by C S Marks
He says they will all be dead soon? Good. It’s no less than they deserve. Mother was like them—she bore the scars, but she never blamed anyone. She never hurt anyone.
By the time morning came, I hated them all.
We had traveled with Caspar for nearly a fortnight when he started to change. He moved slower, tired more quickly, and grew irritable.
“Are you all right?” I asked him one night. “You’re not sick, are you?”
“Of course not!” he snapped. “I’ve been through hell already and the Sickness hasn’t gotten me. Now don’t mention it again!”
His voice may have been steady, but I could see the fear in his eyes, and I felt a strong desire to keep Salina away from him from then on.
The nights had gotten colder the farther north we traveled; Caspar had led us toward some tall hills covered with sparsely-scattered trees, hoping for shelter from the wind.
“I don’t like sleeping in his blankets,” whispered Salina. “They’re full of fleas!”
“Well, they’re all we’ve got,” I whispered back, fighting the urge to start scratching the itches that had suddenly appeared at the very mention of fleas. But they were real enough. I saw the red marks they made on me, on my sister, and on Caspar. He had caught a ground-squirrel in a snare several nights before. Perhaps that was where they had come from.
When we awoke the next morning, we knew something was wrong. Caspar was coughing, his eyes red-rimmed and fevered. I could feel the heat rolling off of him. He pulled the canvas over his head and moaned. “Oh, Lord of Heaven…after all this time…please, not this!”
My sister pulled back into her own tangle of blankets, knowing enough to be afraid of him. “Stay here,” I told her. “Maybe he just needs some water.”
I offered him one of our water-skins, hoping I would not smell the Sickness on him, but it was rampaging through him like a grass fire in a high wind. The sores were already erupting on his cheeks and forehead. The rag into which he had been coughing was soaked with blood. I left him the water-skin, and I had not the slightest idea of where he had been leading us or why, but I would not remain to see if he would die or go mad. I had failed Seth, but I could still protect Salina. Nothing else mattered.
Caspar must have realized we were leaving him. I heard his voice, cracked and full of pain, drifting from the bedroll. “Please don’t leave me…I need you. Please help me…”
I took the other water-skin, the spare bedroll, and a few strips of dried meat from his pack. Salina was reluctant to leave him, for her heart was still open to pity and mercy, but I gave her no choice. “Thank you for saving us,” I muttered. “May the Lord of Heaven reward you.” Then I turned from him and never looked back.
***
We kept to our northward course, guided by the stars. At times I wondered about the wisdom of it, as the nights were cold enough already and the path we took seemed to get steeper and more arduous as the days passed. We ran out of food on the second day after we left Caspar. After that we ate whatever we could catch, which wasn’t much. We even ate the little, hopping fleas from the bedroll, an act which brought Salina quite a bit of satisfaction. “Bite me, will you? Let’s see how you like being bitten.” She crushed their flat little bodies carefully between strong front teeth. All right—we didn’t exactly eat them. But they are hard to kill, and biting them is a sure way to do it. I’m sure we swallowed some, intentionally or not.
One cannot survive long on a diet of fleas, and grasshoppers were becoming increasingly hard to find. I have eaten many of them out of necessity over the course of my life—fried, dipped in honey, powdered with hot spices—and I have always considered them disgusting no matter what they are flavored with. Back then, lost and desperate, we would have paid a fortune in king’s gold for them. These days, I prefer to avoid eating any creature with more than four legs.
Salina was a strong little girl, but the cold and lack of food had weakened her. When she first had the dream about the Moon Man, I thought she was fevered. She woke up shaking with terror, clutching my arm. I felt her forehead…she wasn’t fevered. “Salina, it’s all right. Just a bad dream.”
“No…no it’s not. The Moon Man is coming,” she said in a voice I hadn’t heard since she was about two and a half.
“What ‘Moon Man?’ Who’s that?” I muttered, knowing it was just some nonsense conceived in her five-year-old mind.
“Don’t ask me to talk about him now. He might hear us,” she whispered. “He’s real. The Moon Man is real.”
Every night thereafter, Salina spoke of the Moon Man. She was afraid to go to sleep because of him, but she wouldn’t travel under the moon, either. She sat, wide-eyed and fearful, with the bedroll drawn up to her chin. At last, overcome by weariness, she would sag over into sleep. If she was lucky, she wouldn’t dream.
If she was unlucky, she would wake screaming. “Soon the moon will be big and yellow…that’s when he’ll come to get us!” she cried. “We have to get to a house—we have to have people to protect us. Lots of people! Big people!”
“Well, we can’t,” I grumbled. “There aren’t any houses around here, and in case you haven’t noticed, the only big people we’ve seen have been horrible. Even Caspar would have ended up horrible. So just stop thinking about it!”
She began to whimper, digging her knuckles into her eyes, which were swollen from crying, making me feel like the most terrible, meanest person in the world. I patted her shoulder. “Listen, Salina, we have father’s axe. If this Moon Man comes, I won’t let him get you. I promise, all right?”
She stopped crying and looked up at me, round-eyed. Then she said something that should never have come from the mouth of anyone so young. “You don’t understand. He eats people, Glennroy. The Moon Man comes out under the yellow moon…and he eats people! He’ll use father’s axe to chop us up. Don’t you think he won’t.” She folded her arms in front of her. “We have to find a house.”
I could see there was no reasoning with her. “All right. We’ll look for a house.” At least it would keep her moving.
Before the incident with the Moon Man, I had not known of my sister’s gift. But when the moon rose over the horizon a few days later, an enormous golden orb tinged with rusty orange, I heard the horrible cries for the first time. They sounded like someone howling in unspeakable pain.
“It’s the Moon Man,” whispered Salina. “He’s coming tonight!”
The horrible cry came again. It sounded closer than the last. “We’d better find a good hiding place,” I said, hoping not to be condemned to eternal torment for committing the sin of not listening to my sister.
“It won’t matter too much,” said Salina. “He can smell us, anyway.”
“Now you tell me. Come on.”
We found the best hiding place we could, crouching amid the dark shadows cast by a tumble of stones. The Moon Man had gone strangely quiet, for which I was both grateful and afraid. Was he quiet because he was going away, or because he was on the hunt?
When the horrible howling came again, he was close enough that we could see him. He stood tall on a rock, silhouetted against the now pale gold moon, his head thrown back like a wolf’s. He was painfully thin and covered with scars—the mark of his madness—his hair a matted tangle full of dead grass and thorns. Around his neck was a necklace of bones, and he carried a large thigh-bone in one gnarled, ragged-nailed hand.
Today, as a man, I cannot be certain that bone was human. As an eleven-year-old boy, I was absolutely certain. He eats people, Glennroy…
When the Moon Man’s head snapped around, and his eyes fixed on our pile of stones, I knew what I had to do. I waited…waited until he drew near enough. He was obviously starving—so were we all—but his desperate hope of finding prey made him careless. He didn’t know who or what was crouched in that pile of stones. Come on, you filthy creature—come and get me. That’s it…come on! A little closer, please. I looked over at Salina and raised father’s axe just enough fo
r her to see. She nodded.
I saw her draw a couple of deep, resolute breaths. Then she leaped up and uttered the loudest, most piercing scream she could manage, throwing both hands in the air.
The Moon Man jumped back, cringing and shaking his head. She had startled him—but only for a moment. It was all I needed. I leaped up and rushed toward him, the hand-axe glinting in the golden light, and I buried it in the side of the Moon Man’s neck. He wasn’t nearly as large a man as he had appeared, and he fell to one knee, cawing like a wounded crow and clawing at the gushing wound on his neck. I knew it would kill him—no one bleeds like that and lives for very long—but I screamed and struck again, this time at the back of his neck, where the spine was. He dropped in a heap of filthy limbs and matted hair.
That was it. I had killed my first man.
I remember being surprised at how easy it was. I had been prepared for a struggle, to die for my sister if need be, yet two well-placed blows was all it took. That and a startled man armed with a thigh bone against a fiercely motivated boy wielding sharpened steel.
Salina was crying now, and she ran to me for comfort. “You killed him! You killed the Moon Man!”
“I promised I would protect you, remember?” Without warning, the strength drained out of me, and I fell over onto the stony ground.
“No, Glennroy…we have to move away from here,” said Salina, tugging on my arm. “You can’t sleep yet. We shouldn’t stay near the Moon Man, even if he’s dead.”
My head was swimming and the stars wavered in and out of focus in a very unpleasant manner, but I took her point, crawling after her until my senses returned and the night air revived me a little. When Salina thought we were finally far enough away from what remained of the Moon Man, she let me fall into an exhausted sleep.
In the morning she brought me a clutch of bird’s eggs she had found—a real gift, our first blessing in a long time. We shared them equally, but she gave one back at the last. “You’re bigger, and you worked hard last night.”
“So did you,” I said, smiling at her. “It takes a lot to scream that loud!” I did, however, take the egg. I don’t care for raw eggs—as a man, I won’t eat them unless desperate. But back then they were ambrosial. I sucked out every bit, then ate the shells for good measure.
When we had finished, we rested again. Salina kept watching me with solemn eyes, and I wondered what she was thinking.
“Glennroy…when you killed the Moon Man, did you like it?”
“What do you mean? I killed him because I had to!”
“But…did you like it?”
I thought for a moment. Why would she ask such a question? And how should I answer it? I thought some more. As I was killing that mad, subhuman creature—a creature bent on destroying my sister and me—I had imagined I was killing every single one of the monsters who had murdered my father and my brother. I imagined I was burying father’s axe in every one of their filthy necks, and it should have felt good. It should have, but I felt nothing. The Moon Man might as well have been a flea between my front teeth. I felt nothing at all.
“Father says we’re not supposed to kill people,” I said at last. “We should only kill if we have to.”
That seemed to satisfy her at the time, but she said one last thing before she fell asleep. “You’ll kill a lot of people someday, Glennroy. You would never kill me, would you?”
I swallowed, feeling a chill take hold of me. “What sort of stupid question is that?” I said, trying to sound annoyed rather than alarmed. “Now, go to sleep.”
She smiled at me, turned over onto her other side, and closed her eyes.
***
Before we moved on, I went back to where we had left the Moon Man’s body. To my surprise, there was no trace of it, other than the marks in the dust where something large and heavy had dragged it away. I shuddered, taking notice of the enormous footprints all around the area. I had no idea what had made them, but the claw-marks at the end of each of the four toes made me shudder. It’s a good thing we moved as far away as we did. Whatever this thing was, we’re lucky it was satisfied with only one carcass last night. From that day, I viewed my little sister with an entirely new level of respect.
We saw the smoke from a distant campfire after two days with almost no water and very little to eat. There was more green here, but the leathery shrubs were still dry and we had seen no sign of rain. At least there was shade. Salina didn’t have enough strength to walk anymore. I had been carrying her since breakfast, which had consisted of a handful of shiny black beetles and some soft, white grubs I had found underneath a rock. We needed to be careful, as some crawly-things could make you very sick if you ate them, and we didn’t know many of the ones found in the lands we traveled through. These black ones, thankfully, could be eaten safely.
Though I was afraid of whoever had made the fire, I knew we had no choice but to make for it. Salina, at least, would die for certain if she didn’t get some good food and a warm place to sleep. I wondered how far away the smoke was—it didn’t look that bad, but I knew that things weren’t always as they appeared. Sometimes you can think a line of smoke is just over the next rise, but that might be miles away. I couldn’t worry about that at the time, so I just kept putting one foot in front of the other.
Then came the moment when I could no longer put any of my feet anywhere. I had come up against an obstacle that I could not get over, and I hadn’t the strength to go around it. I sank down onto the ground, making sure that Salina and I were well away from the edge of the deep gorge blocking our path, and tried not to weep. Maybe I should just throw us both in, I thought. Salina’s barely alive as it is. At least it would be quick…probably.
I remembered one of our goats who had, against all the usual tendencies of his race, fallen from a pinnacle of stone in an attempt to grab a bite of thorn-bush. The goat’s end hadn’t been quick at all, as we couldn’t get to it to ease its suffering. No…throwing ourselves into the gorge wouldn’t serve at all.
My legs cramped from lack of water and salt, I was almost too weary to draw breath, I had stopped shivering in the cold some time ago, and I was beginning to see things that weren’t there. I closed my eyes, hugged Salina, and gave myself over to darkness.
***
When I came to, I could hear the blessed sound of water running. I could smell it, too…river water, if I knew anything at all. We were at the bottom of the gorge. As soon as my eyes could focus, I saw the grey-and-rust-banded cliffs towering on either side. Salina…where is my sister? I looked around for her, reaching as far as I could, as I was too weak to get up. “Salina? Salina!”
A pair of booted legs appeared beside my head, and a man knelt down, placing a hand on my shoulder. “The little girl is here. She’s picking up some, though we all thought she would die. She’s stronger than she looks—just like you. You must be her brother, right?”
I nodded.
“What’s your name, Big Brother?”
“Glennroy, son of Glenndon.”
“Well, Glennroy, you’ll get a new name here. Everyone does. You’ll be getting a new start in life now that you’re with us. It would seem to me that you and your sister have escaped from your own village, and we’re wondering whether the Sickness has been there. I’m thinking you and your sister didn’t get sick, but those who did are trying to kill you now. Am I right?”
I nodded.
“Are any others left alive and unmarked?”
“I don’t know…I don’t know of any,” I said, my head beginning to swim again.
“That’s fine. Now sleep, and I’ll see what I can do about finding you something good to eat when you wake up. Drink this in the meantime—it’s very sustaining.”
He held a vessel to my lips, and I drank. It was warm, fruity, and wonderful. I slept well for the first time in weeks.
When I awoke, I took stock of my situation. Apparently there were a number of people here. I heard many voices, both male and female. They had dres
sed me in clean clothes, no doubt burning the rags I had been wearing—I know I would have. But when I lifted my new tunic and looked beneath it, I saw a boy who was barely alive. My bones were barely covered by anything except skin, which was mottled with bruises and flea-bites. What a mess, I thought, a wave of light-headedness coming over me. I can’t even stand to look at myself.
As if on cue, I heard the same man’s voice again. He startled me, having approached from behind. “Your sister is in better shape than you are, don’t worry,” he said. “And you can relax. No one will hurt you here. You’ve come to a very lucky place—perhaps the only one where you’ll be welcome. You must now put all that has happened in your life—everyone you have known—behind you. We will be your family now, if you will accept us.”
He handed me a bowl of warm goat’s milk sweetened with wild honey. “Only drink this if you are willing,” he said. “Otherwise, you are free to leave. Your sister, however, has elected to stay.”
Of course she has, I thought. What choice did she have? What choice do I have, in fact?
I sat up and looked around. I could see other children running and chasing one another. I heard them laughing. It didn’t seem to be a bad place, and I knew I could never leave Salina, anyway. I took the bowl, and I drank.
***
The man’s name was Thurston, and he looked like a northerner. I know that now, though I had rarely laid eyes on any when I was a boy. There were several northern children in the group, though, as well as almond-eyed easterners, though most were brown-skinned sutherlings like Salina and me. Thurston explained that he and the others called themselves “Gleaners.” It was their job to find and rescue any and all children who had been orphaned by the Sickness. Some of the rescued children had obviously gotten sick and recovered, as evidenced by the scarring on their bodies. When I saw them I shrank back, remembering the Moon Man.