Saturday, May 9, 2708

I lie here, staring up at a ceiling that I don't really see, because it's dark now, it's always dark.  We don’t light lamps when it might be night, it might always be night.

I can hear one of the twins breathing, lying nearby; it sounds hungry, somehow, like he tries to gobble up the air.  Or maybe it doesn't sound like anything at all.

"Say, Yaimis," I inquire, "or is it Yan?  Got anything to smoke?"  No reply.

Over to the other side Kiril says, "Why you askin' him?"

"Well, I've asked just about everybody else."

"Twins don't talk," she says, and rolls over with a rustle.  Now why didn't I notice that sooner?

 

Monday, May 11, 2708

I've got to think of something.  Anything.  Memories.  Something I did right...Mother?

No.  That didn’t work out.  No.  I came here to forget all about that.  Jonathan will suffice for me, I don’t need Bertha Maeve, I don’t need Jacob Keller.  Let my mentor be all the parent for me, fellow agent of the Tilián with values just like mine...

No.  I forgot.  That didn’t work out, either.

I open my eyes to nothing, no borders anywhere, black blended into black without definition.  My hands clasp my middle, but more than my belly starves.

So?  Who needs memories?  If I dwell on it too much, the stench of Rhallunn will come back to me.  Who needs that?  Who needs anything?

 

Tuesday, May 12, 2708

(We need this.  They have no idea how much we need this, the stupid headmaster and the teachers and all their minions. We need the dark.

They love the light, they blister us with light, but they don't see anything in it.  Right-angled walls and walks and hedges, oh, so very right!  They don't know the colors beyond the walls; they've forgotten all that.  So fine—they want us to forget color, and we shall!  Let them keep their light!”

We need to do this in the dark.  We sneak out in the night, cat-softly, past the snoring old chaperone, past the starlight in the lancet windows and the sliver of new moon, down, down into the cellar, down where the Changewright beckons us, down below all of the layers of pretense and discipline and right that isn't wright, that couldn't change a thing.

We can't see a thing down here, and that feels fine by us.  We hear the clink of instruments.  We hear the squeal of a rat.  We smell that iron tang.  We can't see a single color, but we know what light would show us, if it ever sank down so low: Red.  Red, red, red!)

 

Wednesday, May 13, 2708

We don't talk anymore.  We don't do anything anymore.  (I've worked this hungry before.)  We don't even smoke.  Nothing left to smoke, anyway.  (Sometimes I see things.)  We just lay on the cushions, muffled in blankets, each of us alone.  (Things--I see things in the dark.)  Sometimes we drink water--can't taste the flavor anymore.  (Sometimes I hear voices in the rock.)  Sometimes we get up to grope in the dark for that crack in the stone that serves as our latrine.  (I've marched this hungry before.)  Then we go right back in and lay down again.  (A chalice--I see a chalice, beautiful, burnished gold.  It sparkles mid-air, embossed with sacred shapes as it slowly tips towards me.)  (That seething sound—is that the sea?)

Hunger and the dark.  Nothing to see, to feel, to hear, certainly nothing to taste.  (Muttering in the rock--just almost out of hearing.)  My brain feels as empty as my stomach.  (It's not just hunger.  Times were I've danced so hungry that my feet hardly held up enough weight to keep me down.)  (It's the dark.)  It's the dark.  (Things, luminous in the dark.) (Ballet slippers dance up and down the cold rock walls, glowing pink satin.)  (The entire cavern fills with one great, enormous golden snake, beautiful jewel patterns on him, in green and deep red-brown like glossy silk brocade.)  (It's the nothingness.)  (It's the dark.)  (And here I lie, without fear, glad to let the snake devour me if he so desires, if only to feel a change.)  (Those rainbow rubber balls that Mischa used to like, they bounce all over the cave, blazing in the blackness, all in time with each other, all at once.) 

Sometimes the only relief I get comes from hallucinations.  (Horses run.)  (Yes, rainbow horses.) (Yes.  Run horses, run.)  I admit it--hallucinations.  (A New Year’s dragon twists and turns all around the room, shaking his rainbow mane and breathing fire.)  There--I've said it.  (The chalice tips, but nothing pours out.)  But not out loud.  (It's all the emptiness--emptiness is black.)  Nothing ever out loud.  (It's hunger.)  (I dream wide awake.)  (The monotony of the bouncing balls crushes me back into nothingness.)

 I see the most perfect, dew-sparkling cascade of grapes, round and juicy and richly purple, so real that I reach up for them...only to touch rock, cold and flat.  (The dragon’s made of paper and has no soul.  Even the fire’s just paper.)  (It's the dark.)  (It's laying on cushions so soft you don't even feel them anymore.)  The grapes won’t nourish me.  (The dark.)  (The rocks mutter, but they have nothing to say.)  (The horses run away.)  (And I we I can't whistle for them, in the dark.)  (The whistle goes away, just like our voices did.  It all, all, all has gone away.)  Nothing will nourish me.  (I don't know waking from sleeping anymore.)

(A glowing tree spreads branches over me, with stars for leaves and twisty-smoky trunk, roots down deep, deep in amongst the wise old bones.)  (The ballet slippers--empty.)  (My stomach--empty.)  (Mind--empty.)  (Soul...)

I used to get up and hang out in the smoker's cave, just to listen to that underground river.  (It's the dizziness that gets to you, the lightness of no food.)  (I watch all my mothers, all my fathers, dancing together, feet above the ground, light as smoke, light as hunger, they revolve in dreamy slow motion, without a shadow of a sound, not so much as a sigh.)  But after awhile even the water sounded like nothing.  (Skulls roll beneath the roots of the star tree, and the eyes in the skulls look so empty--so depressingly empty.) 

I don't know real from dream anymore.  (I could march, if only someone gave me orders.)  (I could sing, if anybody asked me to.)  I don't know which thoughts are mine.  (The sea means nothing to me anymore.) (It's the air that hardly moves, so that I barely know I'm breathing.)  I don't...I don't know anything anymore.  (It's the dark, the damnable, devil-bowel dark, the hungry dark that eats us all alive.)  (Tinkly music.  I hear a sweet, singing voice, high and quavery, dainty mandolin notes and a song of...I can’t make out the words.)  (No music to the dance--just stone cold silence, cold as a kiss on a dead mother's cheek.)  All alone in the smoker's cave, I used to listen to the water saying nothing.  (The ocean rises and falls beneath me, rises and falls, tipping me this way and that.)  (No face to the singer, just the endless dark.)  (It's hunger of the senses.)  (Empty, bottomless chasm of a dark.)  I don't know me anymore.  (The ocean takes me nowhere.)  (The snake ignores me.)  I am the dark.  (There is no anymore.)  (Nowhere.)  Nowhere.  (Nothing.)  Nothing.  (Empty.)  (Silent.)  (Hungry.)  (Hungry nothing dark of hollow mind and flesh...)

BELLS!  CLANGOR OF BELLS!  Again and again and again--do I hear it for real?  I must!  The others stir, cry out--we all hear it.  I grope until I find a lamp.

"Match," I call hoarsely.  "Who's got the last match?"  One of the twins hands it over--I can't tell which one, Yan or Yaimis, in the night.  Then I obliterate the night and still can't tell.  I try to keep the flame low, but the light hurts all of our eyes--even I cringe and hold up my hand against it.

The bell keeps ringing.  Lucinda gets up, falls to her knees, crawls to a cord and yanks it hard.  The ringing stops.  "Don't pick up that lamp just yet, Deirdre, or you'll drop it."  Her voice sounds rusty, unused.  "Get up and practice walking, two, three times around the room, first."  She grumbles, "How'd we ever let ourselves get into a state like this, I'll never know."

Sleepily, Damien says, "It felt like a kind of spell.  I couldn't think out of it."

"You and your spells!" she snaps.  "We just got soft, somehow."

"I know what happened to us," I say as I make my wobbly circuits of the room.  "Low blood sugar and sensory privation.  Either one alone can drive a person half out of her mind, but the combination completely hypnotized us.  We got too weak to care about the lamps, and without them we went under."

Kanarik can't rise without Damien's help.  When he pulls her up she sort of floats to her feet, still halfway in a trance.  I watch him drop her skirt fluttering over her, to catch on the curve of pelvic bone.  Now he tugs her blouse over ribs delicately etched into her flesh.  Then I realize that not only do I stand here staring like I've got nothing better to do, but that I, too, remain as naked as the hour I first laid down in the dark to sleep.  I dress myself shakily, yet I grow stronger every minute just from having some goal, some act, though no less empty.

Now we light more lamps from the one we began with, as our tolerance to their glow increases.  Lucinda leads the way down the tunnel to Petro's supply shaft.  When we get there Lucinda hollers up, "Lower down some food first, or we won't have the strength to ease you down gently."  My mouth waters at the very words.

"Okay, here comes the bread--should be light enough for ya."  God bless my nose--I smell it all the way down as we play out the ropes.  Could any perfume of heaven match the wholesome sweetness of fresh-baked grain?  It hits bottom with a thump that would've half-killed Petro.  We all pounce on the golden loaves as though they'd run away, then stuff ourselves with the warm and fragrant substance, laughing with our mouths full.  Oh, what Soskia would think of my manners, now!

"Eat 'em all, if you want," Petro calls down.  "I bought 'em special for you folks--bread won't store in the dank cave air."  God bless you, Petro, you gimpy ol' letch!  I feel more human with every gulp.

Even so, it takes all of our strength and our fiercest will to let Petro down more gently with the rest of the supplies, happy and pink with sunburn, already starting to peel.  I should've broken the monotony with exercise these past days--yet it all seemed so unthinkable at the time.

And now for our reward--tobacco!  Our eyes light up with the cigarettes as we send smoke spiraling up the shaft with sighs more contented than human beings have any right to feel.  We slouch upon the heaps of piled rainbow skeins like Naugrenite sultans, and wallow in the joy of living.

"Good news, folks!"  Petro booms at us.  "The heat's died down out there--I got the word from Shermio himself, and if anybody’d know it’d be that lil’ imp.  So you can all go back to the business you know best."  Dear God.  The war.  I'd forgotten all about it.  Suddenly wasting away in the dark seems like a desirable alternative.

Her voice uncharacteristically subdued, Lucinda says, "We've gone hungry a long time, Petro.  We'll need a few more days to build our strength up."

Petro eyes Chulan up and down, her skinny legs apart where she squats on his yarn, eyes squinting through her own smoke as she looks back at him.  "I'll consider it," he says.