By Light Alone

by Adam Roberts

  At the centre of the village Abda’s house was a compound with its back to Beard Height; and Beard Height was a knobbly prominence of bare rock, pink and grey and sand-coloured, that glowered over the whole village. Issa had no idea why it was called Beard Height; it looked nothing at all like a beard, as far as she could see. The gunmen and sub-bosses had smaller houses, running along the downslope, of various sizes and with various examples of luxury attached to them. But Abda’s was the largest and highest. If ever a flitter passed overhead, buoying itself along through the yielding air on the cushion of its own rattle-buzz, then it was on its way to Abda’s place, nowhere else. If strangers came to town, it was Abda they had to talk to.

  Abda ate any food he fancied, and liked to throw good food away, just to show he could afford to. He kept dogs, too. He’d fed his dogs the sunlight bug, and although they were a short-haired breed, the fact that fur covered their whole bodies gave them enough energy to live. And he kept chickens, in a run at the back where nobody was allowed to go; and the chickens were fed on real food and scraps, to make sure they laid eggs.

  Of course there was a village shrine to Neocles, who made the Hair. Neocles the saviour. This was tolerated rather than encouraged by the Boss, and frequented by only a few regulars. But most of the people in the village would go to it in times of trouble: a concrete altar, and roofed over with plastic, with an icon of the Man Himself – a motion icon, playing over and over again, the moment of his martyrdom, with his arms flying out to his sides and his chest turning to fluid red. Arms at sides, chest of solid flesh – arms outflung, chest bubbling blood: one, two; one, two. When Issa first came to the village she often used to go to the shrine just to watch the icon. Soon enough, of course, she got bored by it. It was the same thing over, over, over. Where’s the fun in that?

  Issa had been purchased from a woman in the highlands. Ali Salih had bought her, and then moved her westward. They’d travelled a long way by train: eight trucks carrying food, each with an AI-gun on the roof; and a dozen trucks full of people. Issa had been hypnotized by the way the motion of the train slid the whole landscape around and beneath her.

  Anyway, Ali Salih had sold her to Abda. That was the way of it: Abda bought her from Ali Salih, who had bought her from the woman, who had originally bought her – from her mother, presumably. But settled living worked its amnesia into the texture of existence. Soon enough the routine of life in the village overwrote Issa’s memory, to the point where she could barely remember what lay at the back of the chain of past recollection. There was a kind of shimmery dream-life, something white and immense, a distant place where she had been more than just a girl – a city, a shining place. For a long time, until she knew better, Issa assumed everybody had something like that at the back of their memories. It was hardly even worth talking about it. Wasn’t that just life, though? The day-to-day is laborious and draining, or it is pangs in the stomach, or it is a blow to the head, or it is insects swarming at the mouth and eyes, or worse. But memory possesses a golden quality that the miseries of the present cannot contaminate. Why else would this be, except that behind everything else the mind remembers the glory of how existence used to be, before birth?

  Everybody has dreams like that.

  On the other hand, there were days when her past life came back to her in astonishing detail and fine excess: all the particularities, all the names and places. But she was canny enough to know that that would only make her pine, and pining was no use to her. So she put her thoughts elsewhere.

  As to why Abda had bought her – well, it was obvious she was special. It was not that she was beautiful, or accomplished; but she was tall . . . taller than anyone else her age. One day Rageh asked her how she came to be so tall; and she realized that she had no answer. It was just one of those things. Except she wasn’t stupid; and she knew that kids who ate nothing but sunlight didn’t grow tall. That meant that, before, somebody (her mother, maybe) had fed her plenteous real food. Hard to see why she’d do that, if only to sell her on. Perhaps, Rageh said, she did it in order to sell her on; but that didn’t make sense to Issa. Whatever else she was, she was a logical girl; and she knew the investment in hard food would have had to be maintained for years. There was no way you’d get the money for that sort of an investment back by selling on. So perhaps there was some other story there. Perhaps her mother had never intended selling her, but had made her so striking and handsome by making her so tall that it was inevitable Issa would be stolen away. Stolen away felt right to Issa, chimed with her nebulous behind-memories, although she couldn’t put her finger on specifics. Although the woman in the plane-lands hadn’t been her mother. Although she used to say she was, sometimes. But that woman – she had told her various kids many different things about her name, so nobody knew what she was really called – had gotten sick. The sickness was a horrible thing, and it smelt horrible, and it made all her skin come up with boils like the bubbles in dirty bubblewrap. She’d sold Issa to Ali Salih in a hurry, and for less than she could have got. And Ali Salih had almost wrecked his acquisition by settling down with Issa that very night, drunk on grass wine, and not understanding why he was having such difficulty sticking his thing in. He did realize, eventually, for all his drunkenness, and he did desist. Probably he couldn’t believe his luck. At any rate, when he sold her on he’d certainly got a lot more for Issa than he’d paid.

  So it was she’d ended up in the village. Abda had waited three nights before putting it in, between her legs. Perhaps he’d been in two minds as to whether to keep her himself, or sell her on. But once he’d had her, and she’d lolled around the compound for a week, he more or less lost interest. That’s the way of it, with male desire. She was tall, it was true, and striking-looking; but she was quite skinny, unprepossessingly so. Abda’s favourite girl had sweetly plump shoulders. She went to wash her hair at the watertrough, and when she bent over the skin of her belly smiled a deep fleshy smile. Issa couldn’t match that.

  It was possible Abda had so much money that he simply lost count of what he had. That was possible. Water was a lucrative business. At any rate, Issa didn’t stay in his house for very long. She tried to keep out of everybody’s way, but Abda’s other wives chased her out. Galla had an electrical cord that she used, with wicked effectiveness, as a whip. But it didn’t matter. Issa was taken in by Mam Anna, and ended up sleeping under the big plastic sheet, pinned on one side to a garden wall and on to the other to a series of metal posts, where Anna and her friends lay. It was Mam Anna who showed her how to carry a piece of plastic – the kind of plastic didn’t matter, it was the shape that was important, bitten and trimmed to a particular shape – up inside her to prevent conception. It was strange that she pressed this upon Issa, since one thing everybody agreed about Mam Anna is that she’d had more children than any other woman in the village. She herself said she’d had enough to know better, now.

  Petal, a pale-skinned girl with a gaunt, oriental face, thought it all nonsense and a waste of time. ‘If you get a child,’ she said, ‘it’s going to fall out anyway, except that you eat hard food.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So – don’t need Mam Anna’s plastic.’

  But Mam Anna took Issa in a flappy-skinned embrace and told her that it wasn’t as clean or easy as Petal made it sound. Better not to go there. ‘You understand this, my tall girl,’ she said. ‘You need to do it properly. Pick your time, and make sure you’ve got the food. Kids are what make us up strong. We keep a hold on when we have them.’

  First days in the village, the thing that surprised Issa most of all was how much freedom she was given. Back before, Ali Salih had kept her cuffed with a plastic band to hold her back from running away; but neither Abda nor any of the gunmen seemed to pay her any mind. She thought, this hour, or that hour, of escape, sometime; but didn’t know where she was, or where she might go. There was the sea, of course; and to sit on Beard Height and gaze – it was best in the morning, when the sun was behind you
– was to imagine what freedom might feel like. But nobody else in the village fretted about freedom; and in her bones Issa understood that it was a toxic meme, something alien to the way life is lived, something she had picked up somewhere but would have been better without. What would she do if she went to the sea? She knew nobody down there, and she had no aim or plan. More, she comprehended, without being able to put it into words, that the freedom thing worked better as a thought in the head than a reality underfoot. It was better to see the sea as that azure thread, stitched so tightly against the horizon it almost wasn’t there. It would have poisoned the purity of this line to have got any closer.

  Life in the village settled into a tolerable rhythm. The worst things happened early on, when her place in the network of things was not as yet fixed. She slept under Mam Anna’s sheet with a dozen other girls, and that was safe; but walking around in the daytime she had to run the gamut of crowds of idle males, lounging in the sun and staring at her, calling after her, making sexual suggestions, or sometimes masturbating openly as she went. Though she was a kid she understood all this well enough, and it was no fun. Sometimes, as she ran some petty errand for Mam Anna, or as she went up dog-alley to the water trough, men and boys crowded about her, jostling her, urging her to perform one or other sex act upon them, singly or together. She wriggled free, mostly, though it made her blush. It was the blush, probably, or the combination of the blush and her great height, that meant she became the focus for so much male attention. The other girls experienced it too, of course; but not to the same degree as Issa.

  Well, she was not stupid. Why have sex with these no-good hairy men, who had literally and absolutely nothing they could give her? The village had a dozen powerful men, below Abda, who had stores of hard food and alcohol and trinkets to dole out.

  Mam Anna, though, took what seemed to Issa a surprisingly lenient view of the men. ‘After every-all, what do they have?’ she asked, as they all lay together one evening in open air, and the evening sky grew thicker and thicker with darkness, and the stars toyed with the idea coming into clear view, and the cicadas hissed all around them like steam escaping, and mosquitoes shrieked and stopped. Mam Anna liked to smoke a snuff-pipe, and her girls huddled around her to catch a whiff of the patchouli and lavender scent of it. ‘What do they have?’ Man Anna said. ‘We’ve the bellies to grow kids, and they have not. They sit around all day soaking sun, and drinking at the trough, and going through the field looking for bugs. And apart from that they have nothing, but talk, and all they talk about is us. You could feel sorry for them.’

  ‘Or,’ said Petal, ‘maybe not.’

  The worst happened within her first month. A young man called Adel Bary and another called Oma, ambushed Issa one afternoon, in a shallow, dusty valley south of the village – it was called Road Valley, although Issa couldn’t see evidence of any road. She was individually taller than either of these men, and had it been one-on-one she would probably have fought any of the men off. But together they were able to overpower her by dint of leaping on her and bowling her over. When she was down, they rolled her over. They pulled her arms over her head, and Oma sat on them, hooting in her ear and keeping her still by punching the back of her head. He had a pebble concealed in his fist, which made blows very painful. Adel Bary, meanwhile, yanked her trousers off, and slid his right arm under her belly to pull her hips upward. It took him a number of clumsy stabs with his member, jabbing her leg, or the dirt, or her ass, before he got inside her; and then almost at once he did a ridiculous male epileptic seizure performance, a bird-rapid thrusting and lots of gasping. It was over. Then the two men ran off. Issa didn’t know why Oma hadn’t taken his advantage also. Maybe they’d been interrupted, or maybe they’d been afraid of being interrupted, or maybe their high spirits had just bubbled over into flight. It seemed to Issa that she lay there dirt-dazed for a very long time. It took a deal of energy and coordination to retrieve her trousers and draw them up over her trembling legs. She would not have thought it possible that the sun could have seemed brighter than it did before the attack; but somehow it did. Its glare was acid. A palpable pressure of dry heat. But here was Mam Anna, squatting beside her with a plastic beaker of water.

  Adel Bary was only the second man she had been with.

  But it was the aftermath of this experience that was most instructive. So, Mam Anna sent four girls, and a blade, and they grabbed Adel Bary behind the nettlefield. All the rest they girls come to watch. Mosa and Atene held him down, and Petal grabbed hair and hacked shreds off with her knife. How Adel Bary wailed! He was, Mam Anna said, like any toddler. But his wails lost force soon enough, he was sobbing more than anything, and his whole body shook with feverish little sobs. Petal had the biggest knife, and she cut at his hair, and cut, and left him with nothing but a few tufts, and a scratched and bloody scalp.

  After that Adel Bary went to beg hard food from Abda, to tide him over till his hair grew again. And Abda called Mam Anna to come tell him what occurred, so Mam Anna went up, with a hipsway in her step that the girls could read for confidence. She was there half an hour, and at the end of it Abda himself had been persuaded that justice had to be done. The girls gossiped about what lewd thing or things she had done for Abda; or whether the power of her rhetoric had been enough. Then Abda had two of his gunmen grab the boys, to contribute his display of public justice to proceedings. He liked to do this, every now and then, just to remind people who was in charge. First Oma, although he was let off lightly. Lev, one of Abda’s right-hand men, cut the soles of his feet with a knife. But Adel Bary was punished properly: bound with cord so that his elbows touched behind his back, the last of his hair was shaved clean. He wept piteously whilst this went on, and afterwards he was cut loose to wander the village. How freakish he looked, bald and teary-faced! But his former friends knew better than to associate with him. He tried begging for hard food with everyone. He must have understood this was long odds, longer than hope. But he tried it nevertheless. What else could he do? One strange thing was that he came to Issa first of all, weeping, not apologizing for what he had done to her, but trying to sell her an incoherent plan that she could seduce one of the gunmen in return for just enough hard food to keep him alive till his hair grew back. Issa felt no particular anger as far as Adel Bary was concerned, and neither was she aware of any internal callousness, or any of the satisfactions of revenge. But she felt a complete disconnection between him and her. The idea that she would work to keep him alive was not outrageous so much as it was baffling. At any rate, he gave up bothering her, after a while. By the end of the week he was so weak that he could hardly walk without staggering. He left the village anyway. ‘He should have walked away as soon as he was shaved,’ was Mam Anna’s opinion. But Issa knew why he hadn’t; because his mind was perfectly empty of where he was going to go. A bald man, absolutely poor, trekking the friendless road.

  ‘Don’t pity him, no,’ said Mam Anna. ‘Pity is a scarce resource. You hoard it, girl, keep it for your later.’

  And not all the men were as bad as Adel Bary. Rageh, for instance, who didn’t lounge about with the other men, and didn’t join the huddle. The other men mostly talked, or else played cardgames with greasy plastic cards.— Creased and seamed items, these, despite the UNCREASABLE! boast-logo printed on the back of each. Rageh wasn’t part of that crowd. He preferred going off by himself, liked to spend time observing the world. Round to the north of the village, behind Abda’s compound, a hefty metal tether had been set in the rock of Beard Height. This was where the blimps were tied. They leaked a little, because everything in the world leaked a little and nothing was absolutely tight; but that meant that the fields here were woman-high with weed. Wild rhubarb, bolted, extruded-looking, white as picked-bones curling in amongst masses of dark green nettles. Rageh told Issa that, no question, this was where the best bugs were to be found. Since it was impossible to penetrate the thicket, Issa had to take this on trust. There were certainly many flies – too man
y for Issa’s comfort, really. The thicket, and the sewage tunnel that didn’t go anywhere half-set into the downslope of the hill, were the worst place for flies. Switzer had somehow obtained tomato seeds – tomato the most beautiful food God ever put on the planet, red as strawberries but more luscious, the original fruit of sin of the Garden of Eden she claimed, which led Issa to believe that she’d never actually tasted tomatoes. She had tried sowing them in at the open half-pipe of this sewer. But they had not prospered. Switzer had pulled the weeds clear to give the tomato seeds a chance, but the weeds had grown back too quickly and choked them. Or else the seeds had been duds. That was very possible too. Tomatoes remained an abstract and imaginary food.

  She kissed Rageh. Oh he wanted to do sexual things, naturally enough; but she was clear that she didn’t, yet, and he was ruled by her. Nevertheless it was an interesting thing to kiss him: kissing mouth to mouth, for long long stretches of time, kissing until her lips went numb. They liked to go behind the shrine, down amongst the grass there, and lie together, innocent as Adam and Eve. If Adam and Eve had ever been innocent.