IN THE MOUNTAINS OF FIRE by Dolores J. Nurss
Volume
II: Tests of Fire and Blood
Chapter 24 A Dark Enchantment
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. |
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