No Man's Land

by A. J. Fitzwater

  “What are you on about?” Tea sunk her fingers into Izzy’s ruff. Izzy snapped her teeth; just a warning.

  “I swear to God, if Grant is here, I’ll—”

  “Tea, put pressure on that wound,” Izzy ordered, voice disguised by a low growl. When Robbie shook his head, she added. “It’s alright, Robbie. She’s fire, too.”

  “Wha—”

  “How you think we got here, you silly chook?” Tea grimaced. She tore off the hem of her robe and pressed it into the seeping wound. Robbie didn’t even flinch at the pain. The flickering around his neck slowed.

  “I’ll be right back.” Izzy melted into the gloaming, leaving behind her a warm scent that made Tea realise she was desperately hungry. It must be well past dinner time back home.

  With his spare hand, Robbie positioned her in such a way that her body shielded him from the glare of the silent man in the corner. He hadn’t moved in all this time, but his stillness spoke of a quick deadliness, a wrath Tea did not want to incur.

  All at once, Robbie’s face fell into repose. The pain and anguish didn’t disappear, but the lines and angles changed in a subtle way. The L of his jaw softened, the folds of his eyes loosened, and his lips bruised up a little, like those nights he’d come home having been in a fight.

  “Whaiwhaiā,” he whispered.

  He wasn’t an animal. He was another person.

  Tea glance-checked. Trip had turned his back and was conferring with Anderson. They both stared off into the dark, ignoring the man in the corner. “What … who are you?”

  “You’re not surprised,” Robbie said.

  “I’ve seen too much in the last few months to be surprised by much, but this is getting up there.” Tea smiled to soften her whispered words. “You can change. How … how long?”

  A stutter of bullets. Everyone flinched, except Corner Man.

  “Since I was fifteen, before I went shearing,” Robbie whispered, breathy, high-pitched from fright. “But the feeling, the tearing of it, has always been just below my skin.”

  She touch-checked his face, shoulder, hands – his tremor was a little less – and her brother smiled back. “You’re not angry?”

  In reply, Tea held up her hand. Pulling on the energy of blood, sweat, the cold air, she ran a ripple of scales down her flesh, webbed her fingers, lifted a soft fin up from her elbow. “Scared as heck, maybe. But not angry. You want to tell me what’s going on with you?”

  “N-not here. But I—” He winced at the pain, his own words. “I want to be, need to be … both people.”

  “Both who?” Fear warred with jealousy. Robbie had had so much more time to think about it all.

  A chatter of voices. Tea didn’t understand German, but the harsh, spitting syllables felt like a curved knife slashing the desert air. Everyone tensed, except the silent man. Tea held her breath until she started to see stars against the stars. Her heart beat so loud, she thought it alone would give them away.

  After what seemed like a lifetime, the voices moved away. The shared pain in Tea’s arm had spread into her chest, and she almost vomited spit when she breathed out.

  “That was too close,” Anderson growled, leaping from his crouch to stalk a straight line, back and forth, gun down, not coming too close. “We move now, or we don’t move at all.”

  “Wait!” Tea plead, keeping herself between Robbie and them. “My friend will be back with help any moment!”

  “This is a goddamn battlefield, girlie!” Trip growled. “There’s no help coming! We’re on our own. Oh my God. I’m arguing with a near-naked darkie girl. I’m dead already. I am. And this is hell. We’re going, whether you’re coming or not.”

  “A few minutes more, that’s all we need, Tripplet.” Robbie coughed. “We haven’t been spotted yet. That’s an order.”

  “If a goddamn girlie and her dog can find us—”

  “That’s an order.”

  “Yessir.” He snapped an insolent salute.

  Tea cast about for Izzy’s water song. Nothing. She was either too far away or very good at masking her scent.

  The German voices were still in range. The near-sunrise air wafted their stink to her – crimson iron, grease, hot flesh. She grabbed Robbie’s too-cold hands, suddenly too tired for words. The flickering translated into little sparks of lightning in her skin.

  Hurry up, Izzy. Please.

  A clop-chuff and pant-cough. A wet nose pushed into Tea’s elbow, and the long sandy-grey head of a donkey swung around the broken wall.

  Robbie gasped and flung his free arm around the donkey’s neck. “I thought you were bloody joking when you said Grant was here.”

  Robbie clung to Grant as if his life depended on it. A whole new bunch of questions crowded into Tea’s head.

  No time for any of them.

  “Great,” Trip drawled. “Now there’s a donkey. Will Noah row up with a boat to save us, too?”

  “This donkey is going to get Robbie to safety,” Tea snapped. Did he not want to survive this war? “It’ll be a far sight faster than trying to walk him out. You coming?”

  Trip threw up his hands. “Why not. It’s all madness anyway.”

  Robbie muffled his groan as Tea helped him climb onto Grant’s back. For a small, skinny man, Grant made a sturdy pack animal.

  The sharp lines of Robbie’s jaw and chest had returned. That’s some powerful touch Grant’s got, Tea marvelled. More powerful than me.

  Fear, wonder, jealousy. A war within a war.

  Robbie sat as dignified as he could, shaking and wounded atop a donkey. His bullet wound seeped at an alarming rate. “Brixt, take point as we head left around the dune.”

  The silent man didn’t acknowledge the order, simply stood, took his gun, and disappeared around the side of the crumbled building.

  Robbie sighed and looked over at what Tea had taken for a pile of rags. “We’ll come back for you, lads.”

  Bodies. There had been bodies right by her. Tea’s gorge rose, and she had to pull hard on the water song to keep her flesh intact and her voice inside her body.

  As vulnerable as the bombed-out building had been, at least it had provided corners, shadows, shelter. Against the promise of day, Tea’s composure shattered into something much more acute. Though it was dangerous to remove her attention from what little water she could touch in the ground, the blood soaking into the fine grains was too much to take. She needed all her energy to guide her brother and his friends to safety, not be concerned with her wretched retching.

  At least the light was low. Spinning the water song into a shroud to encompass the other men made Tea’s flesh and bones grind harder, so she had to trust the silent point man and his mask of bloody camouflage. Izzy stayed only a pace ahead of Grant. The sand shifted beneath their feet, but Grant held himself strong and sure.

  “Did you hurt your arm at one point?” Tea whispered, disturbing Robbie from murmuring into Grant’s woolly neck.

  Robbie gave her an all-too-familiar expression: hard to read, calculating. “I thought I could control it without Grant around,” he said. “But it got harder. Every time I had to … use my gun, my hand would shake, like something was trying to break out of me …”

  Grant grunted as an explosion hit too close on the other side of a dune. He stopped in place, and the group hunched down for a moment. Tea lost herself by diving for the comfort of the water song in the ground. The water deep below emboldened her shroud, though it grated along her edges, unfamiliar with her touch.

  A thump. Too light for an explosion, too round for a bullet. Another.

  Tea’s whaiwhaiā burned with the nearness of something salty and hot.

  “Move, move,” she whispered.

  Trip turned a rude stare on her.

  “Someone’s coming.” Her voice took on an urgency and authority she hadn’t thought sh
e could possess against a man. “Those trees beyond the dune. If we make them, we might be alright.”

  “That’s some pretty fancy eyesight you got there, missy,” Anderson whispered. His grim stare swiped a layer of filth over her perception.

  The attack came swift, from above, a dark body flung down the dune.

  A low shout covered by the rat-a-tat of bullets further off. A thump of bodies. Grant froze; there was nowhere for him to go. Robbie reached for a gun, but his fingers shook so much he could not grasp it.

  A dark uniform. Eyes glittering midnight blue below light hair. Fingers hooked.

  Why didn’t he shoot?

  Fingers dug hard into Tea’s shoulders.

  Stars against stars, a bursting flurry of the Milky Way rotating about the Earth, about the war, thrusting their millennia of existence together in one impossible moment.

  Stars. Against the black night of fur. Stars. A glint of fang. Stars. A burst of surprise, the white of the eye. Stars. An explosion of hot matter, a growl, a tear in the fabric of skin.

  Dark stars, singing their ugly splatter across Tea’s flesh.

  Silence, as one patch of the world could be amongst the insanity of falling shells, bursting gunfire, and dying men.

  The song, the scene, realigned itself into a reality that made sense but no sense at all. Izzy standing over the fallen man, four paws caging him, teeth bared, muzzle dark and wet, growling so low her canine-being vibrated nose to tail.

  The man’s – the German’s – head was thrown back, throat exposed to the bone by a long gash. He did not move. Blood trickled weakly from the gaping wound, not the great pumping spurt that would suggest a heart in motion.

  Tea retched.

  “Jee-zus,” whispered Anderson.

  Trip glanced between the corpse and Izzy, face grim. “He must’ve been cut off, too. Probably caught him off guard.” His voice shook only a little. “Let’s go.”

  Izzy shook out her head and left the corpse sprawled in the sand.

  Grant plodded forward, ever stalwart.

  Tea didn’t remember the steps between the body and the trees. A few bullets whizzed by, but not close enough to trouble Anderson and Trip unduly. Robbie kept his face buried in Grant’s neck the whole time, whispering.

  A challenge call. Tea almost flinched into taniwha shape – No, Izzy, please don’t do that again – but the voice called to them in New Zealand-accented English.

  They had made it. They’d found some of Robbie’s Second Battalion mates.

  “… local girl caught in the crossfire …”

  “… got wounded, pinned down …”

  “… helped us with her donkey …”

  “… get her out of here quick …”

  When Tea could make sense of things again, she was huddled inside a lean-to against a truck, a coat around her shoulders, a nurse looking in her eyes, testing her limbs.

  “Not me, him.” She gestured at Robbie huddled up against a now-kneeling Grant-donkey, already attended by a female nurse. A woman, out here, near the front line? That was a thing that could happen?

  Her nurse finished his inspection anyway, frowning in confusion. He passed her a canteen, then left. Her tongue thick, her flesh creaking with overuse of the water song, Tea gratefully swallowed the tepid water. It stayed down, though it roiled in her stomach.

  Izzy wriggled in beside her. “Tea, we have to go,” she whispered. “Some muckety-muck will be all over us in a moment, demanding answers.”

  “But Robbie. We can’t leave him here.”

  “And we can’t take him back with us. That would give everything away. And I doubt you have the energy to do it.”

  Tea sighed. “Wait. Please. I want to say goodbye.”

  Izzy growled low, an assent.

  The nurse finished her triage of Robbie leg. He struggled over with Grant’s assistance. Tea leapt up to hug her brother, afraid to let him go. Izzy twined between their legs, shivering agitation.

  “Thank you for coming for me,” Robbie murmured. Pain etched his face into puzzle pieces Tea might not be able to put together again, but at least those edges were softer. “I wouldn’t have made it without you or Izz. Without Grant.”

  Grant squeezed behind the truck pulled hard up against a stand of rock. A pop of bones, then he sighed. Making a barricade with her body again, Tea peered around the hood taller than her head. In the pre-dawn light Grant’s flesh was very pale, his eyes jaundiced.

  Holding Izzy’s ruff and Tea’s shoulder, Robbie tottered into the narrow space.

  Then he took Grant in his arms and kissed him.

  Kissed him!

  That was illegal!

  A flicker passed over Robbie, head to feet. For a moment, his hair lengthened into tatty but proud victory rolls. Shoulders narrowed, chest broadened, hips curved out, beard disappeared, cheekbones became taut, lips plumped up, and eyelashes lengthened.

  Oh. Oh. Like me, but unlike me.

  Tea stared, eyes so wide she felt them drying up in the cold air.

  Robbie’s other self, his whaiwhaiā, was a herself. A beautiful self.

  “What … how—”

  “Later,” Izzy whispered, nudging at her shins. “Grant. Change. Now.”

  Thankfully no-one was nearby when Tea peered back around the truck. She slid out and beckoned to the others that the coast was clear.

  She helped Robbie slide into a seated position in the lean-to. “I’ve got to go. I’m sorry. I wish I could stay and help more—”

  “You’ve done more than enough.” Robbie grasped her right arm, hard, and the old constant friend of pain slid away to a murmur. “I—I’m proud of you.”

  Her brother. Sister? Proud of her. The idea pounded through her head, circling round the image of her brother kissing another man.

  Tea could find no words other than a useless goodbye. With a clench of her fist, she pulled the shroud of shadows around them. As the ground sang the tell-tale song of approaching footsteps, they slipped farther into the stand of rocks.

  Tea took one last look back. Her heart almost squeezed its way out through her ribs. The strange silent soldier, Brixt, stood sentry at the end of the truck, his gaze on their retreat as if he could see through the shadows Tea made dance to her song.

  Then the crust of blood cracked around his thin mouth. He nodded and raised his hand in farewell.

  9.

  “Oh gosh, I’ve stolen some soldier’s jacket.”

  “Under the circumstances, it’s the least of your worries. Hey, aren’t we going the wrong way?”

  “We can’t go back the way we came, Izz. I smell water this way. Um, is that a well cover?”

  “Huh. So it is. Grant, you all right there?”

  “Tired.”

  “Hang on. We’re almost home. So, what does water smell like?”

  “It’s different everywhere. This one … ow, these steps are steep, sorry Grant. This one smells the way cold off tin tastes.”

  “Right-oh. Oh. Well, you’re getting quicker at it.”

  “That one hurt. Everything hurts. Come on, hurry up. I want to get out of … this place. Grant?”

  “I’m ready. Izz?”

  “Your scales really are very pretty.”

  “Izzy!”

  “Nah nah, don’t fash yourself. Let me get out … of … this …”

  “Ohhhh. That didn’t sound good.”

  “Hush. I’m hungry.”

  *

  “Where in all the bloody hells have you three been!”

  “Sorry, Mr MacGregor. The pig went bush. Took us ages to track.”

  The farmer grunted. “Why the hell are all three of you wet?”

  “The pig charged Tea and we fell in the river getting out of its way.”

  “Well, that was bloo
dy stupid of you. Hmph. Sure you weren’t up to no shenanigans up there? Better be no bloody shenanigans. I’ll have your guts for garters, ladies. You’d be out of here in a moment!”

  “No, sir. I absolutely swear, sir. I would never do wrong by the girls.”

  “Hmmh. There’s nothing to be smirking about here, Miss Gray. You didn’t even bring the bloody pig back!”

  “Not grinning, sir. Just cold.”

  “Mind your lip. Well? What are you waiting for? Get the horses unhitched and get back up to the bloody house! Your dinner’s getting cold. And I’m sure Mrs MacGregor will have a word or two for you.”

  “Yessir.”

  “And don’t think you’re finished with that pig either. First job after milking tomorrow is get back out there and shoot that sunuvabitch. I don’t want it scaring up my ewes.”

  “Yessir.”

  *

  “There you are.”

  “Izzy! How many times have I told you? Don’t sneak up on me like that.”

  “Sorry. Habit. Gosh, I could almost see your tonsils there.”

  “Sorry. I’m bushwhacked. It’s been, uh, a long day. Ha.”

  “It’s all right. Alison and Carmel are still up at the farmhouse with their knitting. And seems you’re not so tired that you have your skin sitting right.”

  “Thanks. Oh, silly … there I go … yawning again. Mmh. The water sings right, now we’re home. Where’s Grant? Is he all right?”

  “Out like a light. Sleeping like the dead.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “Sorry.”

  “No, I … I mean. Is he … what happened … back there …”

  “You’re not upset? Going to the police?”

  “The police? No! That’s my brother! They’re friends. And their whaiwhaiā … mixes. And … oh, I don’t know. I’m very tired, and it all feels like a bit of a bad dream.”

  “Bad?”

  “No … no, I mean … yes, it’s bad. Illegal bad. I can’t stop thinking that. But the way they … Robbie looked like, like life had been put back into him when they … when they …”

  “Kissed. I know. It’s hard to say it. Was for me the first time I found out about it.”