The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Buttoned Sky, by Geoff St. Reynard

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Title: The Buttoned Sky

Author: Geoff St. Reynard

Release Date: May 21, 2010 [EBook #32473]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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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 mist