Filaria - Brent Hayward [62]
Perhaps a dozen angels waited. Some grey, some white. Watching her, squinting, wings folded forward, the beasts appeared as hunched or broken things. One, stepping forward, as if to greet her, though she was still some distance away, was completely black except for white marks that looked like death heads at its quivering wingtips.
How many of these horrid beasts were there? Did more lurk, unseen, within the labyrinthine constructions?
Two looked over the side, gesticulating with rapid motions of their heads, pointing downward, to the distant land, using the miniscule fingers that grew from the junction of their membranous wings.
How had she ever associated these creatures with birds or men? Birds were sweet devices made by supervisors for myriad purposes. Men were complex, beautiful animals. Perfection. These things were grotesque, skeletal, lightly feathered all over, their legs long, thin, and dry. Huge wings. Nearly translucent skin on their faces, ugly features clustered close together: little, suspicious eyes; slitted nostrils; angry little mouths with pinsharp teeth through which the tips of blue tongues showed, panting, over black bottom lips.
Shrieking, giggling, the angels that bore her aloft were hovering now, flapping and debating, and, for an instant, Deidre recalled, absurdly, an image from halcyon times: sitting on the grass, crosslegged before Sam’s softly humming console, an illustrated printout on her lap. She was pointing to an image of an extinct flying beast known as a Steller’s Jay. “What about this thing? It says here it’s a bird. A real bird. Sitting on its nest.” Looking up at the supervisor’s calmly winking façade. “It doesn’t look anything like your bluebirds or your redbirds.”
But memory blew into tatters on the wind as she was dropped.
The angels, she discovered, were not waiting to help her; Deidre came crashing down among them, landing painfully on her hands and knees and rolling immediately to her side, so her body felt the relative firmness of the dirty nest. The structure creaked and groaned. Twigs snapped under her weight.
She lay trembling, panting, petrified as dry winds whipped all about. It was too hot here, too bright. The air was different, painful in her lungs. Hard to fill them.
She glanced up. Directly above was the roof, tinted a pale blue, perhaps just a dozen or so metres over her head. She could see the distinct paneling that comprised it. Rivets held the sky together.
The scaffolding of the suns spanned out in all directions, receding, finally vanishing into the distance.
And angels touched down in gusts of feathers and risen dust.
Deidre tried to cling to the nest with her broken nails but was hauled to her feet, rudely pushed forward. Terrified of plunging — though the edge was metres away — she was directed toward the centre of the platform. Big wings buffeted her, clawed feet nudged, keeping her upright and moving.
Through her tears she shrieked, “You’re hurting me!” Panic that had been held at bay for most of the night rose sharply in her throat. “Stop it, you’re hurting me!” Out over the far side — she’d made the error of looking again: remote fields and farms, houses, forests, small as toys. She loosed a trickle of hot urine into her breeches and stared dumbly down at her own scratched thighs as another sun-bright angel — this one white, wings outspread, feet extended, talons out — came in to land.
She was finally allowed to collapse, huddling behind one of the stick and twig baffles. She curled in on herself for some time, and when she raised her head to see how close the angels were, to her immense shock she met the eyes of a girl, slightly older than herself, who was sitting cross-legged on a small woven mat. Attractive, black-haired, the girl returned Deidre’s stare with an expression of apparent amusement. Her face, rounded and olive-skinned, was grimy, black eyes narrowed. Lips, tightening slightly, went thin and white and bloodless.
Neither spoke, yet Deidre, seeing this other person, crawled forward frantically, to the