Chapter 2 - part the first

 
 
 

2

Late in the morning, the two children awoke.

“What are we going to do?” Amos asked in a small voice.

Veon rolled off the bed aching; he pissed in a chamber pot, then came back to sit on the edge of the bed. Thoughtfully, he answered his sister:

“I think we need to go to the Azot.”

“The Shipwreck?” Amos whispered with real fear. “We can't go there?”

“Why do say so?” Veon asked.

“It's forbidden.”

“Not anymore,” Veon said. “Those who forbade us go there are now in the ground.”

Amos thought about what to say. “Just because mother and father are dead, it doesn't make the things they told us any less true. We still carry their name, and we should still respect their commands.”

“They told us never to go there because they wanted to scare us only,” Veon reasoned with her. “There is no danger there; but there is danger for us here.”

“Here?”Amos looked spooked, as if there might be spies lurking outside the Hall.

Veon shrugged. “Here; on the Prow; anywhere in Caza, or along the three Rivers. Think about it, Amos – the only place they would not think us to go is the one place we will be safe to hide. They think we are too scared to go to the Azot; so we must find our courage and prove them wrong. In their error so we shall slip their net.”

Amos swallowed, and nodded.

So they crept from Silent Hall into the deep woods where no tracks ran except for those made by deer or the skilled hunters who preyed on them. They needed no guidance to find the wreck; everyone living in Caza knew where it was and how to find it. They simply had to climb, for up was the only way to go.

Veon went now burdened by a pack laden with food, for Silent Hall is always well-larded. He made his sister carry nothing, for it was difficult enough just climbing in the mountains. He carried a great fur rolled up for them to sleep in, and he had draped little ones over his sister who still bore merely her satin sleeping gown – a garment now muddied and tattered beyond repair.

There were no hunting cats nor wolves in these woods, which had long been lorded over by the folk of Whennon. Hunters and trappers would allow no such beasts to live near the populated river valleys. A few bears might wander in the higher stretches of the hinterlands, but these were shy and posed no threats.

Weather could prove an unpleasant variable, but there had been little rains, and in this season there would never be any snows, at least not until the great altitudes were attained – but those distant peaks were leagues past where the Azot fell.

It would take them two to three days to get there, Veon calculated. He knew that he could get there in two, but he did not know how to judge what Amos was capable of. She was hearty, and hale, but still young and small.

He was proud of his choice, and he was proud of Amos for following him to the Ship crashed upon the mountainside in ages past. He had expected her to cry, or perhaps to have a difficult time convincing her; but she seems to understand her submissive role now, and very easily accepted that Veon was in charge. This was unlike her entirely: in the house, she would fight with him all the time, and sometimes win when her arguments beat his – or at least swayed their parents to favour her side.

They stopped to eat lunch near a lively stream of clear, loud waters. This was a chance also to wash their faces and feet. Veon tried to take bearings off the position of the sun. He knew they had to come east, but not so far at the Gulch – and certainly they didn't want to stumble and fall into the Gully!

“Look!”Amos said, pointing up at a rocky bluff some miles away. “Goats!”

Veon squinted and shaded his eyes with a hand. Five shaggy shapes of grey he spotted standing impossibly a sheer distant wall, finding footing he couldn't fathom. They all had long, ridged corns growing upon their heads. Veon wanted to startle them; he wanted to see them move. Not daring to shout, he clapped his hands together twice.

The noise reached the animals, and they fled upwards, bounding, kicking off the rock in a show of majestic, bestial strength.

Amos swatted at Veon, hitting him in the arm. “Why did you do that?” she said, then turned sulky.

Veon let her pout. It was a fine day, and he felt he should be out with his brothers. It did not feel to him as though they were dead and gone; that did not process in his mind. Rather, it felt as though he had left them, had run away from home and would never return.

To the east he saw a falcon flying on high winds. Sunlight glinted white on its barred wings. It seemed as though all creatures had their place, and were equipped to get by. “But not us,”Veon mused, looking at his sister in her filthy frock. “We alone are lost.”

Three peaks had to be overcome before the Azot would come into view; but luckily, after the third, the wreck was not far off. Veon had only ever seen it from the Lowland Road, although he'd heard say that a better view of it came from the River. Veon had never ridden craft on the Lapsiam nor any of the other three rivers, before or beyond the cataracts, nor indeed outside the bounds of Caza.

They camped for the night before reaching the first peak; slept on the second the following night, and on the third day out, as they crested the last of the trio, they saw the wreck of the massive ship that had fallen out of the skies, embedded now in the mountain range.

They stood upon a high ridge, gazing down upon the wreck.

“It looks like a hat,” Amos said. “Don't you see? There's the brim, and it has a flat top.”

“And I suppose that tall tree growing askew would serve as a feather?” Veon commented drily.

Amos sniffed at that but said nothing. Veon knew she felt they should not be making jokes, but rather be mourning. Veon knew this himself, too; but he had no practice with grief. He did not know how to begin to mourn.

Once more, he tried telling himself: My family is dead.

Again, it registered no response in him; like dropping a stone into a well with no bottom, there was simply no noise, no echo, no splash.

As they went down from the third peak by a natural stair in the stones seemingly built for giants, Amos suggested they pray. Veon had convinced her to follow him here, but he could not stop her from being afraid; and now that he saw the Wreck, it filled him with a sort of dread and awe which made him also want to pray.

The difference was, Amos still believed her prayers might be answered.

Regardless, the boy led them in the Prayer of the Interstitial. They recited the words together, under their breath, for they had not much left as they marched:

“Bless us upon the borders, and bless us in the center;

“Hinder our hearts, and send us helter-skelter.

“Lift us up into the ether, then cast us down asunder;

“Halter our spirits, yoke the heady than the younger.”

Veon looked at the Ship as often as he could as they descended toward it. He had never been this close to it, of course, and it occurred to him then that probably most of the men in Caza had never ventured even half so close.

The boy reflected, I always thought that men could do as they pleased, but the truth is that they too were told as boys that this place is cursed and haunted; so that even as adults they have been ruled by their childhood fears. It's funny, but I always assumed the men didn't speak of the Azot around me because they deemed me too young. In reality, they had nothing to say of it.

He wondered if any of the trappers came up this way, or perhaps some of the wild folk; but no – they too avoided the spot. There were no tracker trails anywhere near-about. The place was entirely desolate. It seemed as if even the birds did not come here, and the lack of their song and sounds made Veon nervous.

Crouching upon an upraised knuckle of stone in the slanting, west-flung sunbeams, Veon squinted at its great hulking shape rising above the treetops.

Huge, ancient, decrepit, and entirely alien, the wrecked ship poked up at a forty-five degree angle from the dale in which it had crashed – no, Veon realized suddenly – but in the crater it had created. The boy imagined the terrible impact. He envisioned it happening right in front of him, as though a boy living in this same area, living wild, thousands of years hence before any of the cities were built in Novo.

It had an long fuselage, made of a sort of alloy that no metal-smith could mix or identify; and a great rising fin curved out from its dorsal side. He looked for the word, the name, but saw not figures writ upon the wreck. As all who had ever gotten so close could see, Veon noted that the craft was blackened, scorched.

He knew also from the few reports he'd ever heard, that while this side appeared more or less intact, the far side was rent open, utterly destroyed.

Veon understood avarice; he had seen the face of malice, if only just recently. He knew there were people in the world who were hatching plots to bring his family, his kinsfolk, and his entire city to ashes. He knew stone, and sweat, and sweetness – the sweetest being the moment he had gotten Ephe to kiss him in the gardens growing along the Faith – but he did not know what this thing was he now beheld.

“Who could have made such a thing?” he asked, but there was no one to answer him; Amos was well ahead of him now along the path that led from the rocky peak down into the wooded glade. Did she see what he saw? Was she able to ask any of these questions, or was she simply trying to keep her fears at bay?

The sun was sinking fast, and there were miles yet to go – and who knew what they would find once they arrived at the Wreck? Veon quickly leapt down from his lonely vantage point and raced down the slope to rejoin his sister. Once he left the outcropping upon which he had crouched, the fallen form of the mysterious Ship was lost from sight, and he plunged into deepening shadows beneath the indifferent tree tops.

After a final hour of hiking, the two wanderers stumbled into the clearing where the Ship stood at an angle from the hard rock into which it had been speared. Here nothing grew, and it looked as if the rock had been boiled into magma so that all around the site there was a perimeter of obsidian, a table of volcanic consequence.

Veon took the first step onto that weird, dead ground. He peered up at the height of the Ship. He glimpsed the embossed letters, and trotted off to the right so that he could see the rest. Amos let out a squeal and followed him hurriedly.

When the name of the craft came into view, the two siblings exchanged looks. Emblazoned upon the side of the fuselage were the letters:

A Z O T

The T was near the top, where the rear part of the ship had been torn clean off. Veon reasoned that the rest of the Wreck – bits of debris and detritus – had been cleared away ages past by scavengers and treasure hunters; but the fuselage had rested here throughout every era of the past since it had crashed, impossible to dislodge or extract.

“Shall we go in?”Amos piped up, startling her brother a bit as he gazed so intently upon the drastic derelict. He nodded, took her hand in his, and led the way around to the far side where he knew they could find some ingress.

Within, there was nothing but the overgrown ruins of internal mechanisms, fallen machinery, equipment that had once been attached to the interior of the chassis. Rains had rusted none of it, but it was dirty in the collapsed column of the tubular ship. There was no floor within, only a chute into which all of the things that could not be salvaged had fallen. There was no shelter, either, as the back end had long ago been lost and the embedded part was completely open to the elements.

“Up there,” Veon said, pointing to a fixed console. He helped his sister climb up onto the angled side of the controlling bank that was still fast to the chassis; then he handed her the pack, and lastly pulled himself up.

“There's no cover,” Amos pointed out.

“It won't rain,” Veon said. “Trust me.”

He wasn't sure why it was important for them to sleep within the Ship and not somewhere nearby – he just knew that this was the place for them, their only haven. Here they made a narrow bed for themselves, and laid down to sleep.

Deep in the night, as the moon soared into the west, Veon lay awake listening to the spies creeping about in the brush outside. He knew that none of them dared to venture out onto the circumference of the blast radius – at least not yet.

Straining his ears, he could hear them whispering out there. He tried to make out their words, and he thought he heard “absconds” or perhaps “ensconced” but he couldn't be sure.

Veon started, thinking that he had to get Amos out of here before they closed in; waking in the dark from his nightmare, he rolled off the narrow console and fell with a shriek of terror into the black pit that lay below.

It wasn't until the pale light of dawn had lifted some of the shadows that he came to his senses. Amos was crying, somewhere above.

Veon tried to get up. He was sprawled on his back. His head hurt where he'd struck it, and he felt a bump there when he brought his hand to see if it was cut. Slowly, prudently, he tested everything. There were lots of bruises, and a bad scrape along his left arm – but the worst of it seemed to be a twisted ankle. It was already quite swollen and hurt to move it.

“Amos,” he called up. “I'm all right.”

He saw he poke her head over the ledge to peer down toward her fallen brother. “Where are you?”she whined. “I can't see you!”

“I'm right here. I can see you,” he said. “I'm about sixteen feet down.”

As her eyes adjusted, Amos made out the figure of her brother waving to her from below.

“Can you climb up? Veon, I'm scared.”

“I'll try, but let's wait until there's a bit more light.”

“What happened, Veon?”

He tried to lift her spirits by laughing at himself. “I suppose I just rolled right off!” He could remember the voices he'd heard, but now he wasn't sure if that had been a dream or not.

Amos sniffed. “Maybe I can find something to lower down to you,” she said, then disappeared for a while.

When she came back, there was enough light falling into the Azot for them both to see one another quite clearly. Amos reported that she had found nothing; but Veon held up a length of cordage that he had scrounged from some of the tumbled machinery.

“Will that hold?” Amos asked, skeptical. “It looks very thin.”

“Yes, but I believe it is strong.” Veon pulled on it to test it out. His sister remained unconvinced.

“Throw it up,” she said, “and we'll try it out.”

“What's the worst that can happen?” Veon called up. “It'll break and I'll fall flat on my butt! One side is already bruised anyway; if I land on the other cheek, maybe I can even it out!”

Still, Amos didn't laugh. Now Veon knew something was wrong with her, as she always giggled at least, whenever he made dumb jokes involving someone's posterior. For a fleeting moment, he wondered if she would ever be the same again. Surely he would once again hear her sweet, childish laugh?

Veon threw her the cable, and on the third try she caught it. There was no shortage as far as its length; Amos was able to leave the Wreck and cross the bubbled perimeter where no tree grew, until she found a sturdy and thick trunk to fasten it to. She knew a few good knots – their eldest brother, Solo, had taught her at her behest, when she had one rainy day come across him and a panoply of ropes laid upon the study floor. So Amos was able to trot back to her only remaining brother, sure that she had done her duty well to get him out: she had tied a double fisher's – the strongest one in her repertoire.

When she poked her head over the edge, she saw that Veon was already on his feet – or foot, rather. He wasn't able to put any weight at all on his sprained ankle. In his one hand was the cable; the other was pressed against the interior of the buried chassis, for balance.

It was not a completely sheer climb. There was a lot of equipment cast into a heap down where Veon had fallen. Also, the Ship was not standing with its head buried at a perfectly erect angle, but rested somewhat upon its side.

Still, there was a good seven feet which he would have to climb with nothing to put his feet upon except the interior wall, which offered no footholds.

He set himself to do it, climbing up to the highest place he could reach before there was nothing left but a strong-arm attempt to heave himself up and out.

He had climbed ropes before, but they were thick and easy to grip. This cable was not so; also, he could not use his feet to pinch it below him and give him the ability to hike up the line.

“Like a tiny green caterpillar, inching up its little gossamer thread,” Veon repeated to himself, remembering when he had been taught by Solo this other trick with rope.

With his arms only, Veon attempted the climb. Amos watched breathlessly as he tried to pull himself up; but halfway up, his arms quivering and giving out, he looked up at her for just a moment and she could see fear in his eyes – not for himself, but for her, because if he could not make it out, there was no way he could protect her.

Veon fell. He tried to let himself down; the cable slipped in his hand. He landed as best as he could on his one good foot – but this only threw him off balance so that he tumbled backwards, arms flailing desperately.

Amos called after him as he slid down further into the dark. She listened, but no answer came. She called again; then when she was certain that Veon was in real trouble, she put her leg over the edge, grabbed the line, and took a deep breath.

Squeezing the cable between her legs, and using her feet as well to slow her descent, Amos squiggled down the line. She knew that she didn't have the ability to climb back up, either.

Where only moments before, Veon had braved his failed ascent, she alighted. It was dark, but Amos could make out the shapes and forms of the heaped, ancient debris. All of it looked alien to her, with rows of switches placed upon banks below smashed monitors, and the exposed innards of consoles, with long ribbons of red wires leading to pins and plugs, reminding her of intestines.

“A muffin for some lovin',” Amos muttered, hoping the words would bring some courage. They came from a children's book that her mother read to her often, retelling the tale of Anka the baker whose baby was accidentally lost in a pile of dough. Anka then had to give away all of her delicious muffins to everyone in town to help her look for the babe before it was carried into the ovens and cooked! Anka gave muffins to her greedy neighbours, to the birds that she usually shooed, and even to the rats who could sniff out the lost baby.

“She never lost heart,” Amos' mother liked to say. “Even though she was right next to the hearth. When she was down to her last muffin, she gave it to a snake, and do you know what happened?”

“The snake burped up the baby so it could eat the muffin!”

“That's right,”her mother would say, beaming at her giggling girl. “And that's how Anka learned of the plot they had laid in order to steal all her muffins: the rats, the birds, and all her greedy neighbours. So she threw some of her baking liquors into the oven, and burned them all in her kitchen while she escaped down the coal chute with her burbling baby.”

“What's a burble?” Amos had asked, once.

“It's what all babies do, when they're happy,” her mother had explained. “It sounds a like cross between your father's singing and a goat's bleating.”

“I never burbled, did I?”

“You were a burbling wonder, my dear. Now, how does the story finish? Do you remember what Anka says to her baby?”

“Yes!” Amos squealed, writhing in her bed, because she didn't want the story to come to an end; but she came up with the answer before her mother read it from the book, so that she would be proud. “She says, “They took all my muffins, and they nearly took you! But never again, my baby, because everyone will know: you don't get a muffin for nothin'!”

They said the last few words in unison. That was the name of the storybook: A Muffin for Nothin'!

Presently, Amos was finding herself feeling much less courageous now that she had brought to mind the notion of facing rats and snakes, and perhaps other creatures fouler still in the bowels of the Ship.

Somehow, duty trumped any of the things that might test her heart. She knew that Veon needed her, and that she had to face whatever dangers lay ahead because that was what was called of her.

So she slowly began to shuffle and clamber down the jumbled mass of dead machinery. She took with her the rest of the cable, that still had many loops to go before its end. As she went, she softly called her brother's name.

When she came to a gaping hole in the wall where part of the Ship had fallen away into the deep caverns below, she stopped calling Veon's name. It was obvious he could not hear her, and was too far away to answer.

Amos could see nothing through the rent in the chassis; it was a hole, black as a starless sky; but she could feel some cold air rising from the earth.

How deep was it? Was Veon down there, dying?

Amos sighed and threw the last of the dangling cable into the black hole before her.

“Down the coal chute!” she said, then she leapt into the dark.