“Done!” he proclaimed, splitting open one of the lumps and tipping a little of the juices from the partridge over its white flesh. “Let it cool a bit before you try it,” he warned, “or you’ll burn your mouth.”
“Are you sure this is edible?” Deborah asked, wriggling an arm from beneath her shawl and dropping the hot thing with a yelp onto a fold of her shawl.
“The man who taught me how to forage called it spud. It’s a sort of food that grows under the ground. You find them in odd green places, especially along the river. Sometimes there are the remains of houses, and plants with scented flowers and sharp thorns. The man I lived with said there were more and more of these places. He said it was a sign the Green Woman’s magic was working. I found these in an abandoned garden further up the slope. The people before grew all sorts of food, in plots around their houses. There were lots of these spud things. They must like the soil here.”
Deborah was impressed. “Who was it taught you all this? I wouldn’t even have known gardens existed before, never mind how to cook the things I found growing in them.” She eyed the spud with circumspection. “I’m going to need both hands for this,” she murmured and wriggled her other arm free so her shoulders were bare.
Jonah couldn’t help staring at the whiteness of Deborah’s skin, at the tiny drops of water that dripped from her hair, and his eyes followed their course as they trickled down her neck into the fold of her shawl. His hands sawed mechanically at the partridge until he nicked himself. He sucked his finger and remembered he had been asked a question.
“The Elders tell you the war destroyed everything except Providence, don’t they?” Deborah nodded. “Well, it didn’t. Don’t ask me how, but there were isolated valleys, mountains, places where few people ever lived, that were not touched by the effects of the war. They barricaded themselves in, high in their valleys, letting no one come near. The stories say the mountain people are cruel and merciless, protecting what they have like a wolf with its kill. But there were other survivors too who wander about in the desert.” He hesitated. “They don’t look like you and me, the war has changed them.”
Deborah looked uneasy, thinking of Cerberus and lindworms and suchlike. “What do you mean?”
“The survivors of the bombs had all been exposed to the burning atmosphere, they got sick; many died. The babies who were born after the bombs were deformed and sickly.”
“Just like the Ignorants—I mean the Dananns,” Deborah interrupted. “I knew they had been poisoned.”
“Mostly the desert wanderers live alone, living by what they remember of the time before the war, passing it on to their children, if they have any. They are the people who showed me the ruined houses, the wild gardens. They taught me what’s edible and what isn’t. They showed me how to use flints to make fire, how to make a bow and arrows. I stayed with one of them for a few years. He was almost blind, but he knew every nook and cranny of the desert round about the Cleft Rock.”
They both ate in silence for a few moments, then Deborah said brightly, “This garden food is delicious. We must remember to collect some before we move on.”
Later, Jonah watched Deborah’s brisk, decisive movements as she wrapped the potatoes up in her shawl. Already she seemed totally concentrated on her journey. Now that she had eaten and rested and washed away the dust of Providence, all she wanted was to push on, to find her mother. All she had left behind in Providence was set to one side, her family, friends, the Dananns who helped her escape from prison. Briefly, the glimmer of sadness that lay in the depths of Jonah’s eyes flickered on the surface, and his brow furrowed. If he lagged behind, Deborah would forget him too.
Jonah gathered his things together, deep in thought, and scattered the ashes of the fire. Whistling softly he called the pups and let them trot ahead to find the way. With her shawl pressed into service as a sack, Deborah’s hair hung loose and blazed like a flag as she marched, head held high, behind the pups.
Jonah could not help admiring her. Deborah had a mission to accomplish, it was only right she should be single-minded about it. The sadness sank back, out of sight again, and he smiled to himself. Deborah was pig-headed and pig-ignorant, and he hadn’t had so much fun in ages. Whatever happened, he would stick by her to the end.
* * * *
There was still much of the afternoon left by the time they struck camp. The colours were brighter and most of the trees seemed sturdy and healthy. The veil of yellow cloud had thinned, barely concealing a new luminosity that was the sky. On the far side of the mountains, Jonah was convinced the sky would be as blue as it was in the old stories. On the far side of the mountains, there would be no more sinister scars of the war, no more clumps of blighted trees, blackened and dead or dying, with stunted brown leaves and rotten branches. When they came upon these places where the soil was poisoned, like spots of disease on a ripe fruit, they hurried past, keeping close together, their eyes averted. Something had claimed the dead vegetation and invested it with a creeping presence that was not life, but not quite death either.
By the time evening fell, they were deep in deciduous woods. The leaf canopy screened the dying light, and darkness caught them almost unawares. They found themselves in a grassy hollow ringed by young beech trees and undermined by burrowing animals. The edge of the hollow was broken by a deep trough, and in the trough lay the remains of an ancient tree.
Neither of them had seen a tree of such awesome dimensions, even though it was rotted by insects and fungus and quite hollow. Jonah stood by the tree, looking down its hollow length, and a deathly chill clutched at his heart. Shadows moved in front of his eyes, and every fibre of his body called on him to move, but his will was frozen.
He called out to Deborah in his head, but his lips refused to obey, and she didn’t hear the unspoken cry.
“What a giant it must have been!” Deborah’s voice was strong and practical. Her attention was already turned to searching out a comfortable place to sleep.
Jonah felt the shadows take his hands, leading him into a darkness that was full of a silent menace.
“The tree made the hollow when its roots were wrenched out of the ground as it fell.” He forced out the words the shadows whispered inside his head. “The roots and branches have been eaten away¬—only the trunk is left. The heart of the tree is dead, but its body waits. It defies the corruption of time. Its destiny is fire.” Jonah passed a hand in front of his face to brush away the shadows. He was deathly white and his hands trembled.
“Cow pasture,” Deborah said briskly.
“Cow pasture?” Jonah had no idea what she was talking about. He tried to shake off the shadowy grasp. “Let’s get away from here, Princess, find somewhere better. This place is evil.”
“Don’t be silly, it’s just an old tree. It was the big shade tree in a cow pasture.” Deborah seemed proud of her discovery. “I can hear the cattle lowing, can’t you?”
Despite his cold fear, Jonah listened. From far away, it seemed, came a sound neither had ever heard before, but that was so redolent of peace and a lost happiness that they held their breath, unwilling to lose a note of the dying sound. Briefly, Jonah’s shadows left him.
The sound of the cows cast them both into a pensive silence. Even Deborah was discouraged by her meagre knowledge of the world. Jonah had seen pictures of cows on the walls of Underworld, but no one had been able to tell him what they sounded like or what they did. The Dananns remembered a lot of things, but much more had been forgotten. How were they going to bring back what they had never heard of?
Deborah was the first to recover her optimism. “Tomorrow we might be high enough to see our way to the far side of the mountains. We might even meet a cow!”
Jonah smiled, but in his heart he was afraid. Deborah had no idea of the unpleasant things they might find before they found their cow. Since they entered the forest, he had been aware of rustlings and cracklings, of shadows slipping from tree to tree, of jaws opening and snapping shut, of p
anting and withheld breath. He had never been into a forest before, never attempted to cross the river for fear of disturbing the river monsters. But he had not expected this. The shadows were everywhere, something was not right.
The air beneath the trees was still and mild, and the harsh desert wind, carrying flails of sand and grit, seemed to have been left behind on the other side of the river. While Jonah covered their fire for the night, Deborah collected armfuls of greenery to soften the forest floor. She was aware she was making a single sleeping place, not two, and her heart raced at the audacity of it. But with her journey’s end so close, she was incapable of reining in her excitement.
Once she had been a loved child, but it was so long ago she couldn’t remember it. For years she had known only the dislike of givenparents and distrust of her classmates. It had made her bitter and cold; that was obvious to her now. Her heart beat quicker since she met Jonah—she could feel how it glowed. The ice around it was melting in the warmth of another human being who cared more about her than anyone had done before. Jonah had been with her ever since she lost her parents. He had been with her when she cried herself to sleep in those first months as a givenchild. He had held her hand when she wanted to slip into the shadows and give up longing for something better. He had been part of her dreams.
Together they had overcome the dangers of the desert, and the Garden was just at the other side of the mountains. Nothing could stop them now! The release of tension was almost painful, and she shivered as the other emotions, bottled up for days, began to fight their way to the surface.
From beneath her lashes, Deborah snatched furtive glances at Jonah, watching him greedily as he bent to place rocks and sods of green earth around the campfire, as he paced about the clearing making certain everything was safe for the night, for her, for his Princess. Her heart swelled with longing, and suddenly she wanted Jonah there, next to her, to share her thoughts, to share something more profound, though she was confused as to what that might be.
She sat down on the springy mattress, imagining Jonah sitting beside her, taking her hand, pulling her towards him. A hot blush swept across her cheeks. She wanted to know what it was like, she thought angrily, to love somebody so much that…She would find out, nobody was going to stop her! With a defiant gesture she tipped the garden food on the ground and shook out her shawl before spreading it like a pillow where their heads would lie. She lay down amid the red waves of her hair and waited for Jonah.
* * * *
Jonah paced the clearing one last time. Deborah was already making herself comfortable, but the pups were as edgy as he was. They turned round and round on themselves before deciding not to curl up after all. A few of them whined and licked his hand.
He comforted them as best he could, but he knew they were uneasy so far from the scent of their parents. They too sensed something was wrong. Perhaps their parents were already preparing for war, wearing their heavy-spiked war collars. Their handlers would be goading them with sticks and spear tips to a battle frenzy, throwing them captured wolves and foxes to fight, to rouse their fury and their hatred with the taste of freshly spilled blood. The army hosting in the desert was cruel and relentless. It was the army of death.
The closer they drew to the Garden, the uneasier Jonah became. He was used to the desert with its hardships and dangers, the demons filling the night with the fluttering of giant wings, and he had often seen wolfmen too on the prowl. This was different. The new green world should be full of hope, but he sensed evil very close at hand.
Suddenly, he caught sight of Deborah watching him intently from a bed made of branches and a mattress of green leaves, and his anxieties faded into insignificance, carried away on the wave of the most powerful emotion he had ever experienced. Her red hair lay like the petals of a luxuriant flower about her head, and her green eyes never left him. Jonah’s mouth was dry as he took a step closer, feeling awkward and wooden.
She smiled and held out a hand. He knelt beside her—the moment trembled, fragile as a leaf in the wind. The slightest movement could blow it away. He took her hand and she drew him down beside her.
“Jonah,” she whispered. “Did you remember me? Did you dream of me too?”
He smiled. The scent of her hair filled his head reminding him of wood smoke and gorse flowers. Or did gorse flowers simply smell of Deborah? The touch of her hand was as familiar to him as the memory of his mother’s hands, and he had seen her hair in the colour of autumn leaves.
“I used to dream of a little girl who needed comforting. Then an older girl who needed a guide. I used to see you in every wonderful thing, rocks and coloured pebbles, a pool of clear water, a tree bowing down beneath the weight of orange leaves. I think you have always been with me.”
“It was meant to be like this, wasn’t it? We were meant to meet and we were meant to recognise one another.” She put her arms round his neck, her whispered words echoing inside his head and touching a deep chord of sadness in his heart.
“It was magic. Green magic brought me to you,” Jonah murmured. “I don’t want to lose you now.”
“You won’t,” Deborah whispered, so low it was the sound of her breath he heard. “You are part of me. We can’t be parted. Ever.” She turned her head and her lips found Jonah’s.
In that instant, Jonah, the dog boy, desert wanderer, and Ignorant runaway became simply Jonah. Deborah’s Jonah. He pushed aside his sadness and gave in to the heat of her fire, wrapping himself in the flames of her hair. Whatever happened, they would always be together.
Chapter 23
Deborah slept soundly. She was not even aware the pups had curled up around her when Jonah got up to watch again. She did not stir later when her live blanket wriggled and squirmed, unaware that parts of it got up and wandered about, that it whined and growled piteously.
Jonah watched. At first the turmoil of his thoughts kept him awake, and he watched Deborah’s sleeping face and the faint smile on her lips. He traced the outline of her cheek and brow and smiled to himself. This was the first time he had ever seen her features in such peaceful repose.
From the moment she stumbled out of Providence and he snatched her from the jaws of certain death, Deborah had been a burden to him. Despite her obvious talents, like being able to build bridges and convert demons into angels, she was about as worldly-wise as a nest of newborn field mice. All of his short life had been spent living on his wits, watching out for himself, and now he found himself, like it or not, having to look out for someone else too.
Jonah’s smile spread to a face-splitting grin of happiness. Deborah was a burden he never wanted to put down. He would watch over her forever, carry her anywhere, whatever the cost.
Later, as the night wore on, the inexplicable melancholy returned. The enormous responsibility of his task overcame him, and the wearying day’s march began to take its toll. His head began to nod. It was then he first noticed the whispering. It was the trees, or rather the tree spirits, the Dryads, helping to keep him vigilant. Sometimes he thought he saw them, with their supple limbs and hair threaded through with vines. Their light voices like leaves rustling in the breeze comforted him though he could not quite hear what they said. He knew they were telling him stories of the olden times, the times of the great forests, and he let the rhythm of the words weave its own story of untroubled happiness. He knew he must stay awake.
The long night deepened, and the pups whined and snapped their jaws even in sleep. He knew he should wake Deborah, that he could not safely watch the whole night through, but he was loath to disturb her. He could not imagine how she did all that stuff with the Memory, but he could see it consumed her and left her drained and pale. It was his role to look after her, so he would let her sleep.
He dared look no further ahead than the next day. The sadness that waited behind every moment of happiness told him that his part would soon be over. Soon Deborah would not need protecting any more. Soon she would no longer need a guide. The sadness welled and f
looded. Perhaps nothing can ever be perfect, he thought. Without sadness we would never recognise how lucky we are to hold happiness in our hands, if only for a brief while.
Deborah’s face took up all of Jonah’s thoughts, her green eyes mesmerised him; he could see every golden fleck of their irises even through her closed lids, then through his own closed lids. With a sigh, he gave up the unequal struggle and felt himself falling into their green depths. Round about the hollow, shadows slunk out of the trees, and narrow, yellow eyes watched without blinking, as Jonah’s head sagged and his chest rose and fell in the regular rhythm of sleep.
* * * *
A pale light was falling through the branches of the trees above her head when Deborah awoke. The pups shifted and yawned then got up and stretched. Some wandered off on their own business; Silver licked Jonah’s sleeping face but when she got no reaction left him alone. Deborah sat up, a radiant smile illuminating her face. In a daze, she picked her clothes off the bush where they had been drying and dressed. She sat for a while, hugging her knees, watching Jonah curiously. It was a rare opportunity. Usually he seemed to be watching her.
She remembered how it used to bother her, his constant attention, made her feel awkward and self-conscious. But all that was long ago, in a fading dream. Now she was glad he noticed her. The emotion his attention kindled burned like a steady fire deep inside, radiating a warmth she felt to the tips of her fingers. Thanks to him, she knew what it was like to love and be loved. It was an experience, and she felt stronger for it, older, more mature…ready to take on whatever task might be required of her. Not knowing anything about singing, Deborah wanted to shout!
She saw Jonah differently too. He was no longer the wild-looking, ragged boy of their first encounter, but a man, with a hard, muscular body and a feline grace. She shivered as she recalled that body, stroking the chest and the sliding muscles of his back. She loved the taste of his lips, and the touch of his fingers as they wandered across her skin, memorising her body. But most of all she loved his face, or rather the look in his hazel-green eyes. Jonah’s eyes were the mirrors of his thoughts, and what they showed was such honesty, such devotion, such generosity and selflessness that Deborah felt worm-like beneath their gaze. Jonah was good.
The Dark Citadel (The Green Woman) Page 20
