by P. J. Sky
You don’t want to end up enslaved in the mine, thought Ari, that ain’t no life for anyone. That’s the life I had and the life I escaped, and that’s what we’re risking here.
Later, Ari lay in the darkness and listened to Keshia snooze in the other cot. She remembered when she’d first met Keshia. Ari had been new in Bo. Out in the desert she’d lost her camel, sucked down into a pit of sinking sand, and following this tragedy she’d spent several days dodging the troop movements of the Black Mulga, a mechanised curse that swept from village to village like locusts. Ari had been starving when, on the horizon, she’d spotted the smoky stain that was the city of Bo.
It wasn’t The City, not the shimmering city of Alice with its great towers of steel and glass. Bo was more like Alice’s dirty, flee-ridden cousin, but its gates were always open and everyone was welcome, including refugees like Keshia.
Keshia had already been in Bo some time and she was prone to getting herself into trouble. The first time Ari had come to her aid, she was being accused of stealing a loaf of bread. Though there was little excuse for stealing, hunger was a far better one than most, and Keshia was clearly hungry then. But Keshia had big ideas beyond her daily struggle to survive, and had begged, borrowed and stolen from the wrong people, landing herself a debt to the Jackrollers, a crime syndicate more powerful than the King of Bo, and whose power, rumour had it, stretched far into the wasteland. Of course, Ari could abandon her, but so far some impulse had stopped her doing so. If she did, who knew what would become of Keshia? She seemed too young to be alone on these dangerous streets. And besides, if Ari did abandon her, then she’d be alone too. That was all right out in the wasteland, when you could truly be alone, but nothing was lonelier than being alone amongst crowds of people.
Ari closed her eyes. In her dreams, she returned to the hot, dark tunnels of the coal mine. She heard the harsh clatter of pickaxes against the coal face and saw the pale, dead eyes of the miners. The thick coal dust clogged her throat.
“Look out, look out, wherever you are, else the Bone Pointer’ll get ya.”
Every day, another soul lost, sucked into the Bone Pointer. Two phosphorescent eyes glowing in the thick, hot darkness, like burning coals.
“I never told you what happened to your father…”
Gasping, Ari sat up in bed. The voice had been so clear and crisp and smooth, as if it had been spoken by someone in the room.
The velvet curtains fluttered with the breeze. In the darkness, Keshia snoozed.
Ari remembered the day her father had left. She remembered the way he’d tucked her long, dark hair behind her ear and the way he’d looked down on her with that funny half smile, as if his lips said one thing but his eyes said another. He was leaving her behind to fetch the medicine for her dying mother, the medicine her mother would never get.
“I’ll be back soon,” he’d said, “I promise, but your mother needs medicine.”
Ari had looked away, at the empty wall. That day, something had told her he shouldn’t leave. She couldn’t explain it, it was just a feeling in the pit of her stomach, a cold and growing emptiness.
Over the days that followed, when her father failed to return, and her mother’s life had drained away like the waters of a receding sea, the hut had grown increasingly hollow. It remained four walls and a roof, but it was no longer a home. On the morning her mother left her, her empty eyes staring at the ceiling, her pale skin so thin it was almost transparent, Ari had packed a bag and abandoned the hut and everything she knew of that old life. In the same way she’d forgotten that early life in the city, before her parents’ exile, she now forgot that happy life in the hut with her parents. She’d wandered into the wasteland, where life was reduced to a single instinct, and it was here the caravans of roving slavers had found her and dragged her to the mine. The Bone Pointer’s mine.
All over her body, Ari felt the sweat break through her pores. In the back of her mind, she still saw those eyes, like burning coals, smouldering in the darkness, in that place where the Bone Pointer had filled her every waking nightmare.
∆∆∆
Starla remembered orange lamps that glowed in the smoky atmosphere, and people in white robes moving around, murmuring and humming.
A woman leant over her.
“Shush, child, it’ll all be okay now. You’re among friends.”
The woman pressed something cool and damp to Starla’s forehead.
This isn’t the city. Starla wondered, am I back in Cooper? She remembered the explosion. The aircraft engine had been on fire and they were going down. Had it been an accident or something deliberate? The Big Fella’s men again? In her nostrils, she could still smell the burning oil. Starla tried to think but it made her head hurt.
“Where…?”
“Shush…” said the woman. “We’ll get to that later.”
Starla’s heavy eyelids closed and her mind drifted to the time before the crash. Somewhere there she was sure she’d find the answer.
In Cooper, Starla had met with the wise woman. She remembered the way the woman had spoken in a thin, rasping voice. The lines that marked her dark face had been so thick they looked like the bark of an old tree. Her sightless eyes had been of the purest white.
Starla had felt uneasy. The Big Fella’s men with their red armbands had stood in the doorway. She’d been assured that that first altercation with them had all been a hideous misunderstanding, and now she had the city guards for protection, and Janus, but still these men chilled her.
Be strong, she’d told herself. This is the way. You’re safe this time.
“We’ve brought grain,” said Starla. “And tools for sowing it, and a machine to help irrigate the land.”
Starla had that nagging feeling of embarrassment, that what she gave hadn’t been more, and that in the giving of it she somehow undermined who these people were. And Starla had thought of Ari; of her strength, of her pride, of things she rarely witnessed so clearly in the city.
“Yes, yes,” said the old woman. “Please, sit with me.”
Starla had lowered herself onto a small stool in front of the old woman. Despite her blindness, the woman had reached out and taken Starla’s hand. Her fingers were so dry; the skin so thin and fragile and cold, like crinkled paper.
“I want to help you,” said Starla. “All of you.”
“An’ ya ‘ave done,” said the old woman. “Ya ‘ave a kind soul, my dear.”
Starla shuddered. She remembered how her father always called her My Dear. The way that phrase always reinforced their mutual divide; that he was mayor first, of an isolated city, and father only a distant second. And the way his charity only stretched so far as those within the city walls, and often not even that. She remembered her father’s words; “Those that have the most, also have the most to lose.”
So, thought Starla, this woman has nothing to lose. She has everything to gain from me and nothing to lose.
The old woman spoke. “I sense a secret in ya. One ya don’t even know of ya’self.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, dear, I can’t see what’s on the outside, though rumour has it ya very beautiful, I don’t doubt that. But instead, I see what’s on the inside. An’ inside, ya full of questions. Nothing but questions. I sense you’ve been ‘ere before, to the outside I mean. Perhaps even to Cooper. An’ it taught ya something about yourself. An’ even when ya returned to the walled city, the wasteland stayed with ya. Ya can take the girl from the wasteland, but ya can never take the wasteland from the girl.” The old woman smiled. “Ya won’t be the first person to wander the wasteland in search of themselves. Here, there are secrets to be found for sure. If it’s answers ya seek, then it’s answers you’ll find. But I warn ya, in the end, everyone always finds what they go lookin’ for, an’ those answers won’t always bring you peace.”
The old woman closed her eyes, those glowing whites disappearing beneath folds of paper skin.
The old woman gasped
and her fingers squeezed tightly to Starla’s palms. Starla fought the urge to drag her hands free.
“I’m sorry child,” said the woman. “I sense a kind of prophesy. Not a real one, but one he gives himself.”
The old woman released Starla’s hands.
“Who gives himself?” asked Starla. “Are you talking about my father?”
The old woman swallowed; she no longer smiled. “The road ahead is long, child, but it may be the only way. I see darkness ahead, when the moon swallows the sun. There are madmen afoot; a fool an’ a joker playin’ toy soldiers.” It was like the old woman had lost her accent, for now she delivered her words quickly and precisely. “Be careful child, for I fear this is the only way. He’s set it in motion an’ we must let ‘im play it out.”
“Set what in motion? What has my father done?”
The old woman stood and flapped her arms. “Go my child, go now, I’m sorry child.” She called out; “Big fellas, take her back, take her back.”
“But the grain?”
“We ‘ave the grain, forget the grain. I thank ya child, but ya can save more this way, so many more. Remember child, when the moon swallows the sun; he’s set it in motion, now it has to be.”
The Big Fella’s men shoved Starla out of the little hut. The hot sun blazed down, white like the old woman’s sightless eyes. Janus and the other guards threw themselves between her and the men with the red armbands. As she returned to the waiting aircraft, the old woman’s words ran through her mind.
When the moon swallows the sun.
Chapter 5
When morning came, Kim and the syndicate’s smartly suited enforcers collected Ari and Keshia and escorted them back out, into the quiet avenues of the rich suburbs, and through the city’s western gate.
Kim leant in to Ari but Keshia could just catch the words. “So ya decided to take the job?”
Ari didn’t answer.
“Well, there’s always time to change ya mind.”
Kim looked behind at Keshia and his grin formed a crooked, downwards triangle that exposed his gold tooth.
Beyond the walls, they passed the refugee tents and shanties. Wood smoke and the stench of rotten meat rolled over the hot mass of people. They passed the volunteers handing out, from rusty barrels, ladlefuls of the lice-ridden grain which, to Keshia, had always felt like such a last resort. The people waited with their empty cups, gaunt, with that far away stare. Keshia was always surprised by how many of them there were beyond the gates, and seeing them here gave her the uncomfortable feeling that perhaps she’d abandoned them. She had walked in with them from the war-torn wasteland. As she looked at them now, she knew these people were desperate, ready to cling on to the little hope offered by the grain, and yet they’d not ventured into the city. Cataclysmic events, first the famine and then the war, had robbed them of everything, and yet they waited here, on their knees by their transient tents and shanties, as if unable to abandon their old lives and commit entirely to the possibilities the city offered.
A lump formed in Keshia’s throat. She wasn’t starving; she was hungry and in debt to the syndicate, but she wasn’t as hungry as she’d been in the final months at the orphanage, before the Black Mulga had stormed the convent.
In those final months, the wells had dried up and the crops in the orphanage gardens had withered and died. And then came the crows; those harbingers of what was to come. The great black birds came circling overhead, squawking and diving and swooping back into the air.
Keshia later wondered, had they come to warn us? Or had they known what was coming and were just waiting to pick clean the bones of the dead?
Local people had started to disappear. Some, perhaps, had indeed seen the crows as a premonition of what was to come and had begun the journey to Bo all the sooner. Keshia wasn’t really sure, but when the final attack came there hadn’t been many of them left.
Marie and Jericho, her friends in the orphanage, had been eager to stay on, but Keshia had felt the tug towards Bo. The convent had seemed small and the nuns and the mother superior had seemed petty. After the attack, no one else seemed to be standing. The mother superior lay dead in the chapel, face down in a pool of her own blood. The dormitory had been on fire. When soldiers began moving through the dusty streets, Keshia’s sole instinct was to run. She ran from the soldiers, the orphanage, the mother superior, the crows, and all the things that had formed her small, confined life in the orphanage. She ran in search of something to fill that empty space inside her that all orphans seemed to have and that no one aspect of her life so far could fill. To Keshia, the other refugees seemed to be looking back, while she only looked forwards.
Even before they’d left the shanty world of the refugee camps, Keshia caught sight of the huge hot air balloon glinting in the sun like a giant, inverted pear. Dead straight mooring lines strained against their stakes and the bulging balloon already looked ready to escape its tether with the ground. It was like nothing Keshia had ever seen before. It loomed above them; a vast, bulbous behemoth ready to float away.
At the balloon’s base, people in shawls loaded sacks and other supplies from camels onto what appeared to be a large deck. A man hobbled about the deck, pointing his finger this way or that. On all four sides of the deck, at floor level, stretched a large awning of brown canvas like a canopy. Beneath the deck, suspended just above the ground, a collection of canisters and pipes appeared to form some kind of machine. In contrast with the bright, silver balloon, the decking with its awnings and the machine underneath, half hidden in shadow, looked old and dirty and like it might be in danger of falling apart at any moment.
“He expects us to get on that?” said Ari.
Kim grinned. “Well, if ya too scared, ya can always change ya mind and stay ‘ere.”
“I ain’t scared,” said Ari, “I just ain’t never been on nothin’ like that before.”
Keshia let her eyes follow the smooth curves of the balloon upwards, all the way to its swollen peak, so high it left her feeling giddy. The hot air bulged between the taut lines. The sunshine danced across the silver surface and bounced from curve to curve. The balloon felt like magic, like an impossible machine.
The suited enforcers beckoned her forwards and before she knew what she was doing, her feet were on the rungs of a metal ladder and she was climbing up, over the canopy, and down onto the metal deck.
And old man grinned at her. “Ya first time, is it?”
Keshia nodded.
The old man’s eyes sparkled. “Nothin’ like it in all the world. An’ don’t ya worry ‘bout nothin’, we’ll be right.
Ari stumbled onto the deck beside her, her grey eyes wide and wary. They darted around this new space like a cat exploring some new room for the first time.
Kim’s face appeared at the stairs. “Now you two just remember who ya workin’ for, don’t matter how far ya go, the syndicate’ll find ya. So ya do the job an’ ya get on home an’ no one ‘as to get hurt.” Kim grinned. He looked at the old man. “Look after ‘em Cap’in, but I reckon with these two, they’ll be lookin’ after you.”
“Hey, Kim,” said Ari. “Ya didn’t wanna join us on the road to Hell?”
Kim shook his head. “Not a chance. I’ll be seein’ ya, if ya survive, that is.”
Once Kim had disappeared back down the ladder, Keshia crawled back up the canvas awning and peered over the side. Kim had his back to the balloon and was speaking with two of his enforcers. Kim waved to the men by the mooring lines, they nodded back, picked up axes and hacked away the lines. One by one, the lines cracked and fell away. As if by magic, the silent balloon began to rise.
Keshia’s heart beat faster; it was almost too much to believe that they were really taking flight. In the warm air, the deck rocked gently and Keshia gripped hold of the edge of the awning. She recalled the words of the priest in her convent.
“Who are those who fly like the clouds, like doves to their shelters?”
He’ll probably b
e dead now, she thought. And here we are, flying to the shelter of the heavens, there to cross the wasteland and the war.
The balloon rose higher. Below, Kim and the other Jackrollers now looked like insects crawling around a patch of red dust. Beyond were the refugee camps; a sea of little brown tents and shanties, partially hidden under clouds of grey wood smoke. Tracks carved through the tents, like termite trails, lined with dark figures hidden under shawls and camels tethered together in chains.
If heaven is above us, do we fly there now, she wondered? How high are the clouds? How high are the stars?
The balloon moved eastwards, back towards the city walls, and Keshia shuddered when she spotted the line of hooded thieves strung up by their necks outside the city walls. Like ragged banners, the figures swung gently in the breeze, a permanent warning of the rough justice of the city guard.
Keshia looked away from the figures and pushed the threat from her mind. As the balloon climbed higher and passed over the city walls, Keshia could see over the red rooftops of the buildings to where the big screen was playing the moving pictures; spacecraft of another age swooped through a field of twinkling stars.
Will we fly through the stars like they did in the past?
People surged like human rivers between the dusty rooftops and barren gardens. Washing billowed in the wind. The rickety monorail worked its way along the tracks above the streets, like a giant mechanical snake that creaked and sparked as it slithered from rooftop to rooftop. There were the squares, with monoliths like prickly junk with hooded figures kneeling before them. And deep in the centre of everything was the King’s palace; a walled compound with turrets and ancient high walls beyond which the tops of palm trees emerged, their green plumage sagging in the endless sun.
All too quickly, the balloon passed over the eastern side of the city walls as if the city was really nothing. Passed over by the balloon, Keshia’s home these past months felt small and insignificant. Beyond were more tents and shanties, and the lines of refugees that poured into the city, like ants following a trail, some with only the clothes they wore, while others pulled makeshift carts.
