by Paula Guran
I pulled the odd bundle from the pack. It rattled and shifted as I unrolled it. I looked into the woods, into the shadows, but my mother was still away. I drew back the last folds.
On the threadbare cloth lay the skeleton of a human child. Its skull was the size of a fist, its bones as white as fresh-fallen snow but except the fine lines of rust. There was no clinging flesh, no shriveled skin. It had been scoured clean.
I had seen my mother strip the carcasses of rabbits and birds. When we had taken what we could eat and it was unwise to leave remains behind, she would loose the hungry swarm and watch as the specks crawled like maggots over the limp dead thing and gorged themselves, blue fading to purple, purple to red, swelling and finally popping like blood-fat mosquitoes as the last flesh fell away in charred curls.
My hands shook as I wrapped the bones into their shroud and hid it again. I retreated to the far side of the camp, hugged my knees to my chest and waited.
My mother returned only moments later, as though she had been watching from the forest. She said nothing. We did not speak for the rest of the night. After we ate, she sat by the fire and sharpened her knives one by one, a narrow shadow with flat pale eyes. The hiss of her blades on the whetstone drew shivers across my skin.
In the morning my mother gave me a knife. It was a sturdy blade on a wooden haft, too large for my hand, undecorated but stained with smudges that might have been oil, might have been blood. The blade was black, free of rust, sharp enough to sting my fingertips at the lightest touch.
I spread my fingers to match the stains, held it against my palm and tested its weight. It was the first gift my mother had ever given to me. I did not know if I should thank her.
“Stop wasting time,” said my mother, as I turned the blade. “We’re going to the river.”
The clouds had broken during the night. Above the imperfect cathedral of pines the sky was brightening, but the aching cold lingered. We followed a creek into a steep ravine. Sunlight touched the hilltops, but the river was in shadow and blanketed in mist. All of the color the snow and rain had leached from the world was returning: the deep green of the pine boughs, the white and pink rocks, the blue sky. Even the rich brown trees twisted with blight were beautiful in the rising morning, with streaks of red and orange lacing the wood like a caravan matriarch’s jewelry.
Beautiful, but frightening as well. As the weather warmed the infestation would spread, and by the end of the summer this hillside, this valley, this pretty green lean of pines and oaks crawling down to the river would be dead.
At the river, my mother led me onto a flat boulder. Water curled in eddies and gulped beneath rocks, and thin ice crackled along the banks.
My mother leaned close to speak over the river’s roar: “Your boots. Take them off.”
I obeyed. The cold granite burned, and edges of knobby white crystals bit into my bare feet.
My mother held out one arm and rolled up her sleeve. “Like this,” she said.
I did the same, shivering.
“Your knife,” said my mother, her lips moving against the shell of my ear. I looked at her, and she snapped, “Take out your knife.”
She jerked the knife from its sheath and pressed the hilt into my hand, closed my fingers over the stained wood. With her other hand she grabbed my free wrist. She was wrapped around me, pressed warm against my back. We had not been so close since we had slept together on cold nights when I was young.
“Like this,” she said. “Not too shallow. You have to bleed.”
She sliced the blade across my arm. Blood welled from the wound and slid over my skin. I tried to pull free, but my mother shoved me forward until I stepped into the water. The shock of cold made me gasp and kick, but my mother was immovable at my back.
“Not over the stone, stupid girl!”
The first drop struck the water.
There was a sickening lurch in my gut and a black flood engulfed me. I was upright still, on wobbling legs and knees, my feet going numb, but it made no difference to the mindless panic overtaking my mind. I coughed and choked and kicked. My mother’s arm was strong across my chest, her hand an iron cuff around my wrist. I fought until my strength failed and every breath filled my lungs with freezing water. The river stripped away my skin, my twitching muscles and pumping blood, scouring down to the bone, then took the bones as well.
The world beneath was slick, shifting and dark, and the current caught me. The surface above shimmered: trees and cliffs whipping by, boulders bending the water this way and that, logs and tangles of branches and sodden grass. I tumbled to the riverbed. Grit scraped my face, stones bruised my chin, my cheeks, my knees. A bridge flashed overhead, fish danced quick and silver, and still I flowed faster, faster, until a great weight overtook me, tugging me down and down and down, and the last sunlight winked away.
I opened my eyes.
I was lying on my back beside the river. For a moment, I felt nothing but the granite beneath me, then I choked and rolled onto my side. I coughed and retched and did not stop until my throat ached and my body shuddered. My hair was not wet, nor my clothes, nor any part of me save my feet, blue with cold.
My mother stood over me, a silhouette against the morning sky.
She said, “Did you feel that?”
I wiped my mouth and could not speak.
“Did it frighten you?”
A stiff nod.
“That’s what will happen if you don’t learn to control it.”
Her mouth was thin as a knife, but she was smiling.
The valley narrowed to a gash as we climbed into the mountains. There was rarely more than a faint deer trail to follow. The days lengthened as spring approached, but the nights were cold and snow fell often.
My mother did not make me bleed into the river itself again, but every time we crossed a spring or tributary stream, she stopped and said, “Your knife.”
And every time I returned, gasping and quaking, she asked me what I had discovered and told me what I had done wrong. She delivered each lesson like the lash of a whip: Sit down before you fall down. Don’t bleed on soil or stone. Don’t linger where people might see. Don’t stay away more than half a day. Don’t follow more than one route. Don’t forget what you are. Remember to eat. Remember to sleep. Clean and wrap the wounds. Find the cracks, find the seams, find the flaws. Everything is weak against water and patience.
My arms were soon crisscrossed with new red cuts and tender scabs. My mother refused to use the swarm to heal them. I kept the blade sharp and clean.
Ankle-deep in the water, eyes closed tight and blood dripping from my arm, I rode a dozen streams into the mountain river. I explored their turns and stones, their logjams and bending reeds. I tasted the water as it wound through overhanging roots and high grass, seeped into impossible cracks and worked stones loose in their muddy banks. I smelled elk and bears where they stopped to drink, the nests of birds in quiet ponds, the ash of human campfires.
I grew bolder. I let myself venture into the northern lowlands, where spring was giving way to summer. It did not matter how swiftly or how slowly the water moved; if it flowed to a place, I could go there. I tasted sweet fields freshly plowed and felt bridges thrumming with hooves and boots. I watched women burdened with baskets wading in the shallows, farmers leading mules and carts through fords, and barefoot children skipping rocks on quiet river bends.
Sometimes, if I lurked too long, comfortably nested in a lazy eddy or deep pool, I might catch a child studying the water so intently I was certain she could see me. I imagined myself as a shivering, bleeding specter, a reflection of a reflection, wavering and thin.
Sometimes I looked back before flowing away again.
“You are a coward,” said my mother.
She was whittling arrow shafts. The swarm followed her blade, smoothing the wood with every stroke. It was evening and the day had been dreary. High in the mountains, the few creeks we crossed were icy trickles, and the trees were gnarled, twist
ed knots so rusted with blight they rattled like chimes in the wind.
“I’m not,” I said. I dug my fingers into what little soft earth I could find and watched stars wake in the purple sky. I focused with every breath on pulling the thousand slippery pieces of myself back into the barrier of my skin.
That afternoon I had followed the river all the way to the coast. It was a journey of several months’ time by foot, but for me it had flashed by in moments. I had stopped before I entered the sea itself. It was endless and strange and dark, and I did not know if I could ever find my way back.
I had been to the city as a child and I remembered the smell of it, refuse and smoke and the green stink of low tide, but it was different in the water. In the water I could crawl along the canals and explore sunken boats and drowned ruins. I could creep through cracks in walls and see what was meant to be hidden. I saw a man cut a soldier’s throat in a cellar and seal the body in a barrel of wine. I saw a laughing woman lead a laughing man into a pantry and lift her skirts while he fumbled with his belt. I saw sickly blank-eyed children huddling in a garret with a locked door, sailors bartering colorful caged birds and black snakes on the docks, men in red robes with red-stained eyes boarding a ship with red sails. I saw mud-splattered masons building a wall of stone between the city and the sea, trowels in hand, warily watching the tide.
They never saw me, slipping as I did through the cracks and gutters, dripping down walls and draining through floors, testing the strength of every seam and wondering what would survive if the wall failed and the sea swallowed the city. It was so easy to slip through gaps unseen, to open paths where no water had flowed before, to weaken the mortar with a slow damp seep.
“I’m not,” I said again.
My mother whittled and was silent.
“They’re building a new seawall,” I said. We had walked the old one when I was a child, early in the morning to watch gulls diving and children with nets fishing at low tide. “The masons don’t think it will hold through next winter’s storms.”
“Find a beaver dam first,” said my mother. Her knife snicked cleanly as she sliced bark from wood. Her eyes were bright with silent laughter; her amusement made me uneasy. “They’re easier to take apart.”
“I’m not going to destroy the seawall,” I said, aghast.
My mother snorted. “As if you could. Don’t be stupid. Start with a beaver dam.”
The next morning, I bled into the same creek and explored the mountain waterways until I found a quiet beaver pond. I examined the dam and the lodge, flowing in circles through the grass at the bottom, surprising the sleepy creatures in their musk-scented den. I slipped into the piled branches and tested the bend of waterlogged wood. Fish darted around me, slick, nervous. Once or twice I felt a branch shift, but the dam was strong.
I tried for three days to topple the dam, and each time I opened my eyes my mother said, “You’ll do it tomorrow.”
“I don’t know what you want,” I said after my third failure. I was lying on my back and catching my breath. “They’re only animals.”
“You won’t learn if you’re too frightened,” said my mother, and her voice turned mocking. “Are you scared? What do you have to fear? They’re only animals.”
I rolled onto my side to look at her.
“Did you bring my sisters here?” I asked. The sisters I imagined were small and thin like me, but they had no faces. “Did you teach them too?”
My mother’s hands stilled. She was crouched by the fire, roasting a marmot she had caught during the day. We had left the trees behind two days ago; the shrubs that dotted the rocky slopes were squat and thorny. We had not seen another person since we had left the clan’s winter camp. I wondered how far away my mother had ventured to set the snare, if during the day she had left me here alone, insensible by the water, my body limp and useless.
“Were they better than me?” I asked. “Did they learn faster? Was it easy for them? Did they—”
“Alis.”
My name, as always, a foreign word on her tongue.
“You’ll do it tomorrow,” she said. “Come to the fire. You have to eat.”
I didn’t ask her anything else that night. I decided, when our meal was finished and the fire burning low, I didn’t want to know if my sisters had been here before me, if they had bled into this same river, traced the same scars on their pale childlike arms. I didn’t want to know if they had cut too deep and bled too fast and been lost, one by one, swept away while my mother whittled by the empty shells of their bodies.
Two days later I found a weakness in the beaver dam. The logs collapsed and I rode the torrent down and down, out of the valley and onto a broad, sunny plain.
When I opened my eyes, the sun was still climbing toward noon.
“Well?” my mother asked.
“I destroyed it,” I said.
She was not whittling or shaping arrows or sharpening her knives. She was sitting very close to me; her shadow fell over my face. I did not want to look at her.
“That was well done,” she said. “You learn more quickly than they did.”
I could not recall if my mother had ever praised me before. The words were like the gift of the knife, ill-fitting and sharp.
We crested the mountains at a high pass of stone and snow. What little water we found was frozen in shallow tarns, useless to me, and I grew restless. Walking was so slow, so plodding, and the ache of my feet so tiresome. I scratched at my wounds in idle moments, dropped my hands when I caught my mother watching.
The south-flowing streams joined a silty river that tasted of iron and mud. The land was quiet, barren, infected with blight. The trees still struggled to grow, but the wood was laced with rust and leaves scraped and screeched in the wind.
I passed through towns as I explored the river, but they were all empty. Sand drifted through doorways and roofs gaped with holes. Buried on the muddy bottom of the river were countless skeletons: horses and cattle and oxen, mostly, but people too, their bones traced with rust, skulls sunk in the muck. The bridges were crumbling and weak with neglect, but they were still harder to tease apart than the beaver dam. Stone by stone, crack by crack, I pushed my way in and worked the blocks free.
The first time I brought a bridge down, I pulled out in shock, shaken, and my mother laughed. She laughed so rarely the sound was alien and startling.
“They won’t all be as easy as that,” my mother said. She was sitting on her scarf, holding the swarm in the palm of her hand. The blue specks weren’t doing anything, not even humming. “Go farther. You’ll see.”
I withdrew my feet from the water and sat up. I rubbed my hand over my face to remind myself of the shape of my body.
“Where are the people?”
“Who could live in such a place?” said my mother.
“The invaders,” I said, as much a question as an answer. I had never asked what they called themselves or what had happened to them after their invasion failed. The stories the old women shared never followed the iron armies back to where they had come from.
“There’s no one there to hurt, if that’s what worries you,” my mother said.
“Would you care if there were?”
I watched for the same spark of hunger I had seen when I told her how the seawall shivered before pounding waves. But she was not looking at me. She was watching the dark clouds gathering over the mountains.
“Go farther,” she said again.
“I have gone farther. There’s nothing. There’s barely anything alive at all.”
“Venom spreads from a single bite,” said my mother. She closed her fingers; the blue swarm blinked out. “Even if the snake is stupid enough to bite its own tail. We should keep going. I don’t want to be above timberline when that storm arrives.
Late in the day the trail led us out of the spiny mountain shrubs and into a proper forest. The trees were no healthier than the high country snarls had been, but if I breathed deeply, I could smell pine s
ap beneath the sharp tang of iron. Thunder rumbled distantly and the sky was dark, but the only suggestion of rain was a smear blotting out the highest peaks.
My mother left to set snares, and I took my knife to a delicate stream. The water was shallow and choked by yellow grass. I sunk my feet into a tepid pool. I flicked away the scab and opened the same cut I had made that morning.
I raced along the creek, impatient with its playful course, and joined the river in an exhilarating rush. The forest fell away as a stutter of shadows, replaced by rusted fields and empty villages. I passed the wreckage of my bridge. It was still daylight on the plains. Sunlight danced in oily rings on the river’s surface.
Go farther, my mother had said. She knew what I would find across the wasteland.
The city erupted on the horizon like a cancer, and in a blink I was upon it. The river split into a stone maze, a drunken spider’s web of crisscrossing circles and spokes, and countless canals wound through the ruins of fine houses and market squares and palaces protected by high walls. The buildings had once been white, their slate roofs green and blue, but many were crooked and unfinished, angles skewed, dimensions distorted, windows broken and tiles fallen away. Armies of marble statues stood as silent sentries along every tree-lined road, every stagnant garden pond. The statues were as misshapen as the buildings: too many limbs or too few, knees bent backwards, faces twisted the wrong way around.
I had never seen a city so massive and so sprawling. Such places existed only in legends.
All of it, every broken building, every deformed bust, was cloaked in corroded vines and washed with the colors of late autumn, hints of red and orange now rotted away to brown, not a breath of green anywhere to be seen.
I believed the city dead, long abandoned. I disobeyed one of my mother’s sternest rules and divided myself to explore numerous stone channels. I spread through the city as an army of ants would cover a forest floor, pulling farther and farther apart.