The teenager perched on an empty drum did not see her. This young girl had her eyes focused on the ground, looking inside at the many arguing voices of her mind. But the old man picking through the rubbish piled up near the gate stopped and turned to look up at Sophie from his position crouched on the ground. He saw a figure burning with light pass him and leave the Institute. He smiled a toothless smile.
Sophie continued to walk down the pavements littered with people and tents. She did not stop when she reached the empty streets, filled only with the sound of gunfire, screams and explosions.
When the bullet from Wellington’s gun had found its goal, tearing the flesh and splitting the ribs of the man who had looked in from outside, the war had continued as all wars must. Lust for a target, and a desperate need to bring themselves into a world they could understand, had brought all the soldiers of Mr Nietzburger’s army to respond to the trigger of the first shot. They had thrown themselves headlong into the business of killing.
Only after blood was running into pools on the street, and slipping quietly down the stairs in the Head Office, did anyone realise that their fire had been unleashed upon those people recruited in the street, who had become impatient. They had swung on ropes and clawed up walls to be a part of the fight, pushing themselves so intently into it until they had become what they had strained to see.
The city was raging with an empty anonymous war. There was no-one to fight and so they fought themselves. The bullet fired by Wellington was the only one that would be traced to its source and that source was now a ragged and useless thing, a body full of holes.
It was a release for the people, and although it drained their blood into the cracks of the concrete, stopped their hearts with pieces of lead, and left their eyes blank and blind, it was real. And relief was a pleasure so visceral, they tore and beat and stabbed with screams of respite.
Sophie walked through it all. She had no fear, not anymore. No-one touched her. Not a bullet grazed her skin, not a finger came within a metre. Did the others wish to spare so quiet and calm a being? Did they see the place she came from, or where she led? The answer was, most likely, that they did not see her at all.
She walked past the tall buildings of offices and apartments. Their smooth expanse of windows, usually stern and anonymous, were now broken at intervals. Some had been left vacant by haphazard flying bricks, others were dotted with the delicate flower-cracks of bullet-holes. Some showed glimpses of life simple and domestic, like washing strung on lines and crumpled forms of unmade beds. Had Sophie had the sight to see them she would have turned away from moments so intimate. But she did not see them anymore than she saw the men leaning from the holes of splintered frames, with their guns unyielding black and eyes that saw only the death they could bring.
As Sophie walked on the structures around her began to change. They became the squatter, plainer shapes of plants and factories. They drew her on with the expanding shapes between them as the city stretched out to its limits.
At the same time that Sophie let her body lead her through the widening spaces between concrete, bricks and steel, Mr Nietzburger stumbled along the same path, on a different radiant towards the same circumference of green embracing the city. While Sophie strode forward with steps measured and strong, Mr Nietzburger moved with his body bent, his feet pushed out without pattern or purpose. Sophie had the light of her vision to guide her, sheltering her from the pain all around her. Mr Nietzburger’s sight was cloudy and grey, but he could not block out the horror of the corpses, the seeping wounds, the explosions of sound and death. He alone had seen the war turn inwards on itself. He alone had felt fear clutch his heart as the men and women he had gathered unleashed such passionate violence, finding their freedom finally in their end. And the pain that he saw crept into his body. He had no defences left, no strategies. He had no walls to keep it out. And so he had run away. But that running had been crippled by the pain. Now he stumbled, limped, towards freedom.
Without the protection of his mind, the pain swept in, erasing all he had known and leaving only itself. He thought it would be the end, but instead, he moved forward. Step by tortured step, he brought himself through the city. He was doubled over, and writhing awkwardly from side to side.
And then he stopped.
He felt his body straighten, pulled by some invisible force. His eyes opened, and he saw before him green vales and hills, leading up and away from where he stood, melting softly into each other and the distance like the quiet waters of the sea. The sight moved through his body, through his eyes to his fingertips and toes. It flowed through the spaces left clean by the pain, and soaked into those places it had threshed bare and pliable.
He knew, without words or reason, that he had been set free, not by vengeance or violence or will, but by pain.
He saw the frothy heads and long slim fingers of grasses, more different kinds than he had ever stopped to notice, swaying in the wind. He saw how they bent gently with the force of the air. And above it all, the sky rolled out, in rows and rows of crimson clouds. Low behind them the sun lay hidden – the source of this day and this moment.
The bullet, when it came, came with very little sound. It was released from high up on the roof of a factory. The building was the last sentinel of marching monstrous things that pretended to be so much stronger than the land that birthed them. Mr Nietzburger did not see it, or the anger of the man who stormed on top of its deceiving bulk. He was facing out, towards the ring of softness that would outlast all the artifice and edifice it encircled.
The shooter, firing without aim or target, nevertheless achieved a clean path through Mr Nietzburger’s ribs and into his heart. He felt the pain without perceiving what it was. His mind was so empty and his soul so full that he could receive any feeling with a sense of curiosity and detachment. The pain spread as a numbness while the beats of his life slowly ebbed away. If any of the Thought-Makers had been there to watch him, they would not have seen the simmering black line, or the bubbling grey cloud that had once defined him. They would have seen no colours at all. Only Mariella would have been able to see that the absence of his colours was in fact the presence of Mr Nietzburger grown so large as to encompass all that there was to be seen.
Mr Nietzburger fell forward, his face slamming into the first squelches of mud to reach their touch into the city. He was dead before he reached the ground. Redness soaked through his shirt and into the wet earth as the last of the blood seeped from the sky.
How long did Sophie walk forwards, guided by an unchanging light? As the sun sank and the moon rose, she saw only what was before her. The darkness cocooned her, and the dawn of day washed her clean of fatigue, had she had any part of her left to know what fatigue was. The cycle of dark and light unfolded again, but it served only to hold her on a line straight and true. She took no notice when her sandals, thin and flimsy ones selected from the city stores to make her like any other, wore away and trailed behind her in pieces. She took no notice when the skin of her feet flayed raw and bleeding. It was one sensation that swam among the many in her consciousness, the many that were really a single perception.
At some point, that single perception shifted slightly, as the hot smooth tar beneath her soles changed to dry crackling grass. The trees that she knew were around her now, guiding her, holding her. They knew how to bring her home. Although her stride had never faltered on this last long, brief, unending journey, there was a kindness now, moving out from the trees, that in a soft and silent way showed the hardships of her walk. Her step quickened, imperceptibly.
And then, there it was. Her home with Mariella appeared among the trees. She looked at its broken windows, its rotting door, its shingled roof. It looked different somehow. But it was her that had changed, not it.
She walked towards the house slowly, awakening as she did from the trance that had brought her here, across hundreds of miles, years, lifetimes. She reached the door, and placed her hand on the rusty handle. She knew s
he still had a choice.
The door opened. Over by the window, a girl sat with her chin in her hand, looking out. Her hair sprung out around her head like a dark shining halo. She was sitting absolutely still as she watched a little bird.
‘Hello,’ said Sophie, stepping forward.
Mariella turned to her, and smiled.
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About the author
Claire Frances Raciborska lives on a farm in South Africa with her husband Seth, her daughter Emma, two dogs, a cat, some chickens and a lot of cows. She enjoys dreaming about travelling and pretending to garden.
Other titles by Claire Frances Raciborska
Smoke of Spirits
Follow Claire Frances Raciborska at
http://greengolightly.wordpress.com
Mariella Page 9