The Fecund's Melancholy Daughter - Brent Hayward [32]
Crouching, much nearer, Pan Renik was still unable to see the full extent of his bower—
Then he heard the person in his nest again, weakly calling out.
Unmistakable.
Followed by what could only be the rustle of something heavy and unseen crashing through foliage—
A startled glider flapped noisily away from where it had been hiding, making Pan Renik nearly fall to his death: heart pounding, he watched the skinny body silhouetted against its own wide sails, flying down, toward the low moon.
Now came a moan of pain, or maybe pleasure, raining through the sparse twigs as if it were substance; Pan Renik cowered and looked back up at his nest in time to see a form moving there, a hard-edged shape, rising from his bower—
Sudden images of his club and handmade mace lying abandoned, useless, stung him like slaps across the face: whoever was up there had access to his weapons.
He was unprepared.
To squash the growing feelings of uselessness and self-condemnation, Pan Renik had to act. “Hey,” he said, keeping just a little hushed, so that padres would not hear, “who’s up there? Who goes there?”
The response came, reedy and pained, in a strong accent that made the two words very strange—hard, for a moment, for Pan Renik to recognize. But a human’s voice. The voice of a woman. “Help me,” it said. “Help me.”
Pan Renik stammered, almost in a panic, “Look, keep mum, mum, for goodness sake. Padres could hear you. I’m coming up.”
“In the . . . branches down there. Please. You must help . . .”
How did he manage to climb the last few metres, so familiar, yet, on this night, so strange and alien? How? He did, though, arms and legs moving of their own accord.
After drawing a deep breath, and then another, he pulled himself up, into his bower—
She lay on her back.
Sprawling, body flattened, dark and dully glinting, as if oil from a squirrel’s body had been spread across his nest. At first, he thought—for just a moment—that the woman was a form of creature he had never before seen, but this was a device she lay on, an invention, not a part of her at all, flickering highlights of silver. Her shape covered his nest, drooping off the far end, into the night.
She was in the centre, sheathed from toe to head in the complex, deep red garment, integrated into the device, but even without the tubes and membranes and shiny structural frame that seemed to bind her together, Pan Renik knew that this woman, though human (he decided), was nothing like him. Not like anyone in the settlement. Beneath the clinging layers of the outfit, so tight over her skin, and beneath the mask covering most of her face, this woman was not like anyone.
Dark eyes, buried in the shadow of the headgear, moved. Their gaze was sharp, suspicious, watching him as he leaned closer. Her mouth, obscured within the mask, twisted.
“They shot me down.”
“Who did?”
“They shot down our car. And when I came up . . .”
“Came up?” He frowned at the clouds, then looked back at the woman’s face. What was she saying? That she’d come from below the clouds? She was madder than him.
There was so much pain in those eyes, an unfathomable amount. More pain than Pan Renik’s. This realization, for reasons he did not want to think about, made him angry, as if he had sole rights to such despair.
“It’s cold up here,” she said. “My legs are not . . . good. No longer function . . . No air up here, and cold. Are you not . . . cold?”
Pan Renik said nothing. He was staring at the device again, mesmerized by the glints. These tubes were metal! Like the padre’s big knife and a few other artifacts padres kept in their trapeza—gifts of the sky power. These tiny objects in his nest were metal. Scattered, several fragments lay between the woman’s legs, several more to the left of her torso. Only padres could touch metal. Metal was what made padres padres. Pan Renik’s mouth had gone dry. Reaching out with one arm, entranced,