I look out at the people, sitting on the ground, and plants thrashing in the wind beyond them. One, sitting with his legs outstretched, puts his hands to his head and drops onto his back, rolling to and fro on his shoulders in intense pain.
“What’s wrong with them?”
The narrator’s mouth is slack. He’s looking out at them with an alarming dullness in his eyes. Then he seems to recover.
“The grey light from the ruins does that to them,” he says without looking at me. “It appallingly fouls their insides and they never can be well again. Why they don’t leave it, I don’t know. There is water here, maybe that’s their better reason for staying.”
“Are the ruins far?”
He shakes his head, looks at me the whites of his eyes showing all around the iris. “Not far, but you will be killed if you draw too near to the gloomy light and the bad air off-given-off by them.”
“Do you know what those rows of white bumps are out there?”
“... Those are elderly. There they drag themselves into the glow out of fear of the others, choosing instead to grow sick and die in mounds of clay, with only their heads sticking out.
“Food and water is brought to them by the stronger ones. I don’t know the reason why they do it. It would be so much obviously better if they let them die. One might be inclined to suppose they need of others to feel sorry for.”
He shivers, and rubs his teeth with a knuckle.
“I think we will have to go by them,” I say. “Will they attack us?”
“They may.” He throws a look around himself that is nervous but not exactly frightened. He is excited and terrified.
“Sometimes they attack on sight. Other times, they watch and do nothing, or take no notice at all. But might they. But these are so weak, not really dangerous. The stronger ones are further inside, to cope.”
“They aren’t affected by the ruins?”
“No, just the noise. The ruins they stay away from. I think they dig up or dowse for or perhaps they even drill for their water.”
“Do you mean the noise of the trees?”
“They are compelled to fight irritably,” he says. “That noise, their condition, all this—” he gestures around himself vaguely, “—sibilantly grates on their nerves until they can’t help themselves.—Your men are near? ... These people I’ve seen fall on each other for no cause at all. Once, I saw a group of no more than six of them sitting together in a rough circle. One of them began to sway and squeeze his head in his hands. The sound was driving him mad. Not another instant could he stand it. He began to cry out—”
And here the enemy narrator actually imitates him, a series of forced howls ringing at the back of the throat, each one a single breath.
“Then he vomited naturally, and, still vomiting, he turned on the one closest him. It was all he could do, he had no choice.”
The narrator’s voice seems to be choking him.
“They flew at him, just to have the relief.”
His breathing becomes labored with emotion.
A voice calls my name, not too far away. The patrol is looking for me. The narrator can’t have failed to hear them, but he keeps talking.
“They beat him to death. Then they went back and resumed their places conscientiously.”
He turns his eyes to me, something wrong in them.
“There’s a noise within the noise, like glass rubbing that nobody can take that forever and ever, without a moment’s suspension.”
He looks at me, and his breath is ragged, something horrible coming into his face.
Voices call to me again.
He stares at me, horror in his look. A thin, wheezing cry comes from his convulsing mouth.
“It’s the war,” I try to tell him. “You’ve got the war!”
He gulps, his brow crushed in anguish. As if moving on its own, his right foot swings forward and plants itself in a step toward me. His face implores me, tears jostle loose from his eyes.
“War is the spirit that seeks your life,” I say, not knowing what I’m saying. “Don’t—... Don’t let—”
With a sob, he reaches out and shoves my chest with both his palms, driving me a step back. Strangled sounds jerk out of his mouth. He advances again and shoves me harder, head flung back, eyes shut, desperate bleat in his throat.
I turn and run from him. Not wanting to lead him toward the patrol I bear to my left, and eventually duck down out of sight behind seething black shrubs. He dashes past me, arms flung back his whole body rocking from side to side as he runs. His head twists on his neck and as it twists in my direction he sees me and stops. Legs apart, he stands with arms held out like a man who’s just been dowsed with cold water, and his face congeals in a mask of horror. Helplessly he stretches open his mouth, screams with unreasoning rage and despair, and runs at me.
Sharp voices to one side—I see my patrol, drawn by his cries. Their guns sputter and not seven feet from me, two or three shots pluck at him, and he falls. But he lunges to his feet again and runs from side to side before their guns, half bent and bloody, crying out for someone to turn to. Shots thump into him as he runs, head thrown back his mouth bawling, a shot hits him and he crumples to his knees, droops forward. A bullet tears across the curve of his back. I hear his faint, mournful “uh,” when that groove appears as if by magic there.
“It’s me!” I shriek, my voice breaking. “Stop shooting!”
For a moment he is still. The fading sound of the shots echo into the mineral forest. Then the war inside him forces him back up onto his broken legs, and with a scream he blunders forward. Half a dozen gunshots hit him, and he collapses onto his back.
I rush to his side, shouting, throwing up my hands at the others. The shooting stops; one bullet fired too late thumps into the ground a few feet from me. I kneel by his side. His fractured legs still struggle to set his heels against the ground. His upper body is rigid, his face shaking, every muscle contracted, horror, anguish in his eyes, terror in his throat coming out in a ragged, faltering cry, that momentarily sets his vocal chords ringing in the clear sweet tone of his usual, his real voice. As I peer into his eyes, the tension begins to dwindle from his features. They slacken with his feeble scream, and release his face as the sound stops with his breath. Something jealous is finally relinquishing its grip on him. He dies, and leaves the war.
Shots are resounding from the abutment, and all along the treeline around me.
*
The ground is littered with bodies. The vomiters stood or sat impassively watching the others die. With an impatient upward snap of his hand, Makemin orders me to rise and join him, then stops when he sees the dead narrator at my feet.
“Who shot this man?”
Some of my patrol stand together, nearby, eyes on the ground. He struts up to them and begins staring in their faces, one at a time. They shrink under his look. Abruptly he turns back to me.
“I will find the culprit later—or,” he momentarily twists back from the waist looking at them while walking toward me, “perhaps you will all be responsible?”
Now he marches up to me.
“And
you
—” he says almost with disgust, “I suppose you were too busy embracing your comrade to interrogate him?”
Keeping my face expressionless, I tersely repeat the narrator’s story. Why not? Makemin’s face remains tensed but he is soaking it up, every word. When I’m done, he is silent and staring for a moment, but I have told my story in such a way as to answer any questions he might have before he asks them.
“Good,” he says finally, and it isn’t a compliment. He likely mistrusts me. If he doesn’t, so much the worse for him. He should mistrust me. I intend to kill him. It feels false when I write the words. Marching back toward the abutment, he cries out to my patrol.
“Strip the body and return to the road! Get any papers and bring them to the interpreter! Interpreter is with me!” He makes a backhanded gesture over his left shoulder to show I should follow him.
We return to the abutment, where the other soldiers mill. Those nearest us snap to when Makemin bursts out of the woods. He picks out four men with his finger, saying “you” each time. Then he turns and surveys the clearing.
“Bring him here.”
He points to a man sitting on a stone a few dozen yards away. The soldiers rattle over to him at once, take him by the arms, and bring him.
The man is naked, scrawny but not as wasted as some of the others. Tufts of black curly hair still grow from the sides of his head, and his discolored lips and chin are partially concealed by a threadbare beard. The front of his body is marked by an inky vomit stain from chin to groin. He walks between the soldiers, who are meaty, enormous in contrast, without resisting, head cocked a bit to one side. They bring him to a stop a few feet from us. He swallows loudly, and a brown streak escapes one corner of his mouth, stops in his beard.
Makemin begins relaying questions through me. The man returns my look expressionlessly. After three or four repetitions, I see his mouth beginning to work. He stretches out his lower lip, the upper one is gone exposing crooked teeth, and a hawking, shapeless rasping noise comes retching out. A few minutes of this, and then his rasps end in a short gout of bile that splatters noisily on the ground at our feet. The soldiers step back, releasing his arms, and he totters a little where he is.
Makemin selects a few more, all with comparable results.
“Leave them,” he says finally, gazing around at them with disgust. “Get back onto the road!”
*
Dusk makes everything fluoresce blue around us. I have watched as one head after another swivelled to the right, fixing on the vast shapes that flicker there deep in the trees. The line falters to a stop.
“You mean to say you’re not going to investigate any ruins?” Silichieh asks Makemin incredulously, with no interrogative inflection in his voice.
“We will explore ruins only if that helps us find the enemy.”
Silichieh looks peevishly down, brow crumpled. Makemin, still facing down the white abutment, adds, “There will be all the time in the world once we have beat them.”
He is thinking.
He turns to us and raises his hands in a peremptory gesture of attention.
“Comrades! Don’t let yourself be cowed by what you see and hear! Remember,” his flinted voice clatters against the trees, turns into a knife cutting their noise, “you are soldiers of the greatest empire in the world!”
Each tree whispers secretively to each of us—“... you are soldiers of the greatest empire in the world ...”
“We march now in pursuit of our fleeing enemy, but also with the prospect of a great prize!”
He points down the white abutment.
“That way, there is a place of powerful and ancient enchantment. Spirits wait there to receive us, and offer us their aid in our glorious cause, if only we may overcome the obstacles that separate us! That is what we are struggling for now—a miraculous power, that we will bring to bear on the blackbirds to destroy them here, to destroy them on this island, and finally, to blot them out everywhere, once, and for ever!”
Nikhinoch, at a signal not meant to be seen by many, steps forward and strikes up the Red Earth Chant; the asylum soldiers take it cacophonously up at once, but the din emanates a familiarness that draws the regular soldiers in.
We are marching again. The trees salute us as we go by, whispering “you are soldiers of the greatest empire in the world ...” and showing us glimpses of the ruins far away, buried in the wood. I see blue-white sky through a lacy, rent wire spiderweb; stone tracery, the acute curve of a tower or silo, a bellied-out white expanse looking like bone. The walls groan with exhaustion, longing to split apart, to collapse with a sigh, and rot.
The noise of the forest is almost the sound of chewing teeth in a closed mouth. I imagine disembodied voices speaking flat, factual words in Lashlache. The idea is so vivid, I seem to hear them, saying nothing, speaking at random, in fragments of ancient conversations still hanging in the air like unmelting breaths. My balance sways a little in me, and I veer a step or two; I imagine the influence of the ruins had something to do with this.
I am inspired. I exaggerate. I let myself stumble, and pretend that I’ve suddenly gone woozy. Silichieh steps up to me and I feel his arm clamped across my back, his flat hand gripping my upper arm. Rolling my head forward I sag and stagger, mumble a little. I don’t want to overdo it.
“What is it?” Silichieh asks in a bewildered voice. He’s been watching me ever since I first warned of the glass storm. I hate to play with him, but that hate ranks low on the list of things I hate just now.
I pretend a little recovery. I want them to believe I have a special sensitivity to this place, that spirits are meddling with my finely-tuned nerves, so they will listen when I tell them which way to go, and not ask too many questions how I know. It’s not so hard. I’ve always been the sort of person who would sink under the weight of an ordinary day.
“I’m all right,” I insist again and again. I must act irritated, and give the impression that I want to avoid attention rather than attract it.
Silichieh looks hastily in the direction of the ruins. A few others saw me falter as well. Did I imagine I was pretending? Did something
make
me pretend?