Eleanor (55 page)

It comes much sooner than she anticipated.
 

The mountain pitches sideways, and she hears a horrendous crack from deep under the water, and then the entire peak slides into the deep gray water. The keeper climbs to her feet and runs in the opposite direction and leaps from the mountaintop as it smashes into the ocean. She closes her eyes and wheels her arms against the sky, imagining the great crushing end that she will meet in a few seconds—she will fall into the roiling sea, and sink like a stone, and the mountain will grind her bones beneath its weight.

But she lands on something hard and strong, and the wind is knocked from her chest, and then she is climbing, high into the misty clouds.
 

The beasts have returned.

She is seasick.
 

The beasts walk side by side, moving ponderously through the gray sea. Their long necks crane high above the water, scraping the clouds, and the keeper holds fast, afraid. Below her, massive waves break over the beast’s ridged back. The other beast’s back is below the ocean’s surface. She is riding the larger one, then.
 

The creatures walk for weeks and weeks, it seems. The sun never sets and never rises. The world is dim and full of spray and salt.

The keeper asks the beast a question, though she does not know if the beast has ears or understands her.

“Am I in hell?” she asks.

The beast does not answer.

It only keeps trudging through the sea.

She sleeps atop the beast’s head. It is wide and flat, as large as her mountaintop. Its skin is warm, pebbled, porous. She does not know what has become of her shadow. She imagines it pinned beneath the descending, shattered pieces of the mountain, crying for breath, traveling to the bottom of the sea, to the floor of her swallowed valley.

She is truly alone now.
 

The rain wakes her. It tastes of salt, as though the ocean below her somehow lives above as well, strained through the clouds. The keeper realizes her thirst and hunger, and tries to ignore both.
 

“Where are we?” the keeper asks the beast, who does not answer. “Where are we going?”

The smaller beast looks up at her, blinking its great dark eyes.
 

Both beasts stop walking.

The smaller one comes nearer, tilting its head curiously at the keeper, who seems but a parasite on the crown of her own beast.

“Where are you taking me?” the keeper asks again.
 

The small beast stares. Rain collects in a hollow on its head, and for the first time the keeper understands why the beast lumbers about, sickly and tired. One side of its head is caved in, the old skin scarred and thick where the wound has healed. Its two eyes shine bright despite its condition.

“What happened to you?” the keeper asks. “Who did that to you?”

Deep in its belly, the larger beast begins to sing, the sound like an oboe the size of the moon. The great slow sounds thrum in its throat. The keeper feels the song vibrate in her blood, and she remembers.

She remembers rain.
 

Remembers a highway, remembers a plane in the sky. Remembers red hair.
 

Remembers every bit of glass that scissored through her own clothes and skin.

She falls to her knees.
 

“No,” she whispers. “No, you cannot be—you—”

The large beast drops its head then, and the keeper nearly falls over. The wind rushes up about her as the beast’s long neck sinks into the ocean, waves churning over its plated skin, and the keeper shouts in fear. The ocean rises up to the beast’s massive head, and then the beast stops, its jaw resting upon the sea. The gray water splashes up around the keeper’s feet, and she retreats to the highest, boniest point of the beast’s skull.

She huddles there, shaking, frightened. The cold wind is a saw blade, keening in her ears. The cold bites into her, its teeth scraping her bones.
 

“You’ll kill me,” the keeper moans. “You’ll kill me, just kill me, please just kill me.”

The beast hums deeply, urgently, and the keeper, trembling, looks up.

A woman walks out of the sea.

She rises from the water like a forgotten ship hauled to the surface, great gushes of salt water streaming off her, bits of debris and kelp stuck to her skin. She wears a simple black swimsuit, and removes a tight black swimmer’s cap to reveal hair that is dark and damp and cut short. She pulls off dark goggles, and her eyes beneath are intensely green, flecked with orange.
 

The keeper retreats from the stranger, scuttling backward on the beast’s crown like a crab without a shell.
 

“Go away,” she says. “Go away, get out of here, go away.”

The woman stands at the water’s edge, her bare toes flexing against the beast’s knobby skin.
 

“Go away,” the keeper says again. “Go away!” She pounds her fist against the beast’s skull. “Take me away! Take me away!”

The woman says, “They hear you, but they will not listen.”

The keeper falls silent. She pulls her knees tight against her chest, drawing herself into a ball. Without her shadow, without her powers, she feels like a child, exposed and cowed beneath the stranger’s strong gaze.
 

The strange woman looks up at the sky, squinting in the rain. “It’s awful out here,” she says.

The keeper feels a pang of familiarity. She stares at the stranger, then says, hopefully, “I used to be able to fix it.”

The stranger looks back at her. “I know. Can you do it now?”

The keeper shakes her head. “It has gone from me,” she says sadly.
 

“Can I sit?” the stranger asks.
 

The keeper looks around her. There are plenty of places for the woman to rest her feet. She hopes that the woman will not sit beside her. She looks up and shrugs, and looks away again.
 

The woman sits where she stands, her slim legs folding almost elegantly beneath her, her back straight, head proud and tall.
 

“Thank you,” she says.
 

The keeper nods, and looks down at her feet. Her hair falls into her eyes, and she leaves it there. The curtain it creates calms her, if only a little.

They sit quietly for a long time, the beasts still in the sea. Then the stranger says, “I miss the sun.”

The keeper parts her hair with her fingers. “I miss it, too. I made it.”

“You made the sun?” the woman asks.
 

The keeper nods.
 

“Well done,” the woman says. “It was beautiful. I wish it would come back.”

The keeper bows her head, letting her hair fall over her face again.

Another moment of silence, and then the woman says, “What can I call you? Do you have a name?”

The keeper opens her mouth, then looks away.
 

“Do you know your name?” the woman asks.

The keeper cannot answer. She is ashamed, and she does not understand why. Only a short time ago she was a goddess, with the powers of life and death crackling in her veins. She feels as if she has been turned to stone, as if she has been abandoned.

“I am good at names,” the stranger says. “Perhaps I could give you one. You could use it, if you wanted to.”

The keeper says, “I don’t need a name.”

“Everyone needs a name. What will I call you if you don’t have a name?”

“You could go away,” the keeper says. “You could leave me be.”

The woman looks out at the sea. “Where would I go?”

The keeper stands up, suddenly, and looks around desperately for any hint of land.

She sees a beach that was not there before.
 

“There,” she says.

The keeper and the stranger sit still as the beast lifts its great neck into the sky. The clouds fall over its head, draping the two women in gauzy shadow. The keeper can barely make the woman out in the haze. She fixes her gaze on the woman’s indistinct shape, ready to leap to her death if the woman should so much as scoot an inch in her direction.
 

The beasts walk through the sea, the waters crashing against their bodies far below. The keeper can see their wake, deep and wide. The walls of the sea crash together there, and a feather-white trail of foam unravels behind them.
 

The beach is a half-moon of fine, black pebbles, yellow sawgrass at its edges. The fog is deep and heavy, obscuring the land behind it. The keeper can see the hint of trees in the fog, trapped as if in great, dense spiderwebs. As the beasts approach, she notices a rickety pier stretching out from the land into the water, and something tiny bobbing beside it.
 

The beasts stop in the deep water off the shoreline, and the large one dips its head, submerging itself in the water.
 

The pier is only a few feet away, just below the top of the beast’s head.
 

“We’ll have to jump,” the stranger says.

She does not know what she expected, but her new body is a comfortable fit. Her legs are skyscrapers, her body a small moon, her neck a graceful ribbon. The clouds are a fine mist against her broad face and hardened skin. When she dips her head into the sea, she blinks underwater, unperturbed by the salt that stings her eyes lightly. She sees the sea floor, disturbed by her mass, clouds of dirt and mulch clotting her view.