by Jeff Kamen
When she turns back to the conversation, the company vanish, reappearing phase on phase like ghostly warriors fuming in smoke and armaments and wordless mystery. You’re you, she thinks, you’re you, you’re Jaala, but she can sense something else approaching, ready to spring up and take her with it as it runs on again ...
Those gathered around her have fallen silent, awaiting her answer.
‘Well?’ asks a woman in desperation. ‘What do you say to that?’
‘We continue,’ she says, staring them down, feeling that other’s strength again, and she will not listen to their pleas, their weakened cries. ‘We continue.’
Chapter 41 — The Bleak Wilds
Moth stood at the wilderness edge as a faint spiral in the dust, his mask overlaid with foul strips of cloth taken from the bodies of the burnt and choked and fallen.
It was morning, chill and quiet. He raised to his lips the flask of a man called Joszef he’d helped along for two days or more, and he drank freely, without censure of any kind, needing to fill himself, unable to stop, dragging the liquid into his gullet and rejoicing as it washed around and sat there cold and just and necessary. When he’d finished, he rewrapped his face and tucked the flask away in the woven bag he’d been using since his own had fallen apart. The only thing which had improved in crossing the desert was his memory, and it was in deep reflection that he looked out at the shapes of a ruined town he’d only ever seen before on a monitor screen; and then at a considerable distance.
Spines of glass or metal glinting dully in the haze. Everything humming with immediacy and portent. Everything standing far taller out here than he’d imagined it to be, lonelier, more mysterious somehow. Thick rods of twisted steel rising from an enormous crater in the earth’s floor, with shorter stumps surrounding them like satellites, the remaining walls scoured to thin and isolated stacks. The standing structures mottled and deeply corroded. Fire-blackened in parts.
Then, looking to the north, he watched the advancing smoke, searching for movement, figures stumbling out from it, retching for air, but there was nothing. He turned to the worn rock formations ahead and trekked on again.
~O~
It did not take many calculations for him to realise he’d ended up a long way east of the City.
Climbing, half sliding, down a chute of grit and sand, heading into a wrack of fossilised trees, he took as many right turns as he could to correct his course, knowing that to turn back and look for his father now was to guarantee his own destruction. He had one spare mini tank and in addition to the one on his back it gave him four days at the most to get home.
A day later he stood in a burnt-out valley looking towards what resembled giant eagle talons twisting from the ground, and which on closer inspection turned out to be the remains of rootstumps. These massive hummocks rose up gnarled and grey and hard as concrete to the touch, the last vestiges of megaflora that had bled to exhaustion the water from the land’s living sources, the cold black tables far below.
Water. Just the thought of it made him weak. He’d done what he could to eke out the flask’s contents, but during the night had had such an attack of thirst he’d drunk it to the bottom to keep the panic at bay. He began to drift from his course in search of a stream, climbing where he ought not to climb just to add to his chances of finding something. Later, after picking his way through a grey pastureland of thorny weeds, he came to a dry wash where a few thin beeches stood, and set off looking again.
He found nothing for miles. Wading through the ash, the dead and stricken plant life. The bleached and woodlike bones. Then on scaling a sprawl of loose rocks, he heard a trickling. ‘Thank you,’ he whispered, climbing away, ‘thank you.’
Soon afterwards, with his feet going mauve in a fast-running rivulet, he began to gather himself. His mind, his memory. Striving to adjust to what had happened. The slow pneumatic shock of death in his presence. The cold steel clamp of it upon his heart.
Reeking, his hands raw from burns where the scorching debris had rained down, he filled his flask again and sat with it dripping between his knees, his head down as he wept, unable to stop thinking of his father trapped in the inferno, the awful possibility of having lost him. Unable to shake off the sight of the Genetik woman from the disk, her comrades too, as they sought to save themselves and others. He’d sighted her again that dreadful night and had been close to making contact when he’d been hooked aside, his ankle caught in a hole and the burning heat descending upon him amidst wet slaps of falling muck and the killing black smoke. By the time he’d recovered himself, she and her comrades had vanished. For a short while, then, he’d been alone. The discovery that his torch was broken not yet known to him as straying lanterns guided him away.
Of the group of tribespeople he’d met up with, he’d seen little more of their faces than a flickering profile before the light from the fires had been extinguished and their period of sunless wandering had begun. He looked up, sniffing. In some ways, he thought, given his appearance, his background, and what he stood for, it had been just as well. They’d hung on each other’s voices for days, raven voices growing fainter in the murk and ever more frantic as their numbers fell.
From that time on, what stories they’d told to spirit each other on had degenerated into wheezing gasps — dwindling to his voice alone, protected by his breathing gear.
Wrung out, unable to weep any more, he dozed a little, then came back around. On shaking out the bag he found only a couple of sachets remained. He stirred up a paltry meal and sat looking around the stony enclave. He had no idea what threats his environment contained but he knew he must rest so as to think properly and construct his plans upon waking. After he’d eaten he curled up as a casted mould of himself, grey and cadaverous with ash. He slept four or five hours, and then on opening his eyes and seeing the vast sky above him, yelled in a fit of vertigo, clutching at the rocks until he had his bearings. He drank and refilled the flask and sat a while, deliberating. Then he forced himself up, stiff and weary, and climbed on again, seeking a benevolent pathway west of there.
Chapter 42 — Ravine
‘We found the ravine a day later. It took hours to get to the bottom. Even to find a way down through the hills.’
The pale woman nodded. ‘You must have felt relieved, better inside. More yourself in some way. Didn’t you feel better?’
‘I suppose so. Things were getting harder, though. It was hard to think straight. I knew the ravine had saved our lives, so I was grateful for that.’
‘You must have wanted to stay there.’
‘Some did, some didn’t. We had people wanting to go back to look for the others. For family. People they were certain they’d find, if only they looked for them. Others disagreed. They said we shouldn’t push our luck, that we needed to get to safety and rebuild before winter came. We had this kind of argument all the time.’
‘But how did you feel? I suppose that’s what I’m asking.’
‘Me, I ... I felt stuck between them. One minute I’d be thinking of Annie, and the next I felt I ought to be leading everyone away. When I look back now ... I think of the ravine as a safe place before what happened after.’
‘Safe?’
‘Yes. Like a warm clear day before everything changed.’
Chapter 43 — The Gorge
All that day they make repairs to the battered vehicles and reshoe the mules. The animals are carrying parasites and they rub ash into their coats and destroy the fallen grubs. They string up their laundry and the stronger ones tend to the sick and injured and all do what they can to cleanse themselves. They boil water infused with local roots and herbs, inhale vapours to purge their lungs. Some sit in prayer.
When Radjík comes to her it’s to say that her brother’s burns need treatment. She visits him, avoiding the large brown eyes of his mother as he mutters in pain, the cart where he lies filled with his stale air and the smell of unwashed items used to nurse the baby. Applying a milk-like substance culled fr
om local plants, she leaves him groaning under the canopy and recommends to Sonja and Radjík that he is left to sleep. ‘And clean everything in there,’ she tells Sonja. ‘Clear it all out if you need to. I think he’ll be fine, but he’s at risk of infection.’
She is called away on similar visits all that afternoon, and without meaning to, falls asleep waiting for an old blackened samovar to boil among the coals.
She rises again uneasily, thoughts of Anya wailing in her, laying claim to each moment, and she looks downstream to where she thinks she’s seen a figure moving. Someone measuring the scent of things, reborn in each shuddering interval between the seconds. Tall and dark and ragged in its cloak. Cautious among the stones, quick and self-preserving, lethally assured.
Growing inside her the echoes of another century, her dark twin on the loose like some fleet departing shadow.
When someone calls, she turns with a tense expression.
Lying down that night she finds sleep coming to her like something unbidden. Contaminated; populated by others.
~O~
In the morning the air smells different and she can feel the summer fading.
She looks down the ravine, following the steep rock walls as they curve away. Where the company will go from there she does not know; perhaps they will take up with merchants and wanderers, travel like hayseeds until in another year life makes sense again. Perhaps when the fire is forgotten and some other settlement can be founded, left to grow.
After breakfast they pack their shelters and cover their litter with stones. The ravine floor is wide enough for their vehicles to run along without incursions into the water and they go on at a good pace. The terrain remains barren those initial hours, the westward peaks standing stark and cold in the sun. They follow the stream until the ground breaks up, deepening, softening, until faced with a long slog through mud they head away and trim the foot of a thinly wooded embankment. On they grind, pushing hard, watching the ash blow over the upper ridges in finely scattering clouds. Once more they find their way blocked and they turn further uphill, forced to use rope winches to proceed. All able hands are called upon as they haul at the lines, and they work like slaves in a galley, the bark torn in wet strips from the treetrunks they use as pulleyblocks.
When they stop it’s to throw themselves down to rest and only later to eat. The hunters return with nets of small game and from this they cook a fatty and bitter-tasting stew. They look about themselves, alone and vulnerable, the wind blowing cold and restless on its way down from the empty hillcountry. Then they go on again, entering open land at last.
Later, crossing a derelict elevation, they look to where the massive peaks of the Ridge peer out from behind the foothills. Uneven wedges of purple and black they have only ever seen before in hazy profile. They watch how the mountains buckle and rear and in the far distance rise away like capped wavelets in a dark and sullied ocean, knowing only storm weather, carrying off the skies. And it is in this place that they remember Triglav and other mountains of legend. Parents recount to their children stories that have been handed down for generations, telling of woodsprites and waterspites and the long-armed ghoul dragging grape thieves under the ground; of Perkmandeljc and gnomes with backward-turning feet and hands, and of the habits of spirits that moan and gnash their teeth and lurk in their loneliness around spinningwheels and hearths. These stories and others, pleasant distractions all, as they crunch through the thin platerock, as the wheels stall and shudder in the dust.
By late afternoon the hunters are silhouettes climbing high among the bleached shelves that overlook the company as they continue. The carts are clattering, swaying alongside the stream they’d lost sight of earlier, the water running deeper now, fed by quiet cascades and tributaries. Apart from a few ruined huts they have found no evidence of human habitation in that land so far, nor evidence of recent traffic passing through. The bones of local creatures lie scattered at the water’s edge. Crows flare at their approach. They pass the half-buried carcass of a goat with a horn twisting upwards, a patch of auburn hair ruffling lifelessly in the wind. Not long afterwards they enter a deep and ash-lined gorge along whose broad bed the stream runs in turbulent shades of steel.
Flanked by high grey cliffs, it feels to Jaala like they are travelling through a mighty hall. A place where no birds or animals stir. When the winds lift, traces of sediment pass around their feet like the goings of spirits towards some silent homeland. The wheels bite through the stones and they walk or ride like people dwelling in realms of solitude and recalcitrant will to continue.
Leading from the front, she rubs her temples discretely, trying to focus on a time, a place, an image eluding her. Dark images appear. A rabbit swinging like a doll of fur. A noose made from a bootlace. Blood. Dead staring eyes.
Somewhere in the column an infant is wailing. As always there is the sound of people coughing, the monotonous clang of goatbells, the scuff of heavy feet. And billowing around her ceaselessly a harsh voice of clamouring ruin. Noise of the tyrant on the march.
A woman like a poisoned cargo, a deathship crossing to the distant oasis of Ansthalt. Her. The powerful one. The one who in time of drought had promised the Naagli a strong new dynasty — had promised them everything, then left them with a cripple to bear the weight of their hopes. Dooming the old lady, then dooming the offspring to follow ...
Staring, she is only dimly aware of her surroundings when Pétar calls to get her attention. She turns to find that the convoy has stopped. Gustav is leaning out from his seat to look back down the line, where the other vehicles have halted in a desultory fashion.
‘What is it?’ she says, walking back.
‘Listen,’ he says, and her eyes go to the back of the gorge, towards which the others are looking.
She catches a faint rasping drone.
‘What d’you reckon?’ says Karl, unwrapping his bow.
‘… Hard to say,’ she says, struggling to focus. The sound feels odd to her, foreign, unnatural.
By now people are getting down from their carts to investigate, muttering anxiously, calling to others to look.
‘We should move, get out the way,’ Jakub says, signalling to those around him, and as Gustav takes up the reins, Jaala sees something moving in the gloom. A dark cloud rising in the gorge’s shaded depths.
‘Could be wagons,’ says Pétar, but she doesn’t know, and turning to Gustav, she adds to Jakub’s words by ordering him to move away. When he continues to lean out, straining to look behind, her face darkens stormily and she yells, ‘I said move! Now! Get moving!’ and slaps the mules forward. A few hunters go to fetch weapons, and as the carts jolt and pull away she calls to Laszló to bring her spear.
‘Hurry,’ she says, then looks ahead to assess their options. In the west, the sun is descending behind black and jagged mountains. She looks along the dry walls to where they break up on the nearside. There’s a gap in the rocks where a dead rivercourse enters the gorge in a long fishtail of silt and rubble. ‘There — take everyone up there,’ she orders Karl, and as the instruction is carried down the line, the sound from the back of the gorge becomes a steady rumbling.
She runs to Laszló as he leans from the back of a supplies cart and snatches the spear from him. There are already people hurrying by on foot. A pack of hunters has split away, yelling at the drivers to move faster, ripping the covers from their bows as they take positions alongside the column, ready to defend it from attack.
She runs to join them, the carts and runners picking up speed. A restless panic is in the air and everywhere passengers are arming themselves or jumping down to let the vehicles travel unburdened. Some come across to join her group, brandishing knives and clubs, while others are getting caught up in the struggle to herd the goats away, the spooked creatures skipping in and out of the path of the vehicles and the mules and ponies groaning and baulking at the sight of them. ‘Get them out of here!’ she roars, and Tomas and a few others run off to help and the rest stay on
as she outlines in a sweep of her pike the positions they’re to take. Half of them are to hang back as a rearguard, and they stand there arming themselves as she takes the rest of the party towards the back of the column, some stringing the arrows in their fists as they go. They run at a sprint against the flow of the convoy, she moving in powerful strides and yelling at the drivers to hurry, to go faster, and the merchant couple’s wagon comes shambling towards her with its reverse-shimmering wheels and the old man driving it is staring ahead with eyes loaded with visions of loss and terror and she roars at him in a harsh iron voice that is not her own and he looks at her strangely as he urges on his mules and then is gone in the dust. Sonja’s sister Azra is driving the cart behind it and her posture is frozen and her dark hair streaming wildly from her face. Her husband is clutching their children in the back and Jaala waves them on and looks back to the archers running after her, pointing to where they should line up in staggered twos and threes. As they turn aside, she runs on alone to discover what it is that threatens them, finding the dustcloud coming closer, thudding menacingly through the gorge.
There are two lights glowing within the cloud. She watches it cross the stream and cut back again so that great wedges of spray shoot up in the air behind it. She checks behind her, sees Karl and Dradjan leading the forerunners and carts to the foot of the rubbled slope, and in their wake the remainder of the convoy lurching along like a cargo of smoking wreckage brought sacrificially before the sun. Nearer at hand, the clustered groups of archers are looking her way with expressions of frightened bewilderment. The rumbling is now a constant banging thump. She signals for them to stay firm and then turns and stands with her feet planted and the heavy iron spear cool in her grip, ready to take down whatever comes her way.
