Among You Secret Children

by Jeff Kamen

  He sloshed on, going deeper into the water, wheezing in panic, retreating until he was so far out he saw he’d risk drowning if he went much further. By this time it was ambling towards the black shoreline, where it stood looking out at him, alone and silent.

  Within its narrow black head, two slotted orbs of yellow fire seemed to be trained on him, and as the beam lit up its eyes, confirming his fear, he yelped, snatching a fraught look towards the low rock enclaves along the nearside of the lake. Seeing a point of safety, he waded further away, and as soon as he did he heard a bleating, heard that same cold and dreadful laugh. A moment later, the goat entered the water.

  He waded harder, splashing, lugging himself and his weight along and all the while fearful of catching his foot in a hollow, some icy crevice which would open up and drag him out of his depth. He gripped his bag, throwing all that he was into moving, and as he slogged on, his eyes fixed on the bank, he did what he could to fathom some means of exiting once he was there.

  He wallowed along with his feet spaced well apart and the freezing spray flinging up behind him and the torchbeam veering as he searched the chambered walls, the light touching faintly upon glints of slime and weathered torture and veins of rot. When he glanced over his shoulder the goat was still in pursuit, coursing along steadily with its horns upraised one moment and then dipping as it negotiated the flaws of the bed. The water was only up to his knees but he could not go any faster, was thrashing to get anywhere at all, the water so bitterly cold he could scarcely breathe, but breathe he had to, for he could hear the goat’s movements at his back. He waded on with all his strength, sobbing, unable to see anything beyond the crazily shaking torchlight, the dancing shadows. The next time he looked the goat was gaining on him, gathering its forelegs and leaping and landing and pushing on. It was closing in quickly, its heavy coat gleaming, shivering out fine metallic droplets as the torchlight swung and shuddered.

  He pleaded aloud for it to go away, begged it, right side leading left side and his hips constantly swivelling, and in his mind as he tried to run he seemed to see a slow-moving vision ...

  His friends were there, and at the heart of it his family, good and honest as morning. He saw in a glimpse his short and pitiful and wasteful little life and saw how different he could have been through all of it; through all of it. All he could have been without the lies, the endless miasmic lies. The secrets, the hiding. If only, he thought, he’d had the courage to leave earlier, if only he’d been more than he was: bolder, filled with his father’s sense of purpose.

  On nearing the water’s edge, he looked back once more in the thinning hope that the creature had stalled somehow, but its dripping bulk was so close he could have thrown the torch to it. The light was racing in its glassy sockets and he went splashing through the shallows and made it to the rocks and there was something cratered-looking in the fissured wall, resembling an opening. He ran across to it with his tanks clanging in the bag and the torchbeam streaking and slashing and saw that the hole opened into a hulking twisting passage. He ran into it and glanced behind, still running, then on turning back he noticed ahead of him something like a toad.

  It was a short distance away, squatting in the darkness. It turned, smirking horribly.

  As it rose up, blinking, he screamed. Other figures stirred. The passage was filled with snorts and bleating. Then coldly burning eyes looming yellow and yellow and a leaping figure with scalpels for tongues and the rearing and the shrieking and a hand clutching hold of him and the shadows fleeing down the long open recesses and the black depths of rock and then everything vanished and swallowed itself and there was nothing, his screams torn brutally away.

  Chapter 32 — Funeral

  When at last she sleeps it’s in Sandor’s shelter. As if to crown her grief with him — and at the same time state to the world that she is not to be forgotten, that she has a place among his friends as valid as it had been before. As it had been when he was living.

  Before she can rise she sleeps again, then comes around with the mugginess still slowing her as she tries to identify the voices outside. Some of the hunters are up, cooking at a fire. She sees the felt sleeves hanging open where she’d stumbled inside at dawn. The voices rise and fall, their tone sombre, considerate of the siblings.

  She pulls back the covers and sits up. The day briefly washes into her. Then the night returns.

  Cold and naked she’d felt as they took the slope leading up from the marketplace. Not even the fluttering glow of torches could alleviate it, could populate that vacuum. Asking herself why he hadn’t met with her that night. Why he had chosen that moment to turn from her, then of all nights. She shakes her head.

  Why then? Why not meet with her? Why not honour that one untouchable promise he’d agreed to keep, whatever else went wrong? Why?

  Then looking ahead to where they were carrying him. Lying draped and aloft and jostling above the climbing path. Bedecked in leaves and flowers, some falling like blossoms to the dark ground below. Had it been to punish her in some way? Or had he not even noticed it? Was it all a mistake, some horrible and stupid act of wantonness, a mistake he could never put right again?

  They say that death comes at a given time for us all, but the man we remember today was stolen from us. The tree of him was cut down many years too early, for he was murdered ...

  Standing high upon the slope, she’d looked downhill. A sea of orange torches following them, the lowered faces solemn and ruddy and most with their lips drawn tight and many people ringing bells and behind them all in the blackness the wolf-like dogs of the Maga howling dolorously and without cessation, as if mourning something far more terrible than the loss of a man. Anya taking her arm as if in encouragement, and the pair of them walking beside the siblings and Sonja, and in a short while all of them coming out upon the promontory.

  That hallowed platform of rock, plangent with the chiming of bells strung along the Gate, whose dark crossbeams had seemed to break from themselves and flit eerily up the cliffs as the torchbearers went ahead. Radjík tensing, hesitating. She’d followed the girl’s gaze and a kind of shared terror had seized her as she saw the tall wooden tower erected there. As if they’d arrived at some ancient place of execution, there to destroy whatever was left of him.

  How she’d been seized by an urge to run up and pull him by the wrists and carry him back to life, sweet life, and set him free.

  All roads lead us back to the stars, and now he is returning. Be happy for him. May he be justly remembered, and freely ushered on, and may we give our thanks for him in the manner to which we are accustomed ...

  She stares out with a dead expression through the flapping canvas sleeves, her eyes misting. Another morning for those alive, she thinks, and what the alternative? Is where he has gone to nothing but a furred black stillness? Noiseless? Bereft of people or homes or light? What, ultimately, has become of him?

  She pulls on her trousers, her socks. She wonders what the siblings will want to do with the shelter. Whether they’ll leave it as it is, or invite someone else to live there; perhaps even herself.

  The stove door stands open in the gloom. No one has thought to close the vent where the flue runs up, and a rag of sky hangs above it like an empty dream. She stares at the objects he’d left discarded on the matted floor. A crude hide bag with a strap, an amulet threaded with stones. A child’s straw poppet. She sees some of her own clothes thrown in a corner, and on them something resembling an animal tooth. Arranged on a dark wooden chest are two of his bows, some nets and other gear; she assumes the rest of it has been packed away. She stares at the patterned rugs she has known so well and realises that somewhere within the tent are the poems she’d written. Now useless bits of paper, meaningless strokes of ink.

  ‘You beautiful fool,’ she’d whispered, wiping the tears from her eyes before they soaked him. He lying there inert beneath heaped garlands, only his face and chest unencumbered, with just a few curled leaves caught among his clothes,
a few damp petals. A leader once more, his features both cruel and noble in death, his long face still and pale within those combed-out dark tresses; a sleeping island.

  She puts her hands to her face and weeps heavily. It’s been brewing inside her for days, even before what has happened. It all seems so sad to her, knowing they will never meet again; that what they’d had is lost, will lie forever broken.

  All that remains is the feel of him, the growing presence of his absence. There’ll be no more smell of him, the smell of him in bed. No more shared sensation of being, his warmth on her back upon waking, their fingers linked. No more whispers, no more loving, no more gentle sighs. No more talk as the day began; no more reflection at its end.

  She looks around helplessly, seeing what he cannot see himself.

  In the entrance she pulls on her boots, eyeing the figures at the fire. About ten of them there. She sees Rosa and Tomas, the brothers too, and taking some comfort from this, she decides to go over.

  She walks through the wet grass towards them. The sun has not yet cleared the peaks and the woods are hung with vapour. The new world like something dipped and coldly steaming.

  On joining them she hears that the siblings have not been sighted that morning. She is not surprised. When she asks about this, Pétar explains that once the ashes were collected, they’d all made it down together, but were very late getting to bed. He meets her gaze a few moments, then looks down, weary and defeated for once. She looks down, too. Trying not to think of Sandor reduced to a few cold lumps in a box. Trying not to think of him standing in the tower with the wood piled around him. Soon to be engulfed, clawed down savagely by flames.

  The other main conversation centres around the measures Staš has been speaking of to keep the settlement secure, and she sits sipping tea as they discuss his warning of a possible invasion, some adding their own thoughts on the matter. Negative, damaged thoughts on the whole. Most are concerned about the clan’s future. It turns out that some of the hunters have already gone uphill to guard the main settlement, and one or two query this new role and the likelihood that other such duties will break up the pattern of life they’ve known so long under Sandor.

  ‘I’ve got a bad feeling,’ Jakub mutters, and there are other sentiments of this kind, cut short by Tanya nodding towards the slope.

  ‘There’s something you don’t see every day,’ she says, and Jaala turns to find Staš running down the path in their direction.

  ‘Now what’s up?’ says Jakub. ‘Sick of these meetings.’

  The headman gives a brisk wave, then runs on.

  A few of the hunters call greetings up at him.

  ‘Quiet,’ Jaala says. ‘Something’s wrong.’

  On he pounds, his face darkly flushed. In spite of the hour he is wearing nothing over his shirt; it’s stained with sweat across the chest and arms.

  ‘Good,’ he says, panting, halting at a distance, ‘good. You’re all up. You’re needed at the top.’

  ‘Why?’ asks Karl. ‘What’s goin on?’

  ‘There’s a fire,’ he says, motioning them to follow. ‘Call everyone to the market. Now. Right now. We need your help.’

  Chapter 33 — Colossi

  Ten hours of digging and drilling later, Lütt-Ebbins was almost there. They pushed again, and as they forced the hatch open they tumbled into the morning, the light hanging cold and grey around them, grey to the muted horizon.

  Lütt-Ebbins was out first, feet planted in the dirt as he hauled Stoeckl out through the hatch, dragging him free of a clinging yellow foam that sprayed up at them like poisons, the liquid globules hardening like rock as they hit the air, scattering weightlessly away.

  ‘I can’t see!’ Stoeckl was yelling, ‘I can’t see!’ He stumbled to the ground to find sinewy hands grappling under him as Lütt-Ebbins hauled him upright and then shoved him in the direction they needed to travel in, leaving him to roam on helplessly while Lütt-Ebbins forced down the groaning door. It closed with a boom, the foam spattering in a crust around its edges. He checked it was properly shut, and then, startled by a hollow popping sound, he turned to find a large striped balloon shoot into the air. It had come from an opening in the ground just a few yards from where they’d clambered out. As it soared away, another popped out, following the first as it wove skywards. Other metsats followed in short intervals, each with a tiny box in tow like a passenger basket. As he backed away, his attention was drawn to the imposing glass dome of the turret. Something he’d assumed he would never see, and which he could not help but stare at. So much bigger than he’d imagined it to be, now filling up with smoke, the lights and banked equipment standing dimly within the haze and the large raised cams tracking dutifully round and out of sight. A weak cry brought him to his senses and he turned and ran, dragging his supplies with him, to find the misty form of Stoeckl staggering a short way ahead.

  All across that desert waste the ground was punctured with hissing wounds, with eruptions of dirt and ash whistling in all directions. A sign that lethal gasses were escaping, boiling up from the systems station, forming a dense cloud of vapour that seemed to drift along with them as they ran. A cloud that screened the world away, neither man able to see and each gripping the other and helping up the one who’d fallen. They journeyed in this fashion down a long incline, stumbling and rolling, and then they got up and ran on again.

  They could not determine where to head to. All they could do as they looked up was take mental snapshots of the slopes rising from the plain, sometimes getting as far as discussing options before another shroud of toxic vapour sent them sprinting away. Mindful of Vonal’s directions, Lütt-Ebbins kept them on a course tending towards the mountain’s eastern flank, believing it to offer the shortest means of reaching the other side; then on spying a route up to a series of rock ledges, he decided it might be safer to divert up there for the moment, sensing safety, protection from the gases. They went at a trot among the talus stones, and shortly were climbing from the desert floor and scaling the broken walls of the mountain’s outskirts, the way before them choked with bladed weeds and shattered boulders.

  The air was cool and clear above the plain and they climbed with a frail light at their backs as the sun ascended behind a tremulous curtain of ash. Steep escarpments rose before them and they ranged uphill through ground pierced with spiny foliage and the roots of sprawling trees, Lütt-Ebbins stopping eventually to point out a niche in the cliffs and Stoeckl agreeing that they should check it out. The prospect of shelter spurred them on for a while, but the rest of the way they had to force themselves to continue. But continue they did, exhausted, their hands bloodied by lacerating thorns and the foam on their clothes having solidified so that it was like being clad in plaster, inflexible sheets of it that fissured and split as they exerted themselves.

  When the ground levelled out they stopped to rest, Stoeckl bending with his hands on his knees as he gulped in the filtered oxygen. ‘We’re quite ... a way up,’ he wheezed. ‘Not ... bad going.’

  Lütt-Ebbins grimaced at him, then staggered off a way to look back down the slopes they’d ascended, wearing a faint look of pride on his face as he returned and said, ‘Not bad at all.’

  They sat down with the wind ruffling their hair, the sweat on them cooling rapidly. Looking out together, a masked species scarcely known to those slopes in centuries, seeing for the first time the world they’d experienced only through their monitors. All lay before them as though set upon a giant rumpled tablecloth. The dead black mountains to the north. The smoggy wilderness around Van Hagens. The grey and undulating wastes to the east, beyond which white-capped peaks stood in remote and monochrome profile like vast photoplates flaring in the sun.

  Lütt-Ebbins turned to survey the cliffs. They were enclosed by rock walls and could not see out west from there. High above them a great jagged peak rose majestically behind wisps of vapour. The beginnings of the summit, whose ultimate spires reared inland from there; a numinous presence in that warming l
ight, more like something that had to be believed in than observed, and which, it seemed, for all their proximity would most likely remain unreachable, forever unknown to them.

  For a while they rested without speaking. Unseen birds whooped and called. The crippled trees whispering. They could hear water trickling down through the rocks and in its brittle music the pain in their bodies and all that agony of night seemed to fall away to nothing, to pass from their minds like a darkened dream.

  ‘Incredible,’ Stoeckl murmured, and Lütt-Ebbins nodded in agreement, closing an eye to measure their course up to the cleft. ‘Still a way to go,’ he replied, rising stiffly, and after he’d helped Stoeckl up, they resumed their trek uphill, treading so that their feet gripped the small weathered stones that built their path.

  ~O~

  Kicking their way through a tangle of dry creepers, they found themselves peering into a small arid cave.

  The interior was thick with webs but where the light fell within the entrance they saw there was space enough for them to rest comfortably. They only hesitated when they noticed scorchmarks on the floor where once a fire had been built. They entered warily, Lütt-Ebbins squatting before the grey cinders to inspect the remains. What he picked up crumbled to a powder between his fingers. Stoeckl watched him closely.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘seems to be pretty old.’ He rose again, looking around. ‘We’ll have to take a chance on it. My guess is they won’t show in daylight. Not in full view of the base.’

  ‘… They?’

  ‘People. The people who live here.’

  Stoeckl turned hesitantly to the ledge outside the entrance, but said nothing.

  After checking to make sure nothing was lurking there, they took off their packs and set about sorting through their provisions.