IN THE MOUNTAINS OF FIRE by Dolores J. Nurss
Volume I: Welcome to The Charadoc!
Chapter 12 THE ART OF THE GUN
Friday,
February 21, 2708 We pause in the march.
I sit under a tree, trying to ignore the throbbing of my feet or the
clank of the chain, every time I move, that loops around its trunk, or the ants
that persist in crawling up my legs.
Instead I watch the way the sunlight dances in between the shadows of
the leaves. I watch a dainty green bug
make his careful, looping progress from blade to blade of grass. And I watch Cyran drilling children on how to
shoot. I listen to the laughter as the
little ones learn a brand new game. (I have to abandon my
desk. I don't know why. Perhaps I lose
my mind. I hear laughter in my head, the
laughter of young boys, and I hear blood in it.
I have to leave this desk, this building, something.) (Something has gone wrong. And Fireheart Friendclan will have to fix
it. It's way up in the northwest. It’s down in the southwest. It's nowhere.
It's everywhere. It…it just is.) “Show them how it's done, Marduk. Now watch carefully—we don't have that many
bullets to spare for practice.” (I feel it in the
halls, too, as though blood dyes the polish in the paneling, as though murder
sparkles in the dust upon the air. I
have to get out!) (I have to get out, into the night,
feeling the sunlight on the other side of the world beat down upon my heart,
illuminating nothing. I fret in this
vacation that Randy has insisted on; my muscles tense for action, my fingers
crook as though I had a trigger to pull.) “Try again, Rashid.
You're hitting too low. Watch
your pattern and learn from it. Raise
the gun a little bit higher...that's better.
I don't expect you to hit it on the first try.” (I feel like a
truant, leaving my desk. But nobody
tells the Headmaster where to come or go.
I sit at the bench by the door and pull on my heavy snow galoshes. I fasten them slowly, deliberately. Nobody must know my panic to get out of here
as quickly as I can. None must suspect
their headmaster of going mad.) “Hey, not bad, Lufti!”
You hit it on the second try!”
The sandy-haired little boy grins from ear to ear, and goes to put the
can that he grazed back up on the stump for the girl who usually guards me when
I'm not chained to a tree. (My overcoat feels
heavy on me as I finally make it out the door, trudging a dirty line through
last night's clean snow. But I welcome
the frosty air; it seems to blow from someplace pure, someplace beyond the
school walls...what a stupid, terrible thought!
Who cares what lies beyond the school walls? Here we have learning, wisdom, the grace of
the old classics, the refinements of generations of gentlemen learning to take
their proper places in society. Here we
have the ghosts of snickers, something evil choking up the stuffy halls. Here we...oh, I don't know!) “Try to brace yourself better, Kiril...uh, no, that's not
quite it. It's the recoil, dear. I'm sure that when you grow a bit you'll aim
just fine. In the meantime, we can find
other ways for you to serve the revolution.” I start to rise from my seat, the chain clanking ominously. Kiril whips around to glare at me. “I can cook!” she declares. “Whadja think e meant, you nasty sow?” (What do I mean by
all of these thoughts? Surely they must
come from me, mustn't they? Neuroses of
my own wandering imagination? I hear
that other countries indulge in telepathy and all manner of impropriety, but we
don't have anything like that here in Toulin, we do quite well without it. No, we are all as innocent as that pure white
snow ahead of me, unmarked by step or shadow.
Except for those tracks over there, converging on the shooting range.) “Fantastic, Damien!
You nailed it on the first go—I mean right down the center!” “Thanks.” The boy
tosses his dark curls and blows smoke from the pistol. “My uncle taught me shooting, while he
lived.” (I hear the shots,
ahead, of students learning the manly art of the hunt. I put on the ear protection at the gate, and
all becomes muffled. They don't see
their Headmaster behind them, coming up to watch their progress. They don't hear me shouting, “Stop this
madness!” when I see the birds and rats
and squirrels that they have tethered to the targets, and the blood upon the
snow. Sportsmen do NOT shoot tethered
animals! I have to grab a boy and
wrestle his gun away. A wounded badger
gives me a bleared look, still alive with several bullets in him, and then he
expires before my staring eyes.) “You'd be amazed,” Damien says, “How long my uncle kept on
shooting, with all those bullets in him, before he died. Someday I'll have to tell you the story.” “What do I mean by all these thoughts?”
Deirdre mumbled, halfway waking up. Some
of that didn’t even belong in The Charadoc, not even the same hemisphere; it
seemed like winter, there—wherever “there” might be. “Dreams,” she decided, “Just memories of
memories of dreams.” And she fell back
into the trance before Justín could stir. |
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