by Mandy Hager
They could just see glimpses of the big ruined complex when the first fat drops fell from the sky and pocked the dusty track, stirring up the air with the tang of rain on dirt. The tree-cover counted for little as the first drops gave way to a furious deluge that instantly transformed the track into a muddy stream. They ran now, their feet flicking the mud up around their legs.
By the time they reached the plateau all four were soaked, and still the rain pelted down. It wasn't like the squally winter rain that sometimes deluged Onewēre. It was tepid and offered little relief from the rank humidity that thickened the air and made every inhaled breath a chore. In Maryam it had brought on a headache that jarred with each step.
“I say we take shelter in the big building,” she called to the others as they made their way through the ruins. She was desperate to stop.
No one bothered to answer her. But the boys veered off their direct route towards the stone gateway that led down to the beach and headed, instead, for the parapeted building at the heart of the complex. They huddled in its doorway and waited for Maryam and Ruth to catch them up. Inside, a wide entrance hall was flanked by the shattered stairwells of the two frontal towers, its once smooth tiled floor littered with the accumulated debris of wind and time: crumbling stone, dried leaves and dirt, stinking mounds of bird droppings and feathers. A host of parasitic plants sprouted from fractures in the floor and walls, as if they'd pushed up through the earth to rightfully reclaim what once was theirs—their florid display at odds with the dull brown stone of the structure that supported them. Rain leaked in through the cracks to form puddles that snaked through the filthy flagstones in dusty streams.
Rows of thick stone pillars formed the backbone of the building. The two most elaborately carved of them stood at the entrance to a gloomy room beyond the hall. Maryam, Joseph, Lazarus and Ruth edged towards it in silence. Something about the decayed majesty of the building and the stifling gloom set their nerves on edge. Maryam's head pounded in time with her heart as they stepped over the threshold and tried to take in the dimensions of the room.
It was an enormous space, almost as big as the atrium of the Holy City, Star of the Sea. The flagstones had been laid in symmetrical patterns, and a pathway of darker stone drew them in towards the raised dais at the far end.
There, in the dull half-light, a huge stone figure looked down upon them. He sat cross-legged on the dais—the same calm-faced man Maryam had seen depicted on the carved reliefs outside. His hands, lying open on his knees, were spread as though to beckon the four unexpected guests; a secret smile seemed to hover on his pronounced lips. His eyes were lowered modestly; his chipped stonework face was streaked with dark trails of rain as if he wept.
“Oh Lord in Heaven!” Ruth cried out. She alone had stopped staring up at the figure, and was clutching Maryam's arm so tightly Maryam could feel her pulse fighting against Ruth's panicked grip. Ruth was pointing a shaky hand at the ground beneath the statue's broad bare feet.
At first Maryam was not sure what she was looking at. Some kind of tangled mass: a pile of sticks, branches and smooth rounded stones.
Lazarus released a long slow whistle. “Meet the former people of Marawa Island,” he said, his voice barely a whisper above the orchestra of rain.
“People?” Yet, even as Maryam spoke, her brain began to make sense of what lay before her. This was not the wind-blown refuse of the jungle—these were bones. Hundreds of them, heaped below the dais and spreading out across the floor to either side. She shook her head, hoping her eyes were playing tricks on her, but when she'd blinked again there was no doubting it: the pile of bones was real.
She looked at Ruth beside her, and they held each other's gaze. Then Ruth began to speak. “And it shall be, if thou forget the Lord thy God, and walk after other gods, and serve them, worship them, I testify against you this day that you shall surely perish.”
Her words struck to the core of Maryam's doubt. Every time she turned her back on the Apostles’ teaching, it was as though the Lord sent forth new evidence that His words were real. She brushed Ruth's hand from her arm, so overwhelmed by the dark shadow this new test cast on her spirit she had to escape her friend's needy grasp. She backed from the room, unable to tear her eyes from the spectre of the island's dead: the bleached brittle bones of men and women, old and young, heaped together as if they'd died in one desperate moment, trapped in time. Long leg bones, disconnected at their knobbly joints. Spidery fingers pointing into space. Whole networks of collapsed ribs and twisted tracks of spines. Slick rounded skulls with their hollow eyes and empty nose-holes. And, most heartwrenching of all, tiny disjointed bundles of bone held tightly in a mother's dying embrace.
And when Judah came toward the watch tower in the wilderness, they looked unto the multitude, and, behold, they were dead bodies fallen to the earth, and none escaped.
The Holy Book's words tolled in Maryam's head as she turned and fled the building. Up until this moment she'd still held to the faint hope that somewhere on the island other people lived to welcome them to this new home. It did not seem possible that she and her two dear friends had fought so hard to reach this place—escaped the cruel clutches of Father Joshua and risked their lives out on the open sea—only to find the island as deserted and bleak as the desolation that now possessed her heart.
Great painful sobs rose up from the pit of her stomach and broke free. It was so unfair—so unfair—that all the hopes she'd held for the future now lay as dead as those poor islanders in their crumbling tomb. She could not stop the tears that seemed to draw from every cell of her body to leave her as depleted as when the Mothers had drained her of her blood.
A hand roughly shook her shoulder and she startled to see Joseph's wary face above her. He looked drained too, his skin grey and unhealthy beneath the veil of rain. “Come inside,” he said. “We've found a corner that's dry and free of bones.”
She could not bear to respond, seeing the hurt and confusion behind his eyes as further proof of the total failure of her dreams. Instead, she slumped her head into her hands, willing him just to leave her to digest the truth. All is lost.
Joseph, however, did not comply. He reached down and firmly grasped her by the arm, coughing as he hauled her up with one impatient jerk. He towed her back across the compound, saying nothing until he pushed her, none too gently, beneath the shelter of a crumbling tiled roof that slumped between two chipped columns of weathered stone.
He took her by the shoulders then, forcing her to meet his gaze. There was a graze just below his right eye, fresh from his collision with Lazarus, its edges blue and puffy where rainwater had soaked into the broken skin. For a moment neither of them spoke, Maryam dizzy from the effort of holding his stare while knowing how he hated her—that she'd lost his love. Her heart drummed out its pain, reverberating loudly inside her head.
Finally she drew in a deep breath. She had to tell him now, while they were alone, what had caused her to abandon him. “I'm sorry. I—”
“I'm sorry,” Joseph echoed. He released her shoulders and took one of her hands in his own, his words tumbling out now as she listened, open-mouthed. “I never should have touched you,” he said. “It was just you looked so beautiful. I feel terrible—and know how much I shamed you—frightened you—I couldn't face you this morning, after what I'd nearly done. I feel so ashamed. So bad—”
“Stop!” Maryam raised her free hand and pressed her fingers to his lips to silence him. He'd run because he thought he'd hurt her? Done her wrong? “It wasn't that at all,” she said, a great wave of relief welling up inside her as she realised that perhaps he didn't hate her after all. “Lazarus was watching us. When I saw him there I panicked—that's why I ran.”
“He was watching?” Joseph shook his head slowly as though processing what she had said. Then a smile dawned in his eyes. “You don't hate me?”
Relieved laughter burst from her. “You don't hate me?”
He did not answer her, just swept her
up into his arms and held her tight. She nestled her head into the crook of his neck as she fought back the urge to cry again. Then he kissed her sopping hair and she raised her face to him, her ear catching in his rain-soaked collar and dragging the fabric away from his skin. As her gaze travelled up his neck towards his lips, something purple registered at the very corner of her vision. She pulled back, suddenly nauseous, and yanked the wet shirt away from his neck. Oh Lord. There, in the recess above his collarbone, the ugly telltale marks of Te Matee Iai mottled his skin.
“No!” The word burst from her lips with such force she saw him flinch.
He released her; his arms hung like dead fish at his sides as he tried to work out why her focus was fixed in such horror on his skin. Then the light faded from his eyes. His voice grew flat. “The marks are back?”
She nodded, hating that she had to tell him. She reached up and cupped his face, pressing her lips to his. At first he did not respond, his lips tight and resistant, but gradually the steady pressure of her own lips softened him, and he drew her hungrily back into his embrace. It was almost brutal in its intensity—not a kiss of passion, but fraught with desperation and fear. Then the rhythm of his breathing changed, and he pushed her away as a ragged cough exploded from his chest.
He was consumed by it, doubled over, hands on knees, trying to bring the choking spasm under control as Maryam frantically rubbed his back. She could feel the way his spine jutted out beneath his skin, and the straining of his muscles as the cough ran on, and saw now that the purple mottling had spread around his neck, tucked just below his hairline too. She felt sick and light-headed. Lazarus was right.
“We can fight this,” she declared as soon as the fit was over and he'd regained his breath. “My blood—”
“Don't speak of it,” he snapped. “You must not risk your life for mine.”
“But I don't care.”
“Well, I do—and we will not have this conversation ever again.” The severity of his tone left no room for further argument.
As she churned over every possible retort, the sudden return of the birds’ clamour distracted her. The rain had stopped as quickly and dramatically as it had started, and the birds once more thronged above. Already the sky was breaking through with blue, the rain-clouds rolling off towards the east as steam rose from the sunlit ground. And now Ruth and Lazarus were walking towards them, and although there was nothing accusing in Ruth's expression, Maryam felt a tug of guilt at having left her friend alone with him. Worse, she didn't want to face Lazarus at this awful moment: her face flushed hot as she imagined how he'd rub it in now that his fears for Joseph had been proved right.
“So you found her,” Lazarus said, shooting Maryam a dismissive look. He jerked his head up at the sky. “While the weather's clear let's get back to the boat and have something decent to eat, then we can talk.”
“How can you think of eating now we know this island is forsaken by the Lord?” Ruth said.
“Easy,” Lazarus replied. “For a start my stomach doesn't care so long as it's been fed. And, secondly, whatever happened here was long ago—the only thing that matters now is what we decide to do next.”
“We?” Maryam said. “Since when did you have any say in what we do? And since when did you become our self-appointed leader?” He may've been right about Joseph, but it didn't give him the right to seize control.
“Since you started acting like such a flake.”
“A what? Look, just because you have a love affair with yourself it doesn't give you the right to judge how others act.”
“It does if you're clearly—”
“Oh, spare me!” Joseph threw up his hands in frustration and marched off towards the stairway that led back down to the beach. “Come on.”
For a moment the other three just watched him stalk away, each of them seemingly locked up in their own dark thoughts. But as Joseph reached the entranceway to the stairs he was wracked by another bout of coughing, and he stopped to support himself against the massive gateway of sectioned stone. Maryam found her eyes drawn to Lazarus, who scrutinised her right back. Here we go. Despite her dislike of him, and her certainty he'd take the revelation out on her, she found herself pointing to her collarbone and neck and shaking her head. He's Joseph's cousin, after all. He has to know.
He blinked, and blinked again, as the meaning of her charade struck him full force. His shoulders slumped and he let loose a drawn-out sigh. “So it begins,” he murmured.
Maryam did not know how to answer him, rattled by his lack of fight. Instead, she jogged after Joseph, who had recovered his breath enough to descend the stairs. Whatever happened now, she would not let him out of her sights. He needed her, she reasoned, almost as much as she needed him.
It was impossible to find firm footing on the boggy ground, and all four of them slipped and fell on the tortuous downhill track. They were mud-coated and bruised when they finally reached flat land again and waded through the remnants of the overgrown village near the beach.
Joseph barely talked, answering Maryam's concerned questions with only a brief word or two as he struggled to keep his coughing under control. It seemed that now these spasms had started, they would not relent. He moved ever more slowly as the last quarter hour of the trek stretched out to double that and then some more. By the time they broke through the trees at the border of the beach he looked completely defeated. He didn't bother washing off the crusted mud, just climbed aboard the beached boat and collapsed on the deck with a wheezy groan.
Maryam clambered after him. She poured him a cup of water and helped prop him up a little so he could drink. His colour was terrible, so pale she could see the veins beneath his skin, and on his chest and neck she could see blotches of red forming next to the purple mottling. It frightened her, knowing full well that by the time the mottling and the breathing problems appeared the plague's victims were already caught fast in its grip. Without a transfusion of blood, there was no doubt he would die.
Lazarus climbed aboard and squatted down next to Joseph. “Come on, cousin, let me take you down to the sea to wash off this mud.”
Joseph barely raised his head. “It doesn't matter. I'm fine.”
“I think Lazarus is right,” Maryam said to him, laying aside her defensive armour for now, for Joseph's sake. “You can't risk an infection from those wounds.” She tucked her hand under his armpit to help him up, and glanced over at Lazarus to indicate that he should do the same.
Between them they supported Joseph down to the sea. She had a terrible sense of history repeating itself as she recalled the night her friend Sarah had died. Only then it was Joseph who'd helped her answer Sarah's dying wish to escape the confines of the Holy City to breathe fresh air. That was the night Maryam had first fully understood that she too would die if she remained in the Holy City. The Apostles had drained Sarah of so much blood her body could not sustain itself, and yet they truly did not care—there was always another docile Sister to replace her, to be bled to death.
Now they walked Joseph out into the sea until the water met their thighs. While Lazarus supported Joseph in his arms, floating him on the warm tide, Maryam gently washed him clean, running her hands along his thin arms and legs to rinse away the mud. His skin felt burning hot despite the cooling effects of the water, and she tried to freshen his face, scooping up water in her palm to carefully trickle it across his forehead before sliding her hands down his cheeks to wipe away the grime and further flush out the graze.
She felt as though she was trapped inside the worst of dreams. Only last night they had embraced in the water here, desire the only thief of breath. But now Joseph was struggling for every lungful, his rib bones straining up against his skin as he fought for air. She did not know why the symptoms of Te Matee Iai were thus: the deep ugly blotches, the fight for breath, the terrible coughing and weakness, the rapid decline to death as every part of the body seemed to scream with pain—but it was something passed down from the Tribulation, tha
t much she knew.
Old Hushai had told her this during one of the long nights before her escape. How the Tribulation had caused blindness, terrible weeping sores, babies born grossly deformed. All this, and then Te Matee Iai, which could consume whole families, generation after generation, yet did not appear to be passed by contact or through the air. It was as if Te Matee Iai was some terrible taimonio—a demon—who could possess a man's body at his birth and one day decide to rapidly and painfully bring on his death. That the Sisters’ blood somehow halted this taimonio in his tracks made no sense to her, and yet it did. She could only suppose that whatever poison the taimonio slowly leaked into its victim's body was diluted by the transfusion of a Sister's blood.
Once again that was Joseph's only hope. She somehow had to convince him to back down and let her help.
Joseph started coughing, the spasms so fierce that Lazarus lost his grip on him and Joseph slipped under the water. Maryam lunged for him as Lazarus dragged him back to his feet. He was choking and spitting out sea water, mucus flowing freely from his nose. When the spasms finally stopped, he shook off Lazarus's hands and rinsed his face.
“No need to drown me, cousin,” he said, forcing a faint smile. “My time will come soon enough.”
“Don't say that!” Maryam pleaded. “You've just overdone it today. Come now and rest while we make you something to eat.” She ducked down quickly into the water to wipe away the mud and grime from her own body before trailing the two boys back to the boat.
Ruth had relit the fire and dragged the sleeping mats outside, piling them one on top of the other clear of the still-dripping trees. Now she held out a dry shirt and pants. “Why don't you put these on and rest here,” she called to Joseph as the group approached. The girls turned their backs as Lazarus helped him change out of his wet clothing. Then Joseph lay back on the sleeping mats and closed his eyes. No one spoke, yet they all seemed instinctively to understand their roles.
