IN THE MOUNTAINS OF FIRE by Dolores J. Nurss
Volume I: Welcome to The Charadoc!
Chapter 13 WATCHING AND WITNESSING Saturday,
February 22, 2708 Weary,
at the end of a hard day's march, no supper in my stomach, I topple into my
hammock too worn out to even register the chains... (...too
worn out to even care much about the smell of this old chicken-coop that we hide in,
yet tense, every muscle of my body tense.
My turn to watch. Makhliya sits
up, watching me watch. Angrily, I point
at the dirt and she lies back down; every one of us who can rest must do
so. I gaze a moment too long on her
hair, shimmering like a night-dark river that spills down over her
shoulders, Then I get a grip on myself
and go out to my post. I try not to brush against the bean stalks
as I walk through the rows, try to make no rustle. The irrigation cobbles there will betray no
footprint--after the old man scolded me I pay much more attention to such
things. “Pimply stick of a boy,” he
called me to my face, but I’ve seen some things that many a grown-up never has. Now comes the grassy stretch. I get down on my hands and knees and burrow
below the seed-heads; if they look they will see no more track than an animal
leaves. I wish to God I really was just a boy, in some other country, where
all you have to do before you come of age is play and study and do small
chores. Maybe one of those countries
where the boys all go to live-in schools and never worry about anything beyond
the walls until they come out as adults, able to read and everything. They don’t wriggle through the grass to hide
from bullets, there. At last I make it to the brow of the
hill. The road winds down below, empty
from horizon to horizon. So it has gone
now, day after day, night after night.
Sometimes I feel like I watch for a convoy of ghosts. They're at least a week late. When will they get here? Already the villagers grumble about how much
food we eat. Yet oh dear God, forgive me for praying
every night, every morning, to hold back the payroll convoy one more day! It's not like I never fought before, God
knows. Yes, God knows, because when I
sleep I stand before the Heavenly Throne in nothing but my own blood-soaked
skin, a wound everywhere that I wounded someone else. Night after night I stand before God like
that, then stumble into other darker dreams. God forgive me for hesitating to avenge my
murdered kinsmen! God forgive me for not
always caring that we hardly ever eat the abundant harvest of stapleseed, that
it all must go to fuel the engines of the rich, that I watched my mother thin
down as I ate the only food we had, till she spent every minute she could
curled up asleep. God forgive me for not
hating the villains that I kill. Villains recruited from the same village,
older boys who used to play with me, taught me how to wrestle and climb trees and
how to throw a rock with deadly accuracy the way I throw knives now. They say that I'm good at fighting, one of
the very best. Oh God, forgive me! And do the rich even know? Do they know what they recruit the village
boys to do? Do they know why I live the
way I must? The overseer who held his
hand from beating my mother when she grew too weak for work, who killed his own
calf to give our family a little respite, who told us how the law bound him
from treating us any better, how he had no choice, did he ever muster the
courage to tell his masters the price of what they ordered? Could anyone ever dare? God!
Why do you stare so hard at me every single night, naked in my
blood! Me, and the conscripts I kill,
and the overseers and the masters and mistresses over them--why must you plunge
each and every one of us into Hell? You
last visited almost three thousand years ago.
Maybe you'd better come back for a refresher course on what it means to
be human.) I sleep
so deeply that if I had any dreams I can't remember them. *
* * Blurs
passed through the psychometrist, days identical and not identical, like the
non-rhythms of tlomi, fluttering changes of vegetation and words, songs and
silences, rocks and winds and clouds, peaks and valleys. Deirdre registered everything, more richly
than most, in more detail than she should, yet in the end no event stuck out
enough to keep it all from blurring anyway.
It surprised Justín slightly, nonetheless
(inasmuch as anything could surprise him anymore) how happiness increasingly
seemed to overlay the view like a softening rainforest mist. No, it
didn’t really surprise him, not after all of the minds that he had
visited. He had met Til agents who had
found something to enjoy in disasters, wars, imprisonments, even torture. Missions made agents strange, until their
very strangeness bored him, each flowing into each like another day
force-marched through a wild paradise.
Yet now and then features surfaced, like great stone outcroppings,
boulders jutting from the jungle green.
Meanwhile, two doors down, a transcriber doggedly typed a book into
Archives... Thursday, February 27, 2708 At least I think it's Thursday; I could easily have
lost track. I have grown so tired these
past few days that I haven't been at all good about writing anything down about
them. Sanzio leads me on a fading trail
from village to village, sometimes two or three in a single day, and that on
muleback. Machine-made vehicles do not
travel where we want to go; no one would sell me any if they did. The villages give off smells that I had hoped to
leave behind me when I rejoined my friends in the Charadoc, smells of no
refrigeration and no sanitation in a tropic clime. Why can't they get their act together like
other low-tech cultures around the world, make themselves buried coolers and
composting toilets and all of the other commodities that people have used since
before the Migration? I ask Sanzio about
this, but he shrugs, telling me that they have no one to teach them, and no one
has time to learn. I think he makes
excuses for laziness; he comes from such people, after all. My sports-clothes, although loosely sleeved, still
mark me as a gentleman roughing it. The
villagers always notice, always defer, always glower under their brows at me
and watch me like every move could be an omen of their fortunes. And each and every one looks like they want
something from me, bright eyes of hope, dark looks of resentment for some help
that I supposedly could offer but won't, can't be bothered. I want to shout in their faces, "I'm not
an agent anymore! I retired to a nice
little embassy to get away from needy people and their voracious demands--I
have nothing left to give!" But
they never actually say anything that I can shout back at. Lovequest never listens anyway, just points and
points like an importunate child, saying, "Look! Look!
Look!" at all the world's misery, no matter where you go, and the
child always wears that orphan face that stares up at you like it's all your
fault. Ai, the contacts made and betrayed, the heartbreak
of starting over from scratch again and again!
And all the while the poor grab at me in nightmares, cackling, "You
thought you could forget me at last--you thought that I had vanished between tea
and supper!" Friday,
February 28, 2708 The hunger gets to me, sometimes. Birds sing, and all I can think of is
succulent fowl on the wing, maybe folded into a flaky crust with nuts and
berries. Rustles in the underbrush might
taste like chicken, or beef, or pork. We
cross a creek and I can't help but scan the waters for fish or frogs, the
sunwashed rocks for lizards. I feel
lightheaded all the time, now, a vast and watery distance wavering between my
feet and head. (I feel crazy all the
time, now, barely hiding it, I fear, from staff and students. My face, my gestures, my posture, all follow
presentable forms by years of habit, but I wonder what they read in my
eyes? Do they see the terror, there, the
sense of pressure in some ungodly medium, invisible to the eye?) As an agent I have undergone hunger before, but never for
so long, barely touched by the Spartan morning meals, falling a little bit more
behind every day. Sternly I remind
myself that other agents have survived worse, far worse, and still fulfilled
their missions. But what mission do I
have now, a prisoner far from the embassy for which I trained, powerless and
chained? Lovequest, Merrill would remind me. Anywhere, under any circumstance. I must always serve Lovequest. Even among my captors. (What exactly do I do
here, as headmaster? What do I
serve? This venerable establishment, all
the more revered for its time-rounded bricks and the mustiness of its books? But what does the establishment serve? These students, eager or bored, innocent or
naughty, brilliant or dull, obedient or rebellious or just quietly trying to
get by unnoticed? Aye, there—I serve the
next generation, and all generations to come. But do I? What if—oh horrible thought!--what if I, what
if we all—no, don't even think such a thing! What if everything we teach, have
taught for generations, is...wrong?) I distract myself.
My eyes go to the intricacy all around me, the tangle of twigs and
vines, roots and ferns, tendrils and spider's webs. Layers upon layers of beauty, an extravagance
of lace in living form. It has existed before my hunger, before my very birth,
and will continue long after I die. Even
the newest sprouts unfurling, the day-old mushrooms, the feather just now
dropped, continue something ancient, new cells in an old, old being. (I distract
myself. I go into one of the empty
classrooms. Proper, that the Headmaster
should inspect these venerable grounds entrusted to me, make sure that
everything has been laid out as it should.
I make it through and close the door just in time, before the vertigo
becomes noticeable. And indeed, I find reassurance in that old
geometry, smooth and polished wood, the desks all in their lines, the chairs
all waiting at the perfect distance from them to give the students room, the
right angles of chalkboard and books and stacks of paper and walls—Right,
right, every angle right. Exactly as it
has been, for generations. I feel steady
once again, my feet planted on solid stone.
But then some impulse, out of nowhere, causes me to walk over and lift
up a desk's lid, to look inside.) But then something happens in my hunger-watery mind. I start to see the twigs and roots and things
form emblems. Horrible emblems. Evil symbols that I once saw on the
charm-bracelets of Alroy's slaves... (...upside-down
crosses, upside-down pentagrams, backwards-whirling swastikas, symbols still
more arcane than these, inked or carved into the wood. I flip open more and more desks, and find the
same—every single desk! Inner chambers
full of darkness, full of things never taught by any authorized class, where
did the boys even hear of such things?) It's just my imagination, I tell myself. It's just my hunger, seeing dreadfulness
where none exists. I stumble on,
listening to delicious-sounding birds. |
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