The oracles say the light
that streaked across the sky was an omen, and a terrible, terrible
omen. That our children will sicken and our herds go mad and our
crops fail, that storms will drive the sea up around our houses and
flatten down our trees with hail. We cringe at every south-winging
bird, fearing omens yet greater, though no one knows quite what
greater condemnation could be visited on us. Not that it would make
any difference if we did. Two already have wandered into the forest,
hollow-eyed, leaving families and fields to grow fallow.
No one speaks of them.
The harvest approaches, and
men oil their plows, slow and distant, wondering whether their work
will ever prove fruitful. They meet together and speak in whispers,
watching the sky as if to read its tells, as if they don't know it
always holds the highest Hand.
Old women watch the sea
breathe, dire tongues that think often of death and will find it no
great hardship. To them the young women retire and hear of past omens
that have come to fruition and omens ill-understood leading heavens
know where. They watch the sea together.
It is weeks gone since the
sky lit up in prophecy, and no new light comes to us. Still, we wait
for ruin.
Wheat rots in the fields
while the men oil and sharpen, and the sea gives forth nothing while
the women tell their tales, and children play quiet in the hen yards.
We find one of the oracles
dead, washed up and shriveled on the beach.
It is a month gone since
the omen, and the young men swing scythes in vain against the ruined
wheat, despairing of their fathers, and the young women milk until
their hands are raw, but they are too few, and the heifers cry out
against their swollen udders. Children cry to their mothers and
instead find the red hands of their sisters, empty.
We are dying, and no fire
has come upon us.
-Nor will, some say, and
never return.
Some will not take food and
waste away. Others see the dawn and will not rise.
The sun rises red and wroth
in their place. I watch it spill out across the water, melting the
fog as it surges forward, its wavering beams a line of startled
chestnut mares, blood bay stallions, charging toward us. We are still
asleep, every dying man and woman.
I am old in my body of few
winters, and I do not flee as the sky-fires return, legion now and
hanging in their multitudes among the fading stars.
Nor flee I as the fires
rain down, molten, glowing, breaking upon the shore to leave pits
that hiss and smoke as the sea rushes into them.
The meteors rain down
closer upon my right and my left; the sky is lit red, falling.
Falling upon our empty houses and shriveled fields, our sleeping
people and our fast-awakening children, huddled together and
shrinking from the sky.
The sky clouds over, and
the fires smoke out, and we are swallowed up by rain.
