IN THE MOUNTAINS OF FIRE by Dolores J. Nurss
Volume
III: Responsibility
Chapter 20 A Vacation is Just a State of Mind
Friday, June 19, 2708 Another midnight and we
absolutely have to rest. We've run out
of leaf, anyway, and don’t have it in us to search for more; it's just as
well. By ones and twos and threes I tuck
rebels and civilians into tree-boles and willow-bowers, in caves and tangles
and underneath the bushes. “Our vacation
resort,” Damien says with a haggard smile, as I hide him under a vine’s canopy,
its foliage turned golden and papery, but still clinging, still thick enough to
hide him. Then I find a fragrant
hidey-hole for Kiril, Lufti, and myself to crawl into–another fairy-ring of
young trees around the soft rot of an old, great stump. We fall onto the crackling leaves as soft to
us as a feather-bed, and sleep there like we died. (God knows we couldn't ask
Hir for a better place to hold a siege than Tumblebugs, our world-renowned
vacation destination, with its springs of water, stores of food, a lip of rock
all around to shoot over at soldiers forced to charge straight up into our gunfire. And we've had years to collect bullets--even
Cyran never knew how much we had. Hey,
this has got to be the paradise of fortresses--no dirty, unshaven soldiers
suffer here amidst the scented soaps and obsidian razors. Yet the perfume of skin conditioners and
bath-herbs mingles with the stench of the pyre, ashes blown across the volcanic
stone that will not break open for graves, and the pall of Hell's own sulfur
covers all. My turn to go up to the
rim. Who am I kidding? How many of us ever paid that much attention
to the training, convinced that we'd always spy and never actually have to
fight? I take my place among the
embattled hairdressers and masseurs, manicurists and cocktail girls, I push my
rifle into place, then feel it thud against my shoulder as I pretend that I
know how to shoot. Bullets whistle back
as my heart beats faster and faster and my eyes see red with fear. Fewer of us return from the rim at every
shift.) * * * I wake in full daylight to
the sound of sobbing. Shivering when I
stir from the warmth of my nest, I grope through the foliage to the hiding
place of a Cumenci-woman and her daughter.
She rocks the dead girl in her lap, tears splashing down onto the
staring face, the pencil-thin limbs trailing from her arms. How could the child have starved, when we
feasted only days before? But days and
nights of running on greenfire--that could do horrible things to so small a body,
with so little reserve. I silence the mother maybe
more harshly than I should, but then I help her scoop out a grave in the soft
mould beneath an arching root. I ask the
child's name, and carve "Mebhra" deep into the root and to hell with
security. The mother, of course, can't
read it. I try to wipe the sticky sap
from my fingers but it doesn't really leave me.
Then we murmur a couple soft prayers together, my arm around the young
mother's waist, her leaning into me like I could protect her or something,
before we go back to rest. I lie here on the leaves
and decomposing wood, still smelling the incense-scent of sap upon my shirt's
hem where I tried to wipe it off, staring up at the branches of the trees that
circle tightly ‘round our little nest. I
listen to Kiril's labored breathing and I try not to wake her as I prop her up
a bit against her pack, then lie back down again. Kief’s fall keeps playing over and over in my
head, from the moment when the blood began to bloom from his breast to the
point when his eyes glazed over, then up again to die before me one more time,
and one more after that, and one more... Think of something
else. Think of Mebhra, Deirdre, and what
will happen to the others, too, if you don’t do something. I feel the hunger hollow out my belly and my
brain. I've got to find some way to feed
everybody--and soon. In a little while,
as soon as I can get everyone together and... ...I open my eyes to night
and close them again. My body will not
budge for me beyond that. Is this how it
ends? Do we die of exhaustion here,
incapable of stirring enough to forage for ourselves? Do I care? Saturday, June 20, 2708 I smell something
indescribably sweet and good, some air from heaven wafting down to earth. I lick sweet juice from my lips, then bite
something soft and slick, then suck in the fragrant pulp of a dulcina. I open my eyes to a big, soft face--motherly,
except for the beard. Malcolm lifts my
head to the spout of a waterskin. Then,
after I have drunk my fill, he presses another dulcina to my lips, his face
gray with weariness but determined to smile on me. "I found a whole
tree-full," he says, "not too far from here--last of the season,
probably, at this altitude.” He smiles
wryly, saying, “Another time I’d call them overripe.” I see now that he can only squeeze his
shoulders and arms between the tight-grown trees, that it must hurt to let them
pinch him even so, but that doesn't stop him from reaching in to me. “When you get your strength back you can help
me feed the others." "You look good with a
beard," I say hoarsely. He smirks
mirthlessly at that, but I insist, "No, really. It complements your face nicely." "Thank you,
Deirdre. But I think a goblin would look
good to you right now, if it brought you food." "Kindness complements
your face, too," I say as I sink back into the leaves and he moves on to
Lufti, searching for a gap between trunks nearer to the boy that will let him
admit an arm. Thank God that we have one
among us with enough reserves on his body to get us through this time! * * * (Thank God that Jake slept
all day and night yesterday, before this arrived! I weigh the cylinder in my hand, watching him
groggily type into Archives while he simultaneously spoons in my bean-and-wheatberry
porridge, the screen-light blue on his face, making him look even paler than he
is. The letter feels heavier than your
average message, and when I tip it I hear something slide back and forth
inside. Maybe it's from hanging around
him, but I have a bad feeling about that. I leave the postal-tube on
the table when I go to fetch his empty bowl and refill it. Let him discover it in his own sweet time.) * * * We need a day of rest, oh Lord! Let us have it early, just this once. Damien shoots a honey-bear, and we clean it
and cook it, but that's about all the work that anybody can ask of us. I’ve heard that on Earth bears could tower
ten feet tall, but a honey-bear's the size of a big dog and doesn't spread all
that far among our numbers. The meat
tastes sort of like pork, though, and the portion that I get satisfies me more deeply than gourmet fare. Kiril stuffs and wraps it in herbs that curl
and blacken on the spit, burning the flavor into the sizzling grease. So we commune on bear and dulcinas and the
greens that Kiril has also gathered (brave, weary girl!) and then we doze, and
eat some more, and doze, and I dream that I hold Fatima's gift of crystal in my
hand... (Why, on God's Green Planet, did Jake have to receive
this thing at a time like this? Okay,
okay, I know the answer—because he's an oracle.
Maybe it even triggered his bad patch in the first place, being on the
way. I don't know. Jake holds the magentine crystal in his hand, though I know
it pains him on a level past the nerves, I can see it in his face. “Did that come with the letter?” I ask. He nods, white around the mouth. “Can you put it down, please?” He shakes his head.
He needn't say another word. I
know that he absorbs its message deep into himself, his psychometry subsumed
into oraclism so deeply that he can’t consciously articulate a word of what he
reads in the stone, but even I can tell that it means no good. I pick up the letter, curled by its long journey, still
crisp and crackly, though, the paper absolutely white. It's a good thing that I studied Toulin
before this arrived. I would not have
otherwise found it so easy to read, even knowing the language, considering their
peculiar habit of leaving no spaces, marking the start of every word with a capital
letter, and writing proper nouns all in caps, each line alternating
left-to-right or right-to-left, with tiny red arrows alongside the rows of
unbroken blue script, taking up the cramped margins, pointing which way to
go. Punctuation alone marks paragraph
shifts. I understand that they evolved
this style during a shortage of paper, and now consider it the only decent way
to write. “Something has gone wrong,” I read. “Something has gone terribly wrong.” And I feel my spine prickle, remembering how
often Jake has repeated those same words, in a different language, for months,
now. I try to laugh.
“Won't Don be surprised—Toulin, of all places!” Jake stirs, looking up at me, finally releasing his grip on
the stone. “Don. Yes.
He'll have to read this crystal, too.” “I guess our vacation's over, then.” Jake forces a smile.
“It's been a long one, Randy.” I stuff the letter back into its cylinder, and then pop the
crystal in after “Now what's the use of
drawing an agent's salary, if not for taking the occasional really long
vacation? And who needs it more?”) I open my eyes to swaying
branches overhead. When this mission
ends, I might just allow myself a nice, long vacation. Yeah.
That'll be the ticket. That's
what I'll look forward to. I groan, forcing myself to my feet to search the woods for
more food. Everybody needs it, after
all. No, it's no good thinking about
vacations someplace far from here. I
have made this my country. No place
exists for me, but here. |
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