The God of the Hive - Laurie R. King [131]
Are you frightened of anything, Mr Robert?
The hole in the owl’s feather was the shape of an elongated tear-drop. Turned slightly, it reminded him of the shape of a child’s eye. A half-Chinese child’s eye.
He shuddered, and let go the feather, leaning forward, forward until a gust of wind caught it, whipping it around the corner and out of sight.
A child’s eye.
Late November, in the depths of an eternal war, a war with no beginning, no end, only stink and muck and death. One rainy day all his men had been taken from him, and in exchange he had been given an ambulance filled with groaning bodies and a dead driver. And so he became Goodman and no longer had to be The Other who ordered his men into the bullets, and he drove like a demon to claw the bleeding away from Death.
Then in December, The Powers Above had decreed that a particular piece of ground must be won, a tiny hillock of no more importance than any other hillock won or lost over the past twenty-eight months. It was to be a surprise push. It was certainly a surprise to the citizens of a much-shelled village, trying to scrape a few potatoes from the liquid ground.
And a child. God only knew where her parents were—under a collapsed building, leaking into a field. But the child was there, a grubby thing in a too-short dress and a too-large hat who had climbed—or been placed—on a bit of surviving wall, where she kicked her heels and watched the parade of passing motors and horses; soldiers marching in one direction, soldiers staggering or being carried in the other.
No fear, no curiosity, just sitting and watching, hands in her lap, as if she’d been sitting and watching the whole of her young life.
One glance, and the passing soldiers and ambulance drivers could tell she was not right. A closer look, and Goodman had seen the almond curve to her eyes, the protruding tongue-tip that imparted a look of great concentration. She was what they call Mongoloid, what his mother—what The Other’s mother—had called one of God’s innocents. The child had sat there like a talisman for three trips to the Front, and then she was gone. The wall was gone. He drove two more trips before he stopped to see. The hat was there; she was not. She was not there all the way until dark, but that night she was back, her epicanthic eyes watching him, that night and a string of other nights. Once the battle had moved on a few miles, he returned to the village and found an old woman who knew of the child, who confirmed that the mother had died and the father was gone to war. The old woman did not know where the child was. He asked soldiers. He haunted the hospital tents. In the end he drove off in his ambulance, far down the line to where the French uniforms began, in pursuit of a rumour of troops who had adopted a mute orphan as their mascot. But it was not she.
Then he was arrested, and it was discovered that Goodman had been born on a battlefield when The Other had died. He expected to be lined up and shot, but word came of a medal, and as a favour to the French, they sent him to Craiglockhart instead. There he met Rivers, and told him, just a little, about the girl on the wall.
Only after, when he’d crawled off to Cumbria and found the old woodsman’s hut and let the land remake him, had she gone away, for good.
Until an aeroplane came at him out of the sky and gave birth to a very different child with the same almond-shaped eyes.
And now below him lay the child’s nest, her hive, the loud, confusing, cold-hearted world into which she had been born. She might appear a being that could not feel the touch of earthly years—Wordsworth’s children, again—yet in no time at all the shades of the prison-house would close in on her and she would grow up. There was nothing he could do to stop it. She could not live in a Cumbrian estate among the owls and the hedgehogs. Her people lay below him.