Night Lights

by Melissa Glisan

  "We're going away, it's All Hallows Eve and we're going to take a boat and ride the sea of winds,” the words had sounded like a lullaby. Margaret sighed unhappily. Her mama always sang, why couldn't she just say what was going on?

  A sound like thunder cracked in her ears and she jumped. Just past the light of the torches, she saw a pale man standing between the torches as her mother fell backwards. “Mama!” she yelled as the limp body smacked into her, carrying them both back into the water.

  Flailing, she tried to get free but was tangled in her mother's gown and hair. Water stuffed up her nose but she couldn't blow out to clear her nostrils; her lungs were empty. Come up for me mama, she willed, lifting her hands to her mother's blank staring face. Desperately she looked past her to the dim light of the torches on the bank, the receding glow of fiery eyes. Come up for me.

  Coughing and crying, Margaret rolled to her hands and knees, and came painfully awake in the predawn light. Sir Joseph was wandering the field as if drunk, muttering and slashing at nothing with his short sword. Turning her head, she saw Kanani wiping the fat rump of the pony with his rag. He smiled at her and winked.

  Suddenly she knew too much.

  Chapter Ten

  "Sir Joseph, I really don't see what last night proved,” Margaret repeated yet again. After waking, she dutifully listened as the aging botanist detailed his midnight romp through the woods chasing motes of light and what he thought were winged, moaning humanoid creatures roaming the forest.

  "I heard you the first three times, Miss Thawley,” he rebuked, brushing imaginary lint from his lapels. “No, I didn't get the physical proof required and I will not send a report to the Royal Society without it, that I do promise. But what I saw was incredible.” His voice was full of awe and his face lit from within as if he had witnessed a miraculous event.

  She made a disgusted sound. “If I may Sir Joseph, my father had a favorite saying that he used to make us repeat whenever one of us had the occasion to be caught passing gossip. ‘Believe nothing of what you hear and only half of what you see.’”

  With an indignant harrumph, he turned and studied the rice fields to the left of their swaying wagon like a chastised toddler. Maybe she shouldn't have spoken so tartly, but really, the man needed to hear it. Even though she knew the truth of what he saw, the way he went on and on made him sound utterly deluded.

  After recounting his adventure, they had spent the next two hours combing the area looking for evidence of his nocturnal visitors. They hadn't found as much as a footprint. What they did find were a large number of slashed tree branches and topless saplings. There was certainly no mistaking the path Sir Joseph carved in the underbrush.

  When he put Kanani to the question, the terse guide professed to having heard or seen nothing. “I slept the night through,” had been the nicest of his responses when pressed. The others didn't bear remembering.

  Knowing the truth, Margaret lifted her head, challenging the grinning guide to call her a liar as she admitted to seeing something but being distracted when the pony bolted down the road. “I dashed into the woods as you directed, Sir Joseph. But as I entered the darkness, I heard the pony's hoof beats returning and I hoped to catch him, so I abandoned the hunt and wandered the road until I was exhausted. I am sorry. Perhaps we should abide here another evening?"

  "The pony!” he exclaimed, charging off to the rotund equine, completely ignoring her question. He spent another half hour patting the contented beast, talking about the mid-October pagan festival of Equirria where a horse was sacrificed in a festival celebrating war. “You see, it was an important date, which is why our night was so successful."

  Margaret shared a very confused look with Kanani as Sir Joseph bustled about, tossing items back into the wagon. In defense of his bizarre conclusion, he romanticized the battles that claimed the lives of the dead. With a flourish, he indicated the sad trenches and then introduced the pony's fear of being sacrificed to draw the Berbalangs. Another dramatic wave covered the ears of the shaggy brown beast as he climbed into the back of the wagon with an excited, satisfied glow.

  "I think you are reaching,” she concluded aloud, crushing the man's high spirits. “Honestly, none of that made any sense.” But Margaret quietly reasoned that perhaps she lacked the education and insight to piece together such a hodgepodge of bizarre, unrelated paganisms so successfully as he subsided into a pout.

  Three hours later, when it became blindingly apparent that they weren't headed back to the seaport village, she risked asking where they were headed. It seemed he viewed their “success” an omen that they needed to journey on to the reputed homeland of the Berbalangs. She shook her head. Rizal was right. The man wouldn't rest until he penetrated the interior and saw the village, met the people, and found nothing.

  Which led to her problem; given what she had remembered of her mother's death and what happened after, she couldn't return home. She wasn't expected to return home. Either Sir Joseph didn't fully understand the situation or something more sinister was planned for the coming night.

  After a second day of sitting on the hard wooden seat, swaying and bouncing down the rutted dirt roads of the Cagayan interior, Margaret was nearly in tears of joy when she saw the line of thatched roofs appear in the distance. Once the village was in sight, Kanani pulled the pony up and refused to move closer.

  Sir Joseph clambered down stiffly but his face was full of excitement as he collected up his satchels full of clanking bottles and papers, and his rolled bedroll. Margaret wasn't nearly as thrilled to be on foot again. Her feet were sore from her new wooden shoes and her spirits were heavy as she collected up her dusty rug.

  "I shall see you in the morning, yes?” Kanani called after the pair, waving happily as he headed down a path between the worked farm fields flanking the narrow road.

  Margaret suspected that they would be seeing the man sooner than that, but kept her observation to herself.

  Walking along the road, she noticed that the ruts slowly faded making travel easier. In fact, she frowned looking at the hard packed soil. The surface went from hard clay to being lined in thick flat stones like a proper roadway. It seemed so very out of place that she stopped to make note of it in the record of the journey she was obligated to keep.

  Once inside the village proper she found a stone ledge to sit on and sketched a rough layout of the houses. The Berbalangs’ ‘village’ was more an arrangement of homes in a circular pattern bisected by two roads. None of the structures were taller than two floors and all looked vaguely the same. Where the town center would be, was a grassy field featuring a plain wooden post with a metal ring. A hitching post, she frowned. Around it grazed a small herd of goats.

  She had just finished sketching the layout when Sir Joseph stood over her shoulder, agitated. “I just do not understand where everyone went. How does an entire community just up and leave without leaving trace of where they went?"

  He walked up to the first house and knocked impatiently. When no one answered, he barged in, searching every room, touching cooking surfaces and meals left on tables. After the third house inspection, Margaret lost her temper.

  "Honestly Sir, I cannot blame the folk of this town a jot for bolting if this is how all visitors treat them. How would you feel, a simple farmer, if you were getting ready to sit down to dinner and word came that strange looking foreigners were coming? You'd probably hide.” She stormed from the house, moved to the central post and pointed at the silent, shuttered homes.

  "What possible reason have these poor people been given to be open and welcoming to strangers? The last visitor told strange tales of their being mosquito-men that ate the dead, and the newest ones just walk in uninvited, poking dirty fingers in their evening meals!"

  The sun was fading into the hills and a vague buzzing sound could be heard in the distance.

  "Now, where are we making camp tonight? I am tired and utterly uninterested in spending another sleepless night in a spooky place. And f
or the record, I find this deserted place spooky.” Hands on her hips, she stared down the disgruntled knight of the realm.

  He sighed and rubbed his bald pate. “I see you've a point, Miss Thawley, let's leave the village and allow these people to get back to their lives. We can bed down in the fields outside of town."

  Slowly they made their way down the road they arrived on, Sir Joseph paused every few steps to look back in confused longing. There was nothing remarkable about the place but that no one was there—just as reported in Skertchley's accounts.

  Shadows were long on the road when they laid out their bedrolls and settled to share a meal of travel bread and dried fruit, washed down with stale water from a canteen. As before, Margaret watched as Sir Joseph covertly splashed lime juice over his food. But tonight he went a bit farther, liberally anointing his clothes and bedroll.

  Yawning, Margaret snuggled under her shawl watching Sir Joseph as he sat keeping a vigil, as the droning hum grew louder. As her mind slid towards sleep, she absentmindedly wondered what could be causing the annoying sound.

  It seemed that she had only closed her eyes and laid her head on the makeshift pillow when she was startled awake by Sir Joseph yelling for help. Margaret rolled unsteadily to her feet and was immediately engulfed in a swarm of small insects. She couldn't see them in the darkness but felt them crawling over her skin on sharp pinching feet. Swatting at her arms, she tried to hasten towards the sound of Sir Joseph's voice but found herself stumbling as wings brushed past her head.

  Bats! The night sky was black with the flying furred bodies snapping up the plague of insects. Pushing down a wave of revulsion, she cheered the flapping predators as she brushed the stinging little insects from her face and neck. It seemed the sound from earlier must have been a swarm of insects headed towards the town following the rain.

  An urge caught at the edges of her mind, she reached a hand up into the air and felt the surprising weight of a furred body sidle into the curve of her fingers. Hesitantly, Margaret looked at the body she had almost called from the air to her hand. It was snuggling up to her thumb, its thin leathery wings pulled protectively around its delicate body lightly clinging to her wrist. The face put her in mind of a newborn kitten, blind with a funny little pug nose above rows of sharp needle teeth. She should have felt fear looking at those blood stained teeth, instead she felt moved to protect the snuffling creature. It was larger than English bats, but its soft warm body cuddled in as loving as any pet. She felt the delicate bones in the wings as they fluttered against her fingers, the tiny claws and toes. Opening her fingers from cradling the creature close, reality intruded and the small predator fell away with a squeak and darted back into the swarm of insects. She felt a momentary urge to follow that was quashed when a squadron of the gnat-like insects invaded her face making her cough.

  Stamping and swatting, she cursed in understanding of the villagers’ flight. Without secure doors and glass-covered windows, there was no real way of keeping the vile little bugs from saturating the homes. The Berbalangs hadn't been driven out by their presence, but from the threat of the swarm they could hear on the wind.

  "Sir Joseph!” she called trying to make for the last place she'd heard his voice. “Sir Joseph, where are you?” Somewhere to her right there came a loud cry of discovery. Blindly she followed the sound until she floundered into ankle-deep muddy water. Through the haze of bats and bugs, she saw a stream that acted as a boundary between farm field and woodlands. Ahead, through the thicket, came triumphant calls of “I've got you now!” accompanied by thumping sounds as blade met tree. At least she hoped it was just trees he was attacking.

  Preoccupied with finding a safe harbor from the itching, crawling insects, Margaret didn't notice the small red lights dancing in the distance until they had almost passed. Circling the homes in the village was a torrent of red sparks. Wiping at her face so she could see, she stumbled and ran closer. Wearing thin shirts and short pants, the youths of the deserted village held funny looking sticks with lit branches bound to the ends. They smoked more than burned, giving the impression of tiny red lights flying in the night air as the children ran around the clustered homes.

  Whatever it was they burned, it did the trick of repelling the insects. The air around the children remained clear and Margaret gratefully moved past them and onto the road leading to the town center. Here and there, she spotted more of the burning aromatic branches. Stopping to examine one bunch she felt the dried stems and fronds were bound up almost like a broom, but one made of twigs instead of grasses. The smoke permeated the village keeping the insects at bay.

  Slowly, as if she were walking through a dream, Margaret paced the circular road nodding cordially to the silent, striped islanders fixing burning fronds to special holders outside of homes. Others were kneeling, passing off bunches to bright-eyed children who viewed the infestation as a different game, made all the more exciting for being done at night. Twin flames caught her attention as she neared the south end of the village. Turning, she walked to the hitching post at the center, off to one side was a thatch-topped lean-to where the goats curled into a single furry ball, sleeping.

  Watching the goats’ peaceful slumber put her mind fully at ease. Looking up, she noticed for the first time that every person in the village had the same pattern of stripes to their skin as Rizal sported last night. Looking at her own hands in the dark, she was surprised to see just how brightly her pale skin glowed in the muted starlight.

  "Beautiful,” the word spun her around, “your skin is beautiful.” Rizal stepped out of the night as if he had a magic wand and tore a hole in the fabric of reality. One moment nothing, the next he melted into being with a flash of dark gold skin and midnight eyes. She watched as the dark orbs caught and reflected the red sparks of the burning brooms, as giggling children raced past.

  "My skin.” She smiled looking at her hand. It was almost blue-white in the darkness, glowing with a muted radiance that shouldn't have been but was. A gift from her real father, her smile turned sad, heart constricting. “Yes, I suppose it is beautiful, but I prefer yours."

  Tracing the stripes that patterned his skin around his wrist, above the elbow to where it disappeared under his shirt. “Tell me again Rizal, about your stripes."

  Gently, he pulled her by the hand towards one of the homes. “Berbelang-balang from which our name is taken is an old, now unused, word meaning ‘striped.’ As you glow in the darkness, we are marked with stripes. We are warriors and use these markings to hide and remain hidden until we strike."

  "And I would glow why?” She floated along in bemusement, allowing his words to carry her. Was it the smoke making her mind float or was it his presence? Margaret didn't know or care.

  In this land, with these people she felt less the outsider then at any other point in her life. She didn't need to hide in the library, away from angry eyes and barbed tongues. No longer was she longing for a place to belong. Her sisters loved her, of that she had no doubt, but with husbands and children she saw them infrequently. Men that had pursued her never looked again after her father interceded. It was as if she was a distraction and, once out of sight, faded from memory. But in Cagayan she felt substantial, as if she had been a ghost and finally took corporeal form.

  "Moths are drawn to flame, my dearest Maggie. Your glow draws me like the light of no other. In that way, you are dangerous.” His slow, seductive smile made butterflies dip and whirl inside her stomach.

  "More like a tiger than a moth,” she teased, caressing a thin stripe on his neck just above the top of his thin shirt.

  "Still, drawn to you, out of the safety of the shadows to stand in your light.” He tugged and captured her mouth for a long, slow kiss that had her clutching his shirt in her hands, twisting the fabric. “We will go to my home and wash off the insects and smoke. Come.” With a hand on her hip he swept her along the path to a house with a blade above the door.

  Fascinated, Margaret stopped and looked at the long
curve of thick steel. Stepping back, she turned slowly and looked to the lintel above the rest of the doors. Some sported blades, others arrows and one a hammer. “Why didn't I notice these before? They mark each house as different."

  "I am at home, and when at home I put up my blade here.” He pointed to the small wooden pegs above the opening. “There is always one who watches, and, when they are on duty, they take with them their weapon. I have many blades but only two such as this.” He lifted down the weapon and laid the flat of the blade against his arm. “It is called a falcata."

  Gingerly she touched the dark wood hilt. The area where his hand gripped the wood was worn smooth and bleached into a softly diffused tan but the end was carved into a sharp hooked beak, like an eagle.

  "So, by your weapons you know your homes.” She gripped the blade and moved to lift it but almost couldn't, it was a lot heavier than it looked. The first eighteen inches started thick at the base then narrowed like a scimitar, but the last foot or so flared into a wide curve reminiscent of a sickle. “A wicked looking thing.” She handed it back, rubbing her hand on her skirt.

  "One I hope you never have to see me wield,” he agreed, replacing it. Opening the door, Rizal bade her enter first. The room was softly lit with shielded lanterns like the one he had carried in the forest. It was a single large room with a low table surrounded by cushions and a thick pallet to the rear. Along the far wall were a large metal tub and a tall table with a clay pitcher.

  "No fireplace?” Margaret asked looking right to where the narrow stairs led to the second floor of the house. “No kitchen area?"

  "There is a small one to the rear of the house. It is not so well stocked but I've fruits and breads if you are hungry.” She tried to push down the urge to explore, but he seemed to read her mind. “Upstairs,” he gestured, where her eyes were yearning, “is a study area. There are small windows you can see from as well as shelves with books and another bed for sleeping. Some nights it is too hot so,” Rizal pointed to the low frame on the floor with the thick pallet strewn with pillows “you can choose where you would rather sleep this night."