The Nethers

by M. E. Parker

  “I can’t go if someone’s watching.”

  “I’ll close my eyes. Okay? Just hurry.”

  As Nico squatted in the corner, the unity binding forced Sindra down with him. She heard the stream trickle to the baseboards.

  They fell asleep hungry, sweating from the bulky harness that held them together, and they awoke to the sound of the lock clicking before the door flew open.

  “Have you, in the eyes of the Great Above, made your union whole?” Dromon asked.

  “Yes!” Sindra shouted. “For Chasm’s sakes, yes. Get us out of this contraption.”

  Nico eyed Sindra. “No, sir, we have not.”

  Dromon exited with a frown, no food again, and this time no water, either.

  With no food or water, they endured the stink of their own waste until they produced no more waste. Sindra had grown so sick of Nico’s face that she fantasized about scraping it off with a draw knife like the ones she used in Jonesbridge to peel away rotten layers from a wooden recovery artifact.

  When the door opened on the fourth day, and Nico held fast to his honesty in the face of thirsting to death, Dromon turned to the presbyters. “Orkin says to get this demon-possessed witch out of our village.”

  “Where?”

  “What about Nico?” the other presbyter asked.

  “Please don’t banish me. I’ll do what you ask—anything but this.” He nodded to Sindra.

  “Nico is very important to the future of our village. Since he is now married, he is of no use as a procreator. Get him out of the unity binding and send him to the reliquary shrine for ministry.” Dromon motioned to the man in the hood.

  Having had no food and scant water for the past four days, Sindra expended her remaining energy on drawing air into her lungs, leaving her with no more fight left to challenge the hooded man who’d stolen her baby. He bent down and began to work the combination on their right ankle first. After turning the mechanism back and forth, aligning tiny symbols on the lock, he gave it a yank. Sindra held her breath in anticipation of having one of the restraints removed, but the lock did not open.

  “I can’t open it.” The hooded man’s gritty voice grated on Sindra’s nerves, as though he’d removed a layer of her skin with a paring knife when he spoke. He tried another, more accessible lock, this one on their right wrists. Again he shook his head. “It won’t open.”

  “Of course it won’t open.” Orkin spoke from just outside the door. “The unity binding can only be removed with the Great Above guiding the hand. This sorceress has not sanctified this union. The Great Above does not smile on this marriage.” He stepped into the room.

  “Orkin.” Dromon lowered his head in respect. Pinky and the presbyters followed Dromon’s gesture.

  “Give them water, along with a half dose. And take them to Carlisle.”

  “What does he mean, he can’t open it?” Nico’s voice shook.

  “It means we have to breathe each other’s hot breath until we piss ourselves to death.” Sindra couldn’t manage more than a mumble.

  Chapter Four

  Ahead of Myron, the hills and sky joined to form a wall of blue silhouettes, empty of water, its hand around the throat of what life remained. Behind him, the place he’d fought so hard to leave tugged at him to return where he could commiserate with the voices of other people and share in their struggles, lead them in their salvage efforts.

  With the sounds of ghosts gone and the sky darkening, Myron finally stopped. He dropped Saul onto an embankment and collapsed, reaching for his waterskin.

  “Water,” Saul whispered. A pool of blood gathered beneath his head.

  Myron sat up and rearranged the chain that connected him with Saul, inspecting the shackle for a weak point. The iron cuff around his ankle had a keyhole and a welded ring that held the link for the chain. Saul’s cuff looked just as strong.

  “Water.” Saul’s voice reminded Myron of the sound a cog makes grinding on a rotary sander.

  Myron grabbed a rock and pounded at the shackle cuff. The limestone split in half. He scanned the ground for a more durable stone.

  “Myron,” Saul said, “I’m gonna die.”

  Myron jostled his waterskin, listening for water. He held it to Saul’s lips, rationing out a drink, but, as he pulled it back, Saul reached for it and gulped down as much as he could. The struggle for the waterskin caused it to fall, spilling the rest of the water onto the parched soil, which sopped it up in a matter of seconds.

  “People like you make me sick,” Saul said. “Selfish to the end.” He struggled to breathe. He put his hand behind his head, horrified to see it soaked with blood when he pulled it away.

  Myron upended the skin over his own mouth and waited for one last drop to hit his tongue. “Backstabbing marks like you make me sick. Last thing I wanted to do was lug your sorry load halfway around Patriot’s Pass.” Myron banged on the chain with another rock. They each pulled their legs in opposite directions.

  “I joined up to fight the E’sters the day I turned fourteen.” Saul’s voice shook. “They didn’t make me fit for soldiering. Shipped me off to Jonesbridge—to do my part.”

  “The E’sters. The Alliance. What’s the difference?”

  “Sounds like something a traitor’d say.”

  “I’m not dying out here, Saul.”

  “If I’m dying, you’re dying.” Saul threw a sharp rock at Myron’s head. Myron dodged, but the blood from Saul’s hand splattered across Myron’s face.

  Saul held the back of his head with both hands. Blood oozed through his fingers. The dry earth soaked up the blood the way it had the water, leaving only a stain. His eyes telegraphed his panic, his resistance to accept the situation.

  “We got to keep going.” Myron began walking to the west.

  Saul crawled in the opposite direction. Weakened by his injuries, he fell and rolled—anything to keep Myron from progressing. Myron removed his smock and knelt beside Saul. “We have to stop the bleeding.” He tied his smock around Saul’s head, a tight knot over the gaping wound in the back. Then he leaned back to rest. “We’ll make it. Once we get to the ocean, we—”

  “No…we won’t.” Saul sucked in a deep breath. His words sounded as though they originated at the bottom of a well. “We won’t make it anywhere.”

  They sat at arm’s length until the sun dipped below the hills and heat of the daytime in the desert gave way to cold air that bit at Myron’s bare chest. His teeth chattering, his skin raw, Myron inched closer to Saul, hugging him for warmth. Saul protested with a grunt but did not open his eyes.

  In Jonesbridge, Myron had grown accustomed to the absence of stars and moon in the smoke-filled night sky. Out here on the fringe of the Nethers, stars twinkled from one side of the frozen sky to the other, and the moon hung among them, in an upward crescent as if to catch the stars as they fell from the heavens. Myron imagined Sindra, wherever she was, holding the star he’d made for her, thinking of him. As the nighttime reached the peak of its dark and cold, Myron fell asleep to the mesmerizing chatter of Saul’s teeth.

  Dreams materialized. His grandfather was sifting through the barn, searching for an undamaged steam piston for his barker wagon. His mother was still alive, calling them for a bowl of bone stew made with marrow, wild onions, and sour grinds. Myron kicked dirt clods through a wire hoop next to the barn, imagining where life would take him, where he might go, and what was left of the world to see. But this was a leftover dream he’d experienced before. It held no meaning except for nostalgia, a sentiment as restrictive as the shackle on his ankle.

  When the sun hit his eyes, Myron jolted from sleep. Forgetting for a moment where he was, he stood up and walked in the first direction he faced until the tug of the shackle startled him. “Wake up, Saul. We have to find water.”

  Myron knelt and grabbed the chain with both hands, giving it a yank. “Come on.” He noticed that the smock he’d tied around Saul’s head was soaked with blood. He shook Saul. Saul did not awaken. Myr
on beat on the chain with a rock. He pried and pulled at the shackle. He could think of no possible way, with what he had at his disposal, to break free. Only one thing mattered now, and that was water.

  Myron believed that he was a true slog, born of the Old Age experiment he’d discovered in the lab under the mountain. If his hunch was correct, that meant he could go without water longer than most people, but he had no idea how much longer. Several hours? A day? A few days? Myron hoisted Saul over his shoulder and walked in the opposite direction of Jonesbridge, toward the Great Western Ocean.

  Saul’s patchy hair tickled Myron’s back, reminding him with every step that Saul had made the journey more difficult than it had to be.

  He trudged along a ridge until his legs had weakened too much to continue. He could tell by the sun that he’d traveled for hours, not minutes. His muscles ached and his throat cracked every time he tried to work up enough spit to swallow.

  Myron put his hand just over Saul’s mouth. No air in or out. His chest did not move. Myron had disliked Saul when he was alive; now that Saul had become a lifeless anchor, Myron despised him.

  He searched for a heavy rock and struck Saul’s leg just above the shackle cuff. Blood squirted out. He struck again and again, turning Saul’s ankle into a purple mush, but he still could not get the cuff off or crush the ankle enough to get it from the shackle.

  Myron removed Saul’s smock and slipped it on. He worked off Saul’s pants and put them on over his own, relieved to have some of the sun and wind blocked. With long strides, he hiked across the terrain, lifting his tethered leg, pulling it forward, yanking the chain with both hands with Saul dragging behind.

  Ahead, a broken chain of jagged mountains flanked a basin so flat that it formed one wavy wall against the horizon. “Water!” Myron shouted. He collapsed into the lake, striking his head on the hard earth. He tried to splash his face. A fist full of salt flew into his eyes. No water, not a drop, only an endless salt flat populated with salt pillars. He turned back to the formidable landscape he’d just traversed. He pulled the chain. Saul’s stiffening body inched forward.

  He continued toward the west, a step, a pull of the chain, another step, hour after hour until a droplet of sweat rolled from his forehead. He jutted out his tongue, sipping the drop, trying to swallow.

  “Gather ’round the kiln. Let your face feel the fire.” Myron muttered the song before he started singing. “Your mama raised a fool if she taught you to dream…the only job to take for your family to feed…the steam shovel forty-five,” he sang, his voice hoarse. “For the pennies and the pork, my life I will lose.” He continued, now yelling the altered version of the Richterville funeral song, words the gravediggers in Richterville made up while sipping rot onion in the barrack yard. “Till my longing come home—Cincinnati steam shovel blues.”

  Myron’s vision blurred. His arms outstretched, reaching for the sky, he continued humming the funeral song of Richterville.

  • • •

  “Hurry up. We have to get to town, Myron.”

  Myron’s family rarely visited Richterville. His grandfather said that the townsfolk cast him a suspicious eye—because of the secrets he worked on in his barn. “Where is everybody going?”

  “Sharma, the village doyen, has died. We must put her to rest,” his grandfather replied.

  At six, Myron knew of death from the lifeless soil and the spoiled sky, from the dead yards east of Richterville where gravediggers used a steam shovel to dig a hole wide enough to bury a hundred war dead at once, dusting them with lime before sealing them below the earth. But he had not yet seen anyone put to rest.

  “Why does she need to rest if she’s dead?” Myron asked.

  “That’s just an expression. The doyen was the eldest person in Richterville—seventy-three long years in this inhospitable world.”

  “This is your first passage, Myron,” his mother noted. “It is an important custom.”

  As they traveled along the road to Richterville, more people joined the procession, until a line of a hundred or more entered the village. A throng had already gathered, warming their hands around the brick kiln. The village center had a market on two sides, an infirmary on one side, and a masonry and coal depot on the other, forming a square where four paths converged. At its center, a gazebo topped with a clock tower chimed on the quarter hour, the only structure in Richterville as tall as the kiln smokestacks. The townsfolk called the back wall of the gazebo, covered in carved images, the story board.

  A man wearing a robe climbed the gazebo steps and stood behind a podium. The crowd silenced as he patted down his thin wisps of gray hair. He scanned the faces around him and cleared his throat.

  “I’ve known Sharma since we were both no more than knee high. I guess that makes me the oldest person in Richterville, now.”

  Myron noted the rare sight of smiling faces in the crowd, and a few chuckles.

  “Death stalks us all. When it claims us, it chips off a hunk of our story and throws it in the garbage.” His lip quivered as he adjusted his robe, a garment riddled with stains and holes that looked much older than any doyen. “And, as is our custom, the next in line for doyen,” he said, patting himself on the chest, “must recount a tale from our past that speaks to the spirit of the bygone doyen.” He gazed across the faces, and through the market, eyeing the jagged quarry at the bottom of the valley. His eyes misted. “Sharma and me used to sit in the field with the billet vine tickling our noses. Her grandmother—Lilly—some of you might remember her. She was the chemist in those days.” He nodded toward a stand near the market that sold herbs and medicines. “She told us things while she gathered her witchworks in the hills.”

  Listening to the story, Myron wished he had someone his age to play with in a field.

  The man went on to tell of times before the dry cracks in the ground widened into permanent channels. And he spoke of times before any rain that did fall left streaks of ochre in the dust. Before the squanderings and the culling when great beasts once roamed the world alongside people. And how the animals that did endure everything that the world had thrown at them were rounded up for gawkers on menagerie trains that traveled the surviving rail tracks between the Eastern Sea and the River Mississippi.

  “Her eyes were hollow when she sat us down that day. She was our age, she told us, when the menagerie train whistle called her to the tracks. They stopped and set up a tent and erected a sign that read, ‘Come see the spectacle of Carrie the Elephant!’”

  He stopped speaking so he could wipe his eyes. When he continued, his voice tensed, shouting to the air as if angry with the sky. Myron’s imagination ran with visions of the majestic and gentle creature the man described.

  “She followed the signs. Bought her ticket. A menagerie roadie led her to Carrie’s enclosure. There she saw the beast in the corner of a dark hole without enough room to escape her own waste. She was covered in flies and moaning. Lilly made me and Sharma pay close attention when she told us that she sat there all day with her hand on that animal’s face as it wallowed and eventually died right before her eyes. Lilly said—without hesitation—that the Great Above called the very last elephant home that day.”

  The elephant, Myron noted, was one less creature in the diminishing dream of what he’d hoped he could discover out there in the world.

  “This wasn’t Sharma’s story, but it was her grandmother’s, and it’s something we didn’t talk about much after we heard it.” He walked over to the story board. “Young folks are hard to come by these days. Babies aren’t coming much into the world anymore, at least not around here. But we do have a few youths. Our youngest must now come to the stage.”

  Heads turned this way and that. Eyes hopped from face to face until the majority landed on Myron. His grandfather lifted on his tiptoes to see if he spotted anyone younger than Myron. “You’re up. The youngest.” He nudged Myron toward the gazebo.

  “But—”

  “Go on.”

 
Myron walked through the crowd as it opened up for him to pass. He stepped up to join the man who was carving the shape of an elephant onto the story board. Myron fidgeted while the man finished, and then they walked together to the kiln firebox where Sharma lay on a plank, her eyes closed with slugs.

  “Gather ’round the kiln. Let your face feel the fire,” the crowd sang as they ambled toward the kiln. “The mornin’ has broken. Stoke the funeral pyre.” Myron stared at Sharma’s corpse, wondering if she felt the burn all the way from the Great Above as her skin melted away in the kiln.

  • • •

  Myron gave the line between his leg and Saul’s one last yank, urging his foot forward, until he collapsed in the middle of a salt flat. Cliffs with red and orange skirts grew no closer no matter how far he went. The only moisture left in his mouth was the blood that seeped through parched cracks in his lips. He lifted his waterskin above his mouth, waiting for a trickle or even a drop to find its way onto his tongue. When none came, he dropped his arm. He was a slog, but slogs, too, died from thirst, a slower and more painful process.

  Myron closed his eyes and imagined himself and Sindra together on the beach in Bora Bora. The dream had evolved since he’d first concocted it. Instead of cerulean waves lapping at a pristine shore, Myron now saw a dried ocean with cracks the size of the Great Gorge and a beach paved by the skulls of ancient seabirds, Sindra asking him over and over how that place was any better than where they’d come from.

  He smacked his lips, felt them touched by a damp cloth and a spray from the ocean that was not there. His mouth filled with water.

  “Hey,” a deep voice said.

  Myron pried open his right eye to a vision of a man in the halo of the sun, leaning over him—Myron’s custodian spirit here to escort him to the Great Above.

  “Swallow if ya able.” The man poured another mouthful of water into Myron’s mouth.

  Myron sat up to find three other figures casting shadows over him. They spoke slowly with a deliberate diction, but Myron couldn’t make out the words. “Am I alive?” he asked, as his surroundings came into focus.