by Leah Bobet
The sob shook out of me, and everything broke around it. I folded in on myself, against the hawthorn, and let out an ugly wail.
Our Thom was dead. My brother, who was going to fix up the smokehouse, who always got Marthe and me laughing instead of fighting, who I’d never even thought would fail to make it home. And finally, I could see the future roll out before me: I’d pull in the next harvest without him. I’d marry one day, and the place where I’d just assumed he’d be standing, broad and smiling, would be empty air. He would never meet my children. He’d never meet his own.
The emptiness grew, and split, and ate the whole world in its wake. It was never going to be all right again.
I heard—didn’t see—Heron plant the shovel in the dirt. And then he disentangled the lantern from my fingers and wrapped his stranger’s arms gingerly around my shoulders.
A shock traveled between us: I’m not—and he shook his head, once, definitive. No, this is not. He patted my back awkwardly, unromantically, and then I understood what the offer was: everything that had been missing since the war ended and the men came back with their hearts stranded miles away; since Marthe went behind her fortress of reserve and temper so she could hold herself up with its walls. Since she left me alone, on the outside, stranded.
Simple, human comfort for all the stupid things we’d lost.
I drooped against him and wept, but it was tempered now, grief mixed with awful, sagging relief. That brave face of mine had been so exhausting. It wasn’t meant to stay up—to be held up—all alone.
The grief worked out of me slowly, like a splinter, and I finally leaned back, wiping my face against my sleeve. “I’m sorry,” I managed, and hugged myself with both arms. The lantern guttered low beside us. I felt scraped clean under the skin. Lightheaded, hollowed. Gone.
“You don’t have to be sorry,” Heron said, and he stepped away, his hands closed empty at his sides.
“You don’t have to talk about it,” I started.
Heron shook his head hard. “It’s all right,” he said. “I will.”
“The recruiter showed up on a Thursday,” he said in the lantern’s shadow, behind the hawthorn, in the dark. “He was half dead with hunger; he begged us to save John’s Creek. So we talked among ourselves, and most of us decided it was too important. We were going.”
The shovel set the rhythm: crunch, heft, crunch; behind it was the sift of falling earth. I knew this part well, like an old bedtime story. A recruiter had lighted in Windstown too, saying There’s a Dark God in the southlands. He’s turning the rivers to rock, making desert of our green fields. You have to help us.
Please.
“So we went,” he said, and shrugged lightly in the breeze. “My cousins and I packed anything that’d shed blood: deer knives, wood axes. We went. I’d never been south in my whole life, and I’d never hit a man with more than my fist. We were woodsmen and farm boys, and we thought we’d be home before the leaves turned. We thought we’d come home heroes.”
“But they told you about the Twisted Things,” I protested, from the dark. “They’d told us about the Twisted Things, but we—”
“Didn’t understand.” Heron smirked. “Lizards, drought? We’d seen those things—or so we thought. We had no notion of gods. I grew up with Jehovah, Allah, Jesus, and Vishnu, and you can’t touch them with your own two hands. We didn’t know how real It would be, how Its voice scraped your eardrums raw.”
I swallowed, even though I was leaning across my own knees for every syllable. This was unbearably intimate. This was private pain.
“We found a regiment at Aylmer, and then mostly we walked, marching in rows like real fighting men all the way down south. We tried not to gawk at the strange trees or the mountains. I’d never seen mountains before. It was still an adventure, you see. People lined up along the roadsides. We did drills for them, like a parade. And they lined up and blessed us for saving their families, even though we hadn’t even reached John’s Creek.”
He leaned on the shovel, far away on that long walk. “It wasn’t even a town when we got there. Folks said there’d been a town there six whole weeks before, but there wasn’t one brick, one bone of it left. John’s Creek was blind, dead desert, where the wind blew all night and whipped up the sand. Everyone who’d lived there had vanished in the storms or run so far they were past hope for finding. You couldn’t blame them,” he said simply. “John’s Creek was the end of the world.
“The sand was brown, and the sky was brown. The air tasted like stale campfires and latrines. The dust got in your sleeves and burned you, speck by speck. The sun was a memory. And the wind—” He stopped and turned to me. “In the wind you heard the Wicked God screaming, and the wind never, ever stopped.
“I still dream about it,” he added, almost offhand. “Its sounds were so very close to words that you stayed up all night long, listening. None of it ever came clear. It never made sense, up to the day It died. But I remember every syllable.”
The shovel dug automatically, as steady as a man who never planned to stop walking. The lamplight drowned between the gnarled hawthorn roots.
“And the problem was, it wasn’t really a war. We were exterminators for the birds and lizards that poured out of the desert every day. Asphodel Jones and his irregulars didn’t line up and charge us, and we weren’t a proper army: just a few thousand men used to their towns and making their own decisions, thrown together in a heap. Everyone had come to save the southlands, and we each had our own idea how—or where to strike camp, or for a better place to dig the cookpits. You couldn’t keep track of the disagreements; no leader lasted more than three days. It was chaos, and the desert just stretched toward us, closer every night. Every morning it crept closer, and another friend had stepped on a Twisted Thing and lost a foot. There was no one to really fight at John’s Creek but each other.”
“But what about Asphodel Jones?” I asked.
I’d heard the name only in whispers, the kind quickly put away. The Wicked God’s prophet, Asphodel Jones: the first man to turn his back on John’s Creek—on people—and act as mouthpiece to a monstrous god. The dark man, with a dark walk, who’d fought to bring the Great Dust to the whole world.
Heron scowled. “Jones had men—not many, but enough to give us merry hell. They slit a few throats every night. They set a few tents on fire, nibbled at our edges until we were ragged. It was Jones that got us going at last,” he said, and his smile twisted into knots. “The countryside was empty. The foragers had to go farther and farther for food, and we’d slaughtered all the livestock whole weeks past. We were starving, and we couldn’t fight the Wicked God. But we could tear apart Asphodel Jones.”
I leaned back. There was bloodlust in those changeable gray eyes. Heron blinked, and looked down, and gave another resigned shrug. “Everyone was so angry,” he said, still surprise-struck. “We were useless. So when de Guzman and Achebe said Let’s go kill Asphodel Jones, nobody argued that they shouldn’t be generals. All these beaten men came together, faced the Great Dust, and just . . . went in.”
He paused, and in the chilled plume of his breath I saw row after row of tattered, dirty farm boys disappear into the blowing sand.
“And we killed things,” he said simply. “The Twisted Things were thick as flies inside the Great Dust, and we stood there and killed them. You couldn’t breathe or see past your elbow, so we just swung our weapons and hoped they cut the right flesh. Men lost their legs wading through the blood we spilled. Men burned to skeletons. My cousin Dudley died, and then my cousin Pierre. And before I ran out of cousins, General de Guzman’s regiment signaled that they’d found Asphodel Jones.
“Jones and his irregulars had a stockade.” Heron’s smile curved, faint and pained. “It should have been ridiculous. This mad, stubble-chinned man with a god in his pocket, and he’d built It a pasture fence to keep It from grazing at the neighbors’. But it wasn’t ridiculous,” he said softly. “I hated him like I’ve never hated anything in my life.
“Only a few thought to run past Asphodel Jones. Because they were thinking. Or cowards. Or”—a shadow crossed his face—“no knowing, now. But they ran around the barricade, through the ghost-flowers and sand, and we found the Wicked God.”
“It was in the storm?” I asked, breathless.
“No.” He sighed. “It was the storm. A million grains of sand and a hot wind, and miles of rage. Eating the goodness out of the land to feed itself, and howling for more all day and night.”
“How—” I started, and Heron shook his head. How do you cut the heart from a storm? He didn’t understand it either. He had no idea how the war, this sham of a war, was won.
Heron traced the lines of the leather-wrapped knife, traced its tornado twists and curls. “There was a calm at the heart of it: the eye of a tornado. A few inches of peace and quiet. And the knife went in, and cut, and—
“And it stopped,” he finished, almost bewildered. “The wind died for the first time in months at John’s Creek. Tons of sand rained out of a clear sky. The Great Dust just stopped.”
“And the God died,” I whispered. “And you turned your face away.”
His dreamy, aching expression stuttered, and his eyes focused for the first time in what felt like hours. “Yes,” he said, almost uncertain. “The God died. Jones vanished from the battlefield. And then the war was over.”
My heart beat hard in my chest. This wasn’t the story I’d thought to hear. I’d been ready for terrible battles, for the terrible cost of victory. This wasn’t it at all. “What about John Balsam?”
Heron’s eyes narrowed. “John Balsam was nobody. He was no one when he came to John’s Creek, and he was no one when he left.”
“But he killed the Wicked God,” I said, shocked now, really and truly.
“By himself,” Heron said, calm with contempt. “He killed the God alone and left the whole mess behind him. He led nobody; he knew nothing about gods or people.” I saw it then: the ghost in his eyes. Whispering obscenities in his ear. “If he’d been someone men could follow, they wouldn’t be sending his likeness to every town from John’s Creek to the ocean, because someone, somewhere, would care enough to recognize his face.”
I stepped back. “But you have his knife. You’re taking his knife home.”
The shovel landed with a vicious thunk. “Every nobody has a home,” he said. Dirt flew onto the heap beside him, blotting out the stars. “Every nobody leaves something behind.”
Something like me. Like Marthe and the child. I squeezed my eyelids shut, but there were no tears left. Heron’s brown desert had drained them dry.
“It’s deep enough,” I told him, hoarse. “It’s done. You can stop.”
Heron blinked and looked down at the tomb he’d made. It burrowed past the hawthorn roots, past rusted old-cities garbage: a jagged gash in the crumbling earth. He flung the shovel away from him, back into the deep brush. There was dust and dying in his gray eyes, and his hands clutched, reluctant, at John Balsam’s knife.
I eased carefully toward him and looked down into the hole. The hawthorn roots pierced its walls like fingers. “They don’t talk about the war because it wasn’t a war like in stories.”
“They don’t talk about the war,” Heron corrected, defeat-bitter, “because we were animals, and we are ashamed.”
And I finally, finally got it. They’d left home to do right, to stand valiantly up for the downtrodden and dispossessed. And come home stained with bickering, and powerlessness, and the taste of endless dust. All summer long I’d lain awake, wrestling with the failure I’d made of Roadstead Farm. I’d thought I understood failure. But compared to Heron, I hadn’t a clue.
Heron drew John Balsam’s knife from his belt and balanced it with all the care he’d withheld from my field shovel. “It’ll be safe,” I told him softly. “I promise.”
He squeezed the wrappings tight and laid it crooked in the grave.
The hole filled in quicker than it had been dug. Heron tamped the earth down flat when he finished, and covered it with a stone and a scattering of brown leaves. An offering for John Balsam’s knife and Heron’s war, Heron’s secrets.
“Thank you,” I said, sore-throated.
He inclined his head gently. Here was the man I’d come to recognize again: the one I’d taken on because he’d seen in me something to call kind. Because I thought I couldn’t hurt him, no matter what I did. His mannerly walls creaked back into place: another selfless, determined soldier walking his lonely roads. But I saw it, now. I’d seen it.
He was so weary it could break your heart.
I took the shovel from him and hefted it through the scrub. He followed me silently to the path, to where untracked wilderness became a field, a farm, a road. Heron looked back over his shoulder.
“It’ll be safe,” I repeated.
He picked a dead nettle out of his pantleg. “I’ll at least cut the firewood here.” He forced his head forward, away from his charge—the one thing he had to make himself someone’s hero after all.
“We should sleep,” I said, quieter.
“In the morning, then, miss,” he answered, soft and formal, and set off across the broken barley.
I trudged, alone, back to the silent house: past the pen where the goats slept heaped and loving and the chickens called sporadically in dreams. My boots crunched gravel. Every sound hushed and echoed, wrapping around the emptiness we’d spilled and left behind us; abandoned, like soldiers and skyscrapers, to fall to quiet ruin.
The fields lay quiet. I snuffed the lantern at the porch step.
Overhead, the broken stars burned.
WINTER
eleven
THE KITCHEN DOOR HAD A NEW GOUGE ON IT WHERE Marthe had flung it shut the morning I left for Windstown. Just last week, I thought. Not even eight days ago. Old wood peeked through years of varnish, clean-looking in the afternoon light. That fight already felt a lifetime old. Everything did, except the dull ache in my chest where Thom’s love used to live.
I’d slept badly for days. I never saw him in my dreams: just his boots, creased with work and age, walking slowly away from me through the brown sand, into the storm. In the mornings, there were chores: malting and mucking out with antsy Heron, who was still perpetually looking over his shoulder to where John Balsam’s knife slept.
In the afternoons we burned Twisted Things. Marthe found them in the vegetable garden, one every day or two, scattered like acorns. Steadily, screaming, in drips and bursts they came up the path between our house and the river shore. They died and died, and we burned them in the yard and marked their deaths on a makeshift map Marthe drew of the farmstead. There were Twisted Things on Roadstead Farm, and none of them went near the grave of John Balsam’s knife. Heron studied the map after supper by the light of his one lantern. “This makes no damn sense,” he muttered, and it didn’t. It made no sense.
It was already habit to leave the windows shut, to check our boots before we stepped into the house.
I wiped mine twice before I opened the kitchen door, and managed, “Butcher’s here, Marthe,” with hearty, fake good cheer. “Hang and Cua need you to sort the goats.”
Marthe nodded, setting the lid on something rich with fresh game meat and onions. I looked down at the floor tiles and swallowed hard. The woodenness had worn off her, slow and trickling, but Marthe had not been the same since we’d found that stone message; since the night I found her in the hay barn speaking of ghosts. She moved like a foggy morning these days. She spoke like a woman underwater.
“I don’t know which goats you want to keep—” I trailed off. The false smile was starting to hurt. “What should I tell them?”
Marthe wiped her hands on the dishrag. “I’m coming,” she said dully, and tri
ed a stretched-out smile. I flinched. You could see the shattered pieces of her trailing along the floor.
“What can I do?” I asked around the glass in my throat.
She focused, for a moment, and dipped a mug in the big soup pot. “Take this out to Tyler Blakely,” she said. “I told Eglantine I’d give him lunch.”
“Right,” I said faintly. My stomach flipped with nerves. Tyler. He’d been grazing the Blakely sheep in our fields for a week, and no matter how small fifty acres could sometimes be, we’d managed to tidily avoid each other. The thought of breaking that distance made my stomach seize. I hate everything, I thought dimly, and hugged the soup mug to my shirt.
Marthe fumbled her boots on. She looked up at me, waiting, and her eyes were a heart-dead mask.
I fled.
Sadie, her black coat smudged with dirt, was waiting outside at the porch rail. Her tail thumped cautiously against the old boards as I shut the door. “Hi, doggy,” I whispered. She was too well trained to jump, but she butted my knee worriedly; she’d taken a bit too well to her new job as Roadstead Farm’s guard. I ran a calming hand down her back. “Come on. We’re going to find your brother.”
She shook with delight and romped ahead of me, her nose fixed to the ground. We almost reached the highway before I saw him: Tyler Blakely, stretching his bad leg in a bitten-down barley field, surrounded by his peaceful, grazing sheep. I caught my breath, and Sadie plowed right past me, barking merrily away.
He startled and straightened awkwardly, an ugly red stain on his cheeks. Sadie plunged toward him; the sheep frayed against the pressure of her sleek black body. “Lunch,” I said hesitantly, and nudged through in her wake.
“Thanks,” he muttered. It took me a moment to translate the word. Before the war—before last week—I’d have had some witty comment about boys who mumble, or at least an elbow straight to the ribs. But I’d lost Thom. I was losing Marthe. And now Tyler’s eyes were fixed away from me, his hands an arm’s length away. Suddenly, nothing was the right thing to say.
