Among You Secret Children

by Jeff Kamen

  Yes, old friend, I want Marty to do it. It will be with the offspring, the girl ...

  The stone. The Genetik woman. The mountain. His road must continue on to them, or stop right now. He sat with his face in his hands, struggling; struggling to keep intact.

  How to tell her all this. How to start again. He imagined himself pleading for yet more time away, not even knowing where the woman or the tribespeople had gone to. How many years more would that be? And what was the point in searching in any case? He’d watched the mountain burn and the life it held burn too. What people were left could be anywhere … anywhere at all …

  ~O~

  As the sun lifted, he watched the sunken works slowly materialising, standing in skeletal disarray as the light grew. ‘Oh Cora,’ he sighed, wanting her arms around him; wanting to see her face, so strong and proud and melancholy.

  He walked the wet sands, looking out, and by the time he’d returned to the ship he’d made his decision. He’d sail north and let events take him where they would. He saw that all he could do was present to her the man that he was, strangely fashioned and much worn and bruised, unable to break his father’s bond. A man returning to the love he knew, and so badly needed back again. Not a Klaus love, no, but equally a love which depended on how much she could forgive him for, and on what else she was prepared to cope with, having heard him out, listened to all he had to say ...

  Yes, he would go, and gaining resolve from his decision, he got to work on his repairs. He climbed on a box to tie ropes round the boom, then set about lowering it to the deck for splinting. He rounded up the baskets and swept the deck clean. Drew down the sails. Gathered up scrapwood for kindling and cooked more fish, setting a tin of glue to heat in the embers.

  Lifting and carrying in the hot sun, eating frugally, he could feel the essence of himself linking to other planes, other destinations. The ills of the past discharging as though along a magnetised wire, his fears born of the tunnel along with them. Spared once back then, he thought, then spared a second time in the mansion house. Spared again in the storm. He thought he should take this as a sign of good fortune and run with it — for he was alive, he was whole, and had good years ahead of him. And what else was there, he mused, what else ought anyone to ask for, imprisoned in such a strange existence?

  A few days on, having completed his most pressing tasks, and in need of supplies, he climbed to the ridge and stood surveying the hot and arid landscape, watching the flutterers spiralling across the skies. A narrow track ran across the headland and a few small homesteads were in view. Moving ahead of a thin column of dust were two men and a child herding goats. They came slowly along the track, and in a while he was surrounded by bustling animals and the three locals in their dusty drapes, the eldermost of whom was a man who could not take his eye off the beached ship, and who, through word and gesture, managed to persuade him to let them have a look around. And so it was that they headed down together, the goats jumping down the rocks and the people following, he doing what he could to account for himself and his vessel, and the locals describing the whereabouts of the country he’d sailed to.

  The child was a girl who took the goats to a safe part of the deck whilst he and the men climbed down the ladder to look around the hold. When the tour was over, he took them back up and shared around the last of his water, the flutterers swirling high overhead, brushing against the furled canvas sails. When he asked what they knew of the creatures, the locals said they had little idea, other than that they’d appeared very recently and were a source of much speculation, especially at what they referred to as an interesting time.

  As they sat talking, a small goatling came up to him and rubbed its rough head against his side, setting the girl to giggle into her fist as he squirmed and twisted and eventually rebuffed it with a little push. It came at him again and he pushed it back the harder, sweating. Seeing the puzzlement on the child’s face turn to gentle disapproval, he went to explain himself. Then he felt another push, and he turned to the goatling in his fear and went to shove it away, and as he did, he saw something he’d not expected to see. Not ever. For he saw in its eyes no yellow fire, nor prescience, nor harm intended towards him, nor wild cold glee, nor anything but the animated force which drove it to nudge him, to assert its will as it wished; the force which drove it naturally to be playful. The girl smiled as if to offer him encouragement, and he sat nodding, dwelling not on dread sprints through concrete or rock but on the wilful beast before him.

  To his surprise, he felt little hooks begin to click. To knit together. With a soft snort, he rubbed the goatling’s coarse dark hair and let it butt into his palm, steering it towards the girl, who clapped her hands and took it back from him. ‘What’s his name?’ he said, but by now the men were getting to their feet. He rose alongside them. The older man took a good look over the ship as if in final appraisal of the situation and made a gesture of money trading hands. At which he had to shake his head. ‘I can’t,’ he said, apologising, and after a little more discussion in which other offers were politely made and politely declined, he enquired where he might ask for water. The locals said they’d show him the way, and they left as a single party, winding up the beachstones to the ridge.

  As they crossed the headland together, he looked up at a sky increasingly populated with the flutterers. Flitting and diving, lifted by the Levant breeze to swirl away over the breaking waters. He looked to where they were coming from, and in discussing them again he heard the story of two mysterious sisters who’d been travelling the land — women who, it was conjectured, had heralded the flutterers’ arrival. These words came to him in a broken and various order, and in piecing them together he pointed to the distant hills and once more asked where the creatures had come from.

  ‘There,’ said the younger man, motioning far beyond, ‘from this. There. There the soil is.’

  On hearing this, he froze, insensible to the goats nudging his leg. The day stopping, cog grinding on cog. Time shattering crystal by crystal across a vast translucent latticework. At the end of which was the herder’s deeply tanned face. ‘Soil?’ he whispered. ‘Soil?’ He took up some dirt and crumbled it in his fingers. ‘Soil? Like this?’

  ‘Lo, lo,’ the man said, shaking his head. ‘Like this,’ he said, motioning expansively. ‘Black. Everywhere.’

  Moth stared at him. ‘Out there?’ he said, pointing again as the flutterers came billowing their way.

  The man smiled. ‘They say,’ he answered, and looked up to watch them flutter on.

  ~O~

  He sold the ship to the family the following morning and set off with a few possessions wrapped in a blanket. He headed away from the track and made his way northwards along the sandy coast to the first road turning inland. All he could think was that he had to see it to be sure; he had to, having come so far, and with no one else to keep alive his father’s hopes and intentions.

  There was spindly dry scrub on the slopes and sand gusting through and little else. He drank water as he walked and refilled the skin from a brook that had chiselled its way out of the cliffs. He slept in a dry clutch of trees, and when he shook out his blanket, a fat brown scorpion scuttled away. Shaken, he looked back lingeringly the way he’d come, but what the herder had told him he could not dismiss, and he trudged on again.

  He rounded the cliffs watching the raw sun ascend into a sky as hard as topaz. It hung there pulsing for hours, radiating, beating, and the heat a repetitive partner to it, heat like the noise of a thousand cymbals getting dashed down on the rocks bordering the roadside, hammering against the hardened trail and against the low whitewashed hovels he passed by; yet there was nothing to hear. Only the trill and buzz of insects, the scuff of weary feet as he continued.

  Evening advanced slowly. The hills stood black in the dusk like cuttings of tin. Atop one the stacked needles of what had once been a communications tower, a listening station. The fine points of treated metals listening to what. Placed there by whom. Secrets un
utterable.

  Hot night on the road. He was directed further to the north and he trekked past empty outhouses long caved and abandoned and he met a night wagon headed for the coast. There was soil heaped in the back of it, and the driver in that insect-teeming lamplight left him a small sample to hold and to smell. The story of its gathering and the warm musky scent of it seemed to ignite something in him that he’d feared was going out, and he went on again more determinedly, a fugitive figure soon enclosed by darkness as the wagon trundled away and disappeared.

  In the banded grey morning he stopped at a barn at the back of some stone dwellings. A woman invited him in to drink at the well, and when he’d finished, there were a couple of families watching him. As he spoke with the hamlet’s sparse population, he was brought to a room and shown a shelf on which the striped and puckered skins of two metsats lay like sacred images, or drawings of the beloved and deceased. When he showed them the soil sample in his pack, the recognition on their faces provoked from him a crow of joy. He told them the tale of the metsats’ journey to that land and they spoke for many hours. Before he left, they took him to an allotment where they grew their crops, and he saw for himself signs of vigorous growth that would have fuelled his father to take flight even were he ailing and in need — were he sickening daily ... were he too delirious to fear the gathering winds that lifted him ...

  From that time on he could sense his father’s presence everywhere in that silent and dusty land. Nor was he alone on the road for long, for people were arriving in the region every day — following the trail of the flutterers and following the stories they’d heard, stories of what it was the creatures augured.

  Within a week, there were new arrivals camping along the wayside. He found himself at cookfires where travellers were gathering by the dozen, talking of legends and sisters and worms, to which he added his own precious tale of the flying man. He spoke with deep warmth to his listeners, portraying the unfolding of a vision his father had been so desperate to see, yet had been unable to. A vision, he told them, his voice turning husky, born of years of sacrifice and frail want. Born of fighting and death and fevered wanderings; born of love and despair and a long flight south that had ended in crashing waves, followed by his own fraught journeys of pursuit.

  No one he spoke to tired of hearing his tale, and often the stories they’d brought with them resonated with it strongly. In the deep crackling flamelight, he heard from people of many lands who’d left their homes in search of what might be possible. People who’d heard the rumours and decided to find out more; who’d sensed in both the soil and the flutterers a sign of something else, a promise of a life that was different to the one they’d known. A promise of peace, they told him, of new ways and understandings …

  On they went together, merging into a single company, travelling as though to a place of great stillness and radiance ... the sound of the flutterers building to a soft velvet roar at times, so strange to hear ...

  He did not eat from then on, did not sleep, found he could not even if he wanted to. Wandering deeper inland, he walked with the flutterers brushing past him continually, flitting all around. They were always in his mind and he felt himself wanting daily to know more, wanting to be among them forever, his need gradually deepening, driving him to a hunger without torment as must creatures of a hive dwell among in the feral and burning summer. On he went, the grim tunnel of the past seeming like a vortex from which he’d come striding with the flutterers trailing from his fingers, a vortex receding hour on hour as he noticed the sand underfoot beginning to darken, to soften, the rolling landscape along with it.

  ~O~

  Moth climbing peak after peak, stopping to ask directions from local villagers, the flutterers blowing through without number. Turning away with them settling on his shoulders and in his hair, the villagers watching on with outstretched hands, letting them alight and twitch their wings and flutter on again.

  Moth bypassing the fires and the wagons and the children and walking day and night. Walking out from the sun into a great black field where the flutterers were settling by the thousand. They appeared to be wilting where they lay, but were not wilting at all. Their wings were yellowing, turning brown and shrivelling, dropping to the ground, but yet the sticklike bodies jettisoning them were not dead; were simply dissolving. He saw splashes of liquid green oozing like hot metallic wax where they were undergoing the changes. Saw tiny white wire-like roots that penetrated the soil and bound it together in a tough white gauze he could barely push a finger through. He smiled in wonder at this, and as others came by discussing what was happening, he told them what he knew, holding in his palm some of the worms that had laid the way for the flutterers to land. And it was during these discussions, studying the worms’ spots and segments, that he found the message of an old familiar music returning, memories rich and true amidst a dreamlike brew of aromas ...

  I grow everything here now. I make good soil, I have the stream. Not too much wind here. It’s a good place, you see?

  He looked over the elevation, dark everywhere but a few isolated spots where bare rocks projected. ‘I see,’ he whispered. ‘I always did. I always did.’

  Going on from there, he watched people driving wagons along the rows and dousing the ground with water. They were setting up irrigation channels, staking out covers, digging in teams. Elsewhere in that turning terrain he saw growths appearing with bunched heads and fiddled arms, sprouting long wiry filaments. He saw flecks of colour scattered like the shavings of precious stones, some crowning long tube-like structures, others thronged in spikes of green. In damper parts, pale clustered pebble-like things like mushrooms were erupting, tin hats festooned, whilst on drier ground, trumpeting into the light, were wrinkled mouths of faded pinks and veined reds and oranges. He stopped for a while, observing with painful pride the variety of these new proliferations; then, waving to the fieldworkers looking his way, he walked on.

  Moth trekking uphill in the long blue cool of dawn. Sometimes journeying with others at his side and sometimes with no one next to him but his father. The pair of them going through the changing land as if through canopies of leaves, canopies of shade, looking round and walking on forever, time with no beginning and no end ...

  Walking through the harvest days of the sun, deep furrows underfoot ... together at the ploughman’s earthen ritual marking each day’s age-old passing ... wheels turning in a pageant of crops and animals never to be defeated, upon whose cart was heaped the produce of nature’s rambling store ...

  Moth in the dark again, whistling quietly, letting his hands trail in the warm and fragrant air as he went about exploring. A fleet shadow by moonlight, he stooped to gather up the soil and speak soft words of that waking dream to it, speak to what seethed and wriggled in his fingers, telling them of the world as he pictured it evolving: a world where tall cornheads clashed like spears in a war where all things were prepared to die and yet no blood was lost, for now something other than death ran through the seasons. A world where storms wet the ground and where loamy heads would come breaking through, green locks curling and entwining. A world of lightning over heat-scented fields, chains of ivies hanging, where grew creatures of night and bog and dawn, creatures tendrilled and vital, swelling and dividing as they shivered upwards ... telling them of all that was to come ...

  Entering a vast open valley he stood there very small against that windless scale of land, turning to take in the sight of great dark shaggy hummocks, all shifting and ruffling. Mile upon mile of them, to which the sticklike bodies of the flutterers were attaching themselves, buzzing and scissoring erratically, some driving at each other with their wings in their excitement and chasing furiously about. He went on dazed and crestfallen.

  He left the valley for the neighbouring hills and these too were richly webbed in soil, and the scent rolling off them was like a drink of light and dark, of depthless purple rivers. And as he took it in, it seemed to him that everything was in that smell, everyth
ing contained and distilled there. A scent that held the promise of watery groves and rustling grasslands; of deep black forests after rainfall. The scent of grey wastes speckling, of dustbowls erupting into painted bloom. A scent that Karoly would have loved, would have given anything to know, the scent of pods and pollens and dripping nectars; the scent of petals in the making ...

  Moth going on newly charged after that, as if sparks would shoot from his hands should he make contact with anybody, as if fireworks were crowning his head, lighting up the dark.

  Moth by day running past travellers crouched at a stand of yellow saplings. Running through the smoke of pilgrims’ fires. Running with his arms outspread, wheeling and stumbling, laughing and crying and laughing again. Running past stalls of heavy fruits and the locals welcoming those tiring on their journey to stop awhile and rest, but he could not rest at all. Moth running and calling aloud, going on hoarse and elated, until, passing a wall where more of the fruit had been set out, he noticed dozens of mane-like heads gazing back at him.

  And it was then that he stopped. Then that he felt he finally understood the truth of what was being created around him. Made in the name of all that was wild and beautiful and free ...

  The dished faces were lightly speckled and ringed by tufts as yet only partially unfurled. They were standing in deep chutes of soil at different heights, some half hidden by others. They looked to him like a team of archers clambering out of cobwebs, their long slender limbs still in the process of hardening, their splayed tips sticky with buds. All of them leaning, their stems awkwardly outstretched, growing across each other at constrained and improbable angles. All silent and fragrant and reposed; simply breathing in his breathing.

  These were the first families, human or not; the pioneers of all that was to come.

  ‘You did it,’ he whispered, feeling the day quieten, grow still, even amidst the ceaseless fluttering; and as he spoke, it was as if the two of them were watching the faces together. Standing side by side. ‘You did it,’ he sobbed, trembling, ‘you did it, father, you did it,’ and the same words were on his lips as he trekked to the top of a marshy hillside the following morning.