Flight (62 page)

Prissi holds her breath as the man-horse
draws closer. He swims to within twenty meters before he stops in a
splotch of dense shadow. Prissi can make out movement, but doesn‘t
understand what she is seeing. Suddenly, there is a streak of brown
flashing toward her. It’s accompanied by a slight hissing sound.
Simultaneously with Prissi whipping her head around to make sense
of what she has seen, Whir yowls before staggering forward with a
brown-fletched arrow buried deep in his left wing below the
shoulder blade. A second sound, anguished, precedes the winger
tumbling off the bank into the river.

Prissi experiences a split second of
overwhelming relief at her rescue before the rope around her waist
tightens. The wounded winger thrashes against the current and his
pain as the two conspire to pull him to a place he does not want to
go. A second later Prissi is torn from the bank and joins Whir in
his fight for a longer life.

Despite her frantic efforts, Prissi can’t get
her feet braced in the soft muck of the river bed. The force of the
winger in his death throes drags her forward. She loses her balance
and her face gets pulled under. She lunges forward to keep from
drowning. She coughs and spits out bloody river water. She pedals
her feet like she is on an invisible bicycle until one foot gets
planted on something solid enough that she can spring forward. That
movement is enough to put some slack into the rope. She uses that
opportunity to lunge forward and spread her sodden wings. When she
comes back down into the river, her half-submerged wings act like
an anchor. She digs in her feet and, after a few tries, manages to
maintain a precarious counter-balance against the river’s pull on
the dying winger.

Afraid of losing her footing, Prissi doesn’t
turn around when she hears the centaur approach from behind. The
man-horse sweeps past her and cuts the tether that binds her to her
captor. As the twitching winger is carried away by the current,
Prissi is transfixed by the rosy contrail he leaves behind.

It takes a touch from the centaur to get
Prissi to turn away. When she looks up into her rescuer’s face, it
is not, as she had supposed, the one who had killed Joe’s friend.
This centaur has a round face with mottled skin from too much sun,
perfectly round pale blue eyes and a small nearly lipless mouth.
When the centaur reaches out a hand, Prissi grabs it. The centaur
cups his other hand and Prissi uses it as a stirrup to climb onto
his back. Even though the centaur’s shirt is little more than a
filthy rag, his long gray hair smells of grease and smoke, and a
quiver of arrows hangs in the way, Prissi can’t help tightly
pressing herself against the man-horse’s back.

When she murmurs, “Thank you,” in a voice
that might be meant more for her than him, the centaur, whose name
is Hortos, rasps, “You helped Mortos.”

Those three words, words which tell Prissi
that something she has done, finally, has helped rather than harmed
someone, snaps her jaw open and eyes tightly shut as she shudders
out her sobs.

Prissi cries as Hortos swims downstream at a
fast, but, seemingly, effortless, pace. Just shy of a bend in the
river, the centaur lunges his way out of the water. Although the
bosky woods look impenetrable to the girl, they are not. Behind a
thin barricade of dense brush begins a trail that is just high and
wide enough for the centaur.

As soon as they are on the trail, Prissi’s
emotions calm as if the solid footing beneath the centaur’s hooves
is providing the same kind of foundation for her feelings.

“Where are we going?”

Although the centaur’s words spill from his
mouth as rough as gravel, Prissi understands him to say, “To find
your ferend.”

“Will we be in time?”

“To do what?”

“To save him.”

“He need saving?”

“The other winger is going to hurt him.”

“Course. He’s angry. But…your ferend…he need
saving?”

“What do you mean?”

“My herd dying, but don’t need saving.”

“I don’t understand. Why would you say
that?”

Hortos cranes his neck to the newly leafed
trees overhead as he shakes his head, “I don’t. She did.”

“Olewan?”

“Old one. Yes.”

“But why does her opinion count?’

“Only one can save us. But, won’t.
Didn’t.”

It’s Prissi’s turn to shake her head, “Why
not?”

It sounds like the rumble of thunder, but
Prissi interprets it as a laugh…a very bitter laugh.

“Don’t need saving.”

Prissi is so engrossed in the futility of
that statement that she gets slapped in the face by a fan of
twigs.

“How is your friend?” Prissi hesitates
because she isn’t sure that she has listened hard enough to
remember his name. “Mortos.”

The centaur’s response is almost a whisper,
“Gone.”

Since she is sure she knows the answer,
Prissi doesn’t ask, “Gone where?” Instead, she says, “I’m so
sorry.”

“Me, too.”

The centaur makes a keening sound and trots a
half-dozen paces before he says, “Old one, too.”

This time Prissi doesn’t know the answer to
the question she has on her lips, but an intuitive part of her
brain keeps her mouth from asking it.

Hortos has trotted another twenty meters down
the green corridor before he says, “Gone.”

A vision, a violent African flash of the
imperious old woman, her few day mother, shrieking as she scuttles
away from enraged hooves flares in Prissi’s mind, but using all of
her will, she extinguishes it. She sees nothing but the maze of
woods around her and hears nothing but unseen birds and the husky
breathing of the centaur. She says nothing. The only sign that she
understands what she has been told is that her grasp on Hortos’
torso loosens.

Flight

After he scuttles the bass boat, Joe stands
rigidly at the helm of the launch. The quiet disturbs him because
it gives him the opportunity to think and thinking, definitely, is
not what he wants to do. Joe can provide himself with no coherent
reason why he thought it was a good idea, let alone a plan, to take
the boats and leave Prissi behind. He tries to tell himself that it
wasn’t fear for himself, but rather faith in her…her skills,
intelligence and courage which led to his choice. When he had found
a backwater close to what he had guessed was three kliks
downstream, he had pulled in to shore. The first five minutes of
waiting he could tolerate, but, now, as each minute passes, what he
is feeling becomes more unendurable.

He is a coward. Prissi is dead. Prissi is
dead…but, she would have been dead despite anything he could have
done. He is not a coward, but he is a fool to sit waiting for the
wingers to show up to reclaim their boat and take care of him.
Prissi, somehow, is holding on, but waiting and needing his help.
He has lost Bob Tom and Prissi and he will lose himself if he
doesn’t take action.

Joe sits in the boat, as frozen in inaction
as Lot’s wife, until he hears the sibilant notes of wings. Even
when the winger’s arrival forces him to act, Joe remains indecisive
as to whether his chances are better staying under the canopy of
tree limbs or trying to outrun his enemy. When his hand flips the
ignition, that slight movement is less the result of rational
thought and more an act of mindless fear. He accelerates into the
river.

The red-faced winger is no more than ten
meters behind Joe by the time he has the boat in the fastest part
of the current. Joe has a moment of dark insight when he
understands that his fear has led to his end. And that insight will
prove true, but not in the way the boy has foreseen.

The winds, blowing to the northeast, slow the
winger and the river’s current, flowing south, adds several
kilometers an hour to the launch’s top speed. After five minutes
the launch is a hundred meters in front of the winger. After ten
minutes, the threat is no more than a dark speck in the sky.

Joe gets to the mouth of the Carman’s River
just before five in the afternoon. He slows his speed as he makes
his way along the coastline of Long Island. He motors west until
the water goes dark. Just before the sun slinks away for good, Joe
veers into a small cove and secures the launch high on the shore.
He takes a pak full of food he has found in a cubby, grabs cushions
and blankets and heads inland to find a safe place to make
camp.

Joe eats until he feels fuller than he has in
many days, but he can’t sleep. Thoughts of abandoning Prissi and
losing Bob Tom’s body take care of that. He lies on his back
looking at the stars and ponders his fate and those of the others
in his constellation.

Tired, and as mentally exhausted as he can
ever remember, Joe swears a dozen revenges on his uncle and cousin.
After hours, he falls asleep and, given the condition of his
conscience, sleeps deeply. He wakes at sunrise and fills his belly
for a second time before dragging the launch back into the water
and a course that will take him home.

Joe makes it back to Manhattan early the next
afternoon.

He calls his family. Bears the burden of
their rage, relief and love. Visits his grandfather and, mostly,
tells his story. Tells what Prissi has told him and how she has
died.

Two days later he fledges. With red and
silver feathers. Joe returns to Dutton ten days late from spring
Break. Endures the stares, the gossip and his new bodyguard. Works
hard at both his studies and keeping his memories at bay. With few
exceptions, Joe Fflowers is as adept as most teenerz at moving so
fast that the things that niggle and chase a heart or conscience
get left behind…things and events once mountainous and momentous
soon become memories no bigger than a pair of small wings in a
great open sky.

Flight

Joshua Fflowers leans back against a single
pillow as he listens to his grandson Joe’s story. His face betrays
almost nothing of what he feels. Some of that sangfroid is from the
medication he takes, some is the product from being so old, but
most comes from the last dregs of a life lived with obdurate
will.

From the boy, the old man learns of how, if
he had allowed himself to play any part in Joe’s life, how he might
have known Prissi Langue, or, as he prefers to call her, Prissi
Fflowers, for more than a year. He is chastened when he considers
that if he had known who and what Prissi was earlier, he might have
protected her, kept her alive. In a darker, more familiar, vein, he
considers how he might have used Prissi as a key, an intriguing
peace offering to Elena. If he had shown up in the Bury with a girl
who looked like, and, from what his grandson is telling him,
is…was…so much like Elena in her fierce intelligence and even
fiercer will, Elena might have given him a word, a bit of a smile
that would have ameliorated a half-century’s bitterness, loss and
remorse. Fflowers tells himself that if he had known that Prissi
existed, of who and what and how she was, he could have insured
that what he had built, his company, collections and wealth, would
have been hers, rather than left to the schools, fools and
foundations he has named.

If.
If.

As Joe talks, one
if
after another
come to the old man’s mind. After Joe leaves, those ifs cause
Fflowers to sift and re-sift memory. To look at what he has
done—all of the things he has accomplished, all the people and
things he has gathered around him, and, lastly, all of the things,
despite the long years, monumental intelligence and Herculean
efforts, that he has not done…respect his wife, love his sons,
forgive himself.

Fflowers measures. He reviews. As the hours
pass and the sun moves past its meridian to begin its own slow fall
from grace, the old man listens to things in his head he has not
heard in years.

He listens to cautions and secrets and words
of praise. He hears the whispered concerns of the machines which
surround him. The old alchemist weighs and balances and, at the end
of the hours of doing that hard math, he concludes that he has just
two things of true significance left for him to do. The fate of
Cygnetics becomes background chatter. The active hands Adanan and
Jack may have had in the deaths of Beryl and Prissi Langue is
someone else’s burden. His place in history will be shaped by hands
other than his own and written by strangers.

As the afternoon begins to fade, Joshua
Fflowers takes pen to paper and writes, “I am sorry.” He seals that
note and writes two sets of numbers, the very same numbers that
Allan Burgey had left for Prissi. He puts that envelope into a
larger one along with a note that it is his wish that the envelope
be delivered to the location whose coordinates he has just written.
He seals that envelope and addresses it to Thes Mason, his roto
pilot.

Fflowers’ finger pulses a button, and when a
triad of attendants respond, he tells them that he wants to be
disconnected from his support systems so that he can spend a few
minutes in his gallery, loggia and gardens. His guardians protest,
but Fflowers protests more.

The old man is freed of his tethers and
placed in a wheelchair. When an obese, smoky smelling nurse tries
to help him, the old man waves him away. He hooks the control knob
with a claw like hand and drives toward the gallery. He takes his
time admiring the idealized marble forms that have survived since
they were carved by philosophers and fools three thousand years
before. He studies the men and women with their perfect, smooth,
white hard beauty and form…perfect humans, except for their missing
limbs, half-faces, and hidden stony hearts. He moves out of the
gallery, into the elevator, and up a flight.

Despite being one hundred thirty stories over
Manhattan, Joshua Fflowers can smell spring as soon as he wheels
himself outside into the garden. The air is so fine that he takes
small sips as if he were drinking an old Calvados. He slowly motors
down the loggia that runs alongside the gardens. His alternates his
attention between the azaleas and hyacinths in the raised granite
planters and the statues that run the length of the black and green
marbled colonnade. He stares at his statues and wonders about those
who could see such potential in the world around them that they
felt compelled to invent gorgons, gryphons, harpies, unicorns and
chimera. Krakens and centaurs.