By Light Alone

by Adam Roberts

  One day some Spartacist wanderers stopped at the village in their ongoing travels. They soon gathered a crowd down by the roofless fac; mostly men, but some women too who wandered down to see what the fuss was about. Three Spartacists, each taking turns to speak, although one was a much more effective orator than her two fellows. ‘What strength is given to us!’ she cried aloud. ‘More than the rich – our strength is greater than theirs! We can go where we choose! Hunger cannot consume us, as it does the wealthy. We are stronger, and gifted, and pure! So why do we live as slaves?’ Issa’s heart beat faster at this, and little sparks of hope gleamed anew in her mind; but people around her muttered as if the answer were obvious, and Astra, whose two-year-old clung about her neck, walked off in disgust. But the Spartacist woman grew more and more passionate as she went on. ‘We are many, they are few,’ she said. ‘We are strong and they are weak. We can endure, where their life is pitifully contingent! Why do we not simply rid ourselves of them? Join with us, live with us and for us and for the greater cause! Become something bigger than yourself! Rise like lions after slumber! Comrades, the revolution is coming.’

  Bolted nettles, growing behind her, swayed in the breeze, an intense green colour in the bright sunlight. Their shadows trembled and pulsed at her feet.

  Then Abda’s men came down, waving their firearms and hooting at the Spartacists to fuck off. The three of them went away, blithely enough, singing some song in a foreign language about colours and flags – a kindergarten song, perhaps. That afternoon, when the sun was hottest, and Issa’s blood tingled with all the sugars in it, she retreated under Mam Anna’s canvas roof. Several of the women there were talking about the coming revolution; how likely it was, or how unlikely. The visit had stirred the soup, and no mistake. ‘What do you think, Anna?’ Issa asked. ‘When is the revolution coming?’ Mam Anna took the pipe from her mouth and said: ‘I remember Triunion.’ But none of the others knew what this meant, and pestered her to explain. ‘I mean,’ she said, eventually, looking weary, ‘that they tried their revolution not many years ago, in Triunion, which is a place over the Western Sea. These Spartacists, they hoped to kick all the rich and bald out of that place, and they spoke big and grandly about going on from there to seize all the tropics. From Cancer to Capricorn was they slogan. But did – not.’

  ‘What happened?’ ‘What happened?’

  ‘The poor had the bodies, and the voices, and the righteousness. But the rich had the guns. And guns count for more than righteousness, or voice, or body.’ She shut up, then, and when prevailed upon to say more, all she added was: ‘It broke this Spartacus movement, is what it did. Now they’s just a few wanderers and hermits, like those who spoke today, who don’t understand that it is over.’

  The next day Issa went off with Rageh, right round to the far side of the Beard hill, in amongst the bushes of scrub, the two of them kissed. Rageh broke off repeatedly to beg her to touch his manhood, or plead whiningly to let him do it to her, and each time he did so made her laugh more than the time before.

  After the punishment of Adel Bary, Abda took an interest in Issa again. One day Lev poked his big head in under Mam Anna’s canvas ceiling, massy bone sphere and boo-boo eyes, chin and upper lip velvet and shiny half-fuzz cranium. ‘Abda requests the pleasure,’ he said, in his low voice. Issa might almost have thought the ceiling thrummed with his voice, but it was only the hot wind. So she stepped out into the blinding heat of midday. The two of them made their way, walking slowly because it was so parchingly hot, up to the compound. Lev was a man who spoke little, as a rule, and since none of the women in the village knew what he did for sex he was assumed to be gay; although if he had sex with any of the men in the village, they didn’t talk about it. Perhaps he simply did without, although that seemed unlikely.

  But having summoned her Abda had no use for her right away. It was too hot for him and her to be slamming their privates together. So she lolled about in the cool big empty rooms of his house, and did nothing for a long while but watch. She watched people come and go; and some of them stopped to pass words with her, or some of them put their faces in another direction rather than look at her. Abda’s two dogs came over, skinny as furred skeletons, to sniff at her. Their noses were shaped like flitter snouts. Their breath smelt of dust and darkness. Then they were bored with her and away they trotted, one behind the other like a slinky-bodied eight-leg beast.

  After that Abda’s kids came hurtling through into the room, moving as a pack, racing fast despite the heat. They came to crowd about her. The youngest was two year old; the oldest – Nik – old enough to be a man in any other situation, but not in Abda’s house, obviously enough, because Abda was the man in this house. As for Nik: well, Issa could see by looking at him that his main pastime was trying to get a nasty fury properly on the boil inside himself. He leered at her, and then ran off and the kids ran off in a straggly line after him, pied-piper-ish. But ten minutes later he was back, standing over where she was sat, her back at the wall. He just stood there and glared.

  ‘How old are you, anyhow?’ Issa asked.

  ‘My papa has brung you here as a present for me,’ he replied. He pulled down his pants and brought out his thing, starkstiff with lust. He held it at her in his right hand. ‘This going to hurt you hard,’ he promised.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘You won’t forget this in no hurry,’ he said.

  She might have been scared, for he was the Waali’s son, after all. But she didn’t feel it in her to be scared. So she said: ‘That little thing, I’ll hardly notice going in.’

  The other kids laughed, and for a heartbeat Nik laughed too. But then he remembered he was supposed to be mean-at-heart and a killer, so he bit his laugh off and put his young manhood away and spoke all the bad words he could at her. And by speaking them, he worked himself up into something like a rage. So he taunted her with what Adel Bary had done; and she retorted by asking where was Adel Bary now? This got Nik into a bigger tantrum rage, and he started trying to slap and scratch her. She had to jump to her feet and hold him off. He was Abda’s son – not his oldest son, for others, older, were elsewhere about the world – but his son nevertheless, and he had the habit of eating hard food. But she was still taller and stronger than him; and he wasn’t used to being fought back against, so she soon enough got the better of him. She caught his hand and swung him about on the pivot of it. He went hard into the wall, and left a bugsplat of blood on the plaster. Then he sat on the floor for a little, little dribbles, tomato-red, seeping from his nose, and he cried a little.

  Soon enough, he got up and ran away. The other kids did not follow him this time, but lolled about the room with Issa, or wandered off on their own. He came back, of course, this time with Lev, and bearing the accusing finger. But Lev laughed, and called Issa a fine little devilla. So Nik went off in a rage. Issa cared nothing for that. After a while her blood started tingling with hunger in the dimness of the room, so she went up to the roof – by the main stairway, like a houseguest, and no slave – and lay in the sun. There were some splotchy white clouds against the blue, like blots of chewing gum flattened upon a pavement. A year before, and Issa might have wondered why she thought of chewing gum, something she hadn’t seen since she didn’t know when. It was a hard food people bought and ate even though it gave no nutrition at all, the ultimate in conspicuous consumption.

  When the sun drifted listlessly behind the western places and the stars came out like a bright pox, Issa went back inside the house. She could smell food being cooked, and it made her mouth gush. So she joined the scrum of all the folk in the house, the guardsmen and wives, the kids and hangers-on, all trying for a crumb, or a lick. A light bulb snapped out, its filament fusing. It was one of two, and when it went the illumination all fled to the other side of the room, which gave it, somehow, the feel of a space that was tilted. Abda spotted her in the crowd, and came shuffling over in his huge red velvet slippers, and his psilk gown. He put his big hairy hand about
her neck, from the front. ‘You fight with my son?’ he boomed.

  Issa, torn between begging for forgiveness as piteously as she could, and replying with boldface heart, chose the latter. ‘Your son? I took him for your daughter.’

  There was the merest – hup – pause, when nothing happened, and the space allowed in the uprushing fear that he was going to be very angry at this, and was going to squeeze her throat until she choked to death. But then Abda started laughing a proper Jabbahutt laugh. He removed his meaty hand from her neck to pat her on the back. ‘Maybe I didn’t altogether waste the money I spent on you,’ he grumbled. ‘I heard he showed you his stabber, then?’

  She had to work to bring out the smile and the flickering eyelid coyness, because her throat was raw from where he’d gripped it. But she kept her wits. ‘Just the tip of it, unless – no!’ She grinned. ‘Never tell me that’s the whole thing?’

  Again, Abda did the Waali thing, making her wait for an instant before revealing whether he was going to manifest displeasure or pleasure. But then he was laughing again, and bringing her past all the others and through the kitchen door. ‘Have a taste,’ he instructed her, and he dipped the handle-end of the big wooden spoon in the soup, and slipped it into her mouth like a dick. It was scalding heat of it, and she ‘oo-oo-oo’ed, which made Abda laugh louder.

  Later, after he’d eaten, Abda took her back to his big bed and hammered her against the mattress for ten long minutes. She didn’t need to simulate her gasping, for he was so heavy and bore down on her chest so mercilessly that he forced the air out like a bagpiper. Afterwards he rolled off with a pleased look on his face. She took this for a good thing. He lay, face upward, eyes closed, and muttered something for a minute or longer, but not in any language Issa could understand. Then he was asleep.

  She stayed four days and four nights in the house. For most of that time she was in one of Abda’s bedrooms, which wasn’t ideal. The door was locked, nobody thought to bring her any hard food, and she had to lean out of the window to warm her hair in the sun. Each night Abda came to her again. He didn’t want anything too elaborate, sexually speaking: her on top, facing away from him, bouncing up and down so that her bony ass bounced against the swell of his big belly. Or else he got her to lie down, which was a little tricky, because his weight was pretty much smothering. But he finished up soon enough, and then roused himself, slapping his stomach with his big hands. He got al-Schawarma, his cook, to bring up many metal plates of sizzling food, and an extraordinary mess of odours steamed the room. He ate, and drank from a litre plastic bottle of white wine, and filled himself; and he permitted Issa to have little licks of his spoon, but no more. Most of the hard food was like acid upon her tongue, and she had to gulp water. ‘How can you eat this?’ she gasped. She was proper amazed. ‘It is like eating fire.’

  ‘Oh, you’re the fire-eater,’ he laughed. It took a while to understand what he meant. The sun, the sun.

  He fell asleep eventually, his sphere-stomach creaking and burbling like a bathysphere squeezed by abyssal pressures in the deep ocean. Issa dozed at the side of his bed. She had a dream in which the sun spoke to her. It said: I am a fish, the greatest leviathan. It was orange as a goldfish, with a peripheral fringe of flame-shaped fins all about its face. Its voice was like the Preacher’s voice, only echoier. And the sky was as blue as any ocean. ‘You are fire, and how can you be a fish?’ Issa asked the dream. ‘Fire cannot swim through water.’ She looked again, and the fish had the face of Mam Anna, and its passage through the cold waters sheathed it in a great mantle of steam the colour of white gold. I am fire, said the sun. And you eat me.

  Briefly, Issa was the Waali’s new favourite. The bedroom door was no longer locked during the day, and she had the run of the house and roof.

  One morning he chivvied her about her inability to eat any of his previous night’s curry. ‘When you get big with my child,’ he said, ‘you’ll have to get the taste for hard food. Besides, you are too skinny.’

  ‘Skinny as a sunbeam,’ she said.

  ‘You must plump up!’ he declared, gravely.

  And for a week or so she settled into a new rhythm. Rather than hang around the house, where there was nothing to do, she ventured outside. Abda didn’t seem to care. Preacher and Mam Anna were walking up and down in the intermittent sunshine, talking. When she saw Issa, Anna embraced her. ‘How is things?’

  ‘I am the new Waali-wife.’

  Issa told her everything, and didn’t even mind the Preacher loitering, eavesdropping. Mam Anna was pleased for her. ‘I am worried about Nik, though,’ Issa confessed. ‘He has a hatred for me, and he is the Waali’s son, after all.’

  Mam Anna waved this worry as if were flies. ‘He’s a fool. Abda has three older sons, and they are in the world, and they are making their ways. Abda do nothing but despise his son Nik.’

  ‘Children are the only wealth in this world!’ intoned the Preacher.

  Mam Anna slapped him twice to drive him away at this; and settled Issa in the crook of her armpit, as they both lay in the sun. ‘Don’t be fearful of Abda. He may look like a big feller, but he’s the weakest of the Waalies in this part of the world. I been up and down to the sea, with the Blimp, more times than I can recall. You see other Waalis run their villages rather different.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Mam Anna. ‘Look at how Abda leaves all the men just lying about in the sun, or playing cards! Other Waalies take their men into a militia, train them up. To defend the village, or maybe attack another village, or to hire them out as soldiers. But Abda is too lazy to be bothered organizing a militia. He’s too lazy even to order Lev to organize a militia.’

  Issa thought about that. ‘So the village isn’t defended?’

  ‘You’re quick, you’ve a wit,’ said Mam Anna, indulgently; ‘and later you can go over my feet with a wet cloth.’

  ‘So why don’t some nearby Waali come take it, if they’ve a militia and we’ve not?’

  ‘Because Abda’s brother is a minister in the national government,’ said Mam Anna. ‘And all the other Waalis know it. If they try, the government would make a media show of bringing in actual army. So we rub along, and we do rub along.’

  Issa understood: Abda was weak. Of course it was true. But she deduced a different moral from this. Mam Anna thought not only that a weak Waali was one she could manipulate (and so she could), but that this made life more comfortable than it might otherwise be. Issa had a wordless comprehension that a weak Waali was a less stable Waali, more vulnerable to outside pressure, and more capricious in his own power.

  Still, who was she to challenge the authority of Mam Anna?

  For a couple of weeks things went well. She picked up various sorts of tidbits, and her stomach got used to the stretching sensation of having stuff inside it. She got so used to having food in her that on the days when she didn’t get to eat she felt the shards of actual hunger inside her. When Abda came in her mouth she could swallow it down without indigestion. One evening, post-coital, he said to her: ‘You are too skinny. But you’re young, and that makes up for it. Make up some way.’ She was emboldened by this to ask him: ‘How old are you, Abda?’ ‘Sixty,’ he said. ‘Sixty years of age.’ He said it with pride.

  The sun turning over in the sky, day-slow, bending the shadows one way and then another.

  The dogs were drinking out of the water trough: a noise like two men clapping.

  The exhaustless sun.

  But then everything went wrong. It happened in a moment.

  At night, in Abda’s bed: she was on her knees and elbows and Abda was taking her from behind. The irony of it was: she was actually thinking, in that pride-goeth-before way we humans are good at: ‘Better this than him on top, squashing me.’ Although she was only thinking it in an idle sort of way. Abda was pulling himself a long way out and pushing himself a long way in, making the sort of noise that Issa knew meant he was about to come.

  Then he screamed.
He reeled back, pulling entirely out of her, squealing like a braking train.

  She was very scared straight away, wriggling round on the bed to sit, holding her knees to her chest. ‘What have you done, woman?’ he bellowed. He was clutching his manhood, bent over. ‘What have you – have you bitten me?’

  She couldn’t stop herself crying. ‘What? What?’

  ‘What have you done?’

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘By the food of God I’ll burn you on an open fire, you bitch!’ he howled.

  ‘What?’ she wept. ‘What?’

  He hobbled over to sit on the edge of the bed, still clutching himself, and swore at her some more. She could see that his cock was bleeding. ‘Lev!’ he bellowed. ‘Lev!’

  Lev came in, went out, saw what had happened immediately, and went back out for wipes and a bandage. By this point Abda had calmed down, but this made Issa more scared than ever. She clutched herself. She was shivering hard with pure fear. ‘Fuck, the fuck,’ Abda gasped, ‘what the fuck’, and so on, and so forth, as Lev – impassive – tended his cut glans. Right on the end, bisected by the cut to give him a cross design there.

  The whole house was roused by his noise, of course. Al- Schawara brought in a bottle of brandy, and Abda guzzled it like fruit juice. Issa could feel the wall shake behind her naked back as people thumped up and down stairs.

  When Lev had finished, Abda came over and grasped Issa by both shoulders. ‘You cut my flesh, woman,’ he said. ‘On a most delicate place. I cannot forget it.’

  This shocked her out of tears. She went very still, expecting a neck-breaking blow, or a gun to her head. But instead he let go of her and turned his back. He left the room, with Lev behind him. Issa sat on the bed, and started shivering again. It was not cold; in fact it was a very hot night. She clutched her knees to her body. She stared at the wall, at the duckbeak shadow cast by the lampshade upon the plaster, and thought: a shaved head is the least I can expect, here. She tried to anchor her terror in practical considerations. If she were shaved, would she throw herself on Mam Anna’s mercy? Or would she leave the village and try her luck whoring for food down by the sea? But her mind’s grip on practical matters kept slipping. What had happened? How had she hurt him? She could not work out what had happened. She could not see how she had caused this sudden maelstrom of outrage and anger.