Flight (11 page)

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.”