Among You Secret Children

by Jeff Kamen

  Soon the smell of cooking began to work at his gut, a sensation he found hard to dismiss. Hard to dismiss as well a slight anxiousness, a sense of unease. He wondered at which house to stop and who he should call upon; wondered if he was about to pass his father any moment.

  Eventually he came to a little square where people were packing up stalls and loading goods into the backs of waiting carts. A dog lapping at a puddle raised its head to look at him, then continued drinking. He took in his surroundings, then noticed something, and went over to a group of men making repairs to a low brick turret.

  The men were deeply immersed in their tasks and did not notice him approach. A few of them were holding lamps over the well, while others were giving instructions to whoever was working down below. Suddenly in their midst a boy’s head popped up. He had a set of nails clamped between his teeth and when he grinned at the men they broke into a riot of slaps and guffaws.

  Moth cleared his throat. ‘Excuse me,’ he said, and a man turned. He gestured with a leather flask and the man elbowed the man at his side. This man elbowed the next and the message went round to its completion. By now they were no longer laughing, were turning to face him, squinting uncertainly.

  ‘I … I was wondering,’ he said. ‘If I could get some water.’

  There was no reply at first, and then like bonded variants of the same organism, the men rearranged their positions to study him further, with lamps lifted in his direction as if it was already dark and a few men that were sat rising to stand and a couple standing now seating themselves, spitting, setting down cups and bottles.

  ‘Sorry, I … I didn’t mean to disturb you. If you’re busy, I can leave it.’

  The men remained mute and stonelike. He motioned them to continue, an awkward gesture he failed to complete in the manner he’d intended. He seemed to be shooing them away. ‘I’m sorry, I ... I can see you’re …’

  ‘See we’re what?’ said a coarse voice, and the largest of the men came forward hitching up his trouser braces. ‘Didn’t realise what?’

  ‘I-I didn’t mean to bother you.’

  The man came closer and studied him from beneath a dirty hide hat. He thumbed back the brim. ‘Where you from, son?’

  A few of the men grinned at this, hanging on his words.

  ‘I’m ... I’m from the north.’

  ‘The north?’

  ‘I don’t think you’d know the place.’

  The man chuckled quietly, shaking his head. ‘Wouldn’t know it. Well, there’s a thing. He thinks I wouldn’t know it.’ He belched from the corner of his mouth, yielding a strong whiff of drink. ‘Which town, son? Say it.’

  ‘I don’t think …’

  ‘Don’t think …?’

  ‘It’s, well, it’s Van Hagens. I mean, it was. Before where I come from now, I mean.’ He tried a smile. ‘That ... that must sound confusing.’

  The man pursed his slack lips, then belched again. ‘Hear that, boys? Seems he’s the confusing type. Well, that’s kind of interesting to me. Not wanting to tell a man where you’re from. Kind of unusual.’

  The men were whispering and nodding. Moth watched them uncertainly, then noticed people gathering around the square to watch. Silhouettes were appearing at shutters and doorways.

  ‘Look, I didn’t mean ...’

  ‘Van Hagens, eh? Well. He’s got a point there, to be fair to him. Which I am. I am very fair. Have to say I never heard of it.’

  ‘Well. It’s not … well, you wouldn’t. I mean, there was a fire. It’s not there any more. I moved south afterwards.’

  ‘Fire? That a fact? Well, well. How about that.’

  ‘It was a while ago. You wouldn’t —’

  ‘So who started it, son? Who made that fire?’

  He went to reply, but faltered, looking round. It seemed the entire settlement was coming to the square to see what was happening. ‘I don’t know,’ he croaked. ‘I’m not sure what happened. I just … I heard about it later. I was away.’

  ‘Away. You mean you ran away or you were just … away?’

  More whispers arose, a few wheezy chuckles.

  ‘I was just away.’

  The man spat down by his boot, then looked back again with an expression of concern. ‘You on your own, son?’ he said.

  Moth eyed the workmen in growing unease. The boy in the well was peering out from between them, clinging to the turret like a barbeled manfish, the nails still splayed from his teeth. He answered the man with a nod.

  ‘Tell me. Which way did you come from?’

  He motioned up the track. ‘Just up there,’ he said. ‘Up the top, past the fields.’

  The man tilted his head, his doughy features working as he chewed on something. ‘Aint no road up to those parts, son. How d’you get up there?’

  ‘I-I didn’t. I just came down from there.’

  ‘Well. So you say. See, what I’m wondering is, how the hot hell you got up there. Hmm? You climb those cliffs, son?’ He turned his head briefly. ‘What d’you think, boys? You see this one climbing all this way? Think there’s some goat in him?’

  The men began to guffaw loudly at this, exchanging big predacious grins Moth did not like the look of.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘I flew here. I flew from the north.’

  The laughter quietened, then fell away to a dubious silence. No sound came from the street and it was as if all life had ended there in a dusty tableau of misgiving.

  He clutched his bag involuntarily and the man’s eye went to it. He tried to swallow but couldn’t.

  Suddenly the man’s lips tore apart in a great black grin. ‘Hear that boys?’ he sang, turning to his men, ‘flew. You ever hear that one before? This aint no goat, it’s a bird. Flew here, all the way from the north.’

  Around the well the men collapsed into one another and a hideous chorus of hoots and cackles echoed across the square.

  ‘He’s runnin, Dag.’

  The big man turned back and looked to where Moth was going, to where the onlookers were parting in haste. His grin slowly fading.

  ‘What we gonna do, boss?’

  ‘Leave him, Dag. It’s just a kid.’

  The man spat, watching the figure sprint away. ‘Get Marek,’ he said coldly. ‘See if he’s got that dog of his.’

  By the time he reached the fields there was a chain of hazy figures running after him, howling dogs and men with their weapons raised. He ran with the dust catching in his throat, making him gasp and spit, and he continued along the track to the dry grey fields and headed straight towards the incline rather than cut across the furrows, fearing he might fall and twist something.

  On hitting the loose scree he climbed with his hands outstretched for balance and did not look back. A dismal barking swept up off the fields and he caught snatches of his pursuers’ voices. When he was able to he ran, but most of the time he was just stumbling and climbing. Halfway up the slope he tore out his handkerchief and tied it around a stone and wiped his scent on it and flung it way away for the dogs to go after, then ran on. He thought he might give out at any moment but something kept him going all the way to the great torso of rock where he’d landed, and he ran round it and leapt into the gulley plastered with sweat and dirt and he hauled the glider from its place and propped it up against the rocks and opened the struts in a miasma. The glider simply would not fly with an unlocked joint and he checked each one individually and then he crawled into the harness and rose up still strapping himself in. Then he trotted out with a hunched stance to determine the wind direction. It was coming up the slope. He did not know if he’d have time to run down into it but a renewed barking set him scrambling away to do what he could. He lurched on panting, the wings almost pulling him off balance. He could hear calls rising hoarsely and in them heard the hunter’s ancient cry for blood, and it seemed to touch something dark and old in him. As if he could taste the icy metals crunching at his flesh. Feel their ropes and hands upon him. The dragging, mauling fangs.
r />   When he turned around to face his pursuers, the dogs were coming at him hard and fast. He ran downhill towards them. He took long strides to begin with, then changed his rhythm and built into a stamping run. Soon he was charging down towards an explosive volley of barks, the lead dog separating from the pack. He ran faster. It was a thickset brindled dog bounding his way and following it closely four or five other dogs all of the same breed and some way behind them a dusty scrummage of figures brandishing hoes and pitchforks and clubs. He ran with the first cool undercurrents catching under the wings and he thought he’d tip aside with his legs cycling until he crashed and then the nose lifted. As the lead dog came slavering up the slope he drew up his feet and the dog leapt up chopping at him and fell away twisting and he held his course into the updraft and climbed. As he turned, rising smoothly, the barks soon faded and the yells of fury grew baseless and impotent and he glided eastwards back over the village, sobbing as he caught his breath.

  ~O~

  Many times that first fortnight he almost forsook it all. Almost gave up, almost wheeled around for home and Cora’s arms. Hungry and miserable, he stood loitering for hours at markets and gathering places, following people to question them, calling them over. Nothing ever came of it but shrugged shoulders and stares of disbelief. People backed away from him shaking their heads, some giggling. He left doorways with his face slapped, was pushed away by the ignorant, the bullish and angry. On he flew, shaken, thinking regretfully after each encounter how he could have spoken better, elicited some other kind of response.

  Skimming those lonely heights or cruising emptily above those pieced and rocky coastal settlements, swooping, descending, he began to doubt he’d find his father were he to live ten times over, were he to call at every home, speak to every soul he met along the way. The world he’d been longing for was so much vaster that he’d imagined, seemed more treacherous and unforgiving than he could comprehend.

  He slept rough in the hills and sometimes on the beaches, often without food or fire, always without company. Three weeks passed and he was out of money and worried about what to do. No one he’d spoken to had seen his father, nor had known a man of his description. No one knew of anyone that could fly, or ever had done so.

  Continuing along the coast, he earned a few coins clearing rubbish and helping with house repairs. Doing anything that was needed. Cleaning, digging, chopping wood. He roved through stinking streets that at night were home to him, sometimes carrying the glider, using it as an aid when questioning people, sometimes leaving it hidden. He asked for Klaus, asked for any man they might have known who owned a pair of wings. Asked for food on occasion.

  Heavy rain kept him grounded for a few days, and soaked through, the glider in its sodden cover tucked under his arm, he trudged around flooded craters and ditches and saw in the murk what appeared to be a gigantic dripping hive. On asking, he discovered it to be the remains of a mighty complex of buildings from long ago times, and entering the citadel through a tunnel, he worked his way through the cold wet streets and took shelter in a damp corner adjacent to where a few families were encamped amidst trails of smoke.

  The next day he went around exploring. The natives here seemed to live as squatters, people dwarfed by the immense slabs and buttresses earlier generations had burrowed into for shelter. Throughout the citadel, frameworks of timber and iron scaffolding had been erected so the inhabitants could climb up and down the huge collapsed walls and reach each other’s doorways. He watched them skulk about in firelit coves to eat the steaming flesh of rats and crabs and lizards, figures long used to roaming in halflit squalor and unafraid of the occasional weary creak of masonry and the netherworld shifting of foundations.

  These looming and crazed surroundings soon had him staring, slowing his pace, and turning into a broad expanse of powdered rubble, he found himself being viewed with keen interest as figures appeared from the jumbled slabs and mounds. Other individuals emerged from tents or holes with items for sale or barter. He walked on hurriedly. An ugly stench hung in the air and the gutters were clogged with a fetid grey matter resembling offal and bleached straw. Finding a figure or two stalking after him, he ran, diverting in the end through a rundown quarter where whores of both sexes lined the street, ragged and poverty-scarred, offering themselves with bleak abandon to any that travelled that wretched gauntlet.

  He was back in his corner within the hour, safe as far as he knew. It was a baleful place to have ended up in, but it seemed there’d be no escaping it while the rains thrashed down. Day after day he sat there, gathering himself, working matters out as he could.

  During this time, he tried to explain to himself what his father’s motives had been, dwelling on everything that Cora had told him, especially matters she’d been reluctant to divulge. He wondered if the reason had been Cora herself. Had his father regretted their relationship, then run away in guilt when he saw how he was hurting her? Was the story of the masked men just a ruse to cover himself, or was he telling the truth?

  He shook his head, picking at his leaky boots.

  Had his father, he wondered, been such a potent threat to those in authority that they’d sent agents following him for miles overland in order to destroy him — whatever it took to do, however dangerous the mission? But why? What had he known, in any case? What had he done that was so wrong, or of such value to them? He tried to imagine a group of masked assassins travelling after him with a year’s supply of oxygen stowed away in their cart, then gave up thinking about it. It was too exhausting to contemplate.

  As soon as the weather cleared he took to the road again. Blinking tiredly in the light, he let an idea develop that, before long, took him to a chain of rocky islands out at sea. Here he glided from one isolated settlement to another, convinced he was onto something. Surely, he reasoned, if his father had been forced to hide, he’d have looked for somewhere quiet, somewhere peaceful in view of the waves — something he could have achieved simply by altering his appearance a little, or arriving with his wings stowed out of sight. A life benign and untraceable.

  But what he discovered were tiny outposts bordering on extinction. The people he came into contact with were hard-bitten and raw, with little in their lives but fish and tough labour and drink. Their days long and empty. Figures that watched him through colourless slats or bleared panes of glass like dead people stuffed and ill preserved. The food tasted of grit and even the dogs looked downbeaten.

  A week passed and he began to wonder why he was there. Frustrated, exhausted from battling coastal winds, he sat on the stones of a gusty peninsula cooking crabs the way the citadel dwellers had shown him. Puzzling. Thinking. Worrying. It seemed impossible to imagine his father choosing to live among such people, not with so many other options open to him. His doubts deepened the more he considered them. The next day he called at yet another island, but didn’t stay long. After questioning the locals, calling at stalls and doorways, walking halfheartedly through a public gathering place, he flew back to the coast and continued over the tall bare hills, wondering if the same logic he’d applied to the islands might apply to the interior.

  This renewed search did not start well. He came down in a deserted village where the parched hide of a door flapped in the wind and splayed bones lay at his feet as he looked about. A hillside studded with recent graves suggested plague as a reason for the abandonment, and in the next settlement along the same dereliction was marked with a great wind-scattered pyre of ash, with charred skeletons laid across it like the nested form of some unimaginable horror. On he flew, bypassing other dead settlements and continuing with little hope until he saw a curl of smoke in the hills. He wheeled down to it faint with thirst and fatigue.

  There were people living here, but the common language was little used by them and he received no sign of recognition when he asked if another man had flown that way. He was informed of another village nearby, still inhabited as far as they knew, and he walked ahead through a blackened country of tree
s left as twisted stands of charcoal. From it he gazed across a featureless plateau where the sediment turned in slow eddies, grey and heavy and lifeless.

  He entered the village through the weathered stumps that passed for a gate, but to no avail. No one knew anything of a flying contraption, nor of any such visitor. No foreigner had been out that way for years. An old woman let him a room for the night, and in the morning she brought him a map to use, torn and oilstained. He looked over it listlessly, the names and markings meaningless to him. He ate, he drank, he paid and left.

  He flew on, agitated, landing at the back of a dusty market where some animals were being slaughtered. He watched the traders sharpening their knives, the dark jets of blood; then looked away.

  He’d promised himself that he’d find something useful out here, detect signs and clues, fruitful meanings, yet it seemed that life in the interior was no better. As he glided on again, he met with nothing but scarred peaks and dried up flats, yet more grey and insignificant lives ...

  Landing on a derelict rise, he found himself at the foot of a bizarre assemblage of excavated machine parts heaped together in a monumental pile. It looked like some kind of demented sacrifice or offering. More than a ton of oxidized and crumbling scrap had been unearthed and reordered, with one loose part fitted haphazardly to another. Wheels welded back to back with what looked like pipes or pistons and loose cabling hanging down everywhere like pagan braids upon some giant hempen skull, the copper all weed green and the guts of the monstrosity choked with mud and grass.

  He walked around it in the silence and looked out. He thought the people who had made it to be witless, even dangerous. Something in the head glinted like a silver tooth. He stared at the structure. It stared back at him. A thing that had never lived forced to contemplate the parched and unfettered world. The planet cracked and traitorous upon which it stood watch.

  ~O~

  He was deep within these eastern territories when what looked like a distant wall or frieze appeared on the horizon. Faint, but it was there. It was there a day later, ominously larger, more distinct. On he glided, keeping it under observation as the edges blackened, recalling the words of a local man who’d told him that were he to travel the ashen steppes to the world’s uttermost end he’d find nothing but storms like this, with dark winds raging horizon after horizon until he was faced with sailing away to the place he’d first set out from.