by Jeff Kamen
On he drifted, a month of bleak drizzle spraying down the hole and the groan of the mast in its blocks like the mutterings of some tormented being watching over him.
Sitting darkly in his chair, thinking of Cora, his father, himself. Time gone now, gone to them all, frozen triumvirate. Three of them killed with one blow.
All he had to do was hold on.
One. I older than you. It matter...
Hold on until the coming summer’s end.
One and a half …
Then it would be over, then it would be done.
No more than that. After, it is gone. Gone forever ...
Problem solved.
He sailed on, travelling rough seas as though he rode the hide of a beast at times, entering long steep nights when the mind unwound and twisted back again and no one else was there. Nights when the rainswept hours hung smothered and strange about him and the ocean’s journeys roamed on blind and dreamwrecked and endless.
Autumn found him in a rugged cove of a burnt-out island where the population had been halved by the coughing sickness. They appeared to be short of working men, and he was able to make a living around the little port. And so his life began again. A stranger clutching at the language, tolerated, not always welcomed. Passing through days of raw fingers and sodden clothes, the stench of fishguts contaminating everything. A life of hake and dories and needlefish, of buckets and wailing gulls, of haggling tiredly in the chill grey markets.
Alone in his floating oubliette. The life he’d asked for.
From time to time he would sail further along the coastline. Eyeing the charred rootstumps along the high ridges, standing cratered in the hills. Passing abandoned towns where wild dogs roamed and little else. Where horned skulls stood raised on poles to warn visitors away. Discovering marooned refineries of old, shoals of dead fish afloat in tidal graves beyond the coastal rocks ...
Before long, storms came raging, and as the weather turned he kept to the port and did not stray from it. There was snow thickening in the rain, and for all he kept the fire going, the floor was soon traced in ice crystals. It meant he could freeze what he caught and keep it stowed for days should he wish to, but the cold was punishing and he could feel it like a claw in his lungs. One day he saw blood in his spit as he stood coughing. He spat again and looked at it bleakly. Fearing for his health, he rented a room in a house close to the waterfront, his quarters modest but warm. A place to heal, to gather himself. A place without a past.
To maintain himself he continued to sell fish at an icy quayside stall, stamping hour on hour, his breath smoking as the locals fumbled for coins or made offers of barter. When his stall was clear, he would tramp away in silence, thickly wrapped, a woollen hat covering the pale-tipped locks that sprang from his skull in the evening mirror.
There to meet eyes staring at him green and hollow. He knew what was happening and knew nothing at all. Began to drink.
He thought that if it was just the mourning of his father’s loss to contend with — if it was this alone — he could have done it, even were it to take years; but he knew the mourning was the least of it.
There was something else. The crackle of a distant fire. Leering shadows.
Clip clop ...
... beginning this night ...
Something he struggled to hold at bay, striving to focus instead on his final words with Cora. The deal they’d made.
... with the assimilation of two as yet unreturned servants ...
He put his head in his hands, squeezing his eyes shut. ‘I can’t,’ he gasped. ‘I can’t bring this back to you.’
Later, alone in his little room, he was crying, and she was crying too. Seated in her kitchen, the house cold and dark, forever empty.
Dry leaves were blowing through the door, swirling about the hearth. In agony he tried to explain that it was over, that they had already shared the time allotted to them; that she had to be brave and forget about him. But as always, she wouldn’t listen. And as always he passed among the birches, muttering, formulating resolutions, calling to her desperately, begging her to release him from a punishment without end.
At the time of the new year, he went down to where the huddled boats stood, to check on his ship in the freeze. He found it lurched at an angle, jaws of ice projecting. Thick snow covered the deck, and he climbed down the ladder with the greatest care not to slip or fall. It was close to his father’s birthday, and he thought of him all the time he roved the hull and its compartments, dark shadows leaning in the lamplight. He thought how sad it was that they could not sail together, how cruel that they’d been denied so much, denied even each other’s company. In the middle of clearing some junk his grief seized him such that he dropped everything and fell to a seat and covered his face.
He sat there sobbing hopelessly in the dark, sobbing into his hands.
Then he sat in silence.
Eventually, with a long sigh, he rose again.
From a frozen shoreline he stared out with the same scene playing continuously across the grainy blur of snow. He’d seen in the vast and lonely reaches between the stars a hint of the desolation that lay ahead if he did nothing to alter himself, yet he did not know what to alter himself to. It seemed that fate had little to offer but a choice of sufferings.
Eventually he trudged away towards the headland, finding snatches of Cora’s song return to him. For once he let it linger, dwelling on the words. He thought he understood it better now.
‘Vrijeme … vrijeme ...’ he hummed, then stopped, his chin trembling. Then he tried again, watching the heavy grey waves surging beyond the port. Listening to the sound of himself, listening to the surf turning restlessly over the deeps.
Chapter 82 — Desert Homeland
The journey to Thessa took months in the end. Sorties and fighting left several dead among their party, although the raiders they fought lay slain in their dozens by the time Tannak broke through.
As a winter freeze sealed the outlying lands, they holed up in a fortified settlement on the Turkic border, and it was here they first heard rumours of spreading disease. Its name in each language they heard tell of it was chilling. They thought they would outrun it, but when Radjík fell ill, rasping as her lungs filled with phlegm, Jaala feared the worst. She nursed her intensively, and using treatments of a local fungus, brought her back to the point where she had little more than a fever. By the third month they were back on the road, climbing high snow-ragged peaks and trundling through silent lunar valleys miles wide and with nothing before them but sediment.
When the winds came from the north it was too cold to travel, but when they eased, they found the ash-strewn terrain already warming. They cut the corner off the descending coastline and from there continued their journey southwards.
~O~
A month later they were leading their pony through a region of endless sands, their going sluggish in the heat. Collections of bones lay in their path, jutting snow-white and scoured as smooth as porcelain. On a bank they found a small skull recently exposed, sitting perfectly intact where it had dwelt long ages in the belly of the dunes. Their drapes hung loose on their sinewy frames and they trudged on with each step an effort, Jaala with her skin very dark from the sun and Radjík with peeling nose and lips and neither with the energy to speak.
The sands were grey with the infiltration of ash, and the cracked hills about them had much the same washed-out tone. They went on. The hills in other parts were charred, a scene of burnt-out desolation, and it seemed that all that landscape was barren, with just a few slopes putting up some brave stalky trees.
A week went by and goats began to wander in their path. A herdsman pointed them on to water and they stopped at a trough where Jaala pumped an iron mouth and held a bucket under the short spurts that came out. They filled their skins and then led the pony to where he could drink alongside the other animals gathered there, leaving themselves to drink away a raging thirst.
When they were ready they slogg
ed on again into the dust, passing through empty streets of sand-built dwellings framed with scrapwood doors, their rounded features windtorched and bereft of colour.
The sun descended foggily behind the hanging ash and night was fast upon them. In the morning the world looked murky still, contaminated as it was with dust swirling off the local dunes. They followed a trickling watercourse where locals wearing drapes and headcloths were cooking roots and lizards on open fires, some sat before their modest homesteads weaving mats and linens from the fibre of rushes. Around midday, Radjík checked the map again and announced that they were very near. ‘Don’t need this no more,’ she said, and folded the tattered sheets away. Jaala smiled at her, but it was an anxious smile, and in the following hours she said little.
When eventually they came to the settlement from which, as an infant, she had taken her name, they looked at the craggy bluffs surrounding them, the squalid run of tents and shacks; then they looked at each other.
‘Can’t be right,’ Jaala said. ‘Can’t be.’
‘Why’s that, then?’ Radjík replied, her manner resigned and distant, as if she’d seen it all coming long before.
‘It just can’t, all right?’ she said, and with her gaze intensifying, she left Radjík checking the map while she went off to talk with the locals.
She returned from the tents in turmoil, her mind filling with a kind of helpless rage as she looked out at the cliffs, the sandy wilderness. It didn’t make any sense: where they’d come to was only place of that name and the locals had confirmed there was no other.
When Radjík asked her what was wrong, she shook her head. ‘Don’t,’ she said in a brittle tone. ‘Just don’t.’ Trembling, she walked out to a bench of rock and sat with her head down, letting the hot day be and breathe and willing night to come quickly. As if to hide herself within it; hide herself anywhere.
She tried to put all else from her mind but that she’d finally arrived, finally got there, yet all she could think was that there was nowhere else to go. The strain showed on her face, and she wished for the first time in months that she had the tin.
The day ached by and she stared at the profile of the cart and the run of tents beyond it. The sick feeling would not go and she knew she had to do something before it worsened. Before it turned to another kind of sickness.
Sobbing, she told herself she ought to be grateful to have reached the place alive. Grateful that in the absence of clamouring voices, she was able to get closer to the images she wanted without painful disturbance. In safety now, her boundaries well known to her, guarded by instinct. As if in doing so, she was parting branches in an orchard of Jaala-like heavy blossoms, the twinned heads bowing and nodding at her approach, wearily surrendering as she pushed on through.
Yes, she thought, at least she was safe. She made a promise then — that the rest of her life would be built on this foundation. This learning, this understanding. Not the disappointment she felt. Not the pain.
At last she got up, and walked leadenly across the dirt.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said to Radjík, approaching the driver seat. ‘Sorry for everything.’
Radjík was sipping from a flask. She put it down and plugged it and covered her face with her dusty wraps. ‘Don’t need to say that,’ she said quietly.
‘I do. I’m sorry because I am. This is my fault. Mine. Whatever we do now, we plan together. This ...’ She looked down, wretched and tearful. ‘I won’t do it again.’
~O~
They were too tired to travel far overnight and ended up in a draughty hostel in a neighbouring village. She asked the people staying there if they could verify the name of the location, verify what it said on the map — and each person did, men and women both, speaking the language that the girl and the woman of that faraway time had spoken, with only a few modifications. ‘Shukran,’ she said to the hostel owner, a thin unshaven man, as he brought them water and left them to sit in the rough chairs he’d set out.
‘I don’t understand,’ she said at last, avoiding Radjík’s gaze.
‘What?’
‘Why does it look so different?’
‘Thought we weren’t talkin about it.’
‘I know but why? Why does it feel different?’
‘Cos it bloody is,’ was Radjík’s retort, and after a few sharp words between them, they parted company, Jaala remaining alone until the owner came by locking up for the night and asked her to go to her room.
She woke up crying. Inconsolable. As though she’d come around to discover that she was someone else, as she’d always feared she would. As if she’d been abandoned on the other side of herself, the true world inverted and indistinct and lost. When, in a conciliatory tone, Radjík asked her if she could do anything, she had no answer for her, nor could she dredge up words to say as they left, the pair of them walking the pony along in search of the coastal road.
Two days later they were asking bypassers for the next water stop. Sheets of sand and dust were casting a heavy pall over the day, trapping them in the suffocating heat. On taking advice to head for a nearby settlement, they trekked away, finding themselves too exhausted to go any further by the time they’d reached the flyblown outskirts. They rested in a wayside storm cabin with the dust billowing outside, taking it in turns to use a bunk until it was cool enough to go out again.
They spent the night in nearby lodgings. The next morning, with the risk of the winds worsening, they stood outside debating a while, then set off in the swirling gloom, following a local trail westwards. After a mile or two, they stopped in sight of what appeared to be a tall dark hill. Then they went on again, the hill slowly turning into the shape of enormous stone walls. Walls which had collapsed into one another. Walls that were part of a collection of oldworld buildings. Walls black from fires, the holes and window squares all puddled with glass that had solidified in the destruction’s aftermath.
Between gusts of wind they saw more ruins nearby, others leaning murkily in the distance. Jaala stared around herself as though in terror, yet it was not terror in her mind but the residual thoughts of another screaming to be heard.
Somewhere close to the buildings there’d once been a flaking roadsign. A stack of burning corpses, the black smoke rolling endlessly ...
‘We’re at the right place,’ she said, and in that other’s language, heard, You’re back again. You’re alive. You’re home ...
‘This is it,’ she insisted, as Radjík looked at her. ‘It’s the place.’
‘Here?’
‘Here,’ she said, and staring ahead she felt a trepidation she’d never known before; felt the essence of that original woman filling her as though with a blazing light. A woman prepared to do what it took to survive, to continue, even if others would not, or were unable to. A woman she could see so clearly before her. As if she might call out and befriend her. A woman running through a tomblike and lightless hell, a living death beneath the ground, the final shelter from fires that would roar and rage and snatch away the living air even as they swept across the land. All lands. A woman running with thoughts beyond value ... thoughts that might permit her to smuggle life somehow into the chill, dead and ashen era to come ...
Approaching the ruins standing obliquely before them, Radjík leading the harnessed pony, they noticed the letters MC lying inverted among worn heaps of stone and sand. Wiping away a tear, badly shaken, Jaala surveyed the outer and upper walls, then studied the letters again, this time with an uncertain expression. Something was coming to mind that she could not quite fathom ...
Listen listen listen …
… mushkila … mushkila ...
The mighty blocks which made up the letters were badly charred and worn, and stood above other words upended in the rubble. The letters had warped in the heat, and like the glass had hardened again in a storm of flying debris.
She looked around again, trying to touch on what was nagging at her. She saw people passing by on the trail, a few figures climbing amongst th
e wreckage, mostly older children. Nearer at hand, in the foremost building’s deep shadow, some people in long grey drapes were stood about with lamps, talking. It was as she studied them, their dress, their gestures, their manner of speaking, that she noticed a solitary light straying. Passing just behind them. She followed it, finding it to be held by a hunched old woman clad in veils as she turned towards the heart of the catastrophe and entered a black knot of concrete and rotting girders wherein appeared to be a passageway.
Her face changed. ‘In there,’ she said. ‘Come on.’
‘Wait a minute. Wait.’
‘Just leave it here,’ she hissed, and leaving the cart behind them, the pony swinging its head in the dust, they ran towards the slanted opening and followed the old woman inside.
It was very dark under the fallen slabs and they could not see where she’d gone to at first. They went further into the dark, then took a turning and saw the shapes of people within what appeared to be a long flickering tunnel. They exchanged a look, then continued into it, finding themselves going along a concrete passage lined with guttering lanterns. The walls and floor were badly cracked, and in parts where the ceiling had caved in, they had to tread through fallen rubble. They went on, passing people who nodded their way without comment, all quiet and calm in manner as if observant of some benign presence in that place. The passage narrowed, then gradually widened again. A coppery glow of torches flickered at the end, where people were walking to and fro like votives in a temple. It was from here that melodic murmurings of prayer or song were emanating, along with whiffs of aromatic smoke. ‘She was here,’ Jaala said in a strained voice, looking towards the glow.
