Farewell to the Liar

by D. K. Fields

Changing into dry trousers, Nicholas caught sight of his own feet but couldn’t bear to look for long. That they swung wildly from numb to stinging to throbbing heat was something he’d come to accept – when the feeling felt as distant as anything attached to him could be. But to see them, properly see them, would be to admit too much.

  They came out of their tents almost at the same time, wet clothes ready to hang, set in this routine that felt so old to them, but was really so new. That was perhaps one of the strangest things for Nicholas – how quickly he’d become used to this place, this way of living, this being ‘married’. Some of that had to be because of the work, but then work had been hard out on the Steppes. Drier, yes, and with less salt everywhere, but hard, nonetheless. Looking after a herd was just as demanding on a body as hauling shells out of Break Deep.

  ‘You’ve got that look about you again,’ Odette said.

  Nicholas blinked. He was standing in front of the tent line, his clothes in his hands, and she’d already finished with hers.

  ‘I was just thinking about… Never mind.’

  ‘I’m thinking about food,’ she said.

  ‘Another oyster stew – a story to make both the Glutton and my stomach sick.’

  ‘Do you remember beef?’

  ‘Don’t.’

  ‘How earthy, how thick it tasted.’

  ‘I remember having to chew food,’ he said.

  When their turn at the stew pot came, all thoughts of complaints or beef were gone, replaced by the hunger of a day’s work. They ate together, but alone, sitting at one end of the long table. In some ways it reminded Nicholas of how he first met Odette, at the children’s end of a wedding table. But then the murmur of conversation snatched between mouthfuls and the clunk of wooden spoons against wooden bowls gave the whole thing a softness, a calm. Other workers drifted to the pot, to the table and away again without the frenzy of a wedding.

  When Anna, the woman from the shucking table, walked past, she didn’t look at them. She didn’t sit near them, either, once she had her stew. Nicholas didn’t know where to look. He wasn’t accustomed to keeping secrets, or people confiding in him. Sneaking around just wasn’t worth it on the Steppes – there was always too much to do, always somewhere else to be moving on to, always another animal that needed tending. If there was a problem between people, they had it out at the fireside: words, fists and, on the rare occasion, knives. Simple.

  Odette appeared more comfortable though. She ate her stew and talked of coming spring rain as if it was just another day at the oyster farm. Perhaps it was all those stories she listened to, those stories she wanted to tell one day. Stories so often had secrets at the heart of them. When they finished eating, Odette herded him away from the table, a hand firmly on his shoulder. They weren’t to speak to Anna, or to look at her even. Not until after dark.

  ‘Play for me?’ Odette said as they neared the tents.

  Nicholas looked down at his hands – the cracks and split skin across his knuckles, the callouses all along his fingers. Playing his little herder’s pipe was uncomfortable these days, sometimes outright painful. But despite all that, he played when she asked.

  They each sat in the mouth of their own tent, and Nicholas played the long, slow herder melodies that were meant to fill the hours. Between notes, between breaths, he occasionally heard the roll and roar of Break Deep, or the sounds of the other farmworkers. The sun set, the moon rose, and on he played. He played until her hand stilled the pipe.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said.

  His hands throbbed and his mouth was dry, but he smiled up at her. ‘For a while, when I’m playing, it feels like I’m back there. Back on the Steppes.’

  ‘We carry it with us,’ she said, ‘no matter where we go.’

  ‘Do you miss it?’

  ‘Already?’

  ‘At all?’ he said.

  ‘A little. But I want to see more. I want to see it all.’

  ‘You want to see what Anna has to say.’

  She glanced towards the bunkhouse. Maybe there was a shadow there, deeper than the others. ‘There’s a story here, and I don’t like knowing just a part of it.’

  He stood slowly, feeling the aches of days and weeks in the shallows. ‘You can’t hear every story. Not even the Audience hear every story.’

  ‘No, but I will hear those right in front of me.’

  The lamps in the bunkhouse had been doused, but the night was still a bright one. Anna was sitting on the front of the porch, just a woman seeking small solace in the quiet of the night. But when she saw them, she stood and, without a word, started walking.

  As they followed her, Nicholas couldn’t help worrying if he should be worried. He had his shucking knife, but then everyone had a shucking knife. Anna led them away from the huts and shacks, and back towards the beach. But not by the usual paths. She was taking them further south, and higher, up to where the reedy dunes topped out as small cliffs. A fall from those cliffs wouldn’t necessarily prove fatal – there was a lot of sand and scrub below – but breaking a few bones would be the end of their time at the farm. Nicholas wondered just how he felt about that idea.

  But for all his wondering and worrying, when Anna stopped a ways from the cliff’s edge, there was no one else out there with them.

  ‘Can’t be too careful,’ Anna said. ‘Mr Samuels has more than two ears, if you catch my meaning.’

  ‘Is this really about bad oysters?’ Nicholas said.

  ‘For now,’ Anna said. She hugged herself against the night’s chill. ‘But you ain’t the first to notice.’

  ‘Notice that more oysters are going bad in the shell,’ Odette said.

  ‘That’s right. And not just bad. But smaller too. Make the mistake of saying something to Samuels, and he waves it away as just a rough season. But it’s not been just one season. We regulars know.’

  ‘What do you know?’

  ‘It won’t feel it, not to you newcomers,’ Anna said. ‘But the water’s warmer.’

  Nicholas sniffed. He hadn’t felt properly warm in weeks.

  ‘And warm water’s no good for oysters?’ Odette said. ‘What’s causing it?’

  ‘That’s why Mr Samuels doesn’t want folk talking about it. He’s scared, see.’

  ‘Scared of what?’

  ‘You want to know – you really want to know – walk along this cliff line for an hour or so. Then you’ll see.’

  ‘See what?’ Odette said, clearly losing her patience with all this secrecy. So much for the storyteller’s love of a good secret – maybe that was something Odette had yet to learn.

  ‘You’ll know,’ Anna said. ‘Not even you wool-headed Wayward can miss it.’

  ‘But people like Mr Samuels can deny it.’

  ‘They try.’

  Without so much as a goodbye, let alone a thank you, Odette marched off south along the clifftop. Nicholas tried to apologise, tried to say thanks, but Anna just shrugged.

  ‘No good will come of it. But she’s the curious kind, isn’t she? I knew she wouldn’t leave it alone.’

  He hurried to catch up with Odette, glad of the clear sky and the bright night.

  *

  They walked side by side, but said little. There was no talking Odette back from this, no suggesting they come out another night – or perhaps on one of the rare days they didn’t work the shore. She needed to see what Anna was talking about, and she needed to see it now – that much was clear. Why Odette felt this way was what occupied his thoughts. Why did she feel so strongly about this, about anything? He didn’t share those feelings at all. Was there something wrong with him, something deeper than the aches and pains of a day’s work? He understood good and bad things happened to people, and that those things made up the stories they told the Audience. There was no stopping those events, no controlling them; that was just the way of life – the way of Nicholas’s life, right up to when a woman he’d just met asked him to marry her. That was just another thing that happened, and a s
tory he’d told the Companion many times since. But he didn’t go out seeking such stories; he didn’t burn with the kind of curiosity that blazed in Odette – blazed bright enough for people like Anna to see. Where was his fire?

  ‘You don’t approve,’ Odette said. Her voice cut across the soft rustle of cloth and their dull footfalls like a pealing bell.

  ‘What?’ he said.

  ‘You’ve been huffing and puffing since we left Anna.’

  ‘I’m just tired.’

  ‘You were grinding your teeth too,’ she said.

  ‘I was?’ He opened and closed his mouth, checking his teeth were all present and accounted for. ‘I was just thinking how different we are. That’s all.’

  Evidently, she didn’t have anything to say to that. So they kept on walking. The cliff trail rose and fell, rolling like the hills of the Steppes. But that’s where the similarities ended. The ground underfoot was too soft, too sandy. The grass too long and reed-like. The air stank of salt, was just heavy with it, not like the fresh crispness of home. The constant noise of Break Deep could almost be the wind blowing across a rocky outcrop under which his family had camped for the night. Almost.

  He found it strange that, given how much he’d wanted to get away from his home and his family, he often thought of them now.

  ‘Is that smoke?’ she said.

  He looked up. There was definitely something in the air, but he couldn’t smell smoke. At least, not a smell he thought of as smoke.

  ‘It’s not… right,’ he said, not having the words to explain.

  ‘No. Something is burning. Just not wood.’

  The ‘smoke’ was billowing up and away from the cliffs in the distance. On a stormy night, which they’d had a few of since arriving at the farm, it could have been the spray from the waves. But that night was still, and Break Deep was as calm as it ever was. The smell grew stronger the closer they went. It not only stung the nostrils but also made him smack his lips to be rid of the taste.

  ‘It’s like a pot burning,’ he said, thinking back to the times he’d been in charge of cooking as a child.

  ‘It’s salt,’ she said. ‘Burning salt.’

  He shook his head. Not for the first time, Odette wasn’t speaking sense. There weren’t any villages or farms on this part of the coast. Maybe someone had set up some tents, other Wayward perhaps, and had left their cooking pot. But that was a lot of smoke-that-wasn’t-smoke.

  ‘Odette, look.’ He stopped, lifted his boot then pressed a toe firmly into the ground. Or tried to. The sandy soil was gone. They’d been so busy looking up at the sky, they hadn’t noticed the ground ahead of them. And now they were walking on it. Hard, rocky, the kind of ground you avoided with your herds. He knelt down and touched what his eyes were struggling to see in the night. It was solid, slick in some places, rough in others, with a grime that came away on his fingers. But there was something else too. He pressed his palm to the ground.

  ‘It’s warm,’ he said.

  She knelt beside him, not believing, or maybe she just wanted to feel it for herself. ‘Clear skies today,’ she said.

  ‘Summer sun, sure, but what we had today wouldn’t leave this kind of heat.’

  ‘Warm water, warm earth.’

  ‘Something burning on the air.’

  They stood and made their way slowly up the next rise. What greeted them there was the answer to one question, but the cause of so many more.

  *

  At first, Nicholas did not understand what he was seeing. But the overwhelming feeling was of something terribly, terribly wrong.

  He recognised the individual parts of what lay below, just in the same way he’d recognised Break Deep for what it was, even when seeing it for the first time. But he could not connect these pieces together into any story that made sense to him. He felt the heat. The smell of burning salt, of burning metal, was growing stronger and stronger.

  ‘Have you ever heard…?’ he said.

  She didn’t answer. She just kept staring straight at it.

  Straight at a river of Wit’s Blood flowing into the sea.

  The colour was impossible to believe. The brightest yellow, hard to look at directly, merging into pulsing oranges. Harsh, bitter shades of red that seemed to grumble and groan as they churned. All those colours moving in a way they never did, never should. Water moved that way, nothing else. Rivers and streams and, sometimes, even lakes on the Steppes moved that way – but all of them were greens or blues or complicated versions of the two.

  And there was more. Not just one stream of Blood, but others along the dip in the cliffs. Some flowed over the edge in broken waterfalls, thick and in bits like porridge from a spoon – searing hot globules that hissed when they met the water, and then were quickly gone. The only trace of them a billowing steam that buffeted the cliff side.

  ‘This isn’t supposed to be here,’ Odette said. A simple thing to say, but one that cut right through all his confusion and cluttered thoughts. ‘The Tear does not reach Break Deep.’

  ‘But here it is.’

  Perhaps it was the walk, perhaps it was weeks of hard work, or perhaps it was the strangeness of the scene that made him dizzy, but he had to sit down. He felt the warm rock through his trousers. Rock that days, weeks ago had flowed across this hillside and swallowed everything in its path. It had settled here, now cooled. For how long? How long could the Wit pour his Blood from his veins and into the sea?

  Odette remained standing. Her whole body appeared tense, as if she were fighting herself – fighting the desire to know more, to poke and to prod places that were not meant for the likes of them. Fighting the desire because she knew better. She was a Wayward, not a Torn. So instead, she could only watch, as they both did, mesmerised by the meandering, flowing stone. The beauty of it undeniable. The presence of it unbelievable.

  ‘This isn’t supposed to be here,’ Odette muttered to herself every so often, alongside more descriptive utterances. This, he’d realised, was her way of being sure of her memory. Of remembering the small and the big, anything that wasn’t itself a whole story but might be part of one.

  He didn’t know how long they stayed there, not talking, just staring. Time struggled to mean anything when faced with rivers of stone. Eventually, it was Odette who decided they’d watched long enough. She turned and started walking back to the oyster farm. He followed in her wake.

  She waited until they were a good distance from the Wit’s Blood before she said anything. But even before that, he could tell she wanted to – it was in the set of her shoulders, and how every time she took a breath, it was like she was readying the words. But they needed time. And they needed to be away from that place.

  ‘It won’t just be the oysters,’ she said, loud enough for him to hear. He came beside her. ‘It will be bigger, the changes bigger, I… I can’t even think about it properly.’

  Again, even when struggling to do so, she found words for what they had both been feeling. He marvelled at that, at her face in the moonlight, and that she had chosen him to share this with. Even if neither of them was certain just what it was they were sharing.

  Back at the farm, they made their way between the rough-shod wooden huts where Mr Samuels toiled with his papers, where the various workings of the farm were stored, and where the oysters were boxed up to send along the River Stave. And once they were finally beyond all these Seeder buildings, their story found a new way to amuse the Audience.

  Their tents had been turned out.

  Their scant belongings, just as much as two horses could carry between them, were scattered across the ground. Those horses were themselves still hitched to the post, calm as could be – that they were untouched was as clear a message to leave as the mess around them. Nicholas’s cloak was sprawled on the ground, its many pockets pulled out and emptied. Their saddlebags were open and screaming their own stories. In the full moonlight, everything looked the same – dark, colourless shapes among the scrub and the grass. Nichola
s almost didn’t recognise anything. Part of him understood what he was staring at, but these didn’t look like his things. His waterskin was tucked neatly inside his tent. His bindleleaf tin was in the fourth pocket, inside his cloak, for the rare times he wanted to taste the smoke. His working gloves had been hung on the line. But no one else slept in tents on the farm.

  He went to start picking things up, but Odette stopped him.

  ‘Nothing’s broken,’ she said quietly. She didn’t sound angry or upset. She could have been talking about a haul of oysters or the state of the stew. ‘Nothing.’

  She still had a hand on his arm. And the more he looked, the more he realised she was right. The tents themselves were fine, just as they left them, no slashes or tears along the hide; on the Steppes, that’s the first thing you’d do if you really wanted to hurt someone. Even the tents’ lines were undisturbed. Looking closer at their clothes and their cloaks, there didn’t seem to be any damage – not a stitch. Yes, things had been opened, yes things had been scattered across the ground, but seeing it now – as Odette did – it almost looked like it could have been done carefully. Deliberate and slow.

  Evidently deciding she’d seen enough, committed enough to memory, Odette picked her way through the mess. She stopped every so often to check a pocket or lining. She ducked inside her tent which had been cleared entirely. She came back to him, hefting two small purses in her hand.

  ‘Two left here, two missing, and two still on me,’ she said.

  ‘Left here?’ he said.

  ‘Had to be. Whoever did this would have found all my purses. But they only took two.’ She pursed her lips. ‘Took the smallest two, as well. What about yours?’

  Nicholas didn’t need to go searching among his belongings. He just patted his pocket to be sure.

  ‘You don’t hide your coins?’ she asked.

  ‘No, why would I?’

  She opened her mouth but clearly decided it wasn’t the time for that particular conversation.

  ‘So, what do we do now?’ he said.

  ‘It’s too late,’ she said. Then she started gathering up her things, not hurrying but not caring too much what went where. She just wanted it all off the ground and in her tent. He did the same. When they were finished, dawn was still some hours away. Nicholas was bone-tired, but sleep seemed unlikely.