October 03, 2017

PodCastle 490: The Names of the Sky

* Author : Matthew Claxton

* Narrator : Tanja Milojevic

* Host : Graeme Dunlop

* Audio Producer : Pria Wood

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PodCastle 490: The Names of the Sky is a PodCastle original.

Rated PG-13.

The Names of the Sky

by Matthew Claxton

Zoya wished one of her flying instructors could have seen her land on that muddy field. Always she had been criticized for her landings. “Light as a feather in the air, lands like a brick,” one had written on his assessment. But this time she brought the bullet-riddled fighter in perfectly, despite the dead engine, despite the ruts that tried to fling her sideways. She bumped to a halt where the field ended and a bare-branched forest of white birches began.

Zoya climbed down, shakily pulling off her leather helmet. She patted the Yakovlev’s flank and muttered something between a prayer and the calming words one says to a nervous animal. She scanned the sky above, but it was empty. No pursuing Germans sullied the blushing evening sky. Her own flight had vanished, too.

There was no human sound. From the woods came the raw-throated cry of a raven, and nothing else.

What to do now, trapped west of the Soviet advance, with a broken radio and a grounded plane? Find shelter. Find food, if possible. Avoid the Germans. Hide, and hope that she could wait it out until the Red Army reached her.

Try not to think of the others who never returned to the aerodrome. Of Anna and Valeyria and Ludmilla, cremated as they fell to earth ablaze. Don’t think of Marta and Yulia, never returned, their bones bleaching in some fallow field much like this one.

Zoya pushed the thoughts down. They wouldn’t bear her aloft.

She opened the cowling and looked at the engine. Nothing was obviously wrong – no metal shattered by shells, no leaking lines.

“You might fly again,” she told the plane. Zoya considered briefly just waiting there, sticking close to the little fighter. The thought of leaving it behind made her wince, but she forced herself to turn and walk away.

At the south edge of the field, she found a weed-choked path. The path led her to a pair of ruts she thought might go by the name of road, in these rustic parts.

While she walked, she conducted an inventory of her flight suit’s pockets. She had her Tokarev pistol, never fired, a seven-ounce can of tinned beets in one pocket, a rectangular tin of Lend-Lease meat in her other. The bright original wrapper was a ghost under the crookedly-applied Cyrillic label that simply read “Pork.” The same pocket contained four squares of chocolate wrapped in paper. Zoya had been eating the bar a single square at a time, one for each time she landed back at the aerodrome.

She left those alone, for now. On the ground was not the same as safely home.

The road wound past fields hacked from the birch wood. The crops were last season’s, mixed with weeds and never harvested.

Fields needed farmers, yes? Zoya knew, from the joyful filmed scenes of the harvest at the cinema, that farmers lived in happy little villages on the big collective farms. Villages had cottages, people, perhaps even radios or friendly bands of partisans.

Her inventory of possible contents of a rural village grew with each mile, adding items such as a hot shower, hot coffee, cigarettes, clean clothes, warm bread, and kind words. Though she would settle for the shower and coffee.

She grew cold, and cursed every rut and hole in the miserable road. There was nothing so pathetic as a grounded pilot,

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