Godzilla vs. Kong by Greg Keyes (e books free to read TXT) 📗

the rising waters of the stream. She liked the scent of the ocean; she remembered long days overlooking the Eternal Waters that surrounded the Land-World, staring across the waves. Back then the black sky and lightning snakes had been out there, surrounding the Land-World. Protecting it, the elders said. Keeping the great enemy at a distance. But now the salt water had come ashore, and the black sky covered the island, and the once-gentle winds had become malevolent spirits, breaking the trees, pushing waves across the lowlands, scouring the highlands. And the things from Below-The-Land, those dark recesses where the bad things came from—they were rising, too. Things were stirring, the elders said, things were mixing that ought to remain separate. The Iwi counted time in bundles of generations, each a bundle of four. And they counted back many thousands of bundles to the start of things, when the Iwi and animals were the same, before they crawled out of the moist earth and became what they were now.

Perhaps because the Iwi tradition was so ancient, they were slow to react. Many of her kin were already gone, buried beneath a mudslide. The village of her birth was now sunken beneath roiling waters. The ancient wall that kept out the predators was filled with debris and became a dam, holding the waters in as they had once kept the enemies out. And now she and a handful of her kin were fleeing toward the high ground of Hanging-Fish-Calls-There, where some said the caves could offer them shelter, shallow as they were, with no deep trails to the Below-The-Land and its dangerous inhabitants.

Now the water was to her knees, and she did not yet see the skyward-yearning earth that led up to the high country. They were still among the ferns and rushes and Make-A-Fist trees that formed intertwined thickets too dense to travel through.

She felt her own heart beating, quick, like a bee. She felt the pulse of Sister-Mother’s fear in her fingers.

And she felt something else, in the water.

She stopped, squeezing Sister-Mother’s hand, then pointing behind them, where a cluster of trees and bushes drifted in the rising waters.

Koru lifted his spear, and Hiu, too, but they might as well have been wielding twigs. The huge jaws opened, filled with teeth: the Sirenjaw clamped down, and now they were four fingers of kin rather than a handful-and-one.

Sister-Mother lifted her bodily and began to run through the water as best she could. Without her feet in the water, Jia could no longer tell what was happening behind her. She tried to look over Sister-Mother’s shoulder, but the rain was now so hard it felt like a shower of stones, and it was cold. Jia began to shiver. She felt Sister-Mother’s breath, so hard it felt like something tearing inside of her, and she squirmed, trying to get down.

Finally Sister-Mother did put her down, and to her surprise, she felt not water, but soil beneath her feet. It was wet with rain, but she smelled moss now, and the rain-bruised leaves of needleleaf, which only grew on high ground.

She looked up at Sister-Mother, who flashed her a smile-that-wasn’t-really-a-smile, but Jia smiled back, a sign of her trust.

There was no one else behind them, Jia saw. Two fingers of kin, now.

They twisted their way through the trees and across rocky meadows. Normally at this time of year, Jia remembered, these open places would be blood red with Ichor Blossoms, and the wind full of their rotting-meat smell, which attracted flies and more noisome insects and even leafwings, supplementing their diets with the liquor of half-digested insects that the funnel-shaped blossoms contained. The Iwi came here to hunt the creatures for their wings. The smell was here, fouler than ever, but the flowers were black and rotten, destroyed by months of rain.

She felt another turning in the earth below her. A trembling, growing stronger, nearer.

Sister-Mother knew it, too. She could probably feel it in the air, with her ears, as Jia could not. Once again, she grabbed her hand, pulling her along, no longer running uphill, but parallel to the gradual slope.

And then, suddenly, in a moment, Sister-Mother grabbed Jia around the waist and lifted her up, pushing her into the closely spaced, sturdy limbs of a Friend Tree. Confused, Jia, looked down at her, saw the smile-that-wasn’t-a-smile, the farewell in Sister-Mother’s eyes.

Then a wave of water swept down from the high ground and took her away. Jia glimpsed her hand reaching for a branch. Then nothing.

The tree shook, despite its thick trunk and deep roots. Panting, her mind bright with fear, Jia climbed up, this branch to the next. But the water was still coming for her. Too soon, she reached the most slender, upper branches of the tree, which bent beneath her weight.

She realized she was staring at her knuckles, pale from her death grip on the tree, at the water rising up the trunk from below, and at nothing else. How tiny her world had become.

So she turned her gaze out and was astonished.

The black clouds piled against the mountains, full of light, glowing red and purple with inner fire. The water cascading down from hills, the birth of a new river, however short its life might be. The trees all bent one way, as if bowing in worship to an unseen spirit in the deep distance. The furious rush of the wind itself. It was terrible, and frightening and beautiful. That was everything about her home at once. There was no mercy in the water, the winds, the clouds, but there was no hatred either. No animosity.

She wondered, not for the first time, if what she saw and felt would be more beautiful if she could do the thing with her ears that other people did; if the “talking air” would tell her something she was missing. She would never know.

She glanced back down. She was still afraid, of course, but her fear seemed a little more distant. She