come and gone, and nothing. The folk were still coming, by ones and twos. The last night had brought several creatures from the southwest, including two young boys each the size of an apple tree, and something which she had only glimpsed, but which had looked like a disembodied head the size of a VW Bug. They had disappeared into the trees at the base of the mountain.
Nobody bothered them. Nobody from the outside world even seemed to have noticed they were there: she imagined the tourists at Rock City staring down at them through their insert-a-quarter binoculars, staring straight at a ramshackle encampment of things and people at the foot of the mountain, and seeing nothing but trees and bushes and rocks.
She could smell the smoke from a cooking fire, a smell of burning bacon on the chilly dawn wind. Someone at the far end of the encampment began to play the harmonica, which made her, involuntarily, smile and shiver. She had a paperback book in her backpack, and she waited for the sky to become light enough for her to read.
There were two dots in the sky, immediately below the clouds: a small one and a larger one. A spatter of rain brushed her face in the morning wind.
A barefoot girl came out from the encampment, walking toward her. She stopped beside a tree, hitched up her skirts, and squatted. When she had finished, Easter hailed her. The girl walked over.
“Good morning, lady,” she said. “The battle will start soon now.” The tip of her pink tongue touched her scarlet lips. She had a black crow’s wing tied with leather onto her shoulder, a crow’s foot on a chain around her neck. Her arms were blue-tattooed with lines and patterns and intricate knots.
“How do you know?”
The girl grinned. “I am Macha, of the Morrigan. When war comes, I can smell it in the air. I am a war goddess, and I say, blood shall be spilled this day.”
“Oh,” said Easter. “Well. There you go.” She was watching the smaller dot in the sky as it tumbled down toward them, dropping like a rock.
“And we shall fight them, and we shall kill them, every one,” said the girl. “And we shall take their heads as trophies, and the crows shall have their eyes and their corpses.” The dot had become a bird, its wings outstretched, riding the gusty morning winds above them.
Easter cocked her head on one side. “Is that some hidden war goddess knowledge?” she asked. “The whole ‘who’s going to win’ thing? Who gets whose head?”
“No,” said the girl. “I can smell the battle, but that’s all. But we’ll win. Won’t we? We have to. I saw what they did to the all-father. It’s them or us.”
“Yeah,” said Easter. “I suppose it is.”
The girl smiled again, in the half-light, and made her way back to the camp. Easter put her hand down and touched a green shoot which stabbed up from the earth like a knife blade. As she touched it it grew, and opened, and twisted, and changed, until she was resting her hand on a green tulip head. When the sun was high the flower would open.
Easter looked up at the hawk. “Can I help you?” she said.
The hawk circled about fifteen feet above Easter’s head, slowly, then it glided down to her, and landed on the ground nearby. It looked up at her with mad eyes.
“Hello, cutie,” she said. “Now, what do you really look like, eh?”
The hawk hopped toward her, uncertainly, and then it was no longer a hawk, but a young man. He looked at her, and then looked down at the grass. “You?” he said. His glance went everywhere, to the grass, to the sky, to the bushes. Not to her.
“Me,” she said. “What about me?”
“You.” He stopped. He seemed to be trying to muster his thoughts; strange expressions flitted and swam across his face. He spent too long a bird, she thought. He has forgotten how to be a man. She waited patiently. Eventually, he said, “Will you come with me?”
“Maybe. Where do you want me to go?”
“The man on the tree. He needs you. A ghost hurt, in his side. The blood came, then it stopped. I think he is dead.”
“There’s a war on. I can’t just go running away.”
The naked man said nothing, just moved from one foot to another as if he were uncertain of his weight, as if he were used to resting on the air