by A. E. Shaw
“Should we stop?”
“I…no, let’s keep going. Come on.”
They battle on, and then Selina stops dead still, catching her breath. She flicks the wet hair out of her face. “I swear…over there…do you see that?”
Alej squints. It does seem as if there’s something, just out of sight, around a corner, hiding. Then a hand flashes out, waving, gesticulating. A human hand (as if there might be other kinds of hands here…).
Come here, is that what that says?
A moment’s above-the-din-of-the-rain whispers Should we? What else can we do? and the decision is made. Alej goes first, but Selina tries to overtake him. His bravado is sweet but his words could easily be the wrong ones.
“Hullo?” he calls. “Who are you?”
The reply comes, clear and high-accented, a voice like neither of them have heard before. It sets Selina on edge because it is not the accent of home, but then, as she is infinitely reminding herself, nothing else of home is how it was.
It is a simple introduction. Bright, through curtains of water. “Kit, my name’s Kit, and this is Ali!”
As Selina peers through the torrent, an arm reaches out, waving.
“It’s okay,” a new voice, equally unusual, continues. “We’re not with them. We know you’re not either, but here isn’t the place to get to know each other! Please, come with us.”
Alej and Selina exchange glances. What are the choices here? Walk, forever, into nowhere, at risk of finding out who ‘them’ refers to? Trust new people to take you…somewhere?
There’s no reason to fear the figures that emerge before them, look at them, even in the greyness it’s plain to see the boy and girl are skin and bone: they look like they’ve been to the end of the world and back already. Selina thinks they look much older than her, but then wonders how old she herself looks, all things considered.
“Come,” the boy says, running off, sharp left through the centre of a heap of debris, off the main track, feet thudding and splashing in the puddling ground. “Quick!” the girl offers up, following. Selina nods to Alej, and he runs, too, and Selina, when she comes to run, she realises it’s something she’s never done before. She’s never had to. She’s never even tried to. The action is jarring and awkward; she lands her weight, slight as it is, all over the place, her legs aching and her chest stabbing for oxygen within just a few paces. The sensation confuses her, for she assumed she was capable enough with her dancing strength and endurance, but this motion appears entirely different.
She does her best, but, she thinks, if this is a skill required in this world, she’ll need practice. Alej has no such problems, his muscular structure standing him in good stead, even if it is lacking in fuel.
They chase down the road, until Kit, the boy far ahead, stops, fumbling in the streaming grit. He’s pulling at something, an expanse like the one that hid them before, is it…what can he be doing…and then, Ali leaps in front of him and disappears down into a hole. Literally, she doesn’t even stop running, it’s just, step, hop, disappear. Alej follows, stops, exchanges a couple of sentences with Kit, and then climbs in, slowly, disappearing out of sight by the time Selina catches up, Kit beckoning her wildly. “Come on!”
Selina finds there a ladder leading down, doesn’t have to jump, and that is something. Its rungs are a crunching thick metal, harsh on the hands, wet, slippery, covered in an unpleasantry of dark filth, and as she climbs down, down, it’s so dark she wants to scream. Kit is already right above her, and she wonders what happens if one of them falls, but the ground catches up with her far before she’s expecting it, and the impact of trying to step down where there is no more down is so painful that she shouts out, surprised.
“Selina!” Alej calls. She walks right into him; he’s stopped to wait for her. He gives her his hand, clammy and dirty.
“Hang on,” he says, but Selina clasps it for only a moment before then rejecting it, feeling she needs her balance to herself right now.
“Not far!” Kit calls from somewhere ahead, his voice echoing about walls that are close, but that can’t be seen. It’s true, after a few more paces there’s a turn to the left, and then along, and then on the right, you can see a glow, far away, but then it comes closer, and closer. Up to the end of that corridor, five or six fire pockets flicker. They sit in the ashes of fires past, and Selina thinks they ought to have someone clean more around here, that there’s no efficiency in fires when they swim in their own remains.
The light doesn’t change anything from the assumption that they’re in a damp underground tunnel, but they can at least see where they’re going. Then again, with the silt and filth that swishes into her inadequate shoes, Selina finds she wishes that she couldn’t. After another few minutes, and another few turns, Ali opens up a door in the wall.
“Here we are! It’s not much, but it’s, well, it’s what we have, here.”
They follow her in, curious, but mostly grateful for the surely-any-minute-now chance to sit down.
The room is stark, chopped stone shaped and buttressed with thick-beaten metal all around, lit by a series of fire pockets placed about the walls. The ceiling arches in the centre. It’s cold, but not unpleasantly so. A pot sits in a makeshift hearth, packed in hot ashes and rocks, water bubbling merrily away in it, and there are two coarsely-moulded cups by the fire which have recently contained…something, for they are lined with bits of greenery. There’s little in the way of furnishing - a heap of something soft in one corner, a wonky bench and table in the centre. At these sits a woman of indistinguishable age with short-sheared hair and a hard face. She looks up at the disturbance without expression, and says nothing.
“This is it,” Ali says, and Selina’s insides clutch and slack in panic. This is it? There are only three of them? She smiles a thin smile, the sort of smile she was taught to give, polite and appreciative.
“This is Eliza,” Ali says, twirling over to the woman at the bench, as Kit disappears into one of the three doors that lead away from this room. “She’s everything she appears to be. Don’t annoy her.” There’s a look that Ali tries to give them both here, but neither Alej nor Selina can interpret it.
“Such an introduction,” says Eliza. As she speaks, Selina feels drawn to her…but isn’t sure if it’s in comfort, or warning.
“It’s nice to meet you…” Selina says, but she isn’t sure that’s true.
Kit comes back in, cleaner and easier to see. There are things to his look that Selina isn’t familiar with - he’s incredibly pale, to start with, but not golden-pale, like Aiden, rather…a green-pink pale, not something she can make much sense of; is it how he would look if his world weren’t so…underground? And she wonders how Aiden looks now, with a few days of Outside to his image?
“Sit, please,” he says, gesturing to the soft things around the edges of the room. “It isn’t much, but it’ll let you get your breath back before you wash up.”
“Don’t you want to know our story?” Selina asks, as she makes herself as comfortable as she can amongst a heap of fabric – surprisingly comfortable, she thinks, forcing herself to sit up a bit so’s not to fall right asleep. “I mean, we’re in your home…”
Kit pushes his scraggy hair back and shakes his head. “It’s fine. When you’re ready, I’m sure you’ll let us know. You must have come far. Everyone’s got their stories, some long, some short. It makes the most sense for you to take some time to get used to us before you give us your stories. None of us have had it easy.”
And there, Selina feels guilt. Why, yes, surely, she has had it easy. Look at the faces of these gathered here - lined and tired and sad. And look at what they call ‘home’. It’s so far from the beautiful things that have surrounded her for years. They are all so different from her, and from Alej. And Aiden. She wonders if they’ve seen Aiden, but if they had, wouldn’t they have mentioned it already? Wouldn’t they have invited him in, too?
Selina has an idea that she looks more or less as bad as they do; that
the rain, rather than washing them clean, as it felt, despite its bitter taste, has done little more than to leave tide marks of dust around every inch of skin. The clothing she wears is so rag-tag and torn as to be scraps, rather than the tailoring she remembers it once was, and her eyes, her eyes wear the sadness felt when leaving good things behind.
She does realise it wouldn’t be wise to mention where they came from, not in the first instance, at least. Not about the mountain, nor about the castle. She hopes Alej won’t think to speak of it either, that he’ll understand from the look she’s giving him that they should take up the offer of time to settle in. These two have been uncommonly kind and welcoming, and even if Eliza looks much less than that, Selina doesn’t hold it against her.
“Can we get you something to eat and drink? Let us, please, I’m sure you are polite and will say you’re fine, but trust me, it would be a much greater inconvenience to us if we had to haul your bodies up to the surface to melt away.” Eliza’s words drip in a sickly-sweet-sharp tone.
“That would be wonderful,” Selina says, ignoring the concept of the ‘inconvenience’ and matching the pleasantry for what it is. She glares at Alej, indicating he should say the same, come on Alej. He does, a touch confused. He is happy to be indoors and out of the rain for a while, and the idea of food is all well and good, but, at the same time, he’s got Selina, and he isn’t sure he wants to give up their exclusivity just yet. He wonders how Aiden is doing. If he’s doing anything at all, that is. Alej doesn’t believe he’s dead. He feels that he would know, somehow, if that were the case.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The Kidnap
Aiden hauls Jere, slowly, slowly, so much heavier than you would imagine, from the tent, leaving a trail of darkness. He can’t bear sharing this space with the body any longer.
He toys with the idea of flinging Jere from the cliff edge, letting him be caught by the sea. Or perhaps he should bury him, as in the old warrior customs he read of. Or should he? Maybe he should leave him here. Some kind of warning; there is a new warrior around. The sheer quantity of options faced at any point in time are coming of as much a surprise to him as anything about this world that he’s fallen into.
In the end, he decides to take the tent to himself, to sleep on it. He’ll continue on during the day, but he wants, first of all, to see if there’s anything here worth taking with him. Perhaps a little food. And he must rest. He’s bloody and tired but he must rest. The fur is beautiful, he thinks, as he nestles back into it, much more relaxed this time. It is pleasantly warm. It’s strongly scented, he can’t tell of what, probably doesn’t want to know. He doesn’t mind, whatever it is, he finds a new appreciation for its strength.
And there, now, lying with his head back looking up and out of the opening of the tent there is something in the sky. It isn’t the sun. It’s new. Look carefully, Aiden, look. Those are stars. Thousands of them, forever and ever away from you. Seeing stars is looking into the past, Aiden knows, he knows all the theory of stars, all their purposes through time, their legendary status. The theory is nothing, compared with the sight of them in themselves.
They give a strange, gentle light that isn’t illuminating, is, rather, highlighting. It is silverish, every bit as poetic as the old poetry suggested it would be, and, as he stares, he begins to see the infinite shapes he’s read about. It’s as if he can read the stars themselves, knows what they are, what they mean. That they’re a semblance of legends, myths, heroes and design, icons of nature, read and misread and interpreted by thousands of generations of humans, shaped to fit every point in their history. Aiden feels that he is, as they are, a culmination of understanding.
He has come to understand, though, with Jere’s body a matter of feet away from him, that he is not putting forth the image he ought. Jere was not awed by him. This will not do. People can’t treat him that way. He must find a way to present himself that will have them understand. He doesn’t know what kind of ignorant, strange beings he’s set to meet, after all. If word will have spread of his coming, via the worthless one and the liar. He’s beginning to feel he should have killed them, too, rather than allowed them to make their own way down into the world that she, the liar, had already left, left for whatever reason it was that she was sobbing onto Alej’s broad chest.
This is another matter for tomorrow. Aiden wants to be worthy of the stars in the sky, and at this point in time, he doesn’t feel he’s there. He doesn’t think people will know who he is as easily as they ought. There can be no doubt.
He pulls fur up to his lips, rubs the softness comfortingly against them. He needs a plan, he ponders available options as he tries to slip into sleep, not used to having to try, not used to having so much on his mind whilst simultaneously feeling so very exhausted. He thinks he hears something, far off, a call of one sort or another. Aiden comes to wonder only then what kind of fur it is that he’s lying beneath, coarse and heavy, if there’s something that lurks in the nearby that wants to get to know him better. It would be the most tragic of wastes if he were to be consumed by an animal, of all things. Then he thinks, no, any hungry animal is sure to, in the interests of self-preservation, go for the body that’s already here before coming to investigate his little shelter, and if it were to go for Jere, he’s fairly certain he would hear that. At least he made the right decision in not flinging the body off the cliff, he thinks, as he turns over again, trying to make himself as comfortable as possible.
There are many things in here, he thinks, feeling for something to form into a pillow of one kind or another. Hard things, a box of sorts, and, of course, his beloved pail, knocked in the earlier skirmish, but still full of his important jewels and silks. He takes stock, breathes, experimentally, checks that that is still easy and possible. It is. This journey has, so far, been a constant process of advance and check, a tiresome game in some ways, an essential one in others. He is constantly refining himself, his beliefs, his understanding. And he is still staring at the stars.
He joins them up, in his mind, with white light, so they spell out his name. They seem to oblige so easily, he finds it difficult to imagine that this is chance or coincidence. Nothing else he tries to forge in the night sky seems to spell out quite so easily. This might be worth remembering, he thinks, because history and legend teach us that there’s nothing people believe so much as something that’s written in the stars.
When sleep finally takes him, it is around the night’s deepest point. Nearby, there are indeed animals, but they come no closer, because Jere kept his territory well, skinned and ate anything that dared attempt to intrude. It’s as well for Aiden, for an encounter with an animal now would be the end of it all. And in the far, far distance, there is the sound of the sea.
Aiden dreams of a boat, something he’s still yet to experience and understand. The boat is wooden, the great wheel that steers the vessel is made of creaking oak, handled with brass and finished with gold. As the boat cuts with an unrealistic silence through a blood-dark sea, there is a stickiness that develops between his hands and the handles, not sweat: thicker, more viscous.
This is not his concern, he tells himself. Aiden doesn’t look down; he simply keeps steering. It is all he can do. In his dreams, at least the endless thread of choices and options available to him at any one point is gone. All he has to do is to keep going forwards. There is a light in the distance, round, orange, glowing and flickering, as if it were fire. Aiden knows all he has to do is to get to that light.
As time passes, the boat becomes difficult. The waves begin to swell, raising and dropping the boat without the slightest care. They grow more forceful, as if trying to reject the boat entirely, to force it up into the sky, or down beneath their foam-spattered surface. Still, Aiden steers on through. The boat becomes heavier; there is a time during which it feels as if the light he’s after is getting further and further away. His feet struggle to stay planted on deck, water lashing over the sides of the boat and soaking his legs right throug
h, leaving them cold and shaking. His hair is whipped flat against his face, his eyes burning to stay open in the salt spray, fighting to keep moving forwards. Just keep moving forwards.
And then, finally, Aiden feels a churn inside himself, a roll in his stomach and a thud in his chest, and he is calm again. He is in perfect control. As soon as his hold is firm, his feet are steady, it as if he can then begin to assert his powers over the sea itself. His breathing becomes regular and clear, rather than raspingly insufficient. Things plateau, and the light draws closer. The closer Aiden gets, the brighter the light is, the wider its scope. The sky begins to brighten around his target, the fire spreading out into the ether. His heart begins to beat harder and faster as the flames take root, as they rush nearer and nearer.
The boat moves faster now that the waves are stemmed to a ripple, it seems lighter, drifting, has no direction or purchase in the waves, and as the heat of the flames embraces and grasps him, a sense at first, a force moments later, so Aiden comes to realise that, after all, he is not in control of this boat. Worse. He’s not in control of anything.
The flames rise up and their roar becomes distinct from that of the sea. Everything crushes together and he is rolling, twisting, fighting to stand as the boat glides into the fire. Deep in its heart, he sees the silhouette of a castle, it might as well have been his, but, of course, he doesn’t recall ever having seen the castle intact from the outside. Its shape is such that the gate at the entrance to the grounds seems to be a mouth that will come to swallow him whole, to want to take him back, to trap him completely.