By Light Alone

by Adam Roberts

  Galla, one of Abda’s house women, came through eventually and wrapped her in an old poncho with the Olympic logo on it. She led her out of the bedroom and took her downstairs to a basement. The bottom layer of the house, underground, where no sunlight ever penetrated: a barren set of rooms. ‘He’s a fury,’ she said, quietly. ‘What did you do to him?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Issa wept. ‘I honestly don’t know. I genuinely don’t know.’

  ‘Did you bite him? He had a girl once called Elen, she had a epileptic condition. One day: sucking his cock, had a fit, bit him. There was no blood, but I’ll tell you what he did. He laid her on the bed until her fit passed, and then he beat her hard on the skull, beat her so hard he got bits of skin with hair on between his knuckles. I saw it! She went simple after that beating.’

  This story might have fuelled Issa’s hysteria; but instead, fire fighting fire, it quelled it. She felt calmer. ‘Will he beat me? How will he punish me?’

  ‘I don’t know what you did, lover-child.’

  ‘I don’t know either.’

  ‘How did it happen? Wait—’ She put her handsome head on one side, listening to the above stairs. The sound of commotion, muffled, from above. ‘Wait – there’s yelling. I’ll be back in a peck.’ She went out. The door banged shut, and a moment later it clucked to itself. Issa didn’t bother checking; she knew it was locked. So she wrapped the poncho around her, and lay on the narrow bed. The aircompressor motor was down in the room with her, making its continual slow drum-machine chug, and eventually she fell asleep to its shushing.

  She woke as the doorlock was unsnibbed. Galla was back, with another one of Abda’s women: Dani. Both looked very sombre. ‘Tell me exactly, as exactly as you know, what happened,’ Gallas said.

  ‘He was having me from behind,’ said Issa, matter-of-factly, her voice still blurry with sleep, her mind not entirely logged-on. ‘Then, sudden, he wailed aloud, and kept wailing.’

  ‘You’ve got something up there?’

  ‘Up there?’ said Issa, thinking this a reference to the topography of the house.

  ‘Up,’ said Dani, patiently. ‘There.’

  ‘Mam Anna put in a length of hard plastic,’ said Issa.

  ‘Lie down, my dear,’ said Galla. ‘No, on your back. Yes, I’m going to have a feel up there.’ She wore no glove, and used no lubricant, so it was indeed an uncomfortable examination. But the physical discomfort took Issa’s mind off its anxious dread. It woke her up too, and as she lay there she regretted telling them about Mam Anna. She shouldn’t have mentioned her name. She could have said she put it up herself on her own. Of course, there was nothing they could do about it now.

  Galla had her whole hand up Issa, and was pulling the face of somebody pondering a philosophical conundrum. Then the expression changed, and she got hold of the device and drew it out in one single movement. ‘He pranged his cock on that,’ said Dani. She sniggered. Then she stopped.

  ‘Maybe it came a little loose from the inner skin,’ said Galla, judiciously. ‘Or maybe it was just the angle, and the depth of his penetration. But he surely caught himself hard on it, on his most tender place.’

  Issa had pulled herself up sat on the narrow bed, trying to braid her left leg around her right. More than the discomfort, and the lingering ache, she felt a new and horrible sense of diminishment. It was to do with being so horribly opened up.

  ‘His rage has altered,’ Galla said, wrapping the plastic device in a piece of plastic cloth. ‘It’s gone cold. That isn’t good for any of us.’

  ‘Dangerous times can be opportune for ambitious people,’ said Issa.

  Dani looked astonished that Issa had uttered this sentence. But Galla said nothing to this. She looked hard at Issa, and then went out. ‘I think,’ said Dani, following, ‘that she was expecting sorry.’

  The door shut with a slap and the lock clucked again. But only a few minutes passed before it was opened again, and Gallas came back in. Then she and Dani brought Issa out of the room. The bare soles of her feet slapped on the ascending stairway. She came before Abda, in the main hall, where he was sitting upon a big metal chair. All the house workers had assembled, the children as well. Lev was there of course; with his gun in his hand. The two dogs lay with their chins on their paws. There was murmuring in the room, but it stopped when Issa was brought in.

  The windows were sheened pale with dawn. One fly, alone out of the whole kingdom of his kind, was terribly excited by the window pane. The creature danced upon it. It swerved away only to rush back to do his lucky-strike prospector jig once more.

  ‘This is a wake-up,’ Abda said, as soon as Issa was standing in front of him. ‘A wake-up for me, and all.’

  Issa didn’t know where to stand. Lev was standing just to Abda’s right, and holding a long-barrelled gun. Kemel, one of Abda’s other musclemen, stood behind the chair, his clothes tight as a scabbard on a sword.

  ‘Mam Anna had no business fitting you with one of those,’ Abda said. ‘I bought you, didn’t I?’ He leant forward at this question, and Issa understood that he expected an answer.

  ‘I guess you did,’ she said.

  ‘Nobody else bought you, no? It was just me.’ He wanted an answer to this, too; but at this point Mam Anna was brought in. She came into the room with her slow swagger, moving weight from hip to hip. Hers the walk of a person aware of their own strength and heft. But Lev put a gun on her and some of her confidence fell away, and when Abda started talking she began to shiver with her own fear.

  ‘You put a plastic stick up this girl’s twat?’

  ‘Abda!’ she said.

  ‘I know you did. It sliced my meat across. My cockend look like a fucking screwdriver now, you cunts.’ There was some sniggering at this, from his men, though it dried up when he looked round in fury.

  Issa, even standing behind her, could see Mam Anna summoning her courage. She was tall and strong, and she had courage to match. Her shivers left her. She straightened her spine. ‘On account of your cock being too big, though, Waali,’ she told him. ‘You think I’m the one not knowing it? Think it again. You wave it about, you’re going to knock stars off heaven.’ Abda did not smile. ‘Some those stars got sharp edges, too,’ she added, looking round the crowd.

  Everybody was silent and still.

  Abda said: ‘This girl ask for the plastic stick?’

  ‘Her? This child doesn’t know.’

  ‘What doesn’t she know?’

  ‘She does not know anything about anything.’

  ‘You sure, now, Mam Anna?’ said Abda leaning forward. ‘If it was your idea, I must punish you. But if it was her idea, then maybe it goes different?’

  At this Kemel stepped out holding plastic cuffs. Mam Anna started to shiver again. ‘You really that angry about a little nick on your little cock, Abda?’ she said.

  ‘You know that’s not it,’ Abda said. And Kemel cuffed her wrists behind her back, and, pressing on her shoulders, made her kneel down. ‘You did it to steal children from me,’ said Abda. ‘That’s the crime. That’s for-why you need punishing. For stealing from me.’

  Mam Anna, when she spoke, had a different tone in her voice now. It was wheedling, ‘But, now, you got lots of children already, Abda.’

  ‘Oho?’ he bellowed. And everybody flinched. Every single person in the room. ‘You say so?’ Nobody moved. The pause button had been applied to the image. ‘I’ve been too soft on everybody, it seems. I’ve been too soft. You think I wouldn’t find this out ? Look at my kids—’ And he flung his arm out to the right. The youngsters cowered at the vehemence of the gesture. ‘Fucking sprats, the lot. This girl, this Issa, she’s a big strong girl, she’ll give me some big strong kids. You don’t have the right to steal those from me.’

  ‘Pama turned out OK,’ said Mam Anna. ‘He’s a good son to you.’

  ‘He’s had ten years away from the village to make it, and I hear nothing about him but drinking and fucking and gambling my money,’ yelled A
bda. His face had changed colour. ‘Pama? You bear me one son, Anna, and think I’m going go on my knees to you in gratitude? What ever else you do me but daughters? And I’ve been too too soft on you, and too soft on the whole town. I’ve let you get away with too much.’

  ‘Don’t shave my head,’ said Mam Anna, her voice all woe now, and the tears dripping (Issa could see) from her cheeks and chin. ‘I’m asking on my knees, don’t shave my head, Abda. Don’t make me beg scraps.’

  ‘You think I shouldn’t punish you?’ Abda said, his voice dropping in volume. ‘You think I shouldn’t get a grip on this town again?’

  ‘Punish me, maybe – but not the bald head.’

  Abda sat back, and sucked a long breath in, and then let it out. ‘I won’t take your hair off,’ he said. ‘You can keep your hair.’

  He nodded at Kemel, and the big man took a grip of the hair on the top of Mam Anna’s head, and then with his other hand took a fistful of the long hair, behind her back. Then, though a big man, he trotted, danced about her. He drew the hair all the way round her neck, and she was pulled to the side and overbalanced. Unable to steady herself with her hands she fell, but she did not smack the floor, because Kemel had twisted the rope of her own hair around her neck. She made a noise like ocsh, and ocsh. Her face blushed with the shame of not being able to breathe. Kemel’s hold slipped, and then Mam Anna’s shoulder hit the floor. He tried to twist the hair into a rope as she struggled, and kept losing his hold of it. ‘Do it,’ said Abda, in a loud voice. ‘Why you waiting?’

  ‘Hard to grip it, boss,’ grunted Kemel.

  Lev stepped forward, the barrel of his gun resting into the crook of his left elbow.

  ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ Abda snapped.

  ‘I’ll finish it,’ said Lev.

  ‘Wait,’ croaked Anna, hauling herself over onto her back. ‘Wait, Abda.’

  ‘I’m not happy about this, Anna, killing you and all,’ said Abda, without looking at her. ‘But what choice do I have? You’ve been undermining me. It’s my authority that’s in question.’

  ‘No,’ Anna gasped. Her eyeballs had grown a little bigger, so as to block off the tear ducts, or else she would surely have wept. ‘Never undermined you.’

  ‘Of course you have. I’m not an idiot.’

  Kemel was trying to hook a rope of twisted hair under her chin, and she was resisting him by pressing her chin into her chest. With a goat-nimble little leap, Abda was out of his chair; he went down upon one knee beside the prone woman. He batted Kemel away. ‘In a sense,’ he said, confidentially – although the whole packed room could hear. ‘In a sense it is unfair. Because I knew, and didn’t care! Maybe I encouraged it, even, because you kept the women in line, and that kept the men in line. I was happy the village was running nicely. All I wanted was a peaceful life, and the chance to grow my family. That’s not too much, is it? But now look at where we are! You wanted power, that’s all.’

  ‘No,’ gasped Anna, pleadingly, raspingly.

  ‘Sure you did! Oh, I don’t blame you for it. You accumulated yourself a little bit of power here, and a little bit of power there – that’s natural. That’s natural to humanity. But a body can only have one head. And this place can only have one Waali. And that’s the lesson, my friend. Come: if you eat power, you shit death. That’s all.’

  Issa’s voice came back to her. She couldn’t have said where it had gone, all this time. ‘Don’t do this,’ she said.

  Abda ignored her. Or perhaps she hadn’t spoken at all. The theatre of it. She might have expected her pulse to be hurrying, her heart lolloping faster, but in fact a weird calm had frozen her innards. None of it was real. Everything was a lie. She had tumbled out of the paradise of tall towers and sunshine, the Eden of which all children are aware, just behind their backs, in the blindspot no amount of spinning around will disclose. The intimations place. The light of setting suns. Perhaps she had only thought to speak and hadn’t got the words out. So she drew in a breath. ‘Don’t do this,’ she said, stepping forward, putting volume into the words. How to make a world: speak it, with enough conviction. ‘Don’t.’

  Kemel stepped in front of her and put his hand out, with a casual gesture. His palm jarred onto the bone of her forehead like a bolt-gun. She reeled back. There was a mortar blast and pain in her head. There was a flapping sheet of light inside her eyes. She stumbled against something behind her, and the collision tipped her over, and without any great sense of her orientation in the largest scheme of things. She leant her shoulder up against the wall, except that it wasn’t the wall, for she was lying on her side on the floor.

  There were hands upon her. They lifted her and carried her through to the terrace of the house. Migraine lights flickered inside her eyes. The air tasted cool and sweet. The early morning sky was syrupy with light, yellow and jam-red with milky spills and patches. She lay on the ground until her head stopped throbbing, and then she sat up. Presently she got up, and went down to the water trough to wash her face and drink a little. The sun was like a hole in the sky from another dimension altogether.

  Later that day there was a deal of shouting on the out-road; Abda down with Lev and Kemel, shaking up the men, scattering their playcards, beating whoever they could land a blow on. Some of the women went down to spectate, but Issa just lay in the sun. She ate the sun. Her belly had got used to food, and that meant that it burned a little flame of hunger, a soreness in the core of her. But she relished her hunger. It was truly hers.

  In the afternoon there was another commotion. Kemel had Rageh by the wrist, and was trying to haul him up the hill. ‘It’s not true,’ the lad was wailing. Despite being by a good deal the smaller of the two, Rageh’s desperate writhing was making it hard for Kemel to move him. ‘I never touched her.’ ‘You’re coming along with me,’ Kemel grunted. ‘She never let me!’ Rageh cried. ‘You’re to come,’ Kemel said, heaving him on, ‘with me.’

  Eventually Rageh was brought up to the house and disappeared inside. Issa watched in a sort of torpor. Silence settled again. Two birds, very high up, moved in an oval path round and round the crown of the hill. The cicadas were the sound of the scrub scratching an endless itch. Issa dozed. A loud snapping sound woke her up.

  She knew what it was. She didn’t want to think what it was.

  She took a long drink at the water trough. The enemy was lassitude. She knew that. But it was hard to rouse herself. The stick-snap that had woken her. She knew what that had been. And there was Lev, strolling about the village with a grave look upon his face, holding his gun in his right hand, resting the long barrel in the crook of his left elbow. He carried it that way. That was his look. Except immediately after he discharged it, when the barrel was too hot to rest there.

  Preacher came and talked with her; but there was something different about him to the way he had been before. The playacting was gone. He asked how she was doing, and her reply was to look through him as if he were a man-shaped portal into somewhere else. ‘It’s tough,’ said Preacher. ‘He’s been King Log. Now our risk: he’ll get a taste for being King Stork.’ He was Abda, of course; but she didn’t know about Logs and Storks and what all that meant. ‘Neocles teaches that there’s a gift that undoes the logic of giving,’ the Preacher went on. ‘It’s a mystic gift, a magic gift, and once given nobody is in debt to anybody else ever again.’ Perhaps this was offered by way of consolation, but Issa didn’t see how that was supposed to work.

  It took a palpable effort in her to get the words out, but she asked: ‘What did they want with Rageh?’

  ‘A kissing thing,’ said Preacher, looking at the sky.

  ‘It was all we ever did,’ said Issa, with a great weight of tears behind the words, somehow managing to hold them off.

  ‘That’s what he kept telling them. But Abda – he has a point to make, now. So to prove his point, they made him kiss Lev’s gun.’

  The stem grows straight until it is snapped.

  This made Issa withdraw f
or awhile. She still lacked the energy to move physically away, but she blocked out the Preacher’s words and lay still, supine, letting the sun feed her and put sugar in her blood.

  The Preacher talked at her, for a bit. ‘I come down from Denmark,’ he said. ‘Nobody ever ask where I come from, or why I speak funny, but there you go. I never tell body else, until you, but there you go. It don’t matter. I come through Europe, and down to Black Sea – many adventures. But you don’t want to hear the adventures.’

  She didn’t say anything.

  ‘The thing about God,’ said the Preacher, ‘is that He only interested in those who eat and drink. That’s in the Bible. After all. You got to eat and drink to please God. That’s the Bible. Drink his wine and eat his bread. But this is what happen: mankind got too numerous, and then there was a choice. The choice was: humanity could die in famine and go to God, or it could use its clever to save itself, and never eat no more, and leave God behind. It chose the latter. That’s why we’re here. That’s why things are the way they are. Now Neocles, maybe he set up a new god. A foodless, breadless, unwined god. But maybe he never found his time to do that.’

  Later Preacher said: ‘You beware revenge, Issa, you know?’

  That word woke her up, at least a little.

  ‘I know you’re going to want to revenge, and to hurt Abda, and his people. That’s natural. But you must not. Whatever they crimes, you must not. You know why you must not?’

  She looked at him.

  ‘You must not,’ he said, ‘because you don’t know how. I don’t say it be wrong – it’s not wrong. But you need to know how to do it, and you don’t know how to do it. You maybe try to stab him, say, and miss, or scratch him. Then he’d snuff you out. How would that help anything?’