by Jeff Kamen
Moth stirred slightly, looking up in the hope that Lütt-Ebbins might linger there, encourage him with a look, perhaps even offer to guide him, help him on in some way; but then the door clicked shut and the moment to connect with him had gone.
He slumped back in his seat, sighing. Feeling like a human vacuum, a person recently vacated. ‘Help me,’ he whispered to the screen, and with his clap-claps hanging at his side, he slumped down further, staring glassily at nothing.
Chapter 7 — Talking With the Versteckts
‘You thought he was trying to signal to you. Send a message. Is that right?’
‘That’s what I thought, yes. I was certain.’
The tall man nodded. ‘Why were you so sure? I mean, surely there could’ve been any number of reasons we were sending them. We sent them up all year round.’
‘This was different. It was only three times a year. On my birthday, on Sandor’s, and on … on our anniversary.’
‘Extraordinary. Was it always like this?’
‘Always. Since I could walk, really.’
‘Right, and so ... you assumed it was Klaus from that. That it was his way of letting you know he was returning.’
‘That’s what I thought. It ... it seems stupid now.’
‘No, not stupid at all. How were you to know otherwise?’
She said nothing. The two Versteckts seemed to smile at her.
‘I’ve got a question,’ the man added. ‘Did you never think to go down and see him? To go to the turret?’
‘No. Never. It was forbidden.’
‘Who forbid it?’
‘Our elders.’
‘Had it always been that way?’
‘Yes. To my recollection. But Staš, I don’t think he agreed. Whenever anyone got caught going to the other side, he gave me the impression he wasn’t angry, not really. I think he wanted to make contact. I think he thought we could learn from you.’
‘Did he know about Klaus?’
‘He knew, yes, although he never met him. His sister met him a couple of times. That was Annie, my guardian.’
‘Interesting. I was thinking … sorry, go on, Nina.’
‘I was going to check, do you mind me taking notes?’
‘I don’t mind.’
‘Can we go back a second, then? I’ve got Staš.’
‘He’s the headman. Annie … his sister.’
‘Sandor?’
‘He ... we were together.’
‘Your husband?’
‘No, we weren’t married.’
‘I see. Children?’
Jaala looked up. The pale woman was sat poised with a pen.
‘No.’
‘Just one thing,’ the man said, tilting his long head slightly. ‘You say in spite of warnings, people still went to the northern side? To observe us, I mean. Did it happen often?’
‘Not often. It was mainly kids. You know, dares and things.’
‘I have to say we never spotted them. Not once, not even on recordings. And we were operational more than a decade. Can I ask why you weren’t allowed?’
She nodded.
‘So, what was it? Was it fear? Fear of our science?’
‘Not that, no. It’s because ... because the Naagli say if something can’t breathe the air, it can’t have a soul. That it’s only half made. In want of a good influence, or spirit.’
‘Half made?’
‘That’s what we believe.’
The man smiled thinly. ‘Well. Interesting. And you say we’re the Hidden Ones, but … you must have been pretty good at hiding, too.’
‘Our children are taught how to hunt. You learn to be careful, that’s all.’
‘Right, sure. So when was the last time you saw the balloons?’
‘Just before autumn. Last year.’
‘When exactly?’
‘Ninth moon.’
‘Before things started to happen.’
‘Before the oil came, yes. Before then.’
This time they both made notes. Then the man looked up. ‘You mentioned teaching before. What did you teach?’
‘A reading class.’
‘I’d like to hear more about that. If you’re feeling up to it?’
‘Yes. That’s okay.’ She placed her hands on her lap. Still. Tranquilised. Calm. ‘What do you want to know?’
Chapter 8 — Figure of Dread
Now he falling sick. Something wrong with his dreams.
His clap-claps dance the keys, he hack the lists, the flashing fields and numbers; he sets the balloons. He swings the bag and runs out pow-powing the guards and booms the roof off. He climbs out through the smoke and goes running, running. The joy of it, the joy, his bouncy-bounces crossing the silky ash, the fires behind him dimming. And then, ahead in the darkness, a large figure that shifts and stirs. That turns its great head towards him, the face hidden by wraps the way a corpse is wrapped. A face like a crater in the blackness, funnelling in the stars. The warm night of dust and hope becoming icy and treacherous, filled with a dreadful cold despair. He tries to stop running, to throw himself aside, but his bouncy-bounces insist on taking him. His arms flail and he screams like a child in panic, but what he has done cannot be undone and the wrapped figure is reaching out, beckoning; waiting to make use of him ...
Weeks become months and the dreams will not go. If anything they worsen, become corrosive. In them, whenever he looks at his screen, a cloaked shape appears, materialising at each point of the compass; a shape which is present no matter the direction he targets the lens. The figure a rearing presence that seems to freeze oddly the moment he captures it on a recording. A dark shape gazing into him. Its eyes in the dark like chiselled glass, staring through the turret’s cameras.
Moaning in his sleep, he tries to turn the lens away, but the figure always appears, sometimes in the foreground, sometimes further away. Waiting for him, unswerving nemesis. Staring unblinkingly, right into the lens. Like the old woman in his father’s recording.
Before she died.
Chapter 9 — Uncertain Teacher
Roaming the marketplace, Jaala rounds up the children as they help their parents with morning chores or eat breakfast in the shaded square. The covers are off the stalls, and looming over them are high cliffs shot with sprays of clawing foliage. When the children are ready she leads them through the huts, and before long the market is behind them and they are climbing the path that leads up to the promontory.
A steep curving climb, then the path gives out onto a flat expanse of rock where the majority of public ceremonies take place. Beyond it the eastern slopes range craggily. It is windy as ever up here and they wrap themselves tight. Leading the group forward, her eyes cut to the Gate, the tall hex of wooden beams planted at the cliff base. Always so sombre, funereal, for all its pennants, its jangling vines of bells. Memories stir with the restless metal noise and as always the old lady is at the heart of the discordance ...
Soon they come to a rutted mudtrack leading up to the woods. Heavy stakes have been driven into the ground to keep carts from slipping, and some lie flattened and ropeworn. They climb at a good pace and enter a clearing where fellsmen have been at work. They pass the tarps and benches of a makeshift camp, the yellow woodchips scattered about like confetti. A fire’s ruin lies within a ring of charred stones; an old lumbercart stands nearby, hung with tools and a blanket. There is no sign of anyone about, nor any sound from the interior. Just a steady breathing, a dry shivering of branches. The children’s voices fall, some looking to her as if for guidance. ‘Keep up,’ she says, striding on, and they leave the clearing and take an old goat trail that winds up through the eastern side of the woods, where the long ascent to the uplands begins. She takes them out along a shelf in single file, all holding hands. Looking out at that teetering sky, they see white clouds scurrying like rags across an eternity of blue.
~O~
Camped in the dry grass of a clearing they spread their coats and settle. A place she knows wel
l, far from the eyes and gossip of the settlement, far from intrusion.
Opening her knapsack, she explains what they’ll be doing that day. The second class she’s been allowed to take, composed mostly of younger children. She is not sure how concerned their parents are that they are studying, but it means the trust is there, that in some way things are improving. Going from one child to the next, she observes them as they put their first words together, creating letters from sticks, from chalk scratchings on rough slate boards. She tells them of the box they will make from their words one day, a box with a voice in it; the voice of the world. The voice of every tree and bird and hill, all their stories and memories and dreams.
The morning wears on. The children are too deeply immersed to notice her calming herself, gently rubbing her temples. Feeling an uncertain stillness there, within her and all around; an odd and growing depth to things. A sense that something is following them, entering the day in whispers. Something unwanted coming, shadows moving in the firs, a herald of eerie jubilees sounding horn on horn, unnoticed by others. Voices distracting her, calling her away.
She looks to the ice-capped mountains to the south and lets her eyes rest on them, feeling out the shapes of the outer world. Assured by the real; nothing at hand to threaten her. Nothing to place her in the past and leave her stranded. Nothing to bring her harm.
Then one of the children asks what she is doing. She turns back hesitantly. ‘I was just thinking,’ she says.
The girl asks what about. She considers this a moment, then with the class watching, says, ‘If you look out now, all you can see is dirt and ash. A wilderness. But Staš has a book that says there was a lake there once.’
The children shift round to look. ‘Velden,’ says one.
‘No, that’s something else.’
‘A dead place, my dad says.’
‘Well, it may be. The point is, the book tells us the lake filled almost all the land out there. Hard to imagine, isn’t it?’
A few pass comment on this, and before the conversation digresses, she adds, ‘The point is, if none of us could read, we wouldn’t know anything about it. All the past would be forgotten, like it never happened.’
‘Can we see it, Miss?’
‘See what?’
‘Staš’s book.’
She makes a doubtful face. ‘It’s possible. I could ask. The problem is, the writing’s in the old style. It’ll be very hard to read. Maybe when you’re older.’
The children seem disheartened.
‘But I’m sure you will read it. All of you. You’ll just have to practise a little every day. And when you do get to read it, just think — you’ll have the people who wrote it speaking to you. Like their voices are still in the pages.’
A boy peers at her through his hair. ‘You mean like a spirit, Miss?’
‘Like a spirit. And don’t forget, I’m sure that even for them, it was hard to learn their letters. Even for me it was.’
‘Miss? How long ago was it a lake?’
She looks out again, shielding her eyes. Within the flickers a glimpse of a flaking roadsign. Dry sand blowing, dim figures running through the smoke.
Some said a thousand years ago. Some said twice that. Some said more.
‘A long time ago,’ she says quietly.
~O~
A week goes by. Warm days and lonely nights, the summer falling from its zenith in one long smoky dusk and her head throbbing as it always does this time of year, her thoughts already turning to autumn.
When not with her pupils, she spends most of her time working with Anya, helping her old friend and guardian to prepare the medicines she uses in her role as tribe midwife and nurse. They sit blending wraps of herbs, sieving powders and weighing them in the pans of a scale; mixing tonics and tinctures. She focuses hard and tries to do what is right for herself, in every way she can; but now and then finds herself straying.
Tall walker in the night, her motives unsure. In darkness looking down at the hunter camp, in hope of a glimpse of him. Praying that sooner or later she will run into him, yet living in dread of it.
~O~
She is leaving the wash area one afternoon, feeling guilty from loitering, when Anya calls to her, the redhead hurrying uphill.
When they meet, Anya explains that a woman from the Maga camp is having difficulties in labour, that she is on her way home to fetch something to stop the bleeding.
Jaala shifts her grip on a basket of damp laundry. ‘Let me help,’ she says. ‘I’ll leave this at yours.’
‘No, I’ll be fine. You go on.’
‘I’ve got time, honestly. I’ll go with you.’
‘No, there’s no need. It’s not that bad.’
‘That’s not what you said.’
‘Jaala, it’s not … just leave it. I’d better go.’
She catches a look on Anya’s face she has seen too often before. ‘You mean she thinks I’d curse the baby. Don’t you.’
Anya wipes her freckled brow on her shirt. ‘Listen, if she says anything like that, I’ll curse it myself. Erna’s soft in the head. She doesn’t really know what she’s saying.’
Jaala looks down. The bundle she is carrying drips at her feet. ‘I ought to get going,’ she says.
Anya sighs. ‘Come here,’ she says, and for all that Jaala towers over her, she manages to hug her tight. Before they part, she invites Jaala round for a meal.
‘Okay,’ she murmurs.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘I’m all right.’
‘When was all right ever all right?’
‘Just go before she bleeds to death, Annie. It’s not that big a deal.’
Anya hesitates. ‘Look, I can’t say don’t take it personally, because it is personal. I know that. But don’t take it too hard or they’ve already beaten you.’
‘I know.’
‘Promise me?’
‘I’ll try.’
‘You take care.’
At home she fastens shut the door of her little shelter and sits in the gloom. The air holds the smell of old hides and dusty herbs. Pots and books clutter the matted floor. There are leftover strands of meat in a bowl and as she picks at them she wonders if it will always feel like this, or whether anything will change; whether the churning and dread will remain under her control, or turn to something else. Something unthinkable.
She boils up some water, pulls up a cushion, makes some tea. Rising from the stove a tin flue that kinks upwards like a madman’s hat through the ragged venthole. The smoke curls from the top and drifts away.
She sits quietly. Watching the flames. Watching the flames.
Thinking of her older pupils. Friends with her now, accepting of her, but for how much longer? Some already coming to an age when they will leave her classes for good, and she wonders how many days she will share with them; how many she’ll share when they have children of their own. Will it be the same? Will it feel natural? Would they still sit and talk together, share reflections on life? Was it even possible? She chews on a nail.
Dogchild. Bitchling. Foresthag.
Talker-to-herself. Witch.
Witch fit for hurting. Witch ready to have its hair ripped out, as some had tried to do. A witch to burn.
Getting up again, she decides to use up her energy on some chores. She drags some mats and her bedding outside and beats out the dust. Then she goes to the line to check her laundry is drying. A short way uphill is a round shelter much larger than her own, occupied by a family of six, the noise more or less constant since the latest arrival. Further uphill, more such dwellings stand along the treeline like a colony of dunghills, dozens of them, legacy of the Naagli’s remote nomadic past. The shelters increase in number all the way up to the heart of the settlement, where beyond her sight a sprawling and noisy village stands in a haze of cooking smoke. She smiles. Her neighbours’ children are out playing, a pair of young boys who emit high shrieks as they chase the chickens around, pelting them with dollops of mud. She m
oves out from behind the damp clothes to watch them, the eldest in particular, a slim and dark-haired stripling, his skin a soft olive tone. Eventually he notices her and stops. He waves, a child’s wave, abrupt and impulsive, then runs off again.
She watches him until he disappears, then returns to her shelter. Inside she stands with her head bent, a hand to her face.
~O~
Another night alone. Making notes in her diary, reading through scraps of the old lady’s output of stories and poems and scattered thoughts.
Burnt scraps most of them, the edges charred and crumbling, rescued from the fire. But still it is pleasurable, leafing carefully through the pages once sewn into a book, nodding reflectively at the odd familiar phrase or observation. Shaking her head at times, her smile rueful, recalling in the flickers the commitment to paper of certain individual lines as Grethà stirs within her. As though years after she has died, the old lady is still able to read them, peering through the sockets of another.
Some pages she barely recognises at all. One contains a verse:
Break me, change me, and you will surely live.
Break me, change me, and you will surely die.
Which will you choose? Which is in your mind?
Ivy or Ivory? How will you know until you try?
More of a riddle than a poem, she thinks, turning to another ageing leaf, and in time she feels Grethà rising to meet her.
A withered old face gazing back from a mirror’s slender shard. Old weights clanking in her heart, feeling the world within the world in its orbit of fleeting shadows. Old figure by the fire; thinking, writing, observing. What dignity in this, scrabbling around like a crab to relieve herself in the woods? Not knowing if some kids were hiding there, waiting and watching. Ready to run out and laugh at her, reporting back to tell the tale.
She grimaces. Feeling it again, feeling Grethà claw and pull herself along in order to get anywhere, in order to take in the views. All those burnings down by the tall wooden beams, too many to count; watching from on high as the dead grew charred or the young couples took their vows. The coloured flags fluttering in the wind and the laughter rolling up the rockface like something created to taunt her, remind her of all she didn’t have. All those lonely years. Hauling her bones along like a sack, then reaching the ridges, gazing out for hours, rainfall and sunshine and gale. A life lived out through the eyes.
