by Tim Lebbon
I turn and try to spot the first cart, but it has already been swallowed by the blackness. The grumbling of its wheels sounds like the gurglings of a giant’s insides, issuing from the dark throat of the ravine. I wonder where they are taking the bodies. A breeze sighs through the rows of plants at my back.
It’s the fertiliser, String had said.
The lake of dead bodies; the massacre I had heard and not seen, the terrible twitching of the dying as flies already began to settle on the fresh blood; the sound of wagons that night, a mile or more from where Jade and I had made love and slept.
I feel sick. Not just nausea brought on by the Sickness, but a sickness of the soul. I double up in pain as more tainted blood floods my system. As utter darkness begins to blank out the moon and stars, and the agony recedes into faintness, the last thing I hear is the interminable rumble of the loaded carts being pushed across the stony ground. Again, and again.
vii
Jade is looking down at me. I experience brief but vivid déjà vu. Is Jade my guardian angel? Her face is a mask of concern. As my eyelids flutter open she looks up, beckons someone over. I think the sky is a deep grey colour, but then realise that I am inside one of the tents.
String is there. He looks similarly worried, though is eyes betray something else, a confidence that I find strangely repulsive.
“Jade, I saw ...” I begin, but though I remember espying something terrible, I cannot recall exactly what it was.
“Keep still,” she says, a quiver in her voice, “just lie still. The Sickness almost had you. String gave you the cure. Rubbed it on your chest, your temples, your throat. He thought you might have been too far gone, so he fed you some of it as well.”
“Fed me?”
Jade shrugs apologetically. “A tube, into your stomach. You’ll have a sore throat for a while. You were wandering around in the fruit plantation when I found you, mumbling, calling a woman’s name. You looked like the walking dead.”
Memories begin to force their way into the light. With them come terrible images, and an awful realisation that turns me cold.
“Jade, I saw bodies, hundreds of bodies. They’re using them, storing them.” I am whispering, but as soon as I begin String appears above me again, his hand lowering towards my face. I cry out, certain that he is going to silence me forever, but Jade is holding me down as String places his hand on my forehead. His skin is cool and clammy.
“He’s burning up. It’s a fight, now, between the Sickness and the cure. I hope I got him in time, but sometimes it’s a matter of will. The cure is just the catalyst.”
Faintness clouds my vision, but I bite my lip and try to stay conscious. I have to tell Jade, warn her, make her get away from this place.
“Will you tell him?” I hear her ask. I can imagine her expression, distant and worried, just as she looked when there was more bad stuff for me to know.
“Not yet.” String replies. “Later, when he’s better. Not now.”
“I think he saw something,” Jade whispers.
I sense String looking down at me. “I’ll have words with Tiarnan. Stay with him, Jade. He’s got a fight on his hands.” Footsteps recede into the distance. All I can see is the unremitting greyness above me. “If you need me, ask someone to find me. I have some work to do.”
Jade bends over me again, softly telling me to be quiet, conserve my strength. And although I have some things to tell her, my body forces me to obey her. I drift once more into welcoming unconsciousness.
viii
I feel different. Lighter. As if a weight, both physical and mental, has been lifted from me.
I sit up. I am still in the tent, but alone. The flap moves softly in the breeze.
Again, I wonder whether I’m dreaming. But the bed beneath me, hard and slightly bowed in the centre, feels solid. The air smells good, laden with the scents of cooking. I have a burning thirst and a sore throat. That’s where they put the tube in.
“Jade!” I can hear nothing from outside. Inside I feel changed. I suddenly realise what is different.
I lift the rough cloth shirt I am wearing and look at my chest. The growths are crusted black with leaked blood, looking like shrivelled mushrooms sprouting from dead flesh. But I am not dead. It is the Sickness that is no more, stumped in its tracks, driven from within to shows itself as a crispy, rotten mess on the outside. Displaying its true nature.
Tentatively I lift my hand, suddenly desperate to touch myself there but aware of the pain which will inevitably come with the contact.
“Go on,” Jade says from the entrance. “It’s all right. Touch it. See what happens.”
I look up, all wide eyed and scared. Jade is smiling and the expression suits her. I touch one of the growths with my fingertips, barely brushing it. It feels hard and dry, like an over-cooked sausage. There is no pain, no sensation of contact at all. I touch it again and jump as it falls off and tumbles to the ground. Lying in the dust, it looks like nothing.
Beneath the old growth there is a flash of bright pink skin. New skin.
“It’ll fade to white,” Jade says, moving towards me, tears in her eyes. “What did I tell you? Isn’t he something?”
“I feel different,” I say.
“You’re better. I remember the feeling. You’re just not used to being healthy. It’s cleaned your blood, driven out all the bad stuff. You’re cured, Gabe.” She runs her hand across my chest and the growths come off, sprinkling into my lap and onto the floor like a shower of black hailstones. All I feel is a slight resistance, a tugging at my chest. “You’re beautiful.”
I reach out for her and hold her close, crying, feeling happy and sad and scared all at the same time. “Jade, I saw something terrible.”
She pulls away. “The bodies?”
I nod, struck dumb with surprise.
“Gabe ...” Jade looks away, avoiding my eyes, and I terrify myself by laughing. It reminds me of the soft laugh of Tiarnan’s partner as he dropped the body, but that only makes it harder to stop. I want to hate myself but find I can’t.
“Is this really the last thing, Jade?” I ask through tears of mixed emotion. “Is there anything else after this? Whatever it is I’m going to be told, or see, now?”
She looks at me nervously, shaking her head. “This is just about the biggest, Gabe.”
We stay silent for a while, me waiting for her to talk, Jade sniffing and wiping tears away from her cheeks. She cannot meet my gaze, her hands will not touch me. We are islands separated by a deep sea of knowledge. I am waiting for her to let me take the plunge.
“Right,” she says, standing back and preparing herself. She looks into my eyes. Suddenly, I don’t want to hear what she is going to say. Out of everything possible, any words, that is the last thing I want to hear. Because it is something terrible. “Right,” she says again, wringing her hands. I swing my legs from the bed in readiness to flee the tent, steal the moat-boat and make my escape before she can say any more. But String is standing in the doorway. I pause, my heart thumping inextricably clean blood around my body, but find myself too scared to enjoy the sensation.
“Shall I tell him, Jade?”
She shakes her head. “It’s about time I levelled with him, I think.” I sit back down. Jade steps closer until we are almost touching.
“Gabe, the cure that String gave you is distilled in the presence of the tomb, under the mountain, in the realm of the flight of birds, from the brain fluid of the dead.” She turns away and looks pleadingly at String.
I feel empty, emotionless, a void. I should feel sick, I suppose, but I’ve had far too much of that already. I’m shocked, but somehow not as surprised as perhaps I should be. I feel disgust, but second-hand, as if this is all happening to someone else. “Oh,” is all I can say.
“All things must be made use of, Gabe,” String says, a note of desperation in his voice as if he’s trying to persuade himself as well as me. “It’s a new world. If humanity wants to go and slaughter its
elf, then at least I can bring some small measure of good from it.”
“Did you kill them?” I ask. It seems the most important question to me, the pivotal factor that will enable me to handle what has happened, or not.
“What?” String seems surprised. He could just be buying time.
“Did you kill them? All the dead people I saw last night. Being taken into the mountain. Did you kill them?”
“No.” He looks me in the eye, his gaze unwavering. He smiles grimly, tilts his head to the side. “No. You heard them killed, so Jade tells me. You saw them dying out there, alone, in the heat. We just use the raw material.”
“Brain fluid?” I am filled with a grotesque fascination in what has happened to me, abhorrence countered with a perverse fascination. I wonder briefly how he knows of the cure — how he discovered it — but shove it from my mind like an unwanted guilt.
String nods. “Yes. I won’t tell you the details.”
“Good,” Jade murmurs. “Gabe, come here. Come here.” She throws her arms around me, hugs me to her. I can feel her tears as they drip onto my shoulders, run down my chest. It feels good.
“Are you leaving?” String says.
“Damn right!” I don’t believe I could stay here.
He smiles, and this one touches his eyes. “Good.” He turns away.
“String.” He glances back, squinting either at the sun or in preparation for whatever else I’m going to say. “Thank you.” He nods as he walks away.
Later, Jade and I leave. The moat-boat takes us across the broken glass. I realise that I have never considered what the moat is intended as protection against; now, I do not want to know. I try to avoid standing on the darker patches in the wood, but they are everywhere, and it is almost impossible.
String is nowhere to be seen. Perhaps he is beneath the mountain, beyond the place of books in the cavern that the birds know all about. Brewing.
Tiarnan has had the trike oiled and serviced. This time, on the way back down the mountain, we take it in turns.
* * *
PART FIVE: THE SUBSTANCE OF THINGS
i
“Sometimes, you’ll have to put up with bad things to accept some good,” Della said. “‘There are more things in Heaven and Earth’, and all that. Sometimes, you may not understand how good can come from events so terrible. But there are places we were never meant to see, ideas we were never meant to know. Even if it’s a person doing these things, it’s with blind faith, not pure understanding. Maybe that’s why it’s so special.”
She was in her garden again, stubbornly wheeling herself between fruit bushes, plucking those that were ripe, cleaning the others of the greasy dust that hung constantly in the atmosphere. I was following on behind her, bagging the fruit and wondering what she was going to do with so much. There were only so many pies she could make.
“I can’t see how any good has come of the Ruin. Millions have died. The world’s gone to pot.” I thought of the marks on my chest, slowly growing and expanding. I had still not told her. “Millions more are going to die.”
She looked up at me from her wheelchair. “If you see no good in the Ruin, it’s ‘cause you’re not meant to. Me, I see plenty of good in it.”
“What? What good?”
Della sighed. I wanted to hold her, comfort her, protect her. But I knew I never could. “Look at all that,” she said, indicating the basket of fruit I carried. “I’ll never use all that. A few pies, a tart, a fruit salad. All that’s left will turn brown, decay, collapse in on itself. Then I’ll spread it on the ground and it’ll give new life to the seedlings I plant next year. New from old. Good fruit from bad flesh.” She took a bite from a strawberry, cringed and threw it to the ground. “So, in years to come, when all the mess of the Ruin has cleared up or rotted down, the world’s going to be a much safer place.”
I did not understand what she meant. I still do not understand now. But I like to think she was right.
ii
We arrive back in the town and make straight for the harbour. There is a ship at anchor there, a large transport with paint peeling from its superstructure and no visible emblem or flag of any kind.
“Pirates?” I guess.
“That’s all there are nowadays, I suppose.” Jade has become quiet, withdrawn, but I am uncertain as to the cause. We made the journey from String’s in one go, travelling through the night and keeping a close look-out for roaming gangs of bandits. I’m still not sure whether I believe the cannibal yarn Jade spun when I first arrived here, but I kept my eyes wide open on the way down. Wide, wide open.
I wasn’t about to be eaten after receiving a miracle cure.
“I suppose I could find out where it’s heading.”
“Good idea,” she says. “I’ll try to get us some food.”
There is a subject that we are both skirting around, though I can tell by the air of discomfort that she is as aware of it as I: Where are we going, and are we going together?
iii
“When you’ve got a tough decision to make, don’t beat around the bush. That’ll get nothing sorted, and it’s prevarication that’s partly responsible for the mess the world’s in. Remember years ago, all the talk and good intentions? Farting around, talking about disarmament and cleaning up the atmosphere and helping the environment, while all the time the planet’s getting ready to self-destruct under our feet.”
Della threw another log on the fire, popped the top from a bottle with her teeth and passed it to me, laughing as it foamed over the lip and splashed across her old carpet. It was an Axminster. I wondered what it was like in Axminster now, how many people were living in the carpet factory, whether it was even still there.
“Take that Jade. Now, whatever it is she wants she’s already made up her mind, she’s that type of woman. So why piss around when time’s getting on? Ask her what’s up, tell her what you’re up to. That’ll solve everything.”
She scratched at her stump, drawing blood. Not for the first time I wished I could write down everything she said, record it for future use. But somehow, I thought I’d remember it all the same.
“If there’s a problem there, with you and Jade, it’ll be there whether you confront it now or in a week’s time. Pass me another chicken leg.”
I passed her the plate. She laughed at my retained sense of etiquette. “Manners maketh fuck-all now, Gabe. Faith maketh man. Just you remember.”
iv
I open my eyes, the remnants of a daydream fading away. I wonder how Della could have known about Jade all that time ago. I wonder how she could have known about String. I realise that, in both cases, it was impossible.
Faith maketh man. I certainly have faith. Whether it’s fed from somewhere or I make it myself, I possess it. And it possesses me.
I move away from the bench as I see a uniformed man come down the gangplank from the ship. There is a noisy crowd on the mole, trying to get a glimpse of what is being unloaded from the hold. A few men in army uniforms lounge around, cradling some very unconventional fire-arms. I guess they could wipe out the town within an hour or two with the hardware they’re displaying.
I approach the man, hoping the uniform is not a lie. “Could you tell me where this ship has come from? Where it’s going?”
He spins sharply, hand touching the gun at his belt, but his expression changes when he sees me. Perhaps he thinks I may have some money because I’m a European. I prepare to run when I have to disappoint him.
“Came from Australia. Goes to Europe. Take you home, eh?” He rubs his fingers together and I back away, nodding.
“Hope so.”
Jade is sitting on a wall near a row of looted, burnt shops. She has some fruit, and is surreptitiously nibbling at a chunk of pink meat.
“How did you get that?”
She smiles. “Used my guiles and charm. Made promises I can’t keep. Just hope I never see him again.”
I frown. “Well, maybe it won’t matter.”
“What do you mean?” she says, but I think she knows.
“The ship’s going to Europe. Are you coming with me?” There, right out with it. No beating around the bush. No prevarication.
“No,” she says. I feel myself slumping with sadness. She hands me some meat, but I do not feel hungry. “Have you got someone there?”
I look at her, thinking, trying to decide whether or not I have. “Not as such,” I say. “Not really. I don’t think so.”
“And what does that mean?”
I shrug. “I’ve got faith in someone, but I don’t really think she exists.” If you know someone’s faith, you know their soul. I feel that Jade has always known my soul, and I think I may love her for that.
“I can’t come, Gabe,” she says. “It’s not too bad here. I know a few people. I’ll survive.” She nibbled at some fruit, but I could tell that she was less hungry than me. “You could stay?”
“You could come.”
We leave it at that.
v
As I board the ship, a roll of Jade’s bribe money sweating in my fist, I hear a sound like a swarm of angry bees. I glance up and see the flash of sunlight reflecting from one of the Lord Ships. It is at least two miles out to sea, drifting slowly across the horizon, but it provokes the reaction I expect.