Sunday, May 31, 2708, continued

        Chimes of pure electricity become the chiming of shovels hitting stones, and then the soft thud of earth falling on the shroud around too young a body, intermixed with the thin chants of voices singing songs too old, songs for the laying of so many to rest after generations of service in the war.  And the night smells like fresh-turned earth, drowning out the sweetness of the moonlight-silvered trees.  I shiver in the autumn mountain cold.

          After the funeral I follow Malcolm out into the brush.  I find him sitting on the ground.  He has bought himself three more meals and now he wolfs one down like he’s trying to choke himself or something, sobbing between gulps, the tears running down his face and splashing onto his food.

"Want to talk about it?"

He whirls around so suddenly that bean sauce arcs out from his plate; his glare makes me afraid.

"Don't you ever, ever approach me when I want to be alone!"  Food hangs from his chins, but I try to look only at the pain in his eyes.

"Do you?  I think you've been alone too much, already."

He sighs and sets down his plate.  I join him there, not looking at him, staring at the same bank of moonshadow’d ferns that he does.

"Would you rather talk about Imad or Aron?"

He finishes the last bites on the first plate, but slowly, and then sets it aside.  "Imad wanted to be a vintner someday--did you know that?"

"No.  I didn't."

"He used to pick grapes on Mukheymer estate, train the vines, do all that work, out back on the rockier terraces where the poor soil made the best wine.  He'd followed his father in the field since he could walk.  He knew everything about what conditions grow the best kinds of grapes for varietals I'd never even heard of."

I hold his hand.  "I had no idea."

"Imad wanted to someday start up his own winery, if he came out well after his part in the revolution.  He had some ideas for pressing a distinctly Charadocian wine that would give us a reputation to rival Raigboth and Llangdan combined."

"Wow."

"And Mischa, she knew a thing or two about olives..."  I hardly listen, just staring at our hands, his great one engulfing mine.  In the dark I can hardly see them as they are; soon I stare at a memory of hands inside my head--Jacob's long and vein-knotted one, all callous and rough; Bertha's delicate little collection of bones, curled up fragile in my palm, cool and sometimes spasming with the pain, but trustful there in my clasp as I tried to warm it with mine; and yes, my own, seeing my fingers as young and graceful, as if they belonged to a stranger, brown as my father's, not much like my mother's at all but nobody cared right then, young hand full of warmth and life.

We held each other's hands. We took turns.  Sometimes my father or I had to let go, like when we went to change the stinking bedding for something fresh and comforting.  They had a basin in that ramshackle house, they had well-water, slightly brackish yet clean enough.  Sometimes we sponged the dry mouth above the throat that could no longer swallow, could only gasp through that little hole.  But we always reconnected; mostly all we did that day, and the next day after, was hold hands, like we could do it forever.  We fell asleep holding hands.  Sometime on the third day one of us died and there it ended and we let go.

"...when I asked Aron what kind of pet he wanted, exactly, he said 'A dinosaur!'"  I try to find my place back in the conversation.  "I don't think he ever got it through his head just how completely impossible this was, and I never enlightened him.  Everybody needs a goal, I guess."

"You did right," I tell him.  "He never got disappointed."

He looks at his two cooling plates, untouched.  “I guess I’m not so hungry anymore.  Do you want these?”  I see the flash of an uncertain smile in the dark.  “it wouldn’t hurt you to have several suppers in a row, skinny as you are.”

I pick them up.  “Let me take them to the others.  At their age they should eat twice the calories of an adult anyway.”

 

Monday, June 1, 2708

Past midnight, now, and still I wriggle in my hammock, trying to get comfortable, making the chaummin-tree groan with my movements, and its sweet scent doesn’t do me a lick of good.  Maybe it’s just knowing that a village lies just a little ways away, down on the other side of this small ridge, and each cottage holds within it real beds, indoors.  But we wouldn’t want to endanger the folks down there.

Ingrate!  Here I lie, in the sweetness of a brand new blanket, a fresh new pillow under my head, clean clothes upon my body, and good food, from a real supper, in my belly.

And yet it isn’t that.  Something else nags me—something of that vague hunch sense that troubles me now and then.  Like great strategies revolve around this inconsequential little village, for reasons beyond my knowledge.  I feel like I ought to hurry past, get out of here.

(Almost out of time!  Almost out of time!  That, and another crazy phrase keeps playing over and over in my head: Snag in a mothhole.  I have no idea what it means, yet I cannot stop the madness of it.  I cannot let anybody at the Academy see me like this, but neither can I stop it.

I have locked the office door.  I have pulled the curtains, so that I grope in the dark despite the dawn, but it feels as though I do that all the time, now, anyway.  I rifle through the drawers, unable to remember for the moment where I keep the most basic stationary, as the urgency drowns out almost everything.)

(The Tilián have a saying for occasions like this—and of course a cosmopolitan education like my own has covered much of Tilián philosophy, no matter how tedious.  For however peaceable they pretend to be, they do have quite an effective military force, don’t they?  How did it go, again?  “A snag in a mothhole can tear open the fabric of the world.”  Melodramatic, like everything about them, but apropos.

I smile to myself, even as I burn my rough draft of the letter to Sanzio.  We are going to rip this lil’ old revolution wide open and beat the stuffing out of it!)

I didn’t even know I’d fallen asleep, but I must have, because the weeping and sniffling wakes me even before I feel the tug on my sleeve.  I open my eyes to his face, shiny in the starlight for the tears upon it.

“Why Lufti!  What’s wrong, pet?”  I let him climb up into my hammock, swaying in the dark.

“Bad dreams,” he whispers.  “I don’t understand!”

“Well, we often don’t understand dreams, dearheart.  Why don’t you tell me about it, so we can laugh at the silliness together?”

“The sharp point of a star caught on a mothhole, and it ripped, and, and guts spilled out!”

“Out of what?” I ask, but he just looks at me terribly, his eyes burning till they glow like two stars, themselves, brighter and brighter…

…and then I wake for real, here in my hammock, all alone in the dark, remembering that Lufti must sleep miles away from here.

(A star.  I shall be the rising star of the Charadocian army, once I pull this business off.  I write the final draft, this time in the agreed-upon code.)

(And then, there, I have it, the stationary drawer.  I find the crisp, pale sheets, precisely in their place, the corners all squared and proper.  I shouldn't write mad things on such purity—but I must!)

I should write all this down…no, that’s Jake.  Jake writes down all his dreams.  That’s his job, as an oracle.  I shake my head.  Strange notions again, Deirdre.  I have no use for dreams, myself.  I try to get back to sleep.

(I take a deep breath, so that my handwriting will not shake.  In precise strokes of the pen, I write, “Dear agents of Til:  Please send someone to the Toulin Academy for Young Gentlemen, in the nation of the same name.  Something has gone wrong.  Something has gone terribly, terribly wrong, and I do not know what.  I may have gone mad, but I fear not.  Please send somebody, just in case.  I know that I ask a lot of you, with nothing to go on, but you have no idea what it feels like to be here, now, with this SOMETHING growing just beneath the surface.  Yours truly, Professor Wallace Weatherbent, Headmaster of the Toulin Academy for Young Gentlemen.  P.S.:  Thank you, thank you, thank you, for being there, even if you don't send anyone.”)

(I sign it with a star.  We agreed upon that, too.  Sanzio understands these things, what officialdom may recognize, and what they do better not to know.  I slip it into the cylinder, with Sanzio D’Arco’s latest contact information upon it in plain sight, but he can take the heat.)

          (Now my hands do shake as I roll the letter up, and slide it into its cylinder.  Then, on an impulse, I also slide in the magentine crystal that the sick boy held, that has glowered at me like some bloodshot eye for weeks now, twinkling in the pencil-drawer, shocking me sick every time I opened the thing, but I can always feel it there, even when I close the drawer.  When I seal the cylinder up I feel a sudden relief.  There—let the Tilián deal with the poisonous rock!  They like that sort of thing.

          I dab the sweat off of my brow.  I straighten my vest and my jacket, pick up that and other letters that must go out with the mail, and leave my office for the mail-room.  I have the keys.  Nobody need know that their Headmaster has not slept all night long.)

          I open my eyes to the paling of the night, in anticipation of the dawn.  I feel as if I haven’t slept at all.