Skyland (4 page)
As Harper drank the bitter tea, his mind was
brought back to the throbbing bruise the knife-life fist had left
behind in his gut. And the man's face, held onto a withered body by
malice, was becoming clearer. Harper couldn't erase that face from
his mind. It was the same face that stood in the corner now.
In here, that face wore his father's
body.
In the mirror, it had often worn his own
body.
The old Reverend kept his head down, but the
hatred was thinly veiled. Harper had seen it every day of his life,
and nothing could keep that prejudice hidden from him. Their hosts
were city people, outliers, yes, but still deserving of the
punishment of the Sky in the doctrine of the Sky Reverends. Those
who had more were misers, even if it was not much more. Just as the
farmers were misers to the scavengers.
No one defends the Sky. They just gratify
their hate.
Harper's cup was only half empty when the
growling voice from the corner made him jump yet again.
"We have to go," his father said, not
speaking to their hosts.
"Are you going on the ship, too, Ecca?" Zara
asked their host.
"No, we're just going to watch the lift
off." She was smiling now and her face lit up erasing the tiredness
it had shown before. "It's so exciting. We've never seen such
massive things fly."
"But won't you see it much better from the
country? It'll be so crowded at the docks," said Zara.
"Yes, but that's the fun of it!" Her face
shone with excitement.
"I don't know..."
Harper could tell Zara's smile was an
attempt to hide the trembling in her lips, and it was beginning to
falter. He put a hand on her arm. Then he took one last look at his
father's face. The scavenger's face, twisted with loathing, wearing
his father's body standing before him, already in the doorway, one
foot out without even a last word for their hosts.
"For the love of the Sky!" the old man
growled. "Let's go!"
None of this is for love of the Sky,
Harper thought. But he only echoed, "Let's go."
And he stood and walked out after his
father.
Footsteps followed him, but he didn't look
back. He heard Zara talking to the city folk, thanking them, and
the city folk replying kindly, humbly that it was no trouble.
They paid him no attention.
His father had walked swiftly ahead, also
not looking back, and Harper stepped quickly after him.
At the apex of the bridge, Harper ripped the
secret pockets out of his shirt. Tiny bits of dirt fell to the
ground. He threw the rest over the bridge and into the trickling
river below.
Not for the Sky, Father – you fight for
yourself. Not for Her!
Zara was beside him now.
He grabbed her arm. "Come with, me now." He
pulled her with him towards the end the bridge. They were almost
over it when–
"No! Harper, there are so many people..."
She was staring at the edge of the river, mouth open, the eyes
stretching until whites shone around the irises. "There are too
many." She tried to twist away, but he held tight, and followed her
stare across to the mass of heads crowding the docks on the other
side of the bridge.
Lights flooded the space under the ships. In
less than an hour the whole city, it seemed, had gathered under
them. Harper had never seen so many people. There must have been
millions! They lined the port and filed into the ship. He had seen
the monstrous thing from a distance and knew that they were bigger
than almost anything else built on the planet. But he could not
have imagined the things he saw before him now. Distracted by the
scavenger before, he had not really taken it in. They were huge.
And the people! He did not even know the city held so many.
As they watched, even more people surged
across the bridge behind them. Some of these were clearly outliers,
wearing frayed blue tunics like Ecca. Others in rough brown weaves,
some stinking of compost or sweat, slunk in huddled groups. They
glanced from side to side and shot frozen looks up at the ships.
These were the villagers, the small number who would accept the
free passage offered in the city's call to farmers, the small
number who would go despite condemnation of the Sky Reverends, in
hopes of a better life.
And they shall have it. They deserve more;
let them go for it.
Harper's father hissed at the villagers that
passed them. Harper didn't need to hear him to know what curses he
slung at them. "Traitors! Blasphemers! Cause of our punishment!
Abominations!"
Harper tried to shut out the thought of his
father's voice.
This is not for him. This is for the
Her.
The groups of outliers and villagers closed
around Harper and Zara and drew them the last few steps over the
bridge. Then they were in the loading area. Harper looked around.
Zara was still twisting in his grasp. His father had disappeared
beyond the crowd.
"No, no. There are too many," she said, and
kept saying, again and again. "There are too many..."
"We will go with them."
"What?"
"We will join them. Zara, they need farmers.
It will be a better life for us."
"But the Sky..."
"She will take care of Herself. We are in
our own hands."
And we will be closer to Her than the hateful
Sky Reverends ever will be. We do serve the Sky!
He took one last look around for his father,
but all he saw was the jostling heads of city folk, outliers, and
here and there an ashamed villager. Ecca and her family had
disappeared, too.
Harper put his arms around Zara's shoulders
and hugged her tight to keep them from being separated. Together,
they were swept up the ramp towards the ship. Then there was a man
before them in a red jacket. He held a tablet.
"Tickets!"
"None."
"Occupation and number?" he shouted over the
noise of the crowd.
"Farmers – two!" Harper shouted back.
"Alright, inside!"
The ship's size as seen from its base could
not possibly prepare Harper for the true massiveness of the thing.
Standing beside it outside, he had just seen a wall rising up from
the ground. Inside, the empty space yawned around him.
"Where are all the people?" Zara asked.
Harper just shook his head. Even though the
docks had been packed shoulder-to-shoulder, once inside, each
person had their own space in the giant foyer. Here and there
people stood in groups, waiting outside the doors that lined the
far wall or peering out the many windows on the near side or
talking to red-coated Transport Union workers. Launch time was
ticking closer and closer (Harper's internal clock was still
counting down as it had been for days,) surely most of the people
were aboard. But inside these massive walls, there was no crowd, as
if the interior of the ship just went on and on and on forever.
The quiet was eerie too. The noises of the
docks had been cut off almost instantly when they passed over the
threshold. For a second, Harper stood with Zara just inside the
front door, and stared around the wide room, completely at a loss.
Until,
"No reservations?"
The friendly voice came from a girl, even
younger than Harper and Zara, standing beside them. She wore the
high-necked red coat of the Transport Union, and like the
ticket-taker, she held a tablet. She poked at the screen a few
times and then looked up, expectantly.
"No," Harper answered.
"Okay. It looks like we can put you in slice
A on level 23."
"Um..."
"Over there," she gestured to the far wall
of doors. "Slice A is opposite us, so take the elevator right in
the middle there to 23. One you're up on the level, they'll tell
you where to go. You can leave your things... oh."
She tilted her head to one side and looked
curiously at their empty hands. Harper worried for a moment that
she would be suspicious, maybe even report them for a search or
questioning. But she just shrugged and continued cheerfully. "Well,
you can go right to your room after you're assigned, or you can
watch the launch from the lounge on 23."
As if on cue, a female voice, calm and
mechanical, boomed through the ship:
Final Notice: Outer doors
are closing. Launch in ten minutes.
And with a great scrape and
clang, the massive doors shut behind them.
"Well, have a nice trip!" the Union worker
girl said. She gave them a wave and moved off to another group of
idling passengers.
Harper and Zara headed across the massive
entry hall to elevator A. They followed an elderly couple in, and
the doors shut behind them. The old woman hit the 23 on the panel
and up they went. Thirty seconds later...
Sky.
The elevator doors had opened and Harper
looked out at the expanse of deep blue. He stepped out of the
elevator.
"It's so beautiful..." Zara whispered.
Across from them was a great window, floor
to ceiling and covering fifty feet of the ship's curved side. The
sun had set, but it's light had not gone out completely. The Sky
was a dark indigo blue. True blue. The last blue before night,
before the stars took over the sky; one or two of the brightest
twinkled here and there, but the dark and solid expanse of blue
still dominated the heavenly field. The window faced out towards
the country and a onto handful of tiny buildings lit up by the city
lights four, five hundred feet below? Harper had never been up this
high. The ground seemed too far away to calculate.
Inside the room, to one side of the great
window the red coat of a Transport worker stood out against the
dark blue of the Sky behind her. She sat at a desk sipping from a
steaming mug and reading from the screen in front of her. She
looked up and smiled as Harper and Zara approached.
"You're the two farmers, right? We've got a
space for you up here. Room 2332 at the near end of the hall, just
here."
She handed them a key. "Launch in fi–"
"Launch in five minutes,"
The ship's
voice interrupted.
"Yes, exactly. You can go to your room, but
there's no window in there I'm afraid. Not in the last minute
spaces; the ones with the good views were snapped up ages ago. But
you can watch the launch from here if you like."
"We'll stay here." His voice overlayed
Zara's, and they looked at each other. Harper could practically
hear her thoughts, the same as his:
We will have a last glimpse
of the Sky.
"Great."
The Transport worker took another sip from
the mug and Harper and Zara moved off.
Now that Harper had lowered his eyes from
the expanse outside the window and looked around the room itself,
he noticed there were more people here than in the foyer, but still
only a few dozen. Some looked bored, swiveling in chairs set around
the window or sitting at tables in the middle of the room. Some
looked excited. And then there were the others...
One old man was bent almost double, his
grizzled beard brushing his waist. He shook as he stood, covering
the side of his face with one hand, the side of his face facing the
giant window. His head twitched over to that side once or twice as
he peeked over his hand. Each time he shook his head and shivered
and hid his face once more. A child stared at the blue field, eyes
wide, face white, terrified. A young woman – his mother? – stood
staring blankly into the room with her back turned to the window.
The elderly couple that had been in the elevator held each others
hands across a table in the middle of the room.
Villagers.
As Harper and Zara moved over to the empty
seats by the window, they glanced at their fellow country folk, the
old man, the couple, the child, the young woman, but as soon as
their eyes met they all looked away, looked down, turned away,
hunched just a little lower. Harper spotted a short couch by one
corner of the window and sat down on it. It was soft, softer than
any of the metal stools he'd so often sat on in the country. It was
like sitting on a pile of blankets.
But he could not get comfortable.
His hands were shaking for the first time
that day. He closed his eyes.
"Here, my Sky?" Zara's voice trembled beside
him. "Here?" she breathed.
"We are going to see the Sky. Don't you want
to?"
"I–I do."
Her hand squeezed his shoulder. Then the
seat shifted as Zara sat beside him. A soft kiss brushed his
temple. Someone laughed loud beside them, and he opened his eyes
and looked over. A group of city folk was chatting, far more intent
on each other than the sight on the other side of the glass.
''How can they be so calm?" Zara asked,
staring.
"The city dwellers have seen the Sky up
close before. They don't appreciate Her. Flight is not new to
them."
He squeezed his eyes shut again.
He could see his father's face behind his
eyelids. He could see the expression that would come over it when
he realized the launch was successful. His cheeks would twist as he
snarled. Tears, angry, disappointed tears, would fall down, running
over the weathered face.
Failure, failure
, would be the word
on his lips.
Failure.
The image glared at Harper in his mind.
But I will be closer to the Sky than you
ever will be,
her thought to his father's image. "We will
see
the Sky," he muttered to himself. "
See
Her, and
not from afar."
And he would. Not from the ground, but from
Her. From the heavens themselves. Oh, to see Her blue fields! To
touch the roof of Skyland! That would make his betrayal worth it.
That would make his defection right.
He opened his eyes and looked out the
window. Her blue, now speckled with a few more stars, shone over
the country in the distance. She was pure today, not one cloud
broke her royal fields. Clouds meant moisture. They were rare now,
and Harper knew to treasure them when they appeared. But there was
nothing like seeing Her in Her purest beauty, like an indigo jewel
closed around the planet.