IN THE MOUNTAINS OF FIRE by Dolores J. Nurss
Volume VI: The Rift
Chapter 3 Loved Ones
Sunday, December 20, 2708 I have assembled my band,
fool that I am. (I have assembled them, O Lord of the Rift.) Lufti–who else will take care of
him? Kiril, for I have promises to
keep. Tanjin because I’m an idiot, and
because he so often knows exactly what I need before I do. Dosh and Nishka because I require strength
and stealth, pixyish little Daia for her sharp eyes and keen aim. Hekut I feel none too fond of, yet the little
fellow does have the agility required to
complete the team, and give him credit, he would never leave a soul of us
behind. (And now we all sit together in three neat rows like a choir,
staring up at the drunken old chaplain as though we paid attention to his
slurry maunderings. Or like the
Lumnite’s rings, pressed together shoulder to hip, so much energy buzzing
between us that it leaps the gaps between the pews. Yet what we pour out to Pastor Jean is pure
love. Doesn’t that make us good?) That’s more than enough to
go on, right there. Even at this late
time of year we pull on every layer of clothing that we have, shivering in the
dawn, at least until the day warms up, when we’ll swelter once again. For already we have climbed much higher than we'd
begun yesterday, and the road still zigzags upward at a steep incline. (We have come so far and yet achieved so little. Some crucial information evades us. I wake up with these thoughts in a dusty bed
in Montoya Mansion’s abandoned guest-suite, running my fingers through my hair
and hoping for something better for breakfast than hamster-feed. “Tshura?
Have you or Guaril found a safe way into the kitchen today?” “Who’s Guaril?” she asks sweetly in my head, in the equivalent of
words. “Oh. Him. Now I remember.” (Cold blow the drafts around the stained glass windows. Except, of course, the boarded-over
ones. Who did they portray, Pastor? The Virgin Mary nursing baby Jesus? Mary Magdalene at the foot of the cross? Did
you break the glass, yourself? Can you
remember doing it, or did you conveniently black out? Do you even know why I have to press tightly to
this nugget in my pocket to recall their names? And yet we embrace you, dear chaplain of a faith no longer
ours. Can you feel our embrace? Each of us, holding magentine in our pockets,
embrace you with our very souls—isn’t that what a minister wants?) Everybody assigned to other
bands wants to hug me before they depart, knowing that they might never see me
again. We haven’t yet achieved the
cold-steel precision of a regular army in this much, at least–no crisp salutes
for us. So I take them all in turn into
my arms, feel the soft clothes-padding and the hard limb cores, breathe in the
very scent of them as deep as lungs allow.
Every hug seems to set off a soft fireball inside me, building up the
glow till it burns away the post-greenfire melancholy, even though I’ll miss
them like a drug. I look beyond them now
and see the blooming meadows, all the flag-brave colors unfurling everywhere
that sunlight streaks between the trees.
I smell the floral scents that intermingle with the pine. I hear the songs of birds. I almost, in that instant, feel renewed. Almost, not quite. As soon as they leave, as if watching it
happen to a stranger, I crumple down to sit upon the ground, curling in around
what must be somebody else’s searing pain of soul. Tanjin sits down beside me and puts an arm
around me, waiting for me to talk. And
finally the words whisper from my lips.
“I don’t deserve so much love.” “So?” he asks with a gentle
smile, wiping away the tears that sting my scratched-up cheeks. “If everyone got only what they deserved,
we’d have no need for revolution. Why
can’t the unfairness go the other way sometimes?” (You think you don’t deserve our love, but you have shown us the
emptiness of your religion, and for that we need to thank you. We only want what you do, when it comes down
to it. Oblivion for you. Haven’t you courted her for years? Won’t you rest at last, in peace, as you like
to say over all the little graves, finally nestled in the arms of Lady Death?) “Why do you take care of
me, Tanjin?” I ask. “Why do you lo...”
but I can’t finish it. “Do you want to know why I
became a rebel?” I nod, unable for the
moment to speak. “I had run away from
home. I made it all the way to the
sea. I stood upon a cliff, and then I
climbed down to a ledge, still higher up than many buildings, and I watched the
waves churn in torment around the rocks, far, far below. Breathing too deeply could’ve knocked me off
that ledge. And I wanted to jump.” “Oh Tanjin! No!” “And why not? My birth drove my mother to suicide. Nobody in my family wanted me, really. I didn’t deserve love.” “Yes you do! You do!”
I grip him as tightly as if he would jump that minute down a cliff miles
and years away, I sob against his breast.
“You do!” “Now you say. But nobody said it then.” He lifts my chin to face him. “We go on, Deirdre. We’re here so we just go on. You don’t know what might change
tomorrow. I never knew, back then, that
someday I would matter to somebody like you.”
He shrugs. “I became a rebel
because I had nothing left to lose. Why
not die avenging my mother? Why not take
down the system that perverted my father?”
He kisses my brow. “Why not
accept love when it’s offered you, and never mind whether you ‘deserve’ it?” Dosh has gone off on his
own somewhere; he left sometime during my melt-down. He’s shown more than a little melancholy of
his own recently, and maybe he knows the hollowness of the praise afforded
me. So I let him go, even when, in the
corner of my eye, I saw his back disappear among the trees. If he returns, good. Yet if he leaves the rebels, if he simply wanders
off without a proper mustering-out, who can blame him, really, after all that
he’s been through? Nishka frets, though,
twisting a crochet-edged handkerchief in her hands. “He saved us,” she keeps
whispering. “Just when I thought I
couldn’t bear any more he broke free and he helped us all escape with him. He could’ve just saved himself.” Yet he does show up again,
just about when we had given up on him and started the first few steps out into
the thick new grass. He grins from ear
to ear, coaxing a burro along. “Tell me you didn’t steal
that animal,” I say, my heart sinking further still. “Steal? Not at all!
I wheedled, sure, but he comes with the farmer’s blessing.” Dosh leads the beast straight for Lufti. “This’ll spare your little friend here a few
steps.” But Lufti’s eyes go wide
and he stumbles back. “Noooo,” he
moans. “Not the saddle. Anything but the saddle!” Dosh stares, dumbfounded
for a moment, then nods. “Torture. I understand.
It does things to you.” I tell him, “It’s all
right, Dosh. The burro will help a lot
with carrying supplies. Thank you. It’s a princely gift.” (It does something to you, love.
It can be a rare kind of torture, sometimes. To be understood. Who honestly wants understood, dear Chaplain? Wouldn’t we really rather have our lies
believed? Yet we know
you—intimately. We know about the taboo
statue, hidden under lock and key. We
know the things that you’ve hidden from yourself. And we want to indulge your most secret
desires.) And so we march into the
brink of summer, a few brown flecks like autumn’s scouts against the green
expanse, a rebel band once more and not an army. Birds sing their hearts out, as though to
comfort us for our missing bard. Flowers
make the most of the brief warming of the mountainside. Leaves soften sunlight radiating between the
trees, cooling it in shades of green. I
hear the rush of water everywhere. And I feel a brief, cool
joy, seeing a burst of red-trumpet blossoming over a meadow glimpsed between
the trees. I feel a kind of
satisfaction. If, right now, the
government tracked us down and shot me dead, I would die happy, with beauty in
my eyes, pouring out my blood to blossom scarlet in the grass, one more burst
of color in the Charadocian landscape, one more song among the tales. Might Damien have told me
such a story, once upon a time? That the
red-trumpet grows wherever a rebel fell, to honor blood well-spilt? I can’t remember everything he’s ever said or
sang. I wish I could. Someone should
keep track of it. (Can you hear the trickle off the steeple of the thawing ice,
dripping faint behind the droning of your sermon? But it’s only a momentary warmth. Tonight will snow again. And tomorrow—the longest night of the year. What if the sun won’t shine again—for you? Would you even miss it?) (Oh my God. How could the
sun ever shine on something like this?) After awhile, though, the
beauty fades behind a fog of achiness.
Winter still lives on in me; my joints feel halfway frozen and my numb
feet drag like stone; I can feel every leak in my secondhand boots that slide
around my narrow heels and pinch the toes like misers. Yet the heat oppresses me above the waist,
while Lufti’s body holds my layers of wool in place. Those less encumbered, those whose burdens
ride upon the donkey’s back, throw off their jackets and ponchos and soon
breathe free. Something in me feels that
I have no right to do the same. (What made them think they had the right? Could their uniforms excuse them even in
their own sight?) Now all that moist and
fertile earth, all that mud, becomes nothing more than something dank and thick
and cumbersome to trudge through, endlessly, forgetting any sense of purpose,
too weary even to feel danger, just going on, as the shadows fade into the
general gloom of another overcast, and now the rain doesn’t exactly fall, it
just mists about vaguely without clear direction, veiling everything in gray so
that nothing keeps the mind from wandering... (They used to be our
sisters, these cold, gray limbs thrust out into the rain. These used to be our daughters, our mothers
and our wives, some taken at gunpoint, some leaving home by choice in the hope
of sending money back to those they really loved. These used to be our lovers and our friends,
our neighbors, even the occasional enemy so comforting-familiar that we’d give
anything to hear that old shrew cuss us out across the fence again, just one
more time.) And
now it rains down heavily once more, drenching me till the weight of my clothes
could almost bring me to my knees. But
not quite. Never quite. I push on through the gray. (And now we find them here
at last, sometimes a body alone, sometimes by twos and threes, sometimes a heap
left halfway sunk in mud where the soldiers used to camp. We watch the raindrops kiss the cold blue
lips we used to know, the black track of blood traced down the side of the face
from the faintly opened lips, now diluting before our eyes, and finally washed
away, the eyes half-closed as though content.
We find them with their limbs all jumbled into postures strange to us,
their hair slicked down black and wet, drops like pure white diamonds in the
strands, like stars upon their brows. At first we wonder–what
offense? What sin, real or perceived,
called for their annihilation? What lies
whispered against them, what impossible demands? Gradually the word goes
‘round. Nothing. Nobody did anything wrong. The order came–kill all the
camp-followers. That’s it. That’s all.
Enough. Of course, some say. Too many rebels had infiltrated that
way. What else could the government
do? And they curse the rebels as they
stand in muddy water, digging graves by shovelfuls of silt, loth to sink their
darlings into such a dirty bath. Others say nothing; they
just pick up an axe or shovel or machete, or pry up the floorboards over a
hidden gun, and they go out into the night, telling no one, so that none might
give any reason to have the answers tortured out of them. But we all know where those others go. And now whole houses stand empty, sometimes
entire rows, rain blowing in where one unlatched door flaps open and shut, open
and shut, in the wind. Many don’t expect
to return. Some plan
on never coming back.) (We’re never going
back. Nobody ever goes back from this
school, not really. You, and the man
over you, robbed us of our women, all womanhood, and without the feminine there
can be no home, no everyday mercies, and love becomes just one more empty
conquest.) |
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