by Demir Barlas
He was looking at her with great concern. She accepted his hand automatically. She stood and looked around at the unspoiled version of the landscape through which she had just come, and she remembered who she was and what had brought her here.
“My family.”
“Safe.”
“The storm.”
“Dissolved.”
“Why am I here?”
“I couldn’t leave you in your state. Time’s short. Here, look at the numbers.”
The Redcolds had numbers, but they didn’t look like this.
The Spirit of Knowledge had extended a figure that turned the verdancy into light to make these numbers. Astrid was certain that the spirit cared for her and had an important objective in mind. With the excellent recollection of all barbarians, and she committed the numbers to memory.
“Remember,” the Spirit of Knowledge emphasized, squeezing her hand. “Remember.”
When she woke up, it was dark and the storm had passed. She was recumbent and looking at the stars. She felt the warmth of the fire before she saw it. Del was squeezing her hand and smiling down at her. Riku, who had apparently been holding a small cup of bone broth to her lips, was frozen in grateful surprise. Further back were the faces of Nya and Balder.
The pain, too, returned. Astrid had flown far and landed hard. She felt a tightness in her back, but, through wincing trials, she found her limbs to work. These facts of the body were of less concern than the survival of her family, and, more distantly, than the survival of the Redcolds.
“They’re gone,” Riku said, once more guessing his wife’s thoughts. “Scattered. Said you were kutsuz.”
“Gone where?”
“Don’t know. They chose another way.”
Astrid frowned. Perhaps she was kutsuz after all.
“Drink,” Del admonished her mother. Astrid was happy to obey. She heard the lowing of her oxen in the distance; they, too, had stuck with her. Behind the fire, she saw the yurt assembled on the ground, although missing several patches and much the worse for exposure to the Storm.
“It must have veered away,” Riku said, knowing that Astrid’s thoughts would have reached the Storm by now.
“Help me sit up. Nya, Balder. Come closer.”
Riku piled more pelts behind Astrid, Del added some wood to the fire, Nya and Balder came closer, and the entire improbable family gathered to hear what Astrid had to say.
“Three nights ago, I had my dream. I saw the golden path. I was wrong. I don’t know why. Kut comes and goes. I’m not the Knower now, so I can’t lead you. Riku knows where the Redcolds went. The best thing all of you can do is follow them. Another Knower will come, and the tribe will take you back. It’s only me they don’t want.”
Del assumed that Astrid was speaking only to Nya and Balder—and, at a pinch, Riku. But Astrid’s glance encompassed her. Riku, similarly, thought that Astrid was proposing that he reunite Nya and Balder with the Redcolds and then return, but he soon realized that she meant him to go as well.
“Dying with me here is no virtue,” Astrid insisted in the face of her family’s silence. Riku wiped a tear from his eye, as the Redcolds’ abandonment of Astrid reminded him of him the central emptiness that counterbalanced his own strength. Astrid knew he wouldn’t leave, but this knowledge didn’t comfort her. It was the burden of guilt, not the grace of love, that bound him to her. She did, however, want to appeal to him to do the observably right thing, to get himself and the children to safety.
“We’re staying,” Balder said. Nya was holding his hand and nodding so vigorously as to set her little ringlets bouncing. Del said nothing. She was offended that her mother had suggested any separation, and it fell to Riku to squeeze Astrid’s shoulder gently by way of assurance. Astrid still looked closely at Del, who relented when she saw the tears in her mother’s eyes. Del had tears of her own. They could be placed in many configurations, Del and Astrid, but they could not be parted.
“I have a plan,” Astrid continued, looking around the circle of faces. “I saw something else in my dream. A building. That’s where we’ll go.”
“A what?” Nya asked.
“It’s like a yurt,” Del explained. “But big and solid and permanent. A structure of the ancients.”
“Where is it?” came Riku’s query.
“Not far.”
“We’d better start,” counseled her husband, with a cooperation that had never been in his voice when she had been the Knower. She might occupy a higher plane than his, but he knew her to be fallible now. Astrid was unbothered. She had never wanted to occupy a role of superiority in relation with her husband, so she was glad.
“But you’re hurt,” Del insisted.
“I’m fine,” Astrid reassured her, and, in fact, the pain in her back had helpfully diluted itself throughout her body. She extended a hand to Riku, who helped her to stand.
“I’ll yoke the oxen,” Riku smiled, and he got to work on this errand while Del dutifully inserted herself under her mother’s arm for support. As they walked towards the yurt, plaintive chirping issued from the nearby forest, and Astrid felt Del’s strength turn to weakness. Del halted, then sagged, at the sound of the chirps, which, to her, would always mean her two lost birds. Del’s weakness was, however, momentary. She had already recovered. She was walking her mother towards the yurt again when Astrid stopped her.
“I’m sorry I opened the flap.”
“You couldn’t have known.”
“It was my fault. I lost your birds.”
“I shouldn’t have caught them in the first place.”
“You have to give yourself permission to resent me, Del.”
“You were the Knower,” Del seethed suddenly. “You could see the Storm. But you couldn’t see my birds!”
“I know.”
“They listened to me. They loved me,”
Astrid’s throat went dry. She and Riku had not always achieved a collaborative equilibrium. They had gone through a period of mighty struggle during which she would surely have ejected him from the yurt but for his potential as a father and during which he subtly undermined and ignored her. They had come through that struggle, but Del was still bearing its scars. The birds had been a salve, and then they had escaped.
“I’m sorry. I wish I could bring your birds back. I’ve even looked for them in my dreams.”
Del was crying softly. The effort of resenting her mother had been great. She hugged her mother, though, and Astrid kissed her forehead.
Riku had led the oxen back to the yurt and was yoking them now. He was as glad as ever of the need to take action, always a welcome distraction from the harder work of feeling. He couldn’t hear Astrid, but he knew that she was performing some emotional work. Work wasn’t the right word for it, for it went inconclusively in circles and offered none of the protective feedback of things. Needs came and went unaccountably, problems he considered resolved—or that he failed to recognize as problems—recurred inexorably, and even the most patient of men was unequipped to follow the spirals of the heart. He had tried. Early in his marriage, he had listened conscientiously to Astrid’s exposition of feelings, but these he had attempted to reconfigure as problems. He had been wrong. There were problems, yes, but their solutions were processes rather than destinations, and Riku’s preference was merely to arrive. There was failure here and victory somewhere else and the point was to get from failure to victory as expeditiously as possible. That was male thinking. That was female thinking too, when the situation merited, but Riku had no other mode. He had been too deeply influenced by the oxen, on whom he could so easily map both problems and solutions. In their sexual heat, the male oxen had to be wrestled to the ground in a certain manner. In their pregnancies, the cows had to be given certain grasses. In their vulnerability, the calves required certain degrees of shade. Emotional life had no such certainties, eager as he might have been to find them.
Balder had had a harder time than Nya. She had not fully understood
her parents’ death, and her helplessness had only been transferred to other caretakers. Balder was old enough to both know and feel, and the idea of being caught in the Storm returned him to the fact of his frailty. Balder would have been equally happy to die fighting his father or the Storm. Both were unavailable for the intimacy of combat. Revenge and action were denied to him. He would have to wander, as he did now, picking up pieces of the yurt and preparing for little journeys of survival.
“Don’t blame yourself, lad,” came Riku’s plaintive voice. He was still yoking the oxen, and his back was to Balder as he spoke.
“Why?”
“My father was the same as yours. At your age, I was two hands taller than him. I could have killed him with either hand, but I didn’t.”
“What happened?”
“He drank too much and slipped on a rock. I still think about him. The worst of it, though, is the shadow of his faithlessness. I’ll always be in it.”
“I’m not faithless. I loved my mother. I used to hear her crying. I saw the wounds. I wasn’t—I don’t think I am—faithless.”
“You’re not.”
“Then why couldn’t I act?”
“Because the horrible thing was that your mother chose her pain. You could have killed the source of that pain. But it wouldn’t have changed her choice, the madness of it.”
Riku trailed off, because he saw Astrid coming—and because, even in the light remaining from the fire, he could see that she disapproved of whatever he was filling the boy’s head with. He returned to the comfort of work like an invertebrate to the comfort of a shell, and he would speak no more to Balder tonight. Astrid didn’t say anything to Balder. She embraced him and waited for his tears, which surprised him when they came.
When the yurt was ready, Del helped Nya climb into it, and the two girls sat in the corner as Astrid took charge of the oxen. They talked by the light of the Sinwoyese lantern, soothed by the pleasant rocking of the yurt and the gentle snoring of Riku and Balder—but, above all, by the ambient knowledge that Astrid was leading them somewhere.
“I saw birds,” Nya was saying, her plump cheeks red and piping voice breathless. “On the edge of the forest.”
“Do you know what kind?”
“They were little and colorful.”
Del laughed and reached for a factbook.
“What’s that?”
“It’s called a factbook. Look, let me show you.”
Del opened the interface, and Nya leaned in to look at the bright screen. It was magical for her, and Del was equally excited to be sharing the device with someone who had never seen it. Del called up 4D renders of birds and leafed through them until she got to zebra finches. Nya giggled at the moving images.
Astrid was glad to be alone behind the oxen. She was glad, more specifically, that Riku was asleep. Had he been awake, he would have come to her side and mooned like a calf until she turned to him, until she gave him some more or less tangible sign that she forgave him for never knowing what to do and what to say. She’d heard some of what he’d said to Balder. She’d heard Riku ruminating about his own parents. How dismally happy he was at the thought that he’d been engendered by their gaps and deficits, that the void in his soul was not of his making. How happy Astrid could have been if Riku had been merely bad, because badness can be so easily remade! What can one do with emptiness? He was prepared—even as he lay there snoring, she knew—to go in any direction at any time at her bidding, and yet it would be meaningless. Even resistance and refusal would be meaningless, because, at the end of any such rebellion, he would return to her anyway, and the return would be just as pointless as the departure. She had mistaken him. She had mistaken his shadow for loyalty, his fear for love, his panic for devotion. And she was hoping that somewhere ahead of them lay a very specific redemption for Riku, though she could not anticipate its form.
Soon, Nya had gone to sleep. Del covered the little girl gently with soft felt and joined her mother. Astrid, who had been frowning, smiled to greet her daughter.
“Nya’s happy,” Del declared as she sat down, reaching forward to pat an ox’s rump.
“All children have that art.”
“Have you seen anything else?”
“No. The Redcolds are right, Del. I think I’ve had my last vision.”
“I believe in you. I’ll always follow you.”
Astrid didn’t cry often. When she did, a few tears came subtly and unbidden to the threshold of her eyes. She blinked away the moisture and smiled gratefully at her daughter.
“That’s more than I deserve.”
Del hugged Astrid. She sat with her mother for a while, under the moon and stars, until she fell asleep. Astrid was grateful for the weight of her daughter on the shoulder. The pressure was the pressure of motherhood—eternal, insistent, comforting. After some time, Astrid walked Del back into the yurt and put her to sleep as she had always done.
Riku woke a little before dawn and joined Astrid. He kept his distance again, always waiting for his wife’s intangible signals to engage. She was tired of severity, and so she smiled at him, and he was instantly happy. He saw down on the other end of the bench.
“Are we far?”
“We’ll be there at first light.”
“How are you?”
“Healed.”
“We should set up camp. Get some sleep—then we can enter this place, whatever it is.”
“Maybe it’s death.”
“But you saw it in your vision.”
“I saw the other path too, and the Storm came. I was wrong.”
“Unless you were meant to choose the building.”
“And I chose the wrong way? Stop, Riku.”
“I wasn’t doing anything.”
“You were going to reassure me. Don’t.”
“I only want to support you.”
“It’s not support. You feel empty, guilty. You echo what I do to feel—I don’t know—full, a person. I’m going to say some cruel things. I have to. If I don’t come out of this place, but you do, you need to be someone. For Del, if not yourself.”
“Astrid, if you die, I’ll—”
“You’ll live. So will Del. After a time, you’ll read the smoke and find your way back to the Redcolds. To the next Knower. You’re coming with me now because I’m not sure that there’s going to be another Knower. I think we’ve come to the end of our dispensation. That’s what’s in the building—the next step, the next journey. I think, but I don’t know. If I’m wrong, you’ll use your strength to use to keep Del alive. She’ll need that part of you. But after that, Riku, you’ll need to make the decisions that produce a person. All right? You’re going to have look inside you—I know you don’t like doing it—to understand who you are; more importantly, who you want to be. Without me guiding you. Do you understand? I know you struggle. I know your parents hurt you. I hate them for it. I know they’re the bog in which you’re stuck. If you can’t get out on your own, Riku, let me get you out. That’s my love.”
“I know.”
“That’s my love. I won’t say it’s better than another love, but I won’t say it’s worse. Get out of the bog, Riku. You’re strong. You can’t have that much energy of body without energy of soul.”
Riku wiped a tear from his eye. He cried frequently and at the simplest sentimentalism. He cried at sunsets. He cried for Del’s lost finches. Now, though, Astrid couldn’t tell whether he was crying for himself or for the hope of change, and enough rode on the difference for her to look very closely at him until she decided it was for the hope of change.
“I would have left you,” Riku confided.
“I know.”
“You and Del.”
“I know.”
“For anyone. For Farinaz. For a night’s pleasure.”
“Because, Riku, you think of loyalty as flesh. A woman’s amatory touch is the most powerful reassurance you can imagine. But this,” Astrid emphasized, holding his hand firmly, “is also tou
ch and love and loyalty. And this has always been yours, if only you would value it—or even see it.”
“I do.”
“Sometimes you do. You need my forgiveness now, and I give it to you. And I need your reassurance that you will try—”
“I will!”
“—will try to be the man I still see in you.”
“It hurts too much to look inside myself. But I will. I will. I promise you.”
“Good.”
While they were speaking, Astrid was aware that the building was approaching. The landscape here was hilly, and she saw the back of the hill that contained the fateful destination. Riku, following Astrid’s gaze, fell silent. The sun warmed their faces and the grass, and it was easy enough to believe that nothing had ever been destroyed or lost. The green hills, too, seemed to have swallowed up whatever evil was in the building or in any of the forlorn remnants of the civilization. There was no need for dread or revulsion. The ancients, abominable as they were, were only shadows.
Astrid guided the oxen around the hill. The sun’s rays struck the side of the hill, revealing, at its base, a large rectangular door whose metal still glittered through the mossy overgrowth. The hill, then, was the building, whether camouflaged or merely overgrown by the landscape itself.
“How do we get in?” Riku asked, ever practical.
There could have been many answers to that question—answers that followed on the ends of pursuits and escapades, unsuspected forest horrors, and the puzzle-solving ingenuity of humans. The answer that obtained was simpler than these. Astrid merely jumped down into the grass and, ignoring Riku’s grunts of caution, approached the door. She had heard a whistling, and, before her fingers touched the door, she already knew it to be open. The slightest palpation resulted in a metal groan that gave way to a well-lit corridor.
While Riku remained frozen on the yurt, Del, newly woken, had already jumped down into the grass and was striding towards her mother angrily.
“Not alone!”
“Del—”
“No!”