IN THE MOUNTAINS OF FIRE by Dolores J. Nurss
Volume
III: Responsibility
Chapter 36 For the Sake of the Young
Saturday, July 6, 2708 "Don't eat apart from
us," Cyran says when Malcolm rises to carry his breakfast out of our
sight. "Stay right here." Beans sure taste good on a
frosty morning like this, complete with a bit of cheese for each of us; my face
loves to hover over the fragrant steam.
(One need not dwell on the fact that Kiril cooked the beans in Rashid’s
bedpan. Boiling sterilizes, right?) "Remember, Malcolm," I ask,
"when we all feasted together on the day we freed you?" "I can never, ever
forget that night," he says, and he sits back down. I pass him the salt-paste, which has dried
into lumps that we crumble over our food, but hey, that’s closer to the kind of
salt I grew up with, anyway. I kick back
and enjoy eating in the peaceful silence of companionship. But I watch Aziz and Damien
finish their bowlfuls in ungodly time, then scrape at every smear of bean juice
on the sides as though they could dig more sustenance from the wood. You can’t cook many beans in a bedpan. They have already gobbled up the tortillas
that Kiril made, but they need more protein than that. Their brown wrists poke too far from their
homespun or altar-cloth sleeves, and you can see their anklebones through the
socks which their cuffs don't hide; they've both hit a critical growth-spurt,
along with demanding hormonal changes.
But they cinch their belts in tighter than ever. I haven't finished my own
breakfast yet. I coax Damien to sing
that old Samurai song again. As he belts
it out, eyes fixed on the blue heavens beyond, Aziz and all others gazing on
him, I slide the last of my own beans surreptitiously from my bowl into
theirs. I wouldn't call myself an agent
if I didn't have the stealth to pull it off. Sunday, July 5, 2708 Dawn. Maybe.
I keep watch, waiting for the sun to creep up past the raw stone peaks
with the stealth of an assassin. The
skies lighten without any appearance of the fiery orb so far. I sit and wait, on a flat
slab of basalt, for the sun to get high
enough to thaw me out, to communicate "day" to my body or even to the
majority of my brain. My hands and toes
and nose hurt with the cold, like ice got inside them and cracked. I hug my knees, hoping that that the rock
will reflect the heat whenever it gets here.
My breath puffs before me; I see no other clouds than that. My skin splits with cold like the earth as I
yearn for the warm monsoons that I cursed so fiercely only months ago. (Fool, to curse the confirmation longed for! Accept it.
Take out the pen, while the rest of the school still sleeps, by
lamplight fading in the dim approach of dawn, and write the words of acceptance
for the three good men who shall come to set things right. Here, on this little slip for a pigeon to
carry—it will go faster that way. And it
won’t take many words. Humble yourself. You are
not so great, after all, despite your paltry title. You have needed help before. And it’s all for the sake of the children. Now stretch those old
bones, walk to the window, throw open the shutters and let the rest of the pale
light in! And with it the fresh summer
air that you need, that breath of hope.
And with that also the songs of birds who fly back every year, to make
our summers better, lighter. We don’t
mislike the birds for coming in from foreign lands, now do we?) I hear the wind but no
birds sing on it; they've all flown north for the winter. I long for wings to fly away with them—then I
remember, yet again, that I can fly, I'm a levitator, and it doesn't do
a damn bit of good for all the politics that freeze me to this spot, the duties
and the sacred vows and yet I can't even do anything of particular importance
right now, anyway, just too godforsaken cold and why'd I ever dream of
an agent's glory in the first place? (It’s not so cold, now is it?
Bracing, and soon to warm up fine. Ah, me. I set back down at
my desk, my head in my hands, the letter drying, waiting for me to roll it up
and send it. Why’d I ever dream of the
dignity of the Headmaster’s office in the first place?) Monday, July 6, 2708 We walk through patches of
snow, now, as we descend into a high river valley with enough moisture in it to
freeze. Flakes swirl lightly around us
like tiny crystal fairies. While they
have it the children make snowballs, laughing and pelting the living spit out
of each other. Kiril and Lufti gang up
on Shermio, but somehow the little elf manages to dodge everything they throw,
giggling and egging them on to try again.
I shiver. Haven't we real war
enough without playing at it, too? Then I see Cyran get a
cheekful from Marduk. E sputters a
moment, then turns and slings one right into the teenager's face. Marduk doesn't miss a beat, scoops up more
snow, takes aim at Cyran... Brrrrrr! Chill smacks into my face and Marduk laughs—the
rotter knew I watched them; he pretended to aim one way and hit me
instead! I run after him with fistfuls
of icy wet cold and catch up, leap, hold on with my knees while Marduk tries to
knock me off and I stuff it all down the back of his shirt. I fall off into a big fat drift and laugh so
hard that I can hardly rescue myself, trying to warm my frigid fingers in my
armpits, suddenly too happy to care if they all fall off from frostbite just to
see the look on his face as he tries to wriggle the snow out from his
clothes. Everywhere I hear the thuds of
snowballs and the giggling children and my body shivers but my heart warms up
so fine I feel that I could thaw these mountains by myself. "Break! Break!"
Cyran laughs so hard e can hardly shout.
"We all need hot soup after that!" In due time, after we have
huddled in our blankets for awhile, our clothes hissing over the fire as they
dry, Alysha hands me a fragrant bowl of steaming hot broth simmered from our
store of dried vegetables, and it tastes better than the finest banquet that
Soskia could devise. As I warm myself
over it before diving right in, I reflect that sometimes it rejoices the heart
to play war precisely because we play at it. It feels good to know that everybody will get
up from where they fell and share a meal together afterwards. And somehow, I know not how, it refutes the
kind of war that we work at, because, despite all reason, the snowballs
that warm our hearts will outlast all the melting bullets in Hell.
I watch for my moment.
Okay, now—with all eyes on Bakr as he tells a Cumencian joke he knows
about bill-collector's wives, I pour from my bowl into those of Aziz and Damien
when nobody watches me but the mule. And
now, as Cyran answers with a joke of hir own, I finish off with Bakr, too. The kindly wind masks the liquid sound, as
though the elements conspire with me.
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