Ages of Wonder Page 15

  He tossed the coin at the creature’s feet. “Take that, and my thanks for your trouble, and be off with you,” he said.

  “But I not wants penny,” the creature said. Danny walked away. “I wants arrow. Must have arrow.” The creature’s voice rose to a wail behind him.

  “I’ll do what I like,” Danny’s father said, but the woman he was threatening was Maria.

  Danny tried to push her behind him but there was someone else there.

  “You touch our women, you die,” said the Spaniard.

  He held up his knife. It was as long as Danny’s forearm and wickedly sharp.

  “I won’t,” Danny said. “I promise you, sir, I won’t.”

  But suddenly the knife was wreathed in blood and Danny couldn’t breathe.

  Couldn’t breathe, and the Spaniard was laughing, filling up Danny’s world with his voice, his face.

  Danny’s eyes flicked open.

  The creature was kneeling across his chest, crushing him. It stared down out of orange eyes.

  Danny looked around. The men he was sharing the room with were still sleeping, or seemed to be. In the bunk above him, fat old Tom Winters turned in his sleep, making the underside of the mattress bulge alarmingly.

  The creature nursed its injured arm, now horribly swollen, in its good hand.

  “You helps me,” it said. “Make arrow.”

  “I can’t!” Danny said, and flinched at how loud his voice was.

  “But you must,” insisted the creature. “I have help you.”

  Much more of this and the others would wake, Danny was sure. Heaven knew what would happen then.

  “All right,” he said at last. “I’ll help you. But not here.”

  “I have place. Good place. I show you,” the creature said.

  He clambered off the bed. Danny followed him to the window. It was a short drop to the ground below. The creature was surprisingly nimble, considering its bad arm.

  Danny followed it through the quiet streets. A glance at the moon told him it was past three in the morning. He could only hope they weren’t caught out so long after curfew.

  But luck was with them and soon they came to a burnt-out warehouse. Danny followed the creature inside. The smell of charred wood overlaid the older, ingrained scent of the fruit that had been stored there. It wasn’t unpleasant.

  The creature had made a camp in one corner: a few rags piled on a straw pallet for a bed, a surprisingly neat stack of cooking things, and a circle of stones around a firepit where embers still glowed orange-red in the darkness.

  “You live here?” Danny asked. It was a far better home than he had expected.

  “Yes yes,” the creature said. “Sometimes here. Sometime in the forest, in a proper hut up above the ground. But I knew to find arrow maker I must be here, in the whitefolk-city. Look. I show.”

  He went to a corner in darkest shadows and moved aside some rags. Beneath it there was a heavily carved box. He tried to open the lid but winced against the pain.

  “I cannot,” he said at last. “You helps—”

  “I know,” Danny said. “I help you.”

  He went over to the creature.

  “Is my box,” the creature said. “All my important things. Treasure, yes?” Danny nodded. “You not take,” the creature said, as if this possibility had only just occurred to it.”

  Danny flipped the lid open. There were several bundles inside, each one wrapped in oiled sacking.

  The creature reached in and touched one. “See?” it said. “I have collect all what you need to make arrow. I try before, but I spoil, so I need to find someone. Fletcher, they say. Fletcher makes arrow.”

  “Yes but I—” Danny had intended to say—but I really don’t know how to make arrows even if I did watch Grandpa a time or two. Yet the desperation in the creature’s eyes and voice stopped him. He looked around for anything to put off the inevitable. The creature cradled its wounded arm against its chest. “Let me see that,” Danny said, more roughly than he intended.

  “Is nothing. Not hurting,” the creature said, but it held out its arm.

  The wound was hot and swollen, the edges of the wound black with red and yellow streaks coming off it.

  “Doesn’t hurt, my arse,” Danny muttered. “Here, let me help you—”

  “Yes yes! Make arrow!”

  “No—let me see what I can do for your arm. Then we’ll talk about the other thing.”

  The wound was going to need lancing and cauterizing, he thought. He’d helped the ship’s doctor a time or two when they’d skirmished with the Spanish. He’d poured rum down a man’s throat then held him down while the doctor sawed his leg off then tarred the bloody stump.

  The memory bought bitter bile to his throat. This wouldn’t be that bad. He could do it. Though he had no rum and only his little pocket knife . . .

  He squatted down, pulled the knife out and stuck it into the coals to heat.

  “What you do?” asked the creature. “You not need hot knife for arrow?” It looked at its arm. It was beginning to understand, to panic. Danny could see it tensing.

  “No,” Danny said. “Don’t think about it.” He put a snap into his voice. “Sit down here. Talk to me—” He cast around for something that would hold the creature. “Tell me why you need arrows.”

  The creature sat down. It never took its huge eyes off the blade in the embers. “It a story that begins long ago. Long before the white people come here, yes? Before the dark brown people and the yellow people. Only people here the color of nuts then. And in those days was magic.”

  “Okay,” Danny said, suddenly feeling at ease. Clearly the creature was just some poor simpleton. He would clean up its arm, make something resembling an arrow for it to soothe its obsession and send it on its way.

  “Long ago, then, one day before I was born, my father was out hunting with his dogs but he had caught nothing and so as the sun went down he started home. There is a lake a few miles from Talubin—big lake, very beautiful. But this day my father he heard a big noise. So he get down and creep close to see what it is. He think maybe it is birds and he can catch some, yes?” Danny nodded, wondering how long the story would go on and how long the blade would take to heat. “My father, he was a great hunter. He crept close and what you think he see?”

  “Birds?” Danny asked. “Animals?”

  “No!” said the creature triumphantly. “Hundreds of ladies, all naked, bathing in the lake. Their clothes were left all around on the banks, like white flowers.”

  “I’ll have none of your filth,” Danny said, though thoughts of Maria came to him unbidden.

  “Is not filth. For they were not girls like you think. And their clothes were not dresses, they were wings. They were star-maidens, come down to earth to bathe in the lake.”

  “I see,” said Danny. “And I suppose he knew because his dogs told him?”

  “No, he know because even while he watch some more star-maidens fall like fire from the sky—”

  Danny laughed. He couldn’t help it. The story was so ridiculous and the creature so earnest.

  “You make fun. I not tell no more.” The creature turned away and glared at the fire.

  “I’m sorry,” Danny said. He really didn’t think the knife would be hot enough yet, and it would be worse than useless if it wasn’t. “Tell the end of the story. I won’t laugh anymore.”

  The creature turned back. Danny wondered how long it had been since it had anyone to tell its ridiculous tale to.

  “Well then. The star-maidens were very beautiful. My father had a bad thought. He send one dog to fetch a pair of the wings. None of the star-maidens saw. As night fell, they came out of the lake and they sang and they danced to the rising moon. And then they put on their wings again and flew up into the indigo sky. Can you imagine that?”

  “No, I can’t,” Danny said truthfully.

  “But one of them, she not have wings—”

  “Because your father stole them?�
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  “Yes,” the creature said. “But he not bad man, not really. How not to be entranced by such a woman . . . but you know this. I have seen you looking.”

  “It’s not the same,” Danny said. “Maria is—”

  “Ah, ‘te amo, Maria,’ ” said the creature. “She is beautiful too, but she is different from you. Perhaps—maybe not more different than my mother was from my father?”

  “Your mother?” Danny said. The creature stared at him out of those huge orange eyes that burned like coals and for a moment Danny found himself believing it was the child of a star maiden . . .

  The creature nodded. “My father persuaded the star maiden to go home with him. To be his wife, because his first wife was long dead in the earth. And so she became and shared his bed and did all the things a wife must do. And she said she was happy, but her face turned every night to the stars, to her sisters.”

  “And you came along?”

  “Oh yes. I was the first, but there was another. My twin, you would say, though he was not a child of earth. There was nothing of my father in him, for he was born of the placenta that followed me out of my mother when I was born.”

  “How lovely,” Danny said.

  “You said not make fun,” the creature said.

  “Yes,” Danny said. “I should keep my promise.”

  “You must, for I need you to make arrow,” the creature said. “But I finish story. One day when we were between childhood and manhood, my brother found something in the garden hidden under a big stone: a package wrapped in a sack, but lighter than down. It was my mother’s wings. That night, we took them to her and she was so happy! Her face shone like starlight. I remember it so well, after all these years still.”

  “What happened?” Danny demanded.

  “She put the wings on and even though they were old and had been in the ground they bore her up. But we cried. Me and my brother. We loved our papa, but we did not want our mother to leave us.”

  Danny nodded, though he could not imagine loving his father, or ever wanting to stay with him. If he’d been able to get his mother away from him . . .

  But the creature was going on, “ ‘Hush,’ mama said. ‘Hush, you shall come with me, then, where there is no crying, in the great heavens with the stars.’ And she took us out into the garden and she got papa’s biggest spear, and she thrust it into the ground—”

  “The point into the ground?” Danny asked. It was all nonsense, of course, and yet he found himself wanting to believe it. Wanting to believe in star-maidens who stayed with men who loved them.

  “No no. She pushed the other end of the spear into the earth and then she told us to run up the spear and balance on the point and then to jump . . .”

  “I can’t quite see that,” Danny said.

  “It is because you are a man of earth,” the creature said. “I could not see it either. But my brother, he ran lightly up to the spear and jumped on it—his foot on the biting sharp point of it and yet he was not hurt—and sprang into the air. Smaller he grows. Smaller. Into the great heavens with the star-folk. ‘And now you,’ my mother said. And I tried. How I tried. But there was nothing to stand on, and I was afraid of the pain. And so at last she gave up and said farewell to me. And the story is told that she said I would leave these islands and travel far, and that I would have many children and from them the people who are white-skinned would be born—the people like you.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Danny said.

  “Is it?” said the creature. “My people, they likes this story. Yet I never did go anywhere. How could I, when perhaps-maybe my mother would come here again? But I tried many times to make a spear I could leap into the sky from. But I cannot. And then I see bows and arrows. I get bow. But I break all arrows. Lose them in forest. Now I have just some sticks and feathers. You make arrow and fire it from bow. I catch it and ride up to heaven to my mother and brother. Yes?”

  “I suppose,” Danny said. “But first I’m going to deal with your arm. I’m not having you dying of that wound. I won’t have it on my conscience, hear me?”

  “I hear,” said the creature. It looked fearfully at the fire.

  Danny took his belt off. “Bite down on this,” he said. “It will help. And try not to make too much noise. I don’t want the soldiers coming to see what’s happening.”

  The creature stretched its arm out. Danny put his knee on the creature’s hand to keep it fixed in place.

  “Hurts!” said the creature.

  “No, it doesn’t,” Danny said. He waited while the creature put the leather strap into its mouth and bit down.

  “Get ready!” he warned. He pulled the knife out of the embers. It glowed in the darkness. Quick as he could he plunged it into the infected wound. Blood and pus sprayed everywhere, and there was the stink of cooking flesh.

  The creature moaned. Tears glistened on its white cheeks.

  “It’s done,” Danny said. “It’s over.”

  Slowly, the creature turned its face to him. “Now you make arrow,” it said.

  Danny held the feather against the shaft of the arrow he was making, waiting for the glue to dry. The creature watched him as it had watched every move he had made since it revealed his treasures to him—four wooden sticks of the right size and length for arrow shafts, the wing feathers of some hapless bird for fletching, and two coils of hemp string for the bow.

  The bow itself was a revelation—not a pretty thing, but made of good English yew without affectation. Danny demanded to know where the creature had acquired it.

  The creature had refused to look at him, and in the end he had given up asking.

  The creature shambled over to him. Its arm looked much better now; the swelling was down, and there was no pus in it.

  “Arrows are made?” it asked.

  “Two of them,” Danny said. He had no idea if he had done a good enough job. He had only common-sense and his half-memories of his grandfather’s workshop to guide him.

  “Is enough,” the creature said. “You not have time to make more today and I want to go to my mother tonight!”

  Danny followed the creature past a jumble of small wooden houses that crammed together near the edge of the city. The creature seemed not to need a lantern and Danny was glad of it. If they were caught out after curfew . . . if they were caught leaving the town . . . Traitor, he thought. They’d call me a traitor.

  I shouldn’t be here, he thought. And yet the creature led and he followed.

  They came, at last, to a quiet place where palm trees gave way to sharp-bladed grass and then white sand. The sea beyond was inky, and above it the starstudded sky stretched away.

  The creature waved its hand expansively.

  “My mother,” it said. “She is there.”

  “Which one?” Danny asked. He couldn’t resist it.

  “I not know,” the creature snapped. “Now you shoot arrow!”

  Danny took the bow. It had been a long time since he had handled one, but the old memory, the muscle-memory, came back to him.

  The creature stood in front of him. “You shoot up,” it said. “Up.”

  For an instant, Danny entertained the idea of shooting the creature. He could be free of it. But it trusted him, and who was to say whether it had a soul—whether shooting it would be the same as killing a man?

  So Danny aimed high, and on the creature’s mark he fired the first arrow. The shaft sailed over the creature’s head. It made a half-movement, as if it wanted to jump but something restrained it.

  The arrow was lost in the darkness.

  “Again,” the creature said.

  Danny breathed out and found stillness.

  He loosed the arrow.

  It flew up. The creature leapt for it.

  Impossibly, the creature grabbed the arrow in both hands. For a moment there was a hint of white light, the merest flicker around the creature’s fingers.

  In that instant it seemed as if the arrow might lift the creature u
p.

  “No!” Danny murmured. If it were possible, everything else was wrong, everything he knew. And yet part of him wanted the creature to go, to fly up, to be all that it could be.

  And then the creature and the arrow fell back to earth. The shaft of the arrow split in three pieces along its length.

  The world settled back into its old familiar patterns around Danny.

  The creature sobbed quietly. Light glittered on the tears that coated its cheeks.

  “Almost, it work,” it said. “I go to my mother . . . you make other arrow. I go to my mother.”

  “No,” Danny said. “Enough.”

  “You make arrow, I get your Maria for you,” the creature said.

  “No,” Danny said. But the thought intrigued him and he said almost immediately. “What do you mean, you’ll get Maria for me?”

  “So she will come with you. Follow you. Be good girl, do what she told.”

  “Anything?”

  “Anything,” the creature said, nodding rapidly. “She be good girl.”

  “All right,” Danny said. “You bring her here at sunset and I will have your arrow for you.”

  It will be all right, Danny thought as he slit fletches from a pinion feather. I’m not going to hurt her. I’m just going to . . . but he couldn’t think of what he might do, if he could do anything.

  The dying sun splashed crimson across the sky as Danny went down to the beach.

  For a moment he thought they were not there. Then he saw them, where they stood in the shadow of three big palm trees: the creature and behind him, Maria.

  He went towards them. The creature smiled, stretching thin lips across yellowish teeth. But Maria . . . Maria never moved, never smiled. Never said his name.

  “See?” said the creature. “I have brought her for you. And now she is good girl. Will do whats you tell her.”

  Danny went to her. She stared at him impassively.

  “Maria?” he asked. There was no response. He reached out and touched her on the cheek with the side of his thumb, as he had dreamed of doing so often but had never dared. “Te amo, Maria,” he said.