Tuesday, August 11, 2708

          In lieu of breakfast, I climb back to my favorite perch in the bell-tower—climb with shaky muscles, because I can only rely on my levitation enough to correct mistakes, not fly outright, with the scant reserves in me.  I turn away from the mire between the chapel and Abojan Manor, so churned up with construction that naked patches of earth show here and there between the rags of slush.  But gazing towards the pass, I can still see beauty.

          The dawn light flushing the snow, against its twilight shadows, almost has a taste that my eyes can savor, the most delectable of confections, and the cold wind helps to wake me up.  Sounds echo off the snow and the ice-rimed rocks.  Somewhere a raptor flushes birds from hiding, with a flurry of flapping wings.  Someone in the manor opens and closes the door to the storage room on the side of the main house.  But mostly I hear only silence laced with a little wind.  I light up one of my few remaining cigarettes, loving each warm mouthful while it lasts.

          Wait…over there.  Who is that speck traveling down the road to us?  Calculations fall into place without even trying.  Size: small;  gait: familiar, habitually soft-footed; posture: just a little slope-shouldered, eyes: downcast, nothing to notice here, unless those large, burning eyes should happen to glance up…

          “Shermio!” I cry, and leap.  I have at least enough energy left to turn a fall into a glide.  I make it quite a ways up what the snow has left of road, and run the rest of the way to tackle him with a hug.  The kid returns it, half-frozen.  “Shermio!  I didn’t even know you’d gone out.”

          “A spy’s duty,” he says through chattering teeth, too cold to utter another word.  I throw my poncho around him, though I shiver to do it, and let him lean on me as we make our way back.  (A spy’s duty, but it’s just plain easier.  I like going out on my own.)

          “You should have been resting.  Save your calories.”  I feel him shrug under my arm.  (It just seems so wrong.  Crowding in among people that I’m not infiltrating on purpose feels lonelier than being alone.  When I go out by myself, I know it’s my choice.  When I infiltrate, it’s okay that nobody knows me.  When I’m with my own, though, I should feel something…different.)

          The warmth feels painfully wonderful inside the Abojan’s crowded parlor.  Kiril has taught Deni how to make a twig-tip tea that at least gives us some vitamins, and they’ve just brewed up enough for all.  I pour Shermio a steaming cup, adding a little of our precious goat-milk, and then pour some without for myself.  And then I wait while he thaws enough to talk.  (How come?  How come I haven’t ever been able to get close to anyone since my village burned down?)  Those overlarge eyes of his seem to plead with me for something more, but I have no food to give him.  (How come being around the people I love just makes me sad?)

          At last he puts the cup down.  “I crossed through the pass.  Nobody saw me.”

          “Yet you saw somebody who might have looked?”

          He nods, takes up the cup again for the final swallow, and then says, “Smugglers.  Headed this way.  With a whole train of llamas bearing goods.”  He stares me in the eye.  “Some of it’s got to be food.”

          And there it hangs in the air between us, as everybody else crowds around with their steaming cups in hand.  They all stare at me, hungrily.  I’m in charge.  I’m the one who has to make the decision.

          I know the rules.  Don’t steal from the citizens—they’re the only hope a rebel has.  But smugglers aren’t citizens—they come from Stovak.  I look to Cyran.  E nods back, slowly.

          “Thank you, Shermio,” I say.  “That’s the most useful information that I’ve heard in days.”  And everybody in the room sighs with relief.  And Cyran totters back to bed.

* * *

(As I entered the confessional, that day—what Father Man has rigged up with a parlor curtain and a half-built corner—why did my eyes have to meet Malcolm’s on his way out?  Now I can’t get those eyes out of my mind.  Why did I have to read the feelings there?  I keep trying so hard to shift from love to hate!

I hate this fever, at least—too weak to get up and do something productive, I have to just lie here, thinking and thinking, drifting between sleep and wakefulness amid the groans and murmurs of other invalids crowded in my tent.  Alysha had put up one of Deni’s curtains so that I wouldn’t have to expose my oddities, but we soon had to take it down again, along with all the others, to turn it into clothes for the ill-clad among us, so that now I have to change clothes under my blanket.  Even so, I still feel naked every time I wake up with a gasp, knowing that they hear me.

I dream about fat men hitting me.  Sometimes I thank them for it, all meek and servant-like.  Sometimes I drill them full of bullets and stare coldly at the blood.  Sometimes he doesn’t hit me but we chat like old friends, like nothing ever happened.  In one dream he served me berries; I ate them but I couldn’t taste them, and woke up with tears in my eyes.  I can’t seem to dream about anyone else.

Maybe this isn’t even about Malcolm, but about something I want, something that he represents.  Abundance.  Generosity.  A taste of berries that keeps eluding me.  Something that my life doesn’t have and might never have and wants so very, very much.

As soon as I return to power, Alysha gets her commission back.  I’ve got no business judging a woman like that.)

(Our general has nightmares.  I know; I hear hir waking all the time.  Must be awful to bear so much responsibility on hir shoulders, in the middle of a war.  I snuggle deeper into my blankets, grateful to be nothing but a footsoldier.  Let somebody else worry about how to feed the lot of us.)

* * *

I didn’t receive my exalted Tilián training to become a bandit.  Yet things happen in the Field that nobody at home would understand; we agents know, though.  I wait with my wild children up in the rocks above the pass till the Stovaki smuggler and all his laden llamas move into exactly the right position—the point with a little bit of slope, not cliff exactly, just enough.

Now I shout “Charge!” and everybody yells at once as we hurtle down on him, all these high-pitched voices screaming bloody murder—so must fallen cherubs have sounded, plunging in rebellion down to Hell.  We pelt the beasts with rocks sized to sting, not kill, stampeding them bleating down the mountainside, while the merchant cowers against a tree-trunk, bullets splintering the wood to either side of him.  (“Shoot to miss,” I told Aichi.  “Shoot to scare.”  She told me “Aichi scare,” and nodded.

Call it a Robin Hood raid—he’s rich, we’re poor.  We could very well die without his supplies.  I keep repeating this, over and over, in my head.

Spilled merchandise litters the ground as our second contingent, hidden just over the edge of that little slope, rounds up the llamas.  They go with us, too; we can eat their meat—we can spare the goat another day.  We might even save some for burden-carrying later; they can browse on winter twigs and straw, kicking off the snow with the nanny.

“So—what have we got?” I ask the kids who struggle upslope, grinning over armloads of loot.

“What we’ve got,” Damien says gaily, “is a party!”  Oh Lord, tell me that our guest wasn’t smuggling liquor!  “Dates, dried figs, candied palm hearts, tins of crab and lobster—every Stovaki delicacy you can imagine!”  Thank you, Jesus, for mercy on a sorry pack of thieves.

“Any bread?” I ask.

“Even better—bags and bags of wild rice.  The good green kind, not the black.”

“Then we eat that for the first day, maybe with plainer vegetables chopped in, if you’ve got ‘em.  We add the richer stuff later, when we’re better used to food.  What else?”

“Morphine, of course.  Anybody who comes through that pass carries fruit of the poppy.”

“That goes with Malcolm back to Rashid’s base as soon as we can clear the...”

“Tobacco!” Alysha cries.  “Oh my lord, the really fancy stuff imported all the way from Strivane!”  She grins at me.  “My father used to smoke this; I thought I’d never smell it again.”

“And there’s brocade,” Damien adds.  “It looks like our own cheir silk, but dyed and woven Stovaki-style to sell back to us at a higher price—the snake!”

In his defense the merchant blurts, “Dyers and weavers deserve their wages, too!”

I wave Marduk’s gun casually his way.  “Normally I’d agree, sir, but we’ve got refugees in serious danger of hypothermia who’ll thank you for your donation.  Nothing in the world’s as warm as silk.”

He stares at the gun and says, “God does, indeed, bless the generous.”  And the highway robber?  But I mustn’t think of that.

“Wait’ll you see the cloth!” Damien exclaims.  “The brightest, prettiest rainbow of shimmer you could possibly imagine.”  Oh great.  Why don’t we just paint bull’s eyes on our chests?  “Lucinda would’ve loved it.”  Oh well, at least cheir silk never holds much dye for long.  A few launderings might mute it down enough for safety.  Till then, dear Lucinda, intercede for us!

“Hey, look at this!” Lufti calls upslope to us.  “This crate says “G-U-N-S”—that spells ‘Guns’!”

I start to chuckle.  Then I can’t help but throw my head back and laugh full-belly, and all the children around me laugh as well, loud and long.  I think I kind of like the life of an outlaw.