Filaria (19 page)

She would never open her eyes again. Never. For now day was burgeoning, she had also seen, instead of endless black, glimmers of distant, unreal lights (the flicker of flame, pinpricks of lanterns, perhaps?), actual
land
: cities and townships and roads and miniature forests, openings of shafts scattered across it like piping mouths, all through morning’s wispy cloud cover.

A good deal of it smouldering, or already charred. This rarified air, sucking it in: the taste of smoke, even up here, at the roof of the world. Closing her eyes could not make
that
go away.

She heard the slow beating of wings, the shriek of alien voices, felt wind in her hair and on her skin from the force of those wings, from being carried, swiftly, across vast, open skies.

When the angels had first plucked her away from her mother and sisters — swooping down from smoky darkness to grab her where she stood by the wagon’s side, watching with horror as the conflagration consumed the valley before them — she had tried to cry, to scream, to fight. And Lady, turning in a crouch, had hurled herself forward. Mother had screamed too, reaching with one hand for Deidre’s foot as it receded up into the night.

There were three, possibly four of them. During the flight, they had transferred her in mid-air twice, from one set of talons to another.

Angels were strong and fast flyers. Thin legs wrapped tight around her waist, bony knees clamped snugly to her ribs. Talons, sharp as blades, easily gripped her, cutting into her soft skin if she struggled too much.

She stopped struggling long ago.

They spoke, but she could not understand their language; neither could they comprehend hers. Or, at least, they showed no signs of comprehension. So she had also ceased demanding to be returned to her family, ceased vacillating between screaming threats to her aerial kidnappers about the wrath of an Orchard Keeper and desperate, whispered promises of vast rewards for her safe and prompt return to Elegia.

Her clothes were torn, her skin raked, streaked with blood.

And now it was morning.

Shrieking louder and louder, sounding remarkably like girls, giggling hysterically, the angels soon became increasingly excited; the
feel
of their wings, and the rate of their collective beating, changed in ways Deidre could not define. Pressure made her ears pop. She never wanted to open her eyes again, had vowed to herself not to,
never
, but she did, one more time. She
had
to:

Boughs and boles, woven crudely, lashed together: a massive cradle had been built into the crotch of the structural beams that lined the sky. These were not at all like the filaments she saw when she looked up from the ground; this close, the beams appeared bigger around than the girth of her waist.

The angels had built a nest.

Short walls had been constructed into the structure, dividing the aerie into a series of rough compartments. Strips of fabric, sparkling junk, and what looked to be constellations of dry white bones littered the open areas. The stench that assailed her, when a gust of wind picked up, was garbage and rancid guano.

Perhaps a dozen angels waited. Some grey, some white. Watching her, squinting, wings folded forward, the beasts appeared as hunched or broken things. One, stepping forward, as if to greet her, though she was still some distance away, was completely black except for white marks that looked like death heads at its quivering wingtips.

How many of these horrid beasts were there? Did more lurk, unseen, within the labyrinthine constructions?

Two looked over the side, gesticulating with rapid motions of their heads, pointing downward, to the distant land, using the miniscule fingers that grew from the junction of their membranous wings.

How had she ever associated these creatures with birds
or
men? Birds were sweet devices made by supervisors for myriad purposes. Men were complex, beautiful animals.
Perfection
. These things were grotesque, skeletal, lightly feathered all over, their legs long, thin, and dry. Huge wings. Nearly translucent skin on their faces, ugly features clustered close together: little, suspicious eyes; slitted nostrils; angry little mouths with pinsharp teeth through which the tips of blue tongues showed, panting, over black bottom lips.

Shrieking, giggling, the angels that bore her aloft were hovering now, flapping and debating, and, for an instant, Deidre recalled, absurdly, an image from halcyon times: sitting on the grass, crosslegged before Sam’s softly humming console, an illustrated printout on her lap. She was pointing to an image of an extinct flying beast known as a Steller’s Jay. “What about this thing? It says here it’s a bird. A
real
bird. Sitting on its nest.” Looking up at the supervisor’s calmly winking façade. “It doesn’t look anything like
your
bluebirds or your redbirds.”

But memory blew into tatters on the wind as she was dropped.

The angels, she discovered, were not waiting to help her; Deidre came crashing down among them, landing painfully on her hands and knees and rolling immediately to her side, so her body felt the relative firmness of the dirty nest. The structure creaked and groaned. Twigs snapped under her weight.

She lay trembling, panting, petrified as dry winds whipped all about. It was too hot here, too bright. The air was different, painful in her lungs. Hard to fill them.

She glanced up. Directly above was the roof, tinted a pale blue, perhaps just a dozen or so metres over her head. She could see the distinct paneling that comprised it. Rivets held the sky together.

The scaffolding of the suns spanned out in all directions, receding, finally vanishing into the distance.

And angels touched down in gusts of feathers and risen dust.

Deidre tried to cling to the nest with her broken nails but was hauled to her feet, rudely pushed forward. Terrified of plunging — though the edge was metres away — she was directed toward the centre of the platform. Big wings buffeted her, clawed feet nudged, keeping her upright and moving.

Through her tears she shrieked, “You’re hurting me!” Panic that had been held at bay for most of the night rose sharply in her throat. “Stop it, you’re
hurting
me!” Out over the far side — she’d made the error of looking again: remote fields and farms, houses, forests, small as toys. She loosed a trickle of hot urine into her breeches and stared dumbly down at her own scratched thighs as another sun-bright angel — this one white, wings outspread, feet extended, talons out — came in to land.

She was finally allowed to collapse, huddling behind one of the stick and twig baffles. She curled in on herself for some time, and when she raised her head to see how close the angels were, to her immense shock she met the eyes of a girl, slightly older than herself, who was sitting cross-legged on a small woven mat. Attractive, black-haired, the girl returned Deidre’s stare with an expression of apparent amusement. Her face, rounded and olive-skinned, was grimy, black eyes narrowed. Lips, tightening slightly, went thin and white and bloodless.

Neither spoke, yet Deidre, seeing this other person, crawled forward frantically, to the girl’s side, nearly touching her hot body, thinking: another human, another human . . . Then, feeling infinitesimally more secure, she looked back through her tangled hair to see that the angels were clustered, and had not followed her here.

“What do they want with us?” Deidre breathed. “Why did they bring us here?” She sobbed. “
Why
?”

“Don’t know why they brought
you
here.”

The dark-eyed girl spoke calmly, looking over Deidre’s shoulder, into the middle distance. She had an unusual accent and her skin smelled of spices. For an instant, Deidre recalled the gram’s unusual accent (was that just yesterday?!), from back in her sanctum, but the inflections, the harshness of this girl’s voice, made it very different from that one. Covered by little more than dirty rags, her body was toned, muscular, tanned. Deidre wondered if she might be a
barbarian
.

Now those dark eyes turned. The girl said, “I don’t know if they brought you here to be my companion, my lover, or my dinner.”

Deidre recoiled.

“A joke, sister. Relax.” Still, no smile. “I’m not going to eat you, chickie. I don’t think they — ” gesturing towards the group of angels, who stood, still watching quietly, “ — know what makes us tick. They don’t know what they’re getting into. Maybe they want us to reproduce.” And, finally, the girl laughed, as if they were exchanging pleasantries up here. But her laugh was without mirth.

“Re . . .? But . . .?” Surely, to
joke
up here like this, to say these horrible things, this girl was crazy. “How long, how long have you been here?”

“Days.” A noise of disgust. “You know, I don’t think they wanna hurt us, if that’s what you’re worried about. They haven’t hurt me yet.” Turning away again.

Deidre whispered, “How do you know they won’t?” Over the girl’s shoulder, another dizzy view of miniatures: a threadlike road, houses no bigger than breadcrumbs. The sky, arcing down in a great slow curve to meet the horizon.

Thin clouds scudded beneath the nest.

“I know men,” the girl said, under her breath.

As confounded by this as she was by everything about the stranger, Deidre peeked down again, through a gap in the nest, at a sliver of sun-yellowed land. She said, “My name is Deidre. What’s yours?”

For a long time Deidre thought she would get no answer except the wind and the angel’s muted chatter but at last the girl said, “Mingh straw. Though that’s not my real name. It’s my stage name.”

She really was pretty, Deidre decided. And with the wind playing through her hair, and light on her plump face, it was as though Mingh straw believed they were sitting in a courtyard together, relaxing, a glass of powdered orangeade in one hand.

“Did
they
set fire to the world? Did the angels do that to us?”

“Us? To
us
? You live down there, on that level?”

Deidre thought: maybe the girl isn’t crazy; maybe she’s just simple. “Yes. Elegia is there. At least, it was. My father is an Orchard Keeper.” Seeking some sign of softness, of compassion. “Look, my mother and my sisters . . .”

Pride made her fight the emotion coiling inside her. She angrily wiped at her eyes. Still the girl stared, unreadable, and Deidre felt another dimension of fear opening up inside her. Was she alone, despite this strange company?
Because
of this strange company? Was she all the more alone up here? “I don’t think my family is dead,” Deidre said, unprompted, wiping snot from her lip. “They’re not dead.”

“What’s Elegia?”

“Our estate. Our family home.”

“
Estate
?” Mingh straw snorted. “You live on an
estate
? I’m from Hoffmann City. Know where that is?”

“No.”

“Seven levels down. Where the water’s stored.”

“Seven?” Deidre had never taken a lift below the plantations. Just one level. Below that was forbidden, dangerous.

“I’d never seen that place before, up under the suns. Never seen the suns. Not until these miserable things lifted me out of the shaft opening. I had never seen the suns.” Mingh straw indicated the nearby celestial furnace, burning out to the left, shining daylight down over the land below. The air was certainly hot here, yet surprisingly they had not been burned to cinders. Heat was directed downward, not outward?

Deidre wanted to mention her interest in the sciences, and in the vanished people who had built the world, but she said nothing.

“Was it nice and cozy?” Mingh straw asked. “Living down there?”

Deidre whispered, “Yes, it was.” The girl was mocking her and her life. But she would be strong. “How far beneath Hoffmann City does the world go?”

“A lot farther, sister. All the way to the bottom.”

“And does this
war
ravage the land there too? Where you’re from?”

“War? Is there a war?” The black-haired girl shrugged. “Hoffmann City’s
always
burning. It’s hot and dirty there and air is pumped in. Light comes from down windows in the ceiling, most of which are broken. There’s anarchists, atheists, celibates.” She drew a deep breath. “This is the cleanest air that’s ever filled my lungs. You know, chickie, I think these flying men did me a favour, getting me out of the Hoff. Ruined my career, mind you, but prolonged my last few miserable days.”

“Listen.” Conversation with Mingh straw, Deidre decided, was like talking to a demented child, or to Lady. “Do you have any ideas about how we can we get down?” She touched the girl’s upper arm, which felt about as hot as she’d imagined the nearby sun to be.

Shaking Deidre’s hand off, Mingh straw asked, “How old are you, kid?”

“Fourteen.” Deidre was exasperated with these digressions. “I’m
fourteen
.” She tried to stare the other girl down.

“What a coincidence. That’s how old
I’m
supposed to look. Or was it twelve? Think we look the same age?”

“I do.”

“Well, I’m thirty seven. Pretty good, no? I’ve taken the
cure
, child. And I’ve had a little surgery. You know, you could make a lot of money in Hoffmann City, with your blond hair and your crying routine and your torn clothes.”

Deidre said, “All I want to know is if you have any ideas about how to get down.”

“At first, I thought they were air gods. At first.” Mingh straw spoke in a lowered voice now, her expression far away. “And that they were coming for me. Coming for me in anger. But they weren’t gods. Only men.”

Deidre tried not to let herself get pulled along this or any other tangent, but indignant words burbled up inside her and fell out of her mouth before she could stop them: “
Men
? Twice you’ve called these things men. They are horrid and nasty and they are
not
men!”

“What’s the distinction?” Mingh straw narrowed one eye and cocked her head.

Above them, the sky made a clanking noise and several drops of warm, viscous liquid fell to spatter Deidre’s thigh.