Thorus was the first to see the skyboat, dropping his needle as he sprang to his feet, shouting. My father and my uncle were no slower upright, the net forgotten on the warm sand. I followed them, staring to where they pointed, not sure what it was they pointed at or what set such fear in their eyes. I knew only that my father, who was afraid of nothing, was indeed afraid. I felt the fear, like the waft of sour sweat, or a drunkard’s breath. Battus shouted and ran from the beach toward the mantis’s cella.

I remember that Thorus said, “They come again,” and my father answered, “It is not the time,” and then told me to run homeward, to tell my mother that the Sky Lords came, and she would know what to do.

As all the men not at sea gathered, staring skyward, I lingered a moment, wondering what held them so, what set them so rigid, like the old, time-carved statues that guarded the entrance to the cella.

Against the knife-sharp brilliance of the sky, I saw a shape. It seemed in that moment like a maggot, a bloated grub taken up by the hot late-summer wind, a speck against the eye-watering azure, that drifted steadily toward me. I felt my skin grow chill with apprehension.

Then my father, knowing me, shouted again, and I ran to our cottage and yelled at my mother that the Sky Lords came.

I think that then, for the first time, I truly knew what terror they induced.

Tonium and Delia fashioned castles from the dirt of our yard, grubby in a manner I-the older-was too adult to entertain. My mother screamed at them, bringing them tearful to her arms, she so distraught she found only brief, hurried words to calm their wailing as she gathered them up. The bell that hung above the cella began to sound, sonorous in the late-afternoon air, its clanging soon augmented by a great shouting from all the women, and the old men, and the howling of confused and frightened children who, like me, knew only that something unfamiliar occurred to induce fear and near-panic in our parents.