by Jeff Kamen
‘Yeah. Just remember you’re jumpin with him, it’s the only way to get him clear. Alright? Leave your arrows with me.’
She waits for him to hook up a bundle, then as he repositions himself, she tells him to get ready. Weeping again, he puts his stronger arm around Karl’s waist while the injured arm hangs loose.
She brandishes her knife for him to see. ‘I’m gonna cut it, yeah?’
‘Hurry, Raj. Hurry.’
‘Okay, I’m doin it,’ she says, then severs the hide strap. The moment it’s cut, Karl slumps down and begins to slip from Laszló’s grasp. ‘Can’t hold him I can’t hold him,’ he cries, and Radjík throws a leg over the beam and clambers to the other side and swings down until she has a footing. Then she hisses, ‘Told you to jump, didn’t I?’ and the last he sees of her is a boot in his face as she sends him sprawling. He doesn’t even shout, just drags Karl away with him as he falls, and they enter the mist shapelessly and hit the water. She watches until they are both afloat, and then she turns, looking up.
The waterfall is crashing and roaring, carbines clattering mechanically. She hears voices hoarse and desperate and the sounds of people dying. There’s no sign of Jaala anywhere. She swings down to where the bundle has been left and attaches it to her belt, and then with her bow hitched across her back, she climbs up in search of her friend.
~O~
Bullet in her thigh like a jagged star a white star burning in her dense flesh as she lies beside the railings clenching her spear, barely able to hear the waterfall for the grinding beneath her as the deck shudders once more and the section running from the road begins to collapse, to fall away. She sees the entry posts lean in one direction and then the other, sinking tragically. Beneath them, beards of rubble are tumbling to the water where the trusses have been pulled away, leaving huge craters exposed in the rockface. The railings still attached to the main structures snap and twist and curl as the bridge splits slowly across the middle.
She looks towards the vehicle, its ramp partially raised, pushed upwards by the scroll of skeletal girders it has gathered up beneath it. With the deck angle steepening, the vehicle is climbing a pathway to the sky, death now a possibility for them all. She crawls alongside the body of a female guard and there is no getting around the bloodpool, nor does she make any attempt to as she looks across at her target, watching as lumps of black mud drip from its coglike wheels slowly turning within their loop of steel. She grimaces in frustration. It must not return to the tunnel. Must not recuperate and grow strong again. Must not survive.
She crawls faster to keep pace with it as it grinds on, shielding her head as the arrows flit by and the bullets whang off the concrete into the early day. At that moment a troop of guards jump from the ramp and run stiltedly uphill, firing up at the cliffs where a host of archers have aligned themselves. Keeping her head down, she looks back to the ramp and finds only a handful of Versteckts there, two of them sorting through a stack of weapons and the rest taking measured shots at the archers on the ridge. One by one these figures fall as the archers concentrate their fire. They drop away screaming and clutching at the shafts and within a few minutes there are no uniformed figures left standing, nor any others storming from the hold to replace them. In spite of this, the vehicle is still inching ahead, hauling at its chains like a demon taking the world with it, returning to the darkness from which it was spawned.
She rises with the spear and limps across to the wheelcarriage and slips between the treads and the mud-plastered hub. Once inside, she squats down to survey the deck and the shivering loom of chains extending back to the hole. Chains that gleam black and silver. That lie groaning under the strain, the smaller links trembling as they stretch and heat and rip open. Some of them explode as they snap apart but in spite of this she continues along on her belly, keeping well clear of the wheels as they continue biting round. The noise beneath the beast is a dreadful hollow roar. She crawls on, the glare from the headlights permitting her to see a dripping and mudslaked topography of boxlike panels overhead. Without knowing the function of any but guessing their purpose, she sets about destroying them, spearing everything around her. She gouges and impales and twists, yelling as a shock kicks back her hand. When she picks up the spear her fingers are numb but she can still use the weapon, and she continues jabbing and wrenching at every exposed part she can see, crawling in a haze of fumes. The engines scream in protest at her work and eventually the wheeltreads stop turning and do not start again. She lies flat in the haemorrhaging smoke, listening to the bootsteps outside, to the voices as the commands change in tone and nature.
She is trying to read events around her when she senses movement. She shifts, eyes narrowing, then lies still, keeping her spear at her side as a bulky figure in grey fatigues comes crawling in from the rear. The smoke is spreading and he gropes blindly among the tortured chains, occasionally stopping to inspect the damage she has wrought, shaking his head at it all. He crawls towards her, not noticing the leonine figure stirring to life beside the wheeltreads, nor seeing her slide in flame-eyed silence towards him, not even as he rolls onto his back to study the hanging wires, muttering uneasily. She strikes fast, dragging him away in a neck lock. The noises he makes are wet noises lathered with his lashing tongue as she hauls him into the shadows for questioning. When they are clear of the fumes, she yanks down his mask and plants the tip of her knife in the outer corner of his eye. In a razor voice she asks if he wants to live.
He nods like a hound, nods fatly and frantically and lies rigid with fear, almost choking, and she puts her mouth to his ear and whispers. So much she needs to know. She asks him about the oil, about the fire at the mountain, about the war between the Versteckts, about the eruption in the gorge. Her questions seem to terrify him: he tells her he doesn’t have the answers, keeps asking how she knows so much, keeps asking who sent her, and she pricks the point of the knife beneath his skin and once more orders him talk.
In a gruff strangled voice he tells her that he comes from Ostgrenze, the old fort out east; he says they all do, they’re just on their way to the City. He says the wrong people have been causing trouble there, not all of them, some of his best friends live in the City, they’re just doing what’s right. He says they’ve only been fighting the last week or so, he doesn’t really know what’s been happening, it isn’t the kind of thing they get told. He says that maybe the others in the City did it, that’s right the City, where all the problems are, the half-breeds rising up and making a disturbance while the better people are trying to work with science. She prods deeper. He blinks the blood away and squirms. He tells her he doesn’t know of Klaus, never heard of him, says it’s hard when there are animals getting in the way all the time, no offence, they were just trying to reorganise the regime.
‘Look,’ he pants, ‘there’s fuel leaking, what are you —’ but she hasn’t finished. She asks him other things, questions that have been eating at her so long she can’t recall a life before them, and she forces him on and he answers as he can but he is struggling, panicking as the fumes spread to the point where he can scarcely breathe. He begs her once more to let him go and she looks at him a moment, then says, ‘Very well, turn over. On your front. Don’t try to move. That’s right, slowly. On your front.’
‘I didn’t mean to hurt them you know, it was the boss, he ordered it. You’re not going to do anything stupid are you, you’re not going —’
‘Face down,’ she says coldly, and he obeys, lying on his paunch, his thick arms behind his back. She pulls down his collar and feels for the two ridges in the hairline at the top of his neck.
‘What … what are you doing?’
She places the point of the knife there. Then drives it deep into the medulla. He bucks and kicks a moment, then lies still. She wipes the knife on his clothes and slides it away and then drags him up against the wheeltreads and leaves him hidden. Upon checking round again, she gathers up her weapons and crawls uphill, listening as a new commotion bui
lds from the tunnel.
Chapter 53 — Pit Slave
‘Here,’ she said, brushing away the flies, and he parked the wheelbarrow at the spot indicated.
Covering his mouth with his scarf, he looked miserably up at the foul stains dribbling from the back of the pighouse, then further along to the back of the latrine, where a chipped hole spat the waste down. The entire wall above the trench was plastered with a yellowish sludge and drying excrement, the trench itself coated with a thick scum upon which red beetles and other insects were scuttling.
She explained that she wanted the entire contents of the trench conveyed to the pit he’d dug, so as to minimise the risk of disease and vermin near the house. When he asked what she planned to do when it was full again she ignored him, indicating he should get to work.
The barrow held a rope bucket to be used for dredging. He took the bucket by the handle and watched with interest as she searched the wall for something to chain him to. She went to both sides of the trench, checking the indentations in the wall and glancing about hesitantly. When she turned to speak to him he did his best to mask his smile, but it was too late: she’d noticed it. Smiling in return, she ordered him to chain himself to the barrow. ‘Now,’ she said, throwing him the key, and he obeyed with a snort, then stood again, his eyes chill with loathing.
‘You can do this,’ he croaked. ‘You, ah, you can hurt me now, but you can’t keep me forever. One day I’ll be gone.’
Still smiling, she motioned westwards. He followed her gaze to find stormy peaks rising far beyond the valley rim, far even beyond the foothills smouldering in low clouds of vapour. ‘You run from here,’ she said, ‘you die.’
He went to reply, then hesitated. Whether she was testing him or not, surely he’d touched on something. Did it mean he was fully cured? Free to run? He sensed a barrier had come down. She was weaker than before.
‘Really?’ he said, smiling back at her. ‘Sounds to me, ah … sounds to me you’re worried about that now.’
With that, he threw back the key. Catching it deftly with in one hand, she said, ‘Yes, you run from here. You go there, to the hill. No food. Wet. Maybe you fall. Maybe … you have blood on you, just a little.’ She dropped the key into a pocket. ‘Then these white dog come.’
His smile vanished. With a vividness that alarmed him he pictured a hairy black snout sniffing at some droplets on a patch of stained rock. Teeth like spikes showing, paws running on again, running faster. A terrible yammering up the cliffs. ‘White dogs?’ he whispered. ‘Wh-what dogs?’
‘Wolf. Everywhere. They find you, always. Then poor you.’ She studied him a moment, as if to allow him to come to a decision about the matter, then returned up the path.
He followed her until she’d gone, then looked anxiously at the trench. The smell was already making him want to vomit; he could feel it churning in him. He retied his scarf around his face and stood coughing, musing on her words.
The valley had fallen quiet. From somewhere he could hear crows calling in a raw black chorus, and understood them well. The early autumn smelled like murder to him, smelled of meat and maggots and the caramels of physical decay. September was a hoary-headed ghoul, its pale cheeks wasted with malnutrition, its eyes dull from want of light. He felt disgust at everything, disgust and despair ...
Like a man on his way to death, he got to work at last, filling his bucket with sludge and emptying it into the barrow. Up to the pit at the beeches he went and back again, trundling the foul loads along and dumping them and scraping the barrow clean and then returning to the trench to start over.
A few hours later, sickened, rigid with resentment, he’d made it back from yet another torturous trip when he saw an old woman coming down the slope to the west of the property. He recognised her instantly: she was sucking on a pipe and clad in a floral headscarf, wearing the same thin overcoat as before, her shoes shaped like Cora’s, clasped by thick square buckles splashed with mud.
‘Ah, hello,’ he said, as she made her way down the trail. By way of reply she raised the battered urn she was carrying and grinned a keyboard of yellow teeth at him, a grin which soon faltered as her eye fell to his chains. Then to the dripping barrow with its spattered muck. To the swarming flies. Approaching more cautiously, she asked what he was doing there.
‘I’m, ah ...’ he began, parking the barrow. ‘I’m doing some work for Cora. She asked me to clear out the trench.’
‘Oh-oh,’ she cooed, her weathered features wrinkling uncertainly. She worked her pipe into the corner of her mouth and squinted an eye at him. ‘And who are you, then?’
He gave his name.
She repeated it, unsure.
He nodded.
An expression of mild displeasure seemed to cross her face, then with a little shrug to herself, she asked if he’d heard about the troubles to the south.
‘Troubles?’ he said, checking to see if Cora was watching. ‘Yes, I-I know all about it. I heard you talking to her.’
‘Oh, they’re bad’uns,’ she said, shaking her small head. ‘And I mean bad. We’ve been invaded, dear. There’s whole villages gone. Not a man or woman left behind.’
‘I-I can believe it. I’ve tried telling her.’
‘Not a soul.’
‘Yes, I’m sure. The thing is, ah, I can help. I know it seems odd, but …’ He checked the path again, the top of the wall. ‘Listen,’ he whispered, ‘I know who they are. The invaders. I can do something about it.’
As the old woman hobbled nearer, he indicated his chain, adding, ‘She won’t let me go. I’m stuck here. But if I could get away, I could do something about it. I-I could stop them. I know how to — I know the right people. Please, just have a word with her, see if you can persuade her. I need to go straight away. I need to get to the City …’
By now she was peering at him with a strange curiosity. ‘Where are you from, dear?’ she said.
‘Ah, Van Hagens. You wouldn’t …’
‘Where, dear?’
‘Van Hagens. It’s … you wouldn’t know it. It’s to the north.’
‘Oh. Is it nice?’
‘Well, ah, not really. It’s gone. It got burnt down.’
‘Oh. Oh dear.’
He nodded, placing a hand on his chest as he started coughing. He tried to speak again but couldn’t, and with growing doubt the old woman looked to the property beyond the wall. ‘Cora?’ she cried. ‘Cora! Where are you, dear?’
‘Please don’t,’ he gasped, ‘she’s inside. Look, I-I realise you don’t know me, but …’
‘Cora?’
‘Ah, Eva!’ came a voice from the path, and he turned to find Cora hurrying towards them with a taut smile, a hand raised in welcome. ‘Eva,’ she called again pleasantly, ‘how are you?’
‘Cora, dear, what’s going on? There’s a man here.’
Before he could say a word, his keeper bustled past him and took the urn from the woman and escorted her away to the path, whispering in her ear as they went, as though in concern. The old woman turned awkwardly to look at him as Cora spoke, then they were gone from sight. He turned away cursing.
He clinked back to his bucket, and taking the rope in hand, he threw it into the slops. To his surprise, Cora returned a minute later. She was carrying the blunderbuss, her features stony. He broke off from hauling in the bucket and stood with his arms hanging at his sides as she approached. Waiting for his punishment, waiting to discover what new crimes he was to pay for.
‘I didn’t say anything,’ he croaked. ‘Wh-what did she tell you?’
She studied him briefly, then seemed to scan the area for something. ‘This spade,’ she said, ‘where is it?’
‘Out there. At the pit.’
‘You go there, bring it to the garden.’
‘Y-You go,’ he retorted bravely, instantly regretting it as she gripped her weapon.
‘I say go now. Go now or I shoot you. Yes. And no help this time.’
He snorted sharply, close to
daring her to do it, but just managed to catch himself in time. They stared at each other a few moments, then she said, ‘You stole, yes?’
In spite of himself, he rolled his eyes.
‘Yes?’
‘Yes. Look, I didn’t say —’
‘So you do work.’ She seemed harassed and burdened, unhappy somehow, and appeared to be speaking from the heart as she added, ‘I don’t like you here. I do this because it is right, not pleasure. So, two week. It is fair. You work here two week, then you go. But you work hard.’
‘But I need to go now,’ he pleaded. ‘Look, I … what if I left and came back again? I could warn my people, tell them what they need to know, then I’d be free to come back and help you. And I would, Cora. I’d do the digging, your fence, the weeds, anything. I promise I would.’
She watched him in silence.
‘Ah, okay? So how about that? Why don’t you let me go?’
‘You lie.’
She spoke calmly as she said this, and his eyes lowered in shame as he saw she had no reason for saying it other than she believed it to be true.
‘But it … it’s not fair.’
‘You eat here. You sleep, you drink, you have clothes. What,’ she added, ‘now you breathe. This is fair.’
As she spoke, he saw her lift a shoulder lightly, saw the tip of her tongue rest for a moment against her teeth. He saw how her lips remained pursed after she’d come to an end, and as the images repeated themselves in his mind, her last words propelling themselves towards him, it was as though he was standing in front of a different woman again. ‘Two weeks,’ he said emptily.
‘Two week.’
He nodded.
Her eyes dimmed. She handed him the key. ‘Get this spade,’ she said.
~O~
The women were discussing something in the back garden when he came clinking through from the orchard. Cora beckoned him across, then as he approached, she asked him politely if he’d fill up a sack with soil.