Free Lucia's Masks by Wendy MacIntyre

days in many forms. She prayed the boy would be wary.
    She gave him as well, little packets of nuts and dried fruit, a light-weight plastic bowl to serve as a hat, and the compass she had used to guide her on her flight from the City. “Go only this way,” she said, pointing to the north. “Promise me,” she urged.
    “Yes,” he answered, although he was saddened and confused still as to why she was sending him away.
    “Never to the South,” she insisted, pointing again. “South is where the City lies and it is full of dangers. In the North you will find others like us.”
    He nodded, yet sensed an uncertainty in her, as if some full force of will was lacking in her words.
    There was no mistaking the Maker’s murderous intent, when he carved his warning on the boy’s back. Chandelier fled the camp of the People of the Silk, with his left forefinger pressed into the tender crevice behind his left ear where the Maker’s knife had dug deepest. In his right hand he clutched the Pouch of Miriam threaded about his throat.He travelled by night because he still had some fear of Sky and the dizzying effects of the unbounded firmament. Night’s blackness also made it easier for him to hide. He knew that in these woods there was no chance he would meet bear, moose, or wolves — all species with which he was familiar from the books and videos in his father’s library. These forest animals had either been murdered by men, his father taught him, or poisoned or immolated in the falls of red rain, a climatic disaster for which wicked, selfish humans were also responsible. So it was the beings on two legs from whom the boy shrank whenever he caught wind of their approach. Their smell announced their presence long before he either saw or heard them. He then curled up and made himself small as Snake had taught him. Or he crawled beneath a blanket of fallen leaves and became invisible.
    Sometimes he was fooled. One night he had to brake hard when he nearly stumbled over a man wrapped in a blanket, who sat cross-legged beside a prickly bush. The man had made a circlet of thorns for his head. The stars were so thickly clustered that the boy could see the blood trickling down the man’s cheeks from the piercing of the cruel crown. He was rocking and mumbling and seemed not to notice Chandelier at all. He had no smell. Afterwards, the boy wondered if this was because the man was good. But if that was the case, then why would he choose to hurt himself with the thorns?
    The third night he was not so lucky. He was moving silently and fast, skills he had mastered on the Egg’s running track. He was holding to true north, as the compass needle instructed, when the tree branches above him disgorged an unwelcome load, knocking him down. He was badly winded and the pain in his head was like serrated files, grinding one on another. He groaned and blinked and saw, sitting on his chest, a boy whose face was obscured by a spotted handkerchief. The boy had his hands clamped on Chandelier’s shoulders, with a force disproportionate to his size. Chandelier tried to shift his legs, and found to his dismay that these too, were weighted down. Were there two assailants then, or more than two? He could neither sit up, nor turn his head to look.
    Were they thieves or were they murderers? Would they kill and eat him?
    “What you got, sweet stuff?”
    Thieves, then. What did sweet stuff mean? Did they want his fruit? He was running through his options. How could he assert himself if he could not stand erect? Snake does not stand, he reminded himself, or at least not often. Take a cue , he hears Snake at his ear. Try cunning.
    “Get up, curly-top. Show us what you’ve got in your pockets.”
    He stood, swaying a little as he did so. He saw that they were in fact only two. But although he was older and taller than them both, they had a lean hardness that made him feel slight and unfinished. More disturbing to him was their agitation, which he strove not