IN THE MOUNTAINS OF FIRE by Dolores J. Nurss
Volume VII: The Burning
Chapter 7 Little Sacrifices
Monday, March 22, 2709 (How sweet the first strawberries of the year! So fresh and delicious I almost don’t miss
having any sugar for them. Lula grins, saying, “It’s good to see you’ve got
your appetite back, Zanne!” She sits
down beside me. “How’s the chest
feeling?” “Sore from all that coughing, but clear.” She pauses, laying a cool hand on mine. “Do you think you’ll feel well enough to
travel soon?” “My heart sinks.
“Yes,” I say, because, after everything, I still worship Truth.) How sweet the summer lands, just on the verge of fall! How green the world, this far below the
peaks, how thick and warm the scent of harvest in the air! We have bought the first green apples of the
year from a roadside stand, and now we bite into their juicy tartness as we
walk, grateful for something fresher than what we carry in our packs. (“Just so
you know,” Lula says,” the folks around here have voted that you can stay at
Outlier Farm, if you want to. We haven’t
even plumbed all the skills you have to offer.” So tempting!
I just want to lie in a clean, soft bed till I get bored with rest and
want to move again, and then exert myself till the purifying sweat pours off of
me, growing food for a life as sweet and rich as berries fresh-plucked from the
garden. Just like I used to do, tending
the potato-towers and milking goats, back when I was Susie. “That’s kind of you, Lula. I really mean it. But that’s not what I trained my skills for.” She sighs.
“I know.” She gazes out the
window, at the flowering fruit tree that now obscures the view of our associate
farms. “We could’ve given you a good life,
here.” “I know”) “Just so you know,” I remark to Kiril as she marches beside me, “I
gave up greenfire for Lent.” “Tobacco, here,” she replies. Hekut admits, “Chaummin.” Baruch looks perplexed and says nothing. Marduk says, “I gave up gambling.
I didn’t even bring my dice with me.”
I didn’t know he gambled. Kiril,
too, cuts him a sharp look. Nishka says, “Boys,” and sticks her tongue out at Damien. Lefty says, “Borrowing.” “What about my tobacco?” “That’s different. That was
rebel sharing.” I raise a brow but
smile. Lufti shrugs, saying, “I have given up on being a god. Not just for Lent, mind you. For always.” He sighs. “Too much work.” “Good for you,” I say, putting an arm around him. Damien dons his cockiest manner and says, “Well, I didn’t give up
anything.” Then he looks at me darkly,
waiting for me to remark upon it. When I
don’t he answers anyway, “Why should
I? God has already taken away from me what
mattered most.” “Don’t blame God for what our own kind does,” I tell him, “But you
know your own business.” (I gaze out the window, breathing in the orchard
perfume and the rough but peaceful barnyard undertone. A chicken enthusiastically announces that she
just laid an egg. The wild birds sing to
each other in the hopes of pairing off to lay their own eggs. Somewhere a child sings a song in French that
goes all the way back to Earth. Here we
have no madness, no violence, no hunger, no fear of what might be in food, no
long exhausting journeys wondering where I’m going to sleep next, no need to
plunder corpses, no need to wonder if we can trust the people around us, and no
need, ever again, to mindblast anybody. “How am I ever going to give all this up?” I
whisper to the ghost of my reflection in the glass. I hear Susie’s voice in those words. The face in the window hardens as I say, “Same
way you did last time.”) Tuesday, March 23, 2709 The weather’s gotten really warm, now, at least compared to what we’d
gotten used to on the peaks. Dust and insects
get into our sweat; I sincerely hope that the next village has an inn, with
something in the way of baths better than trying to shiver into snow-melt
streams. A beer doesn’t sound bad,
either. Marduk’s in a mood. He
grabs suddenly at leafy twigs every so often, and then slowly tears the leaves
off as he walks, muttering, before he hurls the bare twigs down. He snarls over small perceived infractions,
rudely elbowing past anybody who gets too close. But when Lufti says to him, “That mud dried
up a long time ago—don’t stew it all over again,” he takes a swing at the boy
and would have connected if I hadn’t moved faster. I twist his arm back so quickly that the pain quite takes his mind
off of any violent response. “Don’t make
me break it,” I tell him. “Are you going
to be a good boy if I release you?” He nods, gasping. Then,
rubbing his arm, he mutters, “Sorry.
It’s just that it’s somebody’s birthday today.” We start walking again.
“Somebody who died?” “I wish she had.” I don’t
want to know any more. (“Meggie will be joining us here at Outlier
Farm.” “Oh? Has
she had her baby yet?” “Last night.
And he looks too much like his father for her to pretend anymore that
she’s above a little friendly mixing now and then “Ha! I knew it!” I don’t want to know the gossip of the
farms. I don’t want to engage. I try not to listen as my generous hosts pack
up my car for me with bags and baskets of dried fruit and vegetables, cheese
and smoked meats, bread and roots and the last of fall’s cucurbits. Nothing further here must matter to me, for I
will likely never find out how it all turns out, and I am trying so hard not to
care. Yet I can’t resist following a delectable scent
into the Big House kitchen. I hear a
bubbling ahead of me. They’re making
candy bars! I watch for a moment,
longingly, as they mix their precious, limited supply of honey in with melted
butter, fruit and nuts. They will have
to ration those out. I won’t be here
when they do.) I hear a rumbling behind us.
“Move to the sides,” I order. Mechanical
transport whizzes past us, choking us on their dust. My eyes register them, psygraphing them,
before it sinks in what I see. Then it dawns on me: three army jeeps in a row just now passed us
by! My mind replays the psygraphic
image: the riders seemed too weary and wounded to look up, for their part, to
take in the people trudging by the roadside, with weapons slung in plain sight
all about our persons and nary a stitch of uniform upon us. In shock I put my hand over the magentine
bared openly on my breast. I gape after
them, aghast, and then shake my head, chuckling. Then I tell the others and they join me in
laughter, shaking their heads, too. We just keep on marching, listening to the
motor growls grow fainter with the distance, till nothing more disturbs the
rural countryside. (I turn back to the car and see them tucking the
bedding that I brought with me into the back seat, freshly laundered. They’ve filled the footwells with supplies
when they ran out of space in the trunk.) Wednesday, March 24, 2709 An uneasy night. Nightmares
suffused it, full of explosions, screaming, terrified lurking in dark places
beneath the earth, and Abjoan Pass again, all manner of unremembered grief and
upheaval in the setting of Abojan Pass.
I can’t recall much detail, though, on waking. I open my eyes to leaves overhead, green and thick, just beginning
to show a touch of warmer colors, hints of amber and coral. I feel the warmth of Kirl and Lufti nestled
close, still sleeping. Kiril always
snores, what with her asthma and all, and Lufti makes softer sounds, but they
never keep me awake anymore, I like it; it soothes me to fall asleep to the
breath of loved ones. And I ache to
think of it, knowing that when the mission ends so do the bonds. For agents lead lonely lives.
Coming home a couple of times a year—if that--to touch bases with
whichever member of your friendclan–if any–happens to be in town at the same
time, doesn’t exactly count as family ties.
Or maybe not all agents, maybe just me.
All the rest of my friendclan have partnered up in one way or another,
and rarely do solo missions. Then I
laugh at myself, but not happily. I
wasn’t supposed to go solo on this one, either; I came in with my
foster-father. How’s that for family
ties? Kiril stirs, rubs her eyes, and blinks at me. “You all right, Deirdre?” “Fine. It’s a lovely autumn
morning.” I sit up. “And it’s high time I fix us all some breakfast.” A look at our supplies astonishes me–how did we make so much
disappear so fast? We have gotten too
used to regular meals. I will have to
taper us down to adjust us back to the short commons ahead. We might contact rich folk, but they won’t
feed us every day. Yet the world seems so abundant!
We have reached farm country again, the upper slopes and plateaus of The
Midlands, and everywhere folks reap their fields or pick their fruit. We hardly ever pass a farmhouse without the honeyed
smell of bubbling preserves in the making wafting our way. I hear some combines puttering and grumbling
through the larger, flatter farms; otherwise nothing competes with the birdsong
and the wind save for the faint rustle of men and women moving through the
crops on foot and gathering by hand on their terraced slopes. Because the constant warfare of Abojan Pass
has drawn so many soldiers, government and revolutionary alike, most of the
country knows a peace seldom seen here in ages. Yet I remember the three jeeps that passed us by. Peace never lasts long, nor spreads very far,
in the Mountains of Fire. (“We topped off your tank,” Courtney says as I
stand awkwardly by the door of my car, the map clutched in my hand. “How do I deserve all this?” I ask. “I’d like to think of my embroidery as
marvels of the fiber arts, but you and I both know better.” “You gave us even better formulas than Dalmar
did. They’re going to save lives, Zanne” “Thanks,” I say, smiling brightly, struggling
not to weep. “I won’t tell him that when
I find him But I rather doubt that I
could have given you anything that comes close to what you gave me.” Apollo says, “You can at least tell him that I
miss him. And I’ll never stop commending
him to God for what he did for me.” “Of course.” Shon says, “Tell him I expect him back in time
for the First Ever Eclectic Spring Jamboree.
It’s going to be historic, Zanne.”
Ah yes. The jam session that
Outlier House plans to host for every farm in All Kinds Sanctuary, bringing all
the different ethnic instruments together into harmony. I give them each a hug. They fill up my arms with love and aching and
tenderness and a tremble of the unknown ahead of me. My eyes threaten to spill oceans, but I keep
my smile and panache till I pick up Tshura and put her box on the passenger
side, settle in behind the wheel, pull out, and get some distance from All
Kinds Sanctuary, then cry so hard I have to pull over for awhile, till I can
see the road again. The car smells like a country market with all
the supplies they’ve given me, and that is not a bad thing. Underlying it I catch an acrid whiff of
bottles of Antidote. I won’t need the map for quite a ways, with
nothing intersecting this road for miles except for lanes to weedy farms,
escaped barnyard animals foraging where crops used to grow. But I feel glad to have it, to give form and
purpose to my wandering. Merchants came
to All Kinds Sanctuary while I lay sick.
I couldn’t meet them myself, but everyone’s a-buzz with the news that a major
city has begun rebuilding: Nuvelle Parie. “Didn’t
Jacques come from Nuvelle Parie, Tshura?” I ask my ghost. I glance over at her box on the seat beside
me. That’s when I notice the candy bar,
carefully wrapped in wax-soaked cloth, next to her on the seat. And I have to pull over and bawl some more,
but I also eat the candy.) We march on in silence for awhile, taking in the countryside
serenity, before Baruch says, out of the blue, “I usually give up sweets for
Lent. And then Mom would bake a big ol’
rubyberry pie for Easter. But I don’t
think we’ll get many sweets on this road.
I don’t know what to give up.”
Then he smiles wryly and says, “Sometimes I think I gave up hope.” “If you had given up hope,” I say, “you wouldn’t be marching with
us. You’d have gone home with your
mother.” He nods thoughtfully, then says, “Childhood, then. But I gave that up long before Lent
began.” He sighs and says, “I suppose my
Easter won’t come, now, till Judgment Day.”
He looks up at me. “Do you think
they’ll serve rubyberry pie in Heaven?” “They’ll have to.” |
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