“The tent-maker.”
“Hopefully you've found yours comfortable.”
“They're beautiful,” I raved, then blinked. “And yes – very comfortable.”
“It's a shame you have to run off so swiftly, without even settling in.”
“Is it really a time for being settled?”
“Funny,” she mused, “I was always one to prefer wandering until times got so bad. Now I see how valuable it is to have a sense of home.”
“They call you a gypsy.”
She laughed, and it was somehow the sound of coarse joy. “That's fair enough.”
“So you didn't find yourself...in your element, when the quakes took out society and encouraged a vagabond lifestyle?”
“Oh, it was well enough. I didn't struggle. But my joy was always in traveling to new places and seeing new things, and after the quakes hit... It's all the same, out there. And there's war, and disease, and I just came to realize I'm not a romantic sucker for dying alone.”
“Are you...from anywhere?” I inquired, curious. I had never met anyone who hadn't lost some sort of home in the quakes.
A mischievous grin came over her face, and she pushed her sleeve up, turning her arm in the light to show me the array of names tattooed around the limb. Albion, Coopersville, Blue Springs, Indialantic, Bethune, Rhode Island...
She was from everywhere.
That was when the idea came to me. A crazy notion, almost too farfetched to mention, but there was an intriguing spark of possibility. “Would you know of any circuses, or circus personnel around these parts, by chance?”
“What on earth do you want with a circus? I know they're famous as a pick-me-up in hard times, but... Now? These are more than hard times, love. They couldn't travel efficiently enough to make it worth their while.”
“I just... I'm working with the horses on Demon-proofing, and it would help to have some fire drills. But they'd need to be controlled, and it would be perfect if there was someone who could play creature at the same time. I was having idealistic visions of a fire-breathing assistant.”
“A fire-breather. Well, there is Toby.”
“Who's Toby?”
“Not a circus performer, but he did audition, once. He breathes fire at carnivals and on street corners instead. Or, he did. Before there were no more street corners. Before carnivals dissolved like so much cotton candy. He came with me here. Not here, but to the Mo.”
I could only assume she meant Missouri. The M.O.
“We really were like gypsies, for awhile after the quakes. Me with a lot of other misfits. We formed a caravan, of sorts, I suppose. Just while we traveled, though. Then they settled in the ruins of Union Station in St. Louis, but I felt smothered without the open country. I couldn't stow myself away in those collapsed halls, finding some little nook to call my own. I needed the land. It's in my blood.”
That was the Native-American that I had seen.
“So I wandered down this way – had to survive, so I made myself a tent out of the only canvas I could find. It became a fun little hobby to keep myself busy, and then I wandered into Mark Twain's little National Forest, here, and found myself at the doorstep of Sonya's camp.”
“Is that where we are?” It seemed funny, to me, that a forest would be named after someone whose life work turned trees into books.
“Yes-sir-ree. Does that mean anything to you? You know your geography?”
“I've studied some maps. Just to try to grasp how things used to be. How things have changed.” Having been only seven when the quakes hit, I hadn't gotten any regular education. Jay's parents had home-schooled us in those precious moments of free time between rebuilding and surviving, but they were stretched thin, and there were a great many things we had never had the chance to study in full.
“We're in what used to be the Eleven Point Ranger District,” Lady Alejandra said, clearly more informed than I was. “This place is called Irish Wilderness.”
“Why Irish?”
“Some Catholic Priest settled about forty Irish families here in the 1850's. They were wiped out in the Civil War.”
That struck a chord with me, and I felt a grimace come over my face as I searched for why it nagged at me. Lady Alejandra fleshed the thought out even as it came to me, though;
“And here we are with civil war on our hands again,” she observed wryly, but in a decidedly amiable manner. “Settlers in the Irish Wilderness all over again.”
“Well,” I said, smoothing the irrational flutter inside my gut. “I'm not superstitious.”
“But are you Irish?” she asked with a devilish twinkle in her eyes.
It was a good time to change the subject, superstitious or not. And suddenly I realized I had been distracted from the point anyway. There we were, talking like there was time to chat. But it was hard to get my head in the game of war, and the exchange was settling. Maybe just what I needed. But now you can move on, I told myself, focusing once again on my budding plan of action.
“Is there a way you could get Toby for me?” I asked.
“Clear it with Sonya, and I'm sure she'll get one of her men to do it. Maybe two.”
“We're leaving first thing in the morning.” I'm not sure what I intended to gain with that, but it seemed a relevant obstacle to voice.
“Well, love, the men can ride a lot faster than I can. I've always been more about my own two feet, though horses are beautiful animals.”
“Fine. I'll ask her,” I gave in, turning on my heel to see to it. If I was any judge pertaining to how matters of war played out, we didn't have a moment to waste. “It was nice meeting you.”
“You too, girlie. Oh, and Alannis?”
I turned briefly back to face her.
“I wouldn't get too cocky. I may look half Native-American gypsy, but the other half? It's all fiery-haired, ill-tempered Irish lass.”
*
She may have been warning me about paying attention to my superstitions – gypsies were supposed to be superstitious, weren't they? – or it may have simply been a warning that dark things could come here whether I wanted to believe it or not, so I'd do well to be ready for it. I don't know. All I knew was annihilation wasn't what I wanted to consider as I packed up to join the fray.
One of the soldiers was on a Northbound dash to retrieve the assistant I had requested. I was a bit surprised that they had agreed to it, actually, but it seemed I was one of those key individuals who was to be granted whatever she needed. Like some scientist prodigy on the brink of astonishing discoveries, with a filthy-rich benefactor catering to his projects. Or a doctor who had shown up at the scene where people were sick, and ignorant, who went scattering to oblige as soon as someone was there to tell them which way to run and what to retrieve. I was an investment. Some sort of miracle.
That only doubled the pressure.
I knew that I had something special – the incident in the gulley had made it obvious enough – but I wasn't so sure about having so many people depending on me. They were treating me like I could be some sort of savior, when I was used to doing my work quietly – the mysterious one, perhaps, but never thrust into the celebrity limelight. I should only be thankful there were no cameras around, I told myself, to greedily document my mission. Of course, any kind of mob like that would send the horses into a tizzy, so it was unlikely they would be allowed near me anyway.
Since there wasn't a lot I had to do to ready myself for leaving, I spent the evening with the horses. I might as well do what I could with them, I figured, even without the proper means to condition them. It wasn't as if I could hurt their chances with my influence.
“Hey, love,” I crooned as I entered the arena and a large paint came to greet me. She pranced once and arched her sturdy neck, lowering her head so that it rested against my chest. I stroked her soft cheeks, feeling the warmth of her breath against my thighs. There was the sense of complete trust in her stance, and for the first time something sharp as glass lodged in my t
hroat, only hurting more when I tried to swallow it. Closing my eyes, I buried my face in her forelock, her ears soft against my cheeks, and for a time we stood there bowed into each other. But where there was a great sense of contentment evident in her offering of companionship, the opposite was rising in me like a storm on the horizon, like a flood of debris churning down a coast I could only ever pretend was clear for the journey ahead.
Ten –
I did not see Jay that evening, but it was just as well. I could think of no graceful way to break it to him that I was going to war on a whim – never mind that it was someone else's – and so it seemed the best there was for it was to walk out without the drama that would surely ensue if I took it to him. Ask for forgiveness, not permission. Wasn't that how a saying from Before used to go? Back when people could afford to betray each other on a daily basis. Back when there was always a tomorrow for forgiveness.
I shook it from my mind, still trying to avoid that looming notion that war was a place people went and often didn't come back. The resulting sentiment that I managed to pitch inside me was simply a sense of disgust for how the Old-timers managed their system, for ever using such a rule so lightly.
Part of me was clamoring: you are the biggest hypocrite. After feeling so betrayed by Jay leaving with no goodbye or explanation, there was no way I could really feel it was okay to do this. I tried to console myself with the reminder that he had had a good reason, in the end, as I did now. But I knew he would never see it that way. All he would know was how that manner of leaving had registered to me, which meant that, as far as I could know, I was consciously casting those exact feelings on him to deal with. At least the same scenario, because it probably wasn't an accurate assumption to compare Jay's manner of feelings to mine, but that was beside the point. I had made it clear what it had felt like, and I couldn't not assume it would be the same for him.
All the conflicting things inside me were pointless, though, seeing as I was already committed and there was no easy way to say no even if I wasn't. Yet, when I justified my choice and closed the matter, my mind only turned back to that other notion I was trying to avoid, the one about risk and death, and so I spent most of my time traveling circles in my head revisiting each issue to avoid the other.
I considered halting one of the soldiers as he walked by to ask him what he thought about when going into a war zone, but I couldn't quite find it in me to broadcast my struggle, so I sealed my lips and condemned myself to it. Anyway, I was sure they couldn't be bothered by a naïve girl and her emotional struggles when they had battle to prepare for. They had killer's gloves to put on; they didn't have time to hold my hand.
It was just as well. I wasn't much for holding hands. I much preferred burying my hands in the manes of horses, twisting my fingers into those strands and entwining myself with the creature I rode, becoming a single, stronger entity. I could draw strength from that. I could run to the edges of the earth with that. I could silence all unwanted thought behind the pounding of hooves and whipping of mane, behind the pure elation of harnessing the very muscle of the wind that was better than any drug. I could lose myself in the smearing landscape, could surrender all thought to that dangerously close communication between beast and man. As my muscles burned from clinging tight, from the friction of the animal that churned beneath me, the fire in them would smelt me right to my mount's back. Beast and man become one. A centaur...
I opened my eyes, and something in my pelvis crunched as I came back to myself. For a moment it had seemed so real. I squirmed experimentally where I sat cross-legged in my tent, testing my own legs beneath me. Only two of them. Not four. And no hooves; just good, solid boots.
Well, that was one way to get my mind off of things. Suddenly, it seemed entirely too easy to sugarcoat whatever I might need to. My escape put me inside a fairytale that stripped away all human fear and struggle and replaced it with an elation that could not be stopped – would not want to be stopped. It turned me into a beast. A raging, ecstasy-driven, misguided force.
I put my head in my hands, scrubbing my face with my palms, feeling the grit there. Grit was real. Grit was what I would have to face. I was no astonishing mythical creature or equine goddess. I was only a horse whisperer – and in the middle of a heated gallop, whispers got lost in the wind.
Just help the horses do as well as they can on their own, I told myself. You couldn't ride them all at once anyway. Who did I think I was? Even one centaur could not be counted as any miracle advantage.
What am I really going to do with this? I wondered. Gifted or not, I was only one person. And I was no strategist. I was a fantasist. What would they say if they knew? If they knew that my substance was largely based on fantasy? It was real, but there was nothing practical or really all that controlled about it. That day in the gulley came back to me, and I had to admit it to myself again: I hadn't done anything. Nothing conscious, anyway.
There had been the eerie prickle up my spine as a tremor ran through the earth, as I looked down at my feet as if the ground was going to split open beneath me, and there was nowhere I could run. There was the moment my head was drawn over my shoulder as the source grew more concentrated, as something in me began to whisper avalanche instead of 'quake'. Then the herd topped the rise, and the prickle turned into a cold wave of dominoes that fell, hopelessly released, at my feet. I could almost remember the sound of them, chinking as they rained to the ground, splattering and ricocheting in slow motion until they ran out and lay in a pile. The cards I would never get to play in life. The flutter drained from my body, leaving me numb as the herd boiled toward me at top speed. I was overcome by the notion that I was about to be bulldozed, that that was how I would leave this life. There was nowhere to run, nothing I could have done.
Then it hit like a tidal wave, one of those that slams into you like concrete no matter how hard you brace for it, and plows you under and spins you around and grinds you into the sand. Except - it didn't. That wall of thundering legs and pumping chests slammed into me only in the way that something takes your breath away. A force that knocked the wind from me, but did not touch me. They divided, somehow, like the Red Sea but in a way not obvious to the eye, creating a pocket or pattern that I couldn't have aspired to seek for myself. All the colors of the equine rainbow - grays, browns, blacks, whites, reds - flashed past me, beating the ground to a pulp. I remember being jostled only once I was in their midst, clipped by a shoulder here and bumped by a flank there, and I toggled between them all, gasping, terrified, and visited for the first time by the dawning of my euphoria.
For I stood in the midst of racing wild horses, and they were not trampling me. The rush was like no other.
It seemed like forever that I was trapped in that rushing current, everywhere I turned some new color of beast boring down on me, about to knock me senseless, but then, just as suddenly, it used itself up. The tail end of the herd whipped past, a flash of chestnut, then gray, then darker brown - and the thunder dissipated down the gulley, fading until only the pall of stirred-up dust remained as evidence of their passage. I gasped in lungfuls of it, trying to come down from the high of my shock, hardly able to believe I was still left standing. I was rattled to my core, but also left in a crazy state of awe.
It was time to pull something crazy like that again, but I had no idea how to initiate something of that scale. I could go out and root myself before Gabriel's army, and say "let them come", and stand in their path as they released their battle cries and surged forth, but it would do nothing to deter them from reaching their destination of the defending army behind me once they passed me up, and also... The horses may choose to skirt me, but I doubted I would be so overlooked by their riders. My appeal to equines would do nothing to keep a well-aimed sword from swiping my head clean off.
I paused at the notion that they carried swords, wondering where it had come from. Wondering what they did carry. Were these battles carried out just as old-fashioned ones were?
You don't even know what they use for weapons, and you're preparing to march with them. The thought rather threw things into perspective. I really had thrown myself in deeper than I knew how to deal with, here. Congratulations, Alannis. I had secured myself an indispensable position indeed. I was not ready to be so important. Not to so many people.
Yet, with no way to back out, seeing as they already expected my help and did need me, I could do nothing but groan into my hands and come to terms with the fact that I was going to have to fake my way through this. Fake it 'till you make it. Another saying from Before, when faking something often could be enough to survive. You could be an actress, everything you do fake, and make a better living than the farmers and fishermen and laborers who broke their backs to survive. Now, the food chain was back to how nature intended it. I was going to have my hands very full if I intended to pull this off.
I did not sleep much, my mind full with these things, and when Sonya came by my tent early the next morning to wake me, I was up like a shot. A rather ill-feeling, stomach-in-knots shot, but at least up and ready on cue, and in good form from an outside perspective. All I had to do was keep impressing them, and no one would question me. One thing at a time. Make it look good. Just do your part, as much as you can manage. It was all I could do.
Choosing my mount that morning was a more difficult task than the last time. I should have given it more thought beforehand, but it was one of those things I had preferred not to think about, and so I had put it off. Now I was faced with a dilemma: bring along a mount I was getting close to, one I didn't want to risk losing but knew well, or opt for one I was more disconnected with so losing him might not be so painful, but whose loyalty was less developed where loyalty might just come in handy in a pinch.
In the end loyalty won out, and I reminded myself once again I was not going to be a soldier in the battle, and with that I did my best to close the matter from my mind and swung up onto Lake's blue roan back. She bent her neck around as I got settled, nudging my dangling foot with her lips.
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