Flight by Neil Hetzner
CHAPTER NINE
Won’t Break My Bones
Joe Fflowers wipes away icy tears as he stumbles across the slag and scree-covered floor of the abandoned Adirondack iron mine. He is freezing cold, feels faint from hunger and the pain in his knee just keeps growing. Despite that pain, Joe tries to hurry across the pit floor; however his guides are nowhere to be seen. He walks a half-moon arc twenty meters out from the bottom of the path thinking that he will pick up their tracks, but he can find no prints in the flurrying snow. After he trips and falls on a low mound of snow-slick tailings, Joe sits down on a rock, which looks like a cupcake with its frosting of snow, to gather his thoughts.
The longer he sits, the more overwhelmed he becomes with regrets. He does not hate his parents, but he is estranged. For more than a year he has felt an enormous chasm between their wishes and his own wants. But, regardless of those differences, when he thinks about the enormity of what he is doing, it makes his stomach churn, and, despite the cold, his hands sweat.
His uncle, Adaman, had been the one who first suggested that there might be a way to put off fledging until later. Jack’s dad had insinuated to Joe that the labs at Cygnetics were close to solving the half-century old problem of delayed fledging. Even though Joe distrusted his uncle, he had listened. The idea had gotten into his head that he could play hockey for another dozen years, represent Noramica in the Olympics, play professionally, and, then, get his wings. Despite ogling every site he could think of to find support for what his uncle had told him, Joe didn’t find much beyond weak hints and wishful thinking. However, he reassured himself that any knowledge of a late fledging would be a tightly guarded Cygnetics secret. Still unsure, Joe had held off making a decision until Prissi told him that she had gone to Bissell to see Jack and meet his grandfather. Although Joe knew that it should have had nothing to do with his decision, it did. It was her betrayal which had tipped the scales.
Even now, sitting in the snowy dark, a part of Joe is titillated with thoughts of how badly Prissi will feel if he dies in an abandoned mine pit. When that anguished joy quickly dies out, the aching boy thinks that if, somehow, he could turn back and return to school right this moment, he would be able to shift some of his father’s rage away from himself and toward Uncle Adaman. The problem, of course, is how to reverse course. He is in a snowstorm in the middle of nowhere, and, in more ways than one, in the dark.
Joe tries to fight back against the feelings of despair that are nipping and biting him like rats on a dying dog. He reaches down between his shoes, brushes away the snow, picks up a handful of stones and, swearing with each toss, begins chucking them into the black void. The snow is so thick that he can barely hear them land. He hates this place. Plunk. He hates Jack. Plink. He hates Prissi. Plonk. He hates his uncle. Plunk.
The stones are almost gone, but his anger is still with him when a stone hits him on his sore knee. Although it startles him and hurts, he suppresses his outrage.
Let them come to him. He isn’t going to grovel.
He pitches another stone in the general direction from where he thinks the attack has come. He waits, but doesn’t hear a sound except for the wind flinging itself over the mine pit’s rim high above. Another rock hits Joe’s knee in exactly the same place as the first one. This time his anger over-rules his judgment. He swears loudly as he leans forward to pick up more ammunition. He flings a stone, hears nothing, waits, hurls another, silence, pitches a third, and, then, is rewarded with a third strike to his knee. As soon as he is hit, he leaps up and throws the handful of stones he has left with as much force as he can muster.
Neither sound, nor stone, emerge from the darkness.
Joe is lying on his side, knees drawn up tight to his chin, shivering such that all of his bones hurt, when he is tapped upon his head. Not a light tap. Not heavy enough to harm, but definitely heavy enough to say, with insistence, pay attention.
“Rich, but weak. If you can obey in all things, then, get up. If not, lie there like an old dog and die.”
Behind Joe’s closed lids, he can see an immense pendulum, an ancient pendulum with a shaft of shining, honey-colored wood and a gleaming brass compass rose, slowly swing back and forth…from pride to hate and back again. Pride says take nothing. Stay and die. Hate says crawl, snivel, rise, do whatever to survive so that there can be revenge. The pendulum swings back and forth in smooth silence as Joe weighs his options.
Pride…hate…pride…hate.
“Decide. Now.”
But Joe can’t decide. He is mesmerized by the pendulum’s swing. He has never seen fate so clearly. Two choices, one path. He holds his breath and wavers until three more taps to his head, each harder than the one before, doubles, trebles, then quadruples his hate.
He rolls onto his knees, muffles the involuntary groans pulled from his throat, and pushes himself erect.
Seka strikes Joe’s forearm.
“Here. Hold this.”
Joe fumbles in the darkness until he feels the smooth knots of his guide’s staff. As soon as he grasps the wood, he is jerked forward as Seka sets off into the black with the same assurance as if it had been high noon.
After a few minutes of being dragged along in the black, Joe senses that they have passed through some kind of opening and now are underground. The black is black as it has been, but the sound from his feet is different. The air is as cold, but absolutely still. In another minute, Joe’s steps ring out like rimshots on a snare drum, then echo back from the walls. The syncopation brings Joe some small comfort because he can pretend someone, someone like himself, is walking alongside. Since it feels as though their path is pitched downward, Joe decides they are in a tunnel. The pace Seka sets is fast. The tunnel floor is rough and the darkness hides both dips and chunks of stone so that Joe often stumbles. Each time he does, he can feel his guide’s disdain for his clumsy feet travel down the length of the staff.
After what might have been a half-hour, the air begins to carry a tinge of smoke, like burning leaves. A few minutes after that, Joe notices that he can make out the silhouette of Seka’s shoulder swaying two meters in front of him. Another couple of minutes and the tunnel opens onto a large cavern. The room is dimly lighted with two torches wedged into fissures in the rock walls. The perimeter of the space has benches cut into the stone. A shadowy figure, Joe guesses it is Adrona, sits on the nearest bench. In the center of the room, which is more than twenty meters across and easily ten meters high, is a rough circle of rocks whose darkened edge indicates it use as a fire pit. On the far side of the room are three low doorways, which pulse in the flickering torch-lights as if they are alive.
Despite the illumination from the torches, Joe holds onto Seka’s stick as they traverse the room and enter the archway on the right. When the teener passes through, he notices a framework of stout timbers lining the corridor. Joe glances up and sees that the wooden posts support a mat woven of thick saplings. He can see sharp corners of large blocks of rock jutting through gaps in the mat. As he hurries after Seka, Joe decides that he has just seen a device which can be triggered to block off the tunnel.
After a few more minutes, Seka pushes through a heavy wooden door into another torch-lit room. This space, smaller than the first, has a dozen low narrow doors framed into its shadowy perimeter. Against the far side of the room, almost directly under a guttering torch, four people are sitting at a large trestle table playing cards.
As Joe and Seka approach, a small wizened woman with a hawk’s nose, vertiginous cheekbones and a hawser thick braid of gray hair that reaches past her waist, cackles, “Gin, “ and carefully puts down her cards. She taps her well-worn cards before pointing two knobby fingers at Joe and, in a voice that rises and falls like a religious chant, says, “See, I told you that he would bring us good luck. We share our protection with him and he will share his good fortune with us.”
The abbess, which is how Joe guesses the old woman sees herself, beckons him. He hesitates until he feels a prod from behind. When he
turns, he is surprised to find the flat-eyed Adrona. If the younger guide has been following him, Joe has heard nothing.
The tetchy hag snaps her hand impatiently. In the instant before he steps forward, Joe guesses that abbess may not be the right word. The crone shows her half dozen teeth in a smile.
“You liked your walk?”
Joe makes himself smile and nod.
“My name is Rholealy.”
She slowly swings her head to indicate the room.
“Welcome to Greenland. You are safe within this place. It has been many suns and moons since the heathens and their hawks have bothered us.”
Again, a slight twist of her head indicates their surroundings.
“Here, you will walk in peace.”
Joe feels like he has stepped out of the Dutton School and into Middle Earth. He half-expects a nine-fingered hobbit and his loyal friends to burst from one of the doors singing a lusty song about the power of One Ring. Although his knee is on fire, his body is exhausted and his stomach is empty, Joe has to bite back a smile as he says, “Your hospitality, Madam Rholealy, is most welcome.”
After deciding that Joe’s use of “Madam” isn’t meant to mock, the old woman nods her head in condescending grace.
Joe hears Adrona snicker behind him. Rholealy’s hands drop back to the table to gather the cards. Assuming that he has been dismissed, Joe turns back toward Adrona. The guide points the walking stick at an opening.
In less than an hour, Joe has been fed a meal of walnut meats, dried apples, and a hot drink that has pieces of bark floating in it. When he finishes, his stomach is full, but he feels famished. Adrona shows Joe to a bench in an alcove carved into the wall, hands him two thick oft-darned blankets and leaves behind a small sputtering pine brand.
As soon as the guide leaves him, Joe allows himself a second bout of being overwhelmed. He lies rolled up in the surprisingly warm, smoky smelling blankets, looking at the tortured shadows the guttering torch casts, and imagines the Mullen dining hall with its chandeliers shining down on one hundred polished tables, six hundred chairs, the pungent smells of coffee, roast meat and chocolate. He flexes his ankles as he imagines flinging himself around Evenen Rink on scimitar sharp blades. He substitutes the sounds of his favorite pap music by the Kotanbawls coming to his ears rather than the arrhythmic plink of a drop of water that he keeps hearing reverberate along the tunnel. He imagines flying high above the playing fields tossing a FRZ-B back and forth to …Prissi.
It seems impossible that he can be where he is. That he has left behind so many important things. Yet, somehow, he is and he has.
Several times in the first weeks of hockey practice, Joe had noticed a man staring at him from the Evenen bleachers with the intensity of a coach or competitor. At first, Joe thought that it must be the father of one of his teammates. Later, he guessed that the burly man might be a scout. Maybe from the Islanders or Bruins. Joe began to look for the man when he had done something he thought was outstanding. Occasionally, he was rewarded with a quick nod of approval. He saw the man at a game at Loomis. Joe’s eyes sought him out after he scored a break-away goal late in the third period. The man gave him a quick grin. Finally, after running across one another at the Akwautown Deli, the man, who told Joe his name was Nathn, had taken a quarter hour to tell the Duttonian how good he was and how much better he could become. Nathn asked Joe if he were going to fledge. When Joe said he didn’t want to, but would, Nathn had said what a shame it was that someone so gifted at hockey should give that gift away.
Joe twisted around on the rock ledge trying to make himself more comfortable.
It might have been three conversations later that Nathn told Joe that if he ever wanted to go to a place of safety until his window for fledging closed that Nathn could help with that. He had done so with other gifted aletes whose participation in those sports would end with fledging. Joe had laughed and said the idea was ridiculous, and it was…until he was speeding along a sheet of perfect ice, or on the verge of sleep in his dorm-room. Finally, when Joe had asked Nathn if he was a scout, the man just smiled enigmatically.
Even though he is utterly exhausted, Joe cannot fall asleep. He keeps going over the steps he has taken, the thinking behind those steps and the consequences of his actions. He lies still, his eyes closed while the colors on his lids shift from yellow to gray to red and back to yellow as the pine brand sputters. Even after the torch burns itself out, the flickering on Joe’s lids continues until he opens his eyes to stare at the blackest black he ever has experienced.
As the minutes ooze by, the black around Joe and especially the black over his head—perhaps a hundred meters of dark earth pressing down upon him, changing him in the same way that the earth’s weight makes diamonds from coal and coal from sun-dappled leaves and grass—grows heavier and heavier. The minutes ooze, but there is a faster flow inside him. Joe’s bladder fills, then, over-fills, but the novice guest doesn’t know what to do. If he gets up, he can’t see where he is going, nor does he even know where he is supposed to go. And if he just gets up and moves away and empties himself somewhere, he is afraid something will happen so he won’t be able to find his way back.
The minutes ooze. His bladder pulses. His hate bubbles up like volcanic mud. Druids. Deluded Druids hiding under the earth, hiding from their supposed enemies, but, it seems to Joe, mostly hiding from the present world. How can his hosts be so self-absorbed that they couldn’t be bothered to tell a guest where the bathroom was? Or, he suddenly wonders, is this some kind of test? Or, worse, a joke?
Joe’s fear of getting lost wanes and the anger at his maltreatment waxes. Finally, his body can take no more. He gets up from the bench, turns to face the place where he has been, and, fingers trailing the wall, takes a careful step to the left. Joe repeats that eight times. When he is through, he carefully paces back the way he has come. Within a few minutes of finding his bed, he falls into a deep sleep.
When he wakes, his torch has been replaced. Leaning against the edge of the alcove is a long stick with rags tied to its end. The mop is sitting in a scarred wooden bucket half-filled with water. Looking at the mop, Joe suffers the heat of his shame as it flows up out of his chest and onto his cheeks, where it pulses and glows like last night’s torch. He pushes the bucket down the floor with a foot and begins the clean-up. When he finishes, he picks up the bucket, grabs the torch and starts down the corridor. He hasn’t gone far before he spies a faint glow on the tunnel floor. A low, narrow door is carved into a slight recess in the stone. He hears murmurs and rolling laughter. The angry boy wedges his torch into a slight crack in the hewn wall. His fist draws back to pound the door, but stops when he decides that knocking is too timid. He yanks down on the carved wooden handle and slams open the plank door. He strides into a long, low-ceilinged room dominated by an immense stone pedestal table framed with long plank benches. Two dozen Greenlanders in varying shades of green and brown rough-sewn clothes are crowded together eating breakfast.
The old woman Joe has met the night before—he realizes he doesn’t remember her name—smiles her horrible smile as she drifts a bent finger toward Joe and his bucket.
“Civilization may not run deep within the male aristocrat, but other things do.”
When most of those at the table laugh, the fire in Joe’s cheeks flares even brighter.
“Can I eat?”
The old woman stares at Joe until his gaze drops, then mocking him with a slight deferential nod of her head, she said, “Can? Obviously. May? Certainly. Those who work deserve to eat. Put down your tools and join us.”
Joe balances the mop handle against the door frame then shuffles along the length of the table looking for a place where he can sit. Unlike at Dutton, where his friends, or even students he didn’t know, would have squeezed sideways to let him in, here, no one shifts. When he comes to the end of the bench, Joe scans down the other side, which is just as full. Deciding that he is no more likely to be accepted on the far side than
he has been on the near, a seething Joe, suddenly feeling as though he is in a hockey game where he must take charge, strides back to the door, grabs the bucket, hurls its contents into the hall outside, storms back to the end of the table, up-ends the bucket into an improvised stool, sits, and stretches out a hand to grab a basket half-filled with small, oddly shaped pears and apples.
The old woman’s cackling is joined in by almost everyone at the table. Joe says nothing, nor does he look at anyone. He holds his head high and stares at the far walls as he devours the fruit. As soon as he is full, he bounds up without really having any idea of what he is going to do next.
“Wait.”
A person, a woman Joe supposes, middle-aged with long limp black hair framing a narrow head delicately balanced on an incredibly long thin neck, leans toward the hag she is sitting beside to whisper. After a moment, the woman turns back toward Joe.
“Do you prefer up,” and here she tips her head so far back on her thin neck that she reminds Joe of a jonquil in a spring wind. When her head abruptly snaps back, Joe expects to hear something break. “Or, down?”
“Above? Do you mean above-ground?”
“With the sun, yes.”
“Yes. I want to go up. I was told that after coming here that I would get to go north. To Montreal, where a walker wouldn’t be so noticed among all of the immigrants.”
The doe-headed woman starts to say something, but stops when the old woman snatches her arm. The crone’s eyes glare as she speaks to Joe.
“And you will. In time. With our help. You will journey to your destination when the time is right. When we decide the time is right. And, right now, we decide the time is wrong. You are like a rare jewel that is coveted by many. We have been entrusted with keeping the jewel safe. And so we will. Because you are so valuable to some, the time you must wait to be safe may be longer than you wish, but, you can be assured that you will arrive where you wish to be. In the meantime, you will stay with us, enjoy our hospitality and learn our wise ways.”
The old woman leans forward over her plate and says in a whisper that all can hear, “Although my friends and charges revere me as a prophetess, I am not predicting the future when I say that once you spend some time with us, you are very, very likely to want to spend even more time with us.”
The dull thump Joe experiences in his chest as he listens to the old woman’s words is like the sad slow toll of a death knell.
“For now, after you clean up your tantrum, you may go into the sun with Blesonus. You may enjoy the forest and the work you will do there. When the work is done, you may come back to the lair for food and rest.”
As Joe passes by the place on the bench where the old woman sits, Blesonus, who is alongside her, whirls around, grabs Joe’s wrist, and pulls him tight.
“Stop. I must listen.”
The strange woman puts an ear against Joe’s right hand, moves it up his forearm and beyond to his shoulder. She shifts on the bench so that she can go through the same exercise to his left side. After that, she stands, firmly turns Joe away from her and presses her cheek onto his right shoulder blade. Her cheek remains there for ten, fifteen, twenty seconds while Joe becomes increasingly embarrassed and, to his total amazement, peculiarly excited.
Finally, Blesonus murmurs something that to Joe sounds like, “Yes.”
The pressure of her cheek changes to the light rapid taps of fingertips. After a moment that, too, stops. When the touching stops, Joe starts to walk away, but Blesonus barks angrily, “Stay.”
Blesonus’ tone, although an octave higher, reminds Joe of his father’s occasional imperious commands. His inclination is to march off, but the idea that he might soon be out of the darkness and back above-ground where he can get away from his captors keeps his feet planted. He hears a rustling behind him before Blesonus’ hand firmly grasps his neck. Two seconds later, Joe screams from the most excruciating pain he has ever felt. In a split second, he understands that Blesonus has stabbed him and he is dying. With a technique he has perfected in hockey when checked against the boards, Joe relaxes for a split second, then spins out of his assailant’s grip and lunges toward the door.
“Now, it’s safe. We can go up.”
It is the dulcet tone rather than the words themselves which cause Joe to swing back toward his tormentor. Blesonus is holding aloft a wooden-handled knife with a needle-like blade whose last five centimeters are covered in blood.
“I had to slightly wound you in order to mortally wound your i-tag. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be in the sun for ten minutes before the hawks would know your location. Now, you are safe.”
Responding to Joe’s inquisitive look, Blesonus continues, “We didn’t do it yesterday because you were far enough below ground before they began a real search. Once you’re twenty meters underground, your signal can’t be read. But, today, if we had gone up without destroying it, you would have been tracked. Now, you can go where you want and they can’t find you.”
Watching Joe wince as he reaches around to where he has been stabbed, the hag—through his pain Joe suddenly remembers that her name is Rholealy—giggles.
“All freedom comes at some price. In just a few days, your pain will be small, but your horizons will stretch forever.”
Shaking his head in disbelief, Joe mutters to the room at large, “Is there some problem—ethical, ecological, philosophical—with anesthetics?”
A young person with a snub nose, fleshy lips and nearly shaved head, a person of such asexuality that Joe isn’t sure whether it is a male or female, pushes up from the table. With both arms extended in a theatrical gesture of inclusiveness, the person says, “The world is where it is because too many for far too long have acted without consequences. No life must be without pain. You desire a certain freedom. For that freedom, there are costs. We, our Mother’s maids, live with, and readily accept, the many consequences that go along with our decision to live apart as on an island broken free of the mainland.”
While the Greenlanders nod in agreement with the words being spoken, Joe continues to shake his head.
“How do I really know that my i-tag isn’t working?”
Cupping a hand behind an ear as she leans toward him, Blesonus smiles as she says, “Since I know, you know.”
She steps over the stone bench, takes hold of Joe’s hand with one of hers and, using the other to grab the bucket, leads him toward the doorway.
After Joe has cleaned up the floor of the tunnel, Blesonus reaches into one of the many pockets on the vest she wears and withdraws two small circles of pale green glass rimmed with leather and offers one to Joe.
“Here.”
Joe takes one of the lenses and watches as his guide screws the other into her eye socket, like a monocle, before frowning slightly to keep it in place.
“What’s it do?”
“You’ll see.”
Joe attempts to follow Blesonus’ example. It takes him several tries before he can figure out how to keep the lens in his eye socket while at the same time keeping his lid open enough to see. When he finally manages to secure the lens, he is puzzled. What he sees with the lens seems no different than without it.
“Come.”
Blesonus extends her hand again and begins walking quickly down the tunnel. Within a minute they are getting to the outer glow of the last torch. Joe starts to slow his steps as the tunnel grows darker before he realizes that with the lens he can see a slightly glowing line running at waist height along the walls of the tunnel. After just a minute of practice, Joe figures out that when he closes his left eye and stares through the lens in his right that he can see many meters ahead. The lens takes away the mystery of how Seka and Adrona had been able to travel so quickly and with such assurance in the inky black inside the mountain.
“What makes the glow?”
“Fish.”
“Fish?”
Blesonus giggles, a sound far more girlish than anything Joe could imagine her making.
??
?Not quite fish, but like a fish, that we farm in pools. Something Rholealy made.”
“But why does it glow?”
Blesonus laughs again at Joe’s ignorance.
“Not above. In pools down here. Bio-luminescence. We dry the fish skin, make a paste and paint the walls. The lens concentrates the light.”
As his guide moves ahead, Joe sees that she has a small glowing spot on the back of each of her moccasins. Even though they move rapidly along the tunnel, Joe notices that where passages intersect, there are bioluminescent markings, which he assumes work like street signs.
Waiting until they are long past the last sign, Joe asks, “How do you know where you are going? How do you keep from getting lost?”
“We always know.”
“Like you always know where to stab an i-tag?”
“Yes, the same.”
The voice of the woman hurrying ahead of him is so smug that Joe knows that if he had any idea of which way to go to get himself above ground, he would knock her aside and race toward his freedom.
The boy is limping and his knee is throbbing long before they come to a set of stairs carved into the stone. The steps are very steep, almost like a ladder. By the time Joe has counted to one hundred, the glow from Blesonus’ heels is barely discernible above him. When he gets to one hundred thirty, Joe has to lean sideways against the rough rock wall to massage his knee and catch his breath. The stairs finally end at one hundred ninety-three. Since the boy doesn’t find his guide waiting, he follows the glowing streak as it zigzags every few steps in the narrowing tunnel. He is crab walking along feeling very claustrophobic when there is a zig, a yellowish glow, a zag, then, a golden light suffusing the rabbit hole, a last zig and Joe is blinded by intensely bright sunlight bouncing through a thin web of leafless vines growing in thin soil in front of the tunnel’s opening.
With his eyes squeezed tight against the assault from the sunlight, Joe removes the lens, and rubs his eye socket. He pivots away from the light, opens his eyes a slit, and impatiently waits for them to adjust.
It takes a couple of minutes before Joe can see without pain. He moves into the fractured sunlight bouncing off a billion-faceted mound of mine tailings. Yesterday’s snow is completely gone. As soon as Joe circumvents the rubble pile, he spots Blesonus, a hundred meters ahead and twenty meters above him hustling up a steep trail toward the top of the immense pit. Hobbling across the pit floor as fast as he can, Joe keeps looking up, but as far as he can determine, Blesonus never looks back to see if he is following.
Joe, with his burning knee and jellied thighs, feels completely exhausted when he finally crests the rim. He struggles over to a large rock, drops down on it and looks around. Below him, the pit is huge, at least a kilometer across and more than a hundred meters deep. In front of him, he can see kilometer after un-ending kilometer of tree-covered mountain slopes. The perimeter of the mine itself is ringed with tall scraggly pine trees except for three rough arches where Joe guesses once were roads. In those breaks, scrub and underbrush grow thick. He barely can make out the skeletal remains of an immense crane and a junkyard’s worth of rusting machinery cloaked in brush.
“Even with no i-tag, you need to be careful.”
Joe jerks his head toward the voice, but he can’t distinguish Blesonus from the trees until she shifts sideways.
“Sit over here.”
Joe exaggerates his limp as he crosses toward his guide. As he followed Blesonus through the tunnels, he has made grandiose plans to run off at his first chance. However, with his physical struggles with the unending stairs, and after looking out over the limitless forest, Joe’s plans shrink to waiting and watching. As he approaches Blesonus, he forces a smile.
“It’s so beautiful here. So peaceful. It must be wonderful to walk these woods in complete silence. I get to do that a little bit when I’m at summer camp. It’s my favorite part of going there.”
Blesonus returns his smile, but waggles her head at his ignorance.
“This land is never quiet. You must learn to listen with different ears. The wind whispers, soughs, screams, mutters, moans, and cries. The trees snap, groan, shiver and creak. The water gurgles, gargles and laughs. The birds, bears, bees all talk, argue, sing, sigh. If you were to sit here for an hour with a still mind and open ears, you would hear a whole orchestra of sounds.”
“And do you do that often?”
A small thin cloud of regret scuttles over the woman’s face, which, in the sunlight, Joe sees is older and more worn that he had thought.
“The last years have not been easy ones. Living takes up more time, so listening gets less.”
To encourage her to keep talking, Joe extends a hand toward his guide and guard.
“Why has your life been harder?”
Blesonus slowly nods her head a half-dozen times before she speaks.
“We Greenlanders were few, now fewer. We are older. We are weaker. When the last men left, Rholealy laughed at their backs, but they have been missed.”
Joe is confused by Blesonus’ words.
“What about Seka and Adrona?”
The sound from the guide’s mouth is sharp and harsh like the snap of a dry stick.
Joe is astounded. “Seka and Adrona are women?”
“In all ways, but birthing.”
Blesonus tips her head and studies Joe’s face until he grows embarrassed.
“…but birthing.”
“How long have you been here?”
“I was born here.”
Joe reaches down to massage his knee before he asks, “Can we walk? Or is there work to be done?”
“Both. Eat this.”
She hands Joe a small sprig of wilted green canoe-shaped leaves and tells him to chew them before she sets off down a faint path. It is almost an hour before she stops by a large, black boulder, perched in a manner that seems to defy gravity, high above a narrow winding dirt road carved into the dense forest. The leaves he has eaten have helped with the pain so much that Joe has had little trouble keeping up.
“Wait here,” Blesonus whispers before she crouches down and begins to shuffle down through the brush toward the road. As soon as Blesonus is out of sight, Joe turns back toward the way they have come. He looks up to see if he can pick out their path, but he can’t see much. He starts back up the mountain to get a better sight-line, but within two dozen steps, he isn’t even sure whether he is on or off the path. He slinks back down to where Blesonus first left him.
Five minutes later, Joe hears the slightest rustle. When he glances up from where he has been resting with his back propped against a tree and his eyes closed, he sees his guide standing no more than a meter away from him.
“It’s safe, but hurry.”
Joe scrambles down the steep slope after her. Blesonus stops next to a thick tangle of briers. Motioning for Joe to do the same, she drops onto her belly and wriggles her way into a small, nearly invisible opening in the tangle of thorns. Joe follows the worn heels of her moccasins until he finds himself inside a shallow cleft in the hillside. In the darker shadows at the back of the cleft is a large dinged and dented case. Half-crouched, Blesonus finger-combs dried leaves and thorns from her long hair before handing Joe a tightly knit string bag.
“Hold this.”
Using a small key she has pulled from one of the pockets of her vest, Blesonus removes a lock and opens the rusted lid. She passes back to Joe a half-dozen lumenaids, two five kilo bags of salt, two large bottles of some kind of pills, a five liter sof-pak of tea extract and a mypod still in its bubble.
“Now, this.”
Joe takes a second bag and watches the woman fill it with pack after pack of licorice. When that bag is full, his guardian motions for Joe to work his way out from the shallow cave. As soon as Blesonus herself emerges from the thorny gauntlet and rises to her feet, Joe, who has been wiping blood from a half dozen scratches, asks, “What is all this stuff?”
“Staples. When the Greenland movement f
irst started, members were completely self-sufficient, but, as time passed and more people joined, some of the Kins were in places where it was very difficult to follow the original precepts. Special dispensations were given. It was a long battle. Those with less than perfect adherence were considered traitors, apostates, infidels, and heretics, but after a nineteen-year battle, the Greenland Council held a conclave in New Jersey and it was decided that it was better to have healthy, but less than perfect followers, rather than perfect adherents battling scurvy, rickets and goiter problems. Since the Council of Trenton ended in 2063, each Kin has had the freedom to self-determine its needs, as well as which of those needs may be met from resources outside the lair.”
Blesonus waves her hand at the bulging bags.
“With the latest revision of our charter, everything we have here is…acceptable.”
Joe hefts the bag he is holding.
“Licorice?”
“Rholealy’s ancestors were from Australia.”
Blesonus’ tentative, almost embarrassed reply, which Joe doesn’t understand, does make him feel better than anything else has since running away from Dutton.
“And?”
“And it’s very important.”
Joe has a vision of the Kin’s members kneeling while Rholealy passes out licorice with the solemnity of a priest dispensing the Eucharist. The image makes Joe laugh, and his laugh instantly puts Blesonus into a rage.
Whispering savagely, hurling words like stones, Blesonus says, “You rich, stupid whelp. You come to us to escape your life. You depend on us to save you. You dare to laugh? You have no right to question anything that we do. I should leave you here and let you wander in this unmapped maze until you die.”
As Joe slings the laden bag of seemingly sacred candy onto his shoulder, he conjures his meekest tone, “No. You are right. Absolutely right. I should not have laughed. I owe you an apology and both obedience and respect.”
When his guide turns to read his face, Joe keeps his eyes empty and averted. Glowering, but saying nothing, Blesonus starts up the trail. As they climb, Joe pays all of his attention to the trail itself. He tries to determine if, when the path seems to disappear, which it frequently does, there are markings. He looks for some subtle blaze, or another trick, like the fish paint, that allows Blesonus to know where she is going.
If there is a trick, Joe is not able to figure it out. After forty minutes of strenuous hiking back up the mountain, a meek and chastised Joe asks Blesonus about the Kin. When had the men left? Why did they leave? Did they often get new members? Had they harbored teenerz, like himself, before? Who provided the things in the metal locker? Was if for free? Why would they do that?
Joe learns that the last four men had left the den eleven years before because of differences with Rholealy’s leadership. They have had only one new member in recent memory. Joynea, who had come to them just over five years before after running away from a clonephanage, is the one who had talked about responsibility at breakfast. About twice a year, a refugee would show up for a few days before moving on—usually to Montreal, to get lost in the Noramca’s co-capital. The necessities they were bringing back to camp came from a small group of supporters called the Censure Commitatus, who believed that adolescents should be allowed to make their own decisions about their bodies and their guiding beliefs without the interference of family, teachers and clergy. The Kin was willing to accept and protect teenerz undergoing those trying times. In exchange, the Censures helped the Kin. The provisions came at no monetary cost to the members of their lair, but there were other costs, substantial costs, associated with their tradition of offering sanctuary.
“Like what?”
“Hounding.”
“By whom? Rholealy said everything had been safe here for a long time.”
“Rholealy attends our souls, but some powerful wingers and their hawk minions have not forgotten us. I feel we are watched. When we go on our walk-abouts, things happen.”
“Like what?”
“Two summers ago, eight of us left in early May. Only six of us made it back to the lair in late September.”
“You left your home for five months?”
“Oh yes, every year. One third of us make the journey.”
“Why? Where do you go?”
“We go to see the wonders of Our Mother. We go where we feel we are pulled. Two years ago, we walked from here to the southern end of Lake George, over to Rutland and then up through the Green Mountains. We crossed the St. Lawrence River on the east side of Lake Champlain, and went west and north until we came to Lac Papineau where there is another Kin. We camped there for almost a month, making friends, fishing, weaving reed baskets, collecting herbs. Then we went south and east and came back down along the Salmon River to Saranac Lake.
“It was wonderful…The Mother, when She is left alone to mother, makes so much perfection. Within a week of leaving the lair, I knew that being a Greenlander was all that I ever wanted to be.”
There is a catch in Blesonus’s voice that causes Joe to ask, “You had had doubts?”
Blesonus makes no response beyond shifting her pak higher on her back. Joe does the same, but is rewarded with little relief. The pak is heavy. He is tired. The effects of the leaves Blesonus had given him have worn off. Now, both of his knees ache.
Blesonus stops.
After waiting a minute to see if his guide will continue her tale, Joe, with some trepidation, asks, “What happened to those people on your walk-about?”
His guide starts moving up the path. It is minutes later before she says, “They were taken.”
“Taken?”
“Stolen.”
“You mean they were kidnapped. How? Why?”
“We were almost home. Less than week to walk. When we woke up, they were gone. Stolen in the night.”
Joe throws out his hands in disbelief.
“Well, maybe they weren’t stolen. Maybe they just decided to leave. You yourself said you had doubts. Maybe they did, too, except their doubts were big enough that they acted on them.”
Blesonus’ look leaves no doubt in Joe’s mind that she has had that same thought and has forced it back into the shadows.
When the path flattens out on a shoulder of the mountain, Blesonus says, “We’ll stop for a moment.”
The stick-like woman shucks off her pak, lifts her narrow shoulders, arches her back and twists her head back and forth to loosen her neck muscles. Joe, who guesses he has the lighter pack, drops his down with a groan before he tries to imitate her. When he curves his back to loosen the tightness at the base of his spine, he sees how much more mountain there is to climb. He makes a small sound of dismay.
“No. You are looking the wrong way. Turn around.”
Blesonus put her hands on Joe’s shoulders. She holds him for what to Joe seems like a long time before turning him around. They are standing at the top of an escarpment jutting out from the mountain. Joe assumes that it is rain water rushing down the mountainside which has scoured the outcrop free of soil. From where he stands he can see five folds of mountains covered in a carpet of green except for the occasional patch of gray stone and the thin silvery strings of waterfalls.
“It is beautiful.”
“A million acres, a hundred souls.”
“Is that really true?”
“It’s close enough to true. This land was already mostly protected by the Adirondack State Park. When the last of the mines closed and logging was forbidden in the Clear Cut Act of 2038, the exodus of young people, which was already a steady stream, turned into a torrent. After that, the older people slowly died off, killed themselves, or were starved out. Now, it is just us and a handful of Last Boyz hunting and fishing. And smugglers.”
“What kind of smugglers? People smugglers?”
“Those and some other kinds.”
“Such as?”
Blesonus bends to catch a strap of her pak. As she slings it onto her shoulders, she says, “Time to m
ove on.”
Joe wonders if the leaves he has eaten, which he guesses might be coca, could be something that is smuggled. He considers whether the food he carries on his back is payment from a coca smuggler.
Twenty minutes later Blesonus begins to talk in a low monotonic voice that makes Joe think that she has forgotten that he is on the mountain with her.
“I am forty-three. I have been surrounded by My Mother’s beauty since my birth. She has given me thousands upon thousands of dusks and dawns of red and orange, gray, black and white, and another thousand colors which have no names. Mother loves a treasure and loves to share it. She has offered me the gold of her sun just cresting the mountain and in the head of the dandelion and lily. She has plied me with silver. The silver of the moon on the coldest winter night. The silver of the thin squirrel in spring. The silver of cascading water and immobile granite. The silver of melting ice and flashing fish. The Mother provides me with a home with those who think and feel as I do. But…I am the last of my family, and if I stay here I will be the last of me and mine. If I live here, childless, when I die, all of those who gave of themselves to make me, back a thousand years, will die a different death than the one they have died before. I am content to live and die like that if it makes My Mother happy, but sometimes I can hear her plead with me to pack my things and go. To leave. To live a less pure life.”
Seeing an opportunity where he has thought none existed, Joe asks, “If you chose to go, would you be free to go?”
Without stopping, Blesonus twists her head around and looks at Joe as if he has been eavesdropping on her. She opens her mouth, but says nothing, then, picks up the pace.
“I’ve had to make the same decisions,” Joe says in a tone he hopes will gain Blesonus’ sympathy. “My family and my friends want me to have wings. To fly with them. To be part of their flock. But I am most alive when I am close to earth. The sky is something to look up to, not a place from which to look down on others and consider them to be less fortunate than I. For all of the pain I have in my knees, I would rather be here, trudging back up this mountain with you, seeing and feeling and smelling your Mother’s charms up close rather than looking down on a splotch of green and a sliver of silver far below. I only hope that, after a time, my family will see the sacrifices I am willing to make to be part of this earth rather than being above it all. I hope they see, accept, and finally approve of how I want to live my life.”
Joe knows from his literature classes that oftentimes the strongest arguments are those half-made. He wonders if he already had laid it on too thick. He guesses that if Prissi were here her snorts would be coming like mortar fire. He decides to shelve the rest of what he wants to say to go off in a new direction.
“Would men ever returnr? So there could be fathers?”
“The lair has decided men no longer are welcome. Men, and all they bring, distract us from The Mother.”
Joe considers the irony of a mother who doesn’t want her children to bear children. For a moment, his anger at Blesonus’ cultish stupidity outweighs the necessity of currying her favor so that he can escape.
“I would think that Mother might like her worshippers to have an organization that was a little more sustainable.”
Blesonus nods her head, but her words belie that action.
“Rholealy says our devotion will be rewarded.”
“Devotion to whom?”
“Mother.”
“As Rholealy understands her.”
“Yes.”
They are just a couple of hundred feet shy of the crest of the mountain when Blesonus misplaces a foot on a section of the path thick with scree. Her legs splay out as if doing the splits. She yelps, falls sideways and begins rolling back down the path they have just climbed. When Joe catches up with her, she is grabbing the back of her left thigh with one hand and waving her other hand over a lava flow of tea extract oozing across a pure white field of salt.
“Are you okay?”
“No, no, no, no.”
“Let me help you up. See if you can walk on it.”
“No. No. You don’t know. The lair will be so angry. They’ll iso me.”
“What’s iso?”
“Isolate. I’ll have to eat alone, work alone, sleep by myself. No one will talk to me.”
“Because you spilled some salt?”
Blesonus’ waving hand is redirected from the spill to the space just in front of Joe’s face. Her voice pitches up into the hysterical range.
“You don’t know. You can’t know. Our life is so horrible, it’s made the little things—salt on stringy greens, a cup of hot tea in a cold, dark, damp room—incredibly important. The loss of the tea and half the salt is horrible so the punishment must be horrible.”
Blesonus collapses her head onto her knee. Her body heaves with her sobs.
Joe realizes that this is the first time he has ever heard a woman cry. He is caught between wanting to reach down to touch her shoulder to give comfort and slapping her until she shuts up. He thinks of the ancient adage about not crying over spilt latte and how Blesonus’ loss is only tea. He turns his back on his guide and stares out over the endless miles of forest. He looks outward to distance himself from the thick, moist noises coming from close by. He has to get away. And he can not wait until Rholealy decides it is the proper time. He turns back, drops to his knees and gently grasps the sobbing woman’s shoulders.
“Ssshhh. Ssshhh. Blesonus, listen. Just listen for a minute.”
Using a gesture he has seen many times in a vid, a supposedly comforting gesture, Joe takes the woman by her chin and lifts her head so that he can look into her face.
“Good. Good. Listen. You didn’t spill the salt and ruin the tea. I did. My knee. My knee let go and I fell just like you did. You…let’s see...yeah…I yelled and…you pulled a muscle when you twisted around to stop my fall. They can be angry at me.”
Joe watches intently as Blesonus first vigorously shakes off his suggestion with her head, then, becomes more tentative, until finally her head is still but cocked at an angle. The sleek head and the angle at which it is held remind Joe of a Labrador retriever which can’t quite figure out what it sees stirring in the brush.
“Why would you do that?”
Joe gives the woman, now growing calmer, his sweetest smile.
“Because it would help you and it wouldn’t hurt me—at least, not much. What are they going to do to me? Here, let me help you up. See if you can walk okay.”
Joe helps Blesonus to her feet, picks up both paks and starts up the trail feeling as cocky as if he has just solved a tricky quadratic equation.
Won’t Break My Bones
Joe Fflowers wipes away icy tears as he stumbles across the slag and scree-covered floor of the abandoned Adirondack iron mine. He is freezing cold, feels faint from hunger and the pain in his knee just keeps growing. Despite that pain, Joe tries to hurry across the pit floor; however his guides are nowhere to be seen. He walks a half-moon arc twenty meters out from the bottom of the path thinking that he will pick up their tracks, but he can find no prints in the flurrying snow. After he trips and falls on a low mound of snow-slick tailings, Joe sits down on a rock, which looks like a cupcake with its frosting of snow, to gather his thoughts.
The longer he sits, the more overwhelmed he becomes with regrets. He does not hate his parents, but he is estranged. For more than a year he has felt an enormous chasm between their wishes and his own wants. But, regardless of those differences, when he thinks about the enormity of what he is doing, it makes his stomach churn, and, despite the cold, his hands sweat.
His uncle, Adaman, had been the one who first suggested that there might be a way to put off fledging until later. Jack’s dad had insinuated to Joe that the labs at Cygnetics were close to solving the half-century old problem of delayed fledging. Even though Joe distrusted his uncle, he had listened. The idea had gotten into his head that he could play hockey for another dozen years, represent Noramica in the Olympics, play professionally, and, then, get his wings. Despite ogling every site he could think of to find support for what his uncle had told him, Joe didn’t find much beyond weak hints and wishful thinking. However, he reassured himself that any knowledge of a late fledging would be a tightly guarded Cygnetics secret. Still unsure, Joe had held off making a decision until Prissi told him that she had gone to Bissell to see Jack and meet his grandfather. Although Joe knew that it should have had nothing to do with his decision, it did. It was her betrayal which had tipped the scales.
Even now, sitting in the snowy dark, a part of Joe is titillated with thoughts of how badly Prissi will feel if he dies in an abandoned mine pit. When that anguished joy quickly dies out, the aching boy thinks that if, somehow, he could turn back and return to school right this moment, he would be able to shift some of his father’s rage away from himself and toward Uncle Adaman. The problem, of course, is how to reverse course. He is in a snowstorm in the middle of nowhere, and, in more ways than one, in the dark.
Joe tries to fight back against the feelings of despair that are nipping and biting him like rats on a dying dog. He reaches down between his shoes, brushes away the snow, picks up a handful of stones and, swearing with each toss, begins chucking them into the black void. The snow is so thick that he can barely hear them land. He hates this place. Plunk. He hates Jack. Plink. He hates Prissi. Plonk. He hates his uncle. Plunk.
The stones are almost gone, but his anger is still with him when a stone hits him on his sore knee. Although it startles him and hurts, he suppresses his outrage.
Let them come to him. He isn’t going to grovel.
He pitches another stone in the general direction from where he thinks the attack has come. He waits, but doesn’t hear a sound except for the wind flinging itself over the mine pit’s rim high above. Another rock hits Joe’s knee in exactly the same place as the first one. This time his anger over-rules his judgment. He swears loudly as he leans forward to pick up more ammunition. He flings a stone, hears nothing, waits, hurls another, silence, pitches a third, and, then, is rewarded with a third strike to his knee. As soon as he is hit, he leaps up and throws the handful of stones he has left with as much force as he can muster.
Neither sound, nor stone, emerge from the darkness.
Joe is lying on his side, knees drawn up tight to his chin, shivering such that all of his bones hurt, when he is tapped upon his head. Not a light tap. Not heavy enough to harm, but definitely heavy enough to say, with insistence, pay attention.
“Rich, but weak. If you can obey in all things, then, get up. If not, lie there like an old dog and die.”
Behind Joe’s closed lids, he can see an immense pendulum, an ancient pendulum with a shaft of shining, honey-colored wood and a gleaming brass compass rose, slowly swing back and forth…from pride to hate and back again. Pride says take nothing. Stay and die. Hate says crawl, snivel, rise, do whatever to survive so that there can be revenge. The pendulum swings back and forth in smooth silence as Joe weighs his options.
Pride…hate…pride…hate.
“Decide. Now.”
But Joe can’t decide. He is mesmerized by the pendulum’s swing. He has never seen fate so clearly. Two choices, one path. He holds his breath and wavers until three more taps to his head, each harder than the one before, doubles, trebles, then quadruples his hate.
He rolls onto his knees, muffles the involuntary groans pulled from his throat, and pushes himself erect.
Seka strikes Joe’s forearm.
“Here. Hold this.”
Joe fumbles in the darkness until he feels the smooth knots of his guide’s staff. As soon as he grasps the wood, he is jerked forward as Seka sets off into the black with the same assurance as if it had been high noon.
After a few minutes of being dragged along in the black, Joe senses that they have passed through some kind of opening and now are underground. The black is black as it has been, but the sound from his feet is different. The air is as cold, but absolutely still. In another minute, Joe’s steps ring out like rimshots on a snare drum, then echo back from the walls. The syncopation brings Joe some small comfort because he can pretend someone, someone like himself, is walking alongside. Since it feels as though their path is pitched downward, Joe decides they are in a tunnel. The pace Seka sets is fast. The tunnel floor is rough and the darkness hides both dips and chunks of stone so that Joe often stumbles. Each time he does, he can feel his guide’s disdain for his clumsy feet travel down the length of the staff.
After what might have been a half-hour, the air begins to carry a tinge of smoke, like burning leaves. A few minutes after that, Joe notices that he can make out the silhouette of Seka’s shoulder swaying two meters in front of him. Another couple of minutes and the tunnel opens onto a large cavern. The room is dimly lighted with two torches wedged into fissures in the rock walls. The perimeter of the space has benches cut into the stone. A shadowy figure, Joe guesses it is Adrona, sits on the nearest bench. In the center of the room, which is more than twenty meters across and easily ten meters high, is a rough circle of rocks whose darkened edge indicates it use as a fire pit. On the far side of the room are three low doorways, which pulse in the flickering torch-lights as if they are alive.
Despite the illumination from the torches, Joe holds onto Seka’s stick as they traverse the room and enter the archway on the right. When the teener passes through, he notices a framework of stout timbers lining the corridor. Joe glances up and sees that the wooden posts support a mat woven of thick saplings. He can see sharp corners of large blocks of rock jutting through gaps in the mat. As he hurries after Seka, Joe decides that he has just seen a device which can be triggered to block off the tunnel.
After a few more minutes, Seka pushes through a heavy wooden door into another torch-lit room. This space, smaller than the first, has a dozen low narrow doors framed into its shadowy perimeter. Against the far side of the room, almost directly under a guttering torch, four people are sitting at a large trestle table playing cards.
As Joe and Seka approach, a small wizened woman with a hawk’s nose, vertiginous cheekbones and a hawser thick braid of gray hair that reaches past her waist, cackles, “Gin, “ and carefully puts down her cards. She taps her well-worn cards before pointing two knobby fingers at Joe and, in a voice that rises and falls like a religious chant, says, “See, I told you that he would bring us good luck. We share our protection with him and he will share his good fortune with us.”
The abbess, which is how Joe guesses the old woman sees herself, beckons him. He hesitates until he feels a prod from behind. When he
The tetchy hag snaps her hand impatiently. In the instant before he steps forward, Joe guesses that abbess may not be the right word. The crone shows her half dozen teeth in a smile.
“You liked your walk?”
Joe makes himself smile and nod.
“My name is Rholealy.”
She slowly swings her head to indicate the room.
“Welcome to Greenland. You are safe within this place. It has been many suns and moons since the heathens and their hawks have bothered us.”
Again, a slight twist of her head indicates their surroundings.
“Here, you will walk in peace.”
Joe feels like he has stepped out of the Dutton School and into Middle Earth. He half-expects a nine-fingered hobbit and his loyal friends to burst from one of the doors singing a lusty song about the power of One Ring. Although his knee is on fire, his body is exhausted and his stomach is empty, Joe has to bite back a smile as he says, “Your hospitality, Madam Rholealy, is most welcome.”
After deciding that Joe’s use of “Madam” isn’t meant to mock, the old woman nods her head in condescending grace.
Joe hears Adrona snicker behind him. Rholealy’s hands drop back to the table to gather the cards. Assuming that he has been dismissed, Joe turns back toward Adrona. The guide points the walking stick at an opening.
In less than an hour, Joe has been fed a meal of walnut meats, dried apples, and a hot drink that has pieces of bark floating in it. When he finishes, his stomach is full, but he feels famished. Adrona shows Joe to a bench in an alcove carved into the wall, hands him two thick oft-darned blankets and leaves behind a small sputtering pine brand.
As soon as the guide leaves him, Joe allows himself a second bout of being overwhelmed. He lies rolled up in the surprisingly warm, smoky smelling blankets, looking at the tortured shadows the guttering torch casts, and imagines the Mullen dining hall with its chandeliers shining down on one hundred polished tables, six hundred chairs, the pungent smells of coffee, roast meat and chocolate. He flexes his ankles as he imagines flinging himself around Evenen Rink on scimitar sharp blades. He substitutes the sounds of his favorite pap music by the Kotanbawls coming to his ears rather than the arrhythmic plink of a drop of water that he keeps hearing reverberate along the tunnel. He imagines flying high above the playing fields tossing a FRZ-B back and forth to …Prissi.
It seems impossible that he can be where he is. That he has left behind so many important things. Yet, somehow, he is and he has.
Several times in the first weeks of hockey practice, Joe had noticed a man staring at him from the Evenen bleachers with the intensity of a coach or competitor. At first, Joe thought that it must be the father of one of his teammates. Later, he guessed that the burly man might be a scout. Maybe from the Islanders or Bruins. Joe began to look for the man when he had done something he thought was outstanding. Occasionally, he was rewarded with a quick nod of approval. He saw the man at a game at Loomis. Joe’s eyes sought him out after he scored a break-away goal late in the third period. The man gave him a quick grin. Finally, after running across one another at the Akwautown Deli, the man, who told Joe his name was Nathn, had taken a quarter hour to tell the Duttonian how good he was and how much better he could become. Nathn asked Joe if he were going to fledge. When Joe said he didn’t want to, but would, Nathn had said what a shame it was that someone so gifted at hockey should give that gift away.
Joe twisted around on the rock ledge trying to make himself more comfortable.
It might have been three conversations later that Nathn told Joe that if he ever wanted to go to a place of safety until his window for fledging closed that Nathn could help with that. He had done so with other gifted aletes whose participation in those sports would end with fledging. Joe had laughed and said the idea was ridiculous, and it was…until he was speeding along a sheet of perfect ice, or on the verge of sleep in his dorm-room. Finally, when Joe had asked Nathn if he was a scout, the man just smiled enigmatically.
Even though he is utterly exhausted, Joe cannot fall asleep. He keeps going over the steps he has taken, the thinking behind those steps and the consequences of his actions. He lies still, his eyes closed while the colors on his lids shift from yellow to gray to red and back to yellow as the pine brand sputters. Even after the torch burns itself out, the flickering on Joe’s lids continues until he opens his eyes to stare at the blackest black he ever has experienced.
As the minutes ooze by, the black around Joe and especially the black over his head—perhaps a hundred meters of dark earth pressing down upon him, changing him in the same way that the earth’s weight makes diamonds from coal and coal from sun-dappled leaves and grass—grows heavier and heavier. The minutes ooze, but there is a faster flow inside him. Joe’s bladder fills, then, over-fills, but the novice guest doesn’t know what to do. If he gets up, he can’t see where he is going, nor does he even know where he is supposed to go. And if he just gets up and moves away and empties himself somewhere, he is afraid something will happen so he won’t be able to find his way back.
The minutes ooze. His bladder pulses. His hate bubbles up like volcanic mud. Druids. Deluded Druids hiding under the earth, hiding from their supposed enemies, but, it seems to Joe, mostly hiding from the present world. How can his hosts be so self-absorbed that they couldn’t be bothered to tell a guest where the bathroom was? Or, he suddenly wonders, is this some kind of test? Or, worse, a joke?
Joe’s fear of getting lost wanes and the anger at his maltreatment waxes. Finally, his body can take no more. He gets up from the bench, turns to face the place where he has been, and, fingers trailing the wall, takes a careful step to the left. Joe repeats that eight times. When he is through, he carefully paces back the way he has come. Within a few minutes of finding his bed, he falls into a deep sleep.
When he wakes, his torch has been replaced. Leaning against the edge of the alcove is a long stick with rags tied to its end. The mop is sitting in a scarred wooden bucket half-filled with water. Looking at the mop, Joe suffers the heat of his shame as it flows up out of his chest and onto his cheeks, where it pulses and glows like last night’s torch. He pushes the bucket down the floor with a foot and begins the clean-up. When he finishes, he picks up the bucket, grabs the torch and starts down the corridor. He hasn’t gone far before he spies a faint glow on the tunnel floor. A low, narrow door is carved into a slight recess in the stone. He hears murmurs and rolling laughter. The angry boy wedges his torch into a slight crack in the hewn wall. His fist draws back to pound the door, but stops when he decides that knocking is too timid. He yanks down on the carved wooden handle and slams open the plank door. He strides into a long, low-ceilinged room dominated by an immense stone pedestal table framed with long plank benches. Two dozen Greenlanders in varying shades of green and brown rough-sewn clothes are crowded together eating breakfast.
The old woman Joe has met the night before—he realizes he doesn’t remember her name—smiles her horrible smile as she drifts a bent finger toward Joe and his bucket.
“Civilization may not run deep within the male aristocrat, but other things do.”
When most of those at the table laugh, the fire in Joe’s cheeks flares even brighter.
“Can I eat?”
The old woman stares at Joe until his gaze drops, then mocking him with a slight deferential nod of her head, she said, “Can? Obviously. May? Certainly. Those who work deserve to eat. Put down your tools and join us.”
Joe balances the mop handle against the door frame then shuffles along the length of the table looking for a place where he can sit. Unlike at Dutton, where his friends, or even students he didn’t know, would have squeezed sideways to let him in, here, no one shifts. When he comes to the end of the bench, Joe scans down the other side, which is just as full. Deciding that he is no more likely to be accepted on the far side than
The old woman’s cackling is joined in by almost everyone at the table. Joe says nothing, nor does he look at anyone. He holds his head high and stares at the far walls as he devours the fruit. As soon as he is full, he bounds up without really having any idea of what he is going to do next.
“Wait.”
A person, a woman Joe supposes, middle-aged with long limp black hair framing a narrow head delicately balanced on an incredibly long thin neck, leans toward the hag she is sitting beside to whisper. After a moment, the woman turns back toward Joe.
“Do you prefer up,” and here she tips her head so far back on her thin neck that she reminds Joe of a jonquil in a spring wind. When her head abruptly snaps back, Joe expects to hear something break. “Or, down?”
“Above? Do you mean above-ground?”
“With the sun, yes.”
“Yes. I want to go up. I was told that after coming here that I would get to go north. To Montreal, where a walker wouldn’t be so noticed among all of the immigrants.”
The doe-headed woman starts to say something, but stops when the old woman snatches her arm. The crone’s eyes glare as she speaks to Joe.
“And you will. In time. With our help. You will journey to your destination when the time is right. When we decide the time is right. And, right now, we decide the time is wrong. You are like a rare jewel that is coveted by many. We have been entrusted with keeping the jewel safe. And so we will. Because you are so valuable to some, the time you must wait to be safe may be longer than you wish, but, you can be assured that you will arrive where you wish to be. In the meantime, you will stay with us, enjoy our hospitality and learn our wise ways.”
The old woman leans forward over her plate and says in a whisper that all can hear, “Although my friends and charges revere me as a prophetess, I am not predicting the future when I say that once you spend some time with us, you are very, very likely to want to spend even more time with us.”
The dull thump Joe experiences in his chest as he listens to the old woman’s words is like the sad slow toll of a death knell.
“For now, after you clean up your tantrum, you may go into the sun with Blesonus. You may enjoy the forest and the work you will do there. When the work is done, you may come back to the lair for food and rest.”
As Joe passes by the place on the bench where the old woman sits, Blesonus, who is alongside her, whirls around, grabs Joe’s wrist, and pulls him tight.
“Stop. I must listen.”
The strange woman puts an ear against Joe’s right hand, moves it up his forearm and beyond to his shoulder. She shifts on the bench so that she can go through the same exercise to his left side. After that, she stands, firmly turns Joe away from her and presses her cheek onto his right shoulder blade. Her cheek remains there for ten, fifteen, twenty seconds while Joe becomes increasingly embarrassed and, to his total amazement, peculiarly excited.
Finally, Blesonus murmurs something that to Joe sounds like, “Yes.”
The pressure of her cheek changes to the light rapid taps of fingertips. After a moment that, too, stops. When the touching stops, Joe starts to walk away, but Blesonus barks angrily, “Stay.”
Blesonus’ tone, although an octave higher, reminds Joe of his father’s occasional imperious commands. His inclination is to march off, but the idea that he might soon be out of the darkness and back above-ground where he can get away from his captors keeps his feet planted. He hears a rustling behind him before Blesonus’ hand firmly grasps his neck. Two seconds later, Joe screams from the most excruciating pain he has ever felt. In a split second, he understands that Blesonus has stabbed him and he is dying. With a technique he has perfected in hockey when checked against the boards, Joe relaxes for a split second, then spins out of his assailant’s grip and lunges toward the door.
“Now, it’s safe. We can go up.”
It is the dulcet tone rather than the words themselves which cause Joe to swing back toward his tormentor. Blesonus is holding aloft a wooden-handled knife with a needle-like blade whose last five centimeters are covered in blood.
“I had to slightly wound you in order to mortally wound your i-tag. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be in the sun for ten minutes before the hawks would know your location. Now, you are safe.”
Responding to Joe’s inquisitive look, Blesonus continues, “We didn’t do it yesterday because you were far enough below ground before they began a real search. Once you’re twenty meters underground, your signal can’t be read. But, today, if we had gone up without destroying it, you would have been tracked. Now, you can go where you want and they can’t find you.”
Watching Joe wince as he reaches around to where he has been stabbed, the hag—through his pain Joe suddenly remembers that her name is Rholealy—giggles.
“All freedom comes at some price. In just a few days, your pain will be small, but your horizons will stretch forever.”
Shaking his head in disbelief, Joe mutters to the room at large, “Is there some problem—ethical, ecological, philosophical—with anesthetics?”
A young person with a snub nose, fleshy lips and nearly shaved head, a person of such asexuality that Joe isn’t sure whether it is a male or female, pushes up from the table. With both arms extended in a theatrical gesture of inclusiveness, the person says, “The world is where it is because too many for far too long have acted without consequences. No life must be without pain. You desire a certain freedom. For that freedom, there are costs. We, our Mother’s maids, live with, and readily accept, the many consequences that go along with our decision to live apart as on an island broken free of the mainland.”
While the Greenlanders nod in agreement with the words being spoken, Joe continues to shake his head.
“How do I really know that my i-tag isn’t working?”
Cupping a hand behind an ear as she leans toward him, Blesonus smiles as she says, “Since I know, you know.”
She steps over the stone bench, takes hold of Joe’s hand with one of hers and, using the other to grab the bucket, leads him toward the doorway.
After Joe has cleaned up the floor of the tunnel, Blesonus reaches into one of the many pockets on the vest she wears and withdraws two small circles of pale green glass rimmed with leather and offers one to Joe.
“Here.”
Joe takes one of the lenses and watches as his guide screws the other into her eye socket, like a monocle, before frowning slightly to keep it in place.
“What’s it do?”
“You’ll see.”
Joe attempts to follow Blesonus’ example. It takes him several tries before he can figure out how to keep the lens in his eye socket while at the same time keeping his lid open enough to see. When he finally manages to secure the lens, he is puzzled. What he sees with the lens seems no different than without it.
“Come.”
Blesonus extends her hand again and begins walking quickly down the tunnel. Within a minute they are getting to the outer glow of the last torch. Joe starts to slow his steps as the tunnel grows darker before he realizes that with the lens he can see a slightly glowing line running at waist height along the walls of the tunnel. After just a minute of practice, Joe figures out that when he closes his left eye and stares through the lens in his right that he can see many meters ahead. The lens takes away the mystery of how Seka and Adrona had been able to travel so quickly and with such assurance in the inky black inside the mountain.
“What makes the glow?”
“Fish.”
“Fish?”
Blesonus giggles, a sound far more girlish than anything Joe could imagine her making.
??
“But why does it glow?”
Blesonus laughs again at Joe’s ignorance.
“Not above. In pools down here. Bio-luminescence. We dry the fish skin, make a paste and paint the walls. The lens concentrates the light.”
As his guide moves ahead, Joe sees that she has a small glowing spot on the back of each of her moccasins. Even though they move rapidly along the tunnel, Joe notices that where passages intersect, there are bioluminescent markings, which he assumes work like street signs.
Waiting until they are long past the last sign, Joe asks, “How do you know where you are going? How do you keep from getting lost?”
“We always know.”
“Like you always know where to stab an i-tag?”
“Yes, the same.”
The voice of the woman hurrying ahead of him is so smug that Joe knows that if he had any idea of which way to go to get himself above ground, he would knock her aside and race toward his freedom.
The boy is limping and his knee is throbbing long before they come to a set of stairs carved into the stone. The steps are very steep, almost like a ladder. By the time Joe has counted to one hundred, the glow from Blesonus’ heels is barely discernible above him. When he gets to one hundred thirty, Joe has to lean sideways against the rough rock wall to massage his knee and catch his breath. The stairs finally end at one hundred ninety-three. Since the boy doesn’t find his guide waiting, he follows the glowing streak as it zigzags every few steps in the narrowing tunnel. He is crab walking along feeling very claustrophobic when there is a zig, a yellowish glow, a zag, then, a golden light suffusing the rabbit hole, a last zig and Joe is blinded by intensely bright sunlight bouncing through a thin web of leafless vines growing in thin soil in front of the tunnel’s opening.
With his eyes squeezed tight against the assault from the sunlight, Joe removes the lens, and rubs his eye socket. He pivots away from the light, opens his eyes a slit, and impatiently waits for them to adjust.
It takes a couple of minutes before Joe can see without pain. He moves into the fractured sunlight bouncing off a billion-faceted mound of mine tailings. Yesterday’s snow is completely gone. As soon as Joe circumvents the rubble pile, he spots Blesonus, a hundred meters ahead and twenty meters above him hustling up a steep trail toward the top of the immense pit. Hobbling across the pit floor as fast as he can, Joe keeps looking up, but as far as he can determine, Blesonus never looks back to see if he is following.
Joe, with his burning knee and jellied thighs, feels completely exhausted when he finally crests the rim. He struggles over to a large rock, drops down on it and looks around. Below him, the pit is huge, at least a kilometer across and more than a hundred meters deep. In front of him, he can see kilometer after un-ending kilometer of tree-covered mountain slopes. The perimeter of the mine itself is ringed with tall scraggly pine trees except for three rough arches where Joe guesses once were roads. In those breaks, scrub and underbrush grow thick. He barely can make out the skeletal remains of an immense crane and a junkyard’s worth of rusting machinery cloaked in brush.
“Even with no i-tag, you need to be careful.”
Joe jerks his head toward the voice, but he can’t distinguish Blesonus from the trees until she shifts sideways.
“Sit over here.”
Joe exaggerates his limp as he crosses toward his guide. As he followed Blesonus through the tunnels, he has made grandiose plans to run off at his first chance. However, with his physical struggles with the unending stairs, and after looking out over the limitless forest, Joe’s plans shrink to waiting and watching. As he approaches Blesonus, he forces a smile.
“It’s so beautiful here. So peaceful. It must be wonderful to walk these woods in complete silence. I get to do that a little bit when I’m at summer camp. It’s my favorite part of going there.”
Blesonus returns his smile, but waggles her head at his ignorance.
“This land is never quiet. You must learn to listen with different ears. The wind whispers, soughs, screams, mutters, moans, and cries. The trees snap, groan, shiver and creak. The water gurgles, gargles and laughs. The birds, bears, bees all talk, argue, sing, sigh. If you were to sit here for an hour with a still mind and open ears, you would hear a whole orchestra of sounds.”
“And do you do that often?”
A small thin cloud of regret scuttles over the woman’s face, which, in the sunlight, Joe sees is older and more worn that he had thought.
“The last years have not been easy ones. Living takes up more time, so listening gets less.”
To encourage her to keep talking, Joe extends a hand toward his guide and guard.
“Why has your life been harder?”
Blesonus slowly nods her head a half-dozen times before she speaks.
“We Greenlanders were few, now fewer. We are older. We are weaker. When the last men left, Rholealy laughed at their backs, but they have been missed.”
Joe is confused by Blesonus’ words.
“What about Seka and Adrona?”
The sound from the guide’s mouth is sharp and harsh like the snap of a dry stick.
Joe is astounded. “Seka and Adrona are women?”
“In all ways, but birthing.”
Blesonus tips her head and studies Joe’s face until he grows embarrassed.
“…but birthing.”
“How long have you been here?”
“I was born here.”
Joe reaches down to massage his knee before he asks, “Can we walk? Or is there work to be done?”
“Both. Eat this.”
She hands Joe a small sprig of wilted green canoe-shaped leaves and tells him to chew them before she sets off down a faint path. It is almost an hour before she stops by a large, black boulder, perched in a manner that seems to defy gravity, high above a narrow winding dirt road carved into the dense forest. The leaves he has eaten have helped with the pain so much that Joe has had little trouble keeping up.
“Wait here,” Blesonus whispers before she crouches down and begins to shuffle down through the brush toward the road. As soon as Blesonus is out of sight, Joe turns back toward the way they have come. He looks up to see if he can pick out their path, but he can’t see much. He starts back up the mountain to get a better sight-line, but within two dozen steps, he isn’t even sure whether he is on or off the path. He slinks back down to where Blesonus first left him.
Five minutes later, Joe hears the slightest rustle. When he glances up from where he has been resting with his back propped against a tree and his eyes closed, he sees his guide standing no more than a meter away from him.
“It’s safe, but hurry.”
Joe scrambles down the steep slope after her. Blesonus stops next to a thick tangle of briers. Motioning for Joe to do the same, she drops onto her belly and wriggles her way into a small, nearly invisible opening in the tangle of thorns. Joe follows the worn heels of her moccasins until he finds himself inside a shallow cleft in the hillside. In the darker shadows at the back of the cleft is a large dinged and dented case. Half-crouched, Blesonus finger-combs dried leaves and thorns from her long hair before handing Joe a tightly knit string bag.
“Hold this.”
Using a small key she has pulled from one of the pockets of her vest, Blesonus removes a lock and opens the rusted lid. She passes back to Joe a half-dozen lumenaids, two five kilo bags of salt, two large bottles of some kind of pills, a five liter sof-pak of tea extract and a mypod still in its bubble.
“Now, this.”
Joe takes a second bag and watches the woman fill it with pack after pack of licorice. When that bag is full, his guardian motions for Joe to work his way out from the shallow cave. As soon as Blesonus herself emerges from the thorny gauntlet and rises to her feet, Joe, who has been wiping blood from a half dozen scratches, asks, “What is all this stuff?”
“Staples. When the Greenland movement f
Blesonus waves her hand at the bulging bags.
“With the latest revision of our charter, everything we have here is…acceptable.”
Joe hefts the bag he is holding.
“Licorice?”
“Rholealy’s ancestors were from Australia.”
Blesonus’ tentative, almost embarrassed reply, which Joe doesn’t understand, does make him feel better than anything else has since running away from Dutton.
“And?”
“And it’s very important.”
Joe has a vision of the Kin’s members kneeling while Rholealy passes out licorice with the solemnity of a priest dispensing the Eucharist. The image makes Joe laugh, and his laugh instantly puts Blesonus into a rage.
Whispering savagely, hurling words like stones, Blesonus says, “You rich, stupid whelp. You come to us to escape your life. You depend on us to save you. You dare to laugh? You have no right to question anything that we do. I should leave you here and let you wander in this unmapped maze until you die.”
As Joe slings the laden bag of seemingly sacred candy onto his shoulder, he conjures his meekest tone, “No. You are right. Absolutely right. I should not have laughed. I owe you an apology and both obedience and respect.”
When his guide turns to read his face, Joe keeps his eyes empty and averted. Glowering, but saying nothing, Blesonus starts up the trail. As they climb, Joe pays all of his attention to the trail itself. He tries to determine if, when the path seems to disappear, which it frequently does, there are markings. He looks for some subtle blaze, or another trick, like the fish paint, that allows Blesonus to know where she is going.
If there is a trick, Joe is not able to figure it out. After forty minutes of strenuous hiking back up the mountain, a meek and chastised Joe asks Blesonus about the Kin. When had the men left? Why did they leave? Did they often get new members? Had they harbored teenerz, like himself, before? Who provided the things in the metal locker? Was if for free? Why would they do that?
Joe learns that the last four men had left the den eleven years before because of differences with Rholealy’s leadership. They have had only one new member in recent memory. Joynea, who had come to them just over five years before after running away from a clonephanage, is the one who had talked about responsibility at breakfast. About twice a year, a refugee would show up for a few days before moving on—usually to Montreal, to get lost in the Noramca’s co-capital. The necessities they were bringing back to camp came from a small group of supporters called the Censure Commitatus, who believed that adolescents should be allowed to make their own decisions about their bodies and their guiding beliefs without the interference of family, teachers and clergy. The Kin was willing to accept and protect teenerz undergoing those trying times. In exchange, the Censures helped the Kin. The provisions came at no monetary cost to the members of their lair, but there were other costs, substantial costs, associated with their tradition of offering sanctuary.
“Like what?”
“Hounding.”
“By whom? Rholealy said everything had been safe here for a long time.”
“Rholealy attends our souls, but some powerful wingers and their hawk minions have not forgotten us. I feel we are watched. When we go on our walk-abouts, things happen.”
“Like what?”
“Two summers ago, eight of us left in early May. Only six of us made it back to the lair in late September.”
“You left your home for five months?”
“Oh yes, every year. One third of us make the journey.”
“Why? Where do you go?”
“We go to see the wonders of Our Mother. We go where we feel we are pulled. Two years ago, we walked from here to the southern end of Lake George, over to Rutland and then up through the Green Mountains. We crossed the St. Lawrence River on the east side of Lake Champlain, and went west and north until we came to Lac Papineau where there is another Kin. We camped there for almost a month, making friends, fishing, weaving reed baskets, collecting herbs. Then we went south and east and came back down along the Salmon River to Saranac Lake.
“It was wonderful…The Mother, when She is left alone to mother, makes so much perfection. Within a week of leaving the lair, I knew that being a Greenlander was all that I ever wanted to be.”
There is a catch in Blesonus’s voice that causes Joe to ask, “You had had doubts?”
Blesonus makes no response beyond shifting her pak higher on her back. Joe does the same, but is rewarded with little relief. The pak is heavy. He is tired. The effects of the leaves Blesonus had given him have worn off. Now, both of his knees ache.
Blesonus stops.
After waiting a minute to see if his guide will continue her tale, Joe, with some trepidation, asks, “What happened to those people on your walk-about?”
His guide starts moving up the path. It is minutes later before she says, “They were taken.”
“Taken?”
“Stolen.”
“You mean they were kidnapped. How? Why?”
“We were almost home. Less than week to walk. When we woke up, they were gone. Stolen in the night.”
Joe throws out his hands in disbelief.
“Well, maybe they weren’t stolen. Maybe they just decided to leave. You yourself said you had doubts. Maybe they did, too, except their doubts were big enough that they acted on them.”
Blesonus’ look leaves no doubt in Joe’s mind that she has had that same thought and has forced it back into the shadows.
When the path flattens out on a shoulder of the mountain, Blesonus says, “We’ll stop for a moment.”
The stick-like woman shucks off her pak, lifts her narrow shoulders, arches her back and twists her head back and forth to loosen her neck muscles. Joe, who guesses he has the lighter pack, drops his down with a groan before he tries to imitate her. When he curves his back to loosen the tightness at the base of his spine, he sees how much more mountain there is to climb. He makes a small sound of dismay.
“No. You are looking the wrong way. Turn around.”
Blesonus put her hands on Joe’s shoulders. She holds him for what to Joe seems like a long time before turning him around. They are standing at the top of an escarpment jutting out from the mountain. Joe assumes that it is rain water rushing down the mountainside which has scoured the outcrop free of soil. From where he stands he can see five folds of mountains covered in a carpet of green except for the occasional patch of gray stone and the thin silvery strings of waterfalls.
“It is beautiful.”
“A million acres, a hundred souls.”
“Is that really true?”
“It’s close enough to true. This land was already mostly protected by the Adirondack State Park. When the last of the mines closed and logging was forbidden in the Clear Cut Act of 2038, the exodus of young people, which was already a steady stream, turned into a torrent. After that, the older people slowly died off, killed themselves, or were starved out. Now, it is just us and a handful of Last Boyz hunting and fishing. And smugglers.”
“What kind of smugglers? People smugglers?”
“Those and some other kinds.”
“Such as?”
Blesonus bends to catch a strap of her pak. As she slings it onto her shoulders, she says, “Time to m
Joe wonders if the leaves he has eaten, which he guesses might be coca, could be something that is smuggled. He considers whether the food he carries on his back is payment from a coca smuggler.
Twenty minutes later Blesonus begins to talk in a low monotonic voice that makes Joe think that she has forgotten that he is on the mountain with her.
“I am forty-three. I have been surrounded by My Mother’s beauty since my birth. She has given me thousands upon thousands of dusks and dawns of red and orange, gray, black and white, and another thousand colors which have no names. Mother loves a treasure and loves to share it. She has offered me the gold of her sun just cresting the mountain and in the head of the dandelion and lily. She has plied me with silver. The silver of the moon on the coldest winter night. The silver of the thin squirrel in spring. The silver of cascading water and immobile granite. The silver of melting ice and flashing fish. The Mother provides me with a home with those who think and feel as I do. But…I am the last of my family, and if I stay here I will be the last of me and mine. If I live here, childless, when I die, all of those who gave of themselves to make me, back a thousand years, will die a different death than the one they have died before. I am content to live and die like that if it makes My Mother happy, but sometimes I can hear her plead with me to pack my things and go. To leave. To live a less pure life.”
Seeing an opportunity where he has thought none existed, Joe asks, “If you chose to go, would you be free to go?”
Without stopping, Blesonus twists her head around and looks at Joe as if he has been eavesdropping on her. She opens her mouth, but says nothing, then, picks up the pace.
“I’ve had to make the same decisions,” Joe says in a tone he hopes will gain Blesonus’ sympathy. “My family and my friends want me to have wings. To fly with them. To be part of their flock. But I am most alive when I am close to earth. The sky is something to look up to, not a place from which to look down on others and consider them to be less fortunate than I. For all of the pain I have in my knees, I would rather be here, trudging back up this mountain with you, seeing and feeling and smelling your Mother’s charms up close rather than looking down on a splotch of green and a sliver of silver far below. I only hope that, after a time, my family will see the sacrifices I am willing to make to be part of this earth rather than being above it all. I hope they see, accept, and finally approve of how I want to live my life.”
Joe knows from his literature classes that oftentimes the strongest arguments are those half-made. He wonders if he already had laid it on too thick. He guesses that if Prissi were here her snorts would be coming like mortar fire. He decides to shelve the rest of what he wants to say to go off in a new direction.
“Would men ever returnr? So there could be fathers?”
“The lair has decided men no longer are welcome. Men, and all they bring, distract us from The Mother.”
Joe considers the irony of a mother who doesn’t want her children to bear children. For a moment, his anger at Blesonus’ cultish stupidity outweighs the necessity of currying her favor so that he can escape.
“I would think that Mother might like her worshippers to have an organization that was a little more sustainable.”
Blesonus nods her head, but her words belie that action.
“Rholealy says our devotion will be rewarded.”
“Devotion to whom?”
“Mother.”
“As Rholealy understands her.”
“Yes.”
They are just a couple of hundred feet shy of the crest of the mountain when Blesonus misplaces a foot on a section of the path thick with scree. Her legs splay out as if doing the splits. She yelps, falls sideways and begins rolling back down the path they have just climbed. When Joe catches up with her, she is grabbing the back of her left thigh with one hand and waving her other hand over a lava flow of tea extract oozing across a pure white field of salt.
“Are you okay?”
“No, no, no, no.”
“Let me help you up. See if you can walk on it.”
“No. No. You don’t know. The lair will be so angry. They’ll iso me.”
“What’s iso?”
“Isolate. I’ll have to eat alone, work alone, sleep by myself. No one will talk to me.”
“Because you spilled some salt?”
Blesonus’ waving hand is redirected from the spill to the space just in front of Joe’s face. Her voice pitches up into the hysterical range.
“You don’t know. You can’t know. Our life is so horrible, it’s made the little things—salt on stringy greens, a cup of hot tea in a cold, dark, damp room—incredibly important. The loss of the tea and half the salt is horrible so the punishment must be horrible.”
Blesonus collapses her head onto her knee. Her body heaves with her sobs.
Joe realizes that this is the first time he has ever heard a woman cry. He is caught between wanting to reach down to touch her shoulder to give comfort and slapping her until she shuts up. He thinks of the ancient adage about not crying over spilt latte and how Blesonus’ loss is only tea. He turns his back on his guide and stares out over the endless miles of forest. He looks outward to distance himself from the thick, moist noises coming from close by. He has to get away. And he can not wait until Rholealy decides it is the proper time. He turns back, drops to his knees and gently grasps the sobbing woman’s shoulders.
“Ssshhh. Ssshhh. Blesonus, listen. Just listen for a minute.”
Using a gesture he has seen many times in a vid, a supposedly comforting gesture, Joe takes the woman by her chin and lifts her head so that he can look into her face.
“Good. Good. Listen. You didn’t spill the salt and ruin the tea. I did. My knee. My knee let go and I fell just like you did. You…let’s see...yeah…I yelled and…you pulled a muscle when you twisted around to stop my fall. They can be angry at me.”
Joe watches intently as Blesonus first vigorously shakes off his suggestion with her head, then, becomes more tentative, until finally her head is still but cocked at an angle. The sleek head and the angle at which it is held remind Joe of a Labrador retriever which can’t quite figure out what it sees stirring in the brush.
“Why would you do that?”
Joe gives the woman, now growing calmer, his sweetest smile.
“Because it would help you and it wouldn’t hurt me—at least, not much. What are they going to do to me? Here, let me help you up. See if you can walk okay.”
Joe helps Blesonus to her feet, picks up both paks and starts up the trail feeling as cocky as if he has just solved a tricky quadratic equation.