IN THE MOUNTAINS OF FIRE by Dolores J. Nurss
Volume I: Welcome to The Charadoc!
Chapter 33 The Ruins
Saturday,
April 4, 2708, continued Blue
dawn spreads into a dim, green day. We
hurry, now, flittering through the trunks and vines and brush as swiftly as if
a real path lay before us, expertly flowing through the vegetation as the
native beasts must do, around and over and under, the leaves hardly bruised
under feet so light. And
then suddenly, pushing through the rain-wet leaves, I see it for the first time:
(Home!
Home base at last!) the sculpted arch overgrown by jungle, a passage
through walls already breached by trees with roots that break through
stucco. (Home base? Is this where I
shall call home forever after?) Ironically,
the stonework portrays trellises overgrown by vines. Looks like an abandoned campus of some
sort. The smell of cooking-fires and
livestock beckons more sweetly than the perfume of all the flowers of the
rainforest; my mouth waters--I want to eat the smoke off of the air! (Tobacco! Oh God, how I miss tobacco!) Inside
the border wall, under a golden wash of sunlight, stately buildings of
classical form tower over us in proud dishevelment like the antique ruins of
Earth, with rude repairs here and there patched on by unskilled hands. Slogans carved in Latin and Greek drown in
moss and vines, the half-heard whispers of antiquity made visible. Other slogans declare Egalitarian values in
brilliant sprays of paint, with occasional bursts of not unskillful art to
illustrate the point. Children
swarm all over the place, in the shadow of monumental sculptures, tending goats
or chickens or pigs, stomping laundry clean in steaming basins, nailing
shingles onto roofs, attending classes, drilling with weaponry. Here and there teenagers and the occasional
adult direct them. To my shock, many of
them, older and younger alike, smoke little hand-rolled cigarettes. Alysha
clangs a triangle-bell hung at the gate, three quick strokes and pause, three
quick strokes. Immediately children run
up with baskets of bread, preserves, strips of cured meat--and cigarettes. The older children of our party (including
Alysha!) go for the cigarettes even before the food, all hovering around a coal
held in tongs, each to light up in turn. I
tear into salty meat, hot with bits of peppers pounded into it, and cool my
mouth with bread as brown as my hand. My
heart beats with a surprising excitement as I force myself to slow enough to
smear pinkish-orange preserves across the remainder of the bread. Alysha hands me a tub of soft cheese that
just arrived, smoke curling out of her nostrils and around her head; she
doesn't look quite human. I add it to my
bread and almost swoon at the combined flavors, then balance it off with the
spicy meat, then take an embarrassingly noisy slurp at a mug of beer going
around (one mug for all of us, just enough to aid digestion of this
unaccustomed food.) And then I gulp down
handfuls of nuts, and another of dried fruits, I don’t care which kinds. “They
had to come down the hungry side,” I overhear murmurs in the crowd that
nourishes us. “The army held the other
pass.” “Soldiers don't know about Hungry
Pass.” “Nobody goes that way but us.” I reach for more bread and cheese, only to
look into stern eyes withdrawing the baskets again. "That's enough for now," Alysha
tells us. "We'll get a more
organized meal tonight--a dinner." (Dinner!
I haven't had a real dinner since Aunt Jee's!) (I thought I gave up dinners forever when I
left the ship!) (Oh dear God, we've come
home to paradise!) Wise lady,
Alysha; I know I would've eaten myself sick if left to myself--let alone what
the children might've done to themselves.
Even now I discover myself dizzy from unaccustomed nourishment and
suddenly find it challenging to keep my eyes open. "For now, I think we all deserve a
rest." A
girl, on the younger edge of adolescence, takes my chain from Kiril; she has
long hair like a waterfall of night and skin as dark as mine. We enter the indoor shade of what used to be
a library. Hammocks stretch from shelf
to shelf. The girl (Makhliya, she names
herself) hooks my chain to a ring bolted onto a shelf and, as I crawl into the
hammock, she spreads a light covering over me.
Sleep covers me as well, almost before her hands leave me... …and
I walk once again down the alleys of Rhallunn, squeezing between the makeshift
shacks and shelters, the rotting tents and the inhabited barrels, half-stunned
on the odor of pot and marsh and mildew and piled-up old garbage, stumbling in
my weariness, hard to keep my eyes open. But
I must. I have to find my mother. Jonathan said so. But there’s more to it than that. I ache for her, the lifelong absence in my
heart. Lisa
has left a trail of cowrie shells that I must follow, winding in and out,
through the cardboard and the plywood and the rags, glimmering in the dimness. I follow them down stairs, and then more
stairs, past the manmade parts, deep into the caverns underground. And then deeper still, and deeper, down to
where vague ochre figures act out dramas in the walls. But I don’t find my birth-mother there. I find Jonathan. He
looks weird, all wrong. Unshaven and
disheveled, and wild in the eyes. “You
didn’t expect to end up here, did you?” he says. “Well, neither did I. But Rhallunn calls to agents, soon or late,
no matter where they go. I went
down. You think you can escape by taking
the opposite direction, soaring up, soaring high. But up or down it all leads back to the same
place, if you take that road too far.”
And then he stares at me, and I don’t know what to say. Until
I remember what he taught me. The
mission first—always put the mission first, and you can’t go wrong, right? “Where’s my mother?” I ask. His
eyes gleam in the dark as he smiles queerly.
“Yes—that is the question, isn’t it?” I
wake suddenly, and the bookshelves rattle in my jolt. Then I shake my head over the stupid
dream. Lisa had marked the trail to my
mother with bright beads knotted into fabric, that last time that I visited
Rhallunn. I remember that. Cowrie shells had had nothing to do with it. And I attended Mom’s funeral—no use wondering
about her whereabouts anymore. And
besides, no one could ever build stairs down into the soft muck of Rhallunn. (I wake with a jolt at my desk, from my
impromptu nap, the dream already fading as fast as I can push it aside. Some nasty, trashy location. And…cowrie shells! Ugh—I must not think of…of those. I stand up to clear the cobwebs from my mind,
and while I’m at it I pick up a duster to remove some real cobwebs from the
corners. Unbecoming of a Headmaster’s
office—I shall have to address the janitor on the matter. Wait a minute. Did I just dream of…of not being male?) (I wake up in the middle of the night, crying
out for Randy, but of course Randy’s not here.
I never let him spend the night. What a dream! Why’n’earth would her cave lie underneath Rhallunn, of all
places? Still, I must jot it down, to
type into Archives first thing in the morning.
It might prove useful.) (“Break’s over,” Cici says, shaking me as
lightly as a maid at a hotel giving a requested wake-up call, and then she
helps me back to my feet. I didn’t mean
to fall asleep. I think I dreamed
something. But no, alcohol blocks
dreams. Yet I think I did. I think I saw her face, one last time.) |
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