Eban hesitates. Then he says, “I could build us something. Here, or near here. Wherever you wanted. Something safe. Something lasting.”
“We’re not stopping.”
“Just till a peddler comes along, until we can get a tent to—”
“No. Eban.” She shakes her head, a little sadly. “We can’t wait.”
He draws a deep breath. “It will be okay,” he tells her, not knowing what else to say. “We’ve got extra blankets in the pack. We’ll use those for now. If there’s sun tomorrow, we can dry out the sleeping bag.”
They should have waited. In a month or three, it might be warm enough that food would be easier found, and the rivers would run, and there would be no risk of death by exposure. He feels a ravaging hunger in his stomach. “We need meat,” he tells Judy.
* * *
—
After Judy has gone to check the rabbit traps again, rifle over her shoulder, Eban sets to splitting kindling to rebuild the fire. He has struck just one blow of the axe when something makes him turn. Afterward, he can’t recall whether it was a sound that warned him or some precognitive sense of being watched.
He sees them at once. Just ahead, so close he could strike them with a well-aimed stone, they walk in a loose line. They walk slowly, as if in no particular hurry. He thinks at first, for one wild minute, that they will pass on by like that, if he says nothing, does nothing. But it is soon clear what they are up to. Slowly, without urgency, they are forming a circle around him, and with each step tightening it. There are five of them. Six.
Eban grips the axe, his eyes searching the ground for the other rifle, but he must have left it where they slept. He thinks desperately of Judy. Stay away, he thinks. Have the sense to stay away.
One of the figures steps out of the circle then, a false smile drawn across his face. “Now, I know what you’re thinking. But don’t you worry. We’re no marauders.” He crouches in the snow beside Eban and his grin widens. “We’re a family.”
Eban hesitates to speak. All he can think of is Judy. How long has it been? How far might she be? How soon will she be back?
The man is tall and brawny. Even stooped and idle, he intimates wasted strength with every gesture. He studies Eban as if pleasantly surprised by him. “Well then. Let’s get the pleasantries out of the way. That one’s my brother-in-law.” He points to a thin man who has already taken a seat, leaning against a tree with his eyes turned away from the scene unfolding before him. He looks like a sulking adolescent, all lanky limbs and hooded eyes, but he has grey in his hair. “His name is Dean. And I’m Tristan.”
Tristan holds out a hand as if to accept something Eban has offered him, but Eban’s hands are empty. Gently, Tristan takes Eban’s hand by the wrist and holds it in his own. “Like this,” he says, wagging it.
When the other man has released his hand, Eban draws it back as if it doesn’t belong to him anymore, cradling it in the other hand.
“No one does things like that now,” the man says. “But I like to. It’s not my habit to get moony about the old ways, but that one makes sense to me. Show a man you mean no harm. Harder to betray someone, like you’re itching to do, after you’ve shaken hands. Yes, I see those eyes darting around. How many more you waiting on? Where are they—up the trees? You got a camp near here?”
Eban shakes his head.
“Sure. Just out for a stroll in the woods, I’m sure. Maybe you got lost on your way back from a picnic. That it? That your picnic basket you got there?”
Eban can only shake his head again.
“Well, anyway. You see my point. You’re more likely to hesitate to cut the throat of a man whose hand you’ve held.”
“You might spare him the profundity, Daddy. He thinks you’re going to rob him, and I think he’s looking forward to it shutting you up for a minute.” The four women of the group have removed their packs and settled into seated positions on top of them, with a shared expression of weary patience. The eldest is clearly mother to the others—two of the younger women seem only to repeat her, a faint reverberation of her own slight form and thin fair hair. The third daughter, who looks to be the youngest, takes after her father, with a solid frame and dark, ravelled hair that falls to her waist. It’s the third daughter who spoke.
“My daughter Inge,” says the man, without looking at her. “She was born insolent. The other two have about as much to say as a couple of nails. Bethany and Doll.”
“Dollia,” says their mother.
“She goes by Doll.”
Doll herself, identified by a nod from Tristan, does not appear to care what she’s called. Head lowered, she lets a tail of near-white hair fall over her eyes, and escapes behind it.
“And their mother is Vi. What do they call you?”
“My name’s Eban.” He steadies his breathing. “I suppose I’d better get on my way.”
“Sure. And you will.” Tristan swings his pack to the ground and nods to Bethany, who opens it and begins setting up the tent she pulls out from it. “Eban, is it? Well, we’re just travellers like yourself, Eban. Picnicker, wasn’t it? I think you’ll be glad for a little company. Gets lonesome in the hills. Don’t worry. We’ll settle in for the night. Keep the conversation going. And who knows—maybe we’ll find some other folks join us after all. Show up in those trees.”
Eban is careful to steer his eyes from the hills where they want to search out Judy. “There’s no one.”
“So you say. So you say.” Vi and her daughters seem to have taken Tristan’s words as instructions and have gone to work, unpacking their belongings, building a fire and setting up camp. Only Dean remains unmoving under his tree, looking incalculably bored. “Now, why don’t you go ahead and put that axe down, Eban?”
He lowers it slowly to the ground, resting the handle against the stacked firewood.
“That’s better. Friendlier. And while we’re enjoying each other’s company, we ought to have some entertainment. Long day left yet, and we can’t fill it all with yapping.”
Eban doesn’t understand why Dean has begun scowling until Tristan barks, “You heard me,” and the younger man rises reluctantly to his feet. He reaches into his pack and produces a misshapen black case. It opens to reveal a coiling machine of gold.
Looking at the shining object, its whorl of pipes that open into a wide bell, Eban feels strangely moved. He doesn’t know why. Dean handles the machine so gently, fitting his hands around it so precisely—as it, in turn, seems fitted to those hands—that the value of the thing he holds is as evident as if it were named aloud.
“What is it?” Eban whispers.
“French horn.” Tristan looks faintly awed himself, watching as Dean blows into his machine. “I would have rathered a guitar, but it beats the quiet anyway. The quiet out here can put you right out of your head.”
“Horn,” Dean says so quietly that Eban scarcely catches it. “They called it just the horn.”
“It’s for…it makes…” The word seems absurd and Eban stumbles on it before a voice he wanted desperately not to hear speaks it for him.
“Music,” says Judy.
Tristan turns so slowly that Eban hopes she will be gone by the time his gaze reaches the place where she stands, between the very trees he gestured to, minutes ago. She doesn’t seem to notice him, or Eban. She is watching Dean, transfixed, as he raises the horn to his lips.
“Strauss,” he says, his voice without expression. “Nocturno. Opus seven.”
Eban flinches at the sound Judy makes as the man begins to play. It is a cry of something so pure and so unhappy that it is a music of its own. He can’t bear to look at her.
“Listen to him,” murmurs Tristan. “Listen to that.” And Eban does.
The sound that slides from the horn and winds like running water between the air, the trees, the molecules and material of all the world, is n
ot like a human voice. It sings, rises and falls, like a voice might. But it is a machine. He plays only for a count of minutes. But when he has finished, even the light seems to have changed in the wood.
“Please,” says Judy. “Will you play it again?”
Dean doesn’t seem to hear. “Too cold,” he mutters, giving the horn a shake. “Gone flat on—”
“I guess we’ve found some more company,” says Tristan, drawing closer to Eban, who is trying not to look at Judy. “That the last of you? Or are there more out there?”
Eban wonders if it’s better that the man thinks there might be more of them, at wait beyond the camp. Back in the outland, when he was still a boy, marauders would often pass through. He came to know from the sound of his mother’s voice when she had spotted them. She’d send him and his brother to their room, and sometimes they’d have to wait for hours till she came for them. Once she was dragged out of the house before she had time to send them away. “Get out!” she screamed as three men hoisted her by her elbows, her heels leaving two furrows across the dirt floor. Eban thought she was talking to the men, but when he forced himself to lift his head and look at her, her eyes, staring back, were filled with fury. “You get out of here, you and your brother, or I’ll beat you raw!” He felt curiously stubborn as he realized that there was no way she could enforce her words. “No,” he said. He was searching the room for something to use against the men. He found nothing, and by then they were gone. “Don’t listen,” he told his brother, closing the door against the noises from outside. She came back several hours later, and he was feeding his brother at the table. They looked at her, looking for some sign of what had happened, but there was none.
“Well, we’ll find them if there are. Or maybe they’ll find themselves, like young miss here.” Tristan raises his voice now. “Will you introduce yourself? I think this one’s not too happy with you. But we’d be glad to make your acquaintance.”
Inge, who is digging a firepit with a blackened trowel, says, “Quit the speeches, Daddy. You sound a fool.”
Tristan gives no sign of having heard her. “Tristan,” he says, stepping toward Judy with his hand outstretched. “I’m not one for the old ways, but this is a better custom than most. Hard to betray a man you’ve—”
Inge turns her head to watch Judy as she passes, her gaze dropping and lifting to take her in. “He thinks he’s a pirate,” she says, still eyeing Judy, who has accepted Tristan’s offered hand. “He likes to think we’re all very, very impressed. And frightened.”
“I’m Judy.”
“Well, we’re very pleased to meet you, Judy,” says Tristan. “You and this man, who I guess belongs to you.”
“We’re together. As you are.” She looks at the other women. “Hello.”
Tristan introduces them and Judy nods at each before turning back to Dean. “I’m Judy,” she says again.
The man has pulled a u-shaped pipe from his horn and is shaking it over the snow. “Dean.”
“Dean,” Judy says. “It was so beautiful. That music. How did you learn it?”
Dean doesn’t respond or look like he intends to.
Tristan answers for him. “His grandmother used to play in the orchestra.”
“Grandfather,” says Vi.
“He learned from her.”
“Him.”
“I like to hear him play. And you meet a lot of people in these hills that like to hear it too. Oh, we can get by with buckshot and fishing line, same as anyone, but it was my idea to do something different from the rest. Entertainers, that’s what we are. And people don’t mind paying a price to hear something you won’t find anywhere else, living up here.”
“Are you…” Judy looks at Eban for the first time since she emerged from the wood. “I mean, the orchestra…that horn. To have things like that…Are you from the cities?”
Dean looks like he will speak then, but Tristan says, quickly, “Why would we go back there, when we can find all we need in these hills? With company to be found—”
“The cold,” says Bethany. Her voice is ghostly and startling and they all turn to hear her. “That cold never goes, it never gets out of you. Not up here, not in the…” She waves her thin hands, like she’s trying to stir up the right words, but her mother hushes her and she falls silent again.
Tristan regards her for a few minutes and then says, “Well. The ones that haven’t seen it have trouble understanding. They think it would be easier.”
“Not easier,” says Judy. “That’s not it.”
“No?”
“You’ve been there, haven’t you? That’s what you’re saying? Not your mother or your grandmother—you know it yourself?”
It’s not clear whether he is considering the question or Judy herself. At last he opens his mouth to speak, but Judy interrupts him.
“It’s what we left our camp to look for. We want to know about the cities. We want to know why…”
He smiles, and there is a warmth in his eyes and in his voice as he asks, “What why is it that you want to know?”
“Why we…Why we can’t go. Why it isn’t safe. If it’s safe.”
“Here’s what I’ll tell you,” says Tristan. “You take that rifle I see you’ve got cocked ready in your coat, and you go find us something good to eat. Not a bunch of scrawny rabbits. Something hearty, a good meal that’ll leave us with full bellies and in the mood to talk. And then, we’ll have a chat. We’ll let you see the show—yes, there’s a show, and I think you’ll like it, if you liked that one tooting away.”
Judy lets the gunstock slide from her coat, resting in the palm of her hand, but she doesn’t move. “Will you really tell us? Do you really know?”
The smile is gone. “Get our dinner while I’m still in the mood to tell you. No more questions.”
After Judy has hurried off into the trees, with one parting look at Eban that reveals nothing of what she might be thinking, Tristan pays no further attention to Eban. But Eban understands he is to stay within the man’s sight.
Tristan vanishes into the tent Vi and his daughters assembled, and the women follow him inside. Then all is quiet. Eban guesses that they travel by dark and sleep what hours they can during the day. For a moment, he thinks of the cry they heard in the foehn winds, and wonders. Then he gets to work.
After building a fire, Eban strings up the sodden bedding. He doubts it will dry in this weather but hopes the heat of the fire will at least speed the job along. They will need to take the first chance they get to run.
As he knots a length of twine around a fir trunk, he thinks, and not for the first time, that there is something similar in Judy and his brother. Certainty, he supposes, or will. And something more than that. Something that is almost, but not quite, invincibility.
It is an intensely vulnerable feeling to live beside someone with that quality. Even as a child, his brother showed no sign of the worried mind that Eban had been born to. He never had nightmares. Never begged their mother to waste a candle burning in the dark at bedtime.
One night Eban whispered his brother’s name, testing whether he slept. He always fell asleep easily and quickly, while Eban battled his own consciousness every night, sometimes for hours.
“What, Eban?” came the steady, familiar voice, from an arm’s length away.
“Do you ever think about what will happen to us?”
“Tomorrow?”
“No. I mean, later. When we’re grown up. When we’re her age.”
“No.”
“I mean…” He hesitated, frightened even of the words, spoken aloud. “When she dies. When it’s just us?”
“No.”
“You never think about that?”
“No, Eban.”
“Oh.” He turned away, irritated and unsure why. “But…think about it now. Think what it will be like. Only the two of u
s.”
“Yeah.”
“What will we do?”
He was quiet so long that Eban thought he’d gone back to sleep, and felt angry enough to tear the blankets back and shake him till he woke. Then his brother said, “Maybe I’ll learn to make things out of wood. I would like that. And you could get some seeds and make a garden. Maybe you could do that.”
Eban shook his head. “You don’t understand. We’d be alone, just the two of us, forever.”
“Yeah,” his brother answered. “Just the two of us. Just me and Eban.”
“Never mind.”
“Are you angry, Eban?”
“Just go to sleep.”
“You’re angry at me.”
“I said just go to sleep.”
He heard an obedient shifting of blankets and then the slowed breathing of sleep, and sometime after that, it was morning, and they never spoke again of what might happen in the years to come.
At twelve, Eban began his study of the human body. His mother gave him her old textbooks for his birthday that year. She opened one and leafed to a series of transparent pages, each illustrating an isolated system of the body.
On the top page, a stiffly posed male, palms turned out in supplication, presented the integumentary system—a corner cross-section revealing its weave of hair and glands and dermal fibres. With a turn of the page, that system flicked away, disrobing the skeletal system, and then lymphatic, respiratory, circulatory…At the muscular system, he paused, studying the pink web of tissue in the shape of a man. It was the only system beneath the skin that perfectly reproduced the body’s form. It enabled a man to move and to work. It was, he thought, the central human system.
His mother slid open the next page, which depicted the sinuous roots of the nervous system, woven through the man’s limbs and spine and blossoming at his skull. As if disputing the thought Eban was sure he hadn’t spoken aloud, she said, “That is what you are.” She flipped back through the earlier pages, and said, “Bones, cells, lungs, blood, these glands, those vessels, that’s what you’re made of. I’m going to teach you that. But this”—she returned to the nervous system—“this is what you think, what you feel, and what you are. I want you to understand that.”
The Second History Page 8