Diana Pho - Steampunk World

Eru just smiled his infuriating grin. “Oh, Rito. Stop believing everything you’ve been told. The truth is so much more amazing.” Gently he pried her hands away. “Come on, let me show you.”

“But we haven’t brought an offering, or—”

“Rito, if you really believe they’re gods, with the power of life and death over us, then this is all their fault. Why should we bring them an offering?”

“Because if we don’t, it might get worse!”

Eru laughed. “I promise, if the gods get angry, I’ll make sure they know this was all my idea.”

He led her across the plain down to the beach. Rito felt the statues’ gazes on her as they crossed the empty space until they finally reached the nearest one, at one end of the line. Like its brethren, the statue was buried up to the neck, so that it appeared to be only a giant head. No one currently alive remembered why that was done.

Eru stood on tiptoe and smacked the tip of the stone chin. “See? Just rock. And look.” He pointed at distinctive white traces that streamed down from the top. “Would gods allow birds to shit on their heads?”

“Why is this important now, Eru? You still haven’t told me.”

“What do you think these really are, Rito? They’re certainly not our ancestors. Are they just blocks of stone?”

“This is no time for a lesson!” Rito insisted.

Eru chuckled. “You’re right. It’s not. It’s time for a demonstration.”

He led her around the base of the statue to a spot between it and its neighbor. A pile of dirt showed where a hole had been dug alongside the stone; it could’ve been an animal’s burrow, except Eru jumped down into it and grinned up at her. “You’re not going to get scared, are you?”

“I’m not a coward, Eru. Are you asking that because I’m a girl?”

“No, but you think very literally.”

“I do not! I just don’t let my head fly around with the furo birds like some people I know!”

Eru laughed and ducked down in the hole. Something heavy slid against something else and made a grinding sound, followed by a single loud CLONK.

“Eru?” Rito said. There was no answer. She moved a little closer to the hole and tried to peer in from a safe distance. “Eru, are you okay?”

There was no answer. Only the waves from the beach and the occasional bird call broke the silence. She clenched her fists and tried not to think of what was happening in the village, and to not be furious with Eru for wasting their time with this nonsense. Yet what could they even do? The men from the ships were clearly used to killing, and they were just two children, cut off from everything, with only the cloth around their waists to their names. How could they possibly rescue their village?

“Eru?” she asked again, a plaintive whisper.

Then the statue before her began to rise from the ground.

Rito shrieked and jumped back a few steps. She watched the lower body lift straight up, pushing dirt away in a slow wave. It stopped when it was at ground level.

Then one stone foot rose and placed itself on the edge of the hole. Like an old man, it climbed out, groaning and creaking. There was a smell like the odor after lightning struck the island, a burnt-air scent that she couldn’t identify. When its other foot hit the soil, she felt the impact through her own bare feet.

The head was easily three-fifths of its height, and disproportionately large. It held its arms at its side, and the long fingers crossed over its belly, where a navel protruded between the fingertips.

The statue—or was it a god come to life?—turned toward Rito. She wanted to run, but she wouldn’t give smug Eru the satisfaction. She did whisper a prayer she’d memorized as a child, one asking the great gods of the sky to please make her passage to the next life as painless as possible.

But nothing else happened. When the god-statue didn’t move for a long time, and three birds fluttered down to perch on its head, Rito slowly approached it. “Eru?” she called. There was no answer, and he did not emerge from the hole.

She reached out a hand, took and held a deep breath, then touched the statue. It was stone, all right, just as it always had been, cool and solid. No god of spirit and fire. She started to think maybe she’d imagined it moving, that maybe it had been there in the bright sunlight all along. After all, mere statues couldn’t move, could they?

Then, with a great grinding of stone on stone, the omai’s head tilted down and looked directly at her.

She screamed and fell to her knees, her arms out and head bowed.

Rito expected to be crushed, or somehow blasted from existence. She heard more grinding, then Eru’s amused voice coming from above her. “While you’re down there, could you please get that grass from between my toes?”

Rito looked up, astonished. The enormous head had split open down the middle, and the two halves swung apart to reveal a strange sort of seat, flanked by protrusions like the spikes of one of the island’s multicolored beetles. Eru sat there laughing, then reached out and moved two of the spikes, which made the statue tilt down so Eru towered directly over Rito’s prone form.

“What…” Rito sputtered.

“I don’t know,” Eru replied with delight. “I discovered the passage into the statue during the last rainy season. A vakaline had dug a burrow down beside it, and I hid in it to get out of the rain. Somehow I bumped into something that made it open, and light appeared inside it. I found this chair, and these metal sticks. There are drawings on the walls showing someone sitting here and moving these sticks, so I tried them, and discovered the statue moves. It moves , Rito, and it’s made of stone.”

Rito continued to stare.

“Rito!” Eru said impatiently. “We can use these to rescue our village! Nothing the invaders have can possibly hurt us inside here.”

Rito got slowly to her feet. “There’s no room for me inside—”

“No! You enter one of the others and join me. Two of our gods come to life! The invaders will flee like barking monkeys!”

Rito thought this over. It was an actual plan, and it might conceivably work. It beat doing nothing, or hiding until they were inevitably found. “How do I get into it?”

“Watch this.” He pulled some more of the metal sticks, and the statue turned toward its nearest fellow. One hand pulled away from its belly, curled into a cup and scooped out an immense handful of dirt from around the second statue’s base. Two more scoops and a round patch of stone, of a slightly different texture than the rest, was exposed in the bright sunlight.

“Push on the middle of it,” he said. “When it opens, crawl inside.”

She jumped down into the hole and did so. The same grinding sound she’d heard before now came from this statue, and as Eru said, a lit passageway appeared. The rock was covered with shining sheets of metal smoothed to the inside contours of the passage. She climbed up several horizontal protrusions until she emerged into a tiny chamber with the same sort of chair and sticks.

She climbed into the seat, which was cool against her bare back and legs. There were uncomfortable bumps and ridges, but she put her feet on two platforms and looked around the little room.

A rectangular shape glowed directly ahead of the seat and showed the world outside the statue. Then another, smaller rectangle beneath it came to life and showed Eru’s grinning face.

“The big window ahead of you shows where you’re going,” Eru said. “Look to your right.”

On the metal wall were drawings showing which stick caused which part of the statue’s body to move. She tentatively pushed one, and felt the whole statue lurch.