Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 119

by Neil Clarke

  “I’ll have them double the watch on the reservoir.”

  Jen nodded.

  The day passed and no one believed any longer in the exodus Pierre claimed to have seen. There was no one out in the desert. Jen rounded up some children to help her prepare the death meal. And shortly afterward the inner courtyard was full of people sitting on the carpets, crying and talking in low voices about the dead boy. It was the first shared meal since the storm, and they ate it quietly. Pierre sat alone on a carpet under the palm, there where the boy had died whose bones, gnawed clean, now lay on plates and platters all around.

  Jen went around and collected what the tribe had respectfully left over, to gather it into a bundle and hang it on the burned-up palm. Sand and wind would break down the remains over time, and when that was done, the mourning period would be over.

  The sky took on the green shimmer of evening. Pierre sighed. Maybe in the end, the storm had brought them not misfortune but rescue. If there had been an exodus, then the storm had buried it in the sand.

  A shadow fell across his face. Jen stood near him, the bundle with her son’s bones pressed to her breast.

  “You can come to me tonight, if you want,” she said. For a moment a trembling smile played over her lips.

  Pierre felt as if he’d waited half a lifetime for this invitation. But he shook his head.

  “I can’t. Not tonight. I have to go out and search for them. Maybe there’s still something left.”

  No one else would go. No one believed him. It wasn’t just a matter of the spoils that the sand would quickly dissolve. His credibility was at stake.

  Jen nodded. She’d clearly expected this response, but her smile reverted to its usual hardness.

  “Can I . . . come to you afterwards?”

  She shook her head. “Maybe it’s better if we wait a while longer. Until I’ve . . . recovered.”

  Pierre forced himself to nod shortly, then stood up and left.

  He got a mule out of its stall and watered it generously before he loaded it with water pouches, ropes, blankets, a shovel, two lamps with milky glass, and his armored boots. At last he mounted up and drove the great bleating animal on with his heels. If his luck was bad, he would spend the whole night awake in vain. If his luck was good, he would bring spoils back with him. And if his luck was really against him and he stumbled into an ambush, than this would be his last foray out into the night.

  But in the green light of the Heights, it looked as though the sand actually had swallowed everything: there was no hint that there had ever been a caravan there. Despite that, Pierre couldn’t bring himself to go back home, back to Jen, who would turn away from him again; back to the mocking looks if he returned empty-handed. His eyes burned from the traces of acid in the air, and he’d had nosebleeds for two hours. He wouldn’t be able to stay awake much longer. It was the second night he hadn’t slept.

  Only when the pale light of dawn arrived did Pierre’s gaze find an irregularity in the landscape. The fluttering of a shining blue scrap of fabric in the wind. He remained standing a stone’s throw away, waiting to be certain that what he was seeing wouldn’t turn out to be a mirage and evaporate. But the fluttering held steady, and he rode closer.

  In the sand before him lay a tall adult form in a blue coverall, arms and legs much too long and thin, no breasts but still so delicate he had to believe it was a woman. The skin on her hands was gold-colored, the hair that poured from under her tight-fitting helmet almost white. Pierre put his boots on and slid down from his mule into the sand.

  As he opened the helmet’s sand-blinded visor, he saw narrow features with a wide soft mouth and long eyelashes lying like feathers on her cheeks. Her arms and legs were clearly broken in multiple places.

  Pierre took a step back, waiting to see if the form noticed his arrival, if she would move. He could tell that she lived because her chest rose and fell convulsively. If he waited just a little longer, her breathing might stop. He stood there and stared, uncertain what to do. He knew no tribe whose people looked like this girl. The pockets of her suit were empty, and beyond that he found no clue to her origins. He knew he should kill her to end her agony. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it.

  Her body felt very light despite his exhaustion, and she groaned weakly as he laid her prone across the mule’s back. On her back the fabric of the suit had already been eaten away by the sand and had fused with her dissolving skin. She might heal, but only slowly.

  Before he gave the mule a slap to start it forward, he stuck a piece of fabric he’d soaked with water in the girl’s mouth. Her raw back he left open to the still-cool morning air.

  The caravan he’d seen last night had been giant. But this white lanky being on his mule seemed to be the last of her tribe. Suddenly the full force of her tragic fate hit Pierre and he began sobbing softly, throat dry. Killing her would be more merciful, even if she could survive. Somehow, he would have to try to make up for his weakness.

  As I awoke, I was still I. It was cool and dark; I lay on my side and ached, but the ache was still dull, in the background. Directly in front of me a face hung in darkness; in that first moment I thought it was a bird. Its skin was almost black, and its head and chin were covered in hair of the same color. The face smiled and floated upwards and then I saw that it sat on a broad, massive body. I heard its voice, deep and rumbling, but it was articulate sounds that I heard, not the meaningless stammer of a bird.

  Only then did I truly take in my surroundings. Stone walls hung with colorful carpets, two glass chimneys where small fires burned, a low roof, a wide door, and instead of a window, a closed hatch in the wall.

  I’d fallen into the enemy’s hands. I was at their mercy. Apart from my injuries, the gravity of the Yellow World pressed me down all on its own, making it impossible for me to move or even to breathe deeply enough.

  A massive dark hand was laid on my forehead. Strangely, this touch comforted me, and I shut my eyes and fell asleep again.

  The next period is blurred in my memory. There were alternating phases of intense pain, deep darkness, and numbness. Other than the dark one with the deep voice, there was another thickset figure who attended me regularly. In front she had wobbling heavy-looking appendages on her torso, and the thickest, blackest hair I had ever seen fell down her back. She washed me and fed me salty broth and a spicy gruel that lay heavily in my stomach. With a set expression, she stretched my arms and legs into the right shapes and splinted them while the bearded figure held my screaming body down. She spread salve on my back and encouraged me with noises and gestures to move my broken bones, to bend, stretch, and lift. But she never smiled.

  Only the bearded man did that. He smiled wide, with white teeth and with tears in his eyes when he looked at me. And after what seemed like a lifetime, I could hold a spoon myself, and even if I took a long time and spilled, I was full when I was done eating. I lived like a just-hatched youth, fragile and barely strong enough to bear eir own weight. And as with a youth, there was someone near me most of the time, too, keeping me company and watching out for me. Nights, the bearded one often sat on my bed and spoke in his strange rolling language, listening to me as I told him everything that went through my head. We smiled a lot and occasionally we exchanged gestures, and one night he took my hand for the first time and pressed it cautiously, as if he was afraid he might shatter it.

  His strength was unsettling and at the same time aroused a strange elation in me. I felt I trusted him, trusted the enemy, and I told him my name.

  “Tuela.”

  “Tu-e-la?”

  “I’m Tuela.”

  He laughed, long and booming, until my own belly resonated with it and I had to laugh, too.

  “And I’m Pierre,” he said in his language. I understood him.

  Nights. It would be too easy to say I loved him because he was the only one who was friendly and took any interest in me. It was more than that. It was a tension between us, something strange, exciting
. We talked for hours; he helped me train my muscles, massaging them devotedly when I lay sweating and exhausted on my bed after strength training, and I felt this satisfied me just as little as it did him, without knowing what it was I longed for. And one night we pressed ourselves against one another on my bed, entangled ourselves in our ankle-length shirts, and pressed our open mouths against one another like birds shortly before nesting time. This was the night I discovered Pierre had a penis. I’d never—not even once—thought that I could regret not being an animal.

  The next morning, led by Pierre’s hand, I passed through long cool halls and several stairways out into bright sunlight for the first time, still uncertain on my legs and fearful of the strange world outside my small room. There, I’d often shoved the sand-shutter to the side and looked over an endless yellow plain to a far-distant horizon. And nights I’d gazed up at the Dancing Stones and longed for their green buoyancy.

  Now we stepped out into a stone gallery and looked into an inner courtyard with white sand, colorful carpets, large hairy animals, and green plants three times as tall as me spreading their wide green leaves out like a roof under the glaring sky. Everything here was fixed in place, nothing drifted or spun or shifted around anything else, everything I saw was oriented around the same reference point, just as if we still stood in a room in a solidly-built house. Between the trunks of the largest trees stretched hammocks where people lay and dozed in shadows; and at a hearth something was suspended over the open embers, exuding a delicious savory scent. Around this wide hall under the open sky were solid walls built out of solid cliffs, and even the sky with its even, steely blue seemed solid and immovable. I can’t describe that moment as anything but the feeling of having come home, where you could depend on your feet and the direction of gravity. I fell in love with the Yellow World the first moment I set foot on it awake and aware. Pierre stood next to me, small but twice as wide and ten times as strong as I; I clung to him hard and laughed and cried at once, and he laughed his sustained booming laugh.

  We searched out a free carpet, and before Pierre sat with me he rang a bundle of bright bells hanging from a tree branch. Then he disappeared into the dark behind an open gate and came back with fresh water, dried fruit, and bread.

  He began to eat slowly and methodically. While I, in accordance with the custom of his tribe, kept him silent company, the courtyard filled with ever more dark thickset people who scrubbed their hands in a sandbasin, sat down to eat, and eyed me curiously. Finally a good two hundred faces were turned to me, expectant, and Pierre said quietly:

  “Very rarely do so many come to eat at the same time. They knew I would bring you with me today.”

  He stood up.

  “I know you want to find out more about Tuela. Ask your questions.”

  The first to rise was an old man.

  “Rock, do you want to begin?”

  The elder nodded and turned to me, but asked the question loud enough for all those present to hear.

  “You were on an exodus, yes?”

  I didn’t know this word and shook my head, helpless.

  “You wanted to invade.”

  “Yes,” I said truthfully and felt ashamed. I stood up with Pierre’s help.

  “I’m sorry. We’re trying to survive.”

  “We all want to survive,” retorted a young woman. “But we manage it without raiding.”

  “We don’t have fresh water. We’re not interested in your land. We need water.”

  “And how did you want to transport water for so many people? On your mules somehow?”

  For the first time I realized they took me for someone from the caravan I’d seen in the storm, and I glanced at Pierre for help. We’d never explicitly talked about it; I’d just always taken it for granted he knew what I was talking about when I spoke about the Dancing Stones. He nodded at me encouragingly.

  “The birds would’ve carried it for us. They make things light or heavy.”

  The surrounding faces looked at me without comprehension and I’d no idea how to begin to explain. Or if I even ought to explain. Strictly speaking, I would betray Utjok if I did.

  While I hesitated, Pierre spoke for me.

  “She doesn’t belong to the lost caravan. She comes from the Heights. She belongs to the ancient tribe of the Deathbirds.”

  My heart beat wildly, fear-filled. I saw their doubt. And then I saw their fear. Fear of us.

  “But how?”

  “They can fly. Like in the old legends.”

  “No one can fly.”

  “She has to prove it first.”

  “Look at her. She’s so different from us.”

  “And what if she’s come to destroy us once and for all this time?”

  Pierre lifted his hands in an appeasing gesture and the people stopped speaking over one another. He counted off on his fingers:

  “She crashed. Her flightsuit is torn to shreds. She has no weapons. She’s alone. She can’t do anything to us.”

  “What does she want here?”

  “What she said: she wanted to get water because her tribe up there in the Heights is dying of thirst.”

  “I told you so! A raid!”

  “Would we have given them water of our own free will, then?”

  No one answered, and again Pierre did it himself.

  “No. Because anyone who doesn’t belong to us is, obviously, our enemy. But I tell you this way of thinking is a mistake! Since I found Tuela, I’ve thought a lot. About our lives and about the old stories. No one knows exactly what happened then. Why the little world shattered, why we live in a desert. We blame them and they blame us, and that’s the only thing that tells us for certain anything even happened back then. But that was then. And now is now. We have to stop this. We have to learn from each other so we can make our lives easier, together. Tuela’s stranded here. She can’t go back. I want us to take her into our tribe. That would be a tiny beginning, a small change.”

  Pierre paused before he spoke further, looked me in the eyes, saw the pain that had balled up in me like a fist at his words, that choked me and weighed me down.

  “I want to take her to wife.”

  In the courtyard was silence, and Pierre stood there with outflung arms and waited for a reaction.

  It was Jen who was the first to speak.

  “But I won’t let you go.”

  Pierre let his arms sink, astonished.

  “I thought you’d be pleased. I thought I disgusted you.”

  “You’re right. I’ve no desire for a man to lie beside me. And I’d let you go with pleasure. But—” Jen pointed at me. “I’ve seen her naked. She’s strange, she’s . . . not even a woman. If I can prevent her mixing with us through my refusal, I’ll accept being your wife.” Then she turned to me. “I’ve nothing against you personally. But you can’t be a man’s wife.”

  “I want some proof,” said Elder Rock, quiet but clearly audible. “I want some proof that she isn’t human.”

  And Jen tore my long white shirt down the front. And I felt their eyes on me like burning ice.

  “It’s completely flat. It doesn’t even have nipples,” said Jen matter-of-factly. The simple observation sufficed as proof that Pierre and I could never be a couple. I lowered my head, asking myself how I could have let myself hope for even a second.

  “Pierre, she can’t bear children,” said Rock.

  “Of course I can’t bear children. No one can do that before they’ve died,” I said, tired.

  Pierre’s face remained earnest as he turned to me.

  “But I still want to marry you.” Then he turned again to his tribe. “I found her in the desert. It should be left to my decision.”

  “You owe us children, Pierre,” said Rock softly.

  “I know. But I ask this of you, nevertheless. Jen, I ask you as a friend: Let me go.”

  Jen’s lips were narrow and she had her arms crossed over her breasts.

  “Just the thought makes me sick. And Rock
is right. You owe me a son.”

  With that, she turned and walked away.

  And I stood there shivering in the evening air that was quickly turning cold, two hundred pairs of eyes fixed on me.

  Elder Rock laid a drape around my shoulders so I could cover what I didn’t possess. He clapped me on the shoulder as if he wanted to apologize.

  “We aren’t done yet. There will be further questions,” he said. “About your homeland and how we can defend ourselves against you.”

  Pierre brought me inside again. I saw fear in his eyes and felt it begin to clutch at me, too.

  In the following days, I stayed in my room and Pierre came by only occasionally, for a few minutes. He said there were difficult times ahead for us and he’d stave off the worst.

  I’d be neither killed nor chased into the desert. But Pierre couldn’t prevent them from piecing the rest together, too, from connecting the dead waterwatchers with my appearance. They blamed me, and Jen, who’d nursed me back to health, was particularly furious. True, I hadn’t killed her husband or any of the others. But I’d taken part in the missions during which they were murdered. I couldn’t deny my complicity, and so they debated over me and passed judgment.

  Later Pierre explained to me it was Elder Rock who’d had the idea that I should get a chance to settle my debt—and I was beyond grateful to him. But I recognized the real thinking behind this, too: Should my people send watercarriers here again, I’d have a chance to return home. And perhaps to begin then what had become Pierre’s and my greatest wish: To live together. I didn’t explain to Pierre that for me there was yet another way home. Because I feared that way far too much.

  So it was decided that deep in the mountain under the stronghold, I would change filters, work pumps, keep reservoirs clean, and sound alarms if anyone tried to invade.

  It wasn’t, as I’d hoped, Pierre and Rock who took me below. I hadn’t seen Pierre for days; he kept himself away or was kept away. Two men I didn’t know accompanied me. They stared grimly ahead and positioned me between them like a prisoner who threatened to fly away at any moment. Inside the stronghold we went down countless steps; the entire mountain the stronghold was enthroned on must be shot through with tunnels and halls which generations of inhabitants had driven down ever deeper until they had finally struck water.