By Light Alone

by Adam Roberts

  ‘Me a Boss? The idea! My sweet flower, I have this Fwn to put an end to Waalis.’ He put it away again. ‘So, you, you don’t know anything about a fire?’

  ‘I used to have a Fwn,’ said Issa.

  ‘Oho, you were a Waali, is it?’

  ‘When I was younger, I lived in a town where everybody had them.’

  Pal started up his conniption-fit silent laugh at this fantastika, and Issa blushed and grew quiet. ‘Well,’ she said, getting up again. ‘Where are we taking this cow, then?’

  ‘Not far now,’ said Coco. ‘That ledge, and over.’

  ‘Over?’

  ‘Sure. Live cow won’t do us any good. Live cow can be tag-traced. Dead cow, all chopped up – well that can be traced, too, but who’s going to the bother of tag-tracing a stringy old burger? Come on.’ He stretched his arms, and groaned. ‘If we lived on hard food, we’d have the energy for continuous physical exercise,’ he said. ‘Like the workers of the golden age. They were strong as He-Man, and could work without respite all day and all night like Prometheus! Heliophages like us are puny by comparison.’

  Issa didn’t know the word, but didn’t ask what it meant. ‘Come on, then,’ she said.

  So they ran at the cow again, disturbing its placid standing-around once again. They slapped it, and shrieked at it, and got it moving. Pal threw flints at it. He had a knack for finding sharp-edged stones that, evidently, really stung the big beast. The idiot-savant look of its bovine eye took on a long-suffering look of accusation. After the third or fourth strike, Cow kicked both his back legs up like a double-punch, and lurched towards a line of low bushes. Issa didn’t realize that this line marked the edge of a precipice until the beast dropped suddenly, its wide chest giving the rim an audible knock. The cow mooed, struggled, its back legs danced up again. Issa was struck, as if for the first time, by the shape of those legs: the chunk of muscle at the top, the walking-stick-tip of the hoofs, the crick in the line of the leg like a knight’s move in chess. Then the whole creature toppled forward and slid from view. Holloing with joy, Coco rushed forward; Pal too. Issa came more gingerly, still clutching her bag. Peering over the lip made a tingle go all through her torso, and filled her stomach with prickles of dread. It was a long way down, not sheer but hideously steep, and the cow’s passage had left a visible trail. At the bottom Issa could see two individuals pushing a handcart up towards the beast’s carcass.

  ‘Straight down? Round there, I think,’ said Coco. He set off immediately, twenty metres along the cliff edge and down into a gully – still so steep that he slid down on his backside amongst a fuzz of dislodged grit. Pal went after, and Issa, despite misgivings, didn’t feel she could stay behind. Getting down was alarming, but soon enough she was there.

  Coco introduced her to the two pulling the handcart: women both, one called Issa (like her), the other a bindimarked old woman, her skin tan brown and wrinkly as bark, called Sudhir. She seemed to be in charge. ‘Your name?’

  ‘Issa,’ said Issa.

  ‘Her name is Issa,’ said Sudhir. ‘Try again.’

  ‘It’s a coincidence that her name is Issa. Because my name is Issa also. It’s not an uncommon name.’

  ‘Not good enough,’ said Sudhir. Issa did not understand her suspicious hostility. ‘Pick another name.’

  ‘Leah,’ said Issa. It was out before she had time to think of it. And once she had said it, she felt a rush of shame to her chest and face, a feeling that she had, with horrible finality, somehow blasphemed.

  Sudhir glared at her.

  ‘She’s OK,’ said Coco, stepping forward. ‘She shared her water with us.’

  ‘Did she share her private parts with you too?’

  ‘No!’ said Coco, wrongfooted. ‘It’s not like that. I just think she’s a good kid. We could use her.’

  ‘And you just happened to bump into her, up on the high ground?’

  ‘You have trust issues, Sudhir,’ said Coco, chuckling. ‘She’s fine. She can come with us.’

  ‘I don’t know if I want to go with you,’ said Issa.

  ‘That’s a little better,’ snapped Sudhir. ‘But still lame. Go back to your espionage master and tell him to train you up better.’

  ‘I’m no spy!’ said Issa, surprised how shocked she was by the accusation.

  ‘You’re no spy, but you share water with my people unbidden and you’re not sure of your own name. Go on, fuck off.’ The other Issa had strung a rope harness around the cow carcass, and now the three others joined her in order to haul the beat onto the handcart. Issa had no energy in her body at all. She watched, silently.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Coco, once this task had been performed. ‘Sudhir’s the cadre leader. Maybe in another life! For you are very pretty.’

  ‘Where shall I go?’ Issa asked. It felt like some supporting strut, vital to the integrity of her inner world, had cracked and sagged. She didn’t know what, or why. It surely was not that these strangers, having been friendly, were now shunning her. It could hardly be anything so trivial. But what else could it be? She felt ready to cry. She no longer felt like a brave traveller, heading out alone along an inviting path. She felt like an abandoned kid.

  The four were pulling shoulder harnesses on, preparatory to heaving the cow away. ‘Wait,’ Issa said. ‘Don’t leave me.’

  ‘Fuck off, kid,’ grunted her namesake.

  ‘Where will I go?’

  ‘Find a spring in the mountains and live off water and sunlight,’ was Sudhir’s advice.

  ‘Longlake is just down there,’ said Coco, pointing. When Sudhir, in harness next to him, slapped the back of his head he said: ‘What! What? We can’t stop her from going to Longlake, surely.’

  ‘Go straight on to Trabzon, why don’t you,’ said Sudhir, not looking at her. ‘Blag yourself onto somebody’s raft, and try sealife. Just don’t pester me again, or I’ll fucking rip your hair out, fistful by fistful.’ She yelled a mark, and all four of them pulled together. Issa was trembling, she didn’t know why. She sat down on the gravelly dirt and watched the handcart haul down the track and round the bend.

  The sun went down over the screeslope and the flank of the hills. Something – the sunset or some other panic – threw into the sky the loose stones of many birds. They made the friction-noises with their beaks. After flocking, and circling, they eventually settled again.

  It got cool in the valley, and then cold. Issa was torpid. This was solitude. Only one bird remained, and this was not a real bird, this was a metaphorical bird. Its name was misery and it nested down for the night, inside her breast.

  Issa buried herself as best she could into a bank of bushes. The leaves were scratchy, but after some wriggling she got comfortable enough. Then, sipping a little from her water bottle, and just lying there, she fell asleep. She woke with the cold, fell asleep again. Woke, dozed, woke. At some point in the midst of all this she had a conversation with herself. ‘Where will I go?’ she had asked the others. Sudhir had said: To Trabzon, to sea, to oblivion for all I care. She asked herself the same question. Where will I go?

  New York.

  What is New York?

  I don’t know.

  How do I get there?

  I don’t know.

  Where am I now?

  I don’t know.

  She drifted into a state between waking and sleeping where the mantra throbbed in her mind I have nothing I am nowhere, I have nothing I am nowhere. She was woken by a mountain hare, sniffing at her face. When she opened her eyes, and gasped, the creature leapt backwards with a scuffle of grit and was gone.

  She extricated herself from the hedge. It was very early in the morning, the sky pale but the sun not yet visible over the tops of the hills. She was shivering with cold, and no matter how hard she rubbed her arms and legs she couldn’t seem to get any warmth into them. She needed to get up and move around, but a massive inertia, deep inside her bones, prevented her. She could not move. She lacked all energy. ‘Perhaps if I open th
e tin of beer in the bag I am carrying,’ she thought, ‘and drank it. Perhaps it would work like hard food, and give me the energy to get up and go.’ But she knew that on three days of empty stomach the beer would go down and come straight back up again. With a monumental effort she got halfway to her feet, moved into a more open spot and sat on the ground.

  The sun would come over the lip of the valley soon enough.

  She looked up. The moon, almost full, was visible with preternatural clarity against the early day sky. It looked imprinted upon the blue like a seal of official authentication for the sky.

  She watched.

  The line of sunlight moved down the mountainside, slow, slow, superslow. Issa’s shivers had subsided. She watched the coming of the light with a mix of feelings. At first she was aware of impatience: come along, hurry up. Then she fell into a mood of rebuking herself: if only I had stayed on top of the hill, the sun would even now be soaking into my blood. Why did I come down into this valley? What fool’s errand did I think I was on? But, when she looked at the moon, those feelings went away. She began to feel a weird, potent sensation of peace slide into her soul. Before these last few days she had never been alone, not ever, in her life. There had always been somebody with her. It seemed a crowded sort of past. And it seemed to her now that there is nothing fearful in solitude. The moon is a goddess, and this is her song: I have nothing I am nowhere.

  Presently the sun touched Issa’s head. She closed her eyes.

  When she had enough energy she continued walking. She followed the road down out of the valley, and soon enough, with numerous rests, she came to human habitation. The road led down towards a lake, small visible sections of which were bright in the distance. But before Issa came to any buildings, she came upon people. The further down the road she went, the more people there were. Longhairs packed the roadside, or gathered in crowds on the east-facing hillsides – hundreds of them. The sight of so many people was oppressive. Some of them called after her, with questions, or lewd suggestions, but most simply lay there placidly. She passed a few structures: concrete sheds, and some walled spaces, all filled with longhair humanity: all the roofs teeming, all the doorways, longhairs in chairs or prone on the ground, their hair fanned out. Then, suddenly, she was in the town itself. Flat paved roads, buildings on all sides, and some bald-headed people in fine clothes moving jostlingly through the crowd. Turning a corner, Issa came upon a view of the lake – a great perfectly horizontal sheet of water, smooth as plastic, fitting with a pleasing neatness exactly into its slot amongst the hills. Away to the left an island was visible, with two sharptop towers upon it like rockets ready to launch, and a white temple.

  The streets of the town ran down to the water, but the way was blocked by a barricade, with armed guards looking blankly about, or using their rifles as props, seating themselves on the stock and the barrel jammed into the ground. Issa rested on a step – it was in shadow, and so unoccupied – to observe the set-up. There was a gate. Various well-dressed, short-haired or no-haired people came and went, some displaying passes, some simply waving confidently at the guards. At this, the gate was opened and the people passed. Longhairs lounged, and gazed, but none of that kind went through.

  Somebody came and sat next to her. ‘Hello,’ said this stranger. ‘What’s in your bag?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Issa. ‘An empty water bottle. I was hoping to fill it in the lake. It is freshwater, the lake?’

  ‘Good luck with that!’ scoffed the stranger. ‘My name is Roxan.’

  ‘Mine is Issa.’

  ‘Pleased to meet you,’ said Roxan. ‘New here?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, you might get past the barricade: you’re pretty. But you’d have to shave your head.’

  Issa looked at the woman. She was a few years older than herself, with wide-spaced, clever-looking eyes. But her face was quite badly scarred: two long downward lines on the left side, and scuff marks, buckles and weals in the skin on the right. The skin, drawn tightly over the cheekbones, revealed where the bone underneath had been chipped and pocked. It was in Issa’s mind to ask: What happened to you? But that seemed too personal a question for somebody she had only just met. So instead she said: ‘I wouldn’t last very long with a bald head.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  They sat together for a while, watching people come and go. At one point, a policeman came up the hill towards them. He was carrying a long staff, which he used to clear away a dozen or so longhairs lolling on the sunlit side of the street. He spun the stick about his head like a Jedi, clearly very impressed with himself; but the action was nothing more sophisticated than battery – the noise of wood connecting with the stone walls, or with the more yielding heads of the people. Some shunted or shuffled away; some yelled or cried out. After they had all fled, the policeman sauntered back down the hill to the barricade.

  ‘They don’t want us going down to the lake?’

  Roxan ducked her head. ‘Listen, Issa, if you really want to go down to the lake, you can go round the shore. It’s all fenced, to discourage us, of course. But crowds will push the fence over when they get thirsty enough, and you can usually get down to the waterside. They’ll come by soon enough to chase you away, and then you’ll need to be lively enough to dodge the bullets. But you’ve more chance there than here.’

  ‘Why don’t they want us down by the water?’

  ‘Cluttering the space up for the nice people – people with money, and their nice lakeside apartments.’ Roxan ran a forefinger up and down one of the vertical scars in her face. ‘They don’t want us anywhere near here. Don’t want us within a hundred miles of here. They’d like us to fuck off up into the highlands. But there’s no water up there. So we come down here. Every now and again, when the mayor can get hold of a Walker she’ll try and clear the town of all the longhairs. Then there’s lots of shrieking, and some bloodletting. But she can’t get hold of a Walker very often. She has to borrow it from Trabzon.’

  ‘What’s a Walker?’

  Roxan looked hard at the girl. ‘You’re straight off the boat, aren’t you, my truelove? D’you really not know what a Walker is, or are you jesting with me?’

  ‘I don’t see why I’m not allowed to go down to the lakeside!’ said Issa, growing annoyed. ‘By what right do they prevent me?’

  ‘Right.’ said Roxan. ‘Are you for real?’

  ‘I’m only saying.’

  ‘Fair is Spartacist talk.’ This was said guardedly, with Roxan peering closely into Issa’s face. Issa stared back, ingenuously. ‘I’m thirsty,’ she said.

  ‘We’re all thirsty,’ said Roxan. ‘But what can you do?’

  Issa didn’t like the sound of that. After a while she said: ‘I have a tin of beer in my bag.’

  Roxan opened her eyes wide. ‘Where did you get that?’

  ‘Out of a fridge.’ Issa read Roxan’s expression as disbelief, and so brought out the tin to prove her possession of it.

  ‘You’re either very canny or very foolish,’ said Roxan. ‘To show me that.’

  ‘Maybe if I give it to the guards on the gate, there, they’d let me pass?’

  ‘Maybe they’d just take it, and beat you back with a stick.’

  ‘But I would give it to them as a deal,’ Issa explained. ‘The deal would be: I’d give them the tin of beer and in return they’d let me through.’

  ‘Deal,’ repeated Roxan, colourlessly. ‘You actually a holy fool? Or is this some complicated pretence on your part?’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Why should they honour any deal? Particularly with a longhair? Put it this way: if they took the beer from you and then refused to let you through, what could you do?’

  Issa thought about this. ‘I’m being naïve.’

  ‘You’re an odd mix of clever and dumb,’ agreed Roxan. ‘And what about me? You don’t know me. Why wouldn’t I simply take your tin, when you showed it to me?’

  Issa thought about this
, too. ‘I see what you mean. That was naïve of me too. But you didn’t simply steal it from me.’

  ‘No,’ said Roxan.

  ‘Why not?’ Issa asked, simply.

  Roxan put her hands into her hair, and pulled the strands out tight, like zither strings. Then she let it go. ‘You see these scars, here?’ Issa nodded. ‘I’ll tell you about these scars. They mean I have no love for the rich.’

  ‘I think I see,’ said Issa, gravely, although it wasn’t really true.

  ‘Well,’ said Roxan, ‘you have honoured me with your trust. And if it’s the trust of a holy fool, well that’s an even greater honour. It would demean me to betray you. So here’s what I suggest: I know a man called the Nudnik. His name is Sergei, but we call him the Nudnik. He’ll buy the beer from us, I think. And if he gives us a little money, and we can buy a little water – why not? It’s your beer, so it’ll be your money and your water. But perhaps, if you’re truly a holy fool, you’ll share with me.’

  Roxan led Issa up through a series of antique, narrow streets, bent with odd little twists and curves, like rickets. The sunlit side of each street was crammed with longhairs, so they moved through the cool of the shady side. Many of the buildings they passed were fortified, their doors blocked in with metal plates, barcodes of metal rods covering the windows. Most of the other houses were in varying states of dereliction. People thronged the roofs. They passed round a corner and up a staircase of wood so old and crumbly it reminded Issa of biscuit. Through an open door. Inside it was a dark, lengthy room, brushstrokes of sunlight on the floor at the far end where a shuttered window let in a little light. There was hardly any furniture and the place reeked of birdshit. But it was inhabited: for a man with a very strange hairstyle – a great sticky-up crest of hair, like a circle of metal embedded vertically right through his skull – was lying in the corner. Who would wear their hair like that? Neither enough surface area to make for good sun-eating, nor the ostentatiously shaved cranium of the high-status, hard-food man.

  ‘Here’s a girl called Issa,’ said Roxan. ‘Has something to show you.’

  ‘You’re Sergei, then?’ Issa asked.