The Child Goddess (24 page)

25

“VOLCANIC,” JIN-LI SAID.

Isabel looked down on the tiny island. It hardly seemed possible that this benign planet had ever had volcanoes spewing lava and ash and hot rock above its peaceful seas.

The peak of the ancient cindercone formed the center of the island. Black waves of lava had frozen in their flow down the northern slope. On the southern side of the island, a boulder-strewn meadow of the long yellow grass fell away to a wide strip of forest. Crescent beaches gleamed white between the dark green of the forest canopy and the emerald of the sea. As they completed their circle, the storm clouds piling across the eastern sky dulled the waters to olive. Gusts of wind buffeted the flyer.

Oa huddled in her seat, tense and silent, her teddy bear clutched to her chest.

On their second circuit, the flyer skimmed the treetops. The upper branches shifted in the wind created by their passage. Boyer banked over the lava field, and flew up and over the ageworn volcanic dome, down to the southern meadow.

“Oh, damn,” Adetti groaned. “There it is.”

Boyer said grimly, “Doesn’t look good.”

Jin-Li bent forward to see past Boyer, jaw tightening.

The flyer lay on its side, canted against a sloping boulder. Boyer turned and hovered above the field. The spin of the rotors blew a ragged circle in the grass around the other flyer. One of its struts splayed skyward, the other dug into the ground. Boyer flew a few meters below it, and settled to a landing. Even before the doors opened, they saw that the impact with the boulder had shattered the flyer’s windscreen.

Boyer turned off his motor. The blades slowed and stopped, and silence filled their ears.

Oa spoke for the first time since leaving the power park. “Gretchen?” she whispered, not taking her eyes from the crashed flyer.

“We don’t know yet,” Isabel said through dry lips. She touched her cross.

The door retracted, bringing in a wave of cool air scented with the promise of rain. Jin-Li jumped nimbly out, striding to the crashed flyer, climbing up on the bent strut to look inside.

“Is she there?” Adetti called.

“No.” Jin-Li stood on the strut to scan the patchy meadow. A hundred yards downhill, the edge of the forest looked impenetrable, a fortress with tangled walls of green and brown. Above the meadow, a cairn of black stones sprawled at the top of the hill. “I don’t see any sign of her.”

Adetti and Boyer climbed out, and went to look inside the flyer. “She left her wavephone on the console,” Adetti said.

Boyer looked from Adetti to Jin-Li, and then to Isabel. “Don’t know what to do,” he said glumly. “Or where to look.”

Isabel climbed out. The long grass scratched at her bare legs. Insects buzzed, then quieted as a roll of thunder jittered across the sky. Oa, still in her seat, stared fearfully at the crashed flyer, and then over her shoulder at the forest. “Oa, I’ll help you out,” Isabel began, and then stopped.

A wail sounded above the rising wind, a screeching as of a wounded animal.

“Where’s that coming from?” Adetti demanded. No one had an answer. The wind against the rocks made the sound seem to circle them, to bounce from random directions.

Isabel held out her hand to Oa, and Oa took it, leaping lightly to the ground, her knees bending as easily as the yellow grass in the wind. The cry came again. The fine hairs rose on Isabel’s arms.

Oa whirled to look down the hill at the forest as the eerie sound thinned and faded on the whine of the wind. She said something in her own language.

“What was that?” Isabel said. “Oa, I didn’t understand.”

Oa babbled something, out of which Isabel caught only “anchens” and “Gretchen.” She released Isabel’s hand, and then she was off, racing down the grassy hill to the treeline.

“Oa!” Isabel cried. “Oa, no! Wait . . .” A chill crept up her side, the side where moments before Oa had stood so close. It seemed the child had left a hole in the very air, a vacuum that could be filled only by her presence. “Oa—wait for us to—Oa, don’t—”

There was no answer. The last glimpse Isabel had was of Oa’s bare pink soles twinkling up into the forest canopy.

Now she could hear nothing but the strengthening wind of the coming storm. She took a few futile steps, and then halted, standing uncertainly, bereft, in the rocky meadow.

*

OA HEARD ISABEL’S
calls, but the words seemed to mean nothing, as if they were words she had never heard before. As if no time had passed since she and Po and Ette and the others had first heard the whip of flyer blades, seen the men’s hands reaching for the stones of the kburi, since they had watched Nah-nah fall under the sibilant crackle of the men’s weapons. Oa’s feet sought the path to the forest as if she were coming home. Isabel was part of an illusion of soft beds and good food and kind people. Isabel was a dream, too good to be true. The habits of her years on the island of the anchens were real, hard and simple.

She reached the wall of trees, the familiar thicket of roots and broad trunks, the vines that trailed to the forest floor. She might have heard feet pounding behind her, voices shouting, but they were not real. What was real was the canopy above that would lead to the nest deep in the forest, where the anchens might be hiding from the terrors of the pale strangers, their flyers that brought fear and destruction and death.

Oa leaped to the nearest buttress root.

The slick surface of the wood was familiar under her long toes. She shinnied up it to the lowest branch. The thready bark met her knees with a familiar clutching. Her fingers grasped its layered fibers, her toes locked into its texture. The scent of the nuchi leaves filled her nostrils, and the canopy, dark and thick and vine-hung, called her home. All that was left was to discover if she was the only anchen left to inhabit it.

Oa remembered a night long, long ago. She had passed no more than three or perhaps four tatwaj. She had startled awake, in darkness, finding herself outside the protective walls of shahto. She hadn’t known where she was, or how she had gotten there, or where Mamah or Papi were. She was too frightened to move, too frightened even to cry. It was every child’s worst nightmare come to pass. She was lost, and alone. The familiar forest filled her with dread. The night threatened unseen dangers. Vines rustled and night animals chittered. Oa huddled in her sleeping dress, her bare knees deep in the root mat that covered the forest floor, her arms over her head.

It was the sting at her ankle that pierced her into action. She screamed, leaping up, kicking at whatever had bitten her. She saw the forest spider as it fell, its legs a-tangle, its forward eyes gleaming dully in the starlight. Its venom flared up her leg, and she screamed again, a shrill of pure terror.

Her mamah and papi reached her in moments. Her mamah swept her up, clutching her with frantic strength while her papi smashed the forest spider with a canoe paddle. Other people came out, and children, wakened by the ruckus, wailed from their sleeping mats. Someone lit a torch, and exclaimed over the flattened carcass of the forest spider, but Papi kept beating it until it was indistinguishable from the moldering leaves and fungi of the forest floor.

Mamah and Papi carried Oa safely into shahto, and snuggled her between them in their own bed, stroking her hair and her back until her tears stopped and the burning of the spider bite eased enough for her to sleep. She had walked in her sleep, they said, pulled aside the wall mats and wandered out into the forest. After that her papi made a great show of tying the mats tightly at night. And an elder of the people came to her in the morning with a poultice for her spider bite, and all the uncles and aunts and cousins made a great fuss over her.

Only later, when she was an anchen, did she remember the terrors of that night. It was not the forest spider that made it horrible, though that was bad enough. The insurmountable fear, the one every anchen faced as the elders left them standing on the beach of the island of the anchens, was the fear of being alone.

The anchens clung to each other for comfort, Oa and the others, curling together in their nest to sleep in a tangle of arms and legs, even their breath mingling in the closeness of their refuge. It was all they had for comfort in the wide, fearsome darkness. Oa didn’t think she could bear it if she were the only one left.

Oa worked her way through the canopy, finding thick branches to support her weight. A long, angry cry sliced the thick air of the forest. She knew who made that sound, who raged now through the trees, searching. It was not a sound she had heard before, but she recognized the call of a predator. A hunter. And it—she—had given up on Oa, and was hunting for the others.

A vine gave under Oa’s hand, and she caught herself by hooking one foot around a nuchi branch. A tree lizard slid along a vine near her face, its legs flashing as it disappeared among the leaves. Her breath came short, and perspiration dripped down her ribs. If Gretchen found the anchens, terrible things could happen. They would not know, Po and Ette and Bibi and the others, what Gretchen was. And if Gretchen had one of the weapons—would she kill one of the anchens for its flesh? Or carry it back to the infirmary, put it under the spider machine to be taken apart, as Doctor had tried to take Oa apart? They hadn’t found what they wanted in Oa, but perhaps, in one of the others . . .

She gasped for breath, and hurried faster. Her feet slipped on the wood, her soles gone soft from wearing shoes. The bark abraded the skin of her hands, the insides of her knees, where her old calluses had vanished in the soft baths and sweet creams of Isabel’s care.

She called silently to Raimu-ke to protect them, Bibi and Ette and Po and all of them. And for herself she prayed, Let them be there, please, Raimu-ke. Let them still be there.

*

THE POWER PARK
on its deforested island had given little indication of the true nature of Virimund’s forest. Here on the island of the anchens, the great trees stood wide apart, the crowded root buttresses flaring like closely set pillars to create a dense landscape. The broad leaves, almost black in the shadows, narrowed to needle tips. The twisting stems of vines looped low to the forest floor, and the root mat was deep, soft with the detritus of decaying plants, alive with tiny insects. The birds had fallen silent under the threat of the thunderstorm. Some slender creature slithered up a tree trunk so fast Jin-Li almost missed it. In other circumstances, Jin-Li would have found all of this fascinating, but Isabel’s frantic worry and Adetti’s and Boyer’s grim faces made the trek tense.

Isabel had dashed after Oa, but by the time she reached the forest edge, the girl had vanished into the canopy. For long minutes, Isabel called after her. She received no answer. Jin-Li had seen the wild look in Oa’s eyes, fear and fury together. Oa would not be called back.

Isabel turned to Jin-Li, pale-lipped and desperate. “Oh, lord,” she said in a thin voice. She held Oa’s shoes in her shaking hands. “Jin-Li—where did she go?”

Adetti and Boyer came panting up behind Jin-Li just as the banshee call sounded again, this time clearly coming from the forest. “That’s Gretchen,” Adetti said to Jin-Li.

“I know.”

“She’s gone mad,” Isabel said faintly. “We have to do something.”

Adetti reached into his pocket. A shock gun appeared in his hand, black and ugly.

“Put that away!” Isabel cried. “What are you thinking?”

“Oa could hurt Gretchen!” Adetti’s face was tight with anger. “You can’t control her, that’s obvious.”

“She’s just a child . . .”

“Rot! And what about the others? We don’t even know what’s out there.”

Boyer said, “Paolo, this is what caused the first tragedy. I’m not having another. Give it to me.”

The two men faced each other in the fading light. Another roll of thunder, deeper and more insistent this time, rattled through the clouds, and a patter of rain began. Boyer put out his hand, and Jin-Li was impressed by the look of authority on his long face. “I’ll protect her if necessary,” he said in a hard voice. “Hand it over.”

Adetti gave up the shock gun. He whirled and glared at Isabel as if it were somehow her fault. “You can’t blame Gretchen,” he said. “She’s ill.”

Isabel’s hand was at her throat. “I know, Paolo. I know she is.” She turned to Boyer, straightening her slender shoulders. A few raindrops filtered through the canopy to gleam on her bare head. “Jacob, what can we do?”

“We have to start by finding Gretchen,” Adetti said.

“Shall we split up?” Isabel asked.

“I don’t think so,” Boyer said. “Better we’re together.”

They all turned in the direction they had last heard the cries. Jin-Li spotted a clear space, marked by a lichen-covered stone. A step closer showed a path, rutted and narrow, carving through the root mat. “Isn’t she likely to have followed this?”

*

WHEN ISABEL FIRST
put her feet on the path, she felt a shiver of recognition. The anchens had broken this trail. How many years ago? And did they still walk its narrow circuit, dodging these vines that hung everywhere, forging this thicket of roots? These furrows would just fit long-toed bare feet like Oa’s. Her own feet, sandaled and inexperienced, moved awkwardly in the ruts. The path wound around copses of trunks, finding the easiest way, the most open space. The canopy hung overhead, mysterious, dense, daunting. And Oa was somewhere up there, had run from her as if their time together had never been. The word “reverted” came to Isabel’s mind, but she thrust it away. She would not think it, would not believe it.

The wailing cry came again, resounding through the shadowed jungle. Isabel stumbled. It was like trying to run in a nightmare, her feet heavy, her way blocked at every turn.

“We’re getting closer,” Adetti said.

“What’s happened to her?” Boyer asked, as they negotiated a cramped twist of the path. “She sounds crazy!”

“She’s desperate,” Adetti said.

“It’s more than that, Paolo,” Isabel said. She stopped for a moment to shake leaf and moss fragments from one sandal. Everyone else stopped, too, and a heavy silence settled around them, the forest creatures disturbed by their passage. Occasional raindrops found their way through the nuchi leaves to patter against the forest floor. Isabel spoke quietly. “It’s Gretchen’s nature to go after what she wants. It’s not part of her character to submit to defeat—and in her mind, the enemy is death. Or worse, perhaps, at least to her, disability.”