Izzy placed a hand on Tea’s shoulder, but Tea flinched away. The comfort, Izzy’s burn-bright skin, didn’t feel right under the circumstances. “It’s alright, Tea. Take a breath. Let’s find you some clothes first.”
Grant huddled in the sand as they rummaged through the rubble of houses and small barns. Bile surged in Tea’s gullet at the sight of blackened bodies, human and animal.
Izzy found a dirty but serviceable robe that had once been pretty, with blue and white embroidery around the hem and neck. The linen wasn’t thick, but the scent of the previous owner enveloped Tea in a cosy warmth she identified with hard work, sheep and smoke. She had a good feeling the owner had escaped, even if they’d had to leave most of their life behind to be trampled by the oncoming storm.
“Now what?”
Izzy sniffed the air, but it was Grant who answered.
“He’s nearby.”
“How do you know?”
With her vision made staccato by the flash of bomb shells, it was hard to read his face.
Grant rubbed his right hand, the sound like bone on paper. “I know.”
“But I’m his sister. We’re connected by blood, by whaiwhaiā.”
“There are connections other than blood,” Izzy murmured.
“Izz.” Grant’s eyes were too big and tired in his narrow face.
“She’ll know soon.”
“Know what?”
Before Tea could question any more, the pain in her right arm flared into full flight, and she groaned. Izzy hissed her quiet.
“We don’t know what side of the lines we’re on. Which way do we go?”
Tea’s arm jerked up, pain puppeteering her action, like someone had braided her muscles into a rope.
Grant pointed in the same direction at the same time.
South. Towards the greatest noise. Towards the shouting scent of charred iron.
Tea tried pulling on the water’s song for relief, but it gave her little. Dredging up the practice she’d had at hiding her lady moments and the tears from Mum’s slaps, she pushed her ragged nails into her other arm. The pain evened things out a little.
“I need to be less conspicuous.” Grant’s bones creaked as he took his mule shape too fast. Even his animal face held lines of sadness.
What did he have invested here? How could he feel Robbie so strongly?
As if hearing her thoughts, Izzy gripped her shoulder. “We’re doing this together, alright?”
Tea bit her lip to stop a sob, and her chest tightened. So this is what it is like to have true friends, not just people who tolerate having you nearby.
Izzy nodded. Had she heard that, too? Was that part of her weird-wolfishness? Tea didn’t like the idea of someone in her head without permission and Izzy nodded again, releasing her grip on her shoulder.
“Thank you,” Tea whispered.
Her arm throbbed an imperative.
“Grant, you stay back,” Izzy said, low and smooth. “Find an empty building to wait in. I know that doesn’t sound too heroic, but I suspect we’ll be needing your strong back. I’m going to scout in dog form. Tea, you—”
“I’m not hiding. My skin—” She flexed her hand. “—I can hide in the shadows with my skin like this.”
“Sweet Mother of Jesus,” the donkey muttered.
“You can talk.” Tea didn’t mean to snap, but the pain-strings were pulling her muscles and mind taut.
Was that a chuckle as Izzy shifted into her dog form, or the rustle of skin-fur?
“I can track you by scent,” Izzy lisped from her dog mouth. “If you stop moving or find something, I’ll be able to tell. If I find Robbie first, I’ll come get you. Fair?”
“It will have to do.” Tea sighed.
“Be careful.” A big pink tongue scraped up Tea’s cheek, then the border collie flung herself out past the palm trees.
“God damn, Izzy.” Tea back handed the slobber off her cheek. “Oh, sorry” She blushed a side-eye at Grant, who nodded his long head slowly.
“Take care.”
Grant plodded off into the shadows behind a cluster of houses, his pace at odds with the fear and anger that gripped the darkness with talons too sharp.
Tea removed her robe and balled it up under one arm. Calling on the moisture embedded in the shadows to help trick the light around her, she found a dappling that would allow her to dodge from shadows to trees effectively.
After only a few steps, the enormity of the situation gripped her hard, and she had to steady herself against broken mud brick. She didn’t know how to fight! She was just a girl from the bottom of the world in a land meant for no man at all. She was supposed to be marrying a good boy, not creeping around with her skin on display.
But the water song. On the tip of her tongue and her fingertips. Yesss thiss iss your place your time. It emanated off everything: rocks and sand, allowing Tea to taste and move smoothly amongst their shape and rise; the night sky punctured by the great exhalations from explosions and screams; the rustle of the nearby ocean and deep water table; the pizz-tang of metal; the sting of fear on skin.
Under different circumstances she could have spent forever exploring the whaiwhaiā of the place, all it could tell her about what was and what could be, but not in this now.
“Focus, Tea,” she muttered, shaking her head to clear the disharmony of the night.
Further down the road giant vehicles with caterpillar treads ground along, their great arms reaching like angry monsters. Panzers, she remembered from the news reels. They belonged to the enemy. And the enemy looked like they held the line at a pass.
Between them and her, the ropes on her muscles pulled.
Give me something, please, she begged of the water song that didn’t agree at all well with her southern senses.
The night parted, grudgingly. Movement amongst the dunes and trees, green as eel eyes.
There. A fling of ochre buildings, their sides caved in. A handful of troops huddled in what little cover the buildings and fallen palms could offer. Heads popping up from time to time, but bullets made them scurry. Others didn’t move at all.
Tea pulled on the iron sting that rose like a clotted mist from the men. She could be hearing the water song all wrong. The blood of one man was no different to another, they could be Jerries.
But there; she couldn’t mistake her brother. The pull she had only assumed as brotherly love, and now knew as their shared whaiwhaiā, was distressingly weak.
Tea crept as close as she dared, dragging the shadows with her.
What to do? She couldn’t waltz up in her altogether. They would shoot her on the spot. And the borrowed robe, it could mark her as a foe. Darn, botheration, and … and … shit! She put her hand over her mouth to stop the terrible giggle from exploding out.
Tea bided a moment, rubbing dirt into the robe. If she was going to be caught, she decided, she wanted to do it clothed. Come on, Izzy, she thought as hard as she could, wondering again if she had imagined her friend reading her mind before. Where are you? Here I am. Help!
She squinted, the corners of her eyes itching with a crust of sand and salt, and emanated her water song in all directions.
The fear-blood-salt-scent was upon her before she realised she’d let her focus drift too far away.
“What in the bloody blazes!”
Oh, sweet Jesus.
“What is it?”
“It’s a girl. And she’s a bloody darkie! You one of them Jerry whores? Don’t you move, girlie, or you’ll be breathing out new holes!”
8.
The water song off the gun aimed between Tea’s eyes sizzled rotten. It trembled like a branch in a breeze.
“What you smiling about, girlie?” the soldier demanded. She couldn’t see him well in the dark with his face all smudged with dirt and grease, but his accent
was instantly recognisable as New Zealand. He rolled the Rs and rounded out the vowels. He was from deeper south, probably Gore way.
“N-n-nothing. I d-didn’t … didn’t realise I was, I was smiling.” Her voice was barely a whisper.
“Well, bugger me.”
“What you doing, Anderson?” came the other voice, closer now. “Who you got?”
“She looks like one of them local darkies, but she sounds like a Kiwi,” Anderson mouthed off over his shoulder.
Still in a crouch, Tea’s thighs took up a trembling ache. The battle raged on despite the conversation between gun and flesh.
The other man melted out of the shadows, blue eyes brittle within a crust of dirt. “Shut up, will ya. Gray’s a darkie too. Geez, you’re right. That is a girl.”
“He is not,” huffed Anderson. “Anyone can get a good tan in this godforsaken place.”
“What you doing here, girl? All the locals were evacuated.” Underneath the dirt the other man was all angles, blue eyes, and blond hair. Her type, according to Mum. Everyone had all made out the troops were too tough to be frightened, but the stench off this man – No, he’s barely stopped being a boy – told her otherwise.
“I-I’m h-here to help, yes help.” Tea swallowed. “You say Gray? Sapper Robbie Gray?”
All three ducked as a shell whizzed overhead, but Anderson went right back to staring her down, though the gun still wobbled.
“How the hell—?” His hard blue eyes dismissing her with one knife-cut glance, the blond turned to Anderson. “She’s a spy. Shoot her.”
“Wait!” Tea flinched as her voice caught on the cold air. “Robbie’s my brother! I’m Tea! Dorothy Gray! Ask him!”
“All the way from New Zealand to visit her brother in a war zone,” Blue Eyes sneered. “How sweet.”
“It’s true. I’m here to help. Please, take me to him, and I can prove it.” Tea’s whole body shook now, and her stomach went loose, like all her waters and the moon were about to rush out of her. How ignominious.
“She does look a bit like him, Trip,” Anderson said, the gun wavering down an inch. “He said his sister was his twin. Maybe she’s one of the girls, you know, from a forces club. Got worried. Came searching for him.”
“All the way out here? The clubs are in Cairo, man!” Trip’s jaw worked like he was chewing a tough piece of gristle. “How in the hells do you think you can help, girlie?”
Before Tea could muster a reply that might make sense, Anderson cursed at a flash in the dark. “Bugger me, there’s a dog here.”
Trip’s eyes narrowed, and the water of his thoughts sent prickles down Tea’s spine. “Must’ve got left behind.”
“I think … I think I can get you to safety,” Tea whispered.
Trip barked a low laugh. His terrible grin was picked out by the flashes of shells and starlight. He didn’t even flinch at the delayed concussion from a bomb. “For all you know, we could be a forward advance team. Snipers. Pick them Jerries off, one by one. Pap pap pop!”
Tea flinched at the plosive words.
“Trip, the dog, for God’s sake!” Andersons eyes were wide, like he was about to lose it laughing.
“Let me go to him,” Tea plead.
Anderson gave her a quick one-handed pat down.
The most intimate a man has ever been with me, she thought. It meant nothing. She felt nothing, just his rough, shaking hand.
“Oh fer Chrissakes,” Trip growled as Tea pushed into the maze of collapsed walls. Her thighs burned from crouching too long, and her water song thrummed high and cold with all the blood around her. So much blood.
“Robbie? Where are you?”
“Tea? What the …” Robbie’s voiced wavered, whispery, like the water in it was draining out. Had he been away so long she’d forgotten the sound of him?
He huddled beneath a roof on a precarious lean. Izzy stood over another man in the corner, paws planted, fur vibrating with low growls. The man did nothing, just stared out from a mask of dirt, his eyes white against the dark. It took Tea a moment to realise the crust was all blood.
“Tea? It really is you!” Robbie wheezed. He reached out with his left hand, his right arm held tight against his chest like he was afraid something would fall out.
“This really is your sister?” Trip scoffed. “Well, now I’ve seen everything.”
“And is that …”
“Yes, that’s my dog, Izzy.” Tea kneeled.
Trip took position behind her. Anderson had melted back into the darkness.
“How did you get here?” Robbie shivered violently though he was well dressed, his wool uniform mostly intact if incredibly dirty. His boots and gaiters were well broken in, the pants torn at the thigh, and the front of his vest weighed down by things in pockets she didn’t want to examine. She only wanted to imagine Robbie butchering sheep, not other people.
“Not a story for now,” she said. “Suffice to say it was a long journey.”
“Christ, Trip, take a step backwards.” Robbie’s voice was a high-pitched whisper, but it still held authority.
Trip did so, but his hard stance held. “Are you out of your goddamn mind? We’re fucking surrounded, probably dead, and you think your fucking sister from New-fucking-Zealand is here to save you?”
Tea flinched as the curses emulated bullets burying home in her flesh.
“We’re … I’m here to help, and that’s all that matters,” Tea murmured, searching for what had incapacitated her brother.
The lines around his mouth and eyes looked like someone had taking a paring knife to his skin and scored in the borders of the countries he had crossed in the months he’d been away. This wasn’t the brother she recognised. Though she did. He may have been the younger of the two of them before, but not anymore.
Robbie’s right arm shook, though it didn’t look damaged. His hand flickered in the low light, but the flesh was still human.
You’re the stronger one, Grandad had whispered to her not long before he lost the ability to speak. Then she had thought he was being kind, but now? What had Grandad known he didn’t think worthy of sharing?
Then she saw it. The tear in the hip of the pants went much deeper and darker, blood singing an ugly, dirty song. She was good at basic first aid – a scrape here, a cut from wire there – but she didn’t know what she was looking at.
“What is this? What’s going on here? What happened to you? Where exactly are we? Why didn’t you help him? And why aren’t you taking him to safety?”
Tea’s voice rose higher on each demand. At the last, Trip’s hand flinched as if readying to strike her, but he caught himself in time.
“How do you not know where we are? You’re here, aren’t you? And your brother? He’s a bloody fool. Thought we could take out that one last bridge so the Panzers couldn’t get across. Got too close. Stray bullet. We were corralled here.” Trip ended up letting his hand flick in a dismissive gesture. “He’s losing blood but when I went to touch him, he started shrieking like a girl. Had to stop first aid or he’d bring the Jerries right down on top of us.”
“Took out the bridge, though. Boo-oom.” Robbie laughed weakly. “Took some of them bastards with it. Worth it.”
Tea didn’t want to think about what was ‘worth it’. She leaned in so her mouth was by her brother’s ear. “Where are we?”
“Tunisia,” Robbie whispered back, as if guessing she was here by no ordinary means. “Near Gabès. Past Tebaga Gap. The push was going … well.”
Robbie put his head back against the wall and hugged his arm tighter. Tea had never heard of the place, but she had to guess it was real. This was all real, wasn’t it?
“Fascinating,” whisper-lisped another voice. “But that’s not what we mean. How long have we got?”
“Izzy? That really you? Good God, how?” Robbie’s eyes brig
htened for a moment.
Izzy had backed off from the man hunched in the corner, though her hackles remained raised. He stared at the three of them but made no comment about a talking dog. Tea hoped if he did, he put it down to shell shock. Whatever that was.
“Later.” Izzy kept her voice low, muzzle near Robbie’s face, as if licking him. “We have to get you out of here. All of you.”
Tea brushed at the water song surrounding her brother, flinching at the piss-yellow red-clot taste-scent. It shouted, but didn’t scream. The bullet wound might not kill him right away, but the poison slowly taking him over surely would.
“We thought we were getting around the edge of the Germans fine,” Robbie said, voice cracking. “Then a Panzer came around and cut our retreat off. The rest of the British Eighth is somewhere back thataway.” His free hand trembled towards the dark hump of dunes and blackened palms waving in the distance. “May as well be all the way back home for all the hope we have of getting out of here.”
Tea’s giggle came out tinged with hysteria.
“I can’t move, Izzy,” Robbie whisper-groaned. “I want it to stop, but it won’t. I held on as long as I could, but the bullet … oh my God, it hurts, Izzy. It hurts.”
Tea caught her friend in the snare of her glare. Why was her brother, the person she’d swum across the world for, asking Izzy for help? Had Izzy lied about not courting Robbie?
“What can’t you stop coming?” Tea whispered furiously. What form did his whaiwhaiā take? Of course, he would be some strong animal. A stallion, maybe, or a lion. Perhaps a bear. Or moa, brought back from extinction?
“Izz, I’m sorry.” The flickering from his hand manifested in his face. Flesh struggled against flesh.
“Shh, we’re here to help,” Izzy said. “How far to your battalion, do you think?”
“Half a mile, maybe. A bit more. But it doesn’t matter. I can’t walk. And it’s coming, Izz. Any moment now. And the boys will see, and then … I’ll really be dead. Shot on sight. If not, court martial. Jail. Mental asylum.”
“Do you think you could make it stop if Grant was here?”
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