John Wright - Orphans of Chaos

I stepped up close and put my arms around his neck. He tilted me back like a man about to deliver a kiss, or a dancer in some sensuous Spanish dance, and put one arm around my thighs, one around my waist, and swept me off my feet.

He did it better than Quentin did it.

He hefted me once or twice, as if trying to guess my weight. Maybe he liked the feel of me in his arms. He looked up as if scanning for something, some signal in the wind or cloud.

Whatever it was, he seemed to find it. Boreas smiled down at me.

“Are you ready? Snuggle close. If I pass out during the flight, all your troubles will be over, Miss Windrose.”

He kicked the ground away.

What is joy, except to feel, in thought, the soaring wonder which we really feel in truth in flight?

The snow-clad pines and leafless trees of fairy frost now fell below, as we soared up a long smooth slope of transparent air, like a glissade rising from note to note to ecstasy and triumph.

The ground became a textured tapestry, hills were stones and trees were carpet weave. I saw the crawling table of the sea, streaked white with tiny caterpillars of foam. Low clouds appeared to rest upon the surface, illusionary islands made substantial by distance.

I saw a glint of silver-white, a toothpick in a bathtub, a toy boat.

There seemed to be other toy boats, blacker, blockier, and larger, around it, hemming it in, like the little metal square counters in a war game played on a board.

The sight suddenly stung tears from my eyes, even amidst my joy of flight, because I realized I was not flying, not me, not really.

Then fog sent a streaming arm down past us, and a fine mist fell. The fog grew thick and I donned my goggles as small waterdrops began to collect on my face.

Then we came up from the fog bank like a dolphin leaping from the waves, but a leap that went on, up and up, and did not end. I laughed! I laughed because I had not realized (how stupid of me not to!) clouds and fogs were one and the same. Oh, I knew it intellectually, of course, but still I had somehow felt that clouds would feel strange when I passed through one. But no; they were made of the same water molecules that the ninety percent of my body was. They were not so different from me, these sky-dwellers.

And what dwellers they were. The landscape down below had had no sun; this one did. Here were hills of alabaster, towers of white marble, high arches and cupolas of fine ivory, and rippling fields of snow. Slowly, slow as whales, these towers and vales and nodding hills of weightless white were changing to new shapes, or pacing solemnly against an aquamarine blue, icebergs of mist in a sea of atmosphere.

And where the red sun glanced his rays against them, the architect of Heaven had used rosy-tinted marble, or ruddy gold of lambent hue, to decorate his coliseums and cathedral domes.

But, by Heaven, it was cold.

I turned in Boggin’s grip, and he clasped me at my armpits from above, so I could lay facedown in the streaming air, my legs trailing back, my arms stretched out to either side as if I, too, had wings.

The continent of cloud we passed across suddenly broke into a shoreline of peninsulas and archipelagoes of lesser cloud. In the bay, beneath these islands, sunk Atlantis-like beneath the crystal wave, I saw the estate grounds, and the school, little dollhouse buildings of well-crafted make, shingles of gray or slate, chimneys of red brick or white, windows winking like miniature gems.

We fell, and there was no plunge below the waves as we passed beneath the clouds again, there was no sensation of drowning. The make-believe school grew larger underfoot, the buildings swelled and rose up against us like monsters, growing. Growing, I should say, larger, but not any more real.

As we fell further, the gray and white buildings, the blank brick walls, seemed more and ever more like the square pillboxes of a fortress, or a prison camp, growing to full size, no longer toys in some game.

We landed on the balcony of the clock tower, high above the Chapel roof. Boggin dropped me lightly on the balcony next to the huge hanging cylinder of the bell, and he made one great circle around the tower. I saw his hair like a red battle-pennant streaming back from his harsh profile, and the sunlight glanced off the sculpted muscles of his shoulders, chest, and the iron-hard ridges of his stomach. With a swoop and a whirling flutter of red wings, he pushed in between the pillars of the balcony, and landed. One tiny red feather, shaken loose, hung in the air, rocking back and forth, ever so slowly descending.

“Welcome home,” he said.

“It’s not my home,” I said dully.

“Perhaps not, Miss Windrose, but none of us seems to have much choice in the matter, eh?”

He reached up into the mouth of the bell, and took out a long coat, shirt, and his black academic robes, which had apparently been hanging on a hook or a hanger on the bell clapper.

Now he sat down on the balcony rail, his back against one pillar, his foot against the other. He did not put on his coat or robe, but instead laid the fabric across his knee. Out of a large pocket he took a vial of oil and a shiny brass tool shaped something like a cross between a dagger and a comb.

With one hand he drew his wing around before him. With the toothy dagger or sharp comb, or whatever it was, he began prying and primping at his feathers, one after another, row after row. Every now and again, he would pause, pour some oil from his vial onto a channel in the comb made for that purpose, and then continue preening.

I watched him for a while. He worked with a slight, absentminded frown, but his movements were deft and careful. A pleasant odor came from the wings, and the feathers seemed to take on new color under his hands.

“How old am I, Headmaster? Really?”

“Miss Windrose, you are fourteen and three months.”

“Oh, come on! You’re lying.”

“You should not speak that way to your elders, even when they are lying. You are not a Yankee, after all. You should say, ‘I find that hard to believe.’ ”

“I find that hard to believe.”

“Unfortunately, when Miss Fair, who is somewhat older than you, began to develop her ah… rather generous signs of puberty, you also wanted to be older, and quickly, like most girls. Most girls, however, are not shape-changers. Despite our efforts, your powers are still influenced by your subconscious desires. In a few months, you had the body and the glandular reactions of a fully mature woman of twenty or so; and, like all girls your age, you wanted to look like a fashion model. Very few real women—I am tempted to say no women—actually have the perfect wasp-waisted hourglass figure you have wished on yourself.”

“But I am older than Vanity!”

“Actually, no. She is four years your elder. You obviously wanted to be older, bigger, stronger when you were still a very young child. Many young children have this wish. Most do not have the power to make their wishes come true. You had the body of a five- or six-year-old when you were three. It was quite trying for all of us, I am sure.”

After a while, when he had done all his feathers but the ones on the shoulders of his wings, he sat up straighter, and took out a mirror, craned his head back and bent his arm over his shoulder, and began doing the wings along his upper back.

“Can I do that?”

He looked at me sidelong. “I beg your pardon, Miss Wind-rose?”

“I mean, I could help with the spots you cannot reach.”

“Do I want you standing with an object as sharp as a knife right at the small of my back, Miss Windrose?”

“I could promise…”