Flight (12 page)

“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 first
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 move
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.”