In Bonds of the Earth (Book of the Watchers 2)

by Janine Ashbless

  After a few hundred yards I came across some grazing mares with foals in a paddock with a white-painted steel fence. I know nothing about horses, and couldn’t tell if the ones visible in every field were racehorses or not, but they looked vast and leggy and magnificent to me, and their noses so velvety that I longed to touch them. I leaned my arms on the top rail, watching as a glossy foal nursed from its dam. It made me feel a little weird, watching their warm and peaceful bond. Roshana’s mother had been killed by angels; mine had died from pneumonia one long bleak winter. I’d been nine at the time, nearly ten. I remembered her wistfully, but with no great clarity. After her death Papa and I had been the only family members left in the Old Country. He’d never remarried because he was a priest, and they must remain widowers until death.

  It occurred to me for the first time how lonely my father must have been, in that tiny house and that tiny chapel cut into the mountain wall, with only his daughter and our silent, terrible prisoner for company. The responsibility cast upon him, to raise a child and guard a demon, must have been almost unbearable. And then when he’d sent me away to America at eighteen, to keep me away from Azazel, the loneliness must have become so much worse. He’d been without the comfort of family for five years, almost until his death. All because I was too wayward to obey his warnings.

  I’d let him down, beyond words, but he’d never stopped loving me.

  I wondered if it worked the same way for a daughter let down by a wayward father.

  Then I wondered what it was like for Azazel, to love mortal women and father children that he would inevitably see grow old and die. Could he really love them, as a human man loves his family? Wouldn’t there always be that resignation to loss, an emotional distance?

  Shivering a little, despite the brightness of the day, I pulled myself away from the fence and turned down another track, toward the river.

  There was a figure walking up toward me.

  I’d seen ranch hands from afar around the buildings, and out with the horses. This figure, even at a distance, struck me as different. It was very short, and seemed to be wrapped in a drab blanket. I could make out thick dark hair and a dark face, but no other details yet. But it seemed to be making shuffling steps and staggering a little, as if exhausted or dizzy or both.

  I slowed in my tracks, unaccountably wary, just as the figure—was it a child?—pitched forward onto its knees and then sank down, too weary to rise again.

  “You okay?” I called, not as loudly as perhaps I should. I jogged a few hurried strides forward—and then blanched as a squirrel, startled from the base of a tree by my motion, ran across the track and right through the figure as if it weren’t there at all.

  “What the—” I started to mutter, but I already knew. All around me the autumnal landscape was bursting with color; the green of the grass, the gold of the turning leaves, the shining white of the birch boles, the blazing reds of distant maples. But this figure was gray as dust, just as if I was looking at it—and only it—through the lens of an overcast wintery day. It didn’t belong under this bright sunshine, it belonged to a day long buried in the past.

  I hadn’t seen any ghosts since coming back to the States. And as I watched, this one sank down and became a shadow among the other flickering shadows cast by the birch canopies, and then leached out and became nothing at all.

  I walked forward, feeling cold inside. There was no stain on the crushed rock road, no sign of an unmarked grave nearby.

  Why did I see that?

  “Milja. We’re done.”

  I whipped around and there was Azazel close behind me, his arms folded and his shoulders hunched. “Did you see?” I demanded.

  “See what?”

  That gave me pause. I’d never discussed my ghosts with Azazel. I’d seen my father the last time we were back in Montenegro, and that seemed altogether too private a moment to share with him. He’d disliked my father a great deal, with justification.

  I took a deep breath. “Never mind. Just a squirrel. Were things okay with you and…?”

  “We’re okay,” he said flatly. I could read nothing in his mirror-shade eyes.

  “Are you sure?” I asked, laying my hands on his forearms. Inside me, I admit, hope sparked that it was over, that we’d never have to see Roshana again.

  “I apologized. She accepted my apology.”

  That seemed a little weird to me. I blinked, waiting for something more. Shouldn’t that conversation have taken a lot longer? Shouldn’t there have been shared reminiscences and tears and whatever? “Okay,” I said doubtfully. “Are you two going to get on together?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Give it time.”

  “We have that, at least.”

  All the time in the world. I squeezed his hard arm-muscles. “Well, congratulations, I guess. You have a daughter! And…I dunno…any grandchildren? Has she got children of her own?”

  He looked perplexed. “I did not think to ask.”

  “Right then…maybe that’s a conversation for another day.” He doesn’t understand. He doesn’t know what it means to have family, to be a link in a chain from forebears years past, and leading on into the future. He can love his children, but they are not his legacy, because he’s immortal. He’s just himself. So isolated. I stretched up and kissed his cheek, thinking that with each iota of new understanding I gained, he became that little bit stranger to me. “What now?”

  He looked back up the track and jerked his chin. “We’re going for a ride.” There was a chunky Nissan pickup trundling down the road toward us, all shiny ox-blood paint and glittering chrome. I could see Roshana at the wheel.

  “Where?”

  “Not far.”

  I took a deep breath. “You know the Boatman showed up in my apartment last night? We talked for a while.”

  “I heard.” He brushed his fingers across my cheek. “You outwitted him.”

  “Yeah, I…”

  The pickup stopped and Roshana put her head out of the window. “Jump in!”

  There was enough room in the big cab with its bench seat for all three of us, but Azazel only glanced in before vaulting lightly onto the flatbed behind and parking his very fine ass against what I took to be a gun-rack.

  Roshana’s face fell a little.

  I was forced to be a bit more practical about transport, so I climbed in with Roshana, trying not to show my own reluctance. “Everything okay?” I asked, wincing at my own words. How could everything be okay?

  “We’re just fine.” She looked away, checking her side mirror.

  We set off, taking the track up the valley. Soon the fenced pastures fell behind us and we were driving on unpaved roads among stands of aspen and oak and dense, dark conifers. An uncomfortable silence reigned in the cab. I could only think of two obvious topics of conversation, and one was too intrusive. So I broke with, “Where are we going?”

  “There’s a Watcher grave on my land.”

  “That’s…lucky.”

  “Not even slightly. I bought this place because of the local stories.” Reaching to the tablet stashed on the dashboard, she flipped the cover and—driving one-handed—went through the password page before brandishing it at me. “Take a look.”

  I found myself staring at a PDF that seemed to consist of a lot of scanned newspaper columns. Very old newspapers, from the looks of them—most were dated between the 1870s and the First World War.

  “Did you know that the States has a tradition of giant legends?”

  “Paul Bunyan?” I asked, remembering a cartoon I’d seen whilst a student. The newspaper clippings had titles like Giant Skeletons Found in Mound and A Race of Giant Indians. They came from places as disparate as Ohio and Utah and Kentucky.

  “More archaeological than that. In the nineteenth century antiquarians and treasure hunters started digging into pre-colonial mounds. Mostly they just found pottery and ordinary bones, but all around the country there came reports of skeletons and mummies too b
ig to be human—nine, twelve, fifteen feet tall. Some even had red hair. It was assumed then that they dated from ancient races that existed before the Flood.”

  “Huh.” I was pretty sure Azazel gave no credence to the idea of a worldwide Deluge. Floods, yes, in the plural—and earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, when the loyal angels and the Watchers fought. It had been a bad time for everyone. I wrinkled my nose at the dossier. “Really? Where are the bones now then? I’ve never seen any in a museum.”

  “The bodies crumbled rapidly when exposed to sunlight. Almost all the physical evidence vanished.”

  “How inconvenient.”

  “You’re skeptical.” She shot me an acerbic sideways look. “And yet here we are driving around with a fallen angel in the back of the pickup.”

  “Okay… What were they then? Nephilim?”

  “Some of them were, I guess.”

  “No offence, but you’re pretty short. For one of the Nephilim.” Zmajeviti, they’d call her back home. A dragon-child, whose task it was to fight the destructive hailstorms that were so dreaded by farmers.

  “I used to be taller.” She laughed. “Being tall makes you stand out. It’s not always an advantage. Don’t think you’re the only one with extraordinary abilities, Milja honey—You’re just Azazel’s main squeeze. I’m his blood. No offence.”

  I was glad to have to hold on to the seat and catch my breath as we took a sudden turn left up a rutted track that was so badly maintained that birch saplings bent under our bull bars and scraped horribly on the underbody. The SUV bounced around wildly, but I assumed Azazel was just fine out there. “Do you remember him?” I asked, figuring that since we were past the being-polite-to-each-other stage that I might as well ask Roshana the rude questions. “From when you were little?”

  “He wasn’t around as much as he might have been. But yes. I do remember.”

  “Was he a good father?”

  “He never hit any of us, or even shouted. Is that what you mean?”

  “Well, uh…”

  “And yeah, he looked after us, I’ll say that. Until… Well, I remember the day he went to find my brothers, and the ground began to shake.”

  “What happened?”

  “My mother ran with me to the caravanserai and paid a man to take me to Uruk straight away. ‘Her father will come and meet her at the city,’ she told him. But he didn’t. And I never saw her again.”

  “That wasn’t his fault,” I said gently. I could see ghostly gray figures amongst the trees at the side of the path. Just a few, here and there. Most were lying down, and others sat over fallen figures as if tending them, or mourning. I shivered.

  “No, of course not.”

  I wasn’t sure I wanted an answer to my next question. “What happened to you after that?”

  “I survived.” The words were a wall.

  “Did you get back home?”

  “Twenty years later. Our village had gone. An earth slip had taken out the whole side of the valley and wiped every house from existence. Not one of my relatives remained.”

  The archangels did that? The thought made me feel even colder. “I’m sorry,” I said, because there was nothing else to say.

  “It was a long time ago.” She jolted the vehicle to a stop and switched off the engine. “We need to walk from here.”

  Azazel jumped down lightly behind us.

  From here meant down the steep slope of a little wooded valley. A dead stump shelved with hoof-shaped fungi was the only landmark on the trackside to show we’d arrived anywhere at all. I winced inwardly as I climbed from the SUV because my slip-on shoes were hopelessly inappropriate for rough terrain, but I didn’t dare say anything because I knew Roshana would just suggest that I wait in the car. So I slithered down the incline in their wake, gritting my teeth as leaf-mold worked its way in around my toes.

  Azazel seemed quite content to be led, for once.

  The trees here were dense and still quite slender, decked in a fireworks display of fall colors. Once we reached the bottom of the valley we turned what would have been upstream, if there had been running water. Thankfully there wasn’t, though it was squishily damp underfoot. Roshana launched into a monologue about how she’d bought the land at auction from a logging company, and about how there were still bears and mountain lions around here. I think she had very little idea about how to chat to her father, now she’d met him.

  I interrupted her tales with a shriek. I’d looked up as I ducked under a branch and suddenly, there in front of me, was a figure with a face so distorted by pustules that its eyes were swollen shut and its mouth looked like one giant scab. Shock made me cry out loud, but by the time the other two heard me and reacted, the vision was gone.

  “What’s wrong?” Azazel demanded, appearing at my side.

  “Oh hell!” I cried, passing my hand over my eyes as if I could block out the memory of that face. “D’you not see them?”

  “See what?” Roshana asked, hand on hip.

  “Ghosts! This place is crawling with them!” I looked around wildly, as if those shabby gray figures were about to lunge out at me in jerky J-Horror ambush.

  If he’d been Egan, Azazel would have swept me into his arms and comforted me. But he just frowned and tilted his head, waiting for more explanation.

  “What sort of ghosts?” Roshana asked, smiling.

  “I don’t know! That one had a face like a bowl of Rice Krispies—I mean, oh God.” My throat swelled as I tried to recall details I’d only glimpsed. “I—I think they were pretty old. I didn’t see any modern tech or clothes. They all look really ill. What happened here? Why’ve you got ghosts?”

  “Smallpox,” she said, unfazed. “When the white guys first landed east of here, their diseases blazed a trial for them. Millions died before they even saw a white face.”

  “So this was Native American land?”

  “The whole country was Native land,” she said dismissively. “Come on.”

  Azazel said nothing. But he did wait and walk behind me this time as we pressed on. I wished he’d take my hand or something.

  Roshana led the way to where a great cloven boulder stuck out of the valley side. It looked as if the rock face had split away centuries ago from the bulk of the stone, and still stood like a wall. Between the two faces of stone there was just about enough room for someone to walk into the cleft.

  “Here we are,” she said, looking at her father. “Do you want to go first?”

  “Go where?”

  “Into the cave there.”

  Azazel looked at the rock face, then back at her, slowly. “I don’t see any cave.”

  It was Roshana’s turn to look confused. She put her hands on her hips and jerked her chin. “That one.”

  Frowning, he turned to me. “Do you see it?”

  I nodded. “That gap just there? Yes.” The vegetation had been trodden back to make a muddy little path.

  Azazel took another long hard look. “I…can’t see…what you mean.”

  We stood in mutual bafflement.

  “Interesting,” Azazel said thoughtfully. “Not heard nor perceived by the ear, neither hath the eye seen. It has been sealed from my eyes.”

  “How come?”

  “I imagine it’s intended to discourage angelic visitation. I suppose to stop attempts at rescue, in the first place. And once we were defeated…well, even the Host are subject to the subtle temptations of pity.” He snorted softly. “In theory, at any rate.”

  “Is it holy ground?” I asked, nervous about who might be watching.

  He tilted his head. “No. Not now. Maybe…a long time ago.” Holding out his hand to me, he concluded, “Lead me in.”

  “I’ll go first,” Roshana said swiftly, and strode away into the gap.

  I’ll admit I felt slightly relieved. The prospect of leading the way into those shadows had not been appealing. I intertwined my fingers in Azazel’s, wishing we were away somewhere all alone, slick with sweat and urging each other
to new orgasmic heights. Maybe he sensed my thoughts, because he smiled at me. I realized it was the first time I’d seen him smile that day. “Are you all right?” I whispered.

  “I borrow your courage,” he said, stooping to brush his lips across my cheek, and it was a moment before I realized that he wasn’t mocking me. Maybe he really was nervous of going underground again.

  I lifted my hand to his face, longing arcing through my body like electricity. I wanted to slide my hand to the juncture of his thighs and capture his burgeoning flesh. I wanted him to enfold the hollow of my back in his hands. For a moment our lips met, soft as feathers, and I inhaled the warmth of his breath.

  I love you, I whispered into the hollow of my skull. I want you, right now. It was too raw a confession to speak aloud in this company. But his eyes narrowed a little as he smiled again, his long lashes almost tangling with my own.

  “This way,” called Roshana. She sounded dryly impatient, and that lifted my spirits.

  Trying to ignore the mud soaking into my ruined shoes, I took the lead and drew us carefully between the rock walls. Azazel’s grip tightened fiercely on mine for just a moment, and then we were both inside the cleft. A smell of damp stone surrounded us. Just enough light filtered down through the vegetation growing over the gap above our heads to allow me to now make out a low aperture in the rock to my right, admitting us deeper into the body of the cliff.

  I took a deep breath, ducked my head, and plunged in.

  The cave was bigger than I expected, and not natural. That much was apparent as soon as my eyes grew used to the dim light that seeped in from the hole at the apex of the conical roof. It was shaped like one of the old straw beehives they used to have in the village meadows back home, smoothly rounded as if hollowed by water, yet in a place no river had ever run. The roof was striated sandstone and painted with faint petroglyphs of animals and humans. Humanoids, perhaps. The floor was rough rock, more crudely levelled, and in the center was a huge rectangular slab of stone.

  “There were a lot of bones everywhere when I first came,” Roshana explained, “but I had them all tidied.”