The Rain Heron

by Robbie Arnott

  The smell was huge—meat, death, half-digested grass and organ rot. Ren’s throat burned with bile, even as it rasped with thirst. The buck’s milk-clouded eye shone pale and bright.

  She turned from the corpse, her knees twisting in the dirt, and began crawling back to her cave. She might have a bottle there, still half-full. Or rainwater could have collected in some of the ledges on the rock face. She tried to remember the last time it had rained. At once she could feel water hitting her skin, droplets landing on her arms and shoulders and scalp. She could see grey clouds; she could smell drenched grass; she could hear the patter of a steady downpour; but she could not remember when it had last happened. She opened her eyes, still crawling, to see sunlight falling on the clearing in front of her. There was bound to be water there, somewhere. She crawled on, around the rock face.

  Harker was sitting on the ground by her cave. She was flipping a bottle in tight loops, its handle repeatedly landing in her palm. Water moved inside the metal shell, churning with each toss. She must have seen Ren approaching, but she said nothing. She didn’t even look up, not even when Ren collapsed a few metres in front of her. It was only when noises began croaking from Ren’s throat that Harker ceased flipping the bottle, stood up and walked over to crouch by her.

  Pardon?

  She’d lowered her face to be near Ren’s, but she wasn’t looking at her. She was staring out at the ringbarked trees.

  I’ll do it.

  Do what?

  The bird. I’ll take you to it.

  Harker bent her crouch into a kneel. Ren thought she hadn’t heard her, so she sucked in another breath, preparing to repeat herself, when she felt something strange: a hand, running down the back of her head in gentle strokes. Ren recoiled at the touch, but she couldn’t move as fast or as far as she wanted to. All she could manage was a stiff roll, onto her side, facing Harker, whose hand came to rest on her shoulder. In this position, propped up on a wobbling elbow, Ren saw something even more surprising than the feeling of Harker’s hand on her head: she saw her smile.

  A wide grin broke open the lieutenant’s face, transforming it completely. A new person was crouching there: not a grim, emotionless soldier but a young woman like any other, one who knew happiness, who felt joy. Two rows of straight, snowy teeth glowed out of her mouth. Small creases appeared beside her eyes. Even her eyebrows had risen, as if this happiness was mixed with surprise or relief.

  Thank you.

  Pleasure lilted her voice upwards. She shifted, sliding from a crouch into a seated position, and somehow in this movement Ren’s head came to rest in her lap. Ren struggled, jerking her neck and shoulders, but Harker’s hand kept stroking, forcing her into stillness. She flicked open the cap of her bottle, tilted Ren’s head upwards and began pouring a trickle of water into her mouth.

  Drink.

  Ren stopped struggling. She did as she was told and let the water drain down her throat. It was the purest form of relief she’d ever experienced. Harker’s hand stroked on, soft yet firm. Ren couldn’t summon the energy to fight back or roll away. Nor could she deny the pleasure of it: not just the physical pleasure of a hand softly patting her neck, but the warm, animalistic pleasure of feeling safe, protected. Flashes of her childhood came to her, of her mother holding her like this as she lay on the couch, watching television.

  Water kept flowing into her mouth. She wondered how she looked, a grey-haired woman, ill and delirious, with her head in the lap of someone who could be her daughter, who was touching her in the way an adult daughter would her sick mother. Worst of all, it reminded Ren that she’d never had a daughter—only a son. A son she tried so hard not to think about. A son who’d driven her to this mountain by becoming something not unlike the woman stroking her neck.

  Humiliation swelled in her, as did hate, shame, disgust, but she was too feverish to feel any of it with conviction. The water kept trickling, cool and lovely. Harker’s hand stroked on.

  Harker was talking now, small words in her ear.

  I’m so glad you’ve decided to help us. Now we can help you.

  She waved at the trees, and two soldiers pushed out of the foliage. One of them was carrying a first-aid kit, the other a large backpack.

  See to her wound, ordered Harker, as she gently removed Ren’s head from her lap and stood up. Give her medicine, antibiotics—whatever she needs.

  Harker stretched her arms wide and looked up at the sky. She exhaled, loudly, as if she’d arrived at the end of a long day or put down a heavy weight. Only then did she motion at her other soldiers, beckoning them forth from the trees. Six figures walked out. Four were young men in uniform, but the two others, walking between them, were of different ages. One was just a boy, while the other was older, with grey streaking his hair. This older man was limping, and a purple-yellow bruise was splashed across his face. The boy stayed close by his side, making sure he did not fall.

  Ren only recognised them when they were almost close enough to touch. She tried to stand up, but the dizziness and the pain and the confusion swirled together to make her slip back down. Barlow was trying to smile at her, but the act of smiling was beyond him.

  She wanted to scream. She wanted to vomit. But all she could do was lie there, ruined and weak, as Harker laughed. Her joy reverberated off the cliff and around the clearing in high peals, before she turned to her men.

  See? I told you we wouldn’t need them.

  17

  THEY LET HER rest. She sat on the ground, chewing on a muesli bar and sipping from a bottle of fizzing, bright-yellow liquid—water that one of the soldiers had infused with two vitamin tablets. She was given six pills, all different colours and shapes, which she swallowed without question.

  Another soldier knelt to inspect her arm. He was perhaps the youngest of the group: pink-faced, beardless, polite.

  Hello, he said in a quiet, hesitant voice. My name is Daniel. I’m a medic.

  She did not answer, did not look at him. He seemed to want to say something else, and there was an apologetic air to his presence. But he stayed silent, and after a moment he got to work, removing her bandage, washing the wound with water and iodine. Then he treated it with padding, some kind of cream, a fresh dressing.

  Once the infection is cleared up it’ll need stitches, he said. He looked Ren in the face as he spoke, making sure she understood.

  She looked past him, didn’t react. He opened his mouth to speak again, but decided against it. He stood and left her, and she continued to sit still and quiet. She didn’t even try to talk to Barlow, who was sitting on the other side of the clearing and murmuring to his son, the bruise loud on his face. After half an hour Harker checked her watch and turned to Ren.

  Time to go.

  A soldier helped Ren to her feet. Her head swam as she was pulled upright, and her arm ached, but the pain was blunted. She walked to the path leading away from the cave, and continued to ignore Barlow and his son as she addressed their captors.

  This way.

  Harker and three of the soldiers, including the young medic, fell in step behind her. The others stayed by Barlow and his son. Ren didn’t look at them, nor did she or Harker say anything. There was nothing worth saying.

  During the rest, Ren had wondered if there was any point in helping the soldiers. She thought it unlikely they’d let her live, even if she delivered them a flock of rain herons. Harker would probably shoot her the moment they caught the bird. She’d have Barlow shot as well, and his boy. They’d leave, tell nobody about it, and nobody in the village would complain, lest more soldiers stomped into their lives.

  But there was a chance they wouldn’t. There was a chance all three of them would survive. Or just the boy: the boy was enough. This made her think of her son again, her furious son, shouting and shaking in the moments before he left her. She pushed him from her mind, focused again on the present. Even if she decided against helping the soldiers, would she be able to resist them? Harker had already broken her once. Ren ha
d given in so easily, her head cradled in Harker’s lap like a child’s. Her conviction, which she had been so sure of, so quietly proud of—gone, for a drop of water.

  She felt stronger now, but that strength wouldn’t last, not if she took a stand against them. Harker would take it away; she would have so many ways of turning her, of twisting her, of slicing pieces off everything left of her. Ren realised that she wasn’t that strong—maybe she never had been. The water, food, vitamins and medicine sloshed inside her shrunken stomach. She walked on.

  It had been so many years since she’d journeyed to the bird’s tarn, and even then she’d been tired, and it had been dark—she probably couldn’t have found her way there the day after her first trip, let alone now, decades later and half-delirious. Yet, as she walked, making for the edge of the forest where she knew the trees gave way to open slopes, things started feeling familiar—certain patterns in the treescape, the shape of the cliffs above. When they reached the forest’s end she saw a steep, flat plain, devoid of the usual rubble and rocks, sloping upwards to a single peak. Again she felt a burn of familiarity.

  Harker pointed at the dark heights.

  Up there?

  Ren leaned into her knees.

  Yes.

  They began the ascent. With no trees to provide cover they were exposed to the wind, which buffeted them from the south, hitting them in huge, unpredictable gusts, knocking even Harker off balance. Ren soon ran out of lungs, and kept needing to stop. Nobody tried to hurry her. After every such break one of the soldiers would grip her wrist and pull her to her feet. Another would hand her a water bottle or piece of hard, waxy chocolate. They were gentle with her, and she hated them, even the young medic who’d patched up her arm.

  They climbed on, and the effects of the medicine began to wear off. Exhaustion reappeared in Ren’s legs, her back, her breaths. The pain and nausea returned. Her eyes were closed more than they were open, and it was only the soft hands of the soldiers, who had begun more or less shovelling her uphill, that kept her going. That, and the thought of Barlow walking down the mountain with his son.

  Despite her déjà vu, she still wasn’t sure they were going the right way—not until, as if appearing from behind a bank of fog, a flat, cracked wall of rock loomed before them. She wondered how she’d managed to find it; the odds must have been remarkable; but there it was, huge, high, dark. She must have made a noise, because the soldiers all turned to stare at her. She pointed at the jagged aperture.

  There. We go through there.

  Harker nodded. She was the first to bend her body into the contours of the rock and disappear. A soldier followed her, then another. The last was Daniel, the young medic, who laid a soft hand between Ren’s shoulders and guided her forward.

  Before she stepped inside she drew in a long, cold lungful of air. The sun was just beginning to set, and she wanted everything to be over. There, on the slope, with the wind on her skin, the trees below her and the falling, glowing sun above. But the soldier pushed again, and with great difficulty she negotiated her way through the rock. Emerging into the crevasse on the other side felt just as it had all those decades earlier—like coming up for air after a deep dive. It was just as Ren remembered: the tight rock scraping her shins and elbows, the sky clear above, the claustrophobic cling of the walls.

  She could hear the soldiers’ breaths growing shallow. They were staring upwards, straining their necks at the high cliffs. Only Harker was moving forward along the path. They wriggled on after her, and in what seemed a short amount of time—short to Ren, although time and a feeling of its passing were no longer clear to her—they reached the grand amphitheatre.

  The tarn lay still and mirror-like, just as it had when she’d first seen it. Moss still carpeted the grotto floor, green rocks still humped at the tarn’s edge, and the ancient, gnarled tree still stood on the opposite side of the water. The soldiers spread out, taking in the scene, the strangeness of it, the glory of the approaching night, the ocean of forest that spread out from the far cliff. Harker turned to Ren.

  It lives here?

  Ren nodded. The exhaustion had hooked her now, tight and hard, and the waking hallucinations had returned. Faces, shapes, memories: all there, all blurring. She slumped to the edge of the tarn. This time nobody helped her.

  When does it return?

  I don’t know.

  Ren focused on the greenness of the moss, at her reflection in the water.

  When it wants to.

  Harker said something to one of the soldiers, who grasped Ren under the arms and dragged her backwards, propping her against the cliff, halfway back into the crevasse they’d come through. They stopped talking to her after that. She was left to watch as Harker prowled around the pond, fiddling with her ponytail, flexing her fingers, before she ordered the soldiers to position themselves around the tarn. They each crouched down behind a rock, hiding themselves as much as possible. Harker moved to a slender hollow in the cliff, right behind the tree.

  They waited. Ren was dozing now, sliding in and out of consciousness. Scenes of heat and rain flashed through her. She could have been kinder, she thought. She should have been less cold, should have cultivated better, deeper relationships. Other people—she should have poured more energy into helping other people. What would they say about her, those people back in the city, those that were left? That she was hard. Yes. They’d say she was hard as granite. That they didn’t really know her. Maybe they’d say she was a good mother. Maybe they’d say nothing at all—maybe most of them hadn’t even noticed when she left. Throbs and flashes of sickness kept washing through her, on great blood-borne waves, right up until the moment she saw, for the second time in her life, a bird made of water.

  It erupted from the tarn in smooth, splashless flight, heading up in a straight leap to hover effortlessly in the air before alighting on a low branch of the tree. It buried its beak in a wing, flicking water back and forth in neat, sure dips. It looked just as Ren remembered, or thought she remembered: the same marvellous grace, the same rain-smeared transparency. It sat there, its watery body shimmering and glistening, unaware of Ren or Harker or the soldiers.

  Despite the horror of her situation, Ren still felt a sense of wide-eyed awe at what she was seeing. The bird took her out of herself. She watched it preen, fastidious and thorough. She strained to keep her eyes open, fighting the liquid springing from their corner; she concentrated on staying conscious.

  It was only when Harker had moved completely out of her cover that Ren saw her noiselessly inching forward. In her hands she clutched a wide, dark cloth. It was glossy black, treated with oil or tar. As she watched Harker move, Ren realised how much she didn’t want to let her win. She wanted the bird to stay free, but mostly she wanted Harker to lose, to be thwarted. To feel pain.

  Harker had made it to within two metres of the tree when Ren, thinking not of Barlow or the boy or herself or her son or of anything but her anger, shouted. She shouted as loud as her broken body could manage. The bird’s neck snapped upwards, needled her with a swirling, daggering eye; Harker leapt, holding the cloth high and wide.

  Before Ren could see the result, one of the soldiers appeared in front of her. It was the young medic—Daniel. He loomed close and high above her, and there was sadness on his clean skin, on his round face. His pale eyes were dragged by heavy sorrow, which intensified into regret, even as he swung the butt of his rifle into her jaw.

  A crack filled Ren’s ears, and she slammed into the ground. Hollowness welled up inside her. Black fields. As she flickered out of consciousness, she thought she could hear screaming.

  18

  SHE SWAM THROUGH heavy darkness. No dreams. No visions. Just the absence of light and the feeling of weightlessness, punctuated by a rolling rhythm of bumps.

  Eventually, Ren opened her eyes. She was lying on the ground by the entrance to her cave. Her jaw was aching, and so was the rest of her head: a full-skull throb that pulsed at her eyes, which felt too
big for their sockets. Her mind churned with colours and broken images.

  She eased into a sitting position. The sun was up, but not high. Long spears of light were strafing across the clearing.

  The soldiers were sitting around her fire pit. They were speaking to each other in low voices, their mouths and eyes pointed at the ground. A few metres away she could see Barlow and his son, prone, their heads propped up against a log. For a moment she thought they were dead, but then she saw the rise and fall of Barlow’s chest. Relief swam down from her neck to her knees.

  She looked around the clearing, past the soldiers, and saw a large box-like object sitting near the path. A black piece of canvas had been thrown over it. Beyond it sat Harker, cross-legged on the ground, facing the trees. Her back was straight, her ponytail high. Something was wrong with her, Ren could tell: a certain rigidity to her posture, a stiffness in her arms, the speed at which her shoulders moved with each breath. It made Ren nervous—this ever-calm, ever-composed young officer, sitting so fiercely, with so much intent.

  Ren remembered the screams.

  She stood up. None of the soldiers noticed. She walked forward, feeling light, strange, a narrow and woozy version of herself. The pain in her arm was distant again—more like the knowledge of pain than a sensation of it. She stepped towards the canvas-covered box, feeling the wind on her skin, smelling the resin in the air. Still the soldiers did not notice her.

  When Ren reached the box she knelt before it. A noise was shuddering out from behind the stiff cloth—a low, pattering noise, like light rain. At first Ren thought it was some kind of engine, but then she heard the inconsistencies in it, a pattern of slight changes in tone. Up and down, high and low. Inhalations and exhalations in the downpour.