IN THE MOUNTAINS OF FIRE by Dolores J. Nurss
Volume
II: Tests of Fire and Blood
Chapter 52 Just Kids
Monday, June 1, 2708,
continued Rebels pay their way. Up on swaying poles that barely hold our
slender weight, we repair the thatch on the roadside stand with long leaves and
bundles of grasses that Malcolm ties and hands up to us, after our hostess
taught him the art. The couple, meanwhile,
prepares thin strips of meat to hang in a metal barrel out back, turned into a
smokehouse. While her parents work, the
little girl pats out mud pies in the leaf-dappled sun, as earnestly as if she
means to sell them to help keep the family afloat. "A few of the soldiers
come here on Saturday and Monday nights," our hostess whispers below us,
barely audible above our rustling.
"AWOL, but their captain rarely makes it back on Mondays from his
weekend trips down to the lowlands.
Sundays they leave to God." "Lately they've been
badgering us for whores," the man says grimly. I can hear his salt-shaker pause for a
moment. "The last time they said my
wife'll do, if I don't provide better." "You think they're
serious?" she asks him. Vigorous salting. "I don't know what to think. I don't dare guess." "They used to not be
so bad," she says, shaking her head.
"They're just kids. They
like my home-made chaummin better than what you can find anywhere else. But that Purple Mantle..." "Sanzio D'Arco--of all
those sons of sows the worst."
Something about that name makes me nearly drop a straw-bundle. I almost feel as if I’ve dreamed it, as if
that name has no right to intrude upon the daylit world. The woman says, "After
he questioned Aron, he just kept hanging around, poking into people's
business. And his mere presence puts
ideas into young men's heads, what they can get away with just from having him
around. I think even the Master of the
Plantation fears them a little, now."
She comes out with her husband, carrying thin, bloody strips of meat,
sparkling with salt, and glances all about her with wide, trapped eyes. In a little voice she says, "It's not
enough, now, that I make the best chaummin in the mountains." And they creak open the smokehouse and hang
up the raw goat flesh together. * * * (“We couldn’t show you on the Sabbath, sir, you
understand,” says the superstitious lout, standing in the stall's straw, out
here where we raise small livestock to keep the boys fed without having to
leave the Academy. “Didn’t dare touch it
or nothing. Had to clean around it and
try to calm the goats. They didn’t take
well to the smell, the goats didn’t. We’ve
had our hands full, I can tell you.” But I hardly register his presence, except as an
irritation, remembering how I stormed out of the evasive meeting in frustration
the day before. I knew! I didn't want to, I tried not to, but on some
deep, inchoate level, I knew. “Sorry we panicked and called you yesterday, but then...you
know. Wasted your time. A shame it is, to waste a headmaster's time,
but well...” “It's done, man.” My murmur surprises me; I can't imagine
speaking again. Yet after the initial
faintness passes, and I find myself still standing on my feet, still staring at
the...thing...laid out in the bloody straw like a troll’s idea of art, and hearing,
beyond the ringing of my ears, the buzzing flies, the worried bleating of the
animals and the murmurs of the men, I find voice enough to say, “Who did this
terrible thing?” “Satanists, I’d wager,”
says the chief stablehand, just as gray in the face as I suppose I must look,
myself, and just as determined not to show the excess of his alarm. “That goat-head, you know. They need goat’s heads for
something-or-other...” The man swallows
back nausea, his nonchalance wearing thin. I feel more blood flow to
my brain, and with it more sanity.
“Someone imitating whatever they think seems most satanic, more
likely.” I cannot disguise my
disgust—and why should I? I walk around
the ugliness, stepping gingerly, wrinkling my nose at the barnyard smells, and
this sanguine layer added on. “Or trying
to reinvent it all from scratch.” “All the same, the goat’s
head, the chicken feet, the guts—rat, I believe--all that, it’s definitely work
of the devil that someone set out to do here.”
And the magentine crystals, placed in compass directions within the
horrid mandala. I recognize them for
what they are, even if he does not. Where
do the boys find these things? “But
that’s not the worst of it.” The man
turns his terrified eyes to me, though the rest of him tries to stay calm to
the point of stiffness. “At least the
goat died quickly.”
In horror I pivot towards the
chicken-yard, but of course from this distance I cannot see a thing worth
mentioning. “It’s happening at last,” I
whisper to myself. “It’s finally
breaking out into the physical.”)
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