She repeated the process for binds that welded my arms together. Pins and needles shot through my hands and feet as I stretched, finally relieved of the awkward contortions I had been forced to maintain.
A mantid appeared on the lip of the gorge. Urszula whistled and waved her arms. It hopped off the brink and glided down, skidding on the gravel as it landed. It scuttled over and deposited its cargo next to me—the broken and bloody body of a Duster woman. She still breathed, but her condition seemed grave.
Urszula rushed to her side, cradling her head gently in her palms. She checked the woman’s eyes and felt for a pulse on her neck. Her face was swollen. Her skull looked lopsided, cracked and depressed in several places. A mixture of clear fluid and blood seeped out of her nose and ears. Both forearms were bent as if she had extra elbows. She was completely unresponsive. I thought for sure she was a goner.
Urszula got up and fetched a pair of leathery flasks from a saddle bag on dragonfly. I assume this was Lalibela, not that I could tell these bugs apart. She poured some of the contents onto her hand and it foamed up on contact. She slathered the stuff all over the woman’s head, forming a sort of shampoo helmet. From a second flask, with a pointy nozzle like a wine skin, she squirted something pinkish into the woman’s mouth and nostrils.
“Help me straighten her arms,” said Urszula, as I hovered behind her.
“Um. How?”
“Hold her upper arm still. I need leverage.”
I did as she said, but could hardly watch as she took the woman’s broken limb firmly both hands and crunched the bones back into place, before slathering it with more of the foamy stuff. I grimaced and gritted my teeth. I couldn’t stand to watch.
“You are squeamish,” she said, smirking at me. “Come, you do the next.”
“What?”
“Bodies break. You need to learn how to fix them.”
“Nah. I can’t—”
“Do it!”
We switched places. I got down on my knees, hands trembling and touched the Duster woman’s unset arm. She was quite a bit beefier than Urszula, but not much taller. Her skin had broken where the sharp end of a broken bone had gouged it. Blood as red as mine crusted red-brown on her powdery gray skin.
“What do I do?”
“You stretch the broken ends apart and then twist them back the way they should be. Just get them close. The salve will do the rest.”
“That is gonna hurt like a—”
“Believe me, she does not feel anything right now. Do it! Before she wakes.”
I took a deep breath and grabbed her arm, which was thick with pure muscle. She could have been an Olympic shot-putter.
“Pull!” said Urszula.
I yanked and twisted, producing a crackle that made my own bones cry in sympathy. The woman writhed and groaned, but remained unconscious.
“Very good! Now put some of this.” She handed me the flask of salve.
Man, that stuff was freaky! I poured some out on my hand and it came alive, particles digging into my skin, crawling across my knuckle bones. A tingling kicked up that tickled every nerve. I slathered a thick layer of it on the woman’s arm and wiped the rest off on my pants, which I realized was a mistake when it crept through the fibers and invaded my knees.
The woman’s breathing had strengthened and become more regular, but her head and face remained swollen and misshapen. And yet she retained an earthy prettiness not even her grave injuries could spoil.
“What’s her name?” I said.
“Octavia,” said Urszula. “My good friend.”
“There was a guy, too. On the other, injured mantid.”
“Trisk,” said Urszula, sighing. “And the mantis is Gabr. But I think they are both lost.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” I said. “I saw them get away.”
“For true?” said Urszula. “I did not see, but I hope you are right. My friends took a great risk to save you.” She studied the wedge of sky above the ravine.
“You guys shouldn’t have, really. I’m just some Hemi. Totally expendable.”
“No. You are not just some Hemi. You are special.”
“Oh, stop,” I said. There was that word again. What was it with people here? No one ever told me I was special back home. Except mom, maybe. And now she doesn’t even know who I am.
Urszula slid a square of cloth from a pocket in her jerkin and draped it over the woman’s stomach. The edges grew to cover her and the surface altered to match the color and texture of the gravel beneath their feet. I still had my own piece of Urszula’s shroud, surrounding my shin like a leg warmer.
“Is she gonna be okay?” I said.
Urszula shrugged. “We will see.”
She went over to the mantid. Thick yellow fluid dribbled out and puddled onto the stones from a gaping and shredded hole in the creature’s side. Urszula stuffed the hole with some bits of fuzz she pulled out of a pouch and daubed on some of the same foamy salve she had used on Octavia.
Rocks tumbled down a chute. Urszula wheeled around and crouched, studying the heights, scepter at the ready. The crippled mantid appeared atop the gully, ridden by the man who had rescued it. They corkscrewed down like a maple seeds, its forewings so shredded it was barely able to fly. They missed the gravel bed, splashing into the creek and skittering ashore before they could be swept away.
Urszula laughed. “You were right! It’s Gabr and Trisk! I thought for sure we had lost them.” She grabbed me, hugged me and kissed both my cheeks.
***
Trisk was by far the friendliest Duster I had ever met. He was short but sturdy, with a shock of dark hair that rose up like the fur on the back of a frightened cat.
He didn’t know much English, but he had a good natured twinkle to his eye and he laughed at almost everything I did, amused by the spectacle of a Hemi hanging with Dusters. I suppose he found it as absurd as a jackrabbit running with wolves.
He and Urszula spent a good hour tending to Gabr’s wounds. The mantid had tucked its legs beneath itself and lay drooping in a bed of reeds at the edge of the gravel bank. Seraf stood closeby, alert to the skies, forelegs raised in a protective stance.
A bee came and brought Urszula some nectar. And soon after, flight after flight came winging in. The sky over the gorge came to resemble the landing pattern over Orlando on school vacation week.
The bees fed Gabr and Seraf something solid and pasty that they regurgitated, while Urszula and Trisk partook of the nectar, I declined. My stomach was too hyped up from the day’s turmoil.
Once they had done what they could do for Gabr, they came over and patched Lalibela’s wing, sewing it together with a transparent thread that flattened and diffused, disappearing into the mend.
“Lalibela came out that fight in fine shape, didn’t you, my lovely?” She stroked the bristly, muzzle-like bulge between the dragonfly’s eyes. A darkly pigmented juncture between two front plates made it seem like the creature had a permanent smile painted on, although its actual, ugly mouthparts dangled below.
“You guys really shouldn’t have come after me. I mean, look … you almost got your friends killed … and that poor bug.”
“We came, not just for you,” said Urszula. “Raids are important. They keep the Frelsians off-balance, makes them less adventurous.”
“We frighten them,” said Trisk, grinning.
“For good reason.”
“Oh?” She came up to me. “Do we frighten you?”
“A little bit. Yeah.”
She laughed. “So how did they manage to catch you? Did a patrol find you? Why did you not use my shroud?”
“I did. But that damned bee gave me away.”
“Don’t blame it on the poor bee. You should have stayed higher on the mountain. No one would have bothered you up there.”
I must have looked surprised or something.
“Yes, the bees told me you went down to the lake. And that ‘damned bee’ told us you were getting into trouble.
That ‘damned bee’ saved you.”
“Appreciate it. But I could have handled this on my own.”
“So tell me, I brought you to the mountains so you could free your soul. Is your soul now free?”
“Don’t I look free to you?” I stood tall and folded my arms.
She pulled me around and stared into my eyes.
“Pfft! Nothing. Your gaze is still shallow. No change.” She shoved me away and made me stumble.
“Dang, is it that obvious?”
Trisk snickered weirdly.
“Yes.”
“So I suppose I should get back up that mountain.”
“You can’t go right now. The Frelsians are alarmed and mobilized. They will have patrols everywhere.”
“But I need to get back up there. I don’t know how much time I have left … on the other side.”
“If you go now they will simply drag you back down to their pens and you will perish. Give them one day to settle down, and I will take you up myself. Only this time you need to stay where I put you. Agreed?”
“Deal,” I said.
She scanned the heights of the gorge. “But here is not a safe place to stay. We must leave.”
“Safe? Is there such a thing in this world?”
“Yes, there is,” said Urszula. “But Yaqob does not want you on our mesa. But no worries. I know another place. Come!” She took my hand and led me to Lalibela’s side.
***
We straddled the arched saddle on Lalibela’s back, and she immediately began to thrum, getting her flight muscles warmed up. I could feel the power in that hum. I could easily imagine myself on the seat of some large bore Harley.
I looped my arms loosely around Urszula’s waist and rested my chin on her shoulder. She smelled pretty much like a biker chick must smell like, all leather and dirty blue jeans.
The thrumming shifted into Lalibela’s wings and we lifted off as if suddenly weightless. She spiraled up out of the gorge, passing a steady train of bees still coming down. How much nectar and vomit did those Dusters and their mantids need?
We curved away from Frelsi and the glaciered reaches hanging above it, heading further up the main river valley, away from the pitted plains.
“Was that your woman you were lying with, in the compound?”
“My woman? You mean Karla?”
“She is your woman, yes?”
“I don’t own any woman. Karla belongs to Karla.”
I could feel Urszula’s cheek muscles stiffen as she grinned.
Frelsi was just a speck behind us now on the massif, and we flew right past Yaqob’s mesa and the tablelands across the valley. Clearly, Urszula was taking me someplace new.
We flew over an utterly flat and barren void in the landscape. Billowing thermals buffeted us as we crossed this mini-desert, heading towards a range of spiky peaks fronted and flanked by a series of slanting terraces and plateaus that shed the light like the facets on the face of a gem stone. Banks of puffy clouds with gilded tops wafted against the base of the peaks.
Beyond a gap in the mountains, the landscape seemed to stop dead just before the horizon, as if the deity drawing the creation map had run out of ink. But then I realized I was looking at a shoreline. Beyond it stretched a deep, calm ocean; devoid of whitecaps.
Lalibela dove like a kamikaze at the seamless, thousand foot cliff that reared up from the heap of splintered rubble that marked the end of the barrens. I gritted my teeth, dug my heels into the saddle and clasped Urszula’s waist a little tighter. These bugs should really come with seatbelts.
It looked we were going to dash straight into the cliffs. Once again, I thought this was gonna be it. But a rise of air bumped us up over the lip of the precipice. We skimmed across a slant of grassland studded with fleshy-leafed trees—succulents, just like the ones that grew on the other mesa, supersized versions of those rubbery houseplants my grandmother used to keep.
As we flew, we flushed these dazzling bugs from the branches of the trees, their wings bearing zebra-like bands of turquoise and magenta. They were leaf hoppers as big as condors.
Lalibela swerved to catch one on the fly, and I nearly fell off the saddle. Urszula threw her arm back in time to steady me.
“Sorry. She must be hungry.”
Lalibela wasted no time getting her nourishment from all the crunching and sucking sounds and bits of leaf hopper that came flying back.
We headed for a second, narrower terrace below the talus fields that skirted the sharp peaks. There were more trees here, many choked with vines, and the ruins of a city many times the size of the complex on Urszula’s mesa, but with the same architecture. Polyhedral stones, fitted without mortar, formed an elaborate network of arches and bridges and ramps, mostly crumbled but many intact. Some of the houses looked ready to occupy. All they needed was a good sweeping out and new roofs.
Lalibela pulled up and landed softly on a green shaft bearing a flower bud larger than my head. Below us, orchids wafted in the breeze, their blooms as broad as sunflowers.
Lalibela’s weight bent the stalk completely over, providing a narrow, bristly gangplank down to the ground. I climbed off the saddle and made my way down. It was like walking a tightrope, but I did myself proud by slipping and making a fool of myself in front of Urszula, who had hopped off straight off the saddle, landing nimbly as a cat.
“Where the heck did you bring me?”
Urszula leaned back against a leaf as wide a cot and tucked her arms behind her head.
“This is Neueden. The first. When this colony died out, the abandoned city near Frelsi where they are clearing the ruins became the second center before it too perished. A city on the site of Frelsi was the third, until the souls from the tunnels displaced us and renamed it. Our sad, little mesa is now the fourth and probably the last. It was intended only an outpost, a watch station for the larger cities.”
“So there was a war over Frelsi?”
“Not much of one. Most of my brothers and sisters were scattered across the lands. Just as now, the Frelsians had the advantage in numbers. But war is nothing new to us. There has always been war. Wars against the insects. Wars against each other. One cannot be human without war, no?”
“I used to like to think we could, but … I’m not so sure anymore.”
Lalibela buzzed her thorax and clacked her mouthparts raucously.
“Ah, my baby is hungry,” said Urszula. She spoke sharply to her in that bizarre tongue of the Dusters and clapped her hands.
The dragonfly fluttered off to the lower plateau.
“Happy hunting, my love!”
I moseyed over to a ruined staircase and started to sit. Something blinked at me from under a cluster of leaves.
“Gah!” I shot to my feet.
Urszula chuckled. “Calm down! It is only one of my fore-brothers.” She loped over and stripped away a veil of leaves from the Old One’s face. The rest of his body was layered deep with humus and strangled with woody vines.
“There. This will give him a better view. Not that he cared. He had plenty to meditate and contemplate on the underside of those leaves.”
“He can see us?”
“Who knows?” said Urszula. “But in case he does, we do him a kindness.”
Now that I had noticed him, I saw bodies everywhere, embedded in the landscape. Legs protruding from beneath trees. Faces gazing straight up at the sky. One root-encased couple was seated on a stone bench holding hands, their skin weathered and bleached and scaled with lichens.
They would have freaked me out a lot less had they been mere skeletons. There was something grotesque in their level of preservation and in that little bit of life that they retained. Maybe I had seen too many B movies in my time, but I couldn’t help thinking of them as flesh-eating zombies.
“These are the oldest of the Old Ones,” said Urszula. “Our founders. The original rebels of the Deeps. They are to be revered.”
“Yeah, just like you revere Yaqob.”
Urszula took a deep breath. “That is different. That is personal. When he takes the long sleep, I will then respect him.”
“So what does this to them? Is this some kind of disease?”
“Nothing at all like that. It is just the long sleep. It happens to us all.”
Lalibela swooped and darted across the lower terrace, flushing flocks of those day glow zebra leafhoppers. Clouds wafted slowly through the meadows like enormous sheep.
“Oh? Is that gonna happen to you?”
“Eventually,” said Urszula. “Souls are finite receptacles. They fill. One can only hold so much experience of a place. When they fill, souls move on.”
I wasn’t sure whether to feel happy or sorry for her. “So where do they go? Heaven?”
“Only the Old Ones know. And they aren’t talking.”
“So maybe it is Heaven?”
Urszula shook her head. “I don’t think so. The powers that be would not be so charitable. Not to those they intended to spend eternity in the Deeps.”
“Well, here’s to hoping you stick around … at least a little while longer.”
She arched an eyebrow. “No worries. I am a relative newcomer. Less than a hundred years have passed since my arrival. Sixty in the Deeps. Thirty-seven here.”
“And you said you died when you were thirteen. Dang! That makes you a hundred and ten years old!”
“Nineteen aught two. May twenty-three. That was my birthday.”
A bee popped out of the sky and landed on Urszula’s outstretched forearm. It crawled up her arm and she accepted its gift of nectar.
“Man, that didn’t take long.”
“They go everywhere, these bees. They are our eyes, our ears. See all. Know all. It may look like they serve us, but sometimes I am not so sure. Sometimes I think we are here to serve them.”
The bee flitted over to me. I wouldn’t let it land, but I accepted its offering in my hands. I refused to be fed mouth to mouth by a bug, especially after seeing the gunk they coughed up for the mantids.
“I have to go,” said Urszula. “I need to check on Octavia and Gabr. They are vulnerable in that gorge with only Trisk to defend them. And Yaqob will not pleased with our action. This will require some careful explaining.”
“Wait. You’re not gonna leave me here all alone with all these … things?”
“They are not ‘things.’ They are my brothers and sisters. You will be perfectly safe. No Frelsians ever come here. They have neither the means nor the inclination.”