by Adam Roberts
She shook her head, but said nothing in reply.
‘It seems,’ I said, slowly, ‘that we have different purchases on freedom. From this bunk, the view is of Senaar as a nation of slavery.’
This brought a reaction. ‘But it is Als that is enslaved . . . to savagery. To your own primitive lusts and urges. To the ego and monstrousness inside each person.’ She was really quite heated. ‘None of you comprehend the beauty, the liberty of service: of feeling something larger than yourself, of gladly worshipping God. Freedom for you is always freedom to, but there are other freedoms, and the freedom from the self is the greatest.’
This was so splendid an idiocy, so passionately voiced, that I tipped my head backwards and laughed with joy. ‘Rhoda Titus,’ I said. ‘There is passion in you after all, for all that your upbringing teaches you to squash it deep inside! For the first time I can see you as a beautiful woman!’ I leapt up suddenly, the vodjaa warm in my bowels, and cast myself across the car towards her. Her eyes sprang open with the suddenness (it was a look like fear) as I grabbed the back of her neck and had a lengthy kiss with her mouth.
When I pulled back, her face was absolutely frozen, white with passion, motionless as it struggled to register desire past its own internal censors. Her eyes were very open. I had felt little desire to have sexual intercourse with Rhoda Titus for most of the journey, but there was something now that wrestled my desire upwards, that hauled the snake-charmer’s animal from its box. I was still holding my vodjaa glass in my left hand, so I drained it and tossed it away. With the free hand I grabbed Rhoda Titus by her hair, and pressed my body against her, so that she sagged and fell back against her bunk.
She was making little gasping noises, desire sounding almost like sobbing. Perhaps she was trying to say something, to push the words past her internal censor. But all I felt then was the stretch of her flesh, palpable to my own body through the fabric of her clothing. Her breathing was jumpy. I had another kiss, and then raised myself a little to feel the dunes of her breasts. She was managing to say something now, a tiny whispered voice, but the words were less important than the little, raspy texture of the whisper itself. I was complete in my desire.
I started pulling off some of my clothes, but as I did this she started bucking and wriggling beneath me, so I had to pause to hold her down with one of my hands. At first I pressed her face, but she still struggled, so I moved my large hand to her throat. This had the advantage of drawing both of her own hands to my wrist, scrabbling and grabbing at my arm, fruitlessly trying to pull up the deep-rooted tree of my arm, planted against her neck. I pulled off my clothes, except my undershirt, and fumbled left-handed with her hooks and eyes; but Senaarian clothing is strange, and I had to rip some of them to get them loose. Her body was very pale, salt-coloured, a silvery and freckled series of silver arcs, thigh, hip, the loose flesh of her belly and the sides of her body under her arms against the bunk. Her face was red now, but I had seen it red with blushing so often that this did not look out of place. Pale like a candle, with a flame-coloured face. She was trembling, her legs jerking with little spastic motions. The languages of desire that her body speaks were curious, and difficult to decipher. I pulled my hand from her neck, and she convulsed with a huge indrawn breath; then I replaced it with the left hand, the better to enable my right hand access to her thighs, squeezing them apart and placing myself inside her. At this, she went very still, and then as I started thrusting, she ground herself against me, wriggling and struggling with renewed effort.
And then there it happened, the peak, the hiatus, the outside-time moment where you hang for a moment at the top of the dune and then the rapid slide down the other side back towards the trench in which all the rest of our life is conducted. It happened rapidly, but then I had been without sexual intercourse for many days.
They say that the seed of a man has a salty taste.
I was more breathless than the brief exercise might have prompted, so I lay on her as if she were a mattress until my lungs calmed. Then I hauled off, and pulled my trousers back on.
‘A release,’ I said to her, grinning. ‘A release. That is another definition of freedom, that feeling.’
She was looking at me now, without expression, her breasts bulging upwards and sinking down to the rhythm of her own gasps. I refilled my vodjaa glass and drank it. ‘The pleasure was less for you, I think,’ I said. ‘But if we have it again, I will not be so rapid.’
But she was gathering herself, sitting up, clutching her torn shirt about her torso. Then she tumbled from the bunk to her feet and pushed through to the driving cab.
I finished my vodjaa, and pulled on a shirt. The Whisper had now died down, so I decided to set off driving again. I came through to the front, and Rhoda Titus uttered a little groan. She was standing, in a shirt and naked from the waist down, over by the right window. I smiled at her (because the dimples in her thighs where they connected with her knees delighted me) and pulled myself into the driver’s seat.
I charged up the drivepole, but Rhoda Titus rushed from the cab. Assuming she had changed her mind and wanted to lie down, I started the car going, but the faint clack of the back door alerted me to something else happening. I got to my unshoed feet and dogged through to the back of the car, but Rhoda Titus had gone.
This was ridiculous. She was many days’ walk from humanity, and would die. I squeezed through the lock, opened the back door and jumped down myself. My mask snapped into place.
The sun had gone down, with only the thinnest train of inky purple on the western horizon to indicate its passing, but the stars were out. In the unlit wilderness, and without a moon, they shimmered in their millions. Some moved (ships in orbit), most lay like sparkling pips scattered on black soil. The whiteness of the salt desert was ghostly in this meagre light, the shadowy impressions of humps and curves lost in the fuzzy blackness. It was perfectly still, and the only noise was the hum of the car at my back. The salt was cold against the palms of my feet, and the air was very cold against my face. I called out, ‘Rhoda Titus!’ (it is difficult to shout through a mask) and my eyes became slowly tuned to the extremely low light levels. There was no sight of her. I rounded the car, and came round to the back again. Then I saw her, dark hair and her shirt camouflaged but the double streak of white of her naked legs visible, scissoring as she dashed up the face of the next dune over. It is not easy to run on the fine salt of deep desert, and her footsteps dug into the stuff and laboured her way.
I called after her, and she stopped, turned, looked at me, with her hand over the fork in her legs like an old representation of Eve out of the Garden.
‘Where are you going?’ I called. ‘You can’t survive in the desert!’
She said nothing, but sank backwards, and curled herself up like a child on the bare salt ground.
I had been feeling good, but this behaviour introduced a note of irritation into my mood. I clambered back in the car, and went through to the front to turn off the engine. For a few minutes I simply sat there, and waited for Rhoda Titus to come back through, but presently I deduced that she had decided to freeze to death, or thirst to death, or to find some other desolate way of ending herself.
I went back through the car and outside again. Rhoda Titus was still there, crouched and hunkered down against the salt of the next dune. I bellowed across to her, ‘I’m going now, but the back door is still open.’ Then I got back into the car, started it up, and drove off.
For the first ten minutes I made sure to drive very slowly indeed, below even a walking pace. Still nothing. Then I turned a little, and instead of riding the ridge of the dune I was on I slipped a little over the other way, so as to duck out of sight of Rhoda Titus’s vantage point. This had the right effect; within minutes, I heard the door clack open behind me, and then a tempest of coughing in the back of the car. Rhoda Titus, I assumed, had inadvertently sucked in air through her mouth as she scurried to catch up with the retreating car, and so she spent twenty minutes or
more hacking up the residue of the chlorine from her lungs.
I concentrated on driving, I remember. Speeding the car a little, drifting down and up dunes at a narrow angle of attack that meant I travelled miles up each mighty dyke and miles down the other side. After a while it was very quiet behind me, with only an occasional ratcheting cough in the dark.
I drove until I was tired, and then went through. I could see, in the light from the cab, that Rhoda Titus had put on her clothes again, and had then put on her overcoat, and had then climbed into the bunk’s sac wearing all that. The lapels of her coat were visible over the edge of the sac. But she was asleep, and I did not disturb her: I stepped out of the car to secure it against the morning’s Whisper, and then I took myself to bed, to a satisfying sleep.
The next day, Rhoda Titus did not get up, and would not engage in conversation with me, but I did not mind this. I had embarked on the journey for solitude, and in truth I was now weary of her company. I ate in silence, and drove in silence. At dusk, I called through to ask her to secure the car against the Whisper (she had watched me do it often enough, and yet had never offered her help), but she did not reply. So I went through and did it myself. She was sitting, still in her coat (but at least it was unbuttoned), eating strands of pasta with her fingers. Her neck was blotted with inky bruises, like a tattoo necklace. Her chin, just below her mouth, was a little grazed from the rubbing of my new beard. I found these marks of wear queerly attractive.
I fetched myself some food from the Fabricant, and sat opposite her. But she did not meet my eye.
‘Another two days, I think,’ I said.
Nothing.
‘In two days we shall be at Yared, and you can go your way.’
At this her eyes danced up to meet mine, and I could see her glittering with some stifled emotion. But then she dropped her eyes again, and I was tired with talk.
After the Whisper I drove on again, until tired, and then I went through. The lights were still on in the back, and Rhoda Titus was kneeling in prayer by her bunk. The sound of my footsteps startled her out of it, and she rose quickly.
I spent an hour reading at random from my notepad, but now Rhoda Titus seemed to be looking at me.
‘Stop staring at me,’ I said, when I realised that she was. Her eyes immediately dropped.
At this I fed myself quickly, thinking how tiresome the pasta was; how stringy, and how the saltiness of everything took the savour even from the salt. Then I drove on.
The following day I saw the first signs of Southern habitation. A dumper truck wandered past us, on its way to the deep desert to bury some toxic waste presumably. Rhoda Titus dashed into the cabin when she heard the rumble of its distant engines, and waved at its black, blank side like a child. It was the first time she had come into the cab for many days.
Late in the afternoon we came across some houses, and a compound of some sort. I called through to Rhoda Titus to ask if she wanted to be dropped off here, or taken deeper into Yared itself. She did not reply, and so I trundled on. Eventually, an hour short of the Whisper, I came to a central square. Several cars were parked in a grid in front of a foliate dome, which had the letters spelling out SPINAL RAILWAY hologrammed, standing out from the curving roof. So I pulled the car in backwards, with the door close to the over-arch of the building (we all were in these habits automatically, to minimise being in the pathological sunshine). I stifled the engine.
For a while I was content to simply sit, to stare at the place I was now in. After so many days of nothing but blank white desert, of salt stretching sand-like all around, of the bright sun and the dark night, there was something almost obscene to my eye in the mess of this settlement. So many strewn buildings, so many little shapes. The littleness of humankind. And, from time to time, a person would emerge, bug-like, to dash through the sunshine and disappear into the dark of another building. A train of cars groaned through the square and wandered away. Everything blared the banality of everyday doings; it all seemed painfully small. I realised, with a shudder of my heart, that I could hardly stand it. After sublimity, this. Even the thought of Rhoda Titus in the back of the car struck me as a sort of contamination.
And so I strained forward, peered through the thickened plas of the upper windshield to take in a resuscitating glimpse of the open sky, just visible squeezed between the bloc-shaped tops of the Yared clutter. It was breath to me.
And so I was quick in wanting to get away from there. I went through to the back of the car, and Rhoda Titus was sitting on the bunk. The bruises on her neck had tanned to a paler blackcurrant colour, as if drifting inwards and fading. I sat opposite her. ‘You wanted to come to Yared, and I have brought you. Here is the Spinal Railway terminus, and it will take you to Senaar.’
She moved her mouth as if to say something, then stopped. Then, as if dragging the words from a very deep place, she whispered: ‘Thank you.’
I scoffed. ‘I have no desire for the “thank” of the hierarchy,’ I told her.
She flinched tinily at this, but said nothing. There was a pause, and it swelled into a silence. Then she stood up, pulling her overcoat tightly about her body, perhaps to be sure of covering the rip in the undershirt. She went through the lock and opened the back door. The chlorine scrubs whined into action. With her right hand bunched at her breast, and her left hand over her mouth, she hopped outside. I followed her and stepped out of the car. My mask clicked up into place.
She stood in front of me for a while, breathing visibly through her nostrils. The corners of her nose bulged and sucked in with the effort. Then she dropped her hand from her mouth.
‘I put salt there, afterwards,’ she said, in a hurry. ‘After you did it and I was outside, I scooped salt inside myself. I did it.’
Then her hand clapped back over her mouth, and her nose registered the effort of taking in a lungful.
I turned from her and climbed back inside the car. The door shut, the chlorine scrubs briefly whined on, finishing their jobs. I went through to the cab, warmed up the drivepole, started the engine, and drove away.
There was some difficulty in obtaining the water that I needed to continue my wanderings in Yared. I stopped and went into a few buildings, talked to a few people; but monies were wanted, and when they realised that I was from Als most of them turned and walked away. I was prepared to deal in barter-monies with people for these necessary things, but few would talk to me for long. Afterwards, I realised that this had to do with the acceleration of events elsewhere, and the first intimations of war between North and South. At the time, I felt only anger. I spent the night parked in the suburbs of Yared, and in the predawn (in the half-hour before the Morning Whisper, when I assumed people would be battened down) I drove to a water tank and tapped it. In fact, as I discovered, the Morning Whisper is weak in Yared, partly because of the earthworks (salt-works?) constructed east of Senaar, partly because of the lie of the land around the sea on that coast. But nobody noticed me taking the water, and I left it splashing onto the hardened salt of the road, puddling and slowly drinking in the baked salt underneath. By midday I was driving in the emptiness north of the place.
5
Warmaking
Barlei
And so my little narrative comes to the war. Historians of conflict are often snagged up in trying to trace back through events to the first cause, the casus belli. But we all know, we the people, that there is only one point at which our attention needs to be fixed. War is a terrible thing though glorious, and it is a thing of many deaths. As with any death, the just thing for a society to do is to allocate blame. This is why societies have courts of justice; I speak as the Supreme Justice of Senaar. I understand justice.
And there can be no doubt that whichsoever way they are cut, the trail of events leading to war implicates Als as the criminals. It was they who wickedly imprisoned the children, they who resisted a lawful operation of seizure (supported by the courts) with murderous force, and they who exacted a terrorist reven
ge on the civilians of our nation. At each stage we, the nation of Senaar (of whom you can feel genuine pride) responded with strength and restraint. After we had rescued our children, there was a national day of celebration. It is still a day kept in our calendar for celebration, although I rejected a motion to have it as a holiday, because I considered the loss in work revenues unjustified. But now I shudder a little to think of that day; to think of the spiderlike Alsists squatting in their camp, watching our joy with bitterness and bile. It was barely a week later that the first device was detonated in Senaar.
The precise sequence of events remains unclear, but certainly at least two, and possibly more, Alsist planes flew down under cover of darkness, landed in the desert east of the dyke and buried themselves under the salt. Then they sent single backpacked individuals amongst the streets. Critics have attacked me for not sealing the city to prevent such retaliation, but how can you seal a city as great and populous as Senaar? To put a seal upon our mouth is also to seal our eyes, our ears; it is the seal of death. We are, after all, a trading nation; trade is the blood in our bodies. People come and go from all over the Galilean basin, and even occasionally from the North, although it was true, even before the war, that relations were strained. Anyway, when these infiltrators first trod our pressed-salt roads, nobody took notice of them. They looked like any one of five hundred solitary traders; people who made their way by boat or car, or along the Spinal, with goods strapped to their backs, to try and sell in the more lucrative Senaarian market. For the price of a half-day licence they would set themselves up in the secondary Market Square, sell at their best price, and make their way out of the city as soon as the Whisper died down. (The law was that they had to be beyond the original borderline; although this was changed as the city grew. By early evening there would be hundreds of people bedding down under plastic sheets wherever they could pad down the salt to make themselves comfortable.)
