Gods of Earth (51 page)

“Lie down!” Sarah called, flopping backwards.

Thetis followed her example.

And then they hit the Earth.

The cabin bit into the ground and dragged forward. Sarah and Thetis both lay with their feet toward the front of the cabin, and this saved them, as they shot forward and hit hard with knees bent, their feet flat against the front panels as the cabin crunched and folded.

The ship then leaned far back, bouncing and skidding across the ground. The engines screeched and crunched, and then fell silent.

The ship shuddered and settled. The silence, after days of the engines roaring, was palpable.

“Thetis?” Sarah asked. Her ears rang.

The Mother lay with her eyes closed and mouth open, and did not answer. Sarah was stunned but she clung to the tilted side of the cabin and managed to lift herself to her feet. The ship tottered, then settled again.

The front of the cabin was crushed. Through the broken windows, Sarah could see that the black makina birds circled them still, but they remained perhaps a hundred paces above them in the air.

Thetis opened her eyes as Sarah bent over her.

“What happened?” she asked.

“We crashed.” Sarah looked to the Engineer, still strapped in her seat. “Sar?”

No answer.

“The Makine?” Thetis asked.

“Still circling above. Waiting to see if we’re dead, perhaps.”

“No,” Thetis took Sarah’s hand and let herself be helped up. “They’re afraid to come down here. They’re afraid of the modghasts. It is said that the Makine are easy to… possess.”

They stumbled to the side of the Engineer. The crushed control panel was torn in the center. Two long metal rods that had been somewhere inside it had thrust through the folded and torn steel and into Sar’s stomach. Only then did Sarah notice that they went through the seat, and came out its back. Sar held one in each hand, slick with red blood. She looked up at Sarah, then Thetis.

“This is fatal damage,” she whispered. “I’m broken beyond repair, for this workshop.” She nodded at the stark cabin around them, the empty grasses before them.

“Can’t we.…” Sarah faltered. But what could they do, here in the middle of a barren waste of grass?

They heard a sound now, like a humming mixed with the sound of the wind in the grass. Their ears rang with the silence, after two
days with the roaring engines, but this strange sound was clear. Thetis and Sarah both leaned forward, looking out of the smashed windows, expecting the Makine to make a second attack. Sarah gripped her sword handles.

But the black Makine were flying away, back toward Yggdrasil. Yggdrasil itself looked very near to Sarah, but again she could not tell. A cloud passed over, darkening the green slope of grass before them.

And then the sound grew, and Sarah saw a shimmer of bright, sparkling lights above the grass atop a mound about two dozen paces before the ship. Slowly, the lights coalesced into a human silhouette.

“Is that,” she whispered, pointing, “a modghast?”

“No.” Thetis whispered also. “That’s one of the Sidhe. I believe that’s one of the Sidhe.”

“The Sidhe?”

“Lucenfolk,” Thetis explained. “You call them Lucenfolk.”

Other lights appeared over the crest of the mound, a whole crowd of human forms solidifying out of a vague mist of sparkling light. They floated down the hill.

“Lucenfolk,” Sarah whispered, awed. “Lucenfolk.”

“Leave me,” Sar croaked. She coughed, winced in horrible pain from the jerking of her chest that the hacking caused. She spat blood. “I know these ones. I know them. I’m not afraid of them.” Blood ran now in a broad stream from her feet down under the console. Her face turned ashen. “I say goodbye to you. Save the boy. I’ll have a talk with these ones. Go. May your days be peaceful and creative.”

Thetis looked at Sarah. The Mother’s hands shook, and the hint of tears started in her eyes, but she said, clearly, “Chance,” as if to echo Sar’s reminder that they had still to race forward and fight to save the boy. “We know now that the makina has turned on us, because she sent these birds after us. We must hurry.”

Sarah nodded. She put her hand on Sar’s shoulder, feeling tears come herself.

“Thank you,” she whispered. “And goodbye. May God have mercy on you.”

Sarah scrambled to the back of the cabin, which sloped slightly up. Glancing often back at the slowly approaching Lucenfolk, she gathered into a sack what food they had left, then slung it over her shoulder. Thetis pushed open the door, which fell open with a clang. Then she stopped with one hand on the door frame. They both looked at Sar.

“Go,” Sar said. She could not turn to look at them but somehow she knew from the silence that they hesitated because of her. She still gripped the metal rods in blood-slick hands. “I’ve built a lot. I built a lot.”

Thetis nodded. Sarah leapt out the door, and Thetis followed.

In a moment, they were surrounded by the shining, blinding shards of light that comprised Lucenfolk bodies.

Sarah jerked back in surprise when one appeared before her, just an arm’s length away.

“Blood pledge,” it said.

“Blade pledge blade,” another sang behind her. And then all around they seemed to be singing, and none of the words was clearly before or after another.

“Blood pledge blade pledge blade pledge blood pledge blade.…”

“What do you mean?” she whispered.

Thetis pulled at her hand.

“We must hurry,” Thetis said. And she added, “They never explain themselves.”

Sarah let herself be pulled along, not looking where she was going but looking rather around at the crowd of lights, the Lucenfolk.

Their chant continued, following them. “Blood pledge blade pledge blood pledge blade pledge blood.…”

Sarah had long doubted they existed. And she had long wanted to see them. She felt a roiling of emotions, convinced now that her mother had told the truth, surprised to admit to herself that she had ever considered that her mother had lied when, years ago, she had told tales about the Lucenfolk.

She turned her head, letting Thetis tow her along, and called out, “What does it mean, ‘blade mother’?”

They gave no answer but “Blood pledge blade pledge blood pledge blade pledge.…”

And then, after a few more steps, Thetis and Sarah passed beyond the crowd of Lucenfolk and ran free, into tall grass waving in a mild wind. The sun shone down over the edge of a single voluminous white cloud directly above.

Yggdrasil cut the sky in twain before them. The wreck of their airship lay behind them, and all around it the Lucenfolk seemed to dance and run and flicker in and out of being.

“What does ‘blade mother’ mean?” Sarah called out again.

But they gave her no answer and only continued to chant, “Blood pledge pledge blade pledge blood pledge.…”

That last October when Sarah’s mother lay in bed, a few months from death, Sarah had sat at her side and held loosely her burning hand. Her mother’s fingers and palm were worn smooth and had always been cool before, like a breeze; her mother had often brushed Sarah’s cheek as she passed by on some busy chore or other. Fever made the hand hot now.

Sarah had just started her apprenticeship. Her father and brother were in the fields, the grandparents were walking the grounds, and her mother relaxed to be alone with her only daughter.

They shared a secret honesty together, as sometimes a child and a parent may share when they are very close. With the men of the
house, Sarah’s mother spoke with the optimism and the caution one reserved for a child or a sensitive aunt. But she treated Sarah, when they were alone, as an equal.

“You and I understand that the world doesn’t fall apart if it turns out that some of our ideas aren’t quite right,” her mother had once told her. “Men don’t understand that. Men need you to protect every little hope and every little notion they’ve got. Their souls are like pottery, like fired clay—try to change its shape and it breaks.”

Sarah laughed. “What are our souls made of?”

“Earth and water. Our souls are like wet clay. We can bend and change.”

It made Sarah feel special, and strong, and mature, to share this confidence. It also made her feel lonely. Her mother had been raised a Truman but not a Puriman until she was fifteen, when her own father, Sarah’s grandfather, had converted. Sarah’s mother had never complained or spoke an ill word about an Elder or a custom, but a sigh here, and a frown there, had made it clear to Sarah that her mother found some Puriman rules a burden. By sharing this with Sarah in her tone and weariness, Sarah’s mother had lightened her burden by shifting it a bit onto her quickly maturing daughter.

That day, Sarah had piled pillows behind her mother, propping her up in bed, and had thrown open the window so that her mother could look out at the hills turning gold with autumn. The cool air that blew in carried just a hint of the fine smell of piling red and brown leaves. The sun struck down with brief clarity against the house.

“I always loved autumn,” her mother said.

“I know.”

They sat in silence for a long while as her mother stared at the hills. Sarah looked out there also. Part of her itched to get up and go out. The air smelled sweet with cut hay, the sky glowed bright, and some of the other girls had told her they were riding horses by the lake today. Sarah was fifteen. It was hard to sit still on such a day.

Then she looked over at her mother and saw that a hint of tears reddened the woman’s eyes. Shame shot through Sarah as she realized again that her mother was dying, and that they both knew it. In a short while she would be gone. Sarah would lose this woman whom she loved deeply, and she would be alone in the house with a quiet grandmother and three men whose souls were brittle as fired clay.

“What is it, mother?” she whispered.

“I know that people have said spiteful things, about how I talked so many times, for so many years, about the day I saw Lucenfolk in those hills.”

“Tell me again,” Sarah said. For her mother had not told her the story in more than five years, and she knew her mother longed to tell it once more.

“You had been born not long before. A beautiful baby, but tiny. Not big like you are now—couldn’t hardly imagine you’d grow to be a tall girl.

“I went up into those hills, just past where old hermit Sirach now lives. Had you in a sling, looking for mushrooms. Mostly I just hankered to walk. It was like today. Fifteen years ago. The fine end to a fine year, a year to remember. A very good harvest in our fields and everyone’s fields. Great vintages at the crofts. Four babies born that summer, other than you. And that was the year a witch brought the Kyriens a boy, too.

“I had walked a while there where the trees grow on the terraced earth, where there had been vineyard rows a long time ago. I wasn’t much looking, but I’d found a few mushrooms. And then it happened. First the silence. It’d been kind of noisy. It’d not rained in weeks, and a wind was blowing, so the dry leaves were shushing this way and that. But suddenly they all stopped. The wind was still. Birds quieted. There was a feeling around us like the air was being squeezed. You’d been sleeping but your eyes popped open wide.

“A sound came up out of the silence that I can’t describe. Like a little stream going over rocks. Like thousands of tiny soft bells. But not really like those things at all.

“I looked around and it all grew darker, though there was still not a cloud in the sky. Then I saw the first of the Lucenfolk. It stepped right out of a tree. Or so it seemed. I thought later that it had somehow stepped out from behind the tree maybe, but that really makes no more sense than it stepping out of the tree. The tree wasn’t big enough to hide it—it was a little scrappy maple like that.”

She held her fist up feebly: a trunk as round as a woman’s clenched fingers.

“The Lucen was silver and white and shining. It looked just like the water sparkling on the lake, but just imagine the shape of a woman or a man like that. And more came out of trees, out of nothing, then, all around us. Tens of them. And that beautiful sound was all about us.”

Sarah’s mother looked at her.

“They were beautiful. Like nothing you could imagine.” She blinked out two tears. “And they spoke to me. They spoke to me.”

“You never told me that.”

“I never told anyone. Never anyone, all these years. But now I’m telling you. Before I.…” Her voice faltered. After a few seconds she continued, “They spoke. It was hard to understand, and it frightened me, but they all spoke, all of them, all at different times, talking over each other but also kind of like the chorus at church talking with each other, and they said.…”

“What?”

“‘Blade mother.’”

Sarah just stared.

“Or ‘mother blade.’ But strange and like music. Blade mother blade mother mother blade mother. All mixed up. Can’t tell which word came first. I expected you to cry out. I think I squeezed you hard in fear and surprise and all. But you didn’t. And neither did I.
I don’t know how long I watched them. They just walked all about us. This way and that. Until they walked back into the trees. Or behind them. And were gone.”

“What does it mean? ‘Blade mother’?” Sarah asked, in a whisper.