Earth Thirst (The Arcadian Conflict) - By Mark Teppo Page 0,64

from the sea.

I am flying.

I am not afraid of the waves beneath me. They will grab me soon and try to drown me, but I'm not afraid of them anymore. It has been a long time since I fled Troy; crossing the Mediterranean seems so easy compared to the distance I have traveled to reach this rock, to stand before these people and show them how to fly. To show them their gods are real.

I pull my arms in, and dive into the water. When I surface, I am not at sea anymore. I am in a bed with a woman. She is on top of me, her lips against mine. Her skin is warm and her mouth is wet. Her hands knead my arms and chest, and I wrap my arms around her. Her legs part, and she gasps lightly, her teeth pressing against my lower lip. My hands sink to her hips and I hold her close. We move back and forth, like waves against the beach, and she crushes her mouth to mine, our teeth clicking together. I want to bite her, but she won't let me go and so I bite her lip instead. She bites me back, and I moan as our blood mixes.

I am hard inside her, and her fingers are raking across my skin now. I want to bleed for her…

I sit up.

When I look in the bathroom mirror, I see a face covered in sweat. There is blood on my lips. I taste it, and it isn't mine.

Arcadians don't dream, and what I told Aeneas was the truth. I gave up being a seer when we left Troy.

There are too many holes in my head. And they're growing.

You're just a grunt. You follow orders.

What have I done?

* * *

I find my optics and head out to get some air before the sun gets too high in the sky. Outside, the scrub grass glistens with dew and the gulls are calling out to one another across the bay. I walk through town, not really paying attention to where I'm going. I'm letting other factors guide me. The air, the light, the distant sound of surf and seabirds. This is how I used to do it when Aeneas asked me to seek guidance. If the birds and the wind were not forthcoming with insight, there were other, bloodier, methods that were, as a result, prone to violence and darkness. After our flight from Troy, I no longer wanted to use the old methods.

I watch terns flit across the sky, trying to discern the patterns in the flight paths. A fat gull with gray pinfeathers squawks noisily at me from a wooden post as I pass. I walk on, and eventually I realize my destination is one of the moai. It sits on a low bluff near the edge of town, looking over the shallow depression of the bay and valley. There's a tiny café at the bottom of the hill, and a well-worn trail meanders up the slope behind the tiny building. I make the climb and stand next to the giant head. Seeing what it sees. How many are left? I wonder. They were the guardians of the island; they watched over the trees and the clans. And the outsiders came. The cult of the Bird Man came to the island—the tangata manu—and the clans found something to fight over.

The Bird Man brought them jealousy, greed, and avarice—the age-old sins that could never be completely forgotten. How quickly they had fallen into savagery. And the moai were toppled; the clans did not want them to see what was the clans were becoming. They did not want the old gods to look upon the shining white feathers of their new god. Pull them down, the Bird Man had said to them, they may not look upon me. I am for your eyes only.

A large airplane shatters the quiet morning as it comes in for a landing at the airport behind me. It is a different airline than the one we came on from Adelaide and Tahiti. This is the connecting flight that goes east, all the way to Chile.

“Which way should we go?” I ask the sullen moai, which does not respond. Mere's words last night stun, more so because there was great truth to them. I'm not a planner. That was never my role. I would read bird sign once in a while, and the rest of the time, I simply followed orders.