Higher Mythology Read online

  “As you wish.” Maura shredded the paper and tossed it aside. Together, she and Holl pried open the cardboard box. “It’s a sewing machine,” she said. With a good deal of assistance, she drew it out of its protective nest. “A fine one.” The name was embossed on the black enamel of the steel body below the cam dials. At Holl’s urging she flipped up the lid on top and read the small chart. “Look at all the stitches it will do!”

  “Machine doings, huh!” Dierdre sneered. She was the oldest of the old women, a contemporary of Curran, and a clan leader in her own right. “It takes all the soul straight out of the work, so it does. That’ll never make anything worth keeping.”

  “Oh, come, gran,” Candlepat admonished her, with a cocky tilt to her head. “Do you truly enjoy hemming sheets and seaming curtains? I don’t. The machine will leave your hands free for the fine work, which is worth keeping.”

  “That may be qvite true,” Rose said, with a thoughtful expression. Though a Conservative, she was suspected of having Progressive leanings, and in any case trusted Keith Doyle absolutely. She and a few of the needlecraft workers examined the old Singer with pleasure.

  “It’ll come in most useful, you’ll see,” Tiron said. “Next year there’ll be cloth from the backs of those sheep outside. The first of the looms will be ready by year’s end.”

  Diane blew her nose as Maura undid the paper on the next present and lifted the esoteric-looking machine inside to her lap.

  “It’s a blender,” Diane said, and burst into sputtering tears. Through her sobs, she explained. “I always give blenders for wedding presents. It does all kinds of things. You can return it if you’ve already got one, or you can exchange it for something else you’d like better. The receipt’s in the bottom. Oh, I’m so happy for you!”

  “There’s never a thought of returning it. We’re pleased to be part of your tradition,” Holl accepted gravely, “as you are a part of ours. We will use it with joy in the generosity of the donor.”

  “It’s not that big a deal,” Diane said, sniffling, but she was pleased.

  “The last one’s a surprise,” Keith said, handing over the cloth-wrapped bundle. “The Niall sent you something from the Old Country.”

  “Why did he not send it through me, then?” Tiron burst out, disappointed. “And me just lately departed from his domain?”

  “You’re illegal, remember?” Keith pointed out quickly. “No one is supposed to know you’re here.”

  Tiron nodded, stroking his chin. “I’d forgotten. Ah, but forced anonymity is hard.”

  Holl pulled the ribbon off the cloth package, and it spilled open over Maura’s lap, wave after wave of foamy lace escaping in folds down her knees to the floor. Laughing, the two of them knelt to gather it up. Holl threw a swag of it around his bride’s shoulders, where it lay gleaming like joined snowflakes. She beamed and kissed him.

  The others exclaimed over the fineness of the work. “How beautiful. Best I’ve ever seen. Probably very old, feel the texture and the quality.”

  “That wasn’t finished in a day, nor from any hard iron machine,” said Dierdre smugly.

  “No, from a small bone shuttle,” scolded one of the other oldsters. “This is the work of years and many hands.”

  “The card says, ‘with best regards and a thousand blessings,’” Orchadia said. “Well, that’s very fine of them.”

  That was the last of the presents. Rose, Calla, and the other ladies serving circulated with wooden cups, followed by their husbands with kegs of wine. They poured libations into larger goblets for their Big guests, who were touched by the special effort.

  “The toast to the wedded couple,” Dennet said, stilling Dunn’s hand before he could drink. The newest student grinned, sharing a smile with Holl’s father.

  “Sorry. Guess I’m just a little too eager to wish them well.”

  The Master raised his hands for silence. “I haf vun more announcement before anyvun becomes too merry to comprehend,” the Elf Master said. “In three days, please, I vould like from each of my senior students an essay of four pages on the subject of the psychological impact of the Industrial Refolution on those already liffing in the great population centers of Europe at the time. That is all.”

  Keith, Dunn, and Diane groaned. As the Big students scrambled for paper and pen to write down the assignments, Teri Knox and Lee Eisley exchanged relieved glances.

  “Master, I miss you, but I sure am glad I don’t have to do the homework anymore!” Lee said fervently. He raised his cup in salute to the little professor, who regarded him with austere complacence over the rims of his glasses.

  Holding Maura firmly by the hand, Holl turned to Keith with his glass high.

  “As the one who’s most responsible for helping to facilitate the day’s events, Keith Doyle, will you make the first toast?” Holl asked.

  Keith flushed. “It’d be an honor.” Thinking hard to come up with a toast that wouldn’t be too long or too maudlin, he cleared his throat. The room stilled, and all his friends looked at him. He smiled.

  “To my friends, Holl and Maura, I wish every happiness,” Keith said, raising up his wooden cup. “Today is the first day of the rest of your lives. Make the best of it.”

  “That’s lovely,” Diane whispered, squeezing his ribs.

  “Very profound,” said Pat Morgan dryly, eyebrows raised over the brim of his glass. “You ought to write greeting cards, Doyle.”

  “I like it,” Holl said decidedly, touching his wine cup to his bride’s. “To today, and everyday hereafter.”

  ***

  CHAPTER TWO

  A year and a day later, Keith went calling on Holl.

  From the basket of his conveyance, he leaned out and addressed the crowd gathered on the pavement around in the middle of the Midwestern University experimental farm. The handful of students, variously dressed in lab coats or filthy jeans, watched him with interest and thinly-disguised amusement. The ground crew, two men in blue jeans, jackets, goggles, and gloves, walked the balloon at shoulder height, as if carrying a sedan chair, to the designated launch point.

  “To the Scarecrow, by virtue of his enormous brain,” Keith said, gesturing grandly, “to the Tin Woodsman, by virtue of his Heart.…” The rattan basket tipped slightly as he leaned over the side, and he stepped back in alarm.

  “What are you doing?” demanded the other man in the balloon basket, turning away from the gas jet he was adjusting. Frank Winslow’s vintage WWI flyer’s helmet was jammed down over his head, pushing out the goggles standing on his forehead that made him look like he had four round and glassy blue eyes instead of two. “Are you weird, or something?”

  “Nope,” Keith replied cheerfully, turning away from his audience. “Just always wanted to do that.” Deprived of their entertainment, many of them left. A few continued to gawk at the balloon. “Anything I can help with?”

  “Nope. Just sit tight and stay out of the way. Let ’er go!” The lanky pilot waved to his crew, and they loosed the balloon and stepped back.

  The Skyship Iris was an ovoid rainbow as it rose over the buildings of Midwestern University. Keith clung fast to the edge of the waist-high basket until he discovered that the motion was far less than he had expected, milder even than the college library’s geriatric elevator. He felt almost as if the ground dropped away and to the side from underneath them, leaving him hovering in place. The remaining spectators dwindled in size until they resembled grains of rice in the midst of a vast plate of salad.

  A ringing sound went off just behind Keith’s back as the balloon gained altitude. There was a loud click, followed by the sound of Frank’s recorded voice. “Hi. This is Skyship Iris. I’m tied up right now, so could you leave a message at the sound of the tone, and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. Bye.” BWEEP!

  “Good takeoff, Frank,” said the voice of Randall Murphy, one of Winslow’s ground crew. “See you at the other end.” CLICK!

  “You got a phone in this?” Kei
th asked, wide-eyed as the pilot, now with hands free, ran the tape back to the beginning.

  “Sure,” Frank said, leaning back against the frame that supported the twin burners. He looked like a skinny stevedore, a full head taller than Keith, and his grin popped out the corners of his narrow jaw. “Gotta keep in touch. Can’t just land a balloon next to a phone booth. You figure you have to be self-sufficient in piloting one of these babies. There’s a lot of zen involved.” He grinned again, showing broad white teeth. “Modern technology don’t hurt, either. I figured out a new valve that makes my tanks last for six hours apiece. Walkie-talkie batteries don’t hold a charge that long. Cell phone’s easier.”

  “Great!” Keith exclaimed.

  Frank had also brought along a sophisticated-looking but lightweight cooler. “For champagne,” he explained. “Traditional.” Slung by a loop at the basket’s lip was a crank-powered AM/FM radio.

  In spite of its high-tech accoutrements, the balloon basket resembled a relic of a past century. It was made of woven rattan with a padded bumper and curved base of leather, a fragile-seeming craft in comparison with the metal-and-plastic jets and small aircraft Keith was used to seeing.

  As expected, the air was colder the higher they went. Keith shrugged into his thin jacket, zipping it hastily up to his chin, and wrapped his arms around his ribs. The pilot grinned at him and fastened down the flaps of his aerialist’s helmet.

  “Need a blanket? There’s one under the cooler.”

  “N—no, thanks,” Keith said. In a few moments, he was acclimated, and his muscles relaxed. He nodded to Frank.

  “Fine and dandy,” Frank said. “Enjoy the ride!” The pilot perched on the basket’s edge with his long legs up on the other side, and shifted his close-fitting helmet rearwards to reveal his forehead. “Ahhh.”

  Keith, less daring, stayed by the metal frame and gazed at the scenery. It was still a long way down. Frank was completely at home in the air. Nothing seemed to faze him, not even floating around in a craft as fragile as an eggshell. In just a short time, Keith himself had relaxed, and was enjoying the sensation of effortless floating. He leaned back and looked around.

  The day was fine and clear. For some this might have been a mere pleasure trip. For Keith, it was business. Emptying his mind of fear, excitement, and any extraneous thoughts that might interfere with his concentration, Keith closed his eyes. Somewhere out there, he was certain, were air sprites, Little People of the air. He tried to visualize what he thought would be out there in the sky. Did they look like dragons? Pixies? Airplanes? In such a formless environment, would they be able to take any shape they chose? He let his mind drift to catch the trail of any elusive magical creature that might happen by within range.

  Notwithstanding the occasional strong-smelling fume from feed lots they passed over, the air tasted cleaner up there than it did nearer the ground. Keith reasoned that if he were a creature of the air, he wouldn’t hang out so close to the ground, not with the whole sky to range. Holl and the Elf Master had scoffed at his theory, but they’d never checked, had they? The only one of the Little Folk to attain any altitude had been Holl, on his flights with Keith to and from Europe, but he’d been too preoccupied to sense anything outside his own concerns. Tiron, as a stowaway on that same flight, had been bent double in a suitcase, and would have remembered nothing but the difficulties he’d had in breathing and finding some measure of comfort among Keith’s dirty clothes and souvenirs of Scotland and Ireland.

  Still, even if there had been any air sprites around when the two of them had been traveling, they’d have fled screaming from the jet, which Keith felt was too noisy to get close to the sensitive creatures he pictured. He wanted not only to sense the air sprites, but to see them. To do that, he needed to achieve altitude, but in a quiet, non-disruptive fashion. Barring finding wings of his own somewhere, there had to be some conveyance that approximated skyhooks. Gliders were unpowered, and therefore silent, but uncontrollable and too dangerous for an amateur. Helicopters set up too much of a racket. None of the craft with which he was familiar simply allowed him to hang in the air and listen.

  When Frank Winslow, a competition balloonist, came to speak at Midwestern, Keith felt a light bulb go on over his head. The balloon was the perfect vehicle to test out his theories. It was almost completely silent, flew slowly and smoothly, hovering in the very wind currents sprites might live in. Keith was in a fever for the rest of the lecture, wondering how he would convince Winslow to go along with him. After the pilot’s talk, Keith took him to a quiet corner of the Student Common Room and laid out his plan.

  Upon hearing Keith’s theories of mythological beings, Winslow made it clear he thought Keith was nuts, but decided he liked his company and wouldn’t mind indulging him to test out his ideas. Frank was perfecting the Skyship Iris for a round-the-world race. It cost nothing extra to have an extra body in the basket while he ran distances he would have covered anyway: he’d probably have a passenger along during his long-distance runs. All he asked for was a portion of his propane costs, like sharing gas money. Keith thought that was more than fair. The flat plains of Illinois were as good a place as any to practice sea-level skimming techniques, pretending the land was the sea.

  As Keith opened up his senses, he felt disappointed. Both outer and inner sight told him that the sky was empty. The odd bird intruded its neutral presence on his mental radar. He ignored it, feeling further out.

  Something flared suddenly into his consciousness. Off in the distance to the north, he sensed tantalizing hints of a presence, a strong one. Tamping down his delight, he concentrated all his thought in following them, projecting as hard as he could thoughts that he was harmless and friendly.

  The wave of his mental touch broke over the thing he sensed, and it scattered abruptly into countless alarmed fragments and vanished, losing power and definition as it dissipated, like the sparks from an exploding firecracker. It receded ever further into nonexistence as if it could feel his pursuit. In a moment, there was nothing on which he could put a mental finger. Dismayed, Keith was left wondering if he had just imagined the contact. He sighed, planting his elbow on the edge of the basket and his chin on his hand. Another time. He sent his thoughts around, seeking other magical realities.

  There were no more in the air. Below and ahead, the concentrated presence of the Little Folk at Hollow Tree Farm was the strongest magical thing he knew. Anything else seemed unreal and insubstantial, as far as magical traces went. As he got more practice at inner sensing, all the natural things around him acquired a more genuine aura of reality than he had ever known before. A few things just felt more real than others.

  “Do you think there’s anything out there?” Keith asked Winslow.

  “All the time,” Frank said. “Not sentient magical beings—well not secular ones, anyway. Got my own ideas about the sky, Gods and elementals and stuff like that. Almost holy.” He turned a suspicious eye toward Keith. “You don’t want to hear it.”

  “Sure I do,” Keith said. “I’m looking for any kind of clues I can find.”

  “Well …” Winslow began to explain haltingly, in his usual laconic style. Soon, he warmed to his subject and began babbling like a brook, defensively hurling forth ideas as if he expected Keith to refute them, talking about gods and forces of nature and sentient spirits. Keith pulled a tattered spiral notebook out of his pocket and began to take notes. Frank’s personal cosmology was as interesting as anything he’d read in mythology books. Keith guessed that he was the first person Winslow had ever opened up to about his ideas. There was something useful in being known as the weirdest person on the block: it made other people feel that maybe they weren’t quite so off the wall when all they were was sensitive or creative.

  The sky above them was blue and daubed here and there with cottony white clouds. In the distance, Keith saw birds doing aerial acrobatics, and wondered if Little Folk of the sky would sport like that. Below them, the flat, checkered, green expans
e of Illinois farmland stretched out to every horizon. Like a piece on a game board, the miniature shadow of the balloon skimmed from square to square. Winslow pulled the ring on the gas jet for more altitude. The crosscurrent swept them slightly more northeast than north.

  “You sure you can find this farm?” Winslow shouted above the roar of the flame. “I mean, most times I put down where they’ve got landmarks.”

  “I can find it,” Keith said confidently, then felt a twinge of worry. What if his inner radar suddenly ceased to operate? Tensely, he closed his eyes for a second, then tuned in, throwing his sense outward toward Holl and his friends. There they were, just where they’d been a minute ago. Keith let his shoulders sag with relief.

  “You feel sick, Keith?”

  “Nope,” Keith assured him, opening his eyes. “Just feeling the basket sway.”

  “Won’t fall,” Frank promised him. “Never has yet. Want a brew? Or some champagne? Traditional.” The pilot popped open the cooler at his feet and took out a frosted can. Keith shook his head. “Won’t be through again for a couple weeks. I’m on my way to Florida after today. There’s a race over the Everglades.”

  “Sounds great!” Keith said. “I want to stay in touch with you, if you don’t mind. I’d like to go up again when you get back.”

  “Oh, yeah, air sprites,” Winslow said with a grin. He jerked on the heat jet tether. The flames roared. “Well, any time I’m in the area, it’s okay with me. You’ve got the number. Heading for South America in November, joining a rally over the Andes. Wind’s too strong for ballooning around here after then.”

  Keith pointed out the roof of Hollow Tree Farm. Frank nodded, and started the Iris descending slowly.

  Like a beacon, the presence of the Little Folk shone through strongly from one of the homesteads ahead. From above, Hollow Tree Farm looked exactly like all the other farms on the road. It was only Keith’s inner sense that made him signal to Winslow to put down in the right meadow. Feeling a little tired by the effort, he turned off his second sight. Immediately, the auras around everything faded to a nearly invisible glow.