The Second History

by Rebecca Silver Slayter

  “Is that—do you have my…”

  Inge touches her ear, which is swollen and marked by a stain of dried blood. “Sure,” she says. “Why don’t you ask him?”

  Judy takes her eyes from Inge and looks questioningly at him. “She has my mother’s earring, Eban.”

  “It’s all right,” Inge tells her. “We worked it out. He’ll explain it to you.”

  “I had to, Judy,” he whispers. “She said they’d never let us go unless we—”

  “Unless you what?” Tristan peels open the door of his tent and pulls his boots on. “How did she threaten you?”

  Eban doesn’t answer, watching instead as Judy turns away, the shape of her somehow sorrowful-looking.

  “She’s sly, that one,” Tristan says indulgently. “What did she convince you to give away?”

  Inge, sullen-eyed, ignores him, taking a seat beside Dean.

  Tristan laughs, long and low. “Whatever it is, it’s hers now. She can’t let anybody get past us without relieving them of their belongings.”

  “She told me it was you. That you wouldn’t let us leave.”

  He shakes his head. “We were even. I said as much. I wouldn’t have bothered you. I don’t hurt anybody unless they get in my way. But that one would slit your throat without blinking and only be sorry for bloodying her knife. I suppose she told you her sad story. We all have sad stories. You ought to remember that. You shouldn’t sell your pity so cheap. Or your trust.”

  Eban turns his back on the man, his stomach sick. And then, through the tent door that Tristan left open behind him, he notices Vi and her daughters, sprawled naked together in the swell of bedding. The girls sleep with their heads resting on their mother’s stomach, their bodies only partly covered. As Eban watches, Vi opens her eyes, regards him, and then pulls the covers higher, till her face is hidden from him. Eban glances at Judy and can tell from her face that she saw it too.

  “Get us some water, girl,” Tristan orders Inge.

  “Get it yourself,” she answers, and to Eban’s surprise, Tristan chuckles and plucks a jug from the ground and heads off into the wood.

  “Have a seat,” says Dean. “Get your bowl and you can eat with us.”

  “I’m not hungry.” Eban stares at the man and woman seated on the ground, spooning food into their mouths like they’re starved. “I saw,” he says. More loudly, he repeats, “We saw them there. In the tent. Your mother and your sisters.”

  Inge pauses, the spoon in her hand briefly arrested in its passage to her mouth. “Did you get a nice long look?”

  Dean throws his bowl to the ground and glares at Eban. “Leave it,” he growls. “Leave it alone.”

  “Dean, take down my tent,” Inge orders.

  Reluctantly, Dean rises and begins the work of packing up the second tent.

  “He doesn’t like it,” Inge says simply.

  “Does your mother? Your sisters—”

  “I doubt they know what things they do because they like it and what they do because they’re afraid. And I doubt it matters much. He tried that with me too and I woke him with a knife between his teeth and told him next time it would be between his ribs.”

  “Then why do you stay with him?” Judy asks.

  Inge narrows her eyes. “You must not know anything about anything.”

  “Can’t you fight? Can’t Dean? If the two of you—”

  “He tried. Twice.” She leans closer, as if to make certain they understand her. “I don’t think he will again.”

  “But you have weapons…You aren’t helpless. You could—”

  “Dean belongs to Tristan now, like I do and they do. Like my mother does.” Inge looks toward the tent, where the three women sleep on. “But she’ll kill him one day.”

  “You leaving or what?” demands Dean, jamming the tent fabric into a sack.

  “Yes,” says Judy. “We are.”

  * * *

  —

  They wait until it is almost dark before they continue. Eban wants to be sure the others are gone. If Inge didn’t lie, if they were hunted for days without knowing it, he wants to believe that it is only because they weren’t looking for signs of pursuit. He remembers the cry they heard in the wind, and decides not to think of it again. They never guessed they were followed, and, he tells himself, now that he is looking for such signs, he will see them if they’re there. But he and Judy aren’t of interest to that terrible family any longer. He is sure of it.

  Of course it must have been a lie, what Inge said about going to the cities. She only wanted a bauble to amuse herself. He thinks there is no reason to tell Judy what Inge told him, because there is no reason to believe any of it was true.

  A hard, icy rain falls, and the moon is lost in the sky. Judy and Eban talk little, instead driving their shoulders into the wind and setting their teeth against the cold.

  At last they stop. There’s no discussion, but they seem to understand each other perfectly, lowering their packs at once when they reach a small opening in the wood.

  Once there is a fire, coaxed, smoking, out of the sodden wood, once Judy has found the driest clothing left in their packs and set it out for them to wear, once they have prepared a dinner of boiled beans, Judy leans toward Eban and says, “I have to show you something.”

  As he follows her, Eban notices that something has altered ever so slightly in the carriage of her body, the way she walks. He stares at her back, her profile, and wonders if her shape has changed in some way she’s now accommodating. And he remembers how he once had to tell her, this woman who knew about animals and countries he’d never heard named, why she had stopped menstruating, what she carried and how it would be born. The way she looked at him then, caught and ashamed. The way she needed him.

  * * *

  —

  Judy leads him now to a place where the ridge veers sharply and the old stump of a tree, cleaved in two, still stands.

  “Look,” she says. “I saw it when I was gathering wood for the fire.”

  At first he thinks it’s the tree Judy has just taken down to burn, but drawing closer, he sees the cut was made and the tree felled a dozen years or more ago.

  “Look,” she says again, and Eban does.

  Carved into the severed trunk, where its heartwood is exposed, are four curved lines that nearly meet at the centre, a curling x with no apex.

  “Do you know what that is?” Judy asks. He shakes his head. “I think it might stand for Heaven. Look at the other half.”

  From the other side, he can see eight letter u’s roughly hewn into the wood, and beneath, seven vertical lines, maybe capital i’s. “You think it means something?” he asks.

  “They’re numbers. Each unit is shown with a different symbol. Dan used this in his reports, to protect dates and locations. There was some danger that meant he had to keep those numbers safe. If you didn’t know to look for them, you’d think they were just accidental markings, meaningless. I thought it was a code between him and whoever he sent his reports to. But maybe there are others who know the system.”

  “Then it can’t be safe,” Eban says quietly.

  “This mark,” Judy says, pointing to the u’s, “means units of ten. The other is ones. So the number is eighty-seven. I think we’re only eighty-seven miles away now.”

  He wipes away the water dripping from his hair with his hand, which is no drier. “From the colony. But what reason is there to believe that’s what it means? That x could stand for anything. Or nothing at all.”

  She takes his hand in hers and raises it to point at the mountain peaks rising from the forest before them. “One. Two. Three. Four. Four peaks. With a gully between them.”

  He frowns. “You think those are the two-horned mountains? You think if we pass between them we’ll find…”

  Her eyes won’t release his. Her smil
e stretches all the way across. “Heaven,” she whispers.

  He bows his head slowly. “Okay.”

  If it is true, they are close enough they might be watched even now. But then there is no use in hiding. No use in putting out the fire or sitting watch through the night. They are caught, or they are welcome.

  After they eat, they sit in silence. Tired but not yet ready to climb into their soaked bedding and attempt to sleep.

  “How awful they must be,” Eban says. “How awful the cities must be to drive people to lives like those.”

  “No,” says Judy. “It’s the other way around. How could they be any worse?”

  They fall asleep beside one another, still cold, still hungry. Eban feels as though he doesn’t sleep at all, but then there are flashes of dream, sharp and clear, singing like the sweep of a blade through the air, dreams where he shakes with cold. But he wakes dripping with sweat and certain something is wrong.

  VII

  Dawn is already lighting up the sky, so that the mountain and trees above look like they have been set on fire, though it will be another hour at least till the sun clears the hills and is revealed. The sky is lake-blue.

  It rained in the night, and Eban’s clothes are soaked through, his hair and skin damp. His wet face feels hot, though he is shivering.

  “Judy,” he whispers, but she turns in her sleep without answering.

  He can’t seem to free his mind from the half-dream of danger—its formless, shadowy innuendo—that woke him. Sitting up and rubbing his face with his hand, he tries to see the thing he only senses. Something troubling. Something missing. Something that should be there.

  “Gone.” The word falls from his mouth like a stone.

  He takes it in, piece by piece, everything missing revealing itself, one and then another and another.

  Gone is the shelter Eban stitched together out of tarp and twine.

  Gone his pack.

  Gone the axe Judy leaned against the stack of split firewood.

  Gone the sack of fire nests Eban had forgotten to return to the cook kit, half-remembering as he slid into sleep and thinking no harm could come to it in the night.

  Gone the water.

  Gone the fuel tank.

  Gone the food.

  Slumping back onto the ground, Eban tries to clear his head. Anger crowds his mind, blotting out the sequence of concrete, explicit fears just past the outer reach of his thoughts. And something else, some sinewy gravity clings to him, slowing and delaying his thinking.

  “Judy,” he whispers again, but softly, almost wishing she won’t wake.

  It is impossible to know what she will think or say.

  At last he rises to his feet. He is burning and frozen at the same time, and impulsively he strips off his clothes, hooking his coat over a branch with shaking hands, and letting the sodden rest fall to the ground. One less thing, and what does it matter now.

  Slinking over his damp skin, the cold air wakes him up, nerve ending by nerve ending. He is something past awake, electric, quivering in readiness. He kicks off one boot and stares at his foot, white and shrivelled like something that has never seen light. He plants both feet on the wet, melting ground, feels myriad radicles spring from each phalanx and tunnel into the earth, a rhizomatic, anarchic root system, tethering him like a tree—

  “Eban!”

  He doesn’t want to turn. To turn would be to stop the explosion of sensation, cold air broadcasting over his head and throat, his chest, his back, the rush of sky across his body.

  “Eban, what are you doing?”

  And that’s it. That’s what fear sounds like in her voice.

  He turns and smiles at her. It comes to him in a flash what he looks like. White, and grimy with sweat. Yet somehow he feels only a proud certainty, standing naked before her. He tells her, “It’s gone.”

  She is already looking around as he says the words, discovering what he already knows. The way she comes to understand it is systematic. He can see that she is counting things, unpacking what was put where, what they need and how badly, and where it was left and where it isn’t and why it isn’t and how far they have to travel and what they will find and what will be impossible now. He watches how each thought turns the next, its argument and answer.

  “They left my pack,” she says at last. “It must have been those marauders. They must have circled back for us.”

  “Yes.”

  She frowns. “Why?”

  He shrugs. The gesture pleases him and he repeats it. It is the perfect expression of his state; he is perched somewhere that only overlooks what happens to her, to him, things blurred and trivialized by distance. He says, “Beau would have barked.”

  Judy looks into the woods for a long time, as he begins to feel the cold.

  “He would have barked. He would have woken us up.” He looks at the soaked clothing he stepped out of, piled at his feet, and realizes it is all he has to wear now. “If you’d kept him. If you’d kept him with us.”

  Then Judy snatches her pack up by the straps, turns it over and lets the contents fall out over the ground. She opens every pocket, pulls out what’s inside and adds it to the pile. She empties the pockets of her coat and his. And then they stand and look at everything they have.

  She tells him, “I’d put aside some things to wash whenever we reached water. There are pants of yours in there. Dirty but dry. Put them on.”

  He obeys her and then stands shirtless before her.

  She looks him over and bites her lip. Then she pulls a long-sleeved shirt from her pack. And a sweater of hers that once belonged to Alphonse, made of some light violet wool—who knows where he got it or who made it for him. Where would a sheep have been found to shear? He takes it from her hands.

  As she watches, he pulls on the sweater. It is stretched taut across his shoulders, and the sleeves reach just below his elbows, but it fits. There is an unpleasant, animal smell to the damp wool.

  Dressed, he looks at her again and waits to be told what to do next.

  “What’s wrong with you,” she asks.

  He isn’t sure. “I feel strange,” he says at last.

  She nods. “You must have caught a chill in the rain last night. Do you feel feverish?”

  “I feel hot. And cold.”

  “We still have the medicine kit, thank god. We need to know if it’s hypothermia.” She digs out the thermometer and hands it to him, and then kneels over what remains of the fire. “We’re going to have to get this going again and dry out your coat. We can’t leave here until you’re warm and in your right mind.”

  It takes her nearly an hour to get the soaked wood to burn without the fire nests, and she comments tonelessly that only one box of matches remains. Even without his parka, in only her shirt and sweater, he begins to warm. His temperature reads 40.6 degrees—a moderate fever, not hypothermia. He slips in and out of sleep, lets dreams overlap with the figure of Judy before him, tending the fire, putting her hand to his brow to check his temperature and then letting it rest a moment against his cheek, or maybe that, too, is a dream.

  He wakes and she feeds him their last tin of stewed beans. He worries that she has kept nothing for herself. She boils snow over the fire and makes him drink it, which he does, scalding his lips and tongue. A moment later the water spills back out of his mouth, and he sees fear in her face as she whispers that it’s all right, and in her arms, he feels himself lowered to the ground.

  He wakes again and it is late afternoon. “I slept all day,” he says, sitting up. His clothes are dry, and he realizes he is in his coat again, which is smoke-soaked and fire-warmed, the steel buttons searing-hot. His hands shake, not working as they should, as he undoes the buttons. The air feels surprisingly warm, and the fire is high and bright. Judy is, he realizes, no longer worried about being found or caught.

 
“Five days,” she says, smiling wanly.

  He presses the heels of his hands to his eyes, clearing his head of strange dreams. He remembers his last moments of consciousness. The theft.

  Judy seems to read his face. “I made a list of what we still have.”

  “Will we—” He can’t think how to end the question without some histrionic word like survive. “Will it be enough?”

  She begins reading from the list and then stops. “Till we get there.”

  “So you still want to go ahead.”

  “We never had much, really. And now we don’t have any other choice. I’ve torn up every scrap of wood I could to keep the fire going. I had to feed it all night long. I don’t want to waste the few matches we have left. We have no rifle now. Nothing to fish with. I foraged what I could. But we’re both weak.”

  Eban pushes himself to his feet and tries to hide from her the way his legs wobble beneath him. “Then let’s gather up and leave.”

  “I’m not sure you’re ready…”

  He leans his weight against the papery trunk of a birch that is weaving in the light wind. The snow is all but gone from the wood, melted away while he slept. “Maybe I can’t do a full day’s walking. But if we leave now, I can get my legs used to working again, put in a half day before dark, and then leave at dawn tomorrow. If we do long days, we might make it by the day after tomorrow, if you’re right about the markings on that stump.”

  She is thinking. “The day after tomorrow,” she murmurs. “Much longer and it will start to get harder. We’ll be slower. Weaker.”

  “But we can get by till then. Even without food.”

  “Even without food.”

  The slanting sunlight overhead burns his eyes, and already he feels tired. But he helps her pack up what remains of their things. She insists on carrying her pack. He protests, but when she isn’t looking, he tests himself. Suspending the pack in the air, his arm shakes, and he holds tight, letting the muscles grab and release, lengthening and shortening under the strain.