Earth/Sky (Earth/Sky Trilogy)

by Macaulay C. Hunter

  Makala wished me to brush her hair and bring her drinks, to fetch another blanket from her bed and her slippers when she was cold. Refill the dispensers with shampoo and conditioner in the shower. Scrub a stain from her sweatshirt. Move the light. She rose late and sat in the recliner to surf travel websites, trying to find some place that she had not gone, some new thing to see. Eternity stretched out in front of her, and everything in it was boring. One morning she came out in a shirt she had stolen from me in Seataw, and her eyes upon me were wide with challenge. “Do you like my shirt?”

  Did she really expect me to protest that it was mine or call her a thief? I didn’t care if she stole every shirt in my closet. I just wanted to go home. “Yes. It’s a very nice shirt, Makala.”

  “The shirt is nice. Yes, girl? The shirt is nice,” she said in mockery. Makala referred to me as the girl, and sometimes with just a wave of her hand.

  Barasho rarely addressed me even as that. I had no more presence in his mind than a shadow on the wall. He got up at dawn and tended to his own hair. Then he darkened his wings and raced low over the ocean. When he returned, he wanted his breakfast. After that he rested in his chair for much of the day. All of the centuries he had lived and he still had no idea what to do with his time. He just sat there like a toadstool, answering Makala’s queries as she flicked through travel information and otherwise contributing little more. Sometimes he watched movies or drew on a sketchpad that he kept next to his chair. His pictures were very different from Adriel’s beautiful sketches over the decades. Barasho’s were defined by their empty spaces, an ocean with a bare beach, no dolphins jumping in the waves, not even rays coming from the sun. Everything looked stark and barren. Something about the crispness of the lines, the sharp angles of the waves and deep dots of the sand, was angry. I never felt in danger around him, although there was danger in him not caring what anyone else did to me. He wasn’t here to hurt me, but he wasn’t going to help either.

  Zofia read books by the dozens, one after another in a dreary march. Romances, thrillers, mysteries, horror, fantasy, nonfiction, children’s books, she was learning of the human world through them, and her sporadic questions brightened Barasho and Makala into explaining. What was speed dating? What did the skull and crossbones mean? How did solar panels work? Once she had her answer, the page would turn. Zofia found me stupid, since I was unable to braid her hair in the complicated fashion she saw in a magazine picture.

  I didn’t have any higher opinion of Zofia, not that my opinion mattered in the slightest. She missed Trenton and wanted to reclaim him, but as he had been left behind, that wasn’t possible at this time. Trenton knew to make his way to the nearest home should he be abandoned in public like that. They trusted that he had boarded a bus to Herman much farther north where they kept a house in the country. The plan was to let the wounded Rippers heal and then hop and skip their way from Santa Cruz up to Herman to rejoin him.

  “Trenton knew what kind of soda I like,” Zofia said grumpily when I gave her a meal one day. Trenton did everything better. They had picked him up last winter, a skier who went off-trail and got lost in the mountains. In the tapestry, he was set to die there. Worried that she was going to see my aggravation in the shielding, I didn’t say anything and brought her a different kind of soda at the next meal. Making a mental note that that one didn’t inspire a complaint, I figured it was the one she preferred. Once she asked me to go to her room and find a book she wanted to reread. She couldn’t remember the title or even the genre, but there was a character in it named Lance. Then she sniped at how long it took, like I was magically supposed to know which book of the dozens around her bed she meant. I had had to page through them fast, hunting down a mention of a Lance.

  She wasn’t vicious so much as dumb. Barasho and Makala were generally indifferent to my presence, but Japheem terrified me through and through. His mood could change on a dime, happy to raging, raging to sad, sad to happy once more. There was no rhyme or reason to it, only the whims of madness. Once he had the anemoi surround me, and I stood there in terror at the rasp of fur, the teasing bite of their teeth on my legs. Blood ran down my skin from shallow lacerations and I screamed while Japheem laughed. The only reason he stopped was due to Makala snapping, since the screams were interfering with the movie she was watching beside Barasho. Japheem sent me away, and I waited in dread during the hours that passed for him to call my name.

  As his leg was still healing, he made me walk him into his room since sleeping on the sofa was not as comfortable as upon the bed. His weight was heavy against my shoulder, heavier was his jangling music pulling me apart, and heaviest still was the horror that he was going to want me to stay in there with him for the night. And he did for a while, but only to clean up his clothes and tidy his belongings while he lay upon the mattress in sour spirits. Books and magazines and clothes, toys and knick-knacks and random items, it was like Kishi’s room but without projects bringing it to any cohesion. It was just a dump. I stacked his books along one wall and piled the magazines beside them. Into a basket I dumped all of the toys. As I started on the clothes, he said hatefully, “You like them, don’t you?”

  “Like what?” I asked in fear. There was nearly a dark aura around him, and I couldn’t figure out if he meant I liked his toys or his books.

  “The Kreeling hunters,” Japheem said. “You like them.”

  “I don’t even know them,” I answered. What he saw in my soul did not try his temper further. It was the truth; I hardly knew them, and I hadn’t enjoyed the short acquaintance we shared. Still, I would rather listen to them being rude about the Graystones than be here. None of them bore me any ill will. They just weren’t very warm and fuzzy people.

  “Such pretty chords your soul plays,” Japheem said, retreating to placidity. “Plunk-PLUNK-plunk.” His fingers waved in the air like he was strumming the strings of a harp. “Oh, I will always be able to find this sound now, wherever you might go. I hear souls, Jessa Bright. I can hear so much music all at once. But hearing yours now, hearing it over days, it marks itself indelibly upon me. I can find it in all of the racket that is this world. Wherever you go, I can follow. Plunk-PLUNK-plunk. Plunk-PLUNK-plunk. Miles could be between us and still, and still I will be able to hear it, just like I hear Trenton’s. His is not so pretty. Thud-thud-THUD. Thud-thud-THUD. But you and I, you and I will play hide-and-seek sometime around these caves, and you will see how I can always find you. One day we will play this game in a city. You will creep about and think this place, this dark place down here, this dark place down here he will never find me! And you will crouch down and wait and wait in this dark place for me to reach a count of one hundred, and straight shall I come to you. Japheem! Japheem, you will cry! Japheem, how did you know? You will laugh with joy at how I found you so easily, and hold out your arms that I might embrace you. And I will say plunk-PLUNK-plunk goes your soul, and it draws me here. Go away right now! I will close my eyes and cover my ears and count to ten. You hide in another room. Go, go!” He waved his hands in excitement.

  I went obediently back into the corridor as he counted with his face buried in the pillow like a child. In silent steps, I concealed myself in the room that Barasho and Makala shared. They lived in heaps. A heap of clothes, a heap of toiletries, a heap of books, like mountains behind their mattress. Crouching down behind the heap of clothes since it was the tallest, I waited there.

  “Ten!” His mattress squeaked. “Plunk-PLUNK-plunk. Little Jessa has gone to Barasho and Makala’s room!” He laughed and laughed as my heart chilled. There was no way he could have seen me go in there, or heard me either. He bid me to come back and I did.

  I returned to picking up his clothes. Still laughing on his bed, he said, “You will like that game one day! And you will like my mark on your wrist! It is so very pretty. Let me see it.”

  When I showed him the brand upon the wrist of my left hand, he smiled and relaxed. “That was the mark they put on the cave I was within, its
address so the caretakers knew where to go. I stared at it for many long years, since back then they did not bind our heads. Now I put that mark wherever I go, burning it into places as they burned it into my eyes. Now I make them look at it! I got out of there, those Ripper caves. They thought they could keep me, riding along in my memories until the world ends. But no, no, no, I didn’t float away like the others. I stayed. And then that girl came through, that lonely girl set to checking on us. She couldn’t be a hunter, no, no, no. Oh no, not with that gimpy knee of hers that she picked up in training. Do you want to know how she hurt her knee?”

  “Yes, Japheem,” I said.

  “She landed the wrong way while jumping over boulders on a kreolos obstacle course, a course that she had run many times. How sad. Relegated to cold assignments all of her life when she was hungry for action. Oh, she was hungry, Jessa! I saw that in her soul. Like a racehorse taken to the gate, pawing and eager to run, just waiting for the bar to fall. Three . . . two . . . one . . . STOP!” He cried it so loudly that I jumped and dropped a shirt. This he found funny.

  When at last his humor ran out, Japheem said, “How did I escape the Ripper caves, Jessa?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Can you guess?”

  “It has something to do with that Kreeling girl who could not hunt.”

  “Yes! Good, second Jessa. Oh, we talked and talked. I apologized so much for the music that surrounds me, and I insisted that she stay back. How I loathe the way it troubles people. Some humans do not hear it as much. They feel it though, like a current along the bottom of a wave. And they dislike it, and dislike me. Sit, sit!” Japheem said sweetly. I didn’t move, unclear if he meant the girl in the story or myself. Again he cried, “Sit, sit!” So I sat and folded the clothes I had gathered, staying in the entryway where the chords were muted. For the moment, he was beaming at me like we were the very best of friends.

  “That was what I told her. Sit, sit, girl! Please tell me what happened to that poor knee that pains you! Oh, how horrid. This world is so unfair.” He looked genuinely distressed. “She had good things to give to this earth, and the world failed to give good things to her. Oh, how she wanted to chase the cut, to avenge the grandmother she lost. Yes, those cut, how they need chasing! And you, second Jessa, you knew that cut one in Seataw. He was the boy to fight Zofia at your school. Is he a friend of yours?”

  “Yes,” I admitted.

  He shook his head in chastisement. “Never be friends with the cut. They have no souls.”

  Oh God, what I would have given to see Zakia’s sweet, handsome face at this moment. To smell the good earth of him and be swept up by that cute smile, to wrestle over the remote control and stuff our faces with ice cream. There was a soul in those dark eyes and I felt such affection for it. He had tried to save me in the high school parking lot, and I hoped he wasn’t too hurt. I would never watch a movie like Zombie Blast again, and was ashamed that I had ever watched them at all.

  Japheem soured to think of people whose threads on the tapestry were cut. “No, no, no, those are abominations. They should have died and yet they live! They create a shadow tapestry, an ugly thing. Do you know how I hear their souls?”

  “How?” I asked when he waited for a reply.

  “It is static. Szzzzt! Szzzzt! Szzzzzzt! Those are horrifically loud to me. I hear them everywhere. The Kreeling girl, oh, that poor girl of mine, how this world should have spared her knee and let her snip what has already been snipped in the cut. We became such good friends, that girl and I. I was the only one who understood. That was what she said. How was it, she asked, that I became a Ripper? Oh, it was the loneliness, I said. I wanted a friend. How rich is it to have a friend, second Jessa! Do you have friends?”

  “Yes.”

  “You did have friends,” he corrected, and tears stung in my eyes to think of London and Savannah and Kitts, the silly burping buddies, and everyone in Bellangame. I had been rich in friends. Japheem tapped a finger to his wrist like he wore a watch. “So terrible to live for all eternity and to do it alone. The Kreeling girl felt so badly for me, as I felt so badly for her. We became close friends over the years. She watched her compatriots go out on hunts and come back in glory and triumph. A vampire staked! A cut pulled apart! How it hurt her. Meanwhile she minded the caves and minded the caves and minded the caves some more. This is the work of old men and women, and she was young! A hero’s heart beat in that breast, yet how was it to shine? One day exactly like the next day, like the last day, like every day, pacing those quiet caves while everyone else soars. Do you like to fold shirts, Jessa?”

  “Yes,” I said. It was better than being bitten by anemoi. It was better than a thousand other things I could think of Japheem making me do.

  “Yes. Good, for in our many homes, my room is ever a mess. Trenton doesn’t tend my clothes the way I like. They need a woman’s touch.” Japheem stared at his gigantic pile of clothing and I wondered how a woman folded a shirt any differently than a man. Grandpa Jack folded his own clothes without any assistance from me, and my father usually did the laundry at home, not my mother. How I missed my parents!

  While I added another folded shirt to a stack, Japheem said, “We were best friends in time, Japheem the Ripper and the wounded Kreeling girl. Oh, but she was no longer a girl, no, no, no. A bitter woman with one friend, one friend in the entire world, she had one friend who understood. And I had one friend in the entire world in her. She crept closer and closer through those years, and the music ceased to trouble her so in time. What a sweet day it was when she kissed my cheek! Her poor fallen angel Japheem, innocently led astray by the wish for a friend.” The smile to creep over his lips unnerved me. “My poor kreolos hunter girl, innocently led astray by the wish for a friend.”

  The stack of shirts was growing tall, so I began another one. He had enough clothes for three wealthy young men. I made a separate pile of shirts that his wings had destroyed by bursting through. He giggled to see one in shreds and shrugged like a naughty boy. “We talked and talked without fear of being caught, for I had been placed very deeply in the caves. The old caretakers made her walk the distance, and never did they follow to check. Such happiness I felt to hear her come day by day! To have something to gaze upon other than my address carved into the wall! Step-stump-step-stump-step-stump. And then she cried Japheem! My sweet Japheem! She kissed me every day, twice then thrice until I said she was going to wear out the skin of my cheeks. So she moved to my lips every day, twice then thrice and one day she broke away in sadness that I could not hold her in my arms. More than friends now, that was what she felt for me. But how could I be a lover to her when I was trapped in these bindings, tucked into a hole in the caves? How, Jessa?”

  “She removed your bindings,” I said.

  “You skip ahead. I couldn’t be a lover to her this way, not as a man to a woman, and how she wanted to fly away with me. For us to have a home together, so she might spend her mortal life in happiness, and brighten some part of my eternity. For a year we played at the home we would build, on a mountaintop with a garden, a little brown dog for a pet. And how sad, how sad I was that I could never give her a child. No, fallen angels cannot do that. She was such a strong soul, a caring soul. I peered right into it, and I told her of the lovely things I saw and heard. And then she said Japheem, Japheem, couldn’t we just rip a child?”

  I could see all of this sickening scene play out as I separated more destroyed clothes from the pile. This had all been a game to him, his hoodwinking of the Kreeling girl, and she’d been drawn in so completely that she suggested the ripping. Japheem turned over his wounded leg carefully and drew up his blanket. “Her face lit up with joy to say this. A solution! Children died of so many foolish things back then, dirty water, lack of food, shoddy medical care. Oh, we could have our pick of children, and how we quibbled over a boy or a girl and what to name it. She wanted a boy, a boy named Japheem, so she could have her big Japheem and her little Japheem. This charm
ed her. I wanted a girl, a girl with eyes like her, so I could always see one of my girls and be in mind of the other. This charmed me. Such a perfect world we built in words; each one so stinging to that lonely woman who had nothing. No respect from her community; no hunts to liven her blood; no vengeance for her lost one; no man or child to call her own. She began to plot how to get me from the caves, a night with no guards at the exit, a night with no moon. And then one day she gave me a special smile that meant at long last, at so very long last, it was time. Now say what you said before.”

  “She removed your bindings,” I repeated.

  “Do you see how much you would have missed had I just gone on? What richness you would have lost in this story? That night she returned through the caves of sleeping, silent Rippers. The Ripper caves are a giant spider web within the earth, twists and turns in semi-darkness, with angels bound in chains along the strands. She kissed me twice and thrice upon my cheeks, twice and thrice upon my lips, and her hands, they bared me.”

  His wings burst out suddenly, frightening me into falling back into the corridor. The yellow of them was painfully ugly, the rays of the sun dragged through a mud puddle. He said, “What did I do then, Jessa?”

  “Did you fly away?” I asked, wishing Makala to call for me.

  “Yes, yes, I flew away! Past that address I had seen for so long that even when my eyes were closed, it shined there still. Through those caves we raced together, her finger pointing the way to our freedom. Left! Right! Left! Right! Straight! Up! Here! Then I was spinning upwards into that beautiful black sky after a hundred years, two hundred years, more than that . . . I did not know. But I was free. We spun and dipped and weaved and raced, over fields and cities and oceans and forests. We came to a mountaintop, high, so high the air was thin, high, so high the ground was ice. Safe this place, so safe and sweet, since no one lived for miles and miles, since no one could climb up or down that dangerous slope. At that peak I set her down, my broken Kreeling hunter girl, the love of my heart and the mother to be of our child, my sleeping beauty, and I left her there to die.” He laughed, his wings curling over his body. This kept him amused, guessing how long she waited for him to come back, how long it took her to understand that she had been abandoned. I tidied his clothes along the wall and he sent me away with the shredded shirts. I was supposed to put them in the trash, but I carried them to my cave to make more of a bed than the one I had.