13
THE THROBBING RETURNED, at first in pumps, then in waves. Ren kept applying the antiseptic cream, but the tube soon ran out, and the torn lips of her wound turned scarlet, swollen, hot to touch. Yellow-white pus began oozing from the depths of her muscle, carrying an oily, sick scent.
Three days after she ran out of cream Ren tried to unwrap her bandage, only to find that the drying pus had fused to the wound. She lay by the creek, submerging her arm in the water until the gauzy fabric unglued itself from her flesh. Thick threads of pus swam away down the stream. Her wound rang out with pain and rot.
She could have gone to the village to beg for more antibiotics, but she knew the soldiers would be patrolling the lower slopes. She had no way of contacting Barlow, and even if she could, she didn’t want to. They knew his son had come to see her; any further connection would only bring him harm. Without medicine, she should at least have rested, but her stores of food had dwindled dangerously—all she had left were a few half-grown, unharvested vegetables and a handful of stale nuts. So, despite the infection, despite the mind-blanking stabs that now shot through her left side whenever she made even a slightly rough movement, she got up each day and went foraging.
Every movement was awkward, every chore a fresh agony; every choice was a compromise between what she could manage and what would keep her alive. Gathering nuts, mushrooms, herbs and fresh pine needles was okay, but she’d never relied on these things for more than a third of her diet. Now she grabbed as much as she could, and while it was enough to feed her for a few days, she soon went through all the easily collectable food in the area. Checking traps was possible, but resetting them wasn’t; her arm couldn’t take the intricacy and strain her snares required. From her existing set-ups she managed to snag a few rabbits and a single fish, with no hope of catching any more.
Worse, her endeavours on the mountain were being sabotaged. At first she wasn’t sure of it—she thought her snapped snares and displaced fish gullies were caused by weather or animal interference. Then she returned from a brief outing to find her vegetable patch churned and smashed. Her zucchinis, potatoes, pumpkins and yams had been yanked out and stomped into the rocky soil beside the dark loam. She knelt, trying to reclaim as much edible material as she could from the boot prints, and saw tiny white granules littered through the remnants of the patch. A smell rose to her nostrils—a smell that carried scenes of her old life, of the beach, of a rusting breeze and crusting residue. They had salted her garden.
Wet rage welled up inside her, big, overwhelming, but not as big as the hunger aching in her gut—a hunger that drove her back into the forest.
After a half-hour of maddened searching, her movements not even hinting at quietness or stealth, she came across a patch of blackberries, the vines weighed down by dark fruit. She fell upon the bush, ignoring the thorns that pricked her fingers, her wrists, as she ripped the berries free and shoved them into her mouth. The rich flavour lanced her tongue. Blood raced through her veins, juice smeared at the corners of her mouth, and still she kept eating. For ten minutes she gorged, stopping only to burp and breathe, until finally she leaned back, dizzy and sick and full, to see that Lieutenant Harker was watching her.
She was propped against a tree, arms crossed. A thoughtful expression hung on her face—a sucking of the cheeks, a pinching of the brow.
I thought you would’ve found this bush days ago. We’ve known about it for a week.
Ren didn’t respond. Harker pointed at her wound.
That doesn’t look like fun.
Again Ren didn’t speak. The fruit was bubbling in her stomach. She had eaten too much, too fast. It had brought on a wooziness, which, coupled with the ever-present throb of her arm, made her want to close her eyes and lie down. Only Harker’s presence kept her upright.
Now she came closer. Ren could see a spray of freckles across her nose and cheeks: the work of the mountain sun, she thought, and then she was thinking of girls at the beach, of children, of sharp shells and rip currents and bird calls.
Let me help you.
Harker’s voice had lowered but her tone was the same, flat and neutral.
I don’t like doing this. We’ll fix your arm. We’ll leave.
She crouched down before Ren.
Just help us find the bird.
Ren pulled herself into a straighter sitting position.
I bet they think you’re too young.
Harker’s face remained still, touched only by the freckles.
They say it, don’t they? That you’re too young. And here you are. Up a mountain, chasing a fairy tale.
Harker stood up. If she was affected by Ren’s words, if anger or shame had crept across her face, Ren didn’t see it. Harker just smoothed her ponytail and stretched her arms high above her head, arching her back.
This ends when you let it.
Then she was gone, twisting back into the trees with that poise and deftness that somehow bordered on violence.
Five minutes later, Ren heaved herself to her feet, swaying and grunting, and began making her way home. It took much longer than usual, and though she was filled with the energy of the berries she was also battling the sickness they had awoken in her. She went slowly, pausing, sucking in deep breaths whenever she felt like vomiting, not wanting to lose her meal. As she reached her clearing another wave of nausea washed through her, and she steadied herself against a tree. Fresh, pine-thick air filled her lungs, and the bile backed down her throat.
As she leaned, Ren realised that she could feel something foreign beneath her fingers. Where there should have been rough bark, she felt smooth wood and viscous stickiness. She turned to face the tree and saw a wide, neat wound in the trunk, spreading out from beneath her hand. Sap was leaking in glossy rivulets down the naked timber. She circled the tree to see the full extent of the damage. A full ring of bark had been cut off, completely separating one section of the trunk from the other. Ren backed away and turned to study the tree behind her. It, too, had been relieved of a ring of bark, as had the one beside it, and the next one, and the next. She staggered onwards, seeing rings of raw wood on the trunks, matching strips of bark on the ground, on every tree within sight of her home.
It was only then, faced with not just her own starvation and death but with the destruction of the forest around her, with the killing of the trees and the loss of their shade and scent and swamping greenness, that she began to consider telling Harker the truth: that the rumours were true. That a bird made of rain did live on the mountain. That she had seen it.
14
IT HAPPENED WHEN she was a child, the first time she’d come to the mountain. She’d been camping with her grandmother. They had spent the time rambling through the trees, building campfires, cooking flatbread damper, hunting for waterfalls and staring at the stars, and Ren had assumed they’d continue doing this until the end of the trip. But on the evening before they were to leave, as Ren was collecting firewood, her grandmother interrupted her.
Let’s do something special.
They put water bottles, trail snacks and warm outer clothes into a daypack and headed further up the mountain. First they went through the forest, along broad trails that were easy to follow. When the sun began falling, sending the hazy light of dusk slanting through the trees, Ren asked when they’d be arriving at the special place, when they’d do or see the special thing, but her grandmother marched on, her pack swaying with each step.
They climbed higher, steeper, and eventually the trees shrunk in size and thinned out, dwarfing into tiny pines that may as well have been bushes. Ren was tired. She had already spent the day running, hunting, fishing. Now she began losing track of time. She dragged her eyes up from her feet to see that they were on a rocky slope, not following any trail she could make out, and with barely any light left to guide their way. She asked if they could turn around, but again her grandmother did not answer.
The night deepened. They trudged on, ever upwards. Ren’s t
highs and heels ached. The wind picked up, bringing a biting chill to their climb. Her grandmother passed her a jacket, but still they did not stop. Just as Ren thought that the air had become too thin to breathe, that the wind would cut the skin from her cheeks, that she could go no further, her grandmother reached back to take her hand while pointing forward with another, and she saw it: a great wall of smooth rock, jutting up from the slope, rising high into the clouds above them.
This is it, Ren thought. Some kind of rock formation. We have climbed all the way up here to look at a geological oddity we could have seen in daylight. But her grandmother pulled her forward, and Ren saw that the wall of rock was not whole: there was an opening in its face, a dark crevice roughly the shape and size of a crouching human.
She knew instantly that they were going in there, and that she wasn’t going to object. The maw of the opening was pitch dark, but when her grandmother ducked her head and pushed inside Ren didn’t hesitate to follow. After a few minutes of scrabbling through the darkness, following the sounds of her grandmother’s pack scraping against the rock, they emerged in a long, narrow crevasse. Dark cliffs shot high on either side. There was no wind, and the sky above them was clear. Bright stars shone down with fierce light. Ren realised they had gone higher than the clouds. They were walking in a canyon on the roof of the world.
Still her grandmother did not speak. The way was tight. They had to hold themselves sideways, sucking in their lungs, wriggling and squeezing through the gaps in the path. Grazes began accumulating on Ren’s knees, elbows, shoulders and shins, and the hard walls of the crevasse began to press in.
The night was receding from above her, speeding away and growing smaller as the rock crowded. Her breaths fell short and shallow, and her mind began swimming, until she felt her grandmother’s hand knuckle into the folds of her coat and pull her through the final gap.
Ren bent over, heaving deep breaths. Then she straightened up, looked around, and lost the air she’d taken in. Before them the cliffs had abandoned their canyon shape and bulged out into a natural amphitheatre with a wide gap that opened onto a clean view of sky and stars. The ground around them was covered with a thick, verdant moss. Every stone, every surface shone with its dark-green light, somehow visible in the night. The moss gave way in front of them to a small tarn. Its water was still and clear, reflecting the scene around it: the moon, the cliffs, the moss, the sky, even Ren and her grandmother, standing solemnly before it.
Beyond the tarn, at the edge of the clearing, next to the opening in the amphitheatre and presumably above an enormous cliff, was a tree. It was a small, stunted thing, with ancient knots and whorls twisted into its trunk and limbs, as if it had spent millennia folding in on itself. Small, hardened needles sprang forth from its outermost tips, but it was otherwise bare, with grey-white bark coating its gnarled body.
At its highest point, in a clawing crown of branches, sat a bird. It looked like a heron, although it was too big, too blue, too alien. Huge and silent, it was running its long beak through its pale cerulean plumage. Ren watched it groom itself, transfixed by the sight. Water was dripping from the feathers as the bird preened, shedding in a stream of moisture that fell and collected at the base of the tree. She stared, unmoving, until her grandmother’s whisper crept into her ear.
Do you see it?
Yes.
Really?
Of course.
It was right there—of course she could see it; why was her grandmother talking now, the worst time to talk, when she’d spent the whole night saying nothing?
Then her grandmother was lifting an arm.
How about now?
Ren followed the line of her arm, looking closer. As if sensing her gaze, the bird launched itself from the tree, trailing rain from its talons. It twirled in the windless air, shaking ice and dew across the clearing and over Ren and her grandmother, drawing from them shivers and shrieks, before falling in a straight, fast dive into the tarn. It disappeared, but it caused no splash, made no ripples. It was as if the bird had become one with the water, rather than sinking beneath its surface.
Ren wiped at her eyes. Something glowed and fizzed inside her.
Her grandmother whispered again.
I told you.
Yes.
Something special.
Yes.
15
OLD WOMEN DIE, even midnight-mountain-scaling grandmothers. Ren’s had caught pneumonia in the days after they got home. Ren never had the chance to talk to her about what they’d seen, or how her grandmother had known about it. And maybe she never would have—maybe the trip had been too strange, the sight too unreal for Ren ever to bring it up back in the city.
When she’d returned to the mountain as an adult she was so much older. She was also harder, angrier, brimming with sorrow, and less inclined to trust and talk, and she hadn’t gone looking for the bird. She’d had food to find, shelter to build; there was no time to climb to the highest peak, to scarper through the wall of rock, not when she was facing freezing nights and imminent starvation. She hadn’t gone to the mountain for the rain heron: she’d gone there to escape.
But she remembered the bird, and she remembered where it lived; and five years later she had known that the soldiers were there to find it, as soon as Barlow had told her they’d come to the mountain. She’d also known she wouldn’t help them. Not just because they were soldiers, although that was certainly part of it. It was because of Harker.
Ren had seen the way she stalked around the mountain, unmoved by the trees, the air, the staggering slopes and the cellophane streams, the huge and harsh beauty of it all. For Harker, the mountain was no different to a car park, an office, the bottom of the ocean; she would use it, take what she needed, burn it down, dance gracefully in the ashes and never think of it again. Ren could tell: she had seen it in her smooth face, heard it in her placid voice. She knew the type.
Nobody should touch a rain heron, especially not a person who salted gardens, who ringbarked trees. Ren would make sure of it. She would watch Harker leave empty-handed, regardless of the cost. Whatever they did to her, she had survived worse.
16
TIME WAVERED, SHIMMERED. She could no longer tell whether days were beginning or ending. Most of the time she lay in her cave, not quite asleep or awake, buffeted not just by hunger, thirst and pain but also by visions, memories, half-dreams. Mostly they were scenes of her past life—the sea and the sand, the dinners and the bedrooms, the children rushing out of the school gates—but soon they were crowded by other, more recent apparitions. Lieutenant Harker stretching and flexing in the trees, smoke from burning pills rising around her calves. Harker again, speaking low, calm words that Ren couldn’t make out, while her soldiers chewed on tubers they’d ripped from her garden, hard roots splintering in their mouths, cutting their young gums raw and bloody.
And Barlow. Barlow fishing, Barlow speaking, Barlow walking with his son; Barlow’s face, and the way it would relax into a smile when they met at the rock. Then his soft, gentle smile began changing. Her sickness and her malnourishment grabbed hold of it and began melding it with other faces, the faces of men she had known and loved and would never see again. Her father, her brothers, her uncles, old friends, lovers, colleagues, men she had known through shops and swimming clubs and daily routines—all these abandoned faces swam in and out of Barlow’s, until she could no longer remember which part was truly his, or recognise which face belonged solely to him. He appeared so much to her, yet in this way he began to slip, muddled and watery, and her despair, even in the depths of her sleep, had never been so wild.
One morning or afternoon or evening—or maybe it was the dead of night, the moon and stars shining down on her instead of the yellow sun—she awoke on the grass beside her cave, gripped by a huge thirst. On scabbed knees she crawled to the creek, thinking only of water, of its coldness, of throat-drenching relief. She reached the stream and threw her hands into the current. Her palms filled. She lifte
d the liquid to her face, opened her wobbling jaw, tilted her neck, and in the moment before she poured the water onto her swollen tongue, she smelled something terrible.
The water fell from her hands. She sniffed again. At first she thought the smell was her infected wound, so she pushed her nose closer to her arm, but it wasn’t the source. Her wound exuded its own distinct brand of pus-heavy nasal horror. This new smell was more coppery, more meaty, of flesh closer to vitality than that of her arm.
She held her face down to the surface, which increased the intensity of the smell, and she could see faint clouds of redness in the usually transparent creek. Looking upstream she could spot nothing unusual, so she crawled along the bank, around a sharp dogleg in the waterway. Here the view was less crowded, and she could see all the way up to where the stream ran down the cliff. She could see the high spruces, towering above her ringbarked pines. She could see mossy boulders, patches of swarthy grass, thick bushes. She could see the steep harshness of the cliff: its grand height, its grey-cragging face. And lower down, closer, where the water ran slower, she could see the source of its fouling.
The rent, ragged corpse of a once-great buck was splayed over the centre of the creek. Its legs were crooked, wrong-angled. Its crown of antlers rose from the water, fuzzed with velvet, proud and serene against the greenness of the trees even as the head it sprouted from lay half-crushed in the slow-flowing stream. Where the buck’s brow should have been high and strong it was broken and squashed; skull fragments popped out of the thin fur on its face. A grey tongue had fallen from its open jaw. An eye that should have held an amber iris was clouded and milky; the other was submerged in the current.
These wrong legs and this huge, broken head were perhaps the least ruined parts of the buck’s body—its flanks and chest and back were torn apart by what looked to Ren like bullet holes. Blood had run and dried from each individual wound, creating a dense pattern of dark-scarlet snakes. But the worst damage had been done to its belly: slashed into the creamy underfur was a jagged, flapping aperture, revealing a red inner gloom. Organs had spilled or been pulled out of this opening: ropey intestines, a loose bag of stomach, liver, spleen and lungs, all artlessly strewn from the wound to the riverbank, making sure no drop of water could flow downstream without touching a piece of the bloating, floating offal.
The Rain Heron Page 4