by Leyland, L J
The crowd that surrounded us was fraught with anxiety – it couldn’t make up its mind whether it wanted a closer look or whether it wanted to run away, and therefore it ebbed and flowed, giving us a wide berth as we passed but closing in to fill the gaps behind us. It followed us towards the rock platform with a morbidly feverish interest.
We skirted around the pool at the bottom of the waterfall and scrabbled up the stone steps that had been hewn into the rock face until we reached the platform where Rhian and her parents stood. The steps continued above the platform, alongside the waterfall, to the mouth of the falls, tens of metres above the cave floor. We were arranged into a line, facing outwards towards the crowd with our hands pulled behind our backs by our captors. It almost felt as though we were lined up for a public execution; my stomach gave a little lurch of nervous energy. Matthias was closest to Rhian and I flicked my eyes towards him to see that he was staring determinedly ahead as though to show ‘ I couldn’t care about her in the slightest – see? I’m not even looking at her.’
‘Friends,’ began Rhian’s mother, addressing the crowd of people below, humming with interest and fear. ‘Do not be afraid. These wanderers have been sent to us from the Light, of this I am sure. I have been consulting the elements for many days now. We all know Deddern was taken by the Dark recently and I wondered if it was a sign, as I’m sure many of you did, too. But let me assure you, I see no Darkness in these strangers. The elements have revealed nothing to me.’
A murmur of dissent rippled through the crowd. Some had armed themselves with sticks or flints and were holding them menacingly, pointed upwards, towards us. This was the first time that I felt genuinely afraid. The sea of angry faces blurred before me and I suddenly realised how high up we were. The pounding of the waterfall next to us was throwing spray and air sideways at me and I felt as though it might sweep me away.
‘Friends,’ said the woman soothingly in an effort to calm the crowd. ‘We do not know who these strangers are or how they have survived The Reckoning but believe me when I say, I as the channel for the Spirit, the Mother of the Light, the Dark, the Earth and the Water, know these people come from the Light and are of the Earth and the Water. They are not from the Dark.’
A voice called out from the crowd, ‘But what about Deddern? Wasn’t he just taken by the Dark? He couldn’t drink the Water! That is an omen! A warning!’
My mind flicked back to the madman who I had killed in the passageway not half an hour ago.
He couldn’t drink the water?
Deddern had indeed looked as though he had not seen a drop of water in weeks – lips and eyes shrunken, dry skin, foaming mouth. Perhaps thirst had caused his madness. But why hadn’t he been able to drink from the waterfall here?
‘You think you know the elements better than I do? I, who has been chosen since The Reckoning to be the diviner of the elements, the channel for the Spirit? I, who has never led you wrong in the past?’ Her eyebrow curled into a pointed arch that seemed to suggest that any challenge to her authority was not tolerated.
‘Ridiculous,’ spat Rhian contemptuously.
The challenger bowed his head and apologised, ‘Of course not, Sophia. Only you have the knowledge and I was a fool to question you. If you believe these strangers are not from the Dark then I will believe you … However it does seem strange that so many of our people have been taken by the Dark recently … Deddern, Guther, Vanharn … all gone …’ He trailed off, leaving his last words hanging ominously.
‘I do not believe that their being taken has anything to do with these strangers and that is final. Our people have been taken by the Dark as punishment for their sins against the Spirit. We know for a fact that Guther had been going to the surface and taking from the Garden despite knowing that this was a sin. He was well aware that this has been forbidden since The Reckoning in penitence for our gluttony in the past. He was rightfully taken by the Dark when I challenged him about it. We cannot have sinners in our midst. We cannot allow another Reckoning to happen and therefore he had to go. The Spirit has been forgiving enough to spare us so far but she will not tolerate a slide back into the Darkness. As for the others, they must have committed sins we are not aware of. But their punishment is proof of their avarice and they have been rightfully claimed by the Dark. Good riddance; we should rejoice.’
A groan hatched in my throat as I understood what was happening there. They believed that the Flood was a punishment for sins against the Earth and now they were living in fear, underground, and killing their own people for imagined sins in order to prevent another Flood. Oh God, this was worse than I thought.
I knew from speaking to drunks at Nora’s that ever since the Flood, people in Brigadus had become more superstitious, hodge-podging together different threads from religion, witchcraft, paganism, and made-up, Brigadus-style voodoo in order to protect themselves from harm and disease. There was an old crone who sat in a corner of Nora’s who peddled a number of amulets from a kaleidoscope of religions. I once saw a man who had lost his young son to a waterborne disease depart from her simultaneously wearing crosses, a braided corn necklace, the Star of David and a pentagram. I often saw her crouching in the dirt, using a bowl to ‘divine’ the future from a rag-and-bone man’s hoard – chicken bones, conkers, shrapnel from disintegrated tin cans, bits of old plastic. I scoffed loudly when I witnessed seemingly sane people go to her for advice, but still they went and they seemed to place a lot of faith in her.
Matthias and I had once stolen her ‘divining stick’ which she waved over her collection of junk to read the future and replaced it with a toilet brush. She was ecstatic and proclaimed it a sign from the spirits who were encouraging her to clean up Brigadus with her magic. The superstition in Brigadus was a sort of benign damp squib – a placebo that calmed the nerves but didn’t actually do any harm.
But I could tell the type of beliefs that Rhian and her people followed were sinister; talk of light and dark, punishment and sin, leaving one of their own people to die without water. These people were dangerous and I felt my heart sink. There was no way we’d be allowed to fill up our flasks and leave with a cheery wave and a message of good luck.
Elgar stepped forward and held out his hands, a look of rapture on his face. But at that moment an unexpected whooshing noise filled the cave. It came from the mouth of the waterfall and grew louder and louder. People below began to shriek and run for cover, pushing each other out of the way, grabbing loved ones and huddling into corners or under the bridges. Rhian grabbed Matthias’s arm. She yanked him towards a cave set back into the wall beside the rock throne.
My captor dropped his grip and ran for his life, throwing himself down the stone stairs and skittering off towards his hearth to grab his family. I dragged Noah towards the cave where Matthias, Rhian, Sophia, and Elgar were crouched. I had no idea what we were running from but sensed that this disruption was something that the underground people were utterly terrified of. I saw Grimmy’s bewildered expression as he turned towards the source of the sound and, shamefully, I decided to leave him behind.
Perhaps this would be a convenient way of disposing of this particular thorn in my side. But he spotted our escape and clung onto Noah’s shirt, desperate not to get left behind. The survivor in him was indestructible – at the end of time I had no doubt that there would be nothing left but Grimmy lording it over his own kingdom of termites and cockroaches.
We dived into the cave just in time. A black swarm, more terrible and noisy than a thunder cloud, burst from the mouth of the waterfall, blotting out the starry light emitted by the glow-worms above. The swarm flocked as one, streaming out from the cave, down a passageway which I assumed led to the outdoors. I couldn’t make out what it was made of. Rhian looked at the swarm resentfully. It was an intense expression, not necessarily of fear but of hatred.
I noticed that she still had hold of Matthias’s wrist. Her creepy spider fingers encircled his wrist and her bone jewellery dangled against h
is fingers. I could see that he was twirling one of the little bones in his fingers carefully. The bone looked like a wing bone, tiny but arranged differently from a bird’s. It puzzled me for a moment. What sort of creatures apart from birds had wings? Quite suddenly, with a lurch of my stomach, I understood what the black swarm was – bats. A whole colony of them, leaving their daytime refuge behind the waterfall to hunt at night. Creatures of the night; rulers of the dark.
I looked up and made out their vampire bodies, swooping and diving. Bats were the only creatures we didn’t eat in Brigadus. Perhaps it was something to do with their gremlin ears, their fangs, their lust for blood, or that they had a mythical, almost evil, quality to them. Or maybe they were just too hard to catch. But no-one ate them, not even when mothers saw their malnourished children become little more than life-sized dolls, chests heaving, struggling for life. No-one would hunt them which meant that they had free reign in the night time over the marshes – their domain to be entered at your peril. It just seemed almost profane to eat them.
At last, the bat swarm began to peter out, leaving the warming glow from the glow-worms to filter back down to us, like sunshine after a storm.
‘The Light and the Dark,’ said Rhian.
Chapter Twenty
The scalding tea tasted of bitter leaves and grit. Noah was the only one of us who was polite enough to drink it all, gamely sipping it and proclaiming it ‘delightful’, with a grimace.
‘The water is taken from the river, it is as pure as any water can be,’ said Rhian, a rare smile unfurling across her face.
Matthias quickly reached for his tea, obviously keen to get a share of Rhian’s praise. I suppressed a smile when he took a sharp intake of breath, the result of scalding his mouth. I looked doubtfully down at the river, my eyes scanning the area where these people washed and I wondered where they did their ‘necessary business’; the water didn’t look that pure to me.
‘Thank you for your kindness in sharing your water with us. I understand that our arrival has caused a great deal of shock amongst your people and we’re pleased that you realise that we mean you no harm. But I must admit, I’m still puzzled by what you’re doing here and how you live. Please,’ said Noah, ‘tell us about your people. How did you end up here and what do you mean by the Light and the Dark?’
‘Yeah,’ I interrupted, ‘and tell us about The Reckoning. Do you mean the Flood?’
Elgar sighed and looked to Rhian.
‘This is most unusual. It goes against everything we have believed to be true,’ he said.
‘I think, Father, perhaps it might be time to expand our knowledge,’ replied Rhian; her eyes narrowed and she looked wryly at us.
He bowed his head in assent and said to no-one in particular, ‘A long time ago my world changed beyond all recognition, but I was glad of it. We were chosen, vindicated, only us and no-one else. I thought that I had survived the test sent to me and that I would never have to suffer such disruption and confusion again. But alas, I am proved wrong. Your arrival changes everything. I don’t know what to make of this; evidently we were not the chosen ones as we thought …’ His words petered out and he sounded resentful. His gaze was confrontational, as though we were guests who had turned up uninvited to his party.
‘The Black Swarm is the signal that it is night time. It is hard to keep track of time in the cave but we know when the Dark comes because of them. The Light is ever present.’ Rhian pointed towards the glow-worm constellation, ‘and we are glad of it – it keeps the Dark away and stops it from taking over permanently.’
‘So the bats are the Dark and the glow-worms are the Light? Is that it?’ I asked sceptically, thinking that even by Brigadus standards, their religion was a bit obvious. Rhian sighed.
‘It’s more than that. They are representations sent from the Spirit. The Spirit of the Earth. Let me explain.
‘A long time ago, more than thirty or forty years ago, my mother and father founded a movement called the Planetarians. They witnessed the destruction of the Earth by our ancestors and sought to rectify it. The Planetarians eschewed the trappings of modernity and sought to reconnect with the Spirit of the Earth which they believed was being killed by our rape of the natural world – trees felled, oil spilled, animals killed. It was terrible. But my parents had the courage and the vision to choose a different path, a better path. They were pioneers, saviours, heroes.’
‘My father and mother were the leaders and they amassed a large following. They were benevolent towards their followers and more came, eager to hear their vision.’ She indicated the two hundred or so people gathered beneath us. ‘You see, my mother has a very special gift. She reads the Earth. She can sense the elements, sense when they are in equilibrium and sense when they are unbalanced. Before The Reckoning, she felt that they were wholly unbalanced. Things had been knocked out of equilibrium because of human selfishness. Therefore, the Planetarians felt they were tasked by the Spirit to set an example, to live amongst nature and set the Earth along the track to equilibrium again. They were tasked by the Spirit of convincing the wider world of this.’
She shook her head and looked resentful. ‘I can’t tell you how derided, ridiculed, and scorned they were. It was a very trying time for my parents and their followers but they kept their faith. They were hounded as witches. Eventually, the witch-hunt got too much – the wider world didn’t want to be confronted by their sins against nature. Therefore, the Planetarians decided to forsake the wider world and moved into a remote wilderness high in the mountains to start again – that is, to create a civilisation in tune with nature that was not destructive. A better civilization, one guided by my mother’s gift. They took only what they needed or what they thought deserved to be saved. They cut off contact with the world and created their own paradise.
‘One night my mother felt a great shift in the elements. For some time, the balance had been swung towards the Dark – evil, destruction and ruin. But what she felt was wholly unexpected – never before had she felt the elements take such a determined route. The Light began to fight back.’
‘How did the Light fight back?’ asked Matthias.
‘It summoned the elements, of course. The Reckoning. Punishment for the sinners and their destruction. Punishment for those ruled by the Dark and not the Light. Water, water everywhere. Everything drowned. A wave of punishment. Everything gone … apart from the Planetarians and our little paradise.’ She smiled smugly. ‘We have been vindicated! Only we were saved by the Spirit. Only we. Only we were worthy. Only we will start again.’
It was a long time before anyone spoke. I fiddled with my shoelaces, feeling utterly upset although I couldn’t pinpoint the root of my feelings. I could see Grimmy hanging on Rhian’s every word, digesting her ideas and adding them to his own. They both believed in the most extreme solution – starting from scratch in the hope that something better would emerge. For Rhian, this time had already come and the unworthy had been punished for the abuse they had wreaked upon the earth and the Spirit. But for Grimmy, I knew that he was encouraged by what he was hearing, and that he would do everything in his power to make sure that the unworthy in Brigadus got their just desserts in retribution for their treatment of Regina. For him, she was the Spirit and the Light – innocence and purity. The Darkness that had ruined her would have to be abolished in his own version of The Reckoning. I caught his eye and saw the gleam in it disappear and melt into confusion. Oh dear … I posed a little problem for him. What if I was her daughter? I guess she wouldn’t be as pure and Light-filled after all. What would be the point in avenging her if that were true?
Noah finally broke the silence. ‘So … please help me understand. Why do you live underground? I just don’t understand why you live down here if you believe that the Spirit of the Earth has given you a paradise and granted you safety. Why not live on the surface?’
‘Because that is the Garden and we mustn’t take from the Garden. The Spirit has created an Earth as it shou
ld be – free from interference. We are allowed to live but only if we live very discreetly. Nature has claimed back its own and we must respect that. We are the guardians of the Garden, not its destroyers. Besides, we believe that the Spirit has made our guiding element Water. That is why she led us down here to the waterfall and the Light.’ She pointed up at the glow-worms. ‘This is our home, tailored to us by the Spirit and we are thankful.’
There was something about her story that was irritating me. ‘What about the Dark? What happened to that man … Deddern … the one…that one that was killed … by me?’
Her reply was like ice. ‘Do not feel sorrow about killing that man. He had been taken by the Dark and deserved his fate.’
‘He looked pitiful. He looked like he had gone mad and he looked starved and dehydrated and ill. What did you do to him?’ It came out more accusatory than I had meant it.
‘We did nothing. The Dark sometimes takes hold of people and makes them sin. The Light then expunges those who have sinned in order to keep the balance right. We can only be children of the Light here – this has been proved by The Reckoning. If the Dark takes you and you sin, you cannot live in the Light anymore.’
‘But what did you do to him? Did you cut him off and refuse him water?’ My hands were shaking and Noah reached across to steady them.
‘No, his own body rejected the purity of the Water. The Water is too pure for people of the Dark to partake of.’
‘What do you mean?’
She sighed and her face started to lose its indulgent expression. I could see the red blush of anger on her cheeks. I felt pleased that I was ruffling her. Matthias was looking from me to her, me to her, undecided which side he should take. He hated it when I was contradictory for no reason but I knew that he could sense the strange coldness that Rhian had started to radiate. It was heartlessness and, despite his gruffness, Matthias had a very sensitive awareness of others and their suffering. I could feel him retreating from her in distaste.
