamping rhythm. The part of her that was still falling howled and spat, flinging droplets of saliva into the sky. One drop of fluid soared up, darkened and took on shape. Wings bloomed from it, legs extended, and all of a sudden it was no longer a blob of spit but the distant form of an aronan diving toward her.

  Again there was the rush and sweep of wings, the abrupt jerk as the flier caught her and swooped away, clasping her securely between its forelegs. She laughed aloud, hearing her voice come echoing back from the canyon walls. I’m not afraid, shaman. I have made an aronan with my own spit and it carries me beyond your reach!