Broken Earth

by C M Blackwood

  “I get enough to eat,” she said. “And I have my room. It’s all I need, I suppose.”

  “But not all you want.”

  The words struck a chord deep inside, and rang so true to Heidi that she abandoned the cover of her hand across her face. She looked Jade full in the eye, not knowing before she did that she would, and so becoming somewhat discomfited by the cool, easy stare of the green eyes that she found.

  “I suppose not,” she responded, her voice issuing in a somewhat strangled fashion.

  “You don’t suppose,” said Jade. “Do you suppose? Or do you know?”

  Eyes locked firmly as they were with Jade’s, Heidi was too confused to follow the conversation entirely. She opened her mouth to speak, closed it again, and then said slowly:

  “I’m not sure what it is that I’m supposed to know.”

  Jade smiled – and it was much different from any smile of hers that Heidi had seen thus far. It was not of amusement or entertainment, and did not convey a sense of an understanding of all that lay past it. It was not of surety, and was not completely confident. It left a small margin for error betwixt what was and what might be, and did not say for certain which was preferable.

  “Neither am I,” she said simply.

  They both turned their eyes away, then. It was obvious that neither knew what to say, and it was clear that saying anything other than what they knew would be a mistake. They only sat for a while, sometimes looking up and sometimes looking down.

  Finally Jade spoke again, this time turning to a lighter topic, which might not cause any drop into deep thought.

  “Your accent is strange,” she said. “I’ve never heard it before – which means, I think, that you are not of this land.”

  “I’m not.”

  She waited a moment; but when Heidi failed to expound upon her statement, she said: “Well – are you going to tell me where you’re from?”

  “From across the sea.”

  Jade’s expression grew very interested at that. “From across the sea, you say? Some people say that the world falls away at the edge of the sea – though I can’t say that I have ever believed them. For one thing, if it were true, then there wouldn’t be any sea at all. All of the water would only pour off the side of the earth.”

  “I suppose that makes sense.”

  “I’ve given it great thought,” said Jade seriously. “I’ve always dreamt of sailing across the sea, and putting an end once and for all to all of those ridiculous stories.”

  “Well, you wouldn’t put an end to them,” said Heidi. “Not unless you came back.”

  “I suppose it would depend on how long it took me to get there in the first place. You know, some people say that you could sail forever across the sea, and never come to the end of it. They say you would die of hunger and thirst before you ever saw dry land again.”

  “Couldn’t you eat fish?”

  “I suppose so. But you still wouldn’t have anything to drink.”

  “But water is the only thing in the sea!”

  “You can’t drink salt water, silly.”

  “Why not?”

  “You would go mad.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. It’s just what people say.”

  “People say that the world ends past the ocean, too. But you don’t believe that.”

  “At least the water theory can be proved.”

  Heidi nodded. “I suppose so.”

  “You know,” said Jade, looking as though she had just remembered something, “it seems that I’ve fallen off topic again. One moment I was asking you where you were from; and the next we were talking about salt water.”

  “It’s no matter, really,” said Heidi. “There’s nothing more for me to tell, anyway.”

  “Don’t be silly! You haven’t even told me the name of it.”

  “The name of what?”

  “Of the place where you were born.”

  Heidi shrugged. “I don’t really know.”

  “You don’t remember?”

  “I was very young when we came here. I remember hardly anything; and my mother never told.”

  They fell quiet again, and sat each with their own thoughts, till the chill in the air became enough to nudge them back inside.

  Heidi was quite glad that Mrs Flebott had removed herself from the parlour. The first floor of the house was empty, and its silence comforted Heidi just a bit, as she followed Jade on up the stairs.

  Dera and Josephine were seated side by side on the edge of the bed, and were talking with David, who sat in a chair by the small desk pushed against the left wall.

  Jade stood by the small window before the bed, looking out into the night. She glanced from the window to Heidi, and gave her another of those new smiles, what made her seem such a different person.

  Heidi cleared her throat, in an attempt to take control of the situation. She felt her hands shaking, and her voice wavering, as she told the people where they would sleep.

  “Two can sleep in the bed,” she said to Dera and Josephine, who began right away to settle themselves on that narrow mattress. Poor Josephine must have had such a headache, Heidi could not see putting her anywhere but in the most comfortable place.

  “There are two sofas downstairs,” she went on, looking to Jade and David. “You can sleep on those, if you like. There should be blankets already there.”

  “But where are you going to sleep?” asked David.

  “Somewhere on the floor. It’s no matter, really.”

  “Of course it is,” Jade interjected. “You won’t sleep on the floor in your own room. You and I will have the sofas, and David will sleep somewhere in between, on the carpet in the parlour.”

  “Sounds just fine to me,” said David, rising from his seat. He said goodnight to Josephine and Dera, who were already snug under the covers. Then he gestured for his sister and Heidi to lead him down the stairs.

  It was something of an awkward evening – even more so when they in the parlour were awoken come morning by the bony, poking finger of old Mrs Flebott – but it was the catalyst for change in four of the six lives under that roof.

  ~

  When she woke in the morning, Heidi went on her own to fix breakfast. Mrs Flebott’s son had already come to call, and had brought his mother to the weekly meal that they both shared with the rest of their family in Nanik. The old woman would be gone all day – and Heidi took full advantage of the openness of the kitchen.

  She cooked while the others slept on, planning to wake them when she was finished, and to offer them a bit of food before sending them on their way. After all – she needed get to Skyler quite as quickly as she could.

  Yet everything happened so suddenly, with smaller events piling onto larger ones in such a fluid motion, that there was almost no time to even understand what exactly had happened.

  Heidi could think of only one thing quick enough to fix, which would feed every mouth in the house. So she set to work on a large number of eggs, all scrambled together in one wide pan. She had the spatula scraping back and forth in the pan, and the glasses jumping from the cupboard to the counter, where she had the juice pouring from the pitcher into the glasses like a short assembly line. The plates flew down next, coming to rest each in its own place on the kitchen table. And then, as she was getting her bag ready for the departure that she had scheduled to take place in no more than five minutes, she had the pan at the table, with the spatula pushing a heap of eggs down onto each plate.

  It was sometime during that process, that two people arrived in the doorway of the kitchen. Heidi did not see them at first, and so did not try to grab the handle of the pan, so that it might look like she was scraping out the eggs herself. When she looked up from her business, she saw them standing there, and had no words prepared in explanation.

  Dera’s mouth was hanging open – but Jade’s was not. She came into the room, and stood before to Heidi with a self-assured smile. The girl from the night befo
re was nowhere to be seen – and the one from the tavern, from Josef Falimer’s driveway, had returned.

  “Can I tell you a secret?” she asked.

  Heidi said nothing. She only nodded slowly, wondering all the while if she should have done.

  Jade made a small movement with her right hand, motioning towards the spatula on the stove. She brought it through the air and into her hand, just as quickly as – if not quicker than – Heidi would have been able. She passed it to Heidi, her smile not having faded a smidge.

  It was at that moment that David came strolling into the kitchen. He walked past Dera, who stood stock-still in the doorway, and sat down before a plate of eggs.

  “Lovely!” he said, taking up a fork in his hand.

  “Enjoy,” said Heidi, who snatched up her bag with a thumping heart. “Yet I am afraid that I shall have to trust you all, to lock up after yourselves. I must go.”

  With that, she hurried from the room, making her way for the front door without so much as posing an inquiry to Dera concerning Josephine’s state of health.

  She was not at all surprised to find that Jade had followed her. She looked back at her with a quick dart of the eyes, but kept on down the walk, till she reached the rutted drive that led back to the small roofed structure in which Breaker was kept.

  “Heidi,” said Jade, reaching out a hand to touch her shoulder. “Won’t you wait a moment?”

  Heidi shrugged away from her, and tried very hard not to look into her face, as she led Breaker round the house.

  “You can’t just leave,” said Jade, jogging a bit to keep up with Heidi’s pace.

  “Of course I can,” said Heidi. “I have to go to work. I intend to go now – and I don’t intend to speak any more about what happened in there.”

  “But you’ve not said anything about it at all!”

  “And I don’t intend to!”

  “Well, fine,” said Jade. She came to wrap her arms round Breaker’s neck, so that Heidi could not ride away. “But I still want to talk to you.”

  “I cannot talk right now.”

  “You can talk later.”

  “I won’t be back till late tonight.”

  “As I said.”

  Heidi sighed. She put a hand to her forehead, and looked down at Jade’s earnest face.

  “Might I stay here till you get back?” asked Jade.

  “Do you not have somewhere to be?” said Heidi, rather pointedly.

  “Not particularly,” said Jade. “Pa will do all right on his own, for a day or two.”

  “That does not sound fair to him.”

  “Are you truly so anxious to be rid of me?”

  “It’s not that,” said Heidi. She slid down from Breaker’s back, so that she might speak with Jade at eye-level. “But don’t you think – don’t you think that we should all be getting back to our own lives? It was nice to meet you, really it was; but I must get back to work. And you must go home.”

  “But did you not say,” said Jade, with something of a clever glint in her eye (what would grow very familiar to Heidi in the years which followed), “that we should help Josephine? Do you not still think the same?”

  “Of course I want to help her,” said Heidi. “But I have no idea how to do that. I have a very dull, very quiet life – don’t you understand? I’m not made for these kinds of things. I go every day to the shop; and I come home every night, with a sandwich that I bought from Mr Poska. I eat it in my little room, and I look out my little window – looking out at all the little stars, that must be still so much bigger than me. Don’t you understand, Jade? It has always been only me in that room. It is all I know – and I do not ask for more, because I would not know what to do with it, if I had it. Don’t you understand?”

  She took a deep and shaking breath.

  Jade watched her for a moment. She did not speak; and seemed, in truth, altogether uncertain as to what she should say.

  “It does not really matter if you do,” said Heidi, leading Breaker to the edge of the road. “I am sorry if it makes you think badly of me, because that isn’t what I want at all. Please, though – I want you all to be gone, when I come home tonight. But it really was nice meeting you.”

  She climbed back up onto the horse, and clicked once to him, so that he started off at a steady pace down the road. She said nothing more, and she did not look back.

  XV: An Unheeded Warning

  The continuation of their journey seemed nothing but a dream, nothing but a wakeful sleep to Heidi. Whatever they did seemed to pose no more risk whatever. She was only watching it happen, as though she had no stake in the matter. She only watched, when a man took her under his eye on the paddleboat; when he held her eye as though there was something he wished to convey in his gaze. She simply stared at him until he looked away, not yet understanding the gravity of the situation, or of the look that he was giving her. Why would she, after all?

  When they started off into the Abandoned Earth, unsure as to what they would find there, the pace of her heart was not changed. None of it seemed very close to her, and did not inspire as much fear as it should have.

  “I would give anything, if we could only fly over this place,” said Dera, looking far ahead into the low, craggy landscape of grey-and-black nothingness.

  The horses crunched on and on over the gravel-filled floor of that desolate place. They snorted ever and anon, with an anxiety that they could not keep covered. Heidi barely noticed, and did not reach down to pat Eriah’s back as often as he probably would have liked her to. She only turned her eyes all about, watching for signs of movement across that empty earth.

  They had left the Panwye Hills behind long ago, having moved through them as quickly as they were able. Heidi had expected whole hosts of evil things to be lurking behind those tall, dark hills, and was thoroughly surprised to make it through without incident. She had thought, of course, that whatever dwelt in those lands would be hard-pressed to pass up the opportunity of unsuspecting travellers. And so this absence of trouble, rather than reassuring her, served only to make her more anxious. If the Dúnanen felt not the need to attack, under cover of those enormous mounds of ruined earth, there was certainly no telling what they might attempt, in a defenceless plot of open land.

  Dera looked at it in the distinctly opposite way. She breathed a sigh of relief when they passed the last hill, and seemed to gain a feeling of safety.

  Heidi would have warned her, not to be so certain so soon,; but she was far too busy watching for dark shapes, on the horizon of the setting sun. She knew they were there. She only was not quite sure where.

  Even from their distant position, she could see the top of Onssgaard’s North Wall. The ground up ahead seemed to slant downwards; and it became clear, that the remainder of the wall would not be visible till they had reached the decline. Yet still they could see the tops of the towers that must have belonged to the castle. Heidi tried to imagine what it looked like, large and grand as it must have been. She imagined the Princess somewhere inside it, awaiting their arrival, as if she had known of it all along. A great hope attached to this, of course, was that Jade had already found her – and that she was as close as the tips of those towers.

  As the world began to darken, they noticed a strange and amazing effect taking place over the wall of the city. It was as if the lights beyond it were rising up, coming to hover and swirl just over the top of the wall. It was a vision of orange coming to play against the perfect blackness of the night sky, and was incredibly beautiful. Heidi forgot

  – if only for a moment – their grave situation, and could focus only on the way the lights moved.

  The nature of that moment separated them so completely from forgotten warnings of the danger in that land, it seemed for a while quite an unthreatening place. The silence, the lights, and the nearness of the city (which had begun to represent safety to Heidi) all combined to create a space of evaporated fear, which made following events harder to combat precisely.


  There was no sign, no signal. There was only a sudden flash of light, white and blinding. Heidi thought, at first, that it was only a streak of lightning; but realised soon after that there had been no crack of thunder to accompany it. The sky did not open to let loose a torrential downpour, and its stars were in fact untainted by even a single storm cloud.

  There was only the light.

  “What is this?” Dera said loudly, pulling the horses back.

  Eriah reared up, and Heidi had to throw both arms round his neck, to keep from being tossed to the ground.

  “Whoa!” she shouted, tugging on the reins. “Down, Eriah!”

  The light did not disappear. It kept flashing, in large bursts, emitting heat and loud snapping sounds. Eriah could not be calmed by Heidi’s voice, and reared back once more, this time to full height. Heidi lost her grip and tumbled backwards, falling nearly six feet from his back.

  It was then, conveniently enough, that the light vanished. Heidi tried to look up, but her eyes were still affected by the blast of light, with bright colours dancing before them to hinder her sight. She rubbed at them with the heels of her hands, leaning against Eriah’s flank as she pulled herself up off the ground.

  While she was staggering about with stars in her eyes, Dera asked in a commanding tone:

  “Who are you? What is the meaning of this?”

  Heidi longed to see whom she was speaking to, yet could do nothing for that moment but to continue rubbing ineffectually at her hot eyelids.

  “Surely you did not expect,” said a deep, clear voice, “to cross these lands with no consequence?”

  Heidi blinked rapidly, over and over, and looked in the direction from which the new voice had come.

  “And I suppose you are our consequence?” asked Dera.

  “I have come only with a warning.”

  “Well, let’s have it, then.”

  The scene began to open up for Heidi. She crawled up onto Eriah’s back, and looked at the man before them, mounted upon a horse as black as her own – but more than twice the size. Heidi had never seen a beast so large. It towered over them, and allowed the man to look down upon them, with his face shrouded in shadow. And yet there was a strange sort of blue fire in his eyes, bright and hot and impossible to hide.