The Wildest Woods

by S. K Munt

  I should have known better than to be shocked by how much Martya had already learned about the north, but I’d equated her dirty, gaunt appearance with a step backwards in evolution and of course, that wasn’t the case. She didn’t have access to the books we’d had in Eden, but she’d been listening to people- soaking up all they knew into herself like a sponge and now she was practically dripping with knowledge, and after just half an hour in her company I realised that aside from the fact that she’d developed a somewhat coarser sense of humour and a hardness in her eyes, she’d only changed for the better since I’d seen her last. Would that be me after two years in the north? Or was I going to be dead by the end of the day because I’d read a romance novel for every second textbook that she’d pored over?

  After Martya had finished explaining that we would be able to walk through the night because everyone in Hope Station had slept until two that day in order to prepare themselves for this migration, she tried to steer the conversation in Eden’s direction. I managed to give her a brief synopsis over what had happened since I’d seen her last, but luckily for me I didn’t have to go into great detail about the ugliest things that had happened, because Satan had already shared most of that with her. About Kelia’s death, and my almost affair with Kohl and how Kohén had tricked me into the harem… the things that had made me hate myself, before I’d gone to Hell. Martya didn’t understand the specifics of my final night in Eden and so she pressed me to divulge exactly what had happened, but the moment I tried to explain what had gone wrong after I’d received Karol’s letter, my voice failed me. We hadn’t seen one another for a long time and it was pitch black in that tunnel, but Martya had worked out that I was beginning to have a meltdown and so she quickly changed the topic again, and had started telling me about how she’d faked her death instead.

  That was an exciting story, I could tell that much because it involved a sequestered man driving the carriage and helping her make their disappearance look like an accident, but I couldn’t be the audience that she needed me to be because I was concentrating on trying to swallow down the lump that had formed in my throat from just saying Constance’s name out loud- a lump that was refusing to go away. I knew that I had a crying jag coming my way, and that I would probably feel better about everything once I’d actually allowed myself to give into the urge to sob all of my woes out, but was I ever going to be alone again for long enough to do so? Or was my despair just going to expand inside me until I exploded again, like I had in Eden?

  Martya’s mood had withered a little at the mention of Constance’s name and I could not blame her for that because she’d never gotten to know the softer side of the duchess the way that I had… but I missed Constance dearly, and I struggled to come to terms with the fact that they would be holding funerals for the king and duchess in Eden in the near future- funerals that I should have been present for, but could not even dream of attending because I was traipsing through a train tunnel in the north because Satan had asked me to. I’d been barely holding on as it was, but when I imagined Karol throwing a clod of earth onto his mother’s open grave, my heart twisted so sharply that it snapped something inside me and just like that, the dam inside me broke and tears started running down my face- and they kept running steadily and stealthily like that, unobserved by everyone and muffled by Martya’s persistent chatter, until the light at the end of the tunnel became a wall to wall carpet of white.

  We’d arrived at the avalanche tunnel’s exit point, and as though the universe knew that the only way to stop me crying was to intervene, my tears promptly turned into ice on my face as my breath turned into a crystal cloud in front of it. We were in the wastelands all right, and for all of the imagination that I had, I honestly could not picture that there was something on the other side of it, much less another side of it that I would reach alive.

  12.

  The Wastelands

  Larkin

  Tuesday August 23rd AA644

  Bastien allowed us to all pause to rest and have something to eat before we left the avalanche tunnel, but although people gobbled down their portions of jerky, biscuits and warm cider eagerly, they passed over the opportunity to rest in the name of fortifying themselves for the next leg of the journey. I watched in awe as they started unrolling their bearskins and then began wrapping them around themselves, before using the strapping to cinch them in place around their torsos. Boots were taken off and small burlap sacks (the kind we used in Arcadia to keep carrots and potatoes in during transit) were slipped over their socks before the boots went back on. Scarves were then tied around faces and heads, leaving only the eyes uncovered, and despite the fact that the children already seemed to be wearing everything that they owned at once, leaves and down were stuffed under their first layers against their skin for the sake of insulation.

  Then, they started getting their weapons ready. Axes were ground against a stone until they gleamed, and sticks were sharpened to points. Quivers were slung over shoulders and bows were taken in the hand- taken and then tensioned… while I stood behind them open-mouthed, watching a white-haired boy of about thirteen tighten the band on his Shanghai.

  So… not the first time they’ve visited this neck of the woods then?

  I had been appalled at the idea of wearing an animal fur before, but I saw that I would die if I did not rug myself up in something now and so I shouldered it, grateful for the fact that whoever had fixed it up had not left the face attached as some of the others had. I saw Sam smirk at me from across the dingy tunnel as he wrapped his own head up in a scarf and I flushed, knowing that even though he could not read my mind right then, he’d obviously already picked up on how I felt about wearing fur, and was enjoying silently calling me a hypercritical sell-out now. That was irritating, but his pointed look was valid so I didn’t bother to give him a dirty look back. I was stubborn when it came to arguing with people, but only when I was in the right.

  I was touched by how many people came over to me to offer me sweaters and gloves when Martya pointed out that I wasn’t even slightly prepared to brave the cold front dressed as I was, but even though I was tempted to take them, I’d seen enough people doubling up on gloves to understand that the underfed, malnourished humans that I was traveling with would still need them more than I would so I declined, repeating what I’d said earlier about my natural body-heat as an excuse. I doubted very much that my slightly higher core temperature was going to do me much good in a blizzard seeing as how I was already feeling the chill now, but the people accepted my explanation and then put their second or third pair of gloves on as they walked away while I fastened the ties on my cloak across my chest, cursing Satan for having given me such a vampy, low-cut ensemble. The suede pants were easy to move in and comfortable, but who was I going to impress around those parts with an over-abundance of cleavage? Especially once my skin turned blue?

  Still better than those ridiculous togas though… Plus the fact that you’re wearing next to nothing makes you look fearless. Go with it, so they don’t realise that you feel the exact opposite of how you must look from the outside.

  We commenced the fourth leg of that seemingly endless peregrination before I was ready, and it was three times harder to navigate than I’d imagined. There had been an actual trail leading to the third Sequestered camp for years, but it was already covered in snow and so Bastien had to lead us off memory, with the assistance of a few of the other sequestered men that had made the trip a handful of times themselves. I was glad that they were all sure that they knew what direction we ought to head off on, because I couldn’t even tell north from south thanks to the fact that the heavy clouds above us had blocked out the sun and left only a greyish glare behind to vouch for the day. That was bad news for the adults like me, but most of the smaller children had piled onto the sleighs that volunteer adults were trading off pulling to rest their little legs, so the darkness of the day was helping them get some much-needed sleep. They were tough, those kids, and that cou
ld not be denied. Sure they were sleeping now, but anyone too big to be carried had already walked for fourteen hours straight the night before, and I was fairly certain that there wasn’t a child in Arcadia that would been able to do the same thing, even in the Athlete’s caste.

  The wastelands was the name they gave the entire northern half of the continent beyond The Wildwoods so we had already technically started walking through them when we’d started going uphill out of The Wildwoods and into the mountains on Sunday afternoon. But most of the people in The Sequestered were referring to the particular valley that we were starting to descend into then every time that they spoke of the true wastelands, because unlike the mountainous areas before Hope Station, this part of the region had once been well developed and highly populated by people from the time before.

  There hadn’t been any major cities there, according to Serif, the white-haired fourteen-year old boy that walked beside me for awhile as we half-tumbled down an incline into that valley, (I got to travel in the middle of the pack this time because a group of men had offered to bring up the rear and cover us with their bows) but a lot of roads and a handful of small towns had been scattered around us and Serif knew this because Bastien had once showed him a map and a few old pictures in an ancient encyclopaedia that Serif said had smelled like hell. The area had never been bombed, but the floods, flash fires, avalanches and landslides that had ravaged the area during the apocalypse had caused the debris of that civilisation to sink into that valley, and then the blizzards that had set in for the long haul had sealed all of that accumulated waste under ice that was only now starting to dissolve. Clearly excited by the idea of one day staging a major scavenger hunt there, the red-cheeked, bright-eyed Serif swore that if all of that snow were to melt away, it would reveal a virtual junkyard of ancient relics below, and maybe even treasure.

  I wasn’t so sure that we’d find anything resembling treasure under all of that slush and ice, but Serif’s enthusiasm was contagious and distracting, so I listened attentively and smiled and even asked him to list what sort of things he might hope to find there in order to keep that little pocket of sunshine at my side. I was aware that I was enjoying his company so much because he reminded me of a young Kohén, but I refused to let that become a conscious thought for fear that it would bring the shadows back over my mood.

  I would have liked to spend time with the kids that were closer to my age, who were all grouped together right near the front with Martya’s other friend, but I didn’t know how to go about introducing myself to them. The adults seemed to pity me for how I’d been raised because I was still a child in their eyes, and the younger ones didn’t understand Companionship or judgement yet- but young adults were a different story. They had the understanding of grown-ups, and none of the compassion, and I fear that they’d judge me the most. In their eyes, I’d been granted the advantages offered up by adulthood- sex, wealth, alcohol and parties, (by Satan, of all people!) but none of the hard work that they would have been expected to do in alternate castes to earn such things for themselves, let alone whatever they’d had to do to survive on the outside of these fences, and so they eyed me warily. Hell, they probably figured that I’d lived a blessed life in comparison to them, and that was going to make connecting with any of them difficult, despite how desperately I wanted to make friends- real ones.

  Serif was still innocent enough to take me at face value though, and he obviously appreciated having an attentive audience because he treated me like an equal, and seem unfazed by my so-called satanic significance. He went on and on about pirate treasure and ancient art and still-functioning technological devices that he might find, until he ran out of things to unearth in the Wastelands and moved on to tell me what he was sure to uncover under the sand and ice of the abandoned continent of Africa once he was done digging up the frosted northern hemisphere. Despite the fact that I was too tired to talk back much, (I’d offered to take someone’s infant for a while halfway through Serif’s monologue because her mother looked ready to drop so I was extra burdened) I realised that I was enjoying his company more than I’d enjoyed anyone’s company since I’d spent those few sweet hours with Ora the previous Monday, and was thinking that I’d have to befriend the buoyant child- until he glanced up at me meaningfully and hinted that he’d always wanted a girlfriend with hair that was like mine.

  Yes, totally off-topic and completely mortifying, and I cringed inwardly to realise that apparently every male on the face of the earth had an agenda similar to Kohén Barachiel’s- even the ones that hadn’t gone through puberty yet. I’d been blushing fiercely and trying to think of a way out of that one without hurting his feelings or his pride, (Serif had what looked like a very large burn that stretched up from the underside of his jaw to halfway up his right cheek, and I didn’t want to make him think that had anything to do with my hesitation when it was my fear of the male species that had me grossed out) when Sam had called him over to take a turn towing the toboggan loaded with food for awhile.

  ‘You’re welcome,’ Sam came over to me a moment later, rubbing his hands together as he blew into them. Like me, his hands were bare and already chapped from the freezing winds.

  ‘I thought you couldn’t read my m-mind?’ I asked, surprised but grateful all the same as I ducked my head to block the sleeping baby’s face from a sudden flurry.

  ‘No, but I can read his. S-Siria brought m-me more amber, but there’s not enough yet to cover every b-body.’’

  ‘Can you tell me what happened to his face?’

  ‘N-No, he doesn’t even know. He m-must have been a toddler when it happened.’

  ‘That’s awful.’ I felt a rush of sympathy for the boy, but awe too. He was so confident for someone with such an obvious scar! A little over-confident sure, but I was fairly sure that Karol Barachiel would have worn his hair over his face if he’d been that deformed, so vain were the males of Arcadia.

  ‘Nah, he doesn’t let it get him down. Believe m-me when I say that won’t be his only attempt to woo you now that he got through stage one without b-being rebuffed.’

  I sighed and held the baby tighter, feeling uneasy with how quiet and still it was and wanting to share all of the warmth that I had with it. ‘Couldn’t you have intervened a few m-minutes earlier so he wouldn’t have m-made it to stage one to begin with?’

  ‘Why? I’ve got to have some fun. Besides, I was using your rubescent cheeks as a beacon in all of this blinding white.’ He gently barged me in the shoulder and laughed, and I was a little relieved to feel the baby stir. ‘Watch out lady, or I’ll start telling you what he’s thinking about you wh-when he’s alone because he’s not quite as innocent as-’

  I tripped him so he’d fall face-first into a snow mound for that one, and then called out for Martya to come help him up because I had my hands full, secretly thinking that I’d tie Sam to a tree and leave him there if he didn’t stop torturing me with his special ‘gift’. Or set him on fire with my own, seeing as how at least that way I’d get the chance to warm up a bit. But as I entertained the thought of playing with my fire as we walked just to see if I’d be able to generate enough heat to keep everyone warm for awhile without catching on fire myself, the ground levelled out beneath me and became uneven and slushy and just like that, we were in a valley.

  It was like being transported to another planet, so I held the baby tightly to my chest and stared like an alien would. From above, I had been able to see where the original valley had begun and ended because there was still a bowl-like shape apparent in the lie of the land that was rimmed by a thick, dead forest of blackened trees that had once been called evergreens, but once we were in the base of it, there was no guessing how the landscape would change beneath our feet between one step and the next.

  But there was no way to continue north without crossing it and so that was what we did. Our teeth chattered and our muscles seized up with uncontrollable shivering and our eyelashes fused together, forcing us to squint through
frosted-over eyeballs, but we followed the shepherd over rotted tree trunks, rusted and belly-up trucks that were imbedded in ice right to the running boards, collapsed buildings and so many frosted animal carcasses that I gave up trying to count them after fifteen. Sometimes there was nothing to be seen for ten metres except for the lumpy white ground ahead of us, so it was anyone’s guess what was under there, but at another point we actually walked parallel to the hull of a massive wrecked ship on our right that was longer than Eden’s front perimeter fence and jutting up out of the ground so much that the lower portholes were actually visible above the snowdrifts. I was more than tempted to go exploring, (and some people were giving me the time to do just that by collapsing on the ground in fatigue- mostly the ones that had been carrying their children for hours) but I could hear things moving around inside that hull so I nipped my wanderlust in the bud, knowing that bears had probably been camped out inside it for a very long time and would not take kindly to uninvited guests.