They were going for a beer.
Bland-faced moon, sinking, peered down upon Pan Renik. He was very near his nest and out of breath. His failure to bring anything back from his expedition stung inside. Within the thin limbs of familiar territory, here at the top of the world, more expanses yawned than either branches or leaves: the dome of the open sky was so close. Winds became stronger, too. Crisper gusts reached Pan Renik’s lungs, more fragrant and liberated than those stifled ones puffing in the stinking settlement.
Pan Renik imagined he could detect hints of impossible reaches. From where, he wondered (for perhaps the thousandth time), could these winds originate?
Before long, powerful yearnings to be elsewhere—somewhere other than this world—coursed through his blood, taking him over, inflaming him with the thwarted desires he could never explain (had he ever anyone to explain anything to). Was there more to life? There had to be, to continue. More than just branches and the open sky and poisonous clouds below.
Looking directly into the waning night, frowning, Pan Renik suddenly paused. Intangible masses of billows extended out to the horizon, of course, dusted white in places by the waning moon and, from underneath, by occasional flashes of far off lights, but there was . . . something else? A new scent? A sound he had not heard before?
He strained to hear, to sniff, to discern.
Nothing.
“Galls,” he swore, though he did not himself know to whom or what he referred.
Small evidences of life arose from the settlement below—a faint, chanted prayer (for the dead man, no doubt), and a child’s brief cry. They were returning to their beds. Wind and the creak of limbs joined with the voices. Belly full of wistfulness (and that’s about all), Pan Renik gave in to the profound wave of futility that suddenly washed over him, draining him of the small hopes he had detected on the night breezes.
Once in a while, like now, he deliberated opening his veins with a sharp piece of wood, spilling his thick red sap over the people below—
A loud wail brought him out of self-indulgence.
From above.
He looked up.
From his nest.
Pan Renik’s body went cold: he was utterly at a loss. The wail had not been the caw of a lemur or the scream of a nighthawk. Maybe he’d misheard? Had gliders arrived, in his absence, to romp with abandon on the woven leaves of his bower? No. The cry had been from none of these sources: it had been from a person, a person in need, a person in distress.
A person in his nest.
No one could ever have climbed up while he was gone. No other citizen came here. There was not one in the settlement who could climb as well as he, none brave enough to leave the nets and webs and safeguards they all pathetically clung to down there. Not even padres had the balls to come up.
He made a few low hooting noises, to relieve his anxiety, and bobbed his head.
Who in the world could be up there?
After a few beats of his heart—wondering for just a moment if he should wait until the sun rose farther, so he could see the situation better—Pan Renik forced himself to subdue his fears and climb higher. Still, to his shame, his limbs shook and his bladder tightened as he circled underneath his nest. (Was he weak, like the rest of them? Surely not: he was a brave, exiled warrior!)
Crouching, much nearer, Pan Renik was still unable to see the full extent of his bower—
Then he heard the person in his nest again, weakly calling out.
Unmistakable.
Followed by what could only be the rustle of something heavy and unseen crashing through foliage—
A startled glider flapped noisily away from where it had been hiding, making Pan Renik nearly fall to his death: heart pounding, he watched the skinny body silhouetted against its own wide sails, flying down, toward the low moon.
Now came a moan of pain, or maybe pleasure, raining through the sparse twigs as if it were substance; Pan Renik cowered and looked back up at his nest in time to see a form moving there, a hard-edged shape, rising from his bower—
Sudden images of his club and handmade mace lying abandoned, useless, stung him like slaps across the face: whoever was up there had access to his weapons.
He was unprepared.
To squash the growing feelings of uselessness and self-condemnation, Pan Renik had to act. “Hey,” he said, keeping just a little hushed, so that padres would not hear, “who’s up there? Who goes there?”
The response came, reedy and pained, in a strong accent that made the two words very strange—hard, for a moment, for Pan Renik to recognize. But a human’s voice. The voice of a woman. “Help me,” it said. “Help me.”
Pan Renik stammered, almost in a panic, “Look, keep mum, mum, for goodness sake. Padres could hear you. I’m coming up.”
“In the . . . branches down there. Please. You must help . . .”
How did he manage to climb the last few metres, so familiar, yet, on this night, so strange and alien? How? He did, though, arms and legs moving of their own accord.
After drawing a deep breath, and then another, he pulled himself up, into his bower—
She lay on her back.
Sprawling, body flattened, dark and dully glinting, as if oil from a squirrel’s body had been spread across his nest. At first, he thought—for just a moment—that the woman was a form of creature he had never before seen, but this was a device she lay on, an invention, not a part of her at all, flickering highlights of silver. Her shape covered his nest, drooping off the far end, into the night.
She was in the centre, sheathed from toe to head in the complex, deep red garment, integrated into the device, but even without the tubes and membranes and shiny structural frame that seemed to bind her together, Pan Renik knew that this woman, though human (he decided), was nothing like him. Not like anyone in the settlement. Beneath the clinging layers of the outfit, so tight over her skin, and beneath the mask covering most of her face, this woman was not like anyone.
Dark eyes, buried in the shadow of the headgear, moved. Their gaze was sharp, suspicious, watching him as he leaned closer. Her mouth, obscured within the mask, twisted.
“They shot me down.”
“Who did?”
“They shot down our car. And when I came up . . .”
“Came up?” He frowned at the clouds, then looked back at the woman’s face. What was she saying? That she’d come from below the clouds? She was madder than him.
There was so much pain in those eyes, an unfathomable amount. More pain than Pan Renik’s. This realization, for reasons he did not want to think about, made him angry, as if he had sole rights to such despair.
“It’s cold up here,” she said. “My legs are not . . . good. No longer function . . . No air up here, and cold. Are you not . . . cold?”
Pan Renik said nothing. He was staring at the device again, mesmerized by the glints. These tubes were metal! Like the padre’s big knife and a few other artifacts padres kept in their trapeza—gifts of the sky power. These tiny objects in his nest were metal. Scattered, several fragments lay between the woman’s legs, several more to the left of her torso. Only padres could touch metal. Metal was what made padres padres. Pan Renik’s mouth had gone dry. Reaching out with one arm, entranced, he could not quite bring himself to lay his fingers on the glinting shapes. Would metal burn him? Or would Anu suddenly descend, to strike him dead, if he touched this sacred material?
He spat off to the side.
What the woman lay on, he saw, in the pre-dawn light (which was creeping across the clouds in his direction with slowly increasing intensity), appeared to be a blanket of sorts, a greasy membrane, spread out across the twigs and branches. The woman’s thick arms, trembling in spasm, were bound within the structure by straps.
He saw the whites of her eyes now.
Her back was broken. He knew. He could tell.
Then, suddenly, Pan Renik understood something else, understood something as clearly as he had ever understoo
d anything in his life: the woman had flown to his nest, like a glider, through the skies. From another place, from another world. The device that lay broken in his nest had caused her to fly.
She had dropped into his home. A gift.
“Where you from?” he asked, awed. “Where do you come from?”
“Hypoxia.” The woman’s chest seemed broad and strong, yet struggled to rise.
“Hypoxia.” Repeating the word, tasting its magic, Pan Renik could not help but think that hypoxia might be the place the winds came from, the place of his imagination, and to conjure in his mind this other world, one where he would be able to come and go without fear of being chased away, where his past would be forgotten and forgiven. A place where he would not be an exile, nor ever be hungry or lonely. There would be riches there, too, metals of all sorts, and food to be taken by handfuls and stuffed into his face until his belly was finally, once and for all, full.
Through the visor, Pan Renik discerned the altering expression on the woman’s face as he climbed carefully up onto the rim of his nest. He crouched over her, making sure his toes curled on branches and not on the giant membrane, protecting it from his long toenails. She looked at him, perplexed. Concerned. Maybe even a little hopeful? He took great care, as he moved closer, not to damage the frame of the precious device.
Beneath the woman’s shoulder protruded the handle of his wooden mace. He had made this weapon himself, using bark and cloth to smooth the wood. Touching the mace now, rubbing the shaft with his rough fingertips, he said, “And where were you going?” He almost asked, Who knows you are here?, but decided, at the last moment, to shut up.
Holding the shaft of the mace made him feel stronger, confident; he ground his remaining teeth together, recalling (with great distaste and shame) his earlier fear—fear that this woman had caused.
Meanwhile, she coughed, and continued coughing for some time, unable to offer any response. When she did speak again, Pan Renik no longer understood the words she used, for they were not in his tongue.
He began to work the mace out from under her heavy body.
“Rescue,” she said, suddenly, her voice dry and weakened, struggling to lift one hand toward him. “My friends are still there. I must tell someone. Listen. If they come looking for us. We found a ship. In stasis. A mother. We boarded her. But she wasn’t discarded. And I took her seegee from her console. I stole it. And when I touched the surface, I felt the connection, the jolt. She used me. She was waiting for someone, someone like me, for ages. Her symbiotes had all been killed. But there was a brood ship. And when we tried to get away, we were shot down.” She licked her lips. “It’s insane. This world. We crashed . . . But I came up again, to send for help, because no transmissions get out from these horrid clouds. My friends told me it was crazy but I insisted. They were waiting. The drones. They saw me. And now I can’t move.”
She had begun to weep.
Against the dawn’s light, Pan Renik slowly raised the mace above his head. Too many words, he thought. Just like a padre. Too many words, spinning around. For an instant, the briefest of hesitations, while he tried to consider options, he paused. But he came up with no options. There were never options. He felt only vague remorse as he brought his weapon down, with all his might and frustration, trying to destroy what was left of his fear, smashing the woman between her shocked eyes. A little remorse, but not much.
Looking down through the parchment, shacks and cluttered markets appeared heaped, as if thrown from the window and abandoned before the slightest logic and pattern could be imposed. Beyond them, the River Crane seemed blurry and a more uniform sepia than usual, most likely due to her hangover and the dampness that sprung to her eyes.
Outside, there had been rain.
The chatelaine waited for Octavia to return. Her bedchambers felt colder than usual. Because she had not yet ordered it cleaned, the air was still rank with scents: stale wine gone acrid from half-full cups left in the corners of the room and on the few available surfaces; bodily fluids from countless bodies, passing through, essences of which rose above the heaped bedclothes and the strange, scattered devices like spirits of her lost evenings; decaying crusts of food, desiccated and rotting on plates forgotten under the bed. She felt quite ill. Buried like this, in her own city, as most of the palace was—quite literally—allowed the standard brew of city smells to infiltrate from outside, and at times penetrate her room, but the chatelaine had added her own contributions to the mix from within. These combinations nauseated her now.
Most pungent of all was the smell of fright, from her menagerie.
Her poor, poor pets, traumatized by the intruder during the night. Now they were tired from their displays of fear and merely quivered, silently.
What was left of her menagerie, anyhow.
The chatelaine knew she was a leader wont to excesses and, as such, existed in a world filled with the residues of her indulgences. She lived with this knowledge every day. Could the kholic help her change? She imagined scenarios of the two of them together, sharing absurdly mundane domesticities.
Rustles from a rat or other vermin caused the chatelaine to turn from the hazy cityscape: a beast ran across the reeds that carpeted the central part of her timber floor. Not a rat. A faster creature, on two legs. Reddish. Long tail. A jinn, perhaps? Too fast for her to be sure. Some new, unclassified beast, escaped from the dungeon, or even created up there?
The creature vanished behind a curtain.
She sighed.
Just like she had told the pretty kholic, the chamber’s big fires were nearly out. The fireplace itself, which was as tall as a person and two such lengths in width, held but a few sad, smoldering logs. No wonder the pervasive chill. During the previous evening—flushed, eager, much too drunk—she had dismissed her servants, including the fire-tenders. (To their great relief, no doubt.) Though this was a usual call, it was also a stupid one; often these fires expired; often her chambers became cold. All the stone, she imagined. But did it seem strange that, beyond, the city sweltered? Perhaps it was she who radiated this chill?
Regardless, she was a bad mother.
When Octavia returned, she would tell the girl how she felt.
And then visit her father.
Turn over a new leaf.
Be forgiven.
She put her fingers together, raised them to her lips.
Surprising, sometimes, that servants ever returned. Then again, what choice did they have? They surely must be afraid of what they might see.
The chatelaine nearly smiled.
A void had been left when the cherub was abducted. Out in the city, there would be suffering: the void must be filled.
Even from where she stood she saw, in the large mirror against the far wall, the reflection of the gallery of cages, and—near the centre—the empty one, the glaring space.
Her missing cherub represented the Main Gate—the bridge leading into Nowy Solum, and South Gate, spanning it, welcoming or threatening all those leaving or visiting the city. From her window, the chatelaine could not see these parts, but she had an awful feeling just then, a crawling on her skin, and she wondered if someone or something unpleasant might be arriving just now—or would arrive shortly—through the unprotected gates.
“We came over the sand for two days. We left our home ’cause my boy was not right in the head but then a light come down and touched him, changed him, put ideas in him. Only he don’t know what they mean and he needs someone to unlock ’em. Or explain ’em. See? A light come down from the sky and we needed to leave home.”
Path’s father had paused to take a sip of murky water. Then he choked for a while. In the lantern light, his skin appeared pale. His hands shook. Path was perched on the table, in his sling. Because of his position, he could not see much of this hovel, nor of their host—just a wall of dry reeds.
“A finger of light touched him?”
“Yes.” His father wiped at his chin. “That’s what I said. Didn’t see
it happen, though. He was outside, in the garden. Watching for lizards. He would scare lizards away. That’s what he did.” Another pause. Father glanced at son, who stared back, unblinking. “There’s not many people where we live. After this here light hit him, he was a new boy. Smarter. Not like the boy we tried to raise. I didn’t believe him at first. But he was different.”
“You do now?”
“What’s that?”
“You believe him now?”
“He talks in his sleep. Says things no one could understand. Words no one knows. He’s changing every day. He speaks in a voice I don’t know. He talks about places I don’t know. But I guess that ain’t saying much. We’re stopping in almost every home, to see if the right words will come, but he’s said nothing so far.”
“Any women travelling with you?”
“Women? I don’t see why . . . My wife, you see, she got ill a long time ago.”
The stranger chuckled wetly.
“Stop talking,” path said. “He’s making fun of you. I’m not getting anything here. This is not the place. So just stop talking.”
His father, who looked as if he had run out of oxygen, acquiesced.
Then the man who owned this property, and who had reluctantly given them water, said, “Your boy’s right about one thing. You talk too much.” He spat on the floor of his own home, which was not dirt, like the floor in path’s home had been, but a sheet of real tin. “You talk and talk.”
Path craned his neck again to try see the stranger. Fragments of the vision had begun to flicker once more in the perimeters of his mind but no directions or clarifications were presented. He saw a girl, alone, and then crowds of vague people. He saw a vast, cold void where surely nothing could live. What had his father been saying? Did he truly talk in his sleep? Everything seemed like a dream now—
Abruptly the homeowner’s face loomed. He was grinning. He had a hole where his nose should have been and only one eye. He said, “You don’t look very capable. If you’re heading into Nowy Solum, I give you a day, at best. Now get your dad to hold your cup up, drink yer water, and get on out of here.”
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