The Fecund's Melancholy Daughter (11 page)

“What?” Chills ran down Octavia’s spine.

But the fecund laughed. “I’m kidding. Jeez! It’s yummy, as usual. I can’t wait to see what this one’s all about. Now run along. Let me gestate. And bring me what else I require.
Soon
. Has she told you about that?”

“No.”

“Ha! Well, she will. The old lady isn’t through with you yet, I assure you. We’ll talk again. Hey, are you all right? You seem a little pale. In a few places, anyhow. I hope I didn’t frighten you. I get a little angry, that’s all. I’m bored. I like to make jokes. I’m actually very maternal, you know. Which is an understatement. But maybe next time you could find the key for that gate and come sit right here, next to me?” Patting a mossy stone. “Then you could hold my hand while I deliver? That would be
so
nice. Nice to have a visitor.
Especially
one as comely as yourself. Really, with that nice tattoo all over your face. It’s been many years since I’ve been close to a young girl as beautiful as you. I used to have quite a, well, quite an affinity—a taste, shall we say—for girls as attractive as you.” The monster licked her scaly lips and smiled again. “You’d better go. Let me sleep on this.” She burped.

As Octavia turned, a large salamander, or similar such amphibian, mostly pale green but with fat red spots, appeared on the shoulder of the fecund, grinning, and its face—or so it seemed to Octavia—bore hints of her own features, including the black kholic’s mask, which arced over the snout, mocking her own.

Nahid walked a few paces behind Name of the Sun, on Listower Avenue, between the ever-leaning structures. A chicken ran between them, pursued by a lone, sluggish cobali. The sound of the blacksmith, and the smell of his forge, was in the air.

They were going for a beer.

Bland-faced moon, sinking, peered down upon Pan Renik. He was very near his nest and out of breath. His failure to bring anything back from his expedition stung inside. Within the thin limbs of familiar territory, here at the top of the world, more expanses yawned than either branches or leaves: the dome of the open sky was so close. Winds became stronger, too. Crisper gusts reached Pan Renik’s lungs, more fragrant and liberated than those stifled ones puffing in the stinking settlement.

Pan Renik imagined he could detect hints of impossible reaches. From where, he wondered (for perhaps the thousandth time), could these winds originate?

Before long, powerful yearnings to be elsewhere—somewhere other than this world—coursed through his blood, taking him over, inflaming him with the thwarted desires he could never explain (had he ever anyone to explain anything to). Was there more to life? There had to be, to continue. More than just branches and the open sky and poisonous clouds below.

Looking directly into the waning night, frowning, Pan Renik suddenly paused. Intangible masses of billows extended out to the horizon, of course, dusted white in places by the waning moon and, from underneath, by occasional flashes of far off lights, but there was . . . something else? A new scent? A sound he had not heard before?

He strained to hear, to sniff, to discern.

Nothing.

“Galls,” he swore, though he did not himself know to whom or what he referred.

Small evidences of life arose from the settlement below—a faint, chanted prayer (for the dead man, no doubt), and a child’s brief cry. They were returning to their beds. Wind and the creak of limbs joined with the voices. Belly full of wistfulness (and that’s about all), Pan Renik gave in to the profound wave of futility that suddenly washed over him, draining him of the small hopes he had detected on the night breezes.

Once in a while, like now, he deliberated opening his veins with a sharp piece of wood, spilling his thick red sap over the people below—

A loud wail brought him out of self-indulgence.

From above
.

He looked up.

From his nest
.

Pan Renik’s body went cold: he was utterly at a loss. The wail had not been the caw of a lemur or the scream of a nighthawk. Maybe he’d misheard? Had gliders arrived, in his absence, to romp with abandon on the woven leaves of his bower? No. The cry had been from none of these sources: it had been from a person, a person in need, a person in distress.

A person in his nest.

No one could ever have climbed up while he was gone. No other citizen came here. There was not one in the settlement who could climb as well as he, none brave enough to leave the nets and webs and safeguards they all pathetically clung to down there. Not even padres had the balls to come up.

He made a few low hooting noises, to relieve his anxiety, and bobbed his head.

Who in the world could be up there?

After a few beats of his heart—wondering for just a moment if he should wait until the sun rose farther, so he could see the situation better—Pan Renik forced himself to subdue his fears and climb higher. Still, to his shame, his limbs shook and his bladder tightened as he circled underneath his nest. (Was he weak, like the rest of them? Surely not: he was a brave, exiled warrior!)

Crouching, much nearer, Pan Renik was still unable to see the full extent of his bower—

Then he heard the person in his nest again, weakly calling out.

Unmistakable
.

Followed by what could only be the rustle of something heavy and unseen crashing through foliage—

A startled glider flapped noisily away from where it had been hiding, making Pan Renik nearly fall to his death: heart pounding, he watched the skinny body silhouetted against its own wide sails, flying down, toward the low moon.

Now came a moan of pain, or maybe pleasure, raining through the sparse twigs as if it were substance; Pan Renik cowered and looked back up at his nest in time to see a form moving there, a hard-edged shape, rising from his bower—

Sudden images of his club and handmade mace lying abandoned, useless, stung him like slaps across the face: whoever was up there had access to his weapons.

He was unprepared.

To squash the growing feelings of uselessness and self-condemnation, Pan Renik had to act. “Hey,” he said, keeping just a little hushed, so that padres would not hear, “who’s up there? Who goes there?”

The response came, reedy and pained, in a strong accent that made the two words very strange—hard, for a moment, for Pan Renik to recognize. But a human’s voice. The voice of a woman. “Help me,” it said. “
Help me
.”

Pan Renik stammered, almost in a panic, “Look, keep mum, mum, for goodness sake. Padres could hear you. I’m coming up.”

“In the . . . branches down there. Please. You must help . . .”

How did he manage to climb the last few metres, so familiar, yet, on this night, so strange and alien? How? He did, though, arms and legs moving of their own accord.

After drawing a deep breath, and then another, he pulled himself up, into his bower—

She lay on her back.

Sprawling, body flattened, dark and dully glinting, as if oil from a squirrel’s body had been spread across his nest. At first, he thought—for just a moment—that the woman was a form of creature he had never before seen, but this was a device she lay on, an invention, not a part of her at all, flickering highlights of silver. Her shape covered his nest, drooping off the far end, into the night.

She was in the centre, sheathed from toe to head in the complex, deep red garment, integrated into the device, but even without the tubes and membranes and shiny structural frame that seemed to bind her together, Pan Renik knew that this woman, though human (he decided), was nothing like him. Not like anyone in the settlement. Beneath the clinging layers of the outfit, so tight over her skin, and beneath the mask covering most of her face, this woman was not like anyone.

Dark eyes, buried in the shadow of the headgear, moved. Their gaze was sharp, suspicious, watching him as he leaned closer. Her mouth, obscured within the mask, twisted.

“They shot me down.”

“Who did?”

“They shot down our car. And when I came up . . .”

“Came up?” He frowned at the clouds, then looked back at the woman’s face. What was she saying? That she’d come from
below
the clouds? She was madder than him.

There was so much pain in those eyes, an unfathomable amount. More pain than Pan Renik’s. This realization, for reasons he did not want to think about, made him angry, as if he had sole rights to such despair.

“It’s cold up here,” she said. “My legs are not . . . good. No longer function . . . No air up here, and cold. Are you not . . . cold?”

Pan Renik said nothing. He was staring at the device again, mesmerized by the glints. These tubes were
metal
! Like the padre’s big knife and a few other artifacts padres kept in their trapeza—gifts of the sky power. These tiny objects in his nest were metal. Scattered, several fragments lay between the woman’s legs, several more to the left of her torso. Only padres could touch metal. Metal was what made padres padres. Pan Renik’s mouth had gone dry. Reaching out with one arm, entranced, he could not quite bring himself to lay his fingers on the glinting shapes. Would metal burn him? Or would Anu suddenly descend, to strike him dead, if he touched this sacred material?

He spat off to the side.

What the woman lay on, he saw, in the pre-dawn light (which was creeping across the clouds in his direction with slowly increasing intensity), appeared to be a blanket of sorts, a greasy membrane, spread out across the twigs and branches. The woman’s thick arms, trembling in spasm, were bound within the structure by straps.

He saw the whites of her eyes now.

Her back was broken. He knew. He could tell.

Then, suddenly, Pan Renik understood something else, understood something as clearly as he had ever understood anything in his life: the woman had
flown
to his nest, like a glider, through the skies. From another place, from another world. The device that lay broken in his nest had caused her to fly.

She had dropped into his home.
A gift
.

“Where you from?” he asked, awed. “Where do you come from?”

“Hypoxia.” The woman’s chest seemed broad and strong, yet struggled to rise.

“Hypoxia.” Repeating the word, tasting its magic, Pan Renik could not help but think that hypoxia might be the place the winds came from, the place of his imagination, and to conjure in his mind this other world, one where he would be able to come and go without fear of being chased away, where his past would be forgotten and forgiven. A place where he would not be an exile, nor ever be hungry or lonely. There would be riches there, too, metals of all sorts, and food to be taken by handfuls and stuffed into his face until his belly was finally, once and for all, full.