Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net THE BUTTONED SKY By Geoff St. Reynard [Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy August 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Legends spoke of Earth's glorious past, of freedom and greatness. But this was the future, ruled by god-globes, as men gazed fearfully at--THE BUTTONED SKY CHAPTER I The squire he sat in Dolfya Town, He swilled the blood-dark wine: "O who can blight my happiness, Or face the power that's mine?" Then up there spoke his daughter fair: "The priest can end your joy; The globe can sap your might away, And the Mink can you destroy!" --Ruck's Ballad of the Mink The day that Revel killed a god, he woke early. There was a bitter taste in his mouth, and a pain in his ear where somebody'd hit him during a shebeen brawl the night before. He rolled over on his back. The bed was a hollowed place in the earth floor, filled with leaves and dried grass and spread with yellow-brown mink skins sewn into a big blanket; he'd slept on it every night of his twenty-eight years, but this morning it felt hard and uncomfortable. The water gourd was empty. In the cold gray mists of dawn he groped his way sleepily to the well behind the hut, and drew up the bucket. "Damn the gentry!" he burst out. The bucket, an ancient thing made of oak slats pegged together with wooden dowels, was half filled with dirt and rotten brush. "Curse their lousy carcasses to hell!" he yelled, and, suddenly scared, looked around to see if perhaps a god was floating somewhere near him. But no yellow glimmering showed in the mists. Laboriously he cleaned out the well, dropping the bucket time after time and dragging up loads of trash. Some roving band of gentry had fouled the water for sport. Anything that hurt the ruck, made them more work or injured them in any way, was sport for the squirarchy. At last he got a bucket of cold and almost clean water, filled the big gourd and carried it back to the one-room hut. The morning that had begun badly was getting worse; his mother's limp was painful to see; she must have had a hard night. Bent and gray and as juiceless as the grass of their beds, she slept more lightly and fretfully with every passing month. Many years before a squire had ridden her down in the lanes of Dolfya Town, as she scurried out of the path of his great stallion, and her broken leg had mended crookedly. A few hours on the mink-covered bed crippled her up so that moving was an agony.