Blue Window

by Adina Rishe Gewirtz

  Jean’s belly had turned to water. Terror was a jackhammer pounding in her stomach and throat. She would have liked to scream or cry, but her throat closed against it. Not even a sound could make its way up through that tight space. The heat rose, the tent baked, and sweat crept from the roots of Jean’s hair and trickled down her cheek. For all that, her body was a block of ice.

  At last the Genius took his dog and went out into the air.

  “Jean.”

  Liyla’s voice cracked on the name.

  “Jean, I’m sorry.”

  Jean pretended she didn’t hear.

  “I couldn’t help it. They made me. I couldn’t — I couldn’t do anything else. You don’t know them; you don’t know what they do. I couldn’t, Jean. Don’t you see?”

  Jean’s voice had come back to her, but she wouldn’t use it. She clenched her teeth. She hated Liyla. Hated her. Wished she were dead, ripped into a thousand pieces like shredded paper. She hated her “couldn’t” and “Don’t you see?” She didn’t see. She wouldn’t. She turned her face away. It was the one thing she could move.

  The hours wore on and Jean was alone with Liyla. No one brought food. Not for Jean, and not for the girl, whose stomach growled so loudly it made Jean jump, setting her arms throbbing against the ropes.

  “You hungry?” Liyla asked.

  No, no, no, Jean thought. She remembered Liyla in the orchard, dropping plums into her basket and stuffing them into her skirt. Remembered her bargaining with the fruit seller. She’d never asked if Jean was hungry then.

  Liyla went out and returned quickly with bread. “I can’t untie you,” she said, still not meeting Jean’s eye. “But if you want, I can feed it to you.”

  Jean just looked at her. The inside of her mouth tasted sour, and her tongue stuck to the backs of her teeth. No, she wouldn’t eat.

  But Liyla tried to push the bread to her lips. “Eat,” she whispered. “Eat, or you’ll be sick!”

  At this, Jean finally spoke. “Sick! Since when do you care who gets sick?”

  The tiled room, with its straps and needles and knives, flashed before her eyes. Jean shivered, remembering the cold.

  Liyla flushed, and she dropped her hands to her sides. She left the tent, and Jean was happy, furiously happy, that she had gone, but the girl returned and forced a cup of water to Jean’s lips.

  “Drink,” she whispered. “You have to! I don’t want you to be sick.”

  At last, Jean drank. Her throat had begun to stick to itself. She could feel it closing, making it hard to breathe. Panic darted through her again.

  Liyla watched her, nodding anxiously. She drew the cup back and let Jean swallow, then offered it again. Jean shook her head and closed her eyes.

  “You sold us,” she said. “You sold us for money. You gave them Kate’s Barbie and helped them find us!”

  “No!” Liyla croaked. “No, they came and found me! They made me come!”

  Jean only shook her head.

  “It was a fanatic,” Liyla said, quick, low. “One came to my house, looking for you. He told them about this place.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Jean said, turning her face away.

  “Would I know how to get here by myself?” Liyla asked her. “A week’s walk from home, in the mountains? Why would I know?”

  Jean looked at her. She had to be telling a lie.

  Fear:

  The great bird of prey

  Come to rip our throats.

  Madness:

  Our house

  A heap of bricks.

  Salt and ashes,

  Salt and ashes.

  We choke on the food of despair.

  — Poem of the Wanderings in Elsare, Author Unknown, Ganbihar

  Frantic, the children called and searched. The broken one screamed in her wall of stones. The smallest of them was gone. Kate had bolted from sleep near midday, shouting of wrong on the mountain, and Jean, the playful child, was nowhere in the house or garden.

  Salt and ashes.

  Salt and ashes.

  The house would topple to a heap of bricks, and birds of prey circling.

  The mist was rising.

  Laysia ran breathless through the garden. She could feel the mist climbing the mountain, a smothering cloud rolling up to take the wood. No single broken soul stumbling, this, but the smoke rushing before a devouring fire. The air shuddered, and the children cringed and bent at the sound of it, a shout where a whisper had been.

  “It’s taken her!” Susan cried. “Not Jean, too!”

  She ran toward the coming wave.

  “No!” Kate shouted. “This way!”

  Behind the wall, the lost one’s wail choked and fell silent, and Laysia scattered the stones and released her. The maddened child fled before the onrush as the others turned to meet the tidal force, calling for their sister.

  The smell of dirt and sawdust and baking leather clogged the tent as the hours wore away. Heat wrapped around Jean’s body, muffled her breath, slipped into her head to dull the edge of her thoughts. At last even the fear grew distant, an ache that throbbed behind a red curtain.

  She hung listless against the ropes as the sun seeped orange across the canvas. Then a flash of white made her jerk upright.

  A soldier had lifted the tent flap. From the corner of her eye, Jean saw the little mound curled beside her come to life. It was Liyla, wet with perspiration. The black dog bounded in, followed by the Genius and two soldiers. Looming figures in the reddened light, they were too big for the tent, pungent with animal musk and wool gone sour with damp.

  “Ready the banner,” the Genius said. A soldier lifted Jean’s Barbie from the table and lashed it to a pole. The Genius took the red-handled knife and slipped it into his embroidered belt.

  “Good. Bring them.”

  Before Jean could protest, they jerked the chair from the ground and hoisted her between them. The ropes tore at her skin.

  “Wait!” Where are you taking me? Stop! It hurts!”

  No one answered. Over her shoulder, she could see a soldier yank Liyla, startled and blinking, to her feet.

  Tears blurred Jean’s eyes in the sudden glare, but when they cleared, there stood Ker with a company of soldiers, the strange bald angle of her face twisting as she smiled.

  “At last we begin. Hurry now. They’ve been sighted. A force of some size.”

  The Genius’s voice came from behind Jean. “How many?”

  Ker seemed uncertain. “The scout said he couldn’t tell. Something obscures his vision.”

  The Genius only laughed. “Excellent. I would have expected nothing less.” Satisfaction curled from him like smoke.

  From her place on the raised chair, Jean looked out at the hollow with its stumps and tents and red cloaks. Fewer than a hundred soldiers remained in the bowl of land. She turned her head, trying to see the others, and couldn’t.

  “Come now,” the Genius said.

  “Hiyup!” one of the soldiers called, and the men carrying Jean took off at a trot, heading west.

  The soldiers climbed toward a half dozen tall trees that clung to the land overlooking the camp. The dog galloped ahead, turning when it reached the ridge. Another tent sat there, blocking Jean’s view of the forest, but she could see the trees sloping down to the west, dark lines in the breathless wood.

  They set the chair down and released the ropes.

  “Get up,” the Genius said. “Walk with me.” He spoke as if Jean really were his guest; he was as gleeful as he’d been when she’d entered the tent.

  A soldier jerked Jean to her feet, and she stumbled on rubbery legs.

  “Spark enjoys the woods,” the Genius went on, nodding in the dog’s direction. “So much less crowded than the city.”

  He’d begun to stroll past the tent, and the soldier dragged her along. When they’d passed it, Jean turned to see the wood, rolling out from the camp, and nearly fell down again. In the near distance, waiting among the trees, were thousands of
red cloaks, so thick on the mountain that she could no longer spy any of the bushes or vines and knots she’d waded through with the others. Silent, the mass seethed, waiting beneath the leaves, and though she craned her neck to find it, Jean couldn’t make out its end.

  “Of course,” the Genius went on blithely, “too many people discover a pleasant spot like this, and it quickly becomes crowded.”

  From the corner of her eye, Jean saw Liyla, shoved forward by another soldier to keep pace with them. They came to a second structure, a low barn with two wide doors and no windows, a flat roof, and walls of mud-plastered slats. To its left, a corral of sawed-off branches sat on a raised bit of land with a good view of the hollow. Inside it, four men and one woman sat hunched on the grass, their wrists manacled, attached by long chains to cuffs at their ankles. They sat strangely still, and with a start, Jean saw that the woman with her head resting against the splintery fence was Liyla’s mother. The girl’s father sat with his eyes half closed beside her.

  The Genius saw her looking. “People pay for their visitors here,” he told her, and laughed. “Though some were confused on that point and thought perhaps I should be the one paying.”

  As she stared, he went on. “I suspect you know these others. Perhaps you recall my warning that other smooth-faced girl what happens when people tell me lies.” He tilted his head, amused. “So often people forget the meaning of true genius.”

  The wind blew hot on the hill, but as Jean peered into the corral, she shivered. There on the grass sat the fruit seller Liyla had spoken to that first day. Beside him, the soldier who had asked Max to bless him and the younger one, who’d been knocked out by the branch. Each sat as if made of stone, barely flinching as the soldiers dragged Jean and Liyla among them and unrolled two metal chains with cuffs at either end.

  “Tie them to each other,” the Genius said to the guards, and they snapped an iron cuff on each of Jean’s wrists, then fastened her to Liyla so she was forced to face the girl. When they were finished, the soldier who’d done the fastening jerked the chain down and the girls fell to their knees. Jean lunged back up, flailing, trying to pull away.

  “Please,” Liyla gasped. “Hold still!” Jean’s thrashing had pulled her forward, and, trying to balance herself, she’d fallen the other way, almost into her mother’s lap.

  “Girl! Hold still!” Liyla’s mother wailed. “Please!”

  But she didn’t lean down or reach to help Liyla sit up. Surprised, Jean stopped moving and looked at her again. A crust of dried blood ringed her neck, and despite the ragged clothes she wore, she had on a necklace, a bright silver ball the size of a fist that dangled from a black ribbon at her neck. Behind Liyla’s mother, Jean spied a basket full of the pendants, coiled in a nest of black ribbons.

  Jean wondered why she hadn’t seen them before. The men, too, wore the necklaces. She looked up at the Genius and saw that, grinning, he was watching her. Without a word, he pulled the red-handled knife from his belt and leaned over Liyla’s mother. Jean flinched, but the woman didn’t move. With a laugh, the Genius snagged the necklace with the flat side of his blade and the pendant swung free, flashing in the sunlight.

  “My lady Ker tells me you are small, and weaker than the others,” he said to Jean. “She says alone, you’d never be able to loose a strange wind.” He lifted the pendant higher, so it hung just before the woman’s eyes. “And yet even the graceful Ker can be mistaken.”

  Liyla’s mother held perfectly still, and now the others had turned. All the dull eyes had brightened suddenly.

  “It would be a shame to lose you a second time,” the Genius went on. “So let me demonstrate something for you.” With a flip of his knife, he let the pendant fall. Pop! It hit the woman’s chest and erupted. Fire leaped to her shirt and raced across the fabric. The woman shrieked and tried to raise her arms to throw the pendant off, but the fetters jerked her hands down, and all she could do was slap wildly at her chest and then throw herself onto the grass. The flames snuffed, she lay there heaving, the smell of charred skin in the air. No one moved to help her. Her husband trembled beside her but didn’t reach a hand. Jean burst into tears.

  “As you can see, my little gifts of jewelry are sensitive to being jostled,” the Genius said. He motioned to a nearby soldier, who came and slipped a fresh necklace over the woman’s head, then put one on Liyla.

  The man smiled down at her, then turned to Jean.

  “Gifts for all your friends, you see? And they do look to you, don’t they? Such a good girl. They’re relying on you to care for them. So I expect you understand, now, how dangerous it would be if anyone were to loose another strange wind here.”

  Jean.”

  It was Liyla, whispering to her. The Genius had taken his dog and moved off to stand beside Ker at the edge of the ridge beneath the emblem he had made of Jean’s Barbie. At the corral, the captives were circled by a trio of guards, who gazed indifferently at the motionless group.

  Jean tried to catch her breath. Liyla’s mother whimpered in the grass. The fruit seller had been sick, and Jean gagged on the smell of it. Everywhere she looked, there was something awful to see. On her right, the misery of Liyla’s mother and the wood behind her, clogged with waiting soldiers, on the left the hollow and its hundred men standing in grim silence.

  “Jean!”

  She’d tried hard not to look at Liyla, waiting there across from her, not with Liyla’s mother lying in the dirt and the awful pendant hanging round the girl’s neck. Now she was forced to raise her eyes.

  “Jean, you can do things. They kept asking about it after they took us. Asking us if you did anything like make a wind blow. Can you do anything else?”

  Jean shook her head. “No.”

  “But they said —”

  “I can’t. Susan can. Even Kate. But I was too little to learn all of it.”

  “But something!” Liyla pleaded. “Anything. Let us loose!”

  Jean didn’t know what to do. She glanced over at the ruddy-faced soldier who’d let them go on the mountain. There were tears in his eyes.

  “The boy blessed me,” he whispered. “I thought he meant it.”

  Liyla’s father moaned and shifted gently, gingerly plucking at his shirt with a shaking hand. The cloth peeled away to reveal a weeping section of raw skin. The second captive soldier nudged Liyla and pressed a torn piece of his cloak into her hand. “Give him this,” he said. “Slowly.”

  Jean watched Liyla pass her father the rag. Careful not to move too quickly, he dipped forward and slipped it between the wound and his shirt.

  “Needs more padding, in case it happens again,” the younger soldier said. “His have cracked more than once.”

  Jean’s eyes went to the Genius.

  “He likes to test them,” Liyla whispered. “A sharp tug can make them go, or a hard knock. And then, too, the wind blows on its own sometimes.”

  Liyla’s breath was warm in her face, and it was as hot here in the open as it had been in the tent. Jean eyed the silver pendants. What would happen now if the others came? They wouldn’t know; they might do something bad. She closed her eyes and wished the ribbons away, wished the terrible silver balls would float up into the air and go. But wishing never did anything, at least not for her. She’d played once and brought the sea splashing skyward. But Laysia had said that was the way for the very young, who needed to play. This was no time for playing, and so she could only sit shivering across from Liyla, thinking that, after all, she was sorry for how mean she’d been to the girl in the tent.

  In a thousand nightmares, the mist had risen to pursue her, to seek the exile it had relinquished. Now it did so. But rising, the mist touched neither Laysia nor the children. It hunted greater game. Uncoiling through the wood, a beast of the deep with a hundred arms, it rushed past through the trees, its whispered voice full of terrible promises.

  Long ago, Tur Nurayim had spoken of the sanctuary — the council’s sanctuary — as wave and fire. Laysia rememb
ered now that final debate of sages. Shall we nourish or destroy? And here was the final word in that debate — the sanctuary roaring it to the sky.

  Behind the mist, Laysia could just make out the line of dim figures driving the wave. Full they were with fury and joy. Was the Master Watcher among them?

  The thought made her stumble, and she half turned to search for him, shrouded there in the haze, when Kate’s cry stopped her.

  “Jean!”

  “Where?” Susan shouted. “Where? Do you see her?”

  Kate had stopped abruptly near a ridge where the trees gave way to a low clearing that created a hollow to the west.

  “No — no — he has her. He took her. . . .”

  “The mist? She’s in the mist?” Susan gasped.

  But Laysia knew the valley had not gone mad to rise up thus against one small child.

  “No! She’s there —” Kate pointed straight ahead, to where the mist broke free of the empty wood and slipped down into the clearing like water.

  “Who has her?” Nell snapped. “Tell us!”

  Kate was shaking. “The Genius,” she cried. “He took her. He’s here.”

  “No!” Nell shouted.

  Kate shuddered violently and bent nearly double, hands pressed to her ears. Laysia ran to her, grabbed her hand — and reeled.

  Voices crashed over her, the howling madness of the mist — but beyond it, more. She could feel the creatures in the wood scattering in terror, and the children, the battering of their fear and guilt, their hope and their anger. Startled, she dropped the child’s hand, and the sensations evaporated. In shock, she stared down at Kate. At the child’s touch, all the boundary between Laysia and the world had fallen away. The turbulent babble of life had poured into her ears, unfiltered.

  “Kate! What did you do?”

  Guilt, fear, worry. She did not need to hold the child’s hand to see it on her face.

  “Nothing! Please! Can you get Jean?”

  “Yes!”