Laurie King - The God of the Hive

The pounding started up again, with renewed urgency. A few of the accompanying words began to register: Petrol was chief among them, then fire .

A child’s voice from without joined the chorus, twining around the fire-person’s masculine bellows. My head-oh, my head! If they would only be quiet for a moment.

Estelle , that was the small creature’s name. And with her gone I could-just-manoeuvre myself into a half-standing, hunched-over position, my back against what was, in fact, the upturned floor of the enclosure. Which did me no good, since I couldn’t very well lift the weight and crawl out at the same time, but perhaps-

“Estelle? Estelle!” Shouting sent a bolt of agony through my head; it took me a moment to notice that she was no longer wailing and the man no longer shouting.

“’Stella, I need you to find something to prop under the back of the ’plane”-yes, there was an aeroplane in the equation-“when I lift it up. Can you find a big, heavy stick, about as tall as you are?” Could she? She was a mere child; I had no idea what she could do.

I heard her voice, although I couldn’t make out her words. She seemed to be moving towards my right, which indicated some kind of response to my command. The voice stopped, then started up again. It did this two or three times. A conversation? Did small children hallucinate? Or was it normal to converse with imaginary friends at times of stress?

“Estelle, can you find a stick, please? It’s really important, honey.”

“No, I-”

But her protest was cut off by a shudder in the enclosure, and without stopping to reflect on the unlikeliness of a child of forty months (even if she was Holmes’ granddaughter) understanding the fulcrum principle, I responded by pushing upwards with all my strength against the floorboards.

The machine rose, tail-end first, leaving the heavy engine off to my left. Tentatively, I let my knees sag a fraction; when the load remained up, I dropped to the ground and dove out from under the remains of the ’plane.

“Good work, Estelle,” I started to say, but then I saw her, thumb in mouth, staring towards the tail end of the machine. I took three steps forward, and saw the person responsible for lifting the burden.

I say person , but my concussed brain knew full well that it was indulging in a few hallucinations of its own, and that I had conjured up the creature of my recent thoughts and mythic dream. The being on whose shoulders our tail assembly was resting might have been spawned by the trees all around us: a wiry figure, all beard and hair, clothed in dark brown corduroy trousers, a lighter brown tweed jacket with an orange patch on one sleeve, a once-red shirt, a lavender tweed waistcoat, and a cap the green of the branches behind him. The cap had a feather in it. I glanced down, half-expecting hooves or fur where his trousers stopped, but he wore boots, their leather the colour of the soil.

I met a fool in the forest, a motley fool , my mind recited idiotically.

I became aware that he had said something. This creature of the woods had made speech. I blinked at him, and he repeated it, more loudly, but I was distracted by a presence at my side. A small child-Estelle. Estelle had both arms wrapped around my leg, as if clinging to a rooted tree in a hurricane. My hand smoothed the back of her head; I was dimly aware that she was sobbing, and only the woodman’s urgency forced a key word from his thrice-repeated warning into my awareness.

“Petrol!”

Petrol. Fire. Javitz-and the poor devil already bore the scars of flame.

Some dim awareness of a long-ago situation that had involved a child in need of distraction penetrated my mind, causing my hand to reach for an object that I didn’t know was there until I drew it out: a delicate porcelain dollies’ tea-cup, slipped into my pocket days before. I pressed it-miraculously unbroken-into the child’s hand. She looked at the familiar toy and unwrapped her arms from my leg, making sounds of exclamation while allowing me to usher her away (away! from the fire!) and settle her on the ground. I then moved with alacrity back to the remains of the machine.

The wreck was little more than a cigar-shaped tube-both wings had shredded, the propeller was gone, and the whole thing had flipped over. I squatted to look underneath, and blinked at the sight of Javitz’s head and shoulders, upside-down on the earth while his legs disappeared upwards. He worked to turn his head around.

“My foot’s caught,” he gasped. “Get out of here. The petrol will go up any moment.”

It was already dripping down the control-stick and across the pilot’s clothing.

“What can I do?” I asked him.

“Let me have your revolver, and then run.”

My thinking processes, far from clear, failed to connect the weapon with a means of freeing a caught foot. However, I could think of another weapon that might do it.

I dropped my jacket and the gun on the ground, then called to our hirsute rescuer, “Can you keep the machine absolutely still? If it shifts and makes a spark, we’ll both be trapped.”

“I can,” came the reply.

Javitz protested furiously all the while I was inching my way in beside him.

His right boot was caught on something invisible in the broken belly of the aeroplane. Ignoring his furious commands, I slid the knife out of my boot and walked both hands up a trouser leg sodden with petrol: knee; calf; ankle. When I reached his boot, my fingertips found the bit of metal snagging the laces. He had fallen silent, rigid with dread; I needed only whisper my warning: “Brace yourself.”

The knife point slid under the laces and the tough cord parted. He grunted as his full weight settled onto his bent neck. I held his foot away from the metal snag, waiting for him to pull away.

The only direction he could move was out, under the hanging body of the aeroplane, both of us praying that the buttons and ties of his clothing did not create any friction. Head, shoulders, torso, legs, and finally his feet-one booted, one bare-were pulled past my own feet and disappeared from view. My face was mere inches from his toes as I followed, fast as my legs could scrabble.

Out of the corner of my eye I spotted the fur coat and rucksack, spilt from the compartment. As I rose to my feet, I stretched out a hand to snatch them up: The pack came without hindrance; the fur caught briefly on something before coming free.

As it did so, a faint clang came from the depths of the machine. I took three panicked leaps, halfway to Estelle, and then the Whomp! of igniting petrol shoved at me and I caught her up in a somersault that ended in a tangle of legs, leaves, and fur among the trees.

If the petrol tank had not been down to its last quarter, the explosion would have incinerated us all. Still, there was plenty of fuel to set the machine instantly ablaze.

I stuck up my head, taking a census. Estelle sat, wide-eyed, covered in leaves, shocked speechless. I threw aside the fur and went to pick her up, although on closer examination, she seemed less terrified than amazed. Javitz, on the other hand, had come to a halt with his back against a tree and was staring white-faced and shuddering at the flames. Our rescuer-our rescuer was nowhere to be seen.

I set the child down next to Javitz, thinking that comforting her might at least distract him for a moment, then scrambled in a wide circle around the pulse of flames. I expected to find our Good Samaritan either aflame or impaled-but the dirt-coloured boots came into view, waving from the shrubbery beneath a slab of propeller quivering from a tree-trunk. The boots sank, and a head took their place. He stared open-mouthed at the propeller, the fire, and at me. His eyes, I noticed with the peculiar clarity of the concussed, were the very shade of Damian’s Green Man .