Filaria (20 page)

“Tell me,” Mingh straw insisted. “Is it the wings? Is that what sets them apart? No. Look between their legs.” Leaning forward to poke at Deidre, though Deidre, repulsed, had moved back. “That’s where the real truth lies. That’s what makes them men. Have you looked?”

“I have not,” Deidre said, shocked. But her statement was untrue: she
had
glimpsed the tiny, pointed penises of the angels, dangling limply within their feathery codpieces. A flush of hot shame burned through her, down to her core, and she snapped, “Leave me alone, all right? Stop talking to me.”

“Little needle dicks, right? That’s what makes them men. If they were gods? Well, I guess gods can have dicks any size they want!” Mingh straw laughed.

“Are you trying to shock me? It’s not working,” Deidre lied, for the second time in as many minutes. “I may be fourteen but I’ve seen my sister in the stable, on her knees in the straw. I’ve seen her. I know what goes on. She talks trash like you. I know what she does to boys.”

“You do?” Mingh straw laughed again, an ugly sound. “Tell me. I’d love to know.”

“Stop talking. Please. Stop talking to me.”

“Okay, sister.” Traces of a grin remained on her face. “I get the hint.”

To Deidre’s relief and surprise, the request for silence was heeded. As hot winds whipped up again, she glanced about; the angels no longer watched but she heard their unpleasant voices nearby. Every so often, one dropped from the nest to soar past her, through suns’ light and down, toward the ruined and smouldering landscape below. Those winds plucked at Deidre and howled mockingly.

Huddled against the partition of sticks, trying to imagine a way out of this predicament, she abruptly fell into a sort of desperate, exhausted sleep; at this point she had been awake more than a full day.

From the shore of a fetid swamp, which spread out before her, the Orchard Keeper came, slowly transforming into a furred beast with a chitinous breast and sharp, needle teeth. This beast, her father, splashed into the muck and floundered there.

Waist deep in the stagnant water, Deidre watched. Her hair fell out, in clumps, and these floated on the surface of the water all around her like eels.

“Dad?” she said.

The beast went under.

“Hi, D.”

In the reeds stood Sam’s little dead boy, grinning. Next to him, another boy, around the same age as Deidre, gave her a nervous wave. This kid was thin and blotchy and looked sick. His hair, like hers, had fallen out, and when he smiled he had no teeth to show. He said, “I won’t let you go. Don’t worry. We’ll keep our hiding place.”

The gashes on the dead boy’s neck opened and closed, opened and closed, in rhythm with Deidre’s breathing, and Mingh straw’s monotone voice began to infiltrate. Deidre listened, her eyes still closed, wishing the vile girl and all recent events would just go away.

“I’m going to tell you a story . . . I know you’re awake. Make of it what you will. Recently, I had my heart broken. I don’t know if you’ve ever had your heart broken, but you might be able to relate. You seem smart enough. There was a girl, see? There’s always a girl, isn’t there? I worked with her. She was beautiful. Gorgeous and slim. Really hot.
Sexy
. We were often requested together, as a team. I guess we were picked because she looked as young as me — as young as
you
— though I don’t think she had any operations or that the gods gave her anything to keep her that way. She looked young
naturally
. We even fucked a few gods, as a team. Deities don’t really know what they’re doing when it comes to fucking but sometimes they like to give it a shot. Try to pretend they’re down in the dirt with us, you know? Mostly it was funny. Sometimes it was kind of sad. And they wanted to watch us fuck each other, too. Not gods, of course, but men. Men like to watch girls fuck each other. Did you know that?”

Deidre kept her eyes squeezed shut. Some people believed if you’ve done terrible things in life, you would spend eternity in a nightmare, surrounded by all that you find reprehensible and offensive. But what had she done to deserve
this
?

“You can really tell when a girl is into it or when she’s faking, passing time, thinking about cleaning her room or her nails or if she’ll get a food pak or not for her kids back home. This girl Minnie sue was into it. She wasn’t faking
anything
. She ate my pussy like — ”

“Stop talking!” When Deidre finally opened her eyes she saw, in the sudden quietude, that Mingh straw was chuckling. Taking a deep breath, Deidre asked, in a barely controlled voice, “What’s the matter with you? Why are you doing this to me?”

Mingh straw shrugged. “Bored, I guess. And I’ve been kidnapped by flying monsters and fed garbage for four days. Plus, I never liked privileged kids who thought they were better than other people.”

“I
don’t
think I’m better than you. We’re different, that’s all. We should be in this together. If you don’t think so, just leave me alone and I’ll get off of this horrid nest by myself.”

“Maybe you want me to eat your pussy?” Mingh straw leered. “We should put on a show for them? Maybe that’s what they’re waiting for. Plus, it might alleviate the boredom.”

Deidre stood up suddenly but was forced to drop again to her haunches; the wind grabbed wildly for her, whipping her hair back and plucking at her ruined clothes. With burning eyes she crawled away.

Mingh straw hissed, “Where can you go?”

And, when Deidre was a few meters away, still moving, still hiding her tears, Mingh straw shouted in a much louder voice, “I wasn’t telling the truth, you bitch! Minnie sue never broke my heart! She was a lousy lover! She was straight, married to a loser who did nothing but fish every day! Trapped in a marriage to a man she hated! And she was the one gave me — !”

Clambering around the lip of a partition, Deidre gasped and wiped at her face. The wind had blasted tears from her eyes and sliced the air from her lips. Each awful word of that monologue had been branded into her mind, ringing in her ears. Mercifully, it too had been sliced cleanly away.

Huddling nearby, a group of angels — including the black one — were gibbering, talking excitedly amongst themselves. They turned to her, as she emerged, and now they stopped their antics. Gesturing and flapping, a few showed signs of further agitation. Not wanting to go back to where Mingh straw was, Deidre shrank close to the rancid sticks and debris, presenting her back to the group of angels but keeping a wary eye on them, lest they attack.

With slow, strong beats of their wings, two angels lifted off and, in mid-air, kicked at each other, feet splayed in an almost comic fight. Their voices rose in tone and shrillness.

Then a third broke away from the cluster to come rushing toward her, wings outstretched, gait awkward and shifting from side to side. While she cowered, the beast fell upon her, took hold of her shoulders with the tips of the long fingers that spread the membranes of its wing apart, shrieking angrily in her face with horrible breath.

Deidre shouted, twisting, pulling the angel off balance. Clumsily, they rolled. The wings were like stinky warm sheets over her face; she was sure she could have snapped the light bones of the creature with her bare hands but the angel scrambled to its feet and suddenly backed off.

Then she saw the dirigible.

Still quite far away, under thin clouds and smoke lingering from the razed landscape, gleaming dully in the hazy sunlight, approached a ship. Not quite as high as the aerie, without a doubt the tan shape was an airship.

Deidre saw the wooden fuselage suspended from the oblong balloon, and the massive prop churning sluggishly behind it. Though she had only seen images of such a craft she imagined her rescuers standing within the cupola, all dressed neatly in uniforms identical to the one that the gram in her sanctum had been wearing yesterday. She imagined their waxed moustaches, their blue eyes. She imagined their resolve. Perhaps, she thought giddily, it was even the man himself, in the flesh, the man to whom she had listened, in her sketching room, presiding at the helm.

She sat up straight.

Obviously the angels had spotted this craft earlier, and when Deidre had fled Mingh straw’s taunts, they’d been discussing a strategy, in their own way. Now they had resumed their dance, arguing among themselves, kicking and making their awful giggling noises.

“You’re dead,” she told her attacker, who remained standing over her, also watching approach of the slow-moving dirigible. It looked down at her with beady eyes. Its nostrils twitched. “You’ll see, you filthy beast. You’re all dead! You can’t touch me any more!”

The angel blinked, hissed, and looked away.

Balloons were military crafts, under orders from — and in possession of — officials much higher in rank than her father. But was it possible that the Orchard Keeper had discovered her abduction and arranged for her rescue?

She waved vigorously, moving so she could see Mingh straw, who sat still, staring out into the clouds in the opposite direction, as if she remained unawares, unconcerned. Deidre scuttled back to the girl, calling to her, cutting through the crosswind. The angel that had accosted her shrieked once, but did not follow.

“They’re coming,” Deidre shouted. “Mingh straw, they’re coming! We’re getting help!”

The girl turned, very slowly.

Blood bubbled at the corners of her mouth. She smeared the blood with the back of one hand, marking her cheek and chin with demented crimson streaks. “Who is?” Voice thick, though the girl tried to smile. “Who’s coming?”

“You’re bleeding . . .”

“What makes you think, sister, that I need
another
sister? One more to take care of? The gods of fertility took care of
that
. Cut my tubes. I don’t need another kid.”

Deidre turned to pull apart nearby sticks, to better watch the airships’ progress through the gap she made. “Can’t you see it, Mingh straw? Look.” She spoke as if Mingh straw was the child and she, Deidre, was the adult. She took the girl’s hot arm. “Can’t you see it? They’re coming to save us. Everything is going to be all right.”

Gleaming as it rose, turning flank toward her in ponderous yet graceful motion, the craft of the rescuers neared. An insignia, red and blue, almost impossible to make out from this distance — though she was sure she’d seen it before, and knew its detail, on sealed documents brought to Elegia — emblazoned the rudder.

In a very quiet voice, Deidre confided, “I only noticed their penises because I’m a scientist. That’s all. A scientist.”

At least three angels circled the airship out there, appearing in size and form as they had when Deidre had first seen them from the picnic site a lifetime ago, a world away.

Orbiting the dirigible, diving at it swiftly, pulling out at the last moment or occasionally holding place directly over the top of the craft, to hover uncertainly there, the angels clearly did not know how to deal with this threat.

And so, one by one, the creatures plummeted from sight, shot down, dead. Silently Deidre cheered, though she also felt a remote sadness, a surprising empathy for the angels whose source she could not understand; the beasts did not seem much smarter than moths.

Deidre’s eyes narrowed.
It was a cruel world
. She knew that. Nature was impartial, reality harsh. Part of the order of things. But would she stick a pin through an insect again, if she had the luck to survive this ordeal, and again be given the choice? Would she ask Sam for the unfortunate owner of an archived spiral to be retrieved from the library, resurrected from extinction so she could kill it all over again? The idea of her specimen jar sickened her a little now and she wondered if ghosts of all the insects she had ever put into it were gathering together, watching her perils with grim satisfaction, siding with their winged brethren as they, too, succumbed to the nasty humans.

“Confession time, sweet ass?” Mingh straw’s voice was slurred but insistent, as if Deidre’s comment about the angels’ genitalia had percolated down through layers of troubled perception to revive her. While Deidre watched the uneven battle, Mingh straw spoke once more:

“Is it time for true confessions? All right, then, sugar tits, all right. What I believe is that these monsters brought you here because they weren’t happy with me. As a specimen. Because I’m broken and sick and they know it. They wanted another girl. A younger girl. A prettier girl. And I can —
Look out
!”

Something hit Deidre hard, from the side, lifting her completely off the nest and carrying her out into the open air. The landscape below suddenly filled her vision with a rush, and in the initial moment, winded, she wondered if an explosion had occurred, or if she were mortally hurt, about to plummet, but by the time her wits began to return to her she realized that she was dangling high over the ruined world, in excruciating pain, being carried off once more through the skies.

An angel — the black one — had her in its talons, and was flapping away from the aerie.

No pretence of being gentle this time. She was not gripped between the beast’s knees; claws fully pierced the muscles of her shoulders, clinging to the bone beneath. She felt them scraping at her skeleton. From under her torn shirt, hot blood trickled, dripping down onto the land like a baptism. What came out of her mouth was not a scream. The talons tightened; the world grew dim.

She turned her head to see if the airship was changing course to come get her, but saw instead a white angel directly behind her, with Mingh straw hanging from its grip. The other girl was fighting, writhing, reaching up to hit the angel again and again and grab at its wiry thighs as the creature struggled to remain airborne with its load.

“Mingh straw!”

First one claw came free, then the other worked loose, talon by straining talon, as Deidre knew it would.

Liberated, Mingh straw floated for a moment, the suns’ light playing through her hair. Suspended beneath the angel in a position that implied impending and beautiful somersaults, or some other motion defying any rule of cold physics or of nature, as if plunging down to meet death were an act of free will, a conscious decision she had decided not to take — not for this delicious instant — Mingh straw looked at Deidre, her blood-smeared face wild and flushed with ecstasy.