“Master. Speak to us.”
“Do it! On the mouth.”
He wiped his shaking hands on the black snout. The flames roared up, blinding, and then vanished. All three people in the room cried out, but their cries were swallowed by a visceral rumble vibrating in the sudden darkness. It rose and rolled, taking on the shape of language, the silhouette of speech projected by an unseen fire. Pawel was shouting. Jon fumbled at Marina’s feet. “Pick her up!” he yelled. “I can’t see!” But none of them could hear the others. Marina felt hands clawing around her calves and kicked wildly. Her bloodied foot caught Jon in the face, sending his glasses flying. Pawel lost his grip and dropped her on top of him. Both men were swearing, as full of fury and empty of sense as the other language drowning them out. Its guttural cadence began to subside.
“Fuck. Master! Hold still, you little . . .”
“Cut her,” Pawel yelled.
“Where’s your fucking— Ow!”
“Get knife. Hurry.” Pawel leaned down and pummeled the darkness until he got an arm across Marina’s neck. She bucked and flailed her legs, connecting with the other man’s face, the table, anything in reach. Her shift rolled up to her hips. Pawel slapped blindly at her. “Hurry, idiot!” he shouted. “I hold her!”
“Fuck you!”
“More blood. Knife, bowl, I cut her. Ah!” He’d left his hand too near Marina’s face; she’d twisted her head up and bit him. He shoved down on her neck again. His breath was a steaming roar in her face. “For that I cut you deep.”
“Hold her arms,” growled the other voice. Marina could only tug at the weight on her windpipe. Other hands closed on her, down by her thighs. “I’ll make you fucking bleed.” The full brute darkness turned solid and crushed down on her. Its greasy hair and sour breath soiled her face. Her eyes opened wide, horribly wide, and saw the features of a man, and in the instant before it started she discovered something she hadn’t known until then, which was that the human body far too close to her own was an alien species, no more akin to her than the hook to the fish.
• • •
There was a great deal of blood.
31
The door was open.
A wide crack, an arm’s width. A little light came into the room sidelong, as if it didn’t want to look.
She was curled up on the low table. Her knees were tight to her chest. An ugly lump of cold wax pushed against her cheek.
One finger and thumb plucked at the skin of her calf, pinching and twisting. From time to time a helicopter droned somewhere beyond the roof.
“Ahem,” a small voice coughed, eventually.
Marina flinched and pushed her head away from the light.
“Ahem,” it said again. There was a momentary scrape and jingle near her head. “Ah. A somewhat awkward moment.”
She kept her eyes tight, tight shut.
“Though whether a more opportune occasion awaits at any proximate hour is at the very best conjectural. Not to say optimistic. Fantastical, even.”
With one hand she covered her ear. Her fingertips curled to scratch her skull.
“Summ mmghht rrggnn . . . Can yhrrmm?” The muffled voice strained squeakily to raise itself. “Can you hear me?” More scraping and tinkling, and then it sounded closer. “I said, can you hear me?” She pushed her hand down harder until her ear sang with hollow echoes. The little voice came floating in. “You show little of your former courtesy.” It separated the words out one by one to make them heard. “To be expected. Your state is grievously reduced.”
The scraping might have been small feet on the surface of the table next to her head.
“A common slattern, I fear. A soiled thing.”
Something touched her. It was as faint as the tickle of a blade of grass on the back of her hand, but she twitched away from it convulsively, a peep of fear escaping her tight-pressed mouth.
“Now now now. Mind your manners, saucebox. It’s hard enough having to shout for a hearing. I’ll be hoarse tomorrow, and lucky to say thirty words by the end of the week.”
Her hand tightened into a fist and kneaded her skull.
“Ah. There. Well, beggars can’t be choosers. Which is to say, those sunk as low as you set no conditions, and would do better to listen when spoken to.”
She heard a minuscule sigh.
“That said . . . I confess an inability to shrug away the impression, however implausible, of bearing some share of responsibility.”
An expectant silence followed. She felt her fist trembling, close to the corner of her mouth.
“All right,” the voice continued. “So be it. You choose not to notice my condescension. Granted, your former honor is dead and buried, but one might still have anticipated the very minimum of graciousness. The soles of its boots, you might say. The skin of its teeth. Still, if that little is too much to ask, I forgive the offense. I am, you see, magnanimous. The substance may be small but the soul is great.”
Thumb and forefinger plucked, twisted, released, plucked, twisted, released. There was a pinprick of pain each time.
“Mind you. Ahem. Whatever share of responsibility for your unhappy fall belongs to my part, the weightier balance lies with you. You had only to answer a simple question. Candor demands that we not forget the fact.”
Her eyes opened a little. Her hair was all over her face, smelling of man. She thought of water, to wash it out.
“The question in question— Ha!” It interrupted itself with a satisfied chuckle, the shake of wooden dice in a closed hand. “Excellent. As I was saying. The question in question being now moot. Mooter than moot. Never was inquiry so thoroughly redundant.”
Tap, tap, tap on the table near her head. She looked through the clotted screen of her hair. She had the impression of a small odd head with too much chin and nose, under a wide-brimmed hat.
“Let us be clear, from the start, that I owe you nothing at all. I am a free creature, and you a miserable wretch. Let that not be disputed. However. Your virgin blood made a fine draft.” A touch of faraway sweetness came into the voice. “Exquisite. Matchless. And to think the vintage is forever spoiled. None but I will ever be qualified to sing songs in praise of that nectar. Glorious! Think of that.”
She thought of nothing.
“Can you really be ignorant of the virtue of your blood?”
The figure standing by her head appeared to shuffle from side to side, looking for a better view through her hair. “Misery is the lot of your father’s kind. A lesson this past hour has surely taught you more thoroughly than any disquisition of mine, I dare guess. But you’re your mother’s daughter also.”
No mummy. She quivered and mewled from the back of her throat. No. No.
“I see I’m wasting my breath. Very well. Cower and grovel and slink on all fours. Perhaps those undiscriminating vagabonds the weasels will applaud the performance and take you in. I might as well have showered my chivalry in their direction. Here, then, is the first and last and in between of what I came to tell you, rudely truncated, and delivered on this ensanguined platform in its raw state. Men could not but do to you, and now they cannot but be done to. And if the coarseness of my terms offends, your silence has earned it. Upbraid me if you dare. Trollop!”
She flinched weakly. The small person next to her head composed himself. He edged closer still, almost putting his nose in her hair.
“I’d trip those fools on a bramble and stab their eyes out myself, if I could,” he said, conspiratorially. “Alas, I lack the puissance. We folk to our domain and they to theirs, is the way of it. But you, madam, were born to both. Your father went to his drowning like a sheep to slaughter. Your mother wielded the knife. Take a peck of counsel in return for that drop of your blood, and remember the one as well as the other. Now, good day to you. And should you see her again, don’t neglect to tell her it wasn’t my fault. Do you hear? Not. My
. Fault.”
She thought she saw a tiny glittering eye, a snake’s eye. Then with a tap and a skitter it was gone.
A little later she heard it start to rain.
• • •
Her shoes were stiff with dried blood. Bending over to clean them off hurt too much in the middle, and anyway her fingers wouldn’t go straight. She prodded her toes into them. All down her legs were streaks like spilled brown paint.
On the floor near her shoes was a handwritten piece of paper with a name written at the bottom: Gawain. She sat on the edge of the table looking at it, while the array of masks looked at her.
Eventually she poked the paper with the toe of one shoe, pushing it around the right way so she could read. Every movement hurt. There was a big hard lump of pain in the middle of her. All of her was connected to it.
She couldn’t read the whole paper. Some parts were obscure in the apologetic light. Others were defaced with dried bloody spots. She mouthed the words she could make out. It seemed like there ought to be some comfort in them, but she couldn’t find it. She got to the point where she’d dropped the note. There was a bit more.
Later on, I hope (but much later, I have a long way to go, the other side of the world). I’ll be back for sure. I promised someone important I would.
Gawain
Her eyes skimmed back and forth over the words a few times, barely touching them, like insects on water. After that she carefully maneuvered her shoes to each side of the sheet of paper. Wiggling them toward each other, painstakingly, she crumpled up the note.
• • •
Water.
Nothing came between it and her. It fell pure, indifferent, unrestrained. Once it reached the ground it was fouled, picking up the world’s wreckage, mixing with mud and rubbish. Where it touched her it rinsed off red.
She looked up the street and saw closed door after closed door. She turned the other way. She hadn’t managed to get her shoes on properly so she walked in a stuttering limp, taking small steps. The pain wouldn’t allow anything faster.
The rain had the most wonderful smell. It was coming down quite hard from a sky done in long brushstrokes of stone-grey and dove-grey. Very soon, before she’d passed the last house in the village, it had flushed the stench out of her hair and her tattered cotton shift.
There was a lot of debris around her feet. Old newspapers, so wet they’d printed themselves illegibly on the tarmac. Cigarette butts, foil wrappers, plastic forks, crushed cans, things, things, things, intended for vast oubliettes in the ground but lying in plain sight instead, windblown and rain-washed testimony to a catastrophic failure of the whole science of forgetting.
Farther along the road she encountered a knot of people carrying shopping bags and sticks, hurrying. More debris. She aimed herself to the side of them but they stopped when they saw her.
“God in heaven.”
“Are you all right?”
“Hello? Are you hurt?”
“What happened to you?” The wind blew them toward her. “She looks hurt.”
“Did they do this?”
“Where’s your family?”
“Don’t go crawling all over the poor thing. Give her some room. All right, you? Who’s with you?”
“That’s blood. On her dress.”
“You must be half dead with cold. Are you all right, dear? Do you have somewhere to go?”
“Jill?”
“You can tell us. It’s all right. We won’t hurt you.”
“Jill!”
“What?”
“Are you sure that’s really a girl?”
Another invisible gust made some of the debris swirl away.
“They’re coming!” someone shouted.
A car appeared down the road. The glare of its bright white eyes picked out cones of slashing raindrops. “Here,” someone said, and tried to put arms around her shoulders. The arms sprang back at once.
“God! She’s like ice!”
The car blared its horn. It was a big white car, with black letters written on it. The wreckage in the road was sucked under its black wheels, squashed and spat out to the side.
“They’ll take you away,” a person near her said. “This way, quick!”
“Leave it be, Jill.”
The person tried to touch her again. Marina raised her head and looked at her.
“Oh my . . .” The person’s hand went to her mouth. She backed away and then began to run.
“What is it?”
“Let’s go! Go!”
The car growled louder, closer, and then came to a sudden stop. Doors banged open on either side of it. Marina was going to walk past, but two people in lumpy black clothes got out, blocking the gaps. She came slowly toward them, stepping very carefully, putting her feet down softly each time.
“Hello,” said one of the people next to the car. “Who’s this, then?”
An angry shout came from behind. “You leave her alone! Can’t you see she’s hurt?”
“Where’s your mum?”
“Filth!” A stone came flying over her shoulder and banged against the front of the car. The person unstrapped something from his bulky black clothes. The rain made it glisten darkly.
“Everyone calm down,” he said.
The writing on the car said police, and the word was stitched onto the black clothes as well. Marina looked at the glistening thing.
“That’s a gun,” she said, “isn’t it.” It was much shorter than the one Caleb used.
The person’s eyes widened. He gave a short and uncomfortable laugh.
“Well, aren’t we the clever one,” he said.
She looked over her shoulder at the people with the sticks and bags. Some of them had stopped hurrying and were watching from a distance, including the one who’d touched her. Marina turned back to the person with the gun.
“Can you shoot it at them?” she said, pointing.
It was much louder than Caleb’s too. It split the air like an ax. The people starting screaming and running. The second of the two police people said something like what the fuck, though the screaming and the echoes of the shot obscured it. The one with the gun frowned mildly, looking sad, a little lost.
“Keep shooting,” she told him. He held his arm out and pulled the trigger repeatedly, his hand jerking each time. Five more deafening cracks cut through the screaming and swearing. Two of the running people stopped running and fell over. After that the gun only made a soft clicking sound. The person kept squeezing the trigger anyway, until finally he dropped the gun in the road. The other policeman was leaning against the car. His face had gone completely white and his mouth was opening and closing with a little noise like half a word. With trembling hands he undid a strap at his belt and took out another gun. The first man dropped to his knees in the road in front of Marina.
“What did you . . .” he began, but didn’t finish the sentence because he put the back of his hand in his mouth and bit the skin. He and Marina both looked at the other one, the one unsteadily holding his weapon.
“Kill it,” the kneeling man said. “Fucking shoot her.” The white-faced one grasped his gun in two hands and lifted it to point at Marina. His eyes were milky with shock.
“No,” she said. “Him.”
He blinked. The gun wavered and fired again. The kneeling man stopped kneeling and became a limp flat thing, lying under the wheels of the car, waiting to be rolled over and crushed.
“No,” the policeman said, as if echoing her. For a moment he seemed puzzled. He stared at his own hands, then back at Marina.
“Does it work on yourself ?” she said.
He frowned a little, then put the barrel in his mouth, pointing upward and in.
“Oh,” she said. “Of course.” She nodded at him.
Another vicious crack. Mor
e debris. Running water quickly nudged the scraps into the red pools guttering at the edge of the road. No one was in her way now, so she stepped past the car. The rain fell against it with a sound almost like the clatter of a storm on her bedroom windows.
She wasn’t thinking about where she was going so she carried on downhill, like water. The tower of the church whose bells she used to hear ringing across the river overlooked her from a distance, through the upturned brooms of late-budding trees. She passed a field churned into mud and littered with abandoned tents like the colored scraps of burst balloons. Turning a long corner in the lane, she gained a view out to part of the coast. To the north the greyscale sky was palled by a low drift of smoke. Eastward was a slice of the sea. She stopped walking.
She put her hands over her ears and doubled up.
The pain in her middle was the center of everything. It was a slashing, tearing ache at the point where everything met, between front and back, top and bottom, inside and out, flesh and thought. Everything that had happened before was concentrated in it. It was like all the abandonment and loneliness and misery and not understanding rolled up into a tight wad and shoved inside her so she couldn’t take a step without carrying them along.
She sat down on the tarmac.
After a while she heard someone half running, half stumbling along the lane ahead of her. The steps skidded to an abrupt stop.
“Marina?”
They started again, slipping and kicking through the rubbish. “Marina? Marina?”
Someone was in front of her, kneeling down. For an instant her inside fluttered with a feeling other than pain as she recognized a face older than unhappiness, someone from the time before. Then she remembered it wasn’t Gwen.
“What have they done to you? Marina? I heard shots—are you hurt? Marina, look at me.” It looked as if the woman was going to try to embrace her, but something must have held her back. “Did someone hurt you?”
Marina didn’t look at her. “Yes,” she said.
The woman’s face was running with rainwater. “I told you not to go out of my sight. What happened? Can you stand up?”
“Yes,” she said, and stood up, ignoring the hands offered to help her.
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