Image: © Charles Eastwood
It had been a long time since anyone in Luca’s village had seen a star.
When the companies had decided to take the night sky for themselves, there was little anyone could do to stop them – and when the darkness had spilled over the sky, like oil, concealing everything except the sun and the moon, there was even less to be done.
At that time his family had written down everything they could see, made intricate paintings and tapestries of the dotted firmament – something to save for the future – and had grieved the loss for those who hadn’t been born yet.
That was also when Luca had taken to laying out on the grass every evening, a witness to what was being obfuscated by the layer of machinery. He had tried his best to burn the stars into his mind, but on that final night, when the last one blinked out, he knew that he was going to miss them desperately.
Luca’s village lay in the valleys, mountains swelling on either side. The ground was lush, the green river which ran between the groove of the mountains watering the banks and the animals. Luca had heard rumours at school that the blanket of ships was getting energy from the stars somehow, although he couldn’t see the point of energy if not for feeding cows, or painting houses, or running around on the grass.
He had also heard, from the older children, that one star still remained – but that you could only see it at the top of the Western mountain.
Luca had laughed at the idea. The Western mountain was off limits, sharp and deadly, inaccessible to most – especially the lanky boy who told the story over lunch, wild eyed and hollow cheeked. And yet the thought had stuck with him, and he often found his attention slipping, eyes gliding over the summit when he was meant to be listening.
…
The nights passed and passed and passed and Luca had grown taller whilst the sky had faded entirely, a muddy grey almost all of the time. Even though years had gone by, Luca still missed the stars, and was often swung awake in the morning by a deep plunging sensation, as if the same grey mud had pooled in his stomach overnight.
At some point he had begun to learn how to climb, never with any conscious intention, just because it felt good to stretch his lean limbs as far as they would go, to feel the pull of muscles taught under his skin. He enjoyed the silence and the gentle but dizzying sway at the tops of the trees, and he enjoyed peering outward, as the valley cascaded down towards the water.
Over time he started to wander further from the village, first only to the base of the mountains, where he would boulder through the caves, and then further up, where the ground became loose and shingly in places, thick with red mud in others.
Soon he was able to make it up to the midway pass, contorting his body to create deft levers, blistered fingers rough as the stone he climbed on. And then he could make it to the ridge, a flat natural path to the next village over, and he was adopted into the pack of travelling men who carried the messages that needed to be sent quickly, or the medicines only available from a fruit found in a particularly shaded spot.
His mother did not enjoy this choice of career – it kept him away, and at risk from falling or mountain lions on all sides. But it paid well, and the woven garments he brought her, all the colours of light reflecting through opal, kept her complaints at a minimum.
Luca still missed the stars – they were meant to be the mainstays of navigators such as him, but most of the time he kept his thoughts busy and inattentive. At least, until one evening in early spring.
Luca had travelled a fair distance, to a village near to the sea where the kelp grew in clumps and was said to soothe. He and the other men had made camp outside of the village, on a cold outcrop that hung over the ocean, and he had been sleeping in fits and bursts. When he jolted awake in the middle of the night, he wasn’t convinced he had slept at all, a headache humming behind his eyes.
And lying there, flat on his back, was when he first caught sight of the falling star. He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands, sure that it was just a trick of his hazy brain. It was only when the comet tail started to glow, leaving a clear keloid scar across the grey sky, that he properly sat up to look at it.
The star was falling fast, floating down through the sky as if it had been shot by an arrow, until it sank right into the shadowy peak of the Western mountain. Luca sat still for a long time, his jaw hanging open, until its glow faded into the general ambivalence of the night.
Around him the sleeping bodies of his men were quiet. He looked back to the mountain. They were due home in a few days, but the journey would make at least one stop at its base.
If he could just slip away, he could scramble up and down there in the night, moving as fast as he was able. To see a star was an opportunity he couldn’t miss. Maybe he could even find a piece to bring back to his mother.
As he drifted off, his thoughts spun with the idea of a star resting in his open palms – golden, glowing and warm.
…
The next morning Luca was unable to take his eyes off of the mountain, and he felt sure that he hadn’t been dreaming. He tried to study the faces of his other campmates to tell if they had seen anything, but everyone was acting as if it were just any other morning. Luca arranged his face into an expression of neutrality, and ate his breakfast in silence.
That evening they set up their camp at the base of the Western mountain, the final stop on their journey before the scramble around its wide base, then down to his village on the other side. As the other men slowly drifted off, and the sky turned from blue to black, Luca listened until the last of their breathing had settled into a regular cadence. Then he shuffled little by little out of his sleeping bag, pausing every few seconds to make sure that no one was disturbed.
When he was free, he ran away from the circle of sleeping bodies, his weight firmly on the balls of his feet as he had come to learn was the quietest. Only when he was a few hundred metres away did he allow himself to breathe out, shaky, as he peered up at the craning mass of shadow over him. One short sharp exhale, and then he was on the move.
The beginning of his journey was relatively simple, the rocks broad and flat, grooves plenty wide enough for his searching fingers. Soon though the mountain became steeper and looser, small shingles which tumbled out from under his feet, threatening a cascade and making his stomach curdle. Still though he persevered, like a moth to a lantern he fluttered up the façade, his muscles straining, tendons slipping over bone as he moved.
On approaching the summit the rocks became large again, but separated by huge chasms, grinning mouths with infinite gullets and snaggled teeth. Luca stopped and felt his way across their edges, feet pressed firmly on the other side, clinging on to the opposite ledge with his rough hands. He sang many prayers that evening to gods that he had never before given a second thought.
Soon though he was nearing the summit, just as the sun’s light was starting to make its ascent in front of the curtain of smoke and ships that made up the rest of the sky. Luca paused to look up at the heavens, flat apart from the pocked moon, and felt a rush of hope at the thought of a star, even a single star, managing to make it through the barricade. How many ships must it have slipped past on its journey, how many clasping claws and dead-eyed miners trying to drain it of its energy.
He thought of all the generations before him who had found patterns of themselves and their animals and their tools in the same sky, how it had been impossible for humans to look up at the great void and not see a mirror.
Then his eyes returned to the summit from where they had strayed, and he felt a new sense of determination flow through him. He wasn’t sure if it was a trick of his mind, or the light from the unnatural sky, but he felt that he could see a halo of light coming from behind the mountain, flickering.
And so he began to climb again, digging to the depths of his will. He changed paths a few times, unsure as to where exactly the highest point might be, where his star might have landed – until suddenly he was a few metres from the top, the glow much stronger than before. A few more steps and he had made it, his lungs fierce, his spit thick in his mouth.
Luca’s eyes stayed on the rocks as he cast around for a chunk of star. A worry flashed fast that he wouldn’t be able to recognise it even if he did find it. Then, at last, he looked away from the floor to the green groove that lay below him.
And his body filled with sick sweet dread, and his vision swam, and his breath disappeared entirely.
Hundreds of metres below him his village glowed, a bed of amber and charcoal in two pieces, as if it had been sliced by a giant cosmic knife. Even from here he could see the enormous cleaves of metal, each section metres long, which had embedded themselves into the landscape, giant shrapnel from a one-sided barrage. He could see the embossed shapes of recognisable logos on metal. Calling cards.
Luca fell to his knees, unable to understand the enormity of the destruction in front of him, the edges of his vision dripping and vacillating with grey mud.
And as he knelt there, at their altar, his thoughts were too dense and too heavy to parse, apart from one lyric echoing throughout in a twisted rhythm – that it was too late, that it has always been too late, and that it had already been too late, even before he was born. If they would take the sky for themselves, why did he possibly think that they would leave him the earth?
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Caitlin lives in London and fits writing around her 9-5. She is finishing her debut novel – a queer literary thriller – and a collection of short stories, of which Luca is one. She’s happy to note that this is her first publishing credit!