Read Online The World Above the Sky by Kent Stetson - Free Book Online Page A

hill on which Eugainia and Keswalqw stood, a mated pair of golden eagles took to the air from a gnarled old starrigan pine. The People depended upon their feathered brothers and sisters to carry their prayers up to the Great Spirit. The Lady of the Grail felt the air around her tremble when Keswalqw offered gratitude for Eugainia’s healing and petitioned the Great Spirit to maintain The People. Up spiralled the stately birds until, small black specks tracing lines of supplication up from the Earth World, they dissolved in the blue barrier that separates the Sky World from the World Above the Sky.
    Keswalqw showed Eugainia the name of the three-pronged bay—the open claw of the spirit bird its inspiration—and evoked the peculiarities of the surrounding territories. Looking eastward, toward the open sea, the most arresting feature of this rolling landscape was the low, rounded old mountain from the side of which issued the thin band of black smoke Henry had first identified the day the Reclamation arrived.
    Keswalqw pointed. “Those ridges running the length of the valley? We say a great serpent grinds through the earth, its back cutting furrows where it rises through the ground to breathe before plunging back below the surface. We call this big snake Jipijka’maq .”
    â€œ Jipijka’maq ,” Eugainia ventured, the staccato rhythm of the word suiting the image Keswalqw created.
    â€œ Jipijka’maq lays bare the soft black rocks we burn to set the clay when we shape our pots.”
    The black rock—coal, Eugainia gathered—was periodically ignited by lightning. Streams of run-off water from higher elevations overflowed into the crevasses, making a quick end to the mountain’s sooty fussing. All would be quiet until the next storm re-ignited the coal. Rain fell, water pooled, the earth dried; clouds gathered, lightning struck and the cycle began anew.
    Between the extremes of the Smoking Mountain’s smoke and steam cycle, sulphurous vapours escaped from crevasses in faint wisps. Yet the air was normally sweet and clean. Prevailing winds carried the unpleasant odours south and east over the wide peninsula where they were absorbed by the great primeval forests, ancient stands of oak, maple and soaring white pine. The forest hills were the mothers of the bay’s three rivers, Keswalqw explained. Below the trees, thick mats of moss regulated water extirpated by root, branch and leaf. Excess flowed into collector pools. Overflowing pools drained in rivulets. Rivulets deepened into streams. Streams expanded into creeks. Crystal-clear, nutrient-rich water coursed down the flanks of the Smoking Mountain, and her sister hills, to Claw of Spirit Bird Bay in three broad river systems.
    Nothing was as it seemed at first glance. Below them, and a little to the west, Keswalqw indicated the elevated Meadow of the Singing Stone, the great black obelisk barely visible at this distance. In her agony, the stone had seemed enormous to Eugainia, saturated as she was with its primeval power. From this height and distance it was simply an odd feature in a benign landscape. She struggled to remember its significance.
    All things in this strange land were infused with what Keswalqw called Kji-kinap —which translated, as far as Eugainia could tell, as Power. She felt its force, as ancient and particular as any Eugainia sensed in northern Europe, the lands surrounding the Mediterranean Sea, or the vast arid territories her ancestor walked, as described in the New Testament, which Eugainia experienced firsthand when she and Morgase had travelled the way of the Cross some ten years past. Eugainia felt great Kiji-kinap in her current companion. Keswalqw’s power was indistinguishable from the bays, mountains and rivers—the terrain into which she, the Great Mother of The People, had been born.
    Secure in its circling nest of low mountains, aligned on a northeast axis, the great bay opened