Skyland (3 page)

"They are getting desperate."

Sometimes, these poorest of the country folk
hunted in the fields, digging up inedible roots to sell for
compost. Sometimes they roamed far out beyond even the brown
trenches, hunting animals for meat and bone. Sometimes they looted
the ancient sites, dead towns long buried in the sand and brought
back wide beams or massive tree stumps sold at high prices for the
rare wood. Sometimes, they just begged, wailing and panhandling in
the villages, relying grudgingly on the good will of the farmers
and what little food they could spare.

And rarely, when desperation coincided with
boldness, they raided, kicking in doors, tearing every plank from
houses, taking even the last crumbs off tables. And if there was
anyone in the way, their flesh would make food or compost, and
their bone fresh ivory.

A scavenger this close to the city was
desperate. And bold.

"Harper.... what do we do? There's no
time... "

The river was almost dry, but it lay at the
bottom of the ravine the water had carved before drought parched
it. The only other bridge was on the south side of the city – a
three hour walk away. The rocket would sail before they were
halfway. And if he were after their bones, the scavenger would just
follow them.

They were almost in the shadow of the
rockets now. Just a little further and they would be there.

Harper's elbows rested against the pouches
full of fertilizer sewn into his shirt pockets. The bulges were
well hidden in the loose fabric, but the scavengers would know what
the loose shirts of the country folk were usually used to hide.

Sun coins and goods for trade.

And we look like merchants.

Harper and his father and Zara were not
carrying traveling packs. Unlike those who would be carrying all
their worldly possessions to the ship and off this planet (or so
they thought), their family had taken the walk to the city
empty-handed. Harper was uncomfortably aware that there was another
type who would be taking to the docks today: the enterprising
villagers. The farmers' bags would hold little of value to steal,
but tucked away in the hidden pockets of village merchants, there
could be a million Suns worth of jewel chips or fragments of wood
and bone.

He is waiting for the merchants.
As if we have anything of value!

Harper laughed.

Zara looked sharply at him and he stifled
the absurd giggle that was threatening to take him over. It was a
nervous laugh, but also the shock that even here at his last
moments when there was nothing left to his life, there was still
someone who would pick that nothing clean.

But even as he thought it, he knew that,
compared to this beggar, he was a miser. The fertilizer concealed
in his coat might as well be coins. And if nothing else, three
bodies would feed a patch of soil or the beggar himself if he were
hungry enough.

"There are three of us," he said. "We'll go
across."

This was no defense. Harper knew it. Raiders
did not rely on numbers. Their starved forms belied toughness and
speed learned from surviving violently. But there was no other
way.

He stepped onto bridge. Zara held tight to
his hand.

Step by step they walked across, avoiding
the eyes of the man squatted at the other end, but keeping him in
the periphery.

Then the man looked up.

Before Harper could look away, he caught the
eyes, crusty and bloodshot and oozing eye-pus. The scavenger
snarled, and Harper tilted his head.

Something about that face was familiar.

How do I know you?

Chapter
Four

in which there is
water (for strangers!)

Harper could not look away.

Broken teeth looked out from between lips
drawn back in a wordless threat. The narrowed eyes above the bared
teeth were dusty with sand caught in the eyebrows, the eyelashes,
the corners of the eyes, bloodshot and yellow.

Don't stare.

But Harper couldn't look away.

The man twitched.

Then he was up.

Harper pushed Zara behind him as a fist,
thin and sharp like a knife, slammed into his gut. Harper flailed
his own fists about, useless and totally, totally clueless. His
hands were trained for tearing heads of kale up from the ground,
not for fighting. Another hit left him bent double, breathless.
Then arms like bare steel beams clenched down on him in a
headlock.

He choked.

Then the arms were gone.

Off balance, Harper teetered, then his face
thudded against the dirt as he fell. He turned his head to see the
scavenger bounce against the ground five feet away. Literally. His
tiny body hit the dust again and he rolled away. Harper looked up
to see his father moving in on the prone man who picked his face up
from the dirt and looked at them with a menace that sucked the air
from Harper's lungs in a way the fists had not.

Who are you?

Tendons and muscles stuck out along the
man's limbs and up his neck. It looked like the ropes of his body
could have pulled him apart or snapped at any moment. The dry folds
of his wrinkled skin clung weakly to the bones and quivered with
his tension. Every phalange of the fingers that clawed the dirt
stuck out, and Harper wondered how they stayed together. The
reddened and oozing eyes glared at him.

And Harper knew why that face was
familiar.

The man spat on the ground.

Harper's father pulled back his foot, but
the scavenger was faster than the kick. He jumped up and
disappeared into the long shadows of the city.

"Thank the Sky!" an unfamiliar voice called.
"Are you alright?"

Harper felt Zara's hands around his
shoulders and he pushed himself up off the ground. He heard his
father grunt in response to the strange voice, but Harper was still
trying to catch his breath. He looked towards the newcomer. A woman
stood on the bridge, halfway across, she was wringing her hands and
her eyes were wide. Just in front of her, a man was jogging towards
them across the bridge, sleeves rolled up, hands still in fists,
ready to jump into the fight.

He slowed to a walk then stopped beside
them.

"Looks like you're okay." He patted
Harper.

"Yeah, thanks."

Beyond them, at the far end of the bridge
almost in the country, in one of the outlying houses that
surrounded the bridge, the front door stood open and another man
stood in the doorway. Now the woman was trotting the rest of the
way over the bridge, looking around timidly.

"Thank the Sky you're alright!" She leaned
against the man with the rolled up sleeves, and he put an arm
around her. "Thank the Sky."

Harper heard his father growling under his
breath, "I didn't know they thanked the Sky this close to the
city." He spat on the ground.

The city folk did not seem to notice.

"Please, would you like to come in?" the
woman asked. She waved her hand over her shoulder towards the house
at the other end of the bridge. "You must be so shaken. Come in and
rest for a bit. Please."

Harper looked automatically towards the
docks and the ship that would leave soon. The sun was almost gone
now. Zara squeezed his hand, and he looked down at her.

"There is time," she whispered. "The ship
won't leave for another hour."

Harper nodded and looked back to the woman.
"Yes, thank you."

She beamed. "If you are going to the docks,
we can all go together. It will be safer with six than with
three."

"Yes, thank you," echoed Zara. She looked up
at Harper and her lips quivered, but she pulled them back into a
smile.

His father hissed, but Harper ignored him
and followed the city folk back over the bridge.

Inside the house, he paused.

The main room was small and sparsely
furnished. It was surprisingly simple and Harper was struck by how
similar it looked to his own family's shack out in the village. The
walls were almost bare and the room almost devoid of furniture. A
single round table, not wood, but a decoratively cut metal piece,
sat in the middle of the room and a few stools, similarly cut, sat
around it.

But there were some bigger differences.

Thick curtains hung over what must have been
a window on one wall. They blocked completely the lights from
outside, unlike the ragged weave that covered the country shack's
windows. But even though the curtains blocked the setting sun and
the bright lights of the city, there was a nice glow around the
whole room. Harper looked around and spotted the tiny light strips
up where the walls met the ceiling. Then he noticed the weird
squishiness under his feet and looked down to see a little brown
rug just inside the door. Still looking at the floor, he noticed
that there actually was a floor to this house – a wooden (or some
good imitation) floor rather than hard packed dirt. And there were
doorways. Besides the one he was standing in, two doorways led off
the main room: one in the right wall and one opposite that. This
was no one-room shack.

Harper moved further into the house, and
Zara stepped in after him. He was still taking in all the details
of the house, all the familiar and the unfamiliar things, when he
turned to look through a doorway on his right.

He twitched and jumped back a pace.

He looked around, but no one seemed to have
noticed, Zara was leaning in to listen to the other woman who was
standing just inside the other doorway, which Harper could now see
led to a tiny kitchen with an even tinier stove. His father was
standing stubbornly and silently in the corner, arms crossed,
scowling. The other two men were sitting together at the little
table.

Harper turned back to his right.

Through the door wasn't a hall, but an open
closet with a mirror. It was a large but simple piece on the back
wall, almost covered by the clothes hung on hooks around it. Harper
looked into the mirror. A part of his mind revolted at the luxury,
whispered in his ear the words of the Sky Reverends:
The Sky
punishes the greed of the city.

But this time he did not listen.

This time, he looked out of his own eyes,
looked
at
his own eyes, and did not shift in to the mask of
the Sky Reverends.

He stared at the reflection in the
mirror.

His face still bore the marks of shock with
eyes wide and blank. This was not the reflection he usually saw.
The reflection he usually saw, with eyebrows furrowed, mouth set in
a grimace, jaw set, the carefully arranged features a copy of his
father's,
that
reflection was gone.

He had seen it in the face of the
scavenger.

The others chatted behind him, but he just
stared at his reflection, seeing in his mind's eye another face, a
face that he had put on so often he didn't know where it came
from.

It came from hate.

The Sky Reverends'.

The scavenger's.

A hand touched his shoulder and he jumped
again.

"I'm sorry." The woman withdrew her hand and
ducked her head, "Would you... would you like to sit down and have
some tea?"

"Oh. Yes. Yes, I would. Thanks."

He turned away from the mirror, away from
the shocked expression. Zara was standing beside him again, her
smile faltering now. He took her hand and this time it was his lips
that stretched into a bizarre smile. She blinked, confused and
looked away. She pulled her hand out of his and sat down at the
little metal table.

She thinks I am crazy. Well...

Trying to drive himself out of his own
thoughts, he looked around at the little room once more. His eyes
landed on his father still standing in the corner. Harper looked
quickly away from the terribly familiar face and back to their
host. He hadn't really paid her much attention before as his eyes
were examining his own reflection, but he sat up and paid attention
now.

But it wasn't the woman herself that caught
his attention, it was her clothes.

Her tunic was blue

It was a thin, silky fabric, a fitted shirt
that showed the skin tone underneath in some places and confused
the dye of the fabric. He hadn't noticed it before in the orange
light of the setting sun, but inside with the soft glow of light
strips he could see that the fabric was undeniably one of the
lightest shades of blue. Like the morning Sky just beyond thin
clouds.

She wears the sacred color so casually!

In the country, blue was a marker. Prestige.
Piety. Wealth. Reverence. Zara's gem necklace was one of a kind, a
token of her new status as a Sky Reverend's daughter-in-law. Other
chips of blue were guarded in the temple, collected together in the
sacred mosaics. Blue dye was saved for writing and illustrating
special copies of the
Sky Tomes
– his father owned one of
these. And occasionally, Sky colored threads were bought – only the
best threads – to be laid over the altar of the temple. They were
never draped carelessly over the body.

Harper met the woman's eyes and tried to
wipe the rude shock off his features. She smiled and poured him a
cup of tea.

Water for strangers. Who can spare that?
Only city folk.

He took the cup and watched one of her long
blue sleeves brush the table. The silk was shiny and clean, but the
edges were fraying. The hands under them were dried and callused.
Blue garments or not, those were not hands used to idle luxury.

They are not even well off. Not for city
folk.... They suffer here too.

That was not something his father ever
mentioned in his diatribes against the city.

She was young, but as she smiled, her face
creased. Weathered lines appeared around her eyes and mouth.

"Thank you..."
Ecca? Ella? Ellie?
Harper hadn't caught her name. It had passed behind him in chatter
while he stared in the mirror, but he couldn't remember. "Thank
you."