Among You Secret Children

by Jeff Kamen

  He trudged back slowly. The world outside the property wall was black, and the ghostly shapes of birches, their trunks like cold white leather, were the only signs of life other than the wiry shapes of plants standing in their rows. In the doorway he glanced back at her, then returned to the flickering gloom, and as he did he caught sight of the cleaver in the scullery. Exactly where she’d left it when chopping joints that evening. He cut desperate looks around the kitchen. Blood-dripping scenes slashed through his mind and he saw himself leaping at her, hurling chairs. Holding the cleaver to her face and then knocking her unconscious while he ransacked the kitchen for supplies.

  Beating her.

  Killing her. Striking her with a — no, no, no, no, no.

  No.

  He couldn’t. Couldn’t possibly. He saw her body on the ground. Saw the dark blood soaking through as he sprinted away.

  Thief. Murderer.

  His lungs were cooking in his chest. He started to cough. With a pounding in his head he saw her dark eyebrows furrowing as she threw up her hands in anger and closed her tawny eyes. Her strong features tilted downwards. Wild hair awry.

  An ancient, solemn pose; like a dancer.

  Unable to make sense of himself, he noticed the key on the table and went over to it, glancing at the pooled chain on the floor. He didn’t know what to do. She had given him food, shelter, clothes, looked after him …

  Like his mother, she had given him life ...

  Slowly, as though he was watching someone else, he picked up the ankle cuff. Then he lifted his foot and slipped the cuff on. It clicked shut, hanging on him cold and heavy. He padlocked it to the chain. Nothing made sense any more. He coughed again, a hand to his chest. Then she was at the door, and he turned to find her studying him, raindrops sparkling in her hair and the blunderbuss held level in her hands.

  He bit his lip. So she’d had the gun hidden nearby after all.

  She elbowed the door shut, then told him to undo the chain. ‘Now bed,’ she said.

  ‘But I ... I’ve just locked myself.’

  ‘Bed,’ she said, and tossed him the key. When the chain was loose again, he clicked the cuff shut and looked at her blankly.

  ‘Give me,’ she said.

  He took in her features as she looked him over. Not pretty, not in a Tilsen-like way. Different. Solid. Earthy. Real. He tried to guess her age.

  ‘Good,’ she said, catching the key as he tossed it back. She’d spoken very definitely, as if his decision had spared her from having to do something unspeakable. Then, on resting the gun by the door, she motioned him away from the table and accompanied him to his room. She locked him to the bed, wrapping the chain tightly around the struts, the room enclosed in darkness as she worked. When she’d finished, she stood in the doorway a few moments, an immense presence outlined against the dim passageway. ‘Tomorrow you do this trench,’ she said, and left him clinking and wheezing uneasily as she closed the door.

  Chapter 52 — Among The Chains

  Pétar is in the death of himself, is in his own dark dawn climbing over the crest in the direction of the rock shelter. Once on the blind side he sees a few of Markos’ party on their way up to join his own, and he motions them ahead and continues on his route.

  Earlier it would have been impossible to climb this fast, but now he can see individual rocks as he hurries downhill, and when he looks out to the east a weak grey patina has appeared in the sky.

  Then someone waves. It is Markos himself on the slope, the rest of his party trailing behind him like a gang of armed vagabonds, some limping, some helping the wounded along. Pétar alters course and meets with the bowyer a few minutes later. Markos’ lean face is smeared with blood and he wears a bloodied cloth tied in a knot around his arm. When he nods to Pétar his eyes carry a distant look. ‘We lost some men,’ he says. ‘It’s their weapons. We didn’t expect them to be so accurate.’

  ‘How many?’

  ‘Ten or eleven, not all ours. But we think we hit their leader. We got quite a few of them.’

  Pétar nods. ‘They’re retreating,’ he says. ‘The tracks are still there. Don’t think Jaala’s plan has worked.’

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘We haven’t seen her leave yet, so keep an eye out for them.’

  Markos pushes back a wedge of black hair. ‘I’ll do that,’ he says, continuing uphill. ‘Good luck.’

  Approaching the rock entrance, Pétar calls for the oil to be brought out along with fresh ammunition. There are yells behind the drapes and shortly a couple of figures come stumbling out ahead of others who are lifting heavy gear. The heated fuel has been decanted into a great bulging skin that steams at the neck and which two men carry between them. Pétar takes one end of a crate full of shafts and the second-rate bows they’ve been keeping for spares and between them they set off uphill to rearm the frontline.

  Approaching the echo of gunfire he leads them up behind a row of trees standing higher than their usual position. Although it means climbing further, they can cut back down to the gulley with less risk of being targeted. They climb in haste towards a bench of rock they can shelter behind, and when they are squatting down they prepare the torches. While the men soak the swaddled drumheads with fuel, Pétar scoots down a gravel trail to where a dozen figures are ducking and shooting. As he calls to give notice of his team’s presence up above, he notices Dradjan standing away from his earlier position, bow in hand, peering down at the bridge. ‘Dradjan,’ he calls. ‘Drad. Get back in line.’

  The hunter is turning to reply when his young face blasts open in a mist of red. A second bullet takes the back of his skull with it.

  No. Pétar sinks down. No.

  At that moment the sporadic fire from the Versteckts becomes a deafening storm of bullets and flying shrapnel. All along the slope there is an eruption of rock fragments and shreds of wood and the trees are shaking and getting chewed away in tatters. Dradjan topples over with his arms raised as if he is praying to the sky. A few people see him as they hide themselves and someone screams his name and he drops backwards with his arms still lifted and falls away in silence among the rocks.

  Pétar forces himself up with a groan. He looks up to find that the vehicle has made it onto the bridge, and is not far short of the tracks. Engine fumes billow from the rear, where a swarm of grey-clad figures have started pouring down the ramp, their weapons flashing like broomsticks made to sweep away the stars. He runs back up the trail, stumbling as the gunfire turns his way, then he throws himself flat, everyone is on their belly now, the gunfire blasting in a hurricane of lethal and burning shards. Fresh screams break out from the gulley above the crack and zip of ricochets and people all along that shoulder of the ridge are going down injured.

  ‘Mind your eyes,’ he yells, ‘cover your eyes,’ and he scrambles up to where his men are waiting and orders the arrows lit. They work frantically over a tilted lantern.

  We’re here to fight. We’re here to win. We’re here to kill ...

  ‘The sack,’ he says. ‘Give it here.’

  ‘But, Pétar, you can’t —’

  ‘I said give it!’

  The men holding it between them haul it across to him, and seizing it by the rough warm neck, he raises up and lifts it off the ground to asses the weight. The heavy sloshing of the liquid. The way it pulses and breathes. He nods to them. ‘Let’s make it quick,’ he says, and they climb up towards a flat projection from where they will have a clear view over the bridge and road. On reaching it, the archers string their bows, the drumheads spitting fire. He describes the spot he is aiming for and then he swings round holding the sack with one foot acting as a pivot. He swings round again, moving faster. Then again, and again, and on the next revolution he flings out his arms and hurls the skin away with a long and wounded roar and watches it fly out from the slopes like a dripping gutbag. The archers take a pose. Out it soars, nodding on its trajectory. It drops from its highest point and plummets down at speed and on hitting the grou
nd bursts open between the entry posts. As the guards stagger away from it, some still shooting, some holding their faces, the arrows go fluttering down in an arc, landing among the enemy in a hell of spreading flames.

  ~O~

  Returning through the grid, Radjík sees the hunters at work beneath the tracks, two of them a level beneath the other pair. They are clambering up and down like machines in a chaotic mesh of swinging chains.

  She hollers to announce her presence, but they continue without seeing her, looping the chains around the posts and catching the chains which have fallen and lashing them together. She climbs on to help them and there are bullets hammering the deck overhead and every surface she touches is vibrating slightly. She continues along with care, watching every grip. The next time she looks ahead she notices something that stops her moving. Something the others haven’t seen themselves. The chains some way beneath them seem to be entangled around a central beam; are tightening around it, dragging it upwards, the entire knotted mass coming under ever-growing strain as the vehicle drags after it all that it is tethered to.

  ‘Jak! Laz!’ she screams, ‘Hey! Get away! Get away!’ but they do not seem to hear. ‘Look out!’ she cries, climbing on again, while above her the vehicle revs furiously above a storm of gunfire. Then a voice comes from the southern side as Tanya climbs parallel with her. She too has seen what is happening and yells, ‘Jak! Karl! Get clear! All of you get clear! It’s coming up! It’s coming up!’

  They wave and point frantically but neither get noticed. The vehicle continues to exert its terrible pressure and the chains that the hunters are working with are tautening visibly, tautening to the point where they lift up together like a mass of drawstrings suddenly tugged at. As the hunters scatter away yelling at each other, she sees Gustav getting scooped inside the mesh. ‘Gust!’ she cries, climbing towards him, and then stops and turns, hearing an ominous thrumming noise. She looks down to where the massive beam is caught up and buckling out of shape. There are shuddering creaks and groans. Beams and columns it is connected to are separating, getting sheared away from it, leaving a weakness in the structure that cannot be sustained, and as the central posts dislodge, some leaning in together, there is a crack, then another crack, and a mighty iron screech rips through the bridge like a tortured banshee. Suddenly the world blurs, and as the girder she’s treading on twists away she goes clawing down between the uprights.

  Her fall is broken by another crossbeam, punching the air from her lungs. She finds herself on her back, is nowhere, is slipping again with nothing to hook a limb around, and she screams breathlessly and everything around her is quaking or in motion or being torn out of place. There is a raw cry, and at the edge of her sight Tanya falls away through a cold draught of vapour and disappears.

  The quaking settles. She lies stunned, inverted, her mouth filling with warm blood that spots her hands as she gropes about coughing, clutching for a hold. She sees a swirl of mist overhead and between her feet she sees the deck beginning to tilt at an angle. A deck which is bending impossibly section on section, ripping, breaking up in parts. She wraps an arm round the beam supporting her and looks about, panting. Again the iron screeching, the sound of terrible forces at work against each other. Dust is blowing everywhere and she sees bits of concrete spiralling away in the wind and there is a constant clang of metal components on their way down.

  She pulls herself up and manages to get a footing. Then she stands, gripping a trembling post. Everything is shimmering strangely in the dust and it seems to her the vehicle’s engines are bellowing somewhere far away. The hunters are dim in the haze. The ones she can see are on their fronts and sides and clutching at whatever they can amidst a crooked fan of girders. Hitching her bow, she climbs in their direction and is not far from them when she hears a shrill cry from above. It’s Gustav. He’s been hoisted up a level, bundled up in a knot of chains that tightens all the more as the vehicle continues moving. ‘Gust!’ she yells, ‘Gust I’m comin,’ and he flails his arms about at seeing her but cannot free himself. As his cries turn to an ongoing scream she sees a grapnel the size of a child on its way up to him, drawn by a cable being retrieved by the vehicle’s machinery. Fronded with hooks, the grapnel is rising with a clang, locking and spinning and locking again, travelling upwards in an unbreakable diagonal. By now the other hunters are screaming warnings. They are trying to pick their way through the bent and dislocated shafts but they will not get there before she can and she climbs Gustav’s way in a scramble. She shins up to him and is less than thirty feet away when he slumps. As the blood pours from his mouth she screams his name so hard that her sight darkens. The vehicle revs again, the chains biting deeper. ‘GUST,’ she begs, and he is shaking like a doll, his eyes sprung wetly from his head and his jaw jacked open and bleeding in thin quivering jets. ‘GUST,’ she shrieks, and there are two tongues poking from his mouth one pink one black and he is being butchered. For a moment he is still alive, still making noises, then the grapnel cuts into him and seizes hold, dragging his torso up with it towards the ruined deck. All that remains below are his legs and a broken length of spine like a barbed red splinter, now being showered upon by the hot and purple bloody viscera hanging from his ribcage, and it is spilling everywhere, steaming and slapping about and splashing over Radjík’s head. She cries his name with the blood raining all around and then a huge rattling column at the framework’s centre gives way and drops with a violent rumbling. As it sinks down through the massive grid so the structures dependent on it buckle aside and in a few cases follow its descent, the huge trusses at the base of the bridge snapping and creaking and getting torn from their foundations in the mother rock.

  The bridge shakes again, its colossal steel bones grinding together, ripping out of joint. She reaches for a safer hold, and for a few moments she and the remaining hunters are hanging from the girders like apes unable to find a footing. By the time she is able to climb again, Jakub is on his back beneath her and Laszló is lost in the dust.

  She climbs down to Jakub with loose debris falling and metals clattering and spinning away and the main columns standing crippled and dislocated. The crossbeams are half buried in dusty wreckage and ragged parts that hang loosely in the wind. Bloodsoaked, she sits bestride a beam and offers a hand.

  ‘No,’ he says.

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘I’m not climbing.’

  ‘Alright then, go.’

  ‘You come too. Jump with me.’

  ‘I’m goin up for Jaala.’

  ‘You should get away.’

  ‘I aint leavin her.’

  ‘Fuck you then,’ he says, but he doesn’t mean it, he is covered in Gustav’s gore; his face is dark with it and his clothing saturated. As the trusses shake again he loses balance. He snatches at a post but misses, and with a short yell he plunges away from the bridge, his arms wild over his head until he is gone.

  She doesn’t notice Laszló until the vehicle’s engines are making an empty whining sound. She finds him in a clutch of wreckage a short way from the bloodstains, a level down from where she’d last sighted him. He is crouched in the dust with one knee up like he is deep in thought. ‘Laz,’ she calls, and he turns, cradling his arm. She climbs across and asks if he’s okay.

  ‘Can’t shoot,’ he says. ‘I was trying … my arm, it’s ...’

  He is speaking slowly, seems confused. ‘Laz?’ she says, then she notices the bruise like a tumour on his head and the shredded clothing at his elbow and the purple wound within. She tells him to get away if he’s broken his arm and he nods at her.

  ‘See Jaala anywhere?’ she asks, but he doesn’t know. He gets up using the one good hand, hauling at a post, and as she tries to help him the engines cut out with a pop. Both look up and both know something has happened, and she turns to say something but Laszló is staring over her shoulder. She turns to see Karl hanging by a solitary thong of his knapsack. Unconscious. Dangling over the river as a loose dead weight.
r />   The beam he is suspended from is nodding ever further down and it looks like he’s going to fall.

  ‘Karl!’ Laszló cries, but Karl is barely twitching. ‘Karl!’ he screams, but Radjík shushes him quiet. They peer up together. Above them, the deck is bent and splintered all the way along and huge parts of it are missing. They can hear the Versteckts arguing, officers shouting commands. ‘We’re out, where the hell’s Balmann?’ screams a voice. Some say they want to get to the City, some say they should run. Then someone yells, ‘Shut your mouths we fight, we fight these scum right fucking now,’ and a single shot is fired. As the arguments continue, she scans the wreckage around them but there is no sign that any Versteckts have climbed down. ‘Listen, Laz,’ she says, and tells him to climb after her so he can support Karl’s weight while she cuts him free. He nods, mumbling, and while she shins up a column, he clambers awkwardly after her by another route. It takes a few minutes to do, but she manages to climb level with the beam Karl is hanging from. When she looks for Laszló he is almost directly below her, reaching up, close to being able to touch Karl’s feet. ‘Climb up more,’ she says, ‘take him, take hold of him.’

  Karl is rotating slowly. He looks very cold and his soot-blackened face against his blond hair and forked beard make him look like a sunflower hung up to dry. There is a deep gash on his brow and she can see his lips moving as he stirs. She says to him, ‘Wake up, mate, you’re goin in the river.’

  Laszló calls to her, asking what he’s supposed to do. She looks down to find him perched uncomfortably, his shoulder level with Karl’s knees. ‘Take hold of him you idiot,’ she hisses, ‘he can’t just fall, he’ll smack his head open.’ He says, ‘I can get his legs but he’s out cold, he’ll fall anyway,’ and she says back, ‘Grab him round the waist then. I’m cuttin him loose, yeah?’

  He leans moaning and wraps a long arm around Karl’s midriff. ‘Like that?’ he croaks.