By Light Alone

by Adam Roberts

  She digested this. It was probably true.

  ‘Keep in your thoughts,’ said Preacher, standing and readying himself to go off. ‘Everything are supposed to be different to the way they are, now. That’s the one thing to keep in your mind at all time.’

  He went. She never saw him again.

  That very evening Galla came to find her. ‘He wants you,’ she said. ‘He wants both of us together.’ She took her by the hand, like a sister, and together they climbed to the big house. ‘It’s just to make point, you know,’ she said. Issa could think of no reason at all why Galla would want to reassure her, but here she was, trying to diminish Issa’s dread. It was almost humane. ‘Like a dog pissing its territorial marker,’ Galla said. ‘Just to – you know.’

  ‘How is his willy?’

  ‘Oh it’s fine. It got a scrape on the end, nothing at all. He wouldn’t be going to stick you with it if it really hurt.’

  Afterwards, when she looked back on her time, Issa might have wished she had decoupled her hand from Galla’s then and there and made a dash for freedom. To have made her stand against passivity, straight off, instead of being chucked into it. Not that the experience with Abda was especially bad; which is to say, it was no worse than any of the previous occasions: she lay, in effect, in Galla’s lap; the other woman wrapped her legs about Issa’s legs, and the two reclined on cushions, whilst Abda brought his bull-weight to bear on them both. His cock went up her hard, for as Galla had said he was looking to make a point. He came quickly, too, and then he stood back from her, and his member did its little shuddery drawbridge lowering thing. Then he went out, and Galla hugged her a little, and finally she went away too.

  Issa was alone.

  She lay on the bed, and thought about things. Or she didn’t think about things. It was exactly the same. Finally she had a sort of vision, the kind that comes to a person halfway between sleeping and awakening. Those stiff, stacked rising polygons, they were buildings. Blocks and square-edged columns, or table legs without a tabletop. Or casino chips balanced high in piles that did not totter. And here was the wide green rectangle in the middle. New York, she thought.

  She got up and made her way through the darkness of the house. One room was full of people drinking, and the light fell out of the open doorway on the floor like a tombstone knocked over. She skirted that. Here was the kitchen, and the door wasn’t locked. Issa went in, and found al-Schawarma drunk as a stone, lying with his flung arm for a pillow on the ceramic flagstones of the floor. His other arm stuck straight out, along the floor, like a salute. An empty bottle lay on the tiles beside him, mocking his posture with its long neck. What was clear to Issa was that this was a special night. Things would not be good after this night. She went through to the back entrance, and it was shut tight, but the key was in its keyhole. It looked as if the lock was smoking a pipe. She turned the key, and opened the door, and there was the night, all its stars, and she thought: each one is a window into a New York apartment. The evening air wobbled with warmth and moisture and the wheezy sound of night insects. To the right, the rocky cranium of Beard hill blocked out a portion of the sky. Down to the left, over the roofs of the chicken house, was one plastered wall, like the ghost of a wall in the light of a quarter-moon. She went down there, and looked, and soon enough she discovered a dufflebag, or pile of old clothes bundled together, or perhaps a heap of earth, that had been left by the wall. Except for a single spread-finger hand that visibly protruded, like a star, it could have been a large bag, or a bundle of clothes. She trit-trotted down to the wall. This one was Mam Anna. Ten metres further along, near where the garden door was, lay another tangle of shadows. That would be Rageh.

  The trick with any big decision is to finesse it. Don’t force it. Turn your face away and the decision has made itself

  She went back into the kitchen, and locked the inner door. Because she had no animus against al-Schawarma, she dragged him by his heels out through to the back, to leave him under the sky. It wasn’t easy, because he was large and she small. But she managed it. Then she went back inside again, wedged a chair under the handle of the door between the kitchen and the hallway, such that anybody coming from the rest of the house into the kitchen would find their way blocked. Then she opened the kitchen windows. She gathered combustible materials and piled them on the stove. She poured cooking oil over them, and laid rags out in several directions. She went to the fridge. It sat there, enormous, sat on a stone shelf. It was like a god, from the old pagan days, humming to itself its holy hum, all day and all night, and all of it pure. Singing of other worlds than these. A utopian drone. She summoned her resolve and pulled on the handle. The great door swung wide, and its seal between warm and cold broke. The timbre of the hum shifted, went down a semitone. Cold air spilled down upon her. This is what the air of heaven will be like. After the baking heat of life heaven will be as cool as a chilled silk cloth drawn over the body. It stands to reason that heaven is a fridge of vast size, to keep souls preserved at their best for eternity. And its waste heat is piped down a silver chute the diameter of the sun, studded with amethysts and sapphires, all the way down to hell. Those souls who are cruel, and murder and despoil must bake for ever in the overspill heat of hell; but those who are good walk in landscape of cool food for ever and for ever: eggs cooked hard with the shells chipped away, the most perfect whiteness. Jars of many colours. Crisp green salad leaves, more perfect than banknotes. Issa would have prayed, if she could remember a prayer. She thought of all the times she had talked with the Preacher; but he never said prayers, and had never taught her any ritual speech.

  She didn’t have too much time. So she pulled out what she was looking for: a litre bottle of water, cold as gemstones to the touch, and with little pure watery carbuncles all around its neck and torso. Then she took two tins of Virgin Beer and a carton of milk. There was a drawer in the corner crammed with old plastic bags, white and orange, the logos scuffed and rubbed to illegibility. She took one of these and put the drinks in it. The handles stretched when she tried to hold it, so she put the bag in another bag, and – for good luck – put that inside a third bag.

  She wondered whether she ought to close the fridge door, or whether it was better to leave it open. She closed it.

  Then she turned the electric cooker ring on, heating the piled combustibles. She took the backdoor key with her, locking up when she was outside. She smelt smoke as she went by the open windows to the wall, but saw no flames. After she’d scrambled up and over the wall, and hopped down the other side, she began to wonder if she hadn’t done it properly. But down the dark road, and looking behind her, she saw a blur of shining orange. Soon enough the shouts and cries of men were carried down the sounding board of the hillside to her. She was out of the village altogether, walking down the road and miles from the house, but she stopped and looked back. By now the fire was clearly visible against the dark sky, red and yellow, orange and tan, like stained glass in motion.

  She walked for a long time, and it felt like an excursion. She walked until the glow of the burning fire was no longer visible behind her. The sun came up. The journey stopped feeling like an excursion and began to feel like a chore. The day was bright, and there was enough sunlight to mean she could walk pretty much continually. But she got worn out anyway, and had to take more rest-stops than she liked, especially through the afternoon. Not as healthy as she might be. The worst of it was the weariness that afflicted her arms. As her arm grew tired from carrying the bag of drinks, she shifted the burden to the other arm; and as that grew tired and she shifted it back. But soon enough both limbs were on fire with fatigue.

  That night she slept at the base of a broken concrete wall, overspread by an intermittent ceiling of leaves. It was an abandoned roadside shrine to Neocles, but the icon was gone, and the shrine as a whole had been allowed to fall into disrepair.

  She dreamed of New York. All the buildings were towering, massy fridges: blocky and sacred. In the dream she wan
dered through deserted streets, and the buildings all around her murmured to themselves.

  The next day dawned clear and grew very hot very quickly: early autumn weather. She started as soon as her hair had warmed up, swinging the plastic sack at her side. The bright blue sky, the wide, hill-rich land. Only cicadas disturbed the silence. She heard a vehicle barrelling down the road from behind her: the noise alerted her a good time before it came into view. Prompted by the sound, Issa wondered if Abda had sent people out looking for her. As soon as she thought how foolish it had been of her not to have thought of it before, she got off the road, and went up into the hills to her right. But the climb was tiring, and she wrung her ankle on an unsteady stone as she climbed, so she couldn’t go on, and was forced to take cover behind a thornbush. The car came through, by and by, and followed the curve of the road downhill with a loud rear-ear-ear noise. Then it was gone. Eventually the quiet settled again, and only the cicadas remained. She listened to the staccato trill for a long time.

  After that she stayed away from the road. But the going was tough on the uneven ground. Her ankle flared with pain whenever she put too much weight on it. She got up the hill, and started off in the general direction of the sea, stopping to take sips from the water bottle when she grew thirsty. Slow, slow and painful. Come nightfall she had to lie down in the open, and it was very cold. Why hadn’t she stolen more clothes from the house? Through the night she dozed, woke, dozed, woke again. In the morning her limbs were stiff and painful. She wanted to get going at once, but she was too sluggish and underpowered to move. Rather than wait for the sun to power her, she decided to drink some of the milk, and use the food energy to go. But when she unscrewed the bottle, it smelt foul. She drank a mouthful, and then forced another mouthful down, but it wasn’t pleasant. As the sun disengaged itself gingerly from the eastern mountain jags, she decided to try the beer instead. Her assumption was that beer was another kind of food drink, like milk. She cracked the lid, as she had seen Abda himself do on many occasions; but instead of giving her access to a drink the whole tin exploded in foam. She screamed and instinctually flung the grenade away. Straightaway she rebuked herself, and crawled after the thing. It had fallen between stones and was pumping foam like cum in gushing spurts. She plucked it from the ground, held it upright, and watched the strange cream of its content subside. Her first sip filled her mouth only with foam; but with the second she got some fluid, bitter and bite-y from the bubbles. She swallowed it, and got a second and a third down. Then, she sat and waited for energy to come to her, idling the time by trying to work out how to replace the ringpull to preserve the rest of the liquid.

  Energy didn’t come. Instead her stomach roiled, and boiled, and soon enough she had vomited out everything she had drunk. The sour milk and beer came scorching back up her throat, but afterwards she felt immediately better with an empty gut.

  She lay in the open, spreading her hair, and feeling very sorry for herself. The nausea went away eventually, and the sun perked her blood a little, and soon she was able to go on her way, limping only a little. She left the milk and the opened beercan behind her; but she took the as yet unopened tin, and washed her mouth with the water.

  She spent all morning climbing a prominence, resting, climbing, and was rewarded at the top with a fine view down to a broad lake. The rim of the waterland was crusted with signs of human habitation. Across the water, in the V of the horizoning hills, she could see through to a glimpse of the sea.

  She was woken up by two men; and she jumped from sleep in a panic, thinking they were from Abda. But they were just wanderers, their long black hair dusty, plastic bags for socks poking up out of fat plastic shoes. One had close-set blue eyes in a wrinkled dark brown face. The other’s face was longer, smoother and darker. ‘Didn’t mean to startle you,’ said blue-eyes.

  ‘You didn’t,’ said Issa, sitting up and clutching her bag to her. ‘I knew you were there.’

  ‘I’m Coco,’ said the first of these men, squatting down with his back to the morning sun and separating the strands of his hair with his right hand. ‘This is – he don’t speak at all, or he hasn’t to me, so I’m not sure of his name. But I call him Pal.’

  ‘Pleased to meet you.’

  ‘You got an accent there, I’d say,’ said Coco.

  ‘Everybody has one, I would imagine,’ said Issa.

  ‘True, true. What’s in the bag?’

  ‘My stuff,’ said Issa.

  ‘We’re not going to rob you,’ said Coco. ‘That’s not what we do.’

  ‘I’m glad.’

  Coco patted her elbow, and pointed. ‘See?’ She looked in the direction of his gesture. A hundred metres distant, standing completely still, was a long-haired cow. ‘It broke from a farmer’s compound over lakeway,’ said Coco. ‘It’s a hairy beast, don’t eat nothing. It’s only the wealthiest farmers can afford to give their animals food – that’s for the luxury market. Makes the meat more tender and delicious, they say. This beast was for the middle classes. You know what middle classes are?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Issa, although if she’d been pressed for a definition she would have had a hard time.

  ‘Merchants and fly-commuters, down in Trabzon. People too proud to realize they’re poor like us.’ Pal made a grunting noise at this, presumably in agreement. ‘Everybody’s as poor as us,’ said Coco. ‘Save only the super-wealthy, and they’re so different they’re hardly human any more. Everybody’s poor as us, only some don’t realize it. People in Trabzon, merchants and fly-commuters – half of them have hair, you know? They could live on the sun like we do. But they take food for the status. Only for the status of it! I could believe, easily, they don’t even like the taste. Light-reared cattle is supposed to be pretty tough and flavourless, see. But they slaves to their status, see.’

  ‘Slaves,’ said Issa. She was feeling her sore ankle with her left hand.

  Coco gave her a canny look. ‘You’ve got it, sister.’

  ‘Why are you after the cow?’

  ‘It’s stupid,’ said Coco, looking at the beast. ‘It don’t need food save sun, but it need water, and it don’t know it. There’s no water here, so soon enough it will die.’

  ‘And then what? Will you eat it?’

  Coco’s laugh was instantaneous. Pal laughed too, belatedly, with chunky little gasps of amusements. ‘Not that! Not I!’

  ‘Why, then?’

  ‘To sell it, of course. For money, of course!’

  ‘Oh,’ she said.

  ‘And where are you going? You’re not a wanderer, I’d say, by the look of you. Village girl, eh?’

  Issa looked at him.

  Coco stood up. ‘It’s crazy to be up in the hills like this, a crazy location for a village girl. You should stay on the road.’

  ‘You’re not on the road,’ she pointed out.

  ‘We’re following the cow!’

  ‘I am about my own business,’ she said. ‘Why are you doing the work, though?’

  ‘Why us? Who else?’

  ‘Women, of course.’

  ‘Oh! We’re not like most men. We’re hard workers! We have a cause.’

  ‘I see.’ Issa got to her feet. Her ankle still hurt. Standing, she was the same height as either of the men.

  ‘Oh you’re tall!’ said Coco. ‘You want to help us? You could definitely help with the cow!’

  ‘OK,’ she said. ‘But my ankle is hurting. I can’t run.’

  ‘Oho!’ said Coco. ‘If we can’t rely on our ankles, then on what can we rely? Is it both your ankles? Ankles, plural?’

  ‘Just the one.’

  ‘You’ll be fine. Come along.’

  The three of them approached the cow. The beast eyed them placidly. From a distance Issa had thought she had a sense of it, but coming closer it loomed much larger than her depth perception had led her to expect. It was, she thought, simply too big for an animal. Why did it need to be so big? ‘Will it bite me?’ she asked.

  ‘You’ve n
ever seen a cow before, that’s obvious,’ said Coco. ‘It won’t bite you. It don’t eat. Look at its hair.’ Pal coughed at this, as though Coco were omitting the truth. But there was something fascinating, to Issa, in the creature: the unhollow heft of it, the unsettling combination of nobility and imbecility in his eyes. The giant folded purses of its outsticking ears. The double curl of its nostrils, branching in two plump arches from its snout like the top of a Greek column.

  Pal danced forward and slapped the beast’s rump, and Coco began hallooing and hallooing, wordlessly. Sluggishly the cow lurched forward and trotted cumbrously away. They followed. If it looked like the cow was going to stop, or when it stumbled on the uneven upward slope, Coco would dance, shrieking and flapping his arms to get the cow to move on. Issa, hauling her bag with her, found it hard to keep up. There was a problem with her energy levels, but she did her best to push through.

  After a while they stopped, and Issa shared her water bottle with the two men. ‘Where are you down from, then?’ Coco asked her. ‘Livera, is it?’

  ‘Is that the village? I don’t know the name of the village.’

  ‘Up the road. They had some trouble, night before last. So I heard.’

  ‘How did you hear that?’

  Coco looked terribly knowing, and winked his eye. ‘That stone?’ He pointed. It looked like a regular stone: grey granite shaped like a two-metre wide bald head, with a ruff of green weeds growing behind and around it. ‘That stone is a door to a magic kingdom. Pull it aside and walk down the stairs to a land of— No, I’m only joking.’ Pal was laughing big, silent guffaws, like a man choking on a fishbone. ‘I have a Fwn,’ said Coco, proudly, with heavy emphasis on the pronoun. He brought out a scuffed, battered old-model device.

  ‘How do you have one of those?’ Issa asked. ‘Are you a Waali?’