Survive.
He had jumped to his feet and dived into the leaves piled against the trunk of a smooth-skinned tree when, but a moment later, the tree was hit—the beast colliding with it with such speed the tree was no longer a tree but an explosion of wooden shrapnel. He remained corpse-still despite the shower of splinters that rained on his exposed head, his breath held in the fist of his throat and his eyes viciously wide as the pale, leathery hands that were unnervingly human in shape and joint, but large enough to hold an adult in its palm, stampeded to the left of him, and to the right, the creature’s body swaying above him as it recovered from the daze of its impact with the tree. Its great snout whiffed the air; a guttural snort that caught the trace of him, as the snout tilted toward the leaf pile in which he lay. His heart kicking his chest, as he made what could’ve been his final calculation—to run, or be still.
The choice was made for him upon the shriek of a whistle, which hit the beast like a sonic wave. The beast staggered to the side, and—here, with distance, Ahro had a chance to witness its aged face, lit up by a beam of red moonlight that lanced through the canopy—it snapped its sagged jowls. Thick threads of spit flew out, dropping heavily onto the leaf bed in long, viscous loops.
From behind the tree a young woman appeared. She wore a one-shouldered red robe, and had a wooden whistle in her mouth, which she continued to steadily blow as she approached the confused mass of flesh in a lethal crouch, a wooden spear gripped tight in her hands. The beast gibbered against the sound she created. More whistles pierced the air, and from the mists the others emerged; men and women garbed in similar attire, and armed with whistle and spear. There were five of them in all, each of them injured in ways that would require days of attention. They were all tired, and scared, their feet dragging through the leaves, and their spears jangling in their hands. They circled the beast, trapping it in their pentagram of sound, and the beast, which reminded Ahro of a confused old man ten times the size, pulled and stretched with its long fingers at the loose and hairless skin of its head, as if to tear the sound out from its own brain. It curled into itself. The closer the men and women got to the quivering thing at the center of the clearing, the more Ahro believed it was over.
But then, a mistake.
The young woman broke rank and sprinted ahead. The others stared at her, horrified. And when she dug her spear into its distended belly, the tip sinking into the flesh like a finger through soft cheese, the beast swelled, and, with one of its eight arms, it backhanded her. Even from his distance, he heard the crunch of her bones and the strangely silent disturbance in the air as she was flung out of the clearing. The moment so sudden, a few of their number had stopped whistling, the whistles dropping from their parted lips, hanging limply by the cords around their throats. The moment was all the beast needed. It flung itself at them, its howl shaking the canopy, snapping the red and auburn leaves from their perch, scattering them through the mists. The great hands swung through the air. The sandaled feet crunched across foliage. The hunters ran in circles around the behemoth and dodged its wild whipping. One of them too slow. The humph of punched flesh. A scream.
As the battle ran its course, two voices were at war within Ahro, shouting in opposition across the aisle of his heart. The first voice was that of the shadow. It was the voice that for twelve years kept him alive through the worst of the Musicians’ dealings. It was the voice that stayed his hand as he watched from around dark corners as others were beaten and broken, and thought him lucky. And it asked him now to take this rare opportunity, when both the beast and the strangers were too occupied to notice him, to run.
But the other voice said differently. It was still nascent, still maturing. Nurtured in the hatch and common room, the cargo bay, and fed on the lessons of his friends. It asked him to follow the trail of disturbed leaves to where the young woman’s body had flown.
To help her.
She’s probably dead, said the first voice.
To which the second replied, Then do not let her die alone.
He prowled across the forest floor, through the brush and the shadows. Silence was second nature, as was his calm. He followed the markings and signs of the forest, and found her beside an old and stunted tree.
He crouched next to her hiccupping form. She was not so much older than he. A handful of years at most. She looked up at him not with confusion but with a naked need he knew, just by glancing at her wounds, he could not do much to address. He tore strips of cloth from her robe and tightened them in loops around the gashes in her arms and her legs to stop the profuse bleeding, and balled a cloth against the torn hole in her abdomen, and held it there, feeling along the bones in his arms the pulse of life slowly leaving. Her impact with the rock had dented her chest, her breath a quick and empty wheeze. But despite the difficulty of her breath, she spoke, the words in a language beyond him and delivered in a rush so overwhelming he drowned in them. In the worst of his nights, when he lay with his head in Nia’s lap and described to her in whispers the violence in his head, she did not tell him it was only a dream, that it was over, and there was nothing left to worry about. She spoke no lies. All she said was that she was sorry, which was all he ever wanted to hear; it could’ve been from a stranger, and it would’ve been enough to end the night. And it was these words that he now gave secondhand to the dying woman before him.
“I’m sorry.”
But if she heard him, she made no sign of understanding. She stared past him, at nothing, everything, as the words frothed out of her mouth and down her sallow cheeks.
The beast let out its final bellow. And then it stampeded away, chased briefly by one of the men before he was called back by his fellows.
It is over, they seemed to say.
Let it go.
The woman stopped. He felt it before he saw it—the stillness, where his hands met the cloth on her abdomen, when the last of the air wisped out of her lungs. He gazed at her lax face. The waxed stun of her eyes. Her mouth, open, as if mid-thought. He did not cry. This was not his first body. He wiped his bloodied hands on his thighs and did as he had always done back on the Quiet Ship when he encountered on his daily routes a body slumped in its own spoils. He sat with her, and he kept her company, until someone came to claim her.
The men and women approached their fallen sister like cats. He moved aside, and for the time being, he was ignored as they attended to the corpse, standing in a loose circle around her, their heads bowed, and one by one spoke what he supposed were their goodbyes. He tried to parse their language, the texture of it unnervingly familiar to his ear, but his mind was too frayed to make any worthwhile connection. He waited for them to finish their business.
When the last words were given, the men and women turned to him, their bodies strong and coiled, as if ready to pounce. He covered the bareness of his body with his trembling hands. They gathered around him. A small-nosed man poked him with the butt end of his spear. They spoke in quick, fierce tones. He remained silent and small.
It was when they noticed the cloth knots he had made over the woman’s wounds that their expressions softened, knowing now that he had tried. After some deliberation, the tallest of the hunters, a woman, removed her clothes and slipped him into her one-shouldered robe. She smoothed the dirt from his cheek, and shouted at the others. They began their march out of the forest, heading in the opposite direction of the beast and the tree-snapped trail it had left in its volcanic wake.
He walked among their numbers, his nerves stripped, no more energy to consider how familiar their magma-red robes were, or the musical cadence of their speech; no energy to wonder about his location; not until they finally emerged from the forest into morning, where the mist cleared with startling quickness, and he was delivered the last telling detail of this place.
By then the red sun had risen above the valley. From the hill they stood upon, the dhuba fields were in
full view. They were as purple and unending as in his memory, and blazed now like stalks of gold in the dawning light. An awesome sight, which only served to tighten the dead knot in his chest, as he realized just how far he had gone.
* * *
—
They stopped to rest a few kilometers down the road, where there was an indentation in the hill, a cradle of warm grass. While the hunters whispered to one another, Ahro sat down and attended the soles of his bare feet, torn up by the walk. He winced as he drew a thin blade of wood out of his heel. The hunter who had given him her robe held out her hand and passed him two slices of withered jerky and a satchel of water. He chewed the meat slowly as he watched one of the men crouch by the slain woman’s corpse, the face of which was covered with a square of dark-blue cloth. The man held in his hands two of her fingers, rubbing her cold knuckles with his thumb as if to warm them. And then he began to cry.
The colors of the sky were coming into focus with the dawn, the red as deep as an open wound. There were still stars out, though they were dull, and quickly fading, and Ahro felt nothing as he gazed at them—the inverse to what he had experienced in the Painted City, those overwhelming sensations below those three moons so distant from him now it was as though it had happened to another person, even though he knew that it had happened to him, surrounded as he was by the proof that he had moved from one world to another.
Long ago, when Nia had first told him the purpose of their journey, mere days after they had left Pelican Station, he did not know how to react. It had seemed so strange to him at the time, the notion of instant travel, that the information slipped right through him without hold, helped along by the fact that not even Nia herself believed what she said, her mouth a wry twist of a smile when she asked him if he understood their unique situation.
The meaning of the Jaunt had little purchase in him at the time because he had yet to have any true understanding of distance. His life had been a small one, worn into the dark grooves and corridors of the unchanging Quiet Ship. It wasn’t until he traveled with Nia, and lived through the slow weeks of transit, and experienced the uncanny and dislocating feeling of returning to a changed world years later, that his notion of the Jaunt acquired a magical quality. But even then, it was a notion of wish fulfillment; an idle fantasy that made him sigh and smile as he drifted off to sleep in the Debby’s warm quarters. He once thought there would be unbounded joy, if the day ever came that proved the impossible possible; pride, even.
But now, as he observed the strangers around him, the empty set of their gazes, and the man who wept over the corpse of his friend, he felt only fear. Fear for his friends. For Nia. The ones he loved, who would not know where he had gone to. Fear of the hard choice they would make, when, after searching the streets of the Painted City in vain, they would inevitably find no sign of him, and leave.
Fear that they would not meet again.
He curled up, his chin meeting his knees, and he sat in this childlike pose, wondering, and fearing, until the leader of the group rose to her feet and signaled with a nod of her head that it was time to go.
* * *
—
The gates of the village opened upon the leader’s whistleblow, the doors swung open by the strength of three men, and like a parted curtain, the thatched homes of the Fifth Village revealed themselves to him, along with the hill-raised streets. He listened to the crow cry of voices as the villagers greeted them in the plaza, and the somber quiet as the body of the fallen hunter was revealed. It was odd to him—as far as he could find things odd that day—that for a place he could barely remember, the sound and sweet smell of it could bring him to such emotion, as if some silent part of him were aware of a lovely secret that it could only communicate to his conscious mind through welling tears.
What followed was a ceremony it was clear he had no part of. He stood to the side as the hunters greeted the line of six old men and women who had emerged from the crowd. When the leader of the hunters bowed, the others followed suit.
With a strained voice, she seemed to relay the events of the battle to the old ones, who listened with faces flattened of expression. It was the sixth old one that Ahro took notice of; a woman so tanned her skin was the texture of beaten leather, her body short, and, unlike the others, she had a spine that was unbent, her poise startlingly youthful for one her age, as her gaze cut through the people and trained on him like a bird of prey, as if she knew him, and hated him.
The leader was still in the midst of her story when a cry broke out from the crowd, and the people were parted by five men and women who barreled into the ritual clearing with a cloud of dust on their heels. Middle-aged adults whose faces wore what Ahro recognized as the wrath of grief. His attention parted from the old woman, and he watched with hair raised as these five interlopers shoved the hunters aside and fell at the corpse’s feet. They had the choked cry of baby birds. And though he knew no words of their language, he knew the tone of denial, and demand, as the stoutest of the men shouted at the leader of the hunters. With eyes downcast, she firmly answered his spat-out questions. The old ones, and a number of the crowd, tried to talk him down, but this served only to make him puff up. He pointed at the corpse, as if in accusation, while he prowled toward the hunter. He pointed at the corpse again, as if to show her in no uncertain terms her failing. The air turned to glass and all the people in the plaza into ice as he shouted once more. With a cold reserve, the leader of the hunters raised her head and met his eyes, and what she whispered next, whatever words of defiance, made a vein pop in his forehead.
He punched her in the gut. The fist thrown with such force that Ahro flinched in sympathetic response. Her eyes flew open. And as she fought for breath on her hands and knees, her fellow hunters dropped on the man, and like that, the second fight of the day broke out under the unyielding heat of the red sun. Through the hard smack of limbs and the terrible howling for the lost, the old woman’s eyes never left Ahro, not even when his arm was grabbed and he was shown roughly out of the plaza by the only hunter who had not joined the fray, and three other men he had not yet met. The group of men pushed him up the hill, away from the brawl, toward the large house that overlooked the village, and even as they went, he could still feel her, the old woman, watching him.
The sun was directly above them as they walked up the hill. Noon shadows were cast by the houses and unattended objects they passed. An upturned bucket. A rake leaning against the wall of a shed. Their shadows like hard black slices that, in the redness of the day, made it seem as if the world had been cut by these shadows, and was now saturated in its own blood.
One of the men shoved Ahro forward.
The house up ahead, where once he had stayed with the kind old man and his wife, now loomed. And after the men had banged on the door and the governor came out of it, Ahro knew he would find no more kindness here, for in the governor’s eyes he saw only suspicion as the hunter whispered in his ear. They questioned him in that yard. Questions he could not answer, even if he knew their language. He was below an ocean, watching all of this abstractly. As if it were the light that broke on the surface of the water. As if it were all just shapes.
He did not know for how long they questioned him, only that they were not satisfied when it ended, and that he was very tired. He did not struggle as they showed him down the hill, into a house with old wooden steps that led below the ground. He just stood there, in the middle of that basement, that square of light, looking up at them, as they shut the door, and locked it.
* * *
—
The darkness was total. He could not see his own hands. And when he heard the sound of his own quick breath, he was transformed once more that day—less a transformation than a reversion, as the small and hard thing from the Quiet Ship made his exit and left behind a child, lost and afraid.
He scrambled up the wooden steps, tripping in the dark on his way u
p, slapping his cheek against a hard edge. He tasted blood in his mouth.
He staggered forward and banged on the door. He clawed at it and shouted. He screamed Kaeda’s name, the name coming to him only now, too late, in this dark pocket where no one could hear him and where he might never leave, shouting that he had been here before, and that he was a friend. He shouted for what felt like hours. When no one answered this plea, he shouted her name, believing for one stupefying moment that Nia was just behind the door, and that if he screamed loud enough she would hear him and release the latch. He shouted until he could not shout, his voice a sponge wrung of its moisture, shriveled by the dry heat of the basement. He drew his hands away from the door, and felt his way back down the steps, retreating to the far corner of this makeshift prison, where he curled into himself by a large, empty pot. Too tired to even keep his head upright, he rested it against the hardened mud of the wall, and remembered Nia’s secret lesson; the form of the poetry she had taught him one lonely night. It won’t save you, she told him. The bad dreams will still come.
The Vanished Birds Page 24