IN THE MOUNTAINS OF FIRE by Dolores J. Nurss
Volume
II: Tests of Fire and Blood
Chapter 34 No Homesickness Allowed
Sunday, May 24, 2708 (I wake in the middle of the night.
Some deep horror jolts me up, but I find myself safe in the thick, old
quilts and blankets of the Headmaster's quarters, comforting and warm and worn. I can't get back to sleep.
I have the oddest feeling that my distress was not my own. With hardly a susurration I put on robe and
slippers in the dark, and step out into the hall, still feeling a bit fuzzy
from sleep. I don't know why my feet take me downstairs, to the
student's dorms. They seem to know
exactly where to go, my feet. Sometimes
I wonder if I have one of those peculiar senses that some people say run rife
in Novatierre. Then I laugh at my own
rubbish. Still, I follow the instincts
that forty years at my post have trained in me.
I find a cold doorknob by feel and enter a room with four bunk beds, for
our youngest first years. Three of them
snore softly. The fourth sniffles and
weeps. I kneel by this lower bunk.
“Bad dreams?” I whisper. “N-no.” The
starlight in the window sparkles in his eyes. “Would you like to talk about it? I can authorize hot chocolate for an
emergency like this,” I try to whisper as jocularly as I can. A long pause. In
that pause I hear that somebody has stopped snoring. “No sir,” he says at last. "Very well,” I say, standing up. “It can't be too terrible, then. Buck up, young sir, before you disturb your
roommates.” And I leave, helpless to do
anything else if I can't draw him out. I
wonder, despite all sense, if he knows something that I dearly need to know,
myself. I make it almost all the way up
the stairs before I hear, behind me, a wail of absolute despair.) * * * Morning, sort of. We dress in the dark in our laundered old
clothes, scrubbing up and enjoying all the benefits of indoor plumbing. Kief wears his sleeveless shirt over the new
uniform, in deference to the weather, stripping off the black ribbon trim so
that no one will know that it came from Tumblebugs. (“Mornin’, Headmaster,” the dairyman says with a nod in my
direction, his pails gurgling as he passes in the dim blue glow. They’re used to my morning constitutional,
and approve of a man in my position rising early to take a walk. But they would not approve, had they known my
secret heart. Sometimes I just have to
get out of the building, in the early hours before the day, just to breathe
undusty air, just to feel the sky overhead, that indefinable sense of limitless
freedom. Oh God forbid the thought!
We need our limits, lest we live like pirates, rank and lawless!) We pass bread between us as
we hurry out, under the failing stars at zenith while all the horizon below
takes flame. Lucinda also hands out
scarves from the gift shop—all the muted ones that don’t sell well, but knit of
something light and fluffy and heavenly warm. (Yet clouds impose some boundaries, surely. They follow the hidden strata of the air,
each sort of cloud staying to its level, flattening at the foot on the pressure
beneath. However disorderly in
comparison to this institution of brick and polished wood, they do keep laws of
their own. There, just above the school walls, a sheer strand of
sunrise-colored cloud stretches out, pale coral, like a scarf across the
sky. I haven’t seen that color in so
long…) I gaze out on the colors on
the rim of the world. They remind me of
the Coral Gulf at home…and shame on you, Deirdre! Agents don’t allow homesickness. The world holds many beauties beyond the
shores of Til. (I used to love the scarves.
Oh, all the different colors, some shot with silver and some with
threads of gold! Some had beading, some
embroidery, some had sequins that would catch the sun like sparks, and many had
fringes that shivered with each move. We used them to play pirate—swathed about the head, the waist, the
throat, a gaudy wrap for stones and shells that passed for stolen swag. No reason, anymore, why not, sh...someone
said, since sh could never again…NO!
Don’t follow that thought! For
God’s mercy, man, for the salvation of soul and sanity, don’t follow that
thought!) We travel some ways in
silence before the first engines start up--then Yan and Yaimis cry out as one,
falling to the ground with hands clapped on their ears. "Shhhh!" Aichi
hisses and kicks Yaimis, but Fatima pulls her away. Slowly, shaking, the boys climb back to their
feet, shoulder their packs again, and move on.
Damien goes over to march beside them and softly whistles some of the
tunes that he sang to the Tumblebug staff last night, and I can see the twins
work hard to hear nothing else. * * * Sometimes it seems that I
live from meal to meal, but this one hardly counts. Lucinda passes around more stapleseed
biscuits from the gardener's fare: rich, nutty, coarse and toothsome, but not
nearly enough--they barely dent the hunger of hard marching on slopes in the
cold. Why? Our backs ache with the weight of our
supplies, food from both the gardeners and Tumblebugs. We even have some bean cakes left from
Chicamoq. She must foresee hard times
ahead for us, then. On the plus side, feral
tobacco grows abundantly around us, plants as tall as me, with unkempt skirts
of dead leaves underneath the broad, pale-green ones full of life. They give us a rough, uncultivated smoke, raw
in the throat, much like ourselves, so that's all right. We suck in smoke like breathing food, and
tuck away more leaves for future use. My father smoked. I remember my disgust at the time, the smell
of him, the yellow stains on his fingers.
I glance at my own fingers as I pass a hand-rolled cigar to Chulan. Yep, stained.
And my breath smells just like his, no doubt. Father...Jacob Keller. I had my suspicions about that name right
off, of course--it didn't sound at all like Mountainfolk. Jacob--well, people take Bible names
everywhere the missionaries go, and the mountain heights never stopped a
determined soldier of God. But that
didn’t explain the surname. I pass between boulders:
raw, pale outcroppings of the planet’s granite bones. I think of the rough stone chapels, erected
up in the mountains for the saving of Mountainfolk souls that nobody else seems
to want. For a second I almost believe
that I hear church-bells. Then I shake
my head--I’ve always been prone to imagining things like that. I never did find out what religion my father
belongs to. If any. When I eventually did track
him down I found him as Jacob Kusma, of the Kusma Clan in Sunrise House. Which didn't stop him from having a line of
credit in Archives under the Keller name, kept secret from his family--the
family that he never did let me meet. Chulan hands the cigar back
to me and I smoke thoughtfully, only half-regarding the landscape beyond the
swirls that I breathe upon the air.
Blood will tell, they say.
Baptize a child under an alias and who should wonder if she grows up to
be an agent? A foreign provocateur,
infiltrating the ranks of an organization that is, of itself, underground. Sneak, child of Sneak. And oh, Father, I have plenty enough secrets
of my own to not pry too much into yours. Except, on this mission, my
name. No secret there; I entered the
country with no expectation of needing to conceal my identity, or my
affiliation with the Tilián. Everybody
knows me by the name that I’ve borne from infancy: Deirdre Evelynne Keller,
Jacob Kusma’s secret daughter. As it turned out, though, he'd
stolen the name "Keller" from the first sign that he came across when
he hit the Lowlands: "Keller Pianos--Quality Sound at Makeshift
Prices." My heritage. His family never even knew that he'd gone
down to the Cities, nor that he'd fathered a child out of wedlock and left it
for strangers to raise; they believed that he'd traveled from village to
village on itinerant work for awhile.
Sounds like something I could do.
Maybe I got my love of hiking from him. I look around me, at Kief,
at Imad, at Teofilo. So that's what’s
nagging me. Most male persons in this
revolution remind me of my father--I’d never met that many Mountainfolk growing
up. He'd looked like a stranger
to me, and he did not. Jacob’s rangy
proportions and his height spoke of some atavistic mix in the blood, but the
dark skin, slant eyes, jutting nose, and craggy cheekbones defined his race
clearly enough. I take a lot more after
him than I ever did my mother, God rest her soul; pale Little Bertha had hair
as red as Kief's, back when she had any.
But Jacob’s hair gleamed as black as mine, coarse and wavy; it receded
around a widow's peak over his gaunt and big-boned face with the earthtone skin
stretched taut over angles, everything angles.
He had knobby joints and knuckles like mine, only more so, gnarled like
roots, and all the scars and seams and sinews made him look tough, but his eyes
pleaded for understanding, back then, on the day we met. I draw deep on the tobacco
before handing it on to Damien. The man
never told me whether he had ever married, or whether I have siblings. He never said a thing about my Mountainfolk
kin, and all I know of the culture comes from books. He did tell me that it was
better this way, that I wouldn't have liked the mountain life, he left me best
off raised by Til. I look at the steep
landscape around me now, and laugh brief puffs of smoke. I would've had far fewer opportunities had he
claimed me—he’d said. I give that a
little thought. I would never have had
the opportunity to march up here in the middle of godforsaken nowhere, cold and
hungry and footsore, but certainly different peaks than the ones my father
knew, I’ll give him that. I would never
have had the opportunity to get shot at, the opportunity to...kill. Damien hands the cigar
back. I suck the last bittersweetness
from the butt and drop it to the stone underfoot to grind out the glow of
it. I expect I smell like Jacob Kusma,
now. Ah well, he meant well. And Jonathan, the father I chose for myself,
I suppose he meant well, too. All of
these men in my life who mean well. I
glance over at Kief, who smiles back.
Maybe I should try something other than fathers. But even now those dark and
pleading eyes haunt my memory, the way they made me feel like one great, big,
walking shame who'd caught up with him as inexorably as a Fury. I hated my reflection in those eyes and I
almost hated him for it. But when I saw
the genuine concern for my mother as I reported her missing in the grips of her
disease, when he agreed to do anything he could to help me find her, I had to
forgive him everything. Meant well. But...no name. I don't even have a real name. And I only found out last year. |
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