alt.human (34 page)

We had only belief to keep us going, and the dream vision of a woman who was not human.

“!¡
resigned
¡! We should consider going back,” I said. “Finding the others. Settling down. Look at us...”

Frankhay didn’t seem surprised by my proposal. I might even have pre-empted his own thoughts, judging by his lack of reaction.

But it was Divine who was the first to speak against. She stared at me, then said, “!¡
surprised
¡! How can you say that? We’ve barely left them behind. We can’t turn back now, not until we’ve had a proper stab at finding Harmony.”

Most of the others looked uncertain, but then Skids added, “!¡
determined
¡! Divine’s right. You turn back now, then we’re splitting again. I’m not going back. A city protected by a starsinger... That’s got to be worth all this, or what’s the point?”

A
FTER A MORE
peaceful night we set out again, our pace slow.

I walked with Divine. She was strong at first, energised by the resumption of our journey, and I started to feel positive again for the first time in days.

Partway through the morning, the forest started to change, with fewer and fewer deciduous trees and more conifers. This made the under-forest gloomier, which hardly helped our mood, but I remembered learning somewhere that conifers were the dominant trees of the uplands and I started to get excited. The land even started to climb, and for a time I fooled myself that we were approaching the mountains, or at least a viewpoint from which we might finally see them.

And then the land sloped downwards and we entered a block of oak trees, their yellowed leaves littering the ground. That made me smile at my own foolish, easy optimism, and then I realised that I really was feeling better now: stronger, more able to face whatever was to come. My wobble the previous day seemed so distant, as if it was something that had happened to another person.

That was when I noticed that Divine was struggling to keep up and I had to check my pace.

She had gone pale, and the skin around her eyes had a touch of yellow to it. Her breathing, too, was ragged, shallow.

“!¡
falsely up-beat
¡! Thought we were hitting the mountains back there,” I said. “Then we headed downhill again. Must be getting close, though, eh?”

It was as if I hadn’t spoken. Her eyes were fixed straight ahead, determined.

“!¡
concerned
¡! You okay, Div?”

Nothing.

I waved a hand in front of her face. “!¡
assertive | concerned
¡! I said, are you okay? Divine?”

She glanced at me then, and smiled. “!¡
exhausted
¡! Course I am.”

Divine had never been one of the old gang. A couple of years older than me, she’d always stood out, her disciplined aggression making her one of Sol’s most valued supporters. But even though we’d never really mixed, we’d been close. Being singled out by Sol was something we had in common, and then when she hooked up with my old friend Ruth we’d finally started to get closer.

I realised I’d barely spoken to her since Ruth’s death, other than practical matters. We were a team, Divine and me; we made things work. Sometimes, though, that got in the way of the important stuff.

It was only a short time after all this ran through my head and I resolved to make up the lost time with Divine that she paused, put her hands on her knees as if about to cough, then fell to the ground.

I went to her, not realising that it was anything more than exhaustion at first.

She lay face down in the mosaic of fading golden oak leaves.

I kneeled, took her head in my hands, turned it so that she could breathe, and then realised that it was futile as she had already stopped doing so.

Her skin was white, her eyes wide open, staring into some unknown distance. A smear of mucusy red vomit was spread around her mouth and down one side of her chin.

I rocked back on my heels, and looked around at the others as they caught us up.

Divine was dead.

Chapter Thirty-One

W
E CAME TO
the river again some days later.

Hope’s first realisation that something different lay ahead was a change in the light, a thinning of the trees.

She was walking with Marek, letting his words wash over her. He was assuring her again that he would be a man of substance in Harmony. As part of the Vanguard, he had helped people escape from Angiere and Laverne, and he knew they had all been directed towards Harmony. When our group arrived, Marek would be recognised and lauded for the part he’d played in saving so many. It was an account he had given many times already, and Hope did not discourage him, for his words meant that he was aware of her, which meant that at least in some small way she mattered to him, and so she felt significant, not dismissed and belittled. My rejection had cut her deeply, reinforcing the doubts and insecurities that already loomed over her.

And up ahead, a thinning, a brightening. An edge to the forest.

Hope and Marek hurried their pace to catch up with me, Frankhay and Saneth. We had come to pause at the last of the trees.

It was the river, which meant we were still heading in the right direction, but it was not the actual edge of the forest, after all, and there was no city before us, nestling among the mountains. Hope felt the gnawing of hunger in her stomach again.

The river was far narrower here, although still a good distance across. Parts of it were clearly shallower than the great river of Laverne, with white rapids spuming over a rocky stretch at the far side.

We were clearly much closer to its source, and when Hope and Marek came to the bank she peered eastward along the river, following the cleft it cut through the forest.

There was no city, though, no mountains. Soon, the river swept northwards and the trees cut the line of vision.

We made camp there, on the bank of the river. It was not long after the middle of the day, but we were starving and exhausted. It was not a decision we discussed; we simply did not move on.

Hope went alone into the trees, gathering grubs from the leafmould and skewering them on long pine needles, a source of food she had discovered a couple of days before. None of us liked it, but it was one of the things that had kept us going.

After a time she brought her wriggling harvest back to the encampment, keeping none for herself.

She did not know what it was like to be us; all she knew was her own experience. But hunger hurt, and it was a pain that she knew we all felt. The pain was another thing that she used to convince herself that she was more like us than she was not, despite what Saneth had told her, despite the things I had said in my feverish anger.

W
E DINED WELL
that night.

During the afternoon, Jerra brought down a duck over the water. He had to swim to retrieve it, and emerged shivering, sitting by the fire to warm himself even as the bird roasted on a spit. Marek found a stand of chestnut trees, the ground beneath them littered with nuts in their spiky jackets. Dandelions, nettles and dock made for another bitter broth to accompany the grubs, duck and chestnuts. It was the fullest meal we had managed to put together since leaving Laverne.

For what remained of the day we gathered more chestnuts, and boiled dandelion roots to make them easier to chew on when we resumed our journey the next day.

“!¡
hesitant
¡! What if we dunnat find it, though?” asked Jerra. “What if it innat there?”

Hope fixed him with a stare. “I’ve seen the city,” she said, and she had, again, the night before when we had lain in a clearing and the first light snow had fallen, hard crystals of white. “It can’t be far. The river at Harmony isn’t much narrower than this.”

I still didn’t feel safe to trust her vision, even though Saneth explained that it was the voices in her head, the shared experience of countless humans that she channelled.

But I did allow her words to give me a shred of hope to cling to. There were no mountains yet, but maybe soon, maybe soon we would find the city sung into safety by its resident starsinger.

W
E FOLLOWED THE
river.

Days before, from the vantage point of the hills where we had left the others, we had been able to plot a straight eastward route that would bring us back to the river eventually, which it had. But now we had no such advantage. Heading in a straight line east might take us away from the river forever.

And so we found a route through the forest that always kept the river to our left, following every curve and meander. We must have almost doubled back on ourselves many times as the river wound its way through the land, but we had no real alternative.

The days grew noticeably shorter, the grey winter clouds holding back the light of morning and bringing in dusk ever sooner. Snow fell, and hung heavy in the canopy, with only a few clumps making it to ground level.

The cold bit hard. Walking gave us some warmth, and at night we slept in a huddle of bodies by whatever paltry fire we managed to light.

Saneth appeared to suffer the cold more than the rest of us. At night, the chlick even deigned to join the huddled bodies, and I often woke pressed against the alien’s rutted, leathery skin. The chlick didn’t appear to have a shiver reflex, and in the cold her-his body felt like chilled clay beneath that tough hide.

I wondered why Saneth didn’t ride more in the sidedog, for rest and warmth. The chlick didn’t even mount it like a horse any more, as she-he had earlier on the journey. Then one morning we woke to a smell like roast gammon and when I turned towards the fire, rubbing at my eyes, I saw Saneth there, working at a thin slab of meat with a knife, another slab suspended over the fire’s embers on a spit.

“!¡
surprise
¡! The sidedog...?” I asked, joining the chlick and recognising the commensal’s furred skin.

Saneth tipped forward slightly, a nod.

“But...”

“!¡
factual reporting
¡! The beast died. !¡
bitter loss
¡! The beast was inadequately adapted to the conditions. !¡
regret
¡! Lauded scholar must walk always, now. Lauded scholar now has no companion of lofty intellect.” The eye swivelled. “Lauded scholar experiences !¡
grieving
¡! loss.”

The sidedog smelled of bacon, but tasted like shit. I swallowed as much as I could and it filled a cavity in my gut, but some time later that day the beast’s meat had passed through me in part-chewed lumps, clearly undigested.

I recalled the human wraiths of Laverne who had eaten from the pap-houses in the belief that alien foods brought them closer to their gods, even though such food could not be broken down in the human body. I wondered if some of that food was sidedog meat.

I
T WAS LATER
that day that I first noticed changes in the forest, and at first I put it down to the alien meat cramping my stomach.

The pain in my gut was sharp, and it made me think of the day when we had been brought down by sickness. My first selfish thought was that I had been struck down by it again and that I was going to be sick and I might die. And my second thought was of Divine, my lost friend, a thought laced with guilt as I realised my own selfishness had come first.

Emptying my bowels helped with the pain, just getting that undigested alien meat out of my body.

I walked with Frankhay, and he kept giving me sidelong glances, and I wondered just how sick I looked. He was unsettling me, doing things to my head, making me paranoid.

I stumbled, my foot catching on the rocky ground, and Frankhay reached out to grab my arm, stop me from falling.

“!¡
authority
¡! Steady, boy,” he said. Then: “So you’d be feelin’ it too, then, would you?”

I looked at him and wondered what he meant.I understood then that he had been watching me to see if I had picked up on something he had noticed.

I shook my head. I hadn’t felt anything. I didn’t know what he was talking about.

Above us, the trees went on forever. Their trunks were wider than any I’d seen, as broad as buildings; the canopy was so far above us that there was a layer of mist hanging below it.

The ground: rocks and pine needles and fallen branches; a few wispy ferns and marestails.

Our breath: misting as we breathed, the mist freezing, crystallising and falling in a tiny sparkling shower.

Looking up, I felt dizzy.

I had no idea where the river was, or when we had left it behind. Even the morning seemed long ago, waking to Saneth roasting her-his friend... which made me giggle, and Frankhay looked at me strangely, and then I realised what the clan-father had meant when he said
So you’d be feelin’ it too, then, would you?
A strangeness in the air, a distortion of perceptions...

A phreak.

Something was playing with our senses.

I thought it was the meat. Had Frankhay eaten the sidedog meat, too? Had it done things to our heads as well as to our guts? Was that the real reason why the wraiths ate alien food that otherwise did them no good at all?

I turned to Frankhay again, and kept turning, because I couldn’t see him, he’d vanished, and so had all the trees. Instead I was in a park, on grass, in sunlight, swirls of alien dragonflies with bodies the size of my forearm in the air around my head, and sparkling crystals like coloured snow hanging in the air. Children laughing, singing a song, a chanting song, its words indistinct, its tune haunting, hypnotic, building and jarring and swelling to fill the air.

Staggering forward, someone – Frankhay! – grabbing at my arm but unable to support me, so that I landed on my knees, my shins scraping against bare rock, the smell of fallen pine needles suddenly up close, in my face.

The forest.

Just the forest.

Pine trees, fallen needles on the rocky ground, my breath ragged and catching in my chest. Frankhay saying, “!¡
alarm | empathy
¡! You okay, boy?”