... Gathered all together, we are less than twenty. Everyone I know is alive. Thrushchurl crept up to join us from a stone-lined culvert. Jil Punkinflake we found sitting on the chest of a dead blackbird, doodling with a stick in the rust. When he saw us, he popped up smiling gaily as a child and scampered over to Saskia; she is the only one he saw. She glares at him, but puts her hand on his head, which he lowers the instant he sees her raise her arm. I’m close enough to see his nostrils tremble.
Makemin stands before our assembled number with his head down and his back to us, still silent as a stone. In our search, we found dead Wacagan everywhere. Many still bled from fresh wounds.
Everyone waking-dreamt himself valiant defender of the shining city, repulsing barbarians repulsing the invading kingdom. No one has set off the machine I saw yet, and I have given my warning about it.
Thrushchurl sits on a boulder of broken concrete not far from me, rocking slightly and humming his song. Makemin strides over and tears him from the stone, fistful of jacket in his hand.
“Revive them at once!” he bellows. Makemin is pointing to the bodies. A Yeseg militiaman lying there with his head flung back, his mouth a rigid, fibrous O. Makemin shakes Thrushchurl, who seems stiff and light as a scarecrow, eyeing Makemin back, with crazy fascination.
“You were at the mortuary school—you know how to do it! Bring them back!”
Thrushchurl’s face writhes weirdly around his teeth in an expression of utter bewilderment. Makemin releases him and now he has me, shakes me, face in my face—
“You do it!” Pulls me closer with overpowering strength. “You were there, you saw them do it! You do it!”
I’m not saying anything—his eyes are like black pits and I can only stare at them. They don’t budge even as he shakes me so hard my teeth rattle.
“Listen to me damn you—you do it! What did they teach you medics anyway!?”
What I’m looking into isn’t even a face but a pitted crag the setting sun rusts over.
Silichieh’s voice comes to me from somewhere—“Low,
can
you do it? Spirits here talk to you—can you talk back, and tell them to go back in?”
“Well can you?!” Makemin nails the words into my face.
“No! I don’t know anything!” I hear my voice and try to put force into it and it only makes my throat knock shut. I strain out the words as though I were being choked—“I only patch wounds up! I don’t know anything! I don’t know why they talk to me it just happens!”
Makemin is gone. I can’t take my eyes off of him. The bit of uniform he held me by is still bunched, slowly uncrumpling, and seems to retain his heat and venom, I want to pull off my tunic to keep it from seeping all over me like a pollution. It’s like a fat spider fastened on me.
Makemin goes to Jil Punkinflake, who leans by a ruined wall, his head and shoulders lost in the deep shadow of the overhang.
“You!” Jil Punkinflake is now driven back against the wall. “You do it!”
I can’t see his face. The voice comes out of the dark under the overhang, resonating in the stone.
“Do what?” It asks, bubbling with a wild derision.
“
Bring them back!”
Makemin roars, drawing forward and bashing Jil Punkinflake against the wall with one hand, pointing again at the Yeseg body stretched there on the rust.
Jil Punkinflake’s shoulders are shaking. His flung-back head drops down and forward out of the shadows; his eyes shimmer like silver and his face is drawn up in a comedic mask, screaming with laughter. His brows furrowed and knotted, until tears trace arcs along the tops of his cheeks, the laughter the loudest the ugliest erupting out of him with so much force his face should break, as though he were being ripped apart from the inside out.
*
“We go on. Get in formation!”
The voice comes from a far-away projection, bounding back to us from the ruins. Makemin has turned toward the road. We stand there barely breathing; I look from one dirty face to another and every one of them says, “Let’s go back”—but none of us dares to speak, none of us can speak. Makemin has no face.
Saskia shouts, “I suppose you think you can’t be shot just as readily in the back?”
Her voice seems to snap around us like a low swirling wind. I feel a cold splash across the inside of my chest; the circle we had been drawing around us to shut them out, she sets on fire. Cold white flames are consuming it.
“They’ve suffered greater losses than we have—and we’ll find all the help we need ahead!”
She turns to Makemin.
“
Won’t
we?” she shouts to the back of his head.
Makemin is still waiting for us to obey his order. He doesn’t answer.
Like sleepwalkers something tear loose rattling behind, left there as we leave like a shred of meat glued to a hot griddle we fan out onto the road like sleepwalkers like sleepwalkers. Blankness sleeps again on each staring, leaning face. We go on now like sleepwalkers following the darkness shed by Makemin’s turned back.
A hollow howling noise, like wind sobbing at the mouth of a mine, rises behind us as we near the city’s brink. There are the landmarks I’d seen in the charm, the road to the cemetery curves off to the right, through irregular, soft ridges, and trees bristle pitch black above them. The charm tugs at me and without even bothering to look at it I call to Makemin.
“We have to go into the trees.”
Makemin stops. His head turns slightly, just enough so that I can see the darkness of his profile, his glittering eye.
“The road won’t take us,” I say. My voice is flat, lost. “We’re not wanted here. If you want to get to the cemetery, you’re going to have to detour through the woods.”
With inaudible creak and groan, we leave the road. The trees dart in among us again. Saskia storms back and forth, keeping everyone in formation with rough words, shoves.
Roots flex and trip our feet, and the loose white soil drags our steps like a mire. The gaps in the trees and branches stare at us. Shallow pools of fog dot the ground, now mist floats down from the boughs. Almost immediately it is so thick we can barely see ten feet ahead, sluicing over us in a wet wind like snow flurries, dense in my lungs like water. No one wants to go on, but Makemin seems to draw us forward like an ox dragging many leads.
“Stop!” Silichieh cries, his voice nearly stifled. “We’re crossing our own tracks here! We’ve gone in a circle!”
Now Makemin stops, and we all look at the ground, see footsteps ahead of us and doubled up behind us.
“Those are blackbird tracks,” someone says.
I can’t see Makemin clearly in the fog, but he has turned toward us again; his face sweeps to one side and then the other.
“How many of us?” his words are like trumpet notes, puncturing the air.
Count and count again—one less, one less ... the last of the Yeseg officers.
*
The charm is dragging me to one side. They are following me with their eyes, a dangerous, heavy, slow anger. If I tell them it would have been worse on the road, they won’t believe me.
“There’s a hill there,” I say, pointing. “Let me go up and have a look over this fog.”
A muffled word I take for approval comes forward, and I go cautiously away, catch sight at once of a dark, irregular slope through the trees. They let me go alone.
The fog thins, as though it shrouded only us, and, stepping from the trees to the hillside I come back out into the white daylight of the sunless sky. Being alone doesn’t frighten me; I believe the charm would warn me if there were any danger. I climb the hill covered with black flakes of stone, more like a great heap of rocks than a hill. From the top I see trees all around, and a fog bank smeared over the trees to my right.
There’s the road, slicing toward the cemetery not two miles away—remote, dreamlike. There is something across the road near the forward edge of the fogbank, but I can’t see what it is. There is no blockage on the road past that point.
I kneel down to consult the charm. It points to the path, then swings back toward me again, not quite pointing toward me, again and again. I’m putting the charm away when I feel something move over me and it’s ripped from my grasp. Jil Punkinflake has it—the charm—in his fist; a look of demonic joy mutilates his face, and he laughs at me.
“This is how you knew!”
He brandishes it as I get to my feet.
“I knew you were lying!”
My mouth goes dry, his is gasping.
“What do you know
now?!”
he cries, and flings the charm down, shattering it against the stones.
His laughter breaks out again when he sees my face; it grows steadily louder and sharper. He steps forward fluting out his lips and punches, hitting my jaw so my neck twists and I drop, his laughter crashing over me like waves—my spine goes cold. I get up trembling, staring, nearly choking with rage, and take a swing at him.
“Jil!” a voice roars.
He scampers out of reach and from him comes the ugliest laughter in the world, a hagging insane laugh—I whip my arm at him but he evades me and capers down the slope, turning back still laughing at me. I lunge, stumble, and, on all fours, I see myself reflected against the sky in the fragments of the charm there in the rocks, my eyes blank.
“Jil! I’m coming!”
He turns when he hears me—steps, cackling, picks up a rock—he pitches it at me with all his might. I raise my arm and bat the rock aside. Now I’m after him. Spinning my way he kicks me high against the ribs, but I bash him across the face and he tumbles. I hit him square in the face as he gets up and send him teakettling down the slope onto his back; he twists as I come to kick him. Drawing back my leg, I lose balance and fall down. He runs.
“Jil!” roars after him. “
I’m coming for you Jil!”
Having slip trouble with the rocks. Now I’m on foot and following him down into the trees. I can see his track in the loose soil. A dark shape dodges among the trees ahead, the lighter irregularity of the face appears every few seconds, still laughing.
So he does not see the soldiers up ahead of him rise from cover and begin to swirl in their weightless, swinging formation like a bank of leaves blown up in a wind flurry. He does not understand why I scream his name in a changed voice. Laughing he turns to look where he’s going to. I hear cracks and snaps far off. Their roar races away, spreading rings in space, borne along by the endless trees. His left shoulder whips and he pinwheels forward. Punched against his right side he clops to a halt throwing up his right arm.
He takes two weak steps, his arm still high. The soldiers ahead vault away with great impossible leaps in among the trees, but two remaining swing there, aim and fire at leisure, before they go, in turn.
Jil Punkinflake crumples to the ground. Remote, smoke-hazed soldiers turn and skip away.
Low skids on his knees and pulls Jil Punkinflake’s body off its face, putting his hands here and there, throat, wrist. Blood slimes his hands. The slack face is pink and purple ... a blue-grey blush has already begun to spread across its cheeks.
Low jerks to his feet, the front of Jil Punkinflake’s uniform knotted in his fists. Jil Punkinflake dangles lifeless from his two hands.
Low looks wildly all around. He rushes to one side of the small open space among the trees, dragging Jil Punkinflake with him. The limp legs draw grooves on the ground.
He rushes to the other side. First one way, then the other, where there’s no way, as though he wants to catch the escaped life before it gets too far, throw the body down onto it and trap it there like throwing a blanket on a fire. Low’s face has a searching, escaping look on it.
Now Low bends his neck slowly, and stares down at drooping Jil Punkinflake. His face bunches and swells. His chest heaves. Sighs burst from his wrenched mouth, and weak fluting from his throat. His eyes and cheeks drip down onto dead cheeks and eyes. The droplets trickle on a bent back neck.
With a loud sound, he swings the body of his friend onto his back and carries it in the direction of the hill, his reversed steps erasing Jil Punkinflake’s last footprints. His sobs hasten to take their places, to stand forever among the trees.
*
“Doooon’t!”
Talk, gestures, expressions.
“No!” A warning note.
The commotion settles. A deep voice sadness makes deeper speaks calmly, repeating a name, with variable combinations of “low.” Lulom Lousce Lousche Lulom Low Loom, Low Loom Column, is me—meaning me is listening to a request of me to do something that needs to be done, that won’t get done as long as I don’t do it. Silichieh is the one who talks through to me.
They are gathered round me, or around the body of Jil Punkinflake that hangs from my shoulders. Appearing again in my mind, his name knocks the wind back out of me, weakness overtakes me, and I fall down with his weight on top of me.
I can only tell them he ran into a patrol. Why not tell the whole truth? Because I haven’t the strength. Not to keep the secret nor to tell it. So I push my weeping face against the ground.