Black Wings (5 page)
I don’t know how long I lay there before I realized that Beezle was tapping my cheek with one little finger, his anxious face very close to my nose. It made me cross-eyed to look at him.
“Maddy?” His voice was low and urgent.
“Ugh,” I said.
“Are you okay?”
I took a moment to assess things. My ears rang, my vision blurred and every part of my body ached. It felt like I’d been hit by a train, or possibly an airplane.
“I hurt all over,” I whimpered, and then I turned my head to the side so I could vomit.
Beezle tactfully flew a few feet away until I was finished being sick. “Can you stand up?” he asked.
“Working on it,” I said, and laid my cheek against the cold sidewalk.
I must have passed out again. I had a vague sense of being lifted very gently. I heard Beezle and another voice fading in and out, although I couldn’t understand what they were saying. I wondered who was talking to Beezle. Most people thought he was just a statue, or maybe a stuffed doll. It sounded like they were arguing. The arms that held me gripped me a little tighter. I felt safe and warm, so I let go into the darkness again.
I went further, falling, falling, falling through darkness, back to the beginning. And there was a girl, and her name was Evangeline, and I saw her, and I was also a part of her.
At first Evangeline thought he was something she dreamed. He came to her as she lay under the half-moon in the cool of the midsummer evening. Her mother snored away in the hut and Evangeline, unable to sleep, had felt the stars calling her and gone out to listen to them.
The warmth of the earth cradled her, and the grass stroked her long black braids with loving hands, and the stars told her their secrets in whispers. Her fingers pressed into the earth and she closed her eyes and opened herself to everything.
Then she heard the great leathery flapping of mighty wings. Evangeline opened her eyes to find the dark angel blocking out the sky, and all she could see was his awful beauty, haloed in starshine and moonlight, and his black, burning eyes. He whispered her name, and his voice wound into her ear and down her throat and under her ribs, and she knew what he had come for. She opened her arms to him, and his smile dazzled like the Morningstar and he enfolded her in his great black wings.
Evangeline woke the next morning to the sound of her mother’s voice. She was on her own pallet, her hair still braided and not undone by a lover’s hands, her shift clean and unstained by the grass and the earth. She sat up as her mother told her to get a move on, there were chores to do, and she wasn’t a princess who could laze around all day. So she rose, and felt herself all over as she washed her arms and legs with a washcloth from the bucket. Her body did not feel different, and she thought he must have been a dream, and her chest ached a little at that. But she put on her day dress and walked out barefoot to fetch some wood so her mother could bake bread.
Evangeline’s mother had sharp eyes and a sharper tongue and she saw her daughter moving soft-legged and dreamy-eyed, and thought that it was time to go to the bone-counter and have a match made. She knew that when girls got that look you had to take them in hand and tie them to a husband before they got ideas about flowers and handholding, ideas that had them skinning off their shifts with the first sneaky-eyed and sneaky-handed boy that came along.
Evangeline walked behind the hut toward the river to collect the branches that fell from the trees hunched over the bank. As she passed the place where she had dreamed of the dark angel coming to her in the night, she saw that the grass was tamped down, as if someone had lain upon it. Her heart quickened, and she knelt in the grass and ran her fingers across it. As she did she remembered a Morningstar smile, and she saw three drops of blood on three blades of grass. She pressed her hand to her belly, listened, and heard the fluttering of tiny wings deep inside. Evangeline smiled, and stood, and went to the river to collect wood.
All day she smiled a faraway smile, and her sharp-tongued mother said sharp things to her more than once so that Evangeline would pay attention to her chores. Evangeline would start and remember that she was kneading bread, or stitching a blanket, but after a while she would forget again, and smile her faraway smile, and her mother would have to use her tongue as a lash.
And all the while that Evangeline remembered her lover, her mother watched her and thought again that she needed to get to the bone-counter sooner rather than later. So after supper was finished, she told Evangeline to wash the stewpot; she was going to the bone-counter. Evangeline hummed a little noise, and her hand moved forgetfully inside the stewpot, and her mother went to the bone-counter with fear in her heart that her daughter may have been lost to her already.
The bone-counter was a thin brown man with thin white braids and a long thin nose. He sat in front of his hut all day rolling the bones and reading them for the villagers. He knew all of the signs and portents, and whether that year’s crop would be good or bad, or if a woman would birth a boy or a girl, or if the wind might shift and bring the sickness from the Forbidden Lands, as it sometimes did, though not very often anymore.
He also knew all of the old stories, how a long time ago there had been great, shining cities of stone and metal, and there had been noise and people crammed together, and all of these people were connected by roads. Then one day the Great Powers had grown angry and destroyed all of the cities. There had been a great burst of flame, and a white cloud of ash in the air, and then another, and another. And afterward many people got sick and many people died for many years to come. Evangeline’s mother had seen some of these roads once, when she was young and her family had moved from one village to another. They were cracked and filled with grass and trees, and they had felt strange beneath her feet.
Evangeline’s mother went straight to the bone-counter’s hut, and did not stop to visit with the other women of the village that she passed, but the women wondered at the look on her face, and began muttering among themselves about the cause. One word passed their lips again and again—“Evangeline.” For all of these women were mothers, and knew that mothers looked that way only when their daughters had made them heartsick.
The bone-counter sat cross-legged and stern-mouthed, and when he saw Evangeline’s mother coming he knew that the signs he had read that morning were true, though he had prayed otherwise. Evangeline’s mother looked up from her worrying hands and saw the bone-counter’s sad eyes, and fear took root in her, spreading from her heart and hands to her belly and brain and into her knees, and she fell upon them in the dirt before him.
He told her that he had woken that morning with terror in his mouth, and he had gone to the bones, which had revealed to him a vision of Evangeline enfolded in great dark wings. At this Evangeline’s mother felt the fear in her heart burst and bloom and change. She was gripped by anger and shame that her daughter had seen darkness and welcomed it, thereby putting them all in danger.
The bone-counter said, “You know what must be done.”
And Evangeline’s mother nodded, and stood, and went to find strong men to carry the wood.
In the hut Evangeline dawdled and dreamed and thought of black, burning eyes, and felt the fluttering deep inside, a whisper in her blood. She sighed and put away the stewpot, and as she did she heard his voice in her ear, like a caress, saying, “Come to me. Come to me. Come to me.”
She spun in circles, arms outstretched, wanting him again, only him, and cried, “Which way?”
He did not speak again, but she saw in her mind ashand cloud-covered gray mountains, and a twisted tree with white branches clawing at the sky. Evangeline said, “I’m coming to you,” and she pulled the thread from her braids, releasing her black hair, and removed her day dress and shift, and that was how her mother found her, naked and pale and burning as if lit from within by the light of the Morningstar. Her arms were outstretched, and her eyes were closed, and Evangeline’s mother felt shame and rage break upon the surface. She closed one hand around Evangeline’s wrist and Evangeline opened her eyes, and her mother saw gold fire in green depths, and her doom.
Outside the men stacked the wood on the pyre and the bone-counter said prayers to the Great Powers and the women muttered like magpies and said, “Evangeline,” “Evangeline,” “Evangeline.” They all waited for her mother to bring Evangeline from the hut so they could burn her and purify the land before the crop was tainted. And in their secret hearts they were glad that it was not their daughters who had brought this shameful curse upon the village.
Then there was a scream, and the smell of smoke and scorched flesh, and from the hut Evangeline’s mother burst forth, her body covered in silver flames. Evangeline followed, her face all angle and bone, and her eyes burning fiercely in their sockets. Though she was thin, so thin, with tiny bird bones in her wrists and ankles and neck, the women shrank from her blazing eyes, but the men saw her white skin and black hair and wanted her. They rushed to grab her, to take her and keep her, and the bone-counter cried out, but their need pulled them to Evangeline. Where they touched her, their hands were lit by silver flame, and soon the air was filled with black smoke and cries of anguish.
Evangeline walked forward and the crowd parted around her. At the edge of it stood the bone-counter like a strong tree in a battering wind, stony-eyed and grim-jawed. He waved a staff covered in feathers and he spoke words of magic and power to subdue her, but Evangeline did not notice or care. She knew only that she needed to find her lover, and that this man stood in her way.
She closed her eyes, and those around her breathed a sigh of relief, for her eyes were too terrible and beautiful to look upon for long. She raised her arms to the sky and her face turned up to the rising moon, and the villagers were transfixed by her stillness. The bone-counter whispered his magic words and invoked the Powers and waited for Evangeline to be struck down. And in that stillness came the flapping of wings, thousands of wings, and Evangeline opened her eyes and smiled.
The creatures came from the sky on black wings, red-eyed and sharp-clawed, and they screamed horrible cries of joy as they closed upon the villagers. The bone-counter had only a moment to wonder why his power had failed him before his tongue was torn from his mouth and his eyes were pulled from their sockets and his belly was split and spilling.
And Evangeline walked, destruction following in her wake. She did not notice. She did not care. She was looking for someone, and she could not stop walking until he was found.
Smoke curled from her footsteps, and behind her were screams and flames and rent flesh, but they were distant to her, something already past. She looked ahead.
The sun scorched the sand and rocks and Evangeline’s bare skin. Her belly rounded and swelled, and her white skin grew brown. She carried a water jug from the village that burned behind her, but even that was only for the child, for she cared nothing of her own discomfort. She swallowed some water, and her lover’s son flapped his wings inside the taut and straining mound of her belly.
Two thousand miles had passed beneath her feet, and many villages, as she left the green lands and walked into the desert. She walked, searching for her lover, every step bringing her closer to ash- and cloud-covered gray mountains—the Forbidden Lands. Evangeline walked, always hearing his voice in her ear: “Come to me. Come to me. Come to me.” She did not care where her steps led her so long as he was there at the end of it all.
And then one day she woke to find his voice no longer in her ear, and she looked over the horizon and saw the jagged fingers of a white tree reaching to the sky. Beneath the tree there was a dark shadow haloed in starshine, and Evangeline no longer felt the sand of the desert beneath her feet as she ran. For three days and three nights she ran, the horizon always just out of reach, until on the fourth day great mountains suddenly loomed before her, and there was the tree, with him beside it.
“I have come to you,” she said.
His smile dazzled like the Morningstar, and his great black wings opened, and Evangeline went into his embrace. He closed his arms around her, and his wings beat around them, and the wings in her belly beat in time, and he lifted her up and carried her away, and she lifted her face to the brightness of his kiss.
The next morning I woke in my own bed. I’d had a dream, a vivid dream, about a girl called Evangeline, but the memory of it slipped away as I lay in the hot autumn sunshine pouring through my window. Darkness and blazing eyes mixed in my head with a monster and the smell of burnt cinnamon, and fire pouring from my hands.
Somehow I had survived, and someone had brought me home. That same someone had bathed me, twisted my long black hair into a single braid, put me in a clean nightgown, changed my bedsheets and bandaged the palms of my hands. Since I wasn’t close enough to anyone who could have performed such intimate services for me, I was more than a little freaked out.
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