Free The God of the Hive by Laurie R. King

joined the chorus, twining around the fire-person’s masculine bellows. My head—oh, my head! If they would only be quiet for a moment.
    Estelle , that was the small creature’s name. And with her gone I could—just—manoeuvre myself into a half-standing, hunched-over position, my back against what was, in fact, the upturned floor of the enclosure. Which did me no good, since I couldn’t very well lift the weight and crawl out at the same time, but perhaps—
    “Estelle? Estelle!” Shouting sent a bolt of agony through my head; it took me a moment to notice that she was no longer wailing and the man no longer shouting.
    “’Stella, I need you to find something to prop under the back of the ’plane”—yes, there was an aeroplane in the equation—“when I lift it up. Can you find a big, heavy stick, about as tall as you are?” Could she? She was a mere child; I had no idea what she could do.
    I heard her voice, although I couldn’t make out her words. She seemed to be moving towards my right, which indicated some kind of response to my command. The voice stopped, then started up again. It did this two or three times. A conversation? Did small children hallucinate? Or was it normal to converse with imaginary friends at times of stress?
    “Estelle, can you find a stick, please? It’s really important, honey.”
    “No, I—”
    But her protest was cut off by a shudder in the enclosure, and without stopping to reflect on the unlikeliness of a child of forty months (even if she was Holmes’ granddaughter) understanding the fulcrum principle, I responded by pushing upwards with all my strength against the floorboards.
    The machine rose, tail-end first, leaving the heavy engine off to my left. Tentatively, I let my knees sag a fraction; when the load remained up, I dropped to the ground and dove out from under the remains of the ’plane.
    “Good work, Estelle,” I started to say, but then I saw her, thumb in mouth, staring towards the tail end of the machine. I took three steps forward, and saw the person responsible for lifting the burden.
    I say person , but my concussed brain knew full well that it was indulging in a few hallucinations of its own, and that I had conjured up the creature of my recent thoughts and mythic dream. The being on whose shoulders our tail assembly was resting might have been spawned by the trees all around us: a wiry figure, all beard and hair, clothed in dark brown corduroy trousers, a lighter brown tweed jacket with an orange patch on one sleeve, a once-red shirt, a lavender tweed waistcoat, and a cap the green of the branches behind him. The cap had a feather in it. I glanced down, half-expecting hooves or fur where his trousers stopped, but he wore boots, their leather the colour of the soil.
    I met a fool in the forest, a motley fool , my mind recited idiotically.
    I became aware that he had said something. This creature of the woods had made speech. I blinked at him, and he repeated it, more loudly, but I was distracted by a presence at my side. A small child—Estelle. Estelle had both arms wrapped around my leg, as if clinging to arooted tree in a hurricane. My hand smoothed the back of her head; I was dimly aware that she was sobbing, and only the woodman’s urgency forced a key word from his thrice-repeated warning into my awareness.
    “Petrol!”
    Petrol. Fire. Javitz—and the poor devil already bore the scars of flame.
    Some dim awareness of a long-ago situation that had involved a child in need of distraction penetrated my mind, causing my hand to reach for an object that I didn’t know was there until I drew it out: a delicate porcelain dollies’ tea-cup, slipped into my pocket days before. I pressed it—miraculously unbroken—into the child’s hand. She looked at the familiar toy and unwrapped her arms from my leg, making sounds of exclamation while allowing me to usher her away (away! from the fire!) and settle her on the ground. I then moved with alacrity back