All Living : A Seedvision Saga (9781621473923) (45 page)

Instantly the wind changed directions, coming suddenly from behind and forcing him down into a vertical dive. Kole pushed forward on the control bar this time, compensating somewhat, but as his legs swung too far to the left the glider began to tailspin, falling rapidly.

The unexpected plunge caused Kole to bite his tongue, and he tasted the coppery salt of his own blood. Water squeezed out of his eyes as the wind blew like sharp slivers of glass.

Kole realized it was more than his imagination. Bits of debris swirled around him, fragments of dirt and particles of earth. The air seemed full of projectiles stinging his exposed skin and slashing at his clothing. Thoughts of peaceful afternoons and calm weather raced through his mind, but it was more a longing than a command for nature to desist its harassment of his safety. The tempest was too far along to respond to his belated suggestions. The wind could not hear the harmonics of his mind over the voice of its own intimidation.

The subtle influence of mental pictures that Kole fashioned for the responsive side of the storm were flung out of his mind’s reach as the glider continued to spiral faster out of control, the ground drawing nearer with each second. The
seedvision
was failing him. Kole glanced at the ground and saw from his now closer perspective that the entire area was one large field or planted garden. Brief glimpses of color showed where fruits and vegetables grew in abundance, stretching now in all directions, great green swaths of cultivation interspersed with wide rows of cleared paths.

The groundcover gave Kole some little feeling of consolation. There were very few large trees in the area to tear at the cloth wings on his descent, and what trees there were lay scattered about in clustered groves, providing ample room for safely landing between them. He was sure he could dodge them.

Kole struggled to get a controllable wind under him again. He was falling far too fast. He pulled his legs in and up then angled them out to counter his spiral. The exertion stressed the bamboo support above his head too much and his heart turned to ice water as he heard a cracking sound, a crunching of wood. Kole looked up and watched as the central wooden pole split almost in half. Reaching up with one hand, Kole seized the support at the fractured point and held it together. The wind jerked at both pieces, tugging warlike to pull the ends out of his grasp, but he held on tightly, willing the wood to mend with a mental harmony of mending; praying that his
seedvision
would not fail him a second time.

The ground was only a few hundred feet below him now and rushing up fast. Working his guide bar one handed, he experimented with his limited options, desperate to bring the feeble craft back under control. The forces of nature struggled against his efforts, curbing his attempts. But he could feel the wood under his right hand bonding to itself, fibers stretching, joining. The split was still there, a hairline crack that threatened the stability of the craft, but it was holding.

With a final commanding glance at the damage under his fingers, Kole took the upper hand and reluctantly moved it to join his other on the control bar. He winced as he felt the vibrating strain the forces of nature placed on the fractured spline. With a tremendous effort of strength and willpower, he pulled the flyer out of its spin and managed to nearly get it level. Even Kole’s extra ordinary strength was barely a match for the force of the gale that buffeted his fragile wings.

Kole looked down and spat some of the blood out of his mouth. To his surprise, he was much lower than he’d imagined. During his uncontrolled freefall, Kole had focused more on maintaining his craft than on watching as the ground seemingly rushed up to meet him. Now he barely had time to wrench his legs around and angle the wings of his glider between the walls of two enormous buildings. Where had they come from?

He tried to reduce his speed, but he could not. The wind once again had him between its teeth and was shaking him from side to side. It pulled him down and pushed him forward as if it were eager for him to meet his Maker. But the Gardener had promised him a long life, and Kole took comfort in that assurance. What the Creator had not promised him was freedom from fear and pain and injury. Kole cast that thought aside rapidly. What lies ahead, lies ahead. He could not turn back.

The buildings were all around him now, Kole saw. He had mistaken them at first glance for lush ground-level gardens, an easy mistake, since they were covered with vines and ivy that grew from the roofs of the structures and spilled down their stony faces. Grapes the size of fists hung in ripe, purple clusters, weeping pale juice that glistened in the light of the sinking sun. Their thin skins were swollen to near bursting. Berries of various colors cascaded over the edges of the rooftops and hung heavily from thick stems. Flowers here and there adorned the branches like faceted jewels upon a shifting emerald gown, not that he had time to admire them.

Kole saw that all of the roofs of the buildings below and around him were also blooming with a profusion of yellows and oranges. Melons and corn, lettuces and bean pods were thriving in the dense, rich soils on the flat stone tops of the city. A city of stone covered in a layer of swaying green life, no wonder Kole had mistaken the dwellings from the air. The strangeness of the landscape had tickled his awareness, but he had been so consumed with the elation of his flight, his own thoughts after being shot at and then the near panic of the storm. Now he struggled to keep his glider centered between two of the taller buildings. Giant, fifty-foot tall walls, laced with tendrils of Remus and narthicant, towered imposingly over him, casting long shadows.

The wind buffeted him through their narrow valleys, and he steered with his legs and his hands, trying not to overcompensate. Through the gauntlet of the towers, Kole maneuvered around other equally hazardous obstacles, other mountains of buildings, all hidden from plain sight beneath their curtains of verdure. The wind was unpredictable and strange, not adhering to the tendencies that Kole had long since come to rely on. His
seedvision
confirmed that these were indeed man-made halls and homes, rock sheered from other rock and mortared snugly together. The hanging gardens had tricked his eye from the air though, causing the land to look flat when it was anything but that.

What was this place? It seemed vast and well-tended. The size of the buildings shamed many of the structures that Kole had encountered on his travels. The paths between the crops that Kole had seen from the air were actually broad streets between the umbrage-covered walls.

Kole smelled animals, many animals. But the air, though strong and mean-spirited, smelled fresh and clear, not tainted with the burning dry-eyed smell of excrement. Carts leaned empty and unhitched upon their back wheels and railings. Where were the people?

A city this large should be teeming with people, bustling about in the fading light, wrapping up the remains of their wares and tying loose ends. And it was quiet.
Almost too quiet,
thought Kole. Where are the sounds of the children running and playing, parents scolding, animals braying and mooing and barking? A door slamming? A boot scraping?

Kole nearly had his glider under control and was looking for a place to land. There, ahead. At the end of the street was a broad, open area with a stone well in the center of it. The ground looked to be packed dirt and cobbled stone, but Kole had landed in worse places. He aimed his glider for this new target and kept his eyes fixed on that destination. He was vaguely aware when the wind erratically swirled off the face of one building and tossed him off-balance toward another. But it didn’t matter. He was only a few feet off the ground. Just a few more yards and he’d be clear of the walls altogether and safely landed. But he was unaware of the door that opened just in front of him.

He pushed forward on his control bar to lift the nose of the glider up and stall the craft, which would have allowed him to then glide into his landing. He spread his legs apart, easily enough despite the clinging burrs, and swung them forward to meet the ground.

The gasp of a woman’s voice sounded just as Kole realized that she had stepped out of the open doorway and directly into his path.

“Look out,” Kole yelled and then collided with her. She had just time to inhale a surprised breath before Kole’s outstretched legs scooped her up under both of her arms. Her face, and her wide, white eyes, stared at him in something like wonder. Kole was so surprised he just stared back. Thankfully his muscle memory caused him to quickly pull his control bar back toward his chest, and a fortuitous blast of wind lifted the glider back up into the air before they could crash.

The girl was beautiful. Stunning to be exact. Kole had never seen anyone like her. Her eyes gleamed like crystal in the setting sun and sent chills down his spine. Her lips were trying to form words, but she seemed to have forgotten the language. She gripped his legs tightly with her arms, so tight he felt their bones bump each other. Her hair tumbled down out of the bun she had on her head and swirled freely around them like a golden nimbus. Of course these thoughts were fleeting, less than a second, but brilliant in hindsight as Kole recalled them later. The moment he had met her.

She was slim and lightweight, but the glider, not designed for the awkward ballast of both their bodies reacted sluggishly to Kole’s commands. The strange wind from the west blew them higher, above the roofs of the lower houses, and then slackened.

“Hold on,” yelled Kole. “I’m going to get us down from here.” But the words sounded faint compared to the threnody of blood pounding in his ears, and he was not at all sure that she had heard him. The girl just continued to stare up at his face. It was unnerving, all the more so because Kole felt vulnerable beneath that gaze. It pierced the polished solitude of his heart.

He fought the overburdened controls of his glider, angling toward the low roof of the nearest building. But this time the wind seemed to actually help him, and with a soft breeze guided him toward the solid safety of the overgrown roof.

Kole sensed the girl’s feet touch the vegetation and pushed out hard on his bar, dropping into the springy mat of foliage with a grunt. His legs had unwrapped themselves from her as he landed, and he let the glider tip back onto its tail. He untied the harness from his chest and let it drop away. The wind died suddenly, and they stood there in the still empty pocket of the world, face-to-face and body-to-body, staring at each other in disbelief and stunned surprise. Kole felt he should say something, but the girl spoke first.

“I want to do that again,” she breathed, and her wide smile captured him, made him smile too.

Kole laughed. It was a release of all the tension he had felt up to that moment. The harrowing ride against the grain of the world, his shock at crashing into this amazing woman, and his deep sense of relief to finally have his feet on solid ground, even if it was not quite ground in the traditional sense of the word.

“That was incredible,” she said. “Why are you laughing at me?”

Kole’s muscles ached from his long flight. He wanted nothing more than to sink down onto his back and relax under the gaze of the first twinkling stars of the night.

“I’m not,” he started to say, “I’m just, oh, I am so sorry about all this. I didn’t see you come out of that door, and I had no idea the wind would pick up like that. Are you okay? You’re not hurt, are you? I’m terribly sorry. I tried to steer, but nothing about my glider would respond the way it was supposed to. I should have…”

“Shhh…” the girl said quietly, bringing the torrent of Kole’s apologies to an abrupt halt. “I’m alright. I’m not hurt.” She paused, then added, “What did you call your contraption? A glider? It’s amazing. Did you build it? Is it broken? Can you take me up with you again? I have never felt anything as wonderful as that, flying above the tops of my father’s buildings. How did you learn to do that? Can you teach me? Or at least take me back up with you sometime? When I stepped out of that door and you swooped down on me I thought I’d been caught by some terrifying bird, to be taken to its nest, torn apart, and fed to its chicks. And then I saw you and your face, like from a dream, and your strange purple wings, and then the world was dropping away, and I was afraid I would too, but looking at you somehow gave me courage, you know? Like if you could do it, then I could too. I know it sounds crazy, like I’m going crazy, but surely you’ve felt it? This feeling like the world is bigger than you’ve ever imagined it could be. Oh, I don’t know how to describe it. Maybe I am going crazy. Going crazy on a roof in front of a man whose name I don’t know.”

Her words ran and tumbled over each other in a hurry to be heard. The two of them gazed at each other, out of breath and out of words, but making introductions that words were insufficient to foster. The wind was still, and the pleasant scent of flowers and fruit filled the air and wafted over them, stirring her hair and his heart. How long they stood there, Kole didn’t know. He meant to answer her questions right away, to tell her at least his name, but he seemed to have misplaced it for the moment. The world around them seem to slow down and blur, as if he were moving so fast that he was draining the world of movement, robbing it of motion, and leaving nothing for anything or anyone else.

Not true.
She
was moving. Kole watched the pulse in her neck, rapid, hidden behind a veil of honey-colored hair, her breathing, causing her breasts to rise and fall.
No, don’t look there, Kole
. He observed the nervous twitch of a finger and the flutter of an eyelash; the tip of a tongue wetting dry self-conscious lips. Kole saw it all in the twinkling of an eye and memorized every detail before the world faded back into being and began again to turn.

She giggled, childlike, blushing, suddenly aware that she should be nervous in his presence. He was a man, a handsome man, her
dream
man. At least that much had been true. Would the rest of it come true as well? If so, she glanced down at his body and flushed hotly at the swarm of warm feelings and thoughts that flooded her core like skyfire bugs in a bottle. She looked away, down. She clasped her hands in front of her and looked everywhere but at him, everywhere but into his eyes; his deep blue, maybe green, eyes, brow-shadowed and smoldering, measuring her, penetrating. She…had…to…speak.
Say something,
her mind screamed at her.