Among You Secret Children

by Jeff Kamen

  In the background he noticed a strange snuffling and squealing that could only mean animals were on the property. He sat cursing, wondering what they were, and for a while all he could focus on was the bestial noise coming through the shutters. He asked himself what he had set into motion. Was she rounding up her animals to search for him? Were there other people around? Dogs? He continued to listen.

  Then he heard her outside, somewhere near the back wall. ‘Cuck-koo!’ she cried. ‘Cuck-koo!’

  He gasped, shrinking down.

  Her voice came again, cold and predatory: ‘Cuck-kooooo!’

  He heard her go past the window, then heard nothing else, just the noise of the animals. A minute later the front door slammed with a violent crash that reverberated throughout the house. He sat shaking, knife at the ready, waiting for her to do what she’d been preparing to do all along, gallop through the passage and burst in on him; but she never came.

  The house remained silent. He listened with all his strength and thought he heard a gate shut. It was all he needed. He pushed through the baskets and went to the door and leapt bristling into the hallway. No one there.

  He entered the kitchen, checking behind him, checking from side to side, then he went to the door and opened it and peered out at the garden.

  ‘Cuck-koo!’ came a cry off to his left. She was coming back through the orchard. He ran to the path, then thought better of it and cut to his right and ran along the front of the house to the washing line and ducked under the clothes. He continued round and went along the western side of the property, where in a troubled glance he took in a row of headstones set along the garden wall. On reaching the bottommost corner of the house he stopped, his damp fingers twisting the valve to release more oxygen. Inhaling deeply, he heard something clatter as it fell. It seemed to be at the front somewhere. Remembering the animals, he took a quick look across the rear garden, finding a grassy yard staked out with tarps, and in the far corner a low stone outhouse, where, judging by the muddy tracks, he assumed the creatures were kept. There was no sign of them running loose. He kept still, wheezing tightly, and when he heard her again, muttering, kicking out at something, she seemed to be back in the orchard. He scanned the stone wall. He thought it was too high a drop to risk climbing over it: even a twisted ankle could end it for him. It was better to return to the front and try from there, just throw himself over and head for the trees.

  He ran back towards the washing line, stopping before he reached the corner. He would run from there, but had to know for sure if she might see him. He inched along to the corner to look, noticing that among the hanging garments was a long black dress. Then he noticed something else. As the breeze lifted, the dress fluttered aside to reveal a pair of sturdy female legs. He looked down at her shoes. They were like rough leather horns, one tapping restlessly.

  He gripped the knife, sweating.

  Just then the garments flew apart and she charged at him, tawny-eyed, bushy-haired, glaring, strong as a man. Held in her worker’s hands was the barrel of an ancient blunderbuss, blaring his way like a screaming trumpet. He sprang aside and raised the knife to strike. She swung the blunderbuss and the knife clanged and landed in the grass. He edged backwards, shaking the fizz from his hand, and when she swung at him again he dodged her weapon and punched her flush in the mouth. She staggered back a little, cursing, spitting blood. He tried to run from her but she caught hold of his overalls and hauled him back towards her and he swung with his fist and struck the barrel with a howl. ‘HA!’ she cried, slamming her weight into him, grasping at his hair and yanking his skull about. He scuffled from side to side with her, punching and kicking at any part of her that he could reach. Then he had the blunderbuss neck in his hand. Both hands. ‘HA!’ she cried again, trying to unbalance him, ‘HA!’ and in shoving back at her he could feel her fury through the straining of her limbs, and for a moment they stood chest to chest. ‘Look,’ he begged, ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean —’ cutting short as she spat in his face. Snarling in outrage, he drove her backwards through the hanging clothes and into the wall.

  He heard the thud of her scalp on stone. Her eyes rolled. She stood winded, gasping for air. ‘Please,’ he said, ‘I-I don’t want to fight you, I only wanted —’ but she was still grappling, attempting to use the gun. He bit her hand. She bit his harder. ‘Get off me!’ he screamed, and as they fought again he found the metal barrel turning towards his face like a monstrous black hole down which his life would end. He tried butting it away with his mask but she fought back frenziedly, blood running down her chin, and in her crazed eyes he saw a message that it was all going to end far worse than he could imagine. He wrested a fist free and punched her with all his strength. She groaned, and as her shoulders slumped he took her by the wrists and swung her round and threw her away from him, blunderbuss and all. Then he was running.

  He was so close to clearing the wall as the blunderbuss went off that his trajectory continued unbroken. He dropped to the nettles on the other side with one hand raised and the other breaking his fall.

  Only then he seemed to hear the report up the valley; only then the cold chime of the peppered shotballs striking his tank.

  Screaming, he disappeared from himself. When he next knew anything he was groping through a breathless fog. He was crawling through nettles and broken cherts and weeds, pawing at the pierced tubing knowing there was nothing he could do, that the one tank he had would soon be empty. He collapsed, gasping. Lay still.

  He knew then that death was a woman with dark hair and golden eyes, and that he would die in a strange land with neither friends nor family to accompany his final passage; nothing, just the hissing of a broken mask.

  When she came to his side, she bent over him with an impassive gaze. Her face enclosed within the headscarf seemed huge to him. She wiped the blood from her mouth, then put her lips to his ear and whispered softly, ‘Cuck-kooo ...’

  Chapter 48 — Gljiva

  The fire was crackling. Across the gloomy ceiling flickers passed like spirits chasing one another between the rafters.

  He could hear rain sweeping against the door. The blunderbuss stood upright in the shadows. He managed to turn his head. A large cauldron was hooked above the flames, and from where he lay he could see her dropping black lumps into the vapour. He watched her with a dull stare, dark-lipped and ashen, wrapped in a foul and bloodstained sheet. Occasionally he reached out in spasms as might a starving man for food. When he tried to talk, a scalding spray of blood came up and ran down his chest. He lay gasping.

  She sent him a glance, said something in her language. His head fell as he coughed again. It was then that he saw his breathing gear by the woodpile. The tubes coiled in a broken nest. Next to it was his mask. It grinned at him.

  Then he saw her coming. ‘No,’ he pleaded, but she took him by the wrist and yanked him round to face her. He saw her deep in mists, a hateful figure he tried to fight against even as he perished. ‘Please,’ he begged, catching the smell, ‘please don’t please,’ but she would not listen. She rolled him over so that he was facing a steaming bowl she’d set upon the floor. She picked up a few rags, then on moving the bowl closer, prompted him to cooperate. A foul reek filled his nostrils. He whispered, ‘Please don’t. Please. You’re k-killing me,’ giving her a look of such awful reproach that it stalled her for a moment. Then she showed her teeth.

  She growled something, seizing him by the hair, and he was forced to look into a broth in which black lumps were floating like flayed bits of tyre.

  ‘No. No. Not this. I need my mask. My mask. No. You’re killing me, you’re kill —’

  ‘Breathe,’ she hissed, and he held off from breathing the fumes as long as he could, held off until his cheeks darkened, until he was shaking, until the crumbling fires in his chest were all he knew; and then he inhaled.

  And then he screamed.

  ‘Breathe,’ she said, and he did so, and screamed again.

  ‘Breathe,’ she i
nsisted, draping a towel over his head, and he screamed into the vapour and it was like a jagged grey wreath around which lay a greater darkness ...

  And he was floating there, and the darkness was transforming, the steam lifting into a brilliant light that was the focal point of many things, perhaps of everything; and in this light were forms which were birthing and dying and some caught between the changes ...

  All things were radiant and without shadow, some turning slowly in states of gentle repose and other things gathering and accelerating, forces racing in a jetstream of life and yet more life, an abundance of it, a sun-in-the-clouds, leaf-sprouting butchery of stinks and blinding twisting colours ...

  The woman came and went, a shadow across his eyelids. She wrung out the cloths and checked on him, then sat drinking at the table.

  Red dawn underfoot. He had sucked in the sun and he was gold with it and he was shining. He was steaming with gasses and petrols and he was shrinking down into the earth. The ground had been lit with coals for him, and he was passing through and around all things, for he was fire ... he was fire ...

  When he came around it was still night. She was holding his overalls before the hearth as if to hang them up to dry. A new hope took hold of him, but with a smile she dropped them into the flames. He saw them rear up spitting, saw green and yellow fangs pulling the offerings down as she yawned. He tried to plead with her again but then he fell to a terrible new darkness, and the fangs pursued him down ...

  ~O~

  He awoke in a bed. An iron bed like a cot, with a footrest and headrest of iron struts. The room was plain and whitewashed, with a solitary sketch of an apple tree pinned to the facing wall.

  He looked up at the shutters, left draughtily ajar, and saw that it was morning. How long he’d been there he did not know, but the pain was as before.

  Outside, leaves were rustling. He noticed them, then noticed something else. He could hear animals screaming in the background like some hellish audience.

  ‘Gle, gle, gle,’ said a voice, and he lurched aside to find her sitting in the corner.

  She was clad in a headscarf and dark skirts as before.

  ‘Gle koga imamo ovdje?’

  He lay staring at her. He could not understand her words and her smile seemed designed to taunt him. He looked over his blankets, strewn with bloodstained strips of cloth. Then he turned. Beside the pillow was a table with a tray on which stood phials and unwrapped medications and the dreadful black bowl she’d made him inhale from. He coughed with a sawing noise, coughed many times, coughed into a fit, then as it subsided he lay weakly back again.

  She got up and approached him. He went rigid, knowing by now what harm could be done to a human body and unwilling to take any more.

  ‘You wake,’ she said. ‘Good. Later you eat, but not now. Now you rest.’

  He made a movement with his throat as if to say something, but only a croak came out. She bent to hear what he was saying.

  He flicked a tongue across his lips. The muscles of his throat and cheeks worked in tiny tremors, but nothing came.

  ‘What?’ she prompted.

  He made a grotesque little screech.

  ‘Water? You want water?’

  He swung his head.

  ‘What you say?’

  ‘What …’ he managed to croak, ‘what … have you done?’

  ‘I do gljiva.’

  ‘No … I want to know what ... have you … done to me?’

  ‘I do gljiva. Now you breathe.’

  He licked his bloodied lips again as he took this in.

  ‘What?’ she said. ‘You think you dead?’

  His face contorted as if he was straining to remember, then he looked to a point above his head.

  ‘You breathe, no?’

  For a moment he tried to speak again, then a small tear rolled down his cheek and he shrugged, licking the salt from his lips.

  ‘Crossboy does not like it?’

  Stop. Oxygen. He needed oxygen. Needed …

  His face altered, straining as he put a hand to his mouth and found nothing there, nor anything covering his bloodied nostrils.

  Nothing there. He was breathing without a mask. Breathing steadily in and out again …

  ‘I … I can breathe?’ he croaked. ‘Is that right?’

  ‘Yes. You breathe.’

  As she turned to the sidetable to clear away the medications, he stared at her, grasping the meaning of her words in unsteady stages, as though they were coming down to land from a terrifying height. What she had done for him. The enormity of it. Staggering. Dizzying. The machine of himself torn open and the parts cured in steam and put to use again. The bleeding patient left for dead, yet far from it.

  More tears came and he let his hand fall to the sheets, barely noticing the coughing that shook his chest. No tubes, no tank; nothing covering his mouth. He drew in the orchard-scented air and caught in it the odour of marvellous things as yet unidentified to him, smells that led to a beautiful sunlit pathway. She’d done it. She’d bequeathed a miracle upon him; the miracle, the one his father had known and had conveyed in a message so secret it had almost not reached him. A gift that in weeping gratitude he drew into himself again and again while she looked on with a half-filled tray in her hands. He began to make gurgling noises, rocking from side to side. He turned to her ecstatically, wanting to scream and sing and dance, to test the new machinery against anything the surface world could bring to it in challenge.

  ‘Stop. Stop this. What is wrong?’

  He sucked more air into his lungs. It felt like icy blue skies blasting across his tender capillaries but he did not care; cared for nothing but breathing more … more … more …

  ‘I say stop,’ she warned, but he was unable to, unable to do anything but try out his marvellous new powers, and he sobbed and gurgled while she chided him, and then as he went to thank her properly, to throw himself at her feet and offer whatever was required of him, he let out a screech of pain. He drew up in confusion, unable to move his leg. Something cold had bitten into his ankle. He kicked at the sheet to look and heard the chain rattle a moment before he saw it. There was a heavy iron cuff around his ankle, secured by a padlock the size of his fist.

  ‘What … what’s this for?’ he croaked, but when he looked at her, all he got in reply was a faint smile as she went to the door.

  ‘Wait!’ he begged, ‘hey!’ and he bent forward and began to yank and wrench at the chain, all bubbling joy, all laughter gone from him, replaced by a violent wheezing as he cried in outrage. She turned with the tray, watching him with a distant curiosity.

  ‘Please!’ he croaked, ‘please listen to me. It’s … important. I need to get home. I need to do something. People … people could die. Do you understand? Do you … understand me?’

  ‘Ne,’ she replied, closing the door, and continued unhurriedly to the kitchen.

  Chapter 49 — Attack Force

  As they pull round in a crescent, Jakub slaps at the sleeves and tethers them open. Jaala sees the villagers’ convoy coming out of the dark in ramshackle order, the jacketed ponies stepping and snorting and the drivers craning forward as they lift lanterns up on poles and pick their way through the stormy terrain.

  Gustav brings the cart in beneath a giant overhang of rock. When the wheels have stopped they climb out, entering a desolate nightscape steadily filling with armed recruits and a mulch of heavy turning wheels and the drenched and wild-eyed beasts that draw them along, snorting, steaming in their shackles. She leads her party through the manoeuvring vehicles to a point under the projection where people are beginning to gather. Rough voices echo and a warning goes round concerning the lights. Lamps everywhere are extinguished until only a central cluster remains. It is within this trembling core that she stands as the recruits of both sides meet to talk.

  ‘Where’s Ranuf?’ she says.

  Heads turn and the crowd parts as the stocky, bald-headed figure comes through to speak with her. ‘We need to
agree terms,’ he says.

  ‘You know the terms. Now I want you all to listen.’

  But Ranuf comes before her with his arms folded. ‘We are people of honour here,’ he replies. ‘Tonight we pray for the dead. I bury my sister this week. My mother ... many people.’ He brings up a hand, lets it fall. ‘I talk when I need to, to whom I need to. You do not tell me to listen, it is for you to listen to —’

  ‘SILENCE,’ she roars, and he stares at her, while others flinch at the strength of her insistence. She looks round at them stonily, hungrily. Then she speaks:

  ‘We have a few hours before dawn. No more. Do you understand what’s waiting if you stand here squabbling like children? The answer is death. You need to focus your minds on why we’re here. We’re here to fight. We’re here to win. We’re here to kill.’ She turns to Ranuf with her teeth barred. ‘Know it,’ she hisses.

  Ranuf cowers away, and he is not alone in this as she turns her spear and with a swift upward motion rams the base into the living rock, piercing it with a loud reverberating clang that has all eyes turning her way, all disputes and arguments forgotten. Wires of smoke trail down from the buried shaft and she glares round again, tall and barbarous and severe. Then with a stiff wrench she removes the spear and plants it in the earth.

  For a minute she studies the muted gathering of Naagli and villagers. Silence falls throughout the cavernous shelter. Then, in a low harsh voice that few have heard before, she says, ‘We’re going to death and not all of you will come back from it. Understand this. Know it. You were carried here, to this place, by the death of others. And they are here with you, and they will fight with you. We’re not alone. The dead are all around us.’ Her eyes flash in the lamplight as she looks from one cluster of recruits to another, sparing nobody the excruciating black radiance within her sockets.

  ‘Listen to me. I came here from a dark, dark place and I’m ready to return. And you should be willing to die this night in order to return to life. To your homes. Know this. Death is waiting. You go to this dawn like children and you will die.’