by Meg McKinlay
It was close now, the tunnel sloping upwards as it approached the opening in the mountain’s flank through which they had entered shortly after dawn. Where stone ended and sky began, there was a narrow lip, a ledge that sat between the two like a shelf. There was headroom here, and more. Jena loosened the knot at her belt and then patted herself down, sweeping small stones and dirt from her hair and clothes. Perhaps it was silly but it felt like something, a gesture – to do what you could, to leave what belonged here to the mountain. A trade, of sorts, for what they had been given.
When she had finished, she squeezed her eyes tightly shut. This too was a habit she had acquired over the years – closing her eyes as she emerged so she would be out suddenly rather than gradually. So it felt less like a choice and more like something already done, to which she must simply adapt. She felt her way forwards and brought her legs around, swinging them over the rim of the ledge.
When she opened her eyes, the sheer walls towered above and all around. She was at a slight overhang; a few feet below the lip of the rock, the mountain sloped down into the clotting dark of the forest.
Even as Jena had led the others up here this morning, she had known they would have to be careful going back down. The slope was steep and the surface was an unsteady scree of rounded stones, any one of which could easily turn an ankle. She moved forwards a little further. Her legs swung freely at first, dangling out into space. Then she hooked her knees over the ledge and shuffled to the side, making room for the girl behind.
“Oh! You can see everything.”
Min. The name came to Jena as if something had clicked into place inside her head. A first daughter, Mother Berta had said. A first daughter, but a sixth child. Jena winced, thinking of the hunger, the cold. The weight of a whole family on those fragile shoulders.
Min edged into the opening, craning to see. It had barely been light when they came in and in any case a girl on her first harvest would have had more important things on her mind than the view.
She squinted in the light, swivelling left, then right. “It’s so different from up here.”
Jena followed Min’s gaze across the treetops. The whole world was laid out before them. On the far side, the village nestled in a sheltered corner, bordered by rock wall in the north, the fields to the east, and the spreading forest in the south and west. And all of that by the towering ridges of the mountain, the strong stony fingers that encircled the valley, cupping the land in the palm of its hands.
It must have been around midday for there was a wide shaft of sun upon the valley. With the season drawing to a close, there was hardly any heat in it, but the light alone was almost warming. The mountain’s soaring peaks meant the valley had only a few hours of full sunlight each day; each beam felt precious, worth savouring.
There was little movement below, with most of the village and its fields shrouded by the surrounding trees. The tops of the tallest buildings were visible, along with the spindly ventilation pipes that protruded from each house. When the winter snows fell, these would allow them fresh air, at least for a time. They put Jena in mind of the reeds that clustered along the banks of the spring; she couldn’t help imagining creatures hidden below the water, mouths pressed hopefully to the ends.
Although the valley looked peaceful from here, the old wounds were still there. Remnants of the time they called Rockfall were everywhere, ugly outcrops of stone dotting the ground like tumours. There was no way to repair such assaults on the earth – the way the ground had split itself open as if it were being carved by an invisible knife. These things could not be undone but the passage of time had softened the transgressions of the past: the deep green moss coating the low ridges that radiated through the forest from the base of the mountain; the tangle of ivy covering the massive boulders that had shaken loose all those years ago. From here, you could set history aside and see it as nothing but beautiful.
That was, if you didn’t turn towards the Gash, the jagged wound in the mountain’s side where everything had ended. Everyone knew the story of Rockfall. It was a tale that had shaped their lives, whose aftermath they lived every day.
Before Rockfall, their world had been outside. People lived on the plain that sloped away from the mountain, a narrow band of undulating land that lay between it and the edge of the island. Back then, the valley was just a place people came to from elsewhere. Though the ring of mountains formed an almost-closed circle, there had been a way through, a single point where the stony hands tapered down to form a natural passage. Every day, people walked through the place they called the Pass, coming here to pick herbs and berries or trap the landbirds that favoured the shelter of the forest. Or to spread out a blanket and eat lunch in the shade by the spring that bubbled up from the valley floor.
People did other things here too, things that seemed beyond imagining now. Men worked side by side to split open the mountain. They blasted holes big enough to stand in, then swarmed inside with shovels and pickaxes. They hacked at the rock, taking whatever they wanted – some things simply because they were shiny or pleasing to the eye. The mountain’s deepest secrets were shaped into baubles and trinkets; the translucent blue of the mica dotted earlobes and hung in windows.
The Gash was not the only place their ancestors had wronged the mountain, but it was where the rock fought back. Where it finally said enough. It opened its throat and swallowed their world, and them with it. Of those digging, only a handful survived. And did so to find themselves trapped, along with everyone else who had come to the valley that day. When the rocks finally stopped falling, the Pass had closed; what had been sheer walls on either side were collapsed upon each other in a tight jumble of stone. Those in the valley were encircled by rock, utterly enclosed, the mountain soaring above and around them, its treasures sealed deep once more, beyond reach.
Mother Berta’s grandson, Luka, said she had a necklace with a mica pendant, a teardrop of luminous blue stone that had been passed down to her. That she kept it in a chest, snug between layers of heavy fabric.
Jena had scoffed when he told her. When the snow grew too deep for chimneys and hopeful reeds, mica was the only fuel the village could safely burn. It was the difference between life and death and there was little enough to spare. None among them would hoard a trinket while others froze.
A shiver ran through her. How terrible that first winter must have been. The Rockfall survivors could not have anticipated how deep the snow would fall – that the mountain’s peaks would act as a funnel, the small valley as a basin, building it up and up, above and around them, the stone walls that ringed their world seeming to intensify the cold. That their choice, snowbound inside their huts, would be between starvation, freezing and suffocation.
With their chimneys buried in snow, the smoke from the wood fires had nowhere to go but back inside. There was no way to warm themselves and no way to cook. There was no way to get out and no way to remain.
When spring finally came, they had lost several of their number. The elderly, the weak. When they had dug their way out through the softening snow, they began to dig graves.
Over the years, they learned. They found ways to manage better. The ventilation pipes, which bought them time. But most of all the mica, which burned cleanly, leaving nothing in its wake. No smoke or fine particles that would steal your breath and choke you from the inside. When mica was spent, it simply blinked out.
Jena patted the bulging pouch she had lashed against her belt. It was a good harvest. She had been right about the signs.
“Come on, Jena!” Loren called from the middle of the line. Her voice was lighthearted but betrayed a note of impatience.
“Just a minute!” Jena motioned to Min to loosen the rope that looped through her belt. The other girls would follow in turn, working the knots until they yielded. The rope was made of tightly woven rag-vine and was thin but tough, almost wiry. Inside the mountain, they wore it doubled over, giving them extra length in case they needed it for a long descen
t. When they were tunnelling, it bound the line together, but once the knots were undone, it slipped easily away.
“Come on,” Jena said to Min. She pushed lightly off the ledge and onto the ground below, stiffening as her feet sent a flurry of stones skittering across the slope. Then she checked herself. They were just rollers, surface-dwellers the mountain had shed like dead skin. No one would fault her for that.
She watched Min push herself clear. The girl slid almost soundlessly out and down, her hands extended just enough for balance. When her feet found ground, she stood there, contained, as if the rock were still around her, as if she were unsure how to handle the sudden rush of space.
Jena allowed herself the flicker of a smile. It was seven years since her own first harvest but she remembered that feeling, the odd sensation of her limbs suddenly moving unchecked into the outside. This was as sure a test as any, she had always thought. What came naturally here said more somehow than the years of training.
This girl would do well and that was a relief. The Mothers had trialled five others this season but none had made it past the surface tunnels. One was simply too big-boned, the others lean enough but each lacking something necessary – whether agility or strength or a certain steeliness of will.
From six girls, one. But it was enough. One gave them seven and that was what mattered. Having more in reserve was a luxury; that was all.
The others had emerged and now Kari was out, letting the momentum of her descent carry her down the slope. She skidded to a stop, feet shovelling through the loose stones, and grinned when she saw Jena frown.
“They’re rollers, Jena. Stop worrying.”
“I’m not.”
“Of course you are.” Kari put an arm around her. “You always worry. I bet you did that eye-closing thing too.”
Jena flushed. She hadn’t meant to share her funny little rituals with Kari; it had just happened somehow, a natural consequence, perhaps, of all the nights they spent at arm’s-length from each other, snug in the tiny room that had only been meant for one.
“You did, didn’t you?” Kari laughed and reached back to loosen her braid. She combed her fingers roughly through her hair, working from the bottom up. When they were inside, the girls all wore their hair in this style, pulled back from their faces and woven tightly. It was practical for tunnelling but there was more to it than that; it simply felt wrong to leave something loose that might be contained. It was for this reason, too, that even though their years of wrapping were long past, they still bound their hips and chests when they tunnelled, as if to say, We are doing what we can.
Jena glanced down the slope at Min. She had hurried to a nearby bush and was crouched behind it.
Kari’s eyes sparkled with amusement. “They always drink too much the first time.” She turned towards Jena, her expression thoughtful. “She did well, didn’t she? She’ll be good.”
“Yes, I think so.”
“Calla said she was a cleanskin.”
Jena’s gaze took in Min’s slender frame, resting briefly on her hips, then shoulders. Through her thin cotton garments, she could see the outline of jutting bone.
There was something right and natural about a girl like that. It sometimes seemed to Jena that those who had been adjusted had a stunted quality, as if they had been reduced from a larger version of themselves. Some said such girls did not take to the line as easily as cleanskins but if that were true, Jena had seen no evidence of it.
In the mountain, in the dark, it didn’t matter what you looked like. It didn’t matter whether you had been born into your smallness or helped along by the knife, by the careful breaking and compression of your bones. It mattered only that you could get the work done.
A few feet further along, Renae sat with Asha, their eyes fixed in the direction of the village. Thinking of home, Jena supposed. Of a soft bed and a handful of something to ease the ache in their stomachs.
As much as it was what every girl dreamed of, tunnelling was hard work. It sapped them of their reserves, and they had little enough of those. Jena too could feel hunger hollowing her out.
But as eager as they might be to head for home and food, it was important they wait. That they take some time to stretch a tentative arm, massage the cramping knots from a leg. That when they stood, they did so slowly, so the sky didn’t rush to their heads, making them dizzy. Making them fall.
Jena had seen it happen in her first season. Had watched a girl waver where she stood, like a flame about to let go in the face of the wind.
I should have run, she thought later. If she had, she might have reached the girl before she crumpled – limbs folding onto themselves, knees buckling beneath her. But Jena had been young then, and new; she hadn’t known what was coming. For months afterwards, the sickening crunch had replayed itself in her mind.
A fall was bad enough. But fainting was so much worse. A girl unconscious had no chance of remembering what the Mothers drummed into them over years of training: Do not fall. But if you must fall, make yourself limp. Be like water. Be soft upon the ground.
The girl had hit so hard.
That awful sound. Something shattering. The white gleam of bone breaking the surface.
A break was nothing like an adjustment. There was no planning in it, no control. An adjustment could advance a girl; a break could be the end of her days in the mountain.
Jena turned to Kari. “We’ll wait awhile.”
“Of course.”
Jena felt a flush of gratitude. She knew Kari was eager to get back, to see her mama, to place a hand on her belly and wait for the fluttering movements that had lately begun to ripple her skin. They both were. But their work was not done until the harvest was secured and the line safely home, and this was something Kari would not question. She would wait and keep a watchful eye on the others until Jena said it was time to move on.
Jena raised herself onto the tips of her toes and peered out towards the village, resting an arm on Kari’s shoulder. It would take them over an hour to get back, perhaps two. Although you were never far from anything else in the valley, the paths through the forest were not direct. They looped around themselves, following the flattest ground they could between the rugged outcrops of stone.
Jena had begun to lower her eyes to the slope and choose a place to sit when something caught her eye. Through the air above the village a thin column of smoke was rising. It was faint enough that you might easily miss it in the shifting light. And yet clear enough that once you had seen it there was no question it was there.
She stared uneasily across the valley. There might be smoke in the Square, she told herself. The bakery, stoking its ovens. The smokehouse, where people would be preparing bird and rabbit for the winter stores. Or perhaps one of the kilns, where rollers and water stones were melted and shaped into metal and glass. Like everything else, wood was carefully rationed, but daytime fires might burn for such purposes, for the good of all.
But this was not that kind of smoke. There was a puff of colour, a greenish tinge Jena had seen from only one kind of fire. And it was not coming from the Square. It was fainter over the centre of the village, as if it had drifted there on the breeze, thinning out on its way from somewhere else. She tracked its passage backwards, to where it was thicker. And as she did, the skin on her arms pimpled into gooseflesh.
East. The edge of the village.
But it was too early for that. Much too early.
Her arm stiffened on Kari’s shoulder. She turned and saw the flash of realisation, alarm flooding Kari’s face.
A sick feeling roiled deep in Jena’s stomach, and with it a surge of recognition – that instant when you were made to look squarely at something that changed everything.
The smoke. Its colour. Its origin.
East, where the houses in the very back of the village nestled by the curving wall of the mountain.
Kari’s house. Their house.
“No,” Kari rasped.
Her arm wrenched
abruptly from Jena’s shoulders. “I have to go. I …”
And then she was gone, tiny stones scattering behind her as she careered headlong down the slope.
THREE
The forest blurred around Jena. Thin branches whipped across her skin. A footfall ahead, Kari was sprinting, arms pumping by her side, hands clawing at the air as if to pull herself forwards. When Kari took off, Jena had recoiled at the way she flailed, legs tangling, arms windmilling as she tried to find speed.
Then she had followed, stumbling behind Kari down the slope.
Wouldn’t she run too, if it were her own mama?
Hadn’t she, when it was?
Kari’s cheeks were flushed and her mouth was open, panting. Her straw-blonde hair, kinked into ridges from the braid, streamed behind her. Every now and then a strand caught roughly on a twig before being yanked clear; Jena was glad to have left her own hair tightly bound.
Their feet pounded the forest floor, their cadence coming together for a time, then separating again. The pattern repeating, over and over. They were safer now, at least. The ground beneath was well worn – smooth and familiar: no loose stones to snag a careless foot, no holes to turn an unsuspecting ankle.
Branch, rock, mossy log. There was no time for the eye to rest on anything. There was only foot over foot, leaping and turning. Jena’s chest pounded, protesting this sudden exertion after the hours of slow, deliberate movement.
“You … okay?” Kari’s breath came in short, rasping snatches.
Their eyes met briefly and Jena read the fear etched in Kari’s. “Nearly there.” The steadiness in her own voice came as a surprise.
In reply, Kari surged forwards, drawing ahead along the widening track. Her shirt had come loose and fluttered at her side like the wing of a wounded bird. The morning’s tunnelling had loosened her wrappings and where the skin was exposed, Jena saw flashes of red – patches of flesh that had been scraped and torn. Each trip laid new wounds over those that had barely healed from the last, each girl’s body becoming its own kind of map.
