Out of Exodia

by Debra Chapoton

  I hold the tablet under my arm now that I don’t need my hands to help me down the rough terrain. The path ahead of me is clear and I can find my way even in the dark. I should reach them by dawn. With every quick step I picture a possible solution to the second command, but not one that makes sense.

  * * *

  Harmon allowed Eugene to finish his crazy scheme. There was plenty of light from the fires so the Mourners could help Eugene with the melting of the precious metals. Harmon sat off to the side whittling away at a large piece of soft wood. It was his impulsive suggestion that a mold be made so he offered to do the work needed. He’d tried to make something that would look ridiculous and shame them into abandoning this project. He settled on a horned dog though it looked more like a cow or a goat than a dog. He thought it wouldn’t matter. When the drunkenness had worn off and the light of the sun shone on their idol they would certainly see how misguided they’d been.

  Trouble came a few hours before dawn. Cleavon stumbled into the fire and burned his legs and right arm. The three men who rushed to help him tripped over Harmon’s pile of wood. An angry fight interrupted their mission. They grabbed stones and sticks to augment their fists. Cleavon’s burns were less frightening than the blood and gore spilled near the fire.

  And then the partying began. The songs were lewd and the dancing too sensual. When the golden god was finished, Harmon made an altar, too.

  * * *

  “It’s Bram,” someone yells as I reach the first of the container cars and find a scene I couldn’t have imagined. The sounds of a struggle assault my ears.

  Lydia huddles beside several other women, protecting the sleeping children who lie behind them. The women hold the faux swords made from the metal clothing racks we’d pillaged. Our stay at the stores with the twelve springs seems so long ago. They look wary of my approach until Lydia breaks their focus by leaping to my arms. I almost drop the stone tablet.

  “The men have been attacking each other,” she whispers in my ear. “And some of the women, too.” Her arms drop from my neck and she swings her hand out in an arc around the area. “Those who tried to lock themselves in the train cars were attacked by men hiding inside. We’re safer out here.” She raises her voice to a normal tone and points, “Go see what Harmon’s doing. I think he’s gone as mad as the rest.”

  She turns back to guard the little ones and I follow the long shadow of an early sunrise, a red finger of light that points to earth that is equally crimson. There’s blood and gore and signs of a battle. The noises I heard at first grow stronger, and I yell in answer to the swearing and the words of hatred.

  “Harmon! What’s going on?”

  My brother sits rigid upon a makeshift bench, a fallen log that’s twice the size of most trees here. There’s something like an altar behind him, like the one I had made of stones, but this one is formed from the Grays’ furniture. There is blood and ash and strands of fur upon the top as if they sacrificed an animal.

  “The cloud is gone,” he stutters. “You were gone. The people wanted something …” He stumbles over his lies. “They needed a party. It’s just a party, Bram.”

  Cleavon’s sobs draw my attention. Barrett’s father tends to the raw wounds that somehow Cleavon has suffered. Eugene stands to the side, using two sticks to push clods of dirt over the bloody mess to the left of the fire pit. A stream of filthy words pours from his mouth. Barrett’s father quietly stems the vile with gentle words that strike me as too generous. He turns from his patient and helps Eugene cover the mess. There are others listening, men who look sadly beaten, and they respond to the peaceful nature of the words that Barrett’s dad offers. I almost want to laugh when I realize that he is in fact the noble friend that soothes the mood and hides the gore.

  More blood gone, friend soothes. Instantly the puzzle solves itself a second time when I see the idol they have made. The light of dawn crackles along the back of the golden beast.

  “What have you done?” Two, three, ten, twenty speak at once, their words a jumble of senseless excuses and insincere apologies.

  I hold the stone tablet up and wave it in anger. “God spoke to me!”

  They are silenced.

  “God spoke to me!”

  The smooth screen burns in my hand. I turn its face to them and say, “Read the words.”

  The first command centers, glows gold and yellow: I am your God.

  The second command unfurls in brighter bursts as the letters swirl into the message I just now understood: No other gods before me, no idols.

  I am so angry that I throw the tablet at the golden figure. It smashes hard. The soft gold folds in on itself and the tablet breaks in two. I am horrified by my action, but I stand rigid, quaking.

  The sun finishes its red rising, the sky loses the purplish tinge, and a single bird repeats its two-note morning call, the only living sound. The Reds drop to the ground, put their heads on dirt or forearms, and hug their silence. They are bowing toward the golden statue which itself appears to bow toward the tablet. I’m appalled.

  A thousand words war upon my tongue; I’m eager to punctuate the scene with profanities I learned when I was a Blue. But now that I know I can speak I hold back. Something more than exhaustion overtakes me and winds through my veins with defiance; every muscle aches. A whispering breeze rustles the leaves, a branch hits the metal roof of a nearby lodge, and that lonely bird’s whistle pierces the air a final time.

  I take four strides and reach for the idol. Gold flakes spike up from where the tablet struck its back. I pick it up and glare at its outrageous form, waiting for every eye to watch. I spit on its head. With revulsion and shame I place it in the melting pot, brush the flakes from my fingers, and motion to Eugene to fuel the fire.

  I’m sick to my stomach, every pore of my body throbs, wounding bullets of revulsion ricochet off my heart. I cannot look at Harmon.

  Something plunks behind me. I turn and see a loaf of bread within reach. Another strikes the ground near Cleavon’s head, then another by the fire. A fourth loaf lands upon the tablet. The irony does not escape me. I reach for the bread and the broken tablet and throw them both into the fire. If I have to journey back up the mountain to receive a new black slab of God’s instructions then that’s what I’ll do.

  I march back through the camp, pass Lydia without a word, and head north again.

  * * *

  After Bram left the hush over the camp was broken only by the soft thumps of more loaves hitting the earth. People sat on the ground, plucking pieces of bread from what fell near them, holding out loaves to their neighbors, but not uttering a single word.

  Harmon cast a guilty gaze at Eugene before he rose up and took an armload of wood chips to the fire. A quick glance at the idol allowed him to see his profane handiwork had been reduced to a flaccid lump. Barrett’s father watched him turn toward the north and take several steps. He called out to him.

  “Harmon. Look. It’s back.”

  The unmistakable brilliance of the guiding cloud hovered just west of them, then suddenly it moved overhead and changed course northward, as if chasing Bram’s retreat. Wisps of fogging trails left arrow shafts in the sky.

  “And it’s following Bram. I think we should follow him, too.”

  Harmon bobbed his head in easy agreement with Barrett’s father, a fellow judge who seemingly was one of only a few to keep his head since they’d encountered the Grays. As if to fortify an unspoken bond they briefly touched left elbows.

  “Pack up! Pack everything … except that wretched cider. We’re following the cloud.” Harmon’s voice uprooted those nearest to him. They swapped their embarrassed silence for hurried pandemonium, shouting at those they had to step over. More Reds rose up in waves and scrambled in every direction.

  Despite the rushed frenzy it took several hours before the last man and horse crossed the field, the cloud a distant beacon nearer the mountain ahead.

  The old and young Grays stayed behind. Sabina lifted a
stern and somber eye and sang a troubled song at their backs.

  * * *

  The hours rush by me faster than the speed at which the trail passes beneath my feet. Sand and gravel, weeds and roots, black dirt, mud, slippery slopes, rocky paths, treed passages and open fields. The pond. The hill. The mossy bed.

  The mountain looms before me nearly as great and high as my anger which hasn’t ebbed at all.

  This galling day is done, but I’ll climb until it’s too dark to see.

  * * *

  The Reds walked and rode until they reached the pond. The horses crowded around the banks and waded in and drank their fill. Then the murmuring crowds shifted into twelve pie-shaped groupings around the pond, obedient to their judge, chastened and shamed.

  The cloud dipped and swept clockwise like a second hand over the heads and tents of every humbled person as if counting off a census. Harmon’s group camped closest to the base of the mountain. He stood with Mira and his wife, Marilyn, and studied the face of the mountain, stark and gray against an indifferent sky. Certain that a drift of movement on a high ledge was his younger brother, he pointed out the distant figure to the women, then turned to look for Malcolm. The hum of the box meant he was near, but Harmon wasn’t sure the sound produced by the box matched the tone he was used to. If he had to make a guess he thought it was the same sound he heard right before they settled in to a year’s stay in the underground city. He looked around and wondered how many days they could camp beneath the mountain before things would get ugly again.

  Marilyn moved closer to Harmon. “I don’t think I can travel anymore,” she said, patting her great belly. “If the cloud moves us on we’re going to have to stay here until the baby’s born.”

  “There’s a midwife in Blake’s group. Should I find her?”

  “Not yet. I’m just saying that you better figure out what to do if the cloud moves. We could end up a week behind the rest. And lost.”

  Harmon put his arms around her. “Don’t worry. I’m pretty sure we’d be able to find the trail left by thousands of Reds even after a month.”

  “A month? You’d consider staying behind that long?” Marilyn’s face lifted in a hopeful smile, the lines around her eyes crinkling.

  “I would. Besides, something tells me we’re not moving from this valley for a while.” His statement was met with a whistling rush of air as somewhere nearby Malcolm’s box ceased its humming. The cloud, however, did not evaporate above their heads. Instead it caught the colored rays of sunset and gave itself a rainbow-like lining, thickening and hardening into a protective canopy over the pond.

  Marilyn’s laugh lines puckered as her brow creased. “That’s strange.”

  Harmon only nodded. He looked back up the mountainside wall, but in the dimming light he could no longer see Bram.

  * * *

  There’s firelight far below me. I’m almost to the top. I pull my shoes off and finish the climb, my toes and fingers gripping even harder in the dark, finding the necessary outcroppings, the strongest ones, to heave my body upward. The ledge I reach is wide and flat. A dustless wind whips my clothes and burns my face even through my beard. I stretch out long on this protective shelf and peer down. Tiny pinpricks of light move about, new ones are lit, some blink out. Harmon has brought the whole tribe to the base of the mountain. I stretch my hand out over them and close my eyes, forget the angered curse I’d repeated earlier and change it into an absolving pardon, a blessing. My people. My family. My Lydia.

  My eyes fly open at the first quake. The lamps and candles below have vanished. More trembling belches from the earth and I rise to press myself against a wall of rock. Loose stones above shower past my head, gather others and make an ominous rumble as they spill down the mountain side. It lasts only a few seconds. I hear their final clunk and imagine them piling up quite short of the valley as if a giant hand holds them back from crushing the Reds that sleep.

  The hairs on my body respond to the electricity in the air. Like the first time on the mountain I feel compelled to finish the climb. Blind trust. A rock, cold and shaped like a step, meets my foot; perfect handholds find my fingers; I finish the climb upright, but I bow to my knees immediately. The furious sound of thunder and wind fills my ears, but a stillness flattens the air. Just like the first time I came here the reverberations rise into tremors that boom through every organ in my body, then settle into words I understand. God’s words. God’s voice.

  With my head down and my eyes tightly squeezed shut I rest in the heat and know that the brightest light shines upon me. I savor the radiance. A sliver of fear pushes my head closer against my knees as the thought, the memory, of my long ago tutor’s voice rails beside God’s voice in my head and I remember the stories of the nuclear war and the bright lights, the burning flesh, the radiation.

  But that’s the wrong fear. I stamp out the old voice and listen only to God’s.

  Chapter 14 Ten Puzzles

  From the tenth page of the third Ledger:

  By dawn he found his people. Three days and three nights he passed on the mountain. Thunder followed lightning until the cloud was thick over the mountain. A loud blast, like a trumpet, made the people tremble.

  BRAM MET THE judges at the base of the mountain. Their clothes were clean, beards shaven, faces red from scrubbing.

  “What happened?” Blake shouted.

  “What took you so long?” Josh began, but his admonishment turned to silence when Bram lifted his head. “Your face…” he whispered.

  The reddened countenances of the twelve judges flashed expressions of surprise and awe. Bram’s face glowed, his cheeks shone with a golden hue and his forehead beamed with an amber light. Luminous. Brilliant. Barrett’s father and Harmon and six others turned away. The remaining four, Eugene, Korzon, Teague, and Hamlin, dropped to their knees and began to weep.

  “Get up,” Bram said. The four judges kept their faces averted and helped one another up. The others turned forward again, but kept their eyes down. “Enlist the younger men to build a barrier around the mountain here. No one is to go up.” He lifted his eyes and arms and pointed to the highest peak. A charcoal ring of smoke descended, settling several yards above their heads. It completely hid the mountain. “The mountain is holy. Don’t step foot on it. As soon as the barrier is built, bring all the Reds here.” The twelve judges chanced a look, followed Bram’s gaze upward, then one by one nodded or whispered their consent.

  Bram turned and walked through the cloud of smoke, disappearing up the nearest mountain path.

  * * *

  I’m scared. Scared to death. I hold the new tablet and face the judges. I tell them to build a barrier. If they fear God there’s a chance they will refrain from their fighting and whoring, their lying and cheating, and from getting drunk and making idols.

  I stroke the smooth side of the tablet, the new one I’ve been given. I’ve seen all ten of the anagrams that loop across the screen. I’ve solved them all in my head. If my tongue stumbles on any of them I won’t be able to speak these truths to them:

  I, YOUR DOGMA

  MORE BLOOD GONE, FRIEND SOOTHES

  MANKIND TAME ONE VANITY

  BABY SPOKE HEALTH

  OUR SORRY PANTHEON

  NOT RED DRUM

  MOUNT, MY LORD DICTATE

  LOAD TENTS

  TEN ABREAST SNOWFIELDS

  COTTON DOVE

  What if I twist these strange puzzles into phrases even more confusing? My pulse must be at two hundred. I slow my panting breaths, take a couple deep ones, keep my eyes on the ground and focus on Blake and Josh’s questions: “What happened? What took you so long?” But I can’t seem to answer. I feel less dizzy though and lift my head. Some turn away as though they cannot bear to see my face. The old men drop to their knees as if in worship. I’m sickened by the gesture. “Get up,” I say. I give them instructions to build a barricade. I want to tell them more: that they’ll die if they step foot on the mountain, but my tongue cleaves t
o the roof of my mouth. I look high up the mountain and see the fire burning there. The smoke doesn’t rise as it should, instead it drops, hides the fire and threatens to block my ascension. I find my voice again and smoothly utter a couple more things then turn, hold my breath, and pass through the black smoke. I only need to walk up maybe forty feet or so to look back on the camp. From here the smoke acts not as a screen but as a magnifying window. I see farther than I should. All twelve groupings of Reds appear in varying shades of new colors, ones I’ve never been aware of before and yet I know their names in some heavenly language: nursoudavet, shonet, diret, crigonecet…

  I hear their voices, too, but the words are shrill and penetrating. I wish for deafness and briefly feel God’s hands on my ears. The jarring screeches slack off and men’s and women’s voices diminish to what must be normal for other ears, my gemfry gift subdued. The new colors fade as well, their foreign names forgotten.

  I watch the men drag logs to fence off the mountain. This will take time.

  * * *

  By late afternoon the work was done. The barrier kept even the most adventurous child at bay. The Reds milled about and mingled with their neighbors, laughed and joked, and forgot their petty quarrels, their irritations with one another pacified by the strenuous work. They waited for Bram to return; even the Mourners were expectant though a few of them became restless.

  “There he is!” The first one to spot a foot emerge through the black fog alerted the rest.

  “Open the gate.” Teague’s command was carried out by Josh and Blake.

  Bram walked through. His face, though still shiny, looked more like he had worked hard and perspired profusely. The glowing aura that had frightened the judges that morning was invisible to them now.

  “Stand up here,” Harmon directed. He had built a high platform in the most viable spot. The rod was leaning against the ladder. Bram climbed the ladder and pulled the rod up when he reached the top. He stood above the mass of expectant Reds. He cleared his throat twice then held the smooth black tablet above his head in one hand and the rod in the other.