by Jen Williams
For a time, Noon experienced only darkness, with small snatches of light, and the light itself was strange, greenish, not reassuring. Eventually, she began to smell things too, and these were older, well-known smells, the scents of memory and long ago. The warm peppery smell of dried harla root; paper, lots of it, bound in leather; the little wildflower hearts-kiss, which her mother had gathered in thick bales whenever they came across it – tiny and pink, the petals made a sweet paste when mashed together. Familiar scents from a distant time. When Noon awoke, it was to see the peaked, busy ceiling of the tent, and a figure bending over her. There was a yawning sensation in her gut, like being pulled backwards very suddenly. Had her whole life been a fever dream? She was certainly unwell; she could feel it under her skin, a thick hot illness weighing her down, keeping her to the bed.
‘Mother?’
The figure grew still, her head tipped to one side. It was such an alien gesture that Noon felt cast into dreams once again. She struggled to sit up, fighting against the urge to sleep.
‘I suppose you could call me that,’ said the figure, her voice, as ever, amused. ‘But I don’t think you’d really want to.’
‘No.’ Noon squirmed away from the woman’s touch. ‘What have you done? What is all this?’
‘I collected together a few reminders, that’s all,’ said She Who Laughs. ‘I suppose I got a little carried away. And it wasn’t easy, if I’m truthful. Not easy to be authentic, anyway, because of course the tents and belongings of your people – well, they’re not around anymore, are they?’
And it was all slightly wrong, now that Noon looked at it properly. The books were not her mother’s books; Noon had memorised the spines and titles of every one, long before she could even read. And although the herbs were right, they were hanging in the wrong places. The thick embroidered rugs lining the tent walls were alien to her, the blankets did not smell of horse, and, of course, She Who Laughs was not her mother. She still wore the body of the thin blonde woman, although she looked pinched around the eyes and cheeks, and there were shadows under her skin.
‘I need a drink.’ Noon attempted to sit up again, but She Who Laughs placed one hand on her chest and pushed her back firmly.
‘Don’t move. You nearly killed yourself out there, in that heat. So stubborn. But then I never did give my gift to any pushovers.’
She fetched a bowl from the side and lifted a spoon to Noon’s lips. Rather than water, the bowl was full of a creamy sort of soup. Noon swallowed a mouthful, then grimaced. It was hot.
‘I don’t want that. I need water.’ She coughed. The soup had left a strange aftertaste. ‘Listen, I don’t feel well . . .’
‘I’m not surprised.’ She Who Laughs picked up a cloth from another bowl, and pressed it to Noon’s forehead. It was warm and damp, and all at once Noon felt like the small amount of strength she had left was seeping away into the blankets underneath her. ‘You need to lie quietly and relax now, wait for your body to heal itself, Noon. Noon, my little frog.’
‘Wait, what have you . . . what have you done . . .’ Noon reached up and took hold of She Who Laughs’ arm, but her skin was feverish too, and somehow that was too much. She slumped back into the blankets and the darkness swarmed in, hot and hungry.
Her awareness, when it came back, was as bright and as cool as the plains on a spring day. It was the old nightmare, or at least, the setting of it; she stood, a young girl with a wooden sword shoved through her belt, on the edge of her people’s territory. The wind was moving in the long grasses like an unseen animal, and it tugged at her hair – still long and currently free of the braids her mother habitually tried to tame it with. The smell of the grasslands under the sun was in her nostrils, as well as other familiar scents, like wood smoke, tanning leather, horses, meat cooking somewhere. Her people were as busy as they ever were, tending their animals, fixing tents, fetching water. Some of the young people were teaching their horses tricks, laughing and teasing each other, while many older people gathered in groups to talk. Noon took a few steps forward, looking at their faces. She was remembering things she hadn’t thought of in decades. Names drifted up like burning embers in rising smoke.
Grasschance, an old hunter with a lean and wiry frame. His back was a mess of scars where he had fallen into a thicket of brambles as a young man. If you asked him about it, he would spin a wild tale of being captured by his enemies and tortured, but everyone knew the truth.
Father Bird, almost as old as Mother Fast. He had trouble walking, and was cared for by his two sons. He liked rude jokes, Noon remembered, and would tell you one if you brought him sips of stonefeet, no matter how old you were or whether you would understand it or not.
Onlyleaf was tall and fierce, their best and most feared warrior. She could sing too, in a high, wavering voice that she kept for them tribe alone. She was their public weapon and their secret song. Onlyleaf, young and angry and joyous.
Brittlesky had four children, and Noon only ever remembered her with a bundle at her breast and a toddler clinging to her skirts. She was also the tribe’s expert on plants and their mysteries; no one planted anything without asking Brittlesky first. She had a curl in her hair, unusual for plains folk, and all her babies had it too; a little gathering of curly tops.
Hareslife, an irritable old woman who knitted hats for them in the autumn. She lived alone and hated company, but every year, those hats would start to appear . . .
Noon took a sharp breath. All of them had been waiting here all the time. She hadn’t forgotten any of them, not really. Faces and voices she had known every day of her early life, hands that had always been there to help her up when she fell, to brush her down. It was good to see them, it was good, but . . .
‘What am I doing here?’
With great reluctance, she looked down at her bare arm. There was an angry red mark there, as if someone had smacked her recently. Reaching up to touch her face, she felt tears on her cheeks, already drying in the sun.
‘We were playing around, with the horses. Just pretending, like the bigger kids. But I –’ She shuddered violently, and her stomach cramped. She was edging closer and closer to the abyss in her head, so close now she could hear the whistling noise it made as it sucked all the light into itself. ‘I did it wrong, I messed up.’
Another memory: of a hard, flat anger inside herself, and her own hand reaching down towards the short grass.
‘NO!’
Noon lurched up out of the blankets, kicking and fighting as though she were drowning in a pond. Hard, hot hands pushed her back down, pinning her to the ground.
‘You were nearly there!’ She Who Laughs’ face was close to her own, close enough for Noon to smell the illness in the body she wore. ‘Just a little bit further you have to go, that’s all.’
‘No! You don’t understand, I can’t see that again, I can’t, it’ll kill me.’ She struggled violently, but the strength of She Who Laughs was implacable. She held her down without effort, and eventually Noon lay still, although her heart was thundering in her chest. Panic bit at her with rats’ teeth. ‘Why are you doing this to me? Why?’
‘You have to remember, child, that’s all.’ She Who Laughs smiled serenely. She pulled over a couple more rugs and covered Noon’s chest, tucking her in up to her chin. ‘Will you take more soup? It will help.’
‘No, I don’t want any soup, I’m boiling my blood over here.’ Noon gasped. It was getting difficult to breath, and the ceiling of the tent looked hazy, unreal. A flush of nausea moved through her, and she began to shiver. ‘You’re trying to kill – to kill me.’
‘Little frog, if I wanted you dead, do you not think you’d already be a cinder?’
Noon tried to focus on the woman’s face, but it was shifting, and strange. The halo of green fire around her head was bright, too bright, and all the shadows in the room were mocking her.
‘Don’t call me that,’ she croaked. ‘My mum used to call me that.’
She Who Laug
hs tipped her head to one side again, considering. ‘Perhaps a touch of death is what you need, though. Perhaps then you will look it in the face, finally.’
She Who Laughs pressed her hand to Noon’s cheek – hard, calloused hands – and Noon felt all the remaining strength drain out of her. Her vision turned grey and her lips numb, and then . . .
. . . back in the sunlight, in the young horses’ paddock. She was there with a handful of children roughly her own age, and they were admiring the colts, letting them sniff their hands and feeding them handfuls of chopped vegetables. They were happy; the day’s lessons were over, and it was hours until dinner. The adults were content to let their children spend time with the horses and the fleeten, because they too would grow up to be riders and hunters. A child who was afraid of horses was of no use to anyone.
Noon looked at the faces of the children who were with her. Her first friends, long forgotten.
‘Hey, Noon, can you do this?’
A boy with a long nose and a pair of healthy purple bruises across his shins slipped from the paddock fence onto the back of a waiting horse. He tucked his feet in and the animal trotted in a neat little circle. Noon grinned, reluctantly. Purefoot was a couple of years older than her, and she wasn’t anywhere near as clever as he was with the horses. He slipped off the animal’s back and brought it back round to the fence.
‘You know I can’t,’ she said mildly enough.
‘Noon is too little,’ said another girl. ‘She can’t do any of this yet. She’s not old enough to do tricks.’
The other girl, Sunsflower, was only a few months older than Noon herself, and so Noon felt that this was a bit of a cheek. She shifted in her space on the fence, feeling too hot. Her cheeks were flushed.
‘I can do loads of tricks,’ she said easily. ‘Just not stupid ones with horses.’ The colt pushed his nose into her hand, and she rubbed the velvet strip between his eyes.
‘Sure you can,’ said Sunsflower, witheringly. ‘Nothing as good as Purefoot can do, that’s what I think.’
Noon smiled, because of course she had the best trick. One none of them could do. It was a secret, her mother was forever telling her how secret it must be, but these children had grown up with her, they were family. They were all family. It suddenly seemed very strange and even unnatural that she should keep any secrets from them.
‘Oh yeah? Well, watch this.’
She pressed her hand flat to the horse’s head, and took a little from him, just a touch. She held out her other hand and pushed the flame out there. It was a perfect diamond of flame, green and blue and clear, but her friends weren’t looking at it. Instead, they were looking at the horse, who had sunk to his knees in the paddock, head bowed.
‘What have you done?’
Noon blinked. ‘Look at my fire,’ she said. ‘Can’t you see it?’
‘Who cares about your stupid fire!’ exclaimed Sunsflower, who was already scrambling down into the paddock. Purefoot was at the horse’s side, trying to lift his big, heavy head. The animal’s eyes had rolled up to the whites.
‘You mean you know about it?’ Uneasily, Noon climbed down into the paddock herself. She hadn’t meant to take so much – she hadn’t thought she had, but the small horse was clearly in a bad way. Why didn’t I take it from the grass?
‘You’ve hurt him,’ said Purefoot, his voice full of anguish. ‘Why would you do that?’
‘I didn’t mean to. I just wanted to show you – Did you know about the fire?’
‘Everyone knows about your stupid fire, Noon,’ snapped Sunsflower. ‘And we know you’re not supposed to use it.’
Uncertain what to do, Noon reached out to touch the horse. Instantly, Purefoot struck her on the arm – one hard slap, like a mother chasing a baby away from the hot surface of a pan.
‘No!’ he said. ‘You’ll make it worse.’
Her vision doubling with tears, Noon sprang up over the fence and ran blindly through the settlement, not stopping until she had left the tents and the people behind. The grass rose in front of her, and the plains swept away forever north, unbroken until the soft purple mounds of distant hills. Noon stared that way until the tears stopped rolling down her face, and looked at the sharp red mark on her arm. Purefoot had never struck her before. He had never looked at her in fear before.
Slowly, her humiliation and sadness filtered away, to be replaced with something else. A hot, flat anger. The unfairness of it, the injustice. She had thought her fire was special, a special thing that she would use one day to protect her people, but they already knew about it, and didn’t care. They thought it was nothing, a trick or an amusement, of no more use than Mother Fast’s puppets.
‘It is bigger than that, though,’ she murmured. ‘I feel it. Bigger than everything. They just don’t know it.’
Slowly, she turned back to face the settlement. The anger left her as quickly as it had come, and the sadness too, until she felt only curiosity. As she stood with her feet in the grass, this thing that she carried inside her had opened itself up to her, like a tiny bud bursting open to reveal petals, pollen, and new alien colours. Everything now looked slightly different.
She could take the life energy of any living thing that she touched. She made a connection with it, skin to skin, and she took.
But wasn’t everything connected? Weren’t they all connected, one to the other?
Blades of grass growing next to each other, sharing the same soil. Men and women, children, living together on this land. They shared blood, and air. And that air they shared with the plain itself, with its sunshine and its soil. Her people could not exist elsewhere, could not be the same without this plain.
‘It’s all connected,’ murmured Noon. ‘Everything is.’
She just needed to move through those connections.
As if in a trance, Noon knelt down and placed her hand in the grass . . .
She had not done it in anger. Wrapped in blankets and moaning with delirium and fever, Noon nonetheless felt a small blossom of relief at that. She had just had the thought, and had acted on it. She hadn’t killed them out of rage after all.
The energy from the grass flowed into her, as easy and as quiet as water from a creek. From blade to blade her thirst travelled, turning each brown and dead as she went. A circle of browning grass bled out from her hand and seeped away, towards the tents, and she urged it on, her thirst growing, rather than being sated. A small group of fleeten stood in one of the grass paddocks, and she felt them, warm and vital on the grass. It was no effort at all to take her hunger to them, and one by one the little goat creatures dropped to the ground, their eyes rolling up just as the horse’s had. One or two of them shuddered and spasmed as they fell, dying where Noon took too much, but she barely noticed – still the life energy flowed into her cool and quick, even as she knelt on the grass outside the settlement. Curious, Noon pushed her awareness of the connection in another direction; Lightspun, a young man who tended the fleeten, was leaning down to touch one of his charges, an expression of shock creasing his smooth features, and Noon slipped up his questing fingers to drain him, too. He stumbled on his feet, crying out in fear and alarm, but Noon barely noticed; an entire world of connections had opened up to her through Lightspun. There was his mother and father, traders both, his little brother Glow, the girl Sewnseed whose hand Lightspun held sometimes when no one else was around – all of them were open to Noon, their life energies ready to be taken. What she had taken so far had filled her like sand in a sack, running to every corner, making her solid, making her real. Finally.
On some level, she knew this could not be contained. The life energy always had to be released in fire, there was no denying it; if she didn’t let it out, it would burst out of her of its own accord. But this new sensation was dizzying, obliterating all other thought. She was drunk on it.
Thrilled with her own power and cleverness, Noon reached out at once to Lightspun’s parents, his brother, and the girl Sewnseed. As she suddenly sp
un in all directions, four figures dropped to the ground in the middle of their tasks. Sewnseed dropped the clay cups she was carrying and crashed into the mud; Glow, who had been teaching himself to play the pipes, slid limply off the wooden gate where he’d been sitting and broke his neck. Aside from the fleeten, he was the first to die.
From there, Noon lost control – if she had ever really had it in the first place. Life energy streamed into her faster and faster, while new connections opened up as quick as snapping bones: Lightspun’s father had three brothers, his mother was riding a horse, the horse was moving through the same grass as Brittlesky was moving through, two of her children were at her heels, two were back in the tent, being tended by Noon’s mother, who was helping out for the afternoon.
Connections crashed into her, one after another. She felt her mother’s life energy stream into her, so fast it almost seemed like it was returning home, and she felt her stumble to her knees, crying out in fear. Noon cried out back, badly frightened now and unable to stop. The deep reservoir she had found within herself was filling up, yet her winnow-thirst moved faster than she could follow. Deep in her feverish slump, tended by She Who Laughs, grown Noon convulsed in her blankets, too filled with horror to even make a sound – she had torn her mother’s life away from her, unthinking and greedy. A thief and a murderer.
All across the settlement, men, women and children were staggering to their knees in the dirt, fainting dead away, their faces turning slack and numb. Those still conscious began to scream, rushing from neighbour to loved one, crying out against this sudden plague, this curse from out of a clear blue sky. Somewhere in the grass beyond the tents, Noon heard them, even as thin streams of blood ran from her ears and nose.
Meanwhile, her hunger was snaking out across the plains, tendrils of dead grass reaching out as fast as lightning strikes.
I can’t, she thought. I can’t stop . . .
The answer, ultimately, was obvious. Even as the adult Noon shuddered and cried within She Who Laughs’ castle, willing her past self not to do it, there never was any other way.
